Ex-Uber Chief Business Officer Emil Michael on Autonomous Driving, Saudi Arabia, and Uber’s Culture

Uber is facing a difficult moment amid the coronavirus pandemic. The service, built on the belief that people would forsake car ownership in favor of its ride hailing service, is watching many of its customers buy cars and stay home. The new trouble for Uber comes after the company worked to right itself after years of turbulence under ex-CEO Travis Kalanick’s leadership. Emil Michael, the former Uber chief business officer and confidant to Kalanick, joins the Big Technology Podcast to discuss Uber's business prospects, its culture, its current leadership, and its controversies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hello, Emile. Hey there. You ready to do this? I am. Okay, I'll just kick on the music and we can get going.

• 1:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hello and welcome to the Big Technology Podcast, where we have cool, level-headed, and nuanced conversations about the tech world with much less yelling. Our guest today is a great one. It's Emile Michael, former Chief Business Officer at Uber, who has amazing visibility into what's happened in the ride-hailing industry, self-driving industry, and sort of what's going on with the Uber diaspora, the folks that have left, and what they're up to now. But we're going to start talking a little bit about Uber's business, and where it's going to go, where it is today, especially in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Emile, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Good to be here. Great to have you. So I guess like the first thing is I want to try to establish

• 2:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  what your role was at Uber for everybody listening in. So you know, from my understanding, you were sort of like, you know, sort of the chief dealmaker for the company and one of Travis Kalanick's, you know, right-hand man, if not his right-hand man himself. So would you say that that's an accurate description?

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, you know, right-hand man tends to be sort of independent of title, right? Is who does the leader spend the most time with? He and I probably spent the most time together on various business problems in my scope and out of my scope. My day job was Chief Business Officer, which included corporate development that was raising money, which we raised a lot of at Uber, mergers and acquisitions, business development. So like the partnerships we did with credit card companies or car companies and so on. I ran our enterprise business, which was called Uber for Business, sort of S like a mini CEO. And I ran our China business. I was sort of the most senior exec at headquarters,

• 3:09Speaker 01

  managing the China business, which is big, big, big deal for us.

• 3:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. So I want to talk about, so you have great visibility into the company. I want to talk a little bit about sort of the business you expected and then what it's looking like today, especially in the middle of the pandemic. And let's start there. Like a lot of people, I bought a car during this pandemic and I used to take Uber all the time. I don't take Uber anymore. And I don't know, once this thing lets up, if I'm going to start taking it again. And I kind of was, you know, I kind of was bought in on this whole idea, along with many people, that car ownership was dead and it was going to be more cost effective for me to take Ubers and ride a bike and take public transportation. And now, of course, you know, that whole thing is changing. So what's going on with

• 3:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  the core Uber vision? Do you think the idea of the end of car ownership is still something that is actually possible? And how long will this pandemic set us back? If you believe that that's something that we're going to get to, how long is it going to take now? Because this is obviously a setback for the big Uber dream.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, so let's think about Uber in two main parts, right? Their food delivery business and the ride ride hailing business. And there's no doubt that in the last six months on the ride hailing business, uh, it's been decimated. And the question, you know, uh, is this your experience? Is it going to replicate? Meaning you're like, I wasn't, I didn't have a car, but now I need a car and therefore I need Uber less. And that's going to go on for a long term. Um, but I think there is some degree of, of accuracy there, which is the people got cars during the pandemic or moved out to the burbs, to the extent dense urban areas are going to lose population.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  You know, then there'll be less Uber rides to take. Uh, you know, if you believe though, that these urban areas maybe get, are temporarily getting depopulated and then people are going to come back into San Francisco and New York in these places, um, then it sort of might largely come back. But I do think, you know, the pandemic is going to have some long-term effects. And one of them is going to be that people, some, some segment of people are going to be more comfortable driving along in a car than they were with a rider. And frankly, there, there is a counter effect though, of people being less likely to ride in subways and buses who might switch to Uber, but can't afford a car. So how, how that works out, it doesn't, it doesn't know, but I don't know. But I do think there'll be some segment that it's probably a net nega, a slight net negative.

• 5:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Uh, interesting. I hadn't really thought about the idea that people might ditch public transportation for an Uber.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, th- think about that. If, if you could afford it and you don't want to be in that kind of dense environment, your option is to, you know, bike, scooter, depending on the weather and, you know, distance or Uber, right? Um, and to extent you can afford that, I think that you might substitute public transport for Uber.

• 6:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and you know, we know that a lot of municipalities have just been walloped by the budget shortfalls that they're going to have due to the pandemic. One of the things I've watched closely, I'm a native New Yorker, live in San Francisco now, but I've watched the effects of this thing, due to the fact that New York State spent so much money on coronavirus prevention, what that's going to mean downstream for the subway in New York City. And it does seem like it's going to have some pretty detrimental effects. So, you know, it's possible maybe Uber steps in there.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Is that a better society for us if we're moving more towards relying on a private company than, let's say, the subway?

• 6:50Speaker 01

  You know, most big cities are dealing with traffic problems, so I don't think that helps in that respect. To the extent, you know, individual cars add more to climate change than mass transit, that's an issue. But then you're still back to the fundamental question of can we prove to people that being in these environments is as safe as it was before? Like, we get a vaccine in 2021, that's widely distributed and very effective, might people snap back to their old habits? Which means you might sell your car. Like, is that what's going to happen or not? If that happens, you know, then everything bounces back and won't be an issue.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  If not, then you might have more crowded cities from a car standpoint.

• 7:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, I can say just personally, I'm not selling mine. Like, I love the thing, and it was only a couple thousand dollars used from someone fleeing San Francisco. And man, it's really nice to have your own.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  I'm sure.

• 7:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  But I don't know how long that will last. Yeah. Okay, so even if people do continue to take Uber, maybe in this alternative scenario, the other question is, can Uber become a profitable business? I mean, I guess it's been a question that's dogged the company for a long time, but they were aiming for profitability this year, I believe. And, you know, they've cut losses a little bit, but they're still losing like a billion dollars a quarter. So, I'm just actually curious, from your perspective, how does a company like Uber lose money? I mean, so many people are paying it to, you know, take these rides. Where's all that money going?

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a couple, a couple of things. So uh there's a big, big research and development spend on autonomous vehicles, something in order of seven, eight hundred million dollars per year. And so you do that and the payback is not for five, seven, 10 years, right? So but the question i- is to the management team, do you still do that knowing that you could that get disrupted by Google's Waymo that far out? Or do you stop doing that and sort of risk your future a bit? So that's sort of one place that the money's spent and why it's a question. The second place the, the money is spent is like on employee stock comp. So when you look at these numbers, you do have to take out what sort of looks like cash

• 9:13Speaker 01

  coming off the balance sheet versus stocks. A lot still come back like companies that pay their employees with stock of this stock compensation thing, which does have, look, you know, looks scary when you compare it to a traditional company that doesn't quite do a lot of stock uh options. And then third, um I don't know if you remember last quarter, but they showed a big loss because they had to write down their stakes in DD, D and X, all the other investments that they made because ride hailing was sort of compromised all over the world. But that's sort of a paper loss, meaning they're still holding the same stock. It's valued less and next quarter or the quarter after, when it goes back up, they'll have a big gain to show, right? Um so it's a lot of factors there and then the final factor is just Uber's bloated.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Um they laid off a lot of people this summer that they probably didn't need. I don't think Dara took a hard look at the company's cost structure when he came in because he had other problems to deal with, but he finally got to is the company overstaffed. Um they took a big chunk out of it uh this last um summer. And maybe there's another round or two to go, but I do think this company can be profitable in 2021.

• 10:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, so the people I did some research before this interview as I tend to do and like the people that have I've spoken with, you know, sort of, I can sum up their sentiment where they said that Uber needs to price realistically, which will drive down demand and then cut staff, you know, leaving Uber looking a lot like a taxi business. Does that seem like the right path to you or is can it be something else?

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't I don't think that's accurate. I think that the price will have we will certainly have to go up if they get more regulations passed like they did in New York, which they have to guarantee a certain wage or, you know, they lose the employee contractor issue and that will impact demand, that's for sure. But those things aren't certain. My understanding is it looks like Uber's going to win this ballot initiative in California.

• 11:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, which is that it would have to treat their employees, sorry, the people who they call the drivers users of the technology, so they'd have to treat them as regular employees. That's what's on the ballot right now. And you think Uber's gonna gonna win their challenge?

• 11:28Speaker 01

  So it's the inverse, right? So AB5 passed in California says they must treat drivers as employees. The ballot initiative in November is trying to create an exception for rideshare and delivery drivers.

• 11:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Uh huh, okay. And so you think Uber is gonna win that one?

• 11:45Speaker 01

  It seems that way. If you look, you know, the Chronicles, San Jose Mercury News all endorsed Uber's position on that, you know, the polling I've seen seems like that's gonna win. And so that's what I, you know, that's what it seems like, yes.

• 11:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, and so potentially that-

• 12:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that potentially sort of reduces the increased cost of employment versus contracting. But I think, yeah, they have to reduce staff to be efficient. I mean, one thing I love to tell about the early days of Uber, when we launched the company, drivers didn't have smartphones. So we had to hire people to go out and physically give drivers smartphones, teach them how to download an app and sign them up for the service. And we had that in every city around the world. And what's happened since then is now you could recruit drivers online because they're online or on Facebook, they're on all these different platforms. You don't have physical people doing the same things that they did years ago. Same thing with consumers. We throw all these parties and knock on doors and try to stand outside nightclubs and get consumers

• 12:46Speaker 01

  to try Uber. That's that's sort of gone. So a lot of the cost structure can be made more efficient. And I think they will. And I don't think it becomes like taxi situation.

• 12:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And, you know, I understand the move to try to treat independent contractors as employees, especially with regard to Uber wasn't perfect. And it might have caused, you know, more, I mean, there are always secondary effects to this stuff. The freelancers, for instance, like there were publications that were like, we have to fire our freelancers. We can't do this. So, okay, let's say Uber does, you know, win this protest and the ballot initiative and actually say, okay, we can keep treating them as independent contractors or users of our technology or whatever. You know, it still sort of leaves a central problem which that act was trying to get at in place, which is essentially saying, we end up having these drivers, you know, perform, you know, tremendous amount of hard

• 13:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  labor for a technology company. And, you know, through all this work, they end up making a few people rich at the tech company, making the company rich. They don't really share in the benefit of it. And it's inherently, you know, destructive for our society. I'm kind of curious what you think about that. Do you think that there's a way that, you know, Uber can operate where it does have, you know, a more equitable share between, you know, the people making millions of this and then the drivers? And if there is a path to it, why hasn't it happened yet?

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there's absolutely a third way, and there should be a third way, not just for Uber drivers, but for all independent contractors. Let me give you some examples. I think in the ballot initiative, Uber's also proposing to create benefit pools for drivers. So that they're supplementing sort of things that they might not get as an independent contractor at all. Because remember, a lot of the thing that people forget is something like 70% of Uber drivers drive less than 10 hours a week. And then half of them drive not only for Uber, but for Lyft, or Instacart, or DoorDash, whatever. So it's hard to consider them an employee of any one of these companies,

• 14:50Speaker 01

  or even of one company if they work 10 hours a week. Because typically, this is a filler for drivers. It's not, it used to be that there was a lot of full-time drivers, that regime is totally over. So the question is, how can you give them benefits that are split from a cost standpoint amongst the various activities that this driver does in their life? And I think there's a way there. When we hired David Plouffe in 2014 or 15, this was his mission. It was his vision that we tried to promote very early on. So it was always something that the company was thinking about doing, knowing that it was, you know, you have to be fair to employees, you want them to be happy, you need them to have, feel that they can take sick days and so on. So there is a middle

• 15:35Speaker 01

  ground, and I think no one's reached it. Maybe this California thing causes the legislature and the companies to compromise and find this third way.

• 15:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Uh-huh. So do you think, I mean, we've tried the private sector, doing it on its own, we've sort of now seen what it looks like through the public sector. Do you believe it's industry that should drive this change, or do you think there's a role for the government to play?

• 16:00Speaker 01

  I think there's a role for the government, because, and industry, but the government for sure, because one of the things that happened after World War II, when we started attaching healthcare to your job, it skewed the whole way we think about benefits for humans, right? But I think we're one of the only countries in the world that sort of so closely attaches those things. Whereas, you know, if you're leaving a job or moving a job, why are you switching your healthcare insurance? There's a logic for that, right? So this third way that I think we ought to think about, which probably has to be, have government involvement, is can you create systems that are independent of employment that provide benefits for folks? And I think that does require, you know, some cooperation,

• 16:45Speaker 01

  but it does require some change from government as well.

• 16:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, yeah, and we'll see if we'll see the one the one the one issue here is that you know, government is so weak and you know, I was watching it with the tech giants. I don't think that they've really been a very big, you know, deterrent for the tech giants to act in ways they probably shouldn't. And so I wonder what will happen with the Uber situation, but I guess that, you know, we can go on this down this line for a while. And, you know, well, it seems like you might have something else to say about it. So go ahead.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'd say that, you know, I remember early on, we were asked the question of do we support Obamacare and regardless, forget the ideology of it, the notion that one could buy into healthcare at a cost that's sort of pooled and that doesn't take, it doesn't care, it doesn't matter what your job is, is an example of how you separate benefits from employment. And if you can do that with other categories, you know, with retirement benefits and so on, I do think that's a better overall model for the average person in this country.

• 17:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm with you. That would be something that would work very well for the business that I'm trying to run. So I'd be on board with it. Okay, I want to talk a little bit, you know, as we round out this first segment about your relationship with Travis. So I don't know if this was in the Mike Isaac book or somewhere else, or maybe it's, you know, some people close to Uber told me, but, you know, I heard that in Vegas in 2015, there was this, you know, concert with Beyonce that she ended up making a lot of money on and that you got in front of the company and just said Travis Klinek is my best friend. And I'm curious what your relationship is like with him today.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  He and I worked, we were working at Uber, I mean, we were doing 80, 90 hour weeks because it was so intense, the the growth pace we're on and he is one of my best friends still, he was at my wedding. And we're close friends today for sure.

• 18:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  And what's his, what's his, um, I guess the one thing that, that folks really would want to know about him is, you know, does he have this grand plan to come back and take over Uber again? Because it certainly seemed like he was making some maneuvers that might set the ground for that, you know, while he was leaving.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  No, he is deeply involved in his next business. He's happy, he's building something he believes in. Um, I think he's, you know, he sold all his stock, he's off the board, he's moved on.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  From that experience, so I don't think you're gonna see that, uh, that happening.

• 19:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, and what do you think about him? Anyway, I just to let the mind wander a bit, you think he'll ever create a competitor to Uber? Or do you think he's gonna stay in this other industry?

• 19:33Speaker 01

  I mean, I think he believes, um, that this other industry is bigger than Uber.

• 19:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  And you want to tell us a little bit more about what he's doing?

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, at a very high level, he's creating, um, what's called cloud kitchens, which are, uh, built to optimize the preparation and delivery of food. And if you believe in the thesis, um, that people are gonna cook less, have food delivery more, um, then you, like this happening in China, something like, something like 20% of all meals in China are delivered. In the US, it's like 2 or 3%. So if you believe that we're gonna follow that trend,

• 20:13Speaker 01

  then he's making this sort of economic bet that, um, these restaurants are gonna want these very efficient, cheaper places to, to cook food and that are optimized around a city that can be done with fast delivery. So if anything, it's kind of a real estate play. And, uh, that's chasing a trend on food delivery. And I think that's, you know, he thinks it's a bigger idea. There's certainly more revenue in food than there is in transportation. So I think that's, that's the rough sketch of it.

• 20:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, do you think, do you think Uber ends up making more money on Uber Eats than driving at a certain point?

• 20:50Speaker 01

  It's a great question. I, I still think the ride hailing business is bigger than the food delivery business because um when people relying on Uber like you did before you got your car, you were taking it every single day, potentially multiple times a day. The food delivery business, people are not typically ordering food multiple times a day from Uber Eats. They're bigger doing it a couple of times a week. So I still think the

• 21:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Less of a habit.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  It's just less of an everyday habit, less of a reliance, if you will.

• 21:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Okay, I see. So just back to the Travis thing. I think what he's done is like, help build the infrastructure. Now he's building a business on the infrastructure, which is

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  pretty interesting. All right, let's, let's move to um the current leadership. Um, you know, another thing that I had and found out in conversations with folks who pay a close attention to Uber is that, you know, people who are pro Travis, who've been around Travis, tend to not uh like Dara, uh the current CEO of Uber. Someone who uh pays closer attention to the company told me this, uh they said of Dara, he's a suit, he's a hired suit. And I'm sure you remember how obsessed with Travis people are and his fire energy was the lifeblood of Uber. They don't love Dara. Um, what's your reaction to that?

• 22:09Speaker 01

  I mean, they're so different stylistically. And um, I remember at some point Dara had said, I couldn't have started this business. You needed a Travis to start a business like this. So he even acknowledged that, you know, the strengths that Travis had in sort of disruption and innovating and so on were things that he didn't have or weren't his, his uh sweet spot. Um, and I think the vast majority of the people who were looking for that kind of mission oriented experience that was generated around innovation and hyper growth are not at the company anymore. Um, you know, Dara inspires more stability and, you know, more diplomacy. And I think

• 22:54Speaker 01

  the company is sort of culturally orienting toward that, right? So, so I think it's natural to have people say, well, I prefer this or that. You know, I'm a startup innovator person, or I'm a want stability diplomacy person. Um, and that's sort of, that feels, you know, sort of natural and predictable.

• 23:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, okay, all right, I'm gonna read between the lines there and say, all right, maybe that person wasn't so far off. The, uh, one of the things that Dara did also was sort of come in and, uh, you know, basically put the former leadership of the company on blast and, you know, spend his first while making apologies for the stuff that, you know, you guys were doing. What do you think about that?

• 23:43Speaker 01

  I, you know, that was disappointing. It may have been something he had to do just because the, the environment around the company was so intense and he had to give people confidence that it was gonna take a different path. I think, you know, as it played out since then, you know, a lot of the stuff has proven to be more smoke than fire. And so I think he went a little harder core than he needed to on that stuff. But, and then as a result, he lost a lot of great employees who were in the company and knew it wasn't a bad company. It had problems, but it was a good company fundamentally, because they didn't agree

• 24:25Speaker 01

  with that and I think it didn't allow the old management and the new management to cooperate as much as we might have, which meant, you know, the business lost some steam that it didn't have to lose. So I wasn't a fan of that.

• 24:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, now, the other, the other side of it is, you know, a lot of folks would say, you know, he was sort of right to do it. You know, I don't think anyone who lives in the Bay, uh, you know, has gone too long without like speaking with an Uber employee who, you know, did complain a little bit about, um, sort of the environment. So, uh, yeah, I sort of would love to hear your, your thoughts on, on what happened there.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, look, 90% of the people, nine zero employees of Uber who were there in the early days, loved the place and would Whatever problems they had, they said it was the best experience of their life. And they didn't experience sort of any of the problems that were out in the press. That doesn't mean, you know, 10% is still a lot, or 5% is even still a lot, right? But, but I think the company got mischaracterized because it was early on in this cycle that we're in now. And companies are having to account for all the things that happen inside the companies. That's sort of swept all industries since 2017 for a good reason. But Uber was sort of in the front end of that and therefore took a lot more heat than it probably would have if the same things happened now.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  So there's no doubt that there was things that could have been fixed, but this wasn't a bad company. And most of the people, the vast majority of the people inside the company would agree with me on that.

• 25:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. So would you say the problem was the, do you think the problem was like some of the bad elements of the culture? Was the problem the coverage? Just to get you on record.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  No, no, I, I, I don't, I wouldn't sort of disclaim, you know, full responsibility. And here's the reason is the company was growing so fast that unless you were also building the infrastructure of the company in the same, at the same pace. And by infrastructure, I mean HR, legal, training for managers, the things that solidify a company. Unless you're building them as fast as you're building the business, that misalignment is going to cause problems, right? So you have young people with managerial responsibility who haven't been trained as well as they should have. That's the problem, right? So those were real, real issues.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  That being said, I do think the press magnified them to a degree where if you were on the outside and you compared an outsider's view who was just reading that versus the people on the inside, it was like two different companies.

• 26:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, we did, you know, I guess you and I could go on about this for a long time. I did just have Eric Newcomer on, on the show last week from Bloomberg to talk a little bit about this. So if people want some more, you know, a more journalism focused conversation, I would say, go listen to that, that part and sort of can supplement what we're discussing here. And we're also going to get a little bit more into reporting and the reporting on Uber, you know, in the second segment. But I guess like the last question of this segment is, is that sort of what you would say to, you know, people working in startups today? When it comes to culture, make sure to grow. Uh, like the positive elements of culture, you know, so put some guardrails on early. So you don't end up in a similar situation. Would that be your advice?

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, look, the, the, uh, what I call entrepreneurs today is that, uh, when your company building has to track your business building, you know, that is, so there are companies that take a long time to grow and they're slow and the pace is different and, and you could build things incrementally to, to match that. For companies that are in hypergrowth, it's a super unique situation and you cannot ignore the company building parts of that, or you're going to have problems. So yeah, absolutely. I would tell younger people who are in this situation about that mistake and have to correct for it.

• 28:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, great. Um, that's a great place to leave this first segment. We're going to come back right after this to talk a little bit about self-driving and some of the other controversies, uh, you know, that Uber has, has hit into. Uh, and Emile, I already appreciate your graciousness in asking these questions and I'm looking forward to the second segment. So we will be back right after this.

• 28:42Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 29:22Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 29:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, and we're back here for the second segment of the Big Technology Podcast with former Chief Business Officer, Uber, Emile Michael. Let's kick off, starting a little bit, talking a little bit about self-driving cars. So, obviously, like, when we were hearing the Uber story back in 2016, 2017, the idea was that eventually the company would become, you know, an amazing business because they're, it would have the network, right? The technology to be able to call the cars and all those cars would be autonomous. And so you'd be able to, you know, if you're Uber, you would have the interface where people would tap in to get their rides and you'd have the technology to be able to deliver them those rides.

• 30:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I think today, you haven't heard a lot about the self-driving program at Uber. You mentioned it's a, it's a $800 million, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but somewhere around there, item on the balance sheet that's contributing to the company's unprofitability. So, from your perspective, did it just, is it just taking longer? Or do you think Uber is giving up on self-driving cars? Is that dream still alive? How should we think about that?

• 30:56Speaker 01

  I think it's just, it's just taking longer. I always was on the cynical side of the timelines on self-driving. Like, I always, when we were investing in this in 2014, 15, my view was like, it's gonna take till 2025 or longer to have a material number of cars on the road. And I was, you know, I'm not a technologist, so, you know, I was just looking at it from a combination of regulatory, what I understood with the technology and so on. And I still think that date may be too soon even. So, I think everyone made this mistake. GM Cruise made this mistake. Waymo made this mistake. I don't know if you remember, Waymo was saying that they're gonna have a self-driving car

• 31:40Speaker 01

  service launched by 2017. Cruise said that it was gonna have it by 18. So, the whole industry, I think, was just wrong in how fast this was gonna move.

• 31:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Why were they so wrong?

• 31:52Speaker 01

  You know, I think that's a great question. I think that people thought the components were going to advance faster than they did, Moore's Law oriented, and it just didn't turn out that way. Because unlike a microchip, which just gets faster, faster, faster, the thing with self-driving cars is like you have to count for infinite situations. A kid crossing the street, a plastic bag twirling in the air that looks like a rock, what happens in rain, incline, and so on, and just the sheer enormity of the situations. Just make it a much harder problem to solve, and then the public's tolerance for mistakes is not

• 32:32Speaker 01

  high, right? When there was a fatality, that shut the industry down for six, nine months. So, you know, it's just gonna take a long time to get the tech right, to get people comfortable that there are gonna be errors and is that okay, and then the regulations to follow.

• 32:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  What did you hear about when, what did you, sorry, what did you feel like when you heard about the fact that there was someone that was killed by a self-driving car? Is that something that you expected to happen eventually, or did that catch you off guard?

• 33:05Speaker 01

  You know, I was gone from the company by then, but, you know, it was sad. I, you know, I guess you expect these things to happen, but the way it happened was tragic, and you're putting names to faces, or sort of names to these statistics, and it's sad. You know, so I didn't, you know, I wasn't in the guts of it to know how it happened or why until way, way after, but, you know, the thing you have to think about is, driving cars with humans kills a million people a year worldwide.

• 33:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, no doubt.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  So, you have to, yes. So, at some level, you have to believe that we're doing net better for the world by doing the self-driving thing, even though it's imperfect. But that's still hard when you see an individual case.

• 33:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and I wonder if Uber will will continue to do this. It is now a much longer time horizon. Obviously, it's, you know, you have to make the ethical calculation about about doing it after having a situation like that. But I do hear your point on that on that front. And, you know, it seems like there are other programs that are advancing beyond it. And for me, I wonder, you know, obviously, it was a core part of Uber's business back in the day, but I wonder how long that they're gonna hold on to this for. So you've been close to it. You understand the strategy. What where's it gonna go from here?

• 34:34Speaker 01

  I mean, I think there's, I think there's gonna be four or five efforts. I'm self-driving that all have a shot at winning summer all of the market. Waymo clearly is is far ahead of anyone in the industry.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  You have the GM Cruise effort, which is material and is well-funded and has the benefit of being attached to an automaker so that in theory you could take the software and put it in the hardware more easily. And you have Uber's effort. Those are three big efforts in the United States that all have a shot. And then you have something going on in China. The rest of the efforts around the world are relatively minor. So it is not crazy to for somebody to continue investing in these four efforts. It could be that consortium develops and continues investing in Uber's effort and they all, you know, consortium of automakers benefit from that. As as you probably read, Toyota invested in that and I'm guessing they did that because they want access to the tech. So I do think you just have to get other people to help finance it because it's a

• 35:36Speaker 01

  worthwhile effort and they could easily be still one of the main players.

• 35:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so interesting. So it might just end up being something that either spins out or does some partnership. But it seems like from that answer, you don't really believe that it's just gonna be Uber going at it alone for too much longer.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  The the the cash cost of it is enormous. And and the Bennett, you actually, if you're Uber and you're running a network of of cars, you want several automakers to have the software in their car. So you actually want people to have access to your technology. Unlike if you're Waymo and you're like, I'm gonna run the whole closed system, I'm gonna do it all myself. It's a different business model and I think, I think if Uber does it the right way, it's a superior business model to have a lot of the auto companies dependent on their self-driving tech. But to do that, they need their contribution from a financial standpoint to make it through the seven, 10 years it's gonna take to get there.

• 36:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, and I don't doubt that this will change the way that our cities operate and the way that we get around at some point. The question is what point that will be. And so that's sort of interesting, interesting of your business to decide to make a bet on it and try to figure out where the time horizon is that where it makes sense for you. So, uh, interesting lesson for Uber and yeah, we'll, we'll see where it goes on that front. Last point about self-driving cars is obviously there's, you know, been news that Anthony Lewandowski, who was at Google and, uh, you know, got busted for bringing some trade secrets over to Uber is now going to go to prison for, I think, a year and a half, uh, once it's, once the coronavirus pandemic has subsided for his role in doing that.

• 37:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  I just wanna like, you know, you, you obviously work closely with the guy, uh, and were, were in the company at the time. What's your, what's your take on all of this and, and, you know, should, is, is he the one that, that should be, you know, going to prison for this and, and, you know, are there other repercussions? Should there be, you know, are, are there things we're not seeing about it that we should be looking for?

• 37:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's actually much more simple than that. My understanding of what he was convicted of was taking stuff from Google that he shouldn't have. Right? So there's never been proof that that came over to Uber, as far as I know, there was never intent at all, uh, for any of that to come over to Uber. So, uh, so let's separate that piece. What he did at, and what he admitted to doing at Google was the problem that, and, and the challenge that, or the reason he's gonna, uh, spend jail time. So, you know, had we known that that was, uh, gonna happen, obviously that wouldn't have been something that would be okay with us, right? Because, because of the magnitude of that.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  So that, you know, that's a good example of the press muddling the issue and trying, you know, and sort of conflating Uber into it. Well, it was actually an individual's action at his prior company.

• 38:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And look, I mean, there's a reason why I kind of think these conversations are a good way for us to sort of get to the bottom of stuff like, you know, I don't know, I don't think I'm going to be right 100% of the time and we can talk about things. You know, with some nuance. So I appreciate you, uh, you know, being able to go back and forth on it. Um. But let's just play, so let's just do some game theory for a little bit, or I don't even know if that's the right term for it, but. If you're this guy and you're taking these trade secrets from Google and you're going to work for a company that has a really important self-driving car. Uh, uh, you know, initiative, like, what's the point of taking the trade secrets from Google if you're not going to go, you know, apply them to your, to your next job. And, you know, I know it's a game of speculation, but is there any like,

• 39:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  I, I guess like logically, you know, you think about motive or you think about, you know, what the use is in terms of stuff like this. So was he just like kind of getting a kick on downloading stuff off the Google server? I mean, maybe.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Um, I, you know, I, um, the only thing I could speculate on is that Google owed him a whole bunch of money from some acquisition that they did and maybe he wasn't sure he was going to get it. And this was some way of making sure he had something to, to hold them accountable to that. But, you know, there was no, Uber didn't need their stuff. Their stuff was like irrelevant to us. Like we have a, we, Uber was building something totally different. And you wanted, we wanted Anthony's brain. Uh, but we didn't want his work product or Google's work product.

• 40:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Okay.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  And, and as far as I know, that there was never, they never found anything anywhere, right? So that sounds like he downloaded something and then threw it away or never, never used it. So. Um, and this only came up years later. So, or a year later, right? Since the acquisition was done. So I, you know, that's my only guess as to, to motivation.

• 40:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, all right, that's fair. Let's another, I guess we can just kind of go do some like, we can roll through some other controversial things. You're handling them with extreme grace and I appreciate that. Saudi Arabia. You know, I mean, you know, the question that's coming, but you know, as far as we know, US intelligence agencies say they intended to kill an American or a US journalist in Jamal Khashoggi. We know that they're accused by the FBI or people close to the Saudi royal family are accused by the FBI of trying to log into Twitter systems and, you know, get data from dissidents, you know, pass it back along.

• 41:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  And they invested billions of dollars into Uber and I think there's someone, they have someone on the board. Isn't there, is there a certain point where Silicon Valley will throw up its hands and say, you guys got a lot of money, but you know, we don't really want to do business with you anymore?

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Um, well, let's first get the facts and timeline sort of consistent, which is, we took the investment from Saudi in 2016. And so these events that you're talking about happened after that.

• 41:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Happened after, no doubt about it.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  That being said, you know, the broader question is what the Silicon Valley, really any company that's seeking foreign investment do. It's a really hard question because in some ways you could, one can make the argument that, you know, every government has in the world, every big government sort of has their things that they do, right? Like look at Chinese and the Uighurs, what Russians are rumored to do with political opponents. And then, you know, Brazil and the corruption in the Petrobras, like every country has their thing. So do we just, is there, it's a gray zone for what one does unless you want the world's economic clock to stop ticking.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  That being said, you know, is it better? If Saudi makes an investment in American companies, that investment results in money and that money goes back to the Saudi people to improve their lives, right?

• 42:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Mm hmm.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Um, which was the theory, if you remember P, uh, the Public Investment Fund of Saudi, the idea was like to transition the company from oil wealth to other, other forms of wealth because that, that regime was going away. And so we thought, the way we thought about it when we took the Saudi money is we could be a change agent and help convince them that women should be allowed to drive. And that was a major part of our discussions with them and our major, we made it known that that's what we were supporting and we, uh, thought that, you know, Uber could be an advocate for that and we were and it happened soon after they invested in us. So you have this sort of area of like, where, is there a clear answer? Should we be black and white or should we, you know, look at the positives and negatives? And how do we make sure that some things don't ever happen again?

• 43:27Speaker 01

  And it's just, it's a really hard question.

• 43:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's a perspective, um, that I hadn't heard before. It's an interesting one. Um, but there have been so many people who have said, you know, oh, we can change the Saudis or, you know, I remember MBS coming in and doing his tour of all the tech companies. And, you know, people were like, oh, Saudi Arabia has changed and I think Thomas Friedman wrote this whole big column with that same vision. Doesn't seem like it's happened in the way that people have anticipated. So just put yourself, let's say you put yourself in that position of, you know, being able to take an investment like that. Uh, you know, today, you know, let's say we were to flip the timeline, uh, would you still do business with them?

• 44:11Speaker 01

  I mean, I, you know, I, if I, I believe generally that if the regime, if the company or a country that you're taking money from is actually going to use the potential gain in that to help their people. I think that's a, that's a big deal to me. I, I was born in Egypt and I grew up speaking Arabic as my first language. My parents immigrated because they wanted a better life. So I kind of know what life's like in the Middle East. And, you know, I have a lot of sympathy for what people are going through there, what they went through in the last couple of decades with a lot of dictators and so on. And if I believed that the money was going to go back and was going to help improve their lives,

• 44:54Speaker 01

  you know, it would be something I would strongly consider and have to weigh against sort of, you know, the things that happened in the last couple of years.

• 45:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, all right. So, so sort of inconclusive now.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  I mean, I, you know, it's, it's, it depends on the regime. Like now, if you said, would you take money from North Korea? Of course not, right? There's a, there's sort of a line that you draw because you know the money's not going back to help anybody except the regime, right?

• 45:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, that's, that's true. Okay, let's leave it on, leave it there for now. We're going to go to a break. We now know no money from North Korea going to.

• 45:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  So we're making progress here. And we'll be back talking a little bit about the startup ecosystem that has emerged around former Uber employees and Emil's rolling in and where he sees it going. So hang in there and we'll be back right after this break.

• 46:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, we're back for our third and final segment here with Emile Michael, the former Chief Business Officer at Uber. We've had a great conversation so far. We've talked a lot about Uber's business and self-driving cars. Some of the controversies that Uber has been close to, whether that's Anthony Lewandowski, one of their former employees, being sentenced to prison for taking trade secrets from Google, or their connection with Saudi Arabia and sort of the calculations with taking money from a country like that. Let's kind of talk a little bit, spend our last few minutes together, talking about the startups that are emerging from the Uber ecosystem. Because living in the Bay Area, I can tell you that there have been so many of them

• 47:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  that you start to see these Uber employees, I guess, folks who are early on, ended up taking, maybe making some money on the IPO and starting companies. And many of them are still in stealth, but a few interesting ones are Cottage, which sort of build grandma houses in the back of the, or in-law houses in the back of people's houses. And Red Circle, which is the podcast app that I use to host and do dynamic insertion, which I should say introduced us for the purpose of this, or to get together for this interview. Full disclosure. And then there's Bullet Coffee and others. And also, I heard that you, Emile, host a quarterly meeting of Uber alumni to talk

• 47:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  a little bit about what's going on in startup land and sort of compare notes and help each other. So just give us like a quick 10,000-foot view of sort of why there's been such an impressive or enthusiastic group of founders that have come out of Uber and sort of what's the stuff that they're working on? What does it say about the future of our economy?

• 48:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love talking about this team. I mean, You know, if you put yourself back into the early days of Uber's, you know, one of, if not the most exciting company in the world in terms of its ambition, its speed of deployment, its sort of how global it was and so on. So it attracted a really energetic group of people. Um, and we were really relentless about, um, hiring, uh, the best people we could find, um, all the time. I mean, I think Travis and Ryan Graves interviewed people, everyone in the company until it got to like 500 or a thousand people, something like that, to try to keep, um, you know, the level of talent really high.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  So it's natural that, um, you will have this diaspora of great talent. And what made Uber different, maybe than some of the other tech companies, is that because we deployed people in every city, we had more employees than average, than the average tech company, like early on, right? Cause they were doing like things like I was saying, like handing out photos to drivers and they were doing things in the cities they live in. So, so you had this, you know, big employee base relative to other tech companies that was, uh, that was attracted to the place because of the speed and energy it had and because of its big mission. And then the hiring bar was high. So it's natural that you'd have people who are ambitious and going out there doing, um, interesting things.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  And I think, you know, people, uh, you know, uh, had a lot of criticism in 2017 about where we are, you know, uh, promoting leaders of different, uh, stripes. And I will tell people today, I still think there will be more female Fortune 500 CEOs coming out of Uber than any other tech company in the valley.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  The P and Ls they got, the responsibilities they got early in their career were incredible, unable to get in any other type of company. Um, and so I think you'll see leaders who are building their own companies and leaders who are going to join other companies and become C-level folks there. Um, and this is going to happen all over the world.

• 50:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Are they mostly doing transportation-related startups? Because I've, there's like, uh, seems to be this sort of, uh, divide between them. Some of them want to stay in transportation. Seems like you're still bullish on the transportation space and others are like, I don't want to be anywhere near that stuff anymore. So what's your perspective on it?

• 50:28Speaker 01

  I think a lot of them went into the food delivery part of transportation. A lot of former Uber employees at DoorDash, um, Rappi and some of the other food delivery companies.

• 50:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  But I'm talking about like founders, though, like people starting new companies.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  I, I don't, I don't, I mean, I don't think that there's going to be a lot of success in starting new transportation companies.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  You know, I haven't seen, like, you know, I, there was some that were like, oh, we transport kids or we do these, you know, straight line shots down Fifth Avenue in these, you know, SUVs. I just, I don't, you know, I'm not optimistic about those things. So I think the, the more innovative stuff you'll see is, is outside the transportation sector from the, from the Uber people. But what you will see is that they will be way more unafraid of doing operational work than the average software company will be. If that means you have to go to a city and use hustle to start a business because you have to talk to real people or you have to do things on the ground, um, they're less afraid of that because they lived that, right?

• 51:37Speaker 01

  And they're very optimistic about their ability to, uh, to drop into a city and create, create a new business as opposed to sort of sitting at home and do, you know, and writing code. So I think some of the things that require logistics outside of transportation are going to be things that they gravitate toward.

• 51:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. And so you want to tell us like a few that you find interesting and sort of what it, what they say about? The market, I mean, assuming you're able to speak about them, but I'm curious where you think things are going in this world.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, um, I think you'll, you know, like I said, the biggest diaspora has been to other food delivery companies. That's one sort of category that I think is still growing tremendously and had tremendous tailwinds from COVID. Um, I think a lot of the software you're gonna see, software development startups coming out of Uber or, or things like, you know, Red Circle that you're involved or things that are around autonomous, um, you know, how to automate certain things, not just cars, but maybe things on a smaller level. Um, I sort of saw robotic coffee company that was started out from people, uh, from Uber. Um, so I think you're gonna see a lot of that. Um, there was a couple of companies that are starting to work on maps and how to

• 52:51Speaker 01

  make maps more rich for the self-driving future. Um, so you see they're kind of all over the place, to be honest. It's not like, you know, you had PayPal and a bunch of those people went into payments, you know, Keepalboy and so on. I think this is gonna be more widespread in their domain than, you know, the average startup that succeeded in the valley.

• 53:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. So there's gonna be like an Uber mafia that might do like, similar to the PayPal mafia that do like logistic stuff. That'll be interesting. That'd be interesting. Uh, but the question is, can they get over the hump, right? Because we're in the middle of like a pretty devastating moment for business. I would imagine if you're a new company, you're having a hell of a time uh, right now. Uh, how many of them would you say are just gonna get wiped out by this pandemic?

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, there's, there's a light side to the business environment in this pandemic, which is if you're doing anything enterprise software, you're getting way more of a look than you did, you know, a year ago.

• 53:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Cause we're all working from our homes and we need the technology to connect us.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right. And the, and the rise of Zoom and the market caps that they've been able to achieve. So people are like, oh my God, there's a lot in enterprise software that hasn't been done yet. And that's number one. Number two, fundraising is getting in some ways easier because it's all done by Zoom. So if you're an entrepreneur, you could probably talk to 20 VCs when you used to only be able to have the time to talk to five because you'd be traveling up and down San Hill and doing all these things. So the, uh, so that's another thing. And then third, there's still the world, the investment world is awash in money with low interest rates. So it has to find somewhere to go. And it's obviously going into our stock market, which is why it's surprisingly high, but it's also going into startups. Um, so I do think some will get crushed.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Companies that are doing like lending to small businesses like Cabbage or, you know, things like that are just that are sort of counter to where COVID is hitting or will lose. But I think there's a lot of new stuff that's going to come out of this as well.

• 54:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Great. Okay. Um, I, we're just about out of time. I want to ask you one last question, which is sort of going to bring it all full circle. I'd love to know a little bit about like your personal habits right now in the middle of the pandemic. Are you taking Uber? Are you taking it as much as you used to? Do you find, did, did you buy a car? Are you finding yourself driving more? Like, what is your, you know, personal relationship to the technology that you helped build?

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, um, I had, yeah, got married in eighteen, two thousand and eighteen. So, you know, I was forty five. So we did till, till late in life. So more what I've been doing for Uber is sort of catching up to what a normal person might be. So I had my, my first kid, my daughter on February seventh, right before shit hit the fan in, uh, on COVID. So.

• 55:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Good times.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's good times. So since then, I've been like a, an adoring dad in there for every sort of milestone. Like everyone else, when I'm doing business calls, advising companies or doing my board meetings, I'm, I'm on Zoom all the time. I'm trying now to move to, to a half Zoom and half audio, just so I can pace a little bit and not have sort of the, it gets super exhausting to look at someone's face, uh, on Zoom all day, every day.

• 56:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Definitely. Okay. But go, tell, tell us a little bit more about the car stuff though, like.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  What's on your phone and how are you getting around?

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I live in, I live in, uh, on a, uh, in Miami Beach and I live on, you know, uh, an island connected to the main part of Miami Beach and I have car, I've, uh, the car I got from California, which I never got rid of. And I bought another one when we had the kids so we could have baby seat and, and so on. So I'm not. Been in Ubers in the last few months, for sure. You know, have it needed to, because mostly we've been quarantined and then when we go out, you know, we're taking our daughter to pediatrician or something, you know, it's much more convenient to have your own baby seat, to be honest.

• 56:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, totally, totally. I mean, I hear you. I'm all in the personal call revolution now, too. So I'm with you on that. Well, thank you so much. Yeah, yeah, I know. Unfortunately, the circumstances are what they are. But thank you so much. This has been a, you know, great conversation. You really rolled with the punches and we're able to, you know, talk about some of the, some tough, some tough stuff that's been in the headlines with, you know, Cool Hat and, you know, talking about nuance. And I appreciate that very much.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  Great. Thanks for giving me the opportunity.

• 57:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  So thank you for coming on.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  All right. Take care.

• 57:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, you too. And everybody out there, thank you so much for listening. I just recently dug into our statistics and it looks like many of you are listening all the way to the end. So if you're still here with us, I appreciate that. If you've enjoyed today's episode, I encourage you to subscribe and rate. This will help, you know, make sure that we're in your app for the next show and also give us some help with discoverability to make sure other people can, can find us. So thanks again for listening and we will see you next week here on the Big Technology Podcast.

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