Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett Uber CEO: At Uber, If You Don’t Perform, You’re Out! Uber Was Losing $3b A Year About this episode Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi reveals the future of driverless cars, how he led Uber’s financial turnaround, his family’s escape from Iran in 1978, and the truth about AI, automation, and job loss!
Dara Khosrowshahi is the CEO of Uber and successfully transformed the company from losing $3 billion a year to generating over $9 billion in free cash flow. He previously served as CEO of Expedia for over a decade, scaling the company into a global leader in online travel.
He explains:
◼️The "wartime" leadership strategy he used to save Uber from collapse
◼️Why telling the uncomfortable truth is the only way to scale a company
◼️His undercover experience as a driver and why it changed the app
◼️Why 80% of jobs face total disruption from AI automation by 2035
◼️The truth about autonomous vehicles and banning humans from driving
(00:00) Intro
(03:32) Why Escaping Iran Rewired My Appetite For Risk
(10:15) The Brutal Truth About Raising Kids In An Uncertain World
(16:50) Do Engineers Make Better CEOs — Or Miss What Really Matters?
(18:09) How To Choose The Few People Truly Worth Betting On
(19:16) The X-Factor That Turns Good Employees Into Game Changers
(20:51) Why Rejection Is The Price Of Building Something That Matters
(26:46) How To See Industry Shifts Before They’re Obvious
(32:51) The Jevons Paradox: Why More Efficiency Can Mean More Consumption
(39:47) Why Transparency As A CEO Builds Power — Not Weakness
(46:52) Can You Turn A Comfortable Culture Into A Hungry One?
(49:42) Ads
(51:10) The Advice Young People Need Before It’s Too Late
(57:36) How To Build A Culture That Improves Every Single Week
(01:01:53) Why Most Teams Fail At Goals — And How To Fix It
(01:06:56) What Happens When Strategy And Values Fall Out Of Sync
(01:13:53) How AI Is Changing Our Company — And The Moves We’re Making Now
(01:18:52) Why 90% Of Our Engineers Use AI — And What That Signals
(01:23:43) Will AI Replace 9.5 Million Uber Drivers — Or Reinvent The Job?
(01:35:05) The Most Important Advice For Thriving In An AI-Driven Future
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Transcript 18,944 words · 4 speakers
0:00 Speaker 03 You come to Uber, you're gonna work your ass off. And if you're not performing, we're gonna let you know.
0:04 Speaker 01 But do you ever worry that they might not be able to deal with the truth?
0:07 Speaker 03 Then they can leave. Because the most important skill in life is the skill of working hard. And when you see the top athletes, Ronaldo, Michael Jordan, of course they're talented. But the thing that's different about them is they work their asses off. And that's a learned skill. That's not something you're born with. You may be smarter, more talented, etc. But I'm not gonna let anyone outwork me.
0:28 Speaker 01 With that mentality. When you joined Uber Uber was losing 3 billion per year. Now it generates 8.5 billion in free cash flow every year. But it seems that you were forged in such a way that you were gonna be relentless.
0:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, and it really started with being born in Iran. With the Islamic Revolution in 1978, we were not safe there. And I remember at one point we had these revolutionary guards come into the backyard and bullets went through our living room. So my family came to the US to rebuild their lives.
0:55 Speaker 01 You were what, eight, nine years old?
0:56 Speaker 03 Yeah. And it really destroyed my dad. Sorry, he
1:04 Speaker 03 It's tough for me to talk about it.
1:11 Speaker 03 Alright, let me try again. Seeing that has put me on a road where I just wanted to make my family proud. So I studied bioelectrical engineering, and then my first job was invest in banking, and I got to see the process of big companies being built. And then I had the opportunity to take over Expedia.
1:26 Speaker 01 And in your 12 years as CEO, Expedia sales increased from 2.1 billion to 8.8 billion. And you were the highest paid CEO of a US tech company.
1:34 Speaker 03 And I left it all behind to go to Uber.
1:36 Speaker 01 And I want to get into practical company building, how you would get that company to work hard and create a culture of continuous improvement and all that stuff. But there's an alien that's arrived amongst us, which is AI. Now, driving I think is one of the biggest employees in the world, like as of profession.
1:50 Speaker 03 I mean, we've got nine and a half million drivers and couriers on our platform.
1:53 Speaker 01 Those drivers' careers that you have will be out of work. Being honest about the situation, what do the nine million people do?
2:03 Speaker 01 Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us, and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to, and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show. Thank you.
2:47 Speaker 01 Darren, you lead one of the most Consequential, interesting, talked-about companies of my generation. It's worth hundreds of billions of dollars last time I checked. And it's uh it's a company that I use every single day.
3:03 Speaker 03 Thank you.
3:03 Speaker 01 I've looked through your story. You were the CEO of Expedia
3:07 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm.
3:08 Speaker 01 at one point. Yes. You were currently the CEO of Uber, and you've turned that company from a a loss making company to a highly profitable company and one that has continued to be successful through such a great time of transition. I your story starts in a very interesting way.
3:24 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm.
3:26 Speaker 01 And I was, you know, when I start doing the research for guests sometimes, I I I think I come in with some kind of presumption that you like, grew up in California, you went to Stanford, et cetera. But that is not the case. Can you take me to that earliest context so I can understand
3:41 Speaker 01 how and why you are the way that you are?
3:44 Speaker 03 Uh quite the quite the starting questions, but but but I'll try. I I think that for me, the events that shaped my life and maybe a part of who I am really started with. My being born in Iran. And Iran at the time was modernizing, becoming a modern society. And my family built a pretty big industrial company that everyone was quite proud of in Iran. We lost all of that with the revolution in 1978. And my family had to come to the U.S. to rebuild their lives.
4:25 Speaker 01 You had to come to the US.
4:26 Speaker 03 We were not safe there. One of my uncles actually was a cabinet member of the Shaws, who had just been toppled. And at one point, we had uh uh these revolutionary guards come into the backyard. They were actually going after our neighbor's house, uh, and one of their guns went off and bullets went through our living room, uh, shattered the glass in the living room. And at that point, my mom's like, we're not safe being here. So we had to come to the U.S. And I do think that event to some extent has shaped not just me, but my family, in that the rebuilding of our lives, um, of our
5:10 Speaker 03 uh economic lives to some extent, where we're all trying to rebuild what we lost in Iran.
5:15 Speaker 01 Do you look back on that and and can you identify any sort of fingerprints that were left on you from that time that have defined you in a business capacity?
5:23 Speaker 03 I think at my core, I never feel safe. You know, when the the experience of losing everything, and and for the kids, I I tell you, it was fine for the kids. But seeing my parents lose everything, and and it really destroyed my dad. You know, it really His losing his value to the world as he saw it really hurt his inner being. And I do think to some extent seeing that has put me on a road where I want to rebuild, I want to make my family proud. But at the same time, I never that feeling of having the floor, you know, the rug pulled out of you, of building everything.
6:08 Speaker 03 That's a feeling that never leaves you. I think Americans underestimate what this place represents in its ideals, right? Which is if you build something, it's yours. There's a rule of law, it can't be taken away from you. That is not true for the majority of the population of the world. And so I think for me, there's a drive to build, and it's at the same time, never, ever, ever taking anything for granted, never being satisfied. Because the minute you take things for granted, then that rug can be pulled out from under you.
6:43 Speaker 01 On your father, there was a moment where he a couple of years, I think six years, where he got trapped in Iran and wasn't granted an exit visa.
6:50 Speaker 03 Yes.
6:51 Speaker 01 And I imagine at that time your mother was raising you alone here in New York City.
6:55 Speaker 03 Yeah. In Tarrytown, New York, 45 minutes north of New York City. But she she went from a life of never having to work to she had to become a salesperson to make some money. And she did it all herself. And she really stepped up. So I think it shaped us. It was difficult in some ways. I I miss my dad. I remember when he left, he was like a giant compared to me. And then when he came back, it was my sophomore year at college. And he still saw me as a kid. And so he wanted to drive me to uh to college and and he did. And then he's like, he wants to hang out. I'm like, Dad, can you get out of here? I want to hang out with my kids. I was ex uh with my friends. I was excited to go back to school.
7:37 Speaker 03 And it was just, it it was sad seeing the change, you know, of a man who had gotten older. Uh his time in Iran was really tough on him. He had a heart attack on the plane coming back. So he was a diminished person to some extent. Um, but it was great that I had many, many years with him, you know, since then.
7:57 Speaker 01 When he was away, when he was trapped in a run and wasn't able to exit, your mother Lily
8:02 Speaker 03 Yes.
8:04 Speaker 01 referenced how you didn't mention him much, but when he returned, you broke down in tears.
8:21 Speaker 01 That's okay.
8:22 Speaker 03 Yeah, not don't be.
8:26 Speaker 03 He was a very stoic man.
8:31 Speaker 03 That's okay.
8:37 Speaker 03 Sorry, he
8:40 Speaker 03 passed away a couple of years ago, so it's tough for me to talk about it.
8:45 Speaker 03 Yes, okay.
8:55 Speaker 03 All right, let me try again. He was a very stoic man. Um, so he kept it all inside, and we were taught to do the same thing. Uh but we wrote letters together and they're beautiful letters. He wrote poetry. So I communicated with him in Iran. But theirs
9:17 Speaker 03 um expression of feelings and kind of uh of frustration uh were not something that my family did. You know, you just dealt with the situation. And so yeah, I I think I suffer from uh overstoicism and then breaking down every once in a while, as you just saw.
9:38 Speaker 01 It's a a familiar story of them the men that I've interviewed that grew up with that kind of sort of emotional composure enforced and um modelled to them.
9:48 Speaker 03 Yeah, I don't know if it was enforced. Like it wasn't.
9:50 Speaker 01 Implicitly.
9:51 Speaker 03 Actually, yeah, like we were a very loving family, but my father was very humble. Um, he did not believe that just because you're in a position of power, you should kind of project that power, you should communicate that to everyone. And there was a stoicism inside of my family, which is don't complain, you know. Um so they it was it was a weird combination of stoicism and love at the same time.
10:15 Speaker 01 How does um because I'm not a father yet?
10:18 Speaker 03 Yes.
10:18 Speaker 01 But I I'm approaching that.
10:20 Speaker 03 Congratulations. Almost.
10:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, almost yeah. I've just proposed to my fiance, and we're, you know, we're in the process now of r you know bringing children into the world, hopefully. And it's one of the things I think a lot about, which is how do I stop my own st stoicism passing on to my children?
10:37 Speaker 03 First of all, fatherhood, parenthood is is so humbling. You have such a picture in your mind as to how you're going to raise your family, what your kids are going to be like. And they just become their own people. And it's such a beautiful process to see. And at first, there's this alarm oh my God, I'm losing control. You know, I've I've done everything, you've planned everything. This is how I'm going to raise kids. But then real life gets in the way. It is absolutely exhausting. So you probably execute on 80% of your plan and you're 20% imperfect because you are exhausted and you're working and you got a career, or often some people do. And at some point, you see these kids
11:22 Speaker 03 kind of move off into this completely unexpected territory. And there's a point for me, it was like, I'm a bit of a control freak. So I'm like, this is not good. They're kind of doing their own thing. But then you you step back and you're like, this is it's absolutely gorgeous what's happening. So the advice that I would just give in terms of being a parent is just spend the time with the kids. You know, it is that is the magic is not what you do. Um or or the particular tactics, but it's the investment in them and the time spent with them and the rest, you know, you can't control. But what you can control is kind of that connection.
11:59 Speaker 01 Hmm. I um speaking of children, I went back and looked through lots of different photos of where you lived and where you grew up to try and get a picture of your world in an early context. And all these photos look incredibly incredibly I think that was your fifth birthday.
12:14 Speaker 03 Oh wow. I had hair back then.
12:17 Speaker 01 You had a lot of hair
12:17 Speaker 03 My mom loved her dresses up in like little doll outfits.
12:21 Speaker 01 I can tell.
12:21 Speaker 03 Yeah.
12:22 Speaker 01 Another one of you in the garden.
12:23 Speaker 03 Oh lord. Look at that. I'm definitely not gonna do that to my kids.
12:28 Speaker 01 Age four in London
12:29 Speaker 03 Yes.
12:29 Speaker 01 photo of you.
12:30 Speaker 03 Yes.
12:31 Speaker 01 You and your cousins there. Another photo.
12:34 Speaker 03 Family was everywhere for us.
12:35 Speaker 01 And again, another one with a ps a beautiful haircut there.
12:40 Speaker 03 It was a great childhood. It was amazing.
12:42 Speaker 01 I spoke to your mum, Lily.
12:44 Speaker 03 I hope uh well, how'd it go? We'll see.
12:49 Speaker 01 She said, um I'll play the audiophile just so people can hear it.
12:52 Speaker 00 when he was very little, he told me that he wants to do something important in the world and he said becoming wealthy is not his priority, but making a change is
13:08 Speaker 03 I can't say I remember that conversation. But the one of my early experiences that really imprinted on me was we went to visit one of my dad's factories, family factories. And my dad was in charge of designing factories, building them, operating them. And The respect that that population, the factory had for him and the visit and how excited they were that his family was visiting was just really cool. And the way that he treated, he knew everyone's name. He treated them with such respect. It just really imprinted on me. There was this care. It wasn't the boss is coming and there's fear.
13:53 Speaker 03 And so for me, like that. Ability to build a life where you have impact on a lot of people, but it's it's positive kind of building impact. You have the broad respect of these folks, it really imprinted on me. So I was I always wanted, you know, when we came to the States, making money was important. I don't want to kind of BS and say, like, oh, I didn't care about it because we lost everything. And so my first job was like invest in banking. What's the goal of invest banking? Have fun, but make money. Right. And so that was a priority for me. But then as I matured in life, as I knew
14:33 Speaker 03 I had safety in terms of, okay, yes, I know I can do that. I can make money, I can provide for my family, I can support my mom and dad. Then building kind of an enterprise, having that feeling that I saw with my father, that connection with his team, uh, was something that became really important to me.
14:53 Speaker 01 When you came to New York, you were w eight, nine years old?
14:56 Speaker 03 Nine years old, yes.
14:57 Speaker 01 If I had asked you at nine years old when you arrived in New York what you wanted to do when you were older, what would you have said?
15:02 Speaker 03 I have no idea. I want to make my dad proud.
15:06 Speaker 03 That was it. I wasn't kind of motivated for a specific target at all. I just wanted to make my family proud.
15:14 Speaker 01 Why I want to make my dad proud.
15:17 Speaker 03 He's always been an important figure in uh in my life. You know, the there's this um and and I think part of it is that I never got to know him that well as an individual, you know, because he was obviously when I was younger, he was working all the time. So he would show up once in a while for dinner, et cetera. We always had family dinners together. And then he went away. And then I work. So I never really got to know the person that he was. But I don't know. There there's kind of this sense of duty. There's there's a hope that,
15:53 Speaker 03 you know, he's he's somewhere or maybe he's not someplace. But that making my father proud has always been a strong current, undercurrent in my life.
16:02 Speaker 01 So you're nine years old, you've arrived in New York City. Um, you do end up going off to college sometime later.
16:08 Speaker 03 Yes. I went to Brown University, studied engineering there.
16:11 Speaker 01 How do you think about that choice at that time and how determinant that was of your trajectory in your life? That decision to go to that university and study that subject.
16:19 Speaker 03 My father always said you can do anything in your life as long as either you're a doctor or an engineer. And I picked engineering. I just loved the problem solving aspect of engineering and all the layers of equations, et cetera, and those equations being able to represent something in real life, and then magically that something in real life following what it should theoretically. Like the problem solving aspect of engineering fascinated me. I absolutely loved it. Uh, and I think it serves me to this day.
16:50 Speaker 01 Engineers make good CEOs.
16:52 Speaker 03 Great CEOs. If you step back, companies are just machines, right? They're they're machines that are run by people. And over a period of time, you actually try to automate some of the stuff that the people do. And then you send the people off to do new stuff that can't be automated. Like we are rules-based, like it's an organism and it's a machine at the same time. And to some extent, the job of the CEO is engineering how do I set up the company to achieve the goals that I set for shareholders, set for my board sets sets for it. It's a giant engineering problem. And to me, that's like fascinating. The putting together the pieces to get to
17:37 Speaker 03 What you perceive to be the goal, and one of the really important things is you got to pick the right goals.
17:41 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
17:42 Speaker 03 Um, that is one giant problem solving engineering challenge, and it's one of the most fascinating parts of my job.
17:48 Speaker 01 I want to get into that, the the practical uh company building, how you organize um an organization to be a well-functioning machine, setting goals and all that stuff. Um, after after college, you go into investment banking for a period of time.
18:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, I work there for eight years in risk arbitrage to begin with, and then merge as an acquisition advisory work as well.
18:09 Speaker 01 And that experience I I was reading taught you about betting on people
18:13 Speaker 03 Yes.
18:13 Speaker 01 versus other things. What do you mean by betting on people? And why is that important?
18:16 Speaker 03 It was uh it was actually a lesson that I learned from Herbert Allen, who was running Allen and Company at the time. It was the the uh the Allen's uh family starter the company. And he always told me, and and at the time I didn't really listen to him. He he always had, Dara, always bet on people. Companies go, they're good companies, bad companies, but great people stay great all the time. And one of the things that made Allen a company was really special, you know, investment banking can be a dog eat dog sport. But Allen and company really cultivated relationships with people whom they perceived to be great, both in terms of potential and in terms of character.
19:01 Speaker 03 And of all the investment banks, that loyalty, that making a bet on a person and then staying with them through their whole careers is a pattern of how that place works. And it's definitely something that I learned there.
19:16 Speaker 01 What is it about one's character that makes them qualify as a great person?
19:19 Speaker 03 You look for success. Honor, loyalty, people who will tell you what they're gonna do, whether it's good or bad, and then follow through on their promises.
19:29 Speaker 01 Hard work, I'm surprised y that wasn't mentioned.
19:31 Speaker 03 Well, that comes with success.
19:32 Speaker 01 Okay.
19:32 Speaker 03 Talent and hard work. You put it those two together.
19:35 Speaker 01 And why did you leave Alan in company?
19:37 Speaker 03 I left Allen because I met Barry Diller. Uh he was a client of mine. We got to meet in uh big kind of deal, uh unfriendly, uh hostile, tender offer for Paramount at the time. It's that there's another one happening, I guess, for Paramount uh now as we speak. And he was the one person I thought I was going to be Alan Leifer. I thought I was going to be there forever. My older brother, Kave, is an Alan Lifer. He has, it's the only job he's had in his life. But Barry was the one person who I thought, you know, if I get a chance to work for this person, I'm, I'm, I'm gonna jump at it. And I did.
20:16 Speaker 01 Why? Why Barry?
20:18 Speaker 03 He he's spectacular. I mean, he was spectacular. He is spectacular, a doer. You know, he he I I met him in a circumstance where he lost. It was, it was this giant, hostile tender offer. Bids going back and forth between uh the the winner, Viacom and Barry. Ultimately, Barry stepped away, and we were planning uh an announcement. You know, and you can imagine all these like fancy PR people sitting around a table. How do we present a loss as a win? Right.
20:51 Speaker 01 So he bid for a company, he didn't get it.
20:52 Speaker 03 He didn't get it, and he walked away. He didn't get it because he walked away, which in hindsight was a was a mistake. He could have paid more. Uh and then in the release where he walked away, uh, I think the release was they won, we lost next. And he was a constant motion machine. Like, they won, we lost next. What's next? Let's go. And that's the kind of person I wanted to work for.
21:17 Speaker 01 In business, losing is part of the game.
21:19 Speaker 03 Absolutely. Absolutely. But then calling it out, you know, not bullshitting, not like, oh, we tried our best in the circumstances. They won, we lost next. It's okay.
21:32 Speaker 01 Does it matter how you lose?
21:33 Speaker 03 Absolutely it does. Absolutely it does. And I find companies guilty of two things. Like one is ignoring losses, like papering over losses, et cetera, right? And then sometimes being obsessive about the loss, you know, inspecting it, what happened, let's do a summary, let's meet what went wrong, et cetera. And and you know, for me, it's somewhere in the middle, which is recognize why you lost, recognize that you lost. Say it because it's important to say it. Analyze it, but then move on. Like, let's move on. And the next time you hope to
22:14 Speaker 03 have learned some kind of judgment to avoid that kind of a loss, but it doesn't mean you're going to avoid losing at all. Like if you're not taking shots, you're not missing, you're not losing. So for me, it's constantly moving and taking your shots, losing, learning, next, losing, learning, next. That constant motion is what I want to see. That constant motion and learning is what excites me.
22:38 Speaker 01 This is business advice, but also life advice generally, because a lot of people who I meet who come up to me and ask me questions about things often ask questions that sounded a lot like what you just said. It's dealing with rejection, dealing with taking an L and how that L then stays with them sometimes for a decade, sometimes for 15 years, and bec and holds them back, hurts their confidence, means that they don't take it any more shots, and this can cause a sort of a downward confidence spiral.
23:03 Speaker 03 Totally. And and listen, I'm I'm talking a big game, but I'll tell you, in my personal life, I can't deal with a rejection. I have a really hard time dealing with the rejection. Professional life, no problem whatsoever. So it's like in the end, we're all humans after all.
23:18 Speaker 01 You have a a difficulty dealing with rejection in your personal life
23:20 Speaker 03 Very much.
23:21 Speaker 01 kind of rejection?
23:23 Speaker 03 Any kind of rejection conflict, like it's it's something that has been uh that I fought my whole life, which is because I was one of the younger cousins. Because I was a youngest brother, I just kind of didn't have rights. So I was, I went with the flow. And going with a flow means you're going with a current, et cetera. I didn't cause trouble. And that has followed me in my personal life, in my professional life. I don't have as much trouble there. I guess my professional life to some extent is a mask because I get to be aggressive. I get to lose, et cetera. It's something that Sid, my wife, has really helped me with. But it is something in my personal life that generally I'm conflict avoidant.
24:08 Speaker 02 Your conflict avoidance.
24:09 Speaker 03 Yeah?
24:09 Speaker 01 Personal life.
24:10 Speaker 03 Yeah.
24:10 Speaker 01 Interesting.
24:11 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely.
24:12 Speaker 01 Hmm. That's not good in a relationship.
24:14 Speaker 03 No, no. That's why, that's why Sitz helping me out. I'm much better now.
24:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:18 Speaker 03 I'm much better. But it's it's when I take those issues on, I have to fight myself. There's some core, you know, with if if you and I were having an issue
24:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:30 Speaker 03 and I was sitting down with you and saying, hey, I'm not, I'm not happy about X or Y. I can feel there's a core me saying, just let it go. But that's how resentment builds. And that's how relationships over a long period of time start moving the wrong way. So it is something that is at my core, but I actively fight. Uh, and I'm getting better at it, but I'm still on a learning journey there, I'll tell you that.
24:54 Speaker 01 Eventually you go on to becoming the CEO of Expedia.
24:58 Speaker 03 Yeah.
24:58 Speaker 01 After um there was a couple of CEOs that came before you, but you you became the third and took that company on. Very different job going from investment banking to being a CEO.
25:07 Speaker 03 Yeah. Yeah. And there there was a journey there because I went from banking to running deals. And I knew that I knew that I liked how companies worked. The thing that I liked about investment banking was that I got to see a lot. There, I got to see really smart people, really cool companies built, but I couldn't go along with that journey. I was jealous of the journey that these CEOs were moving on. So then when MA was a bridge to work at a company and build uh the company, I moved from MA to CFO, chief financial officer, because that's a That's that's to some extent finance, but it's also being the CEO's partner and helping the CEO build.
25:52 Speaker 03 So I I always knew the direction that I want to go in, which is hey, at some point I want to actually be an operator. And then I had the opportunity to take over Expedia, the CEO of the time, Eric Blashford, kind of said, Yeah, big company thing, not for me. So he resigned. And honestly, Barry didn't have an alternative. I was
26:12 Speaker 01 Who was the owner of
26:13 Speaker 03 uh Barry was the CEO of And chairman of IAC, which was a parent company of what became Expedia, IAC Travel. The head of IC Travel resigned. I raised my hand and said, maybe I could do it. Barry was desperate. He had no one else. So he promoted me to be CEO of IAC Travel. And IAC Travel was going through some difficult times. So we spun it off as at Expedia. So that's when I became the CEO of Expedia, the public company, and I moved to the Netherlands of Seattle.
26:46 Speaker 01 in your job just before you took on that role as CEO, you were buying businesses. So MAs, mergers and acquisitions, you were buying companies.
26:54 Speaker 03 Yes.
26:54 Speaker 01 What are some of the companies that you bought?
26:56 Speaker 03 Oh, we bought a lot of companies. Uh we bought Ticketmaster, uh, we bought Match.com, uh, bought Expedia, Hotels.com, and it was all about the theme that Barry and I were uh fascinated with was the movement of commerce online. You know, it was it was during that uh time. It was the late, late 90s, early 2000s. And and we saw it happening with our very own eyes, really with Home shopping, right? It was a flat screen, it was a television, and you were offering products, and people were calling up, buying those products electronically. And just the medium change. A medium changed from a TV screen to an internet screen. And instead of calling, you could use uh HTTP.
27:41 Speaker 03 Uh and so while the medium changed, we kind of saw this opportunity to take advantage of the change of platform. So Match.com, essentially in the olden days, you know, you had online dating, but you would call a number and you'd be like, My name is Dara, and I'm six foot two. And this is you'd describe yourself and you'd hear other kind of uh uh recordings and you would get matched up based on someone who seemed nice. And all of that just moved online. That was what batch dot com was. Same thing with Ticketmaster, you know, in the olden days you would go to a Tower Records. Have you ever been to a Tower Records? You're too Yeah, so there were these things called record stores.
28:21 Speaker 03 And they also had a desk where they would sell concert tickets. So you would either call for a concert ticket or you would physically go and buy one. Amazing. And there were lines, tower record lines. And all of that exactly moved online. And same thing with travel, right? You would call a travel agent. And so all of there was this movement of retail and phone commerce to online commerce. And we identified the early players to make that shift. And personals, ticketing, travel were the ones that we went with went for because at the time Amazon was doing everything else like physical fulfillment. So what we were going for were essentially
29:04 Speaker 03 electronic transactions that did not require physical fulfillment. And that was travel, because, you know, it's a virtual good. Ticketing, uh, match.com, which was personal. So there was a pattern around the madness, so to speak. But we went out and bought all these companies. It was a really great time.
29:22 Speaker 01 I've got two questions that emerged there. One is Again, I'm really interested to understand how you would look for talent or how what how you'd think about what a great company is. Are there like we we looking at the company culture? We're looking at the founders, was there something else? Was it the profitability? And the other one is just really intrigued as to what this period of your life and thereafter taught you about how to spot opportunity in transition. Because that is a transitional moment of technology. And I think there is a certain pattern recognition one can develop as to like know what to bet on in these moments of transition where there's huge skepticism. The internet's gonna not go anything. So two questions there. One is like, how do you spot great companies? And then the second is like patterns in transition.
30:02 Speaker 03 So they're uh I'd say they're they're related, which is um we would spot great companies just by observing who is taking the lead in these transitions. You know, these transitions are difficult. You can't predict exactly where things are going, how quickly they're going, how much should you invest, what's a return, what uh what the what the market, how large is the market going to be. But there were companies that were emerging as the leaders. And we would just, I just identify the leaders and call call these folks up and say, I want to come in and talk to you. Like that was that was it. And to some extent,
30:36 Speaker 03 it's a self-reinforcing cycle, which is yes, the great management teams and the great founders were the ones who were able to identify the opportunity and hit that opportunity faster than anyone else, recognize that opportunity and execute on that opportunity faster than anyone else. So to some extent, the companies who were in the lead, of course, had the best management teams and had the best founding teams. And when those two things matched, that was when we jumped. And then the last thing I would tell you in terms of these pattern uh recognitions is that
31:12 Speaker 03 we never completed a successful deal because we got the company cheap. We actually overpaid for every single great company that we bought, but we overpaid based on what the market thought at the time, not what the reality turned out to be. So I do think one of the kind of pieces of pattern recognition with me is just.
31:36 Speaker 03 Humans think about success and transitions in a linear way because time is linear.
31:44 Speaker 01 What do you mean by that for someone that doesn't just they think of it going like this?
31:47 Speaker 03 Yeah, you know, it's it's the everything kind of moves this way, right? Your schedule is relatively linear, right? It's you sleep seven hours a day. Like your life is a linear life. But company and company success and company momentum, especially with new technologies, where if there's a technology that's truly better than the other technology, Within the virtual world is absolutely no friction holding it back. The these companies move in an exponential way in terms of their growth and ultimately in terms of their value. So whereas most people kind of see things, they, they, when they project out to the to the future, they see this. What actually happens is this.
32:29 Speaker 01 Oh
32:30 Speaker 03 That's where the opportunity is. It's the spread between the hockey stick and kind of the straight line. And it's very difficult for people to process that. And so that was, you know, those were the companies that we identified that hockey sticked, and online travel was a hockey stick, personals was a hockey stick, ticketing was a hockey stick.
32:51 Speaker 01 I heard about the Je is it Jevons paradox,
32:53 Speaker 03 Yes.
32:54 Speaker 01 which I think kind of sort of overlaps with what you're saying there. When things become easier, faster, cheaper, people do them not incrementally more, but ex like exceptionally more often.
33:04 Speaker 03 I mean, that that's the definition of Uber, and we can get to that at some point. Was uh originally it was built as a black cab service, so to speak, a black car service.
33:14 Speaker 01 Can you tell me that's uh that where it came from? Because a lot of people history has now moved forward. Most people have forgotten the story of how it came to be.
33:20 Speaker 03 Now, to some extent, it was well, to a large extent, it was that the founding was was before me, but it was um Uh Garri Camp, who was one of the founders, had this idea. Uh, and I think it was born in Paris. It was like a snowy day in Paris, and they couldn't find a black car. And it was a bunch of young tech guys. Like, how cool would it be to like pick up my phone and call a black car? And that was the core idea, which is hey, you can use your phone to call a black car. He brought on uh Travis Kalnik. Travis was the operator and and the founder. And To your point on Jevin's paradox, to some extent, people thought, well, what's the size of the black car market place and it was a couple billion dollars? Or what's the size of the taxi industry and it was
34:06 Speaker 03 uh more than a couple of billion dollars? But what they didn't see at the time was that as you improve the convenient if you radically make something either more convenient or cheaper, the market Expands beyond how you calculate it. So the Uber's size and scale now is way beyond the original marketplace of black cars andor taxis. The company today is a result of Jevon's paradox.
34:35 Speaker 01 Timing. We often we often don't think much about the luck of timing. Luck is an interesting word to use, but how important timing is and other sort of foundational factors are in enabling a company like Uber to exist. When you think about the timing of Uber, what are the sort of the foundations that made it possible?
34:54 Speaker 03 Well, it was it was a mobile revolution. It was mobile data technology, the iPhone coming together. In the early days, one of the geniuses of Trav of Travis was he would hire these market managers who would be GMs of new cities that they would expand into. And they would literally go to the city with a bag full of iPhones. And give away iPhones to black car drivers to get them to come on Uber. Because at the time, a lot of them didn't have, you know, they they didn't have smartphones, so to speak. So the onset of the of the smartphone was that kind of that beautiful magic of timing coming together and then aggressiveness of that founding team
35:37 Speaker 03 to understand that there's a pattern here, and I'm going to replicate that pattern all the world and raise as much capital as I have to to get there faster than anyone else. That was the magic. But it was, you know, again, it's Yes, there's luck in there, but if that founding team hadn't been as aggressive in, you know, blitz scaling, which is a term that folks used uh all around the world, company wouldn't be what it is today.
36:04 Speaker 01 Your transition out of investment banking into Expedia, CFO, then CEO. You know, listen, there's a stereotype in business that um Investment bankers and CFOs don't necessarily make the best CEOs because of they might stereotypically
36:18 Speaker 03 Over financialize.
36:19 Speaker 01 overfinancize. Maybe be less risk-averse, maybe be less, you know, those kinds of things. And when I spoke to Barry, he did say the following. I'll just play it for you because it's uh better coming from him.
36:31 Speaker 02 He was not an actual leader. Uh because he had uh his career up until then has had been on the financial side of things. So he really had not yet had the experience, opportunity to manage people. That came in a difficult way to him and he mastered it. It didn't take him all that long. He mastered how to become a leader and he mastered how to take ultimate responsibility for a company.
37:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, it was um growing up under Barry was was and and by the way, I I wouldn't be where I am today without not him as a mentor, because he's not like a mentoring kind of guy, but him as my leader, learning from him. But I'd say that the experience that really, really shaped me as it relates to Expedia was I did come in as more of a financial leader. Our leadership at expedia.com failed. I hired a I had to fire the first person, I hired a second person, complete disaster. And so I was 0 for two in terms of hiring for our largest business. This business was 50% of our profits, and I was 0 for 2 in uh in hiring. And so I went to Barry and the board and I said, well,
37:47 Speaker 03 if I miss hiring the third person to run the biggest parts of our business, then you should fire me. Barry quickly agreed. Yes, of course we will. So I said, obviously, I don't understand enough about the job to find the right person. So I think I've got to take the job myself for six months to a year to understand what it is that the job entails for me to then go and find that person. And so for what turned out to be, I think it was five or six years, I ran both the holding company, Expedia Inc., which is a public company, and I ran Expedia.com. I was president of the largest part of the company.
38:27 Speaker 03 That experience taught me my operating chops. That experience actually taught me how is it that you operate a company? How is it that you run something? And that's a very different skill set from capital allocation and all the financial. Uh wizardry that people embark on, that's important. But the what I discovered was operating a company, leading a company, organizing it, operating it, setting up the goals, getting the right team together. That's the part of the job that I loved. So it it took me a while to get there. Like my whole life, my whole early career was in this financial sector, which I enjoyed. But I didn't find my true love,
39:11 Speaker 03 which is operations and running companies and running a technology company until way, way later in my career. Uh, and I think to some extent now I've got both. I've got that financial part because it has to work. But the operations and the leadership part of the business is something that that I love. And watching Barry take responsibility, take shots, go against the grain as aggressively as he consistently did. I think has made me a much better operator than what the counterfactual would be if I had another boss.
39:47 Speaker 01 Three months into that role, the head of HR told you that you were scaring people.
39:51 Speaker 03 I've forgotten about that.
39:55 Speaker 03 I think that was my job. Yeah.
39:58 Speaker 01 What's the context there?
39:59 Speaker 03 You know, the context was that I first of all turnarounds in technology are really hard. Uh we were talking about the momentum thing when momentum is positive. In the technology sector, if momentum turns negative, it is remarkably difficult to turn it around. You know, Yahoo is Hanging on, but it was the great company, and you see where it is now, it's brutal when you get it wrong. And it always takes longer than you think. And it goes to, you know, when I was talking about linear versus exponential, just like the curves up are exponential, curves down are exponential as well. The first couple of years look bad,
40:44 Speaker 03 but they're not that bad.
40:45 Speaker 02 Mm.
40:46 Speaker 03 But you know in your mind that 10 years from now, it's going to be a fucking disaster.
40:51 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm.
40:52 Speaker 03 So, what I saw with Expedia was a technology company whose technology engine was broken. Code base was old, had not been reinvested in, technology leadership was coasting. And that really alarmed me. And one of the things that I learned from Barry in terms of leadership is that when a bell is rung, when when you when you see something, when you see a pattern, You have to act. You can't wait for a second. So, in my mind, once I figured out, oh my God, this really is a turnaround. This isn't like a company that I've got to tune. This company, if I don't move and move hard and fast,
41:37 Speaker 03 is gonna start on that exponential decay curve. I had to move quickly. And at that point, and and I am one of the skills that I learned from Barry is transparency. It's like whenever he wanted to understand an issue, he wanted to go to the source. He didn't want a summary.
41:56 Speaker 03 And it didn't matter where that source was. Is it a junior analyst or a president? He wanted to hear from the source because what he didn't want to lose is lose the fidelity of the issue. You know, when there's an issue here, then it goes through the analyst and the associate and the vice president and SVP and whatever. By the time it's summarized for you as the CEO, it's just it's lost everything. And usually their levels are like, Hey, do we really want to tell them that? Why don't we phrase it this way, et cetera? So your whole life as a CEO is kind of a it's a version of the world that your team wants you to see. And if you got a good team, usually it has more to do with reality than not.
42:42 Speaker 03 But you are subject to your team and the information flow that gets to you. And so Barry always wanted to go to the source. He would just cut through levels, cut through levels, get to The core of the idea. And then once he did, he would move and he would move fast. And for me, I've kind of held on to that, but I've also turned it the other way, which is one of the ways in which I can depend on getting the real shit from you is my being honest with you. Right. And and human beings are good bullshit, you know, kind of kind of meters, so to speak. And and
43:22 Speaker 03 When you're the CEO and you're talking to your staff and you're giving all the, you know, the business talk and we're doing this, but the last quarter we had some certain challenges and this and that, they see you bullshitting them. And so why the hell should they tell you the truth? Right. If they're if their boss isn't telling them the good stuff, why should they give the good stuff back to the boss? So for me, it was almost like a self defense mechanism that as a boss, I'm going to tell you what's going on because that's the only way I can drag the hard truths back from you. Because otherwise you're going to filter yourself. You're going to be like, I don't want DARTA. No, this happened.
44:02 Speaker 01 But do you ever worry that they might not be able to deal with the truth?
44:06 Speaker 03 Then they can leave. And I think that that's so I think that's what my head of HR was saying. I was scaring the shit out of people because I'm like, we have a real problem here and we've got to come together. And I think that that, you know, I the there's a I was a good decision making framework for me is um if I make a mistake, where do I want to make the mistake on? Right. And so if I want to, if I'm going to err with my company, I'm going to err in telling the truth and potentially scaring someone away. I'll take that. Because if that person doesn't want to face the truth, if he or she's not up for the fight, then they should go someplace else. They can have a good time. I'm sure they can have a good career, et cetera.
44:49 Speaker 03 So for me as a leader, I've always, always believed in transparency, partially because then I think you attract the right people.
44:57 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm.
44:58 Speaker 03 And Uh, partially because then I'm gonna get the good information to act on. Usually the failures I see with CEOs aren't because they made the wrong decisions. It's because they were getting the wrong data that led to the wrong decisions. So it's incredibly important as a leader of any organization for you to build the channels and build the kind of culture that surfaces problems to you quickly. And then for me, too, you always have to have your random direct channels. You know, the, the Again, if you think about organizations as organisms, they have their own incentives. And so my staff's incentive is to control the
45:41 Speaker 03 information that gets to me. Not because they're bad people. It's just their job because I can get overwhelmed. Who do I meet with? What's my schedule? You know, is this person worthy of meeting the CEO? And for me, my fight is I just set up a bunch of random shit. I'll meet with, you know, engineers four levels down. Consistently, because usually they've got the kind of personality where they don't give a shit. They'll tell me anything and everything, and they like putting the CEO down. That's great.
46:09 Speaker 01 They like putting the CEO down.
46:10 Speaker 03 It's, you know, engineers often, you know, don't like authority, and code is like the biggest authority buster. It's like the truth truth. Uh so I find a lot of engineers have a personality which is, yeah, I'm gonna tell you what it's like. Like I'm, you know, they, they, they, their value is in something else, but often they don't, there's a kind of a disrespect for authority that I love.
46:31 Speaker 01 I've found in my companies that there's sometimes like a 24-year-old. Young girl who will just tell me the truth.
46:36 Speaker 03 Yeah.
46:37 Speaker 01 And
46:38 Speaker 03 She's the one you want to hang out with.
46:40 Speaker 01 she's the one I always go and ask for an opinion.
46:42 Speaker 03 Absolutely. So that that's you've got to have your own channels. But the way to the way to get transparency from your team is first, you've got to give it to them.
46:52 Speaker 01 Was the culture hardworking when you arrived? Because you use the word coasting to describe some of the team when you arrived at Expedia.
46:58 Speaker 03 Medium. I think the company had been successful for a long time and uh had coasted on that success to some extent. So I needed to turn over the team, turn over like the entire team very, very quickly and get some hungry people in there.
47:11 Speaker 01 The entire team.
47:13 Speaker 03 Almost the entire team. Yeah, yeah. It was uh it was rough going for a while. But then you have kind of mission-oriented people who are trying to prove themselves. Um, and it's part of the renewal that every company has to go through. And we turn it around. It was it was tough going, but we really turned around. And that was when I kind of learned hey, my my love is running shit. It's great. It's the best part of my job.
47:35 Speaker 01 How did you get that company to work hard? Because there's so many people listening right now that are in a company that might have been successful, might be two decades in. And this is an ultimate question in like executive management. How do you turn around the culture of a big or even even of even 200 people?
47:51 Speaker 03 It's very difficult. Um, and sometimes the shortcut is just change of people. Like it's very easy to say, oh, you have values, this and that. So it's It's finding the people who you believe will line up with your cultural mechanisms or how you work or your values, and then embodying those values and those mechanisms as examples, and then making sure that your team embodies those values and imbues down the down the organization. So part of working hard is like, you know, sending emails to the team on a Saturday. And if I don't get a response on Saturday, sending them an email on Sunday with a question mark. What's going on? You know, I think at Expedia, in hindsight,
48:35 Speaker 03 we we worked intensely and and and we went hard, but but not as hard as I like, because Expedia was we were selling vacations, right? It was it was the the product that we were selling was about turning yourself off. And so we did talk about work life balance. Uh and in hindsight, at Uber, I don't. You know, you come to Uber. You're going to work your ass off. We're going to be really demanding. If you're not performing, we're going to let you know. And if you don't fix it, we're going to push you out. But while it will be incredibly hard,
49:17 Speaker 03 you will have real agency at the company. We're a big company, but individuals can make a big difference. And it's a company that's making a difference in the world. You're going to learn so much. And while you will have worked hard, you're going to have a great time. But this is don't come here if you want to coast. And I'm very clear about that. And I should have been more clear at Expedia, but we were selling vacations, so I couldn't be quite that clear.
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50:32 Speaker 01 And you can sign up for a $1 per month trial right now, too. Just go to Shopify.co.uk slash Bartlett. I promise you, you don't need to have it all figured out. You just need to start. In your twelve years as CEO, Expedia stock rose five hundred and fifty percent, and sales increased four hundred percent from two point one billion to eight point eight billion. And you were the highest paid CEO of a US tech company with a pay of ninety-four point one million.
51:01 Speaker 03 I left it all behind to go to Uber.
51:03 Speaker 01 And you left it on
51:04 Speaker 03 It was the big options packet that I never vested, but it's all good. It was a great run.
51:10 Speaker 01 I'm so I'm so intrigued about this point of hard work because I think ten years ago, saying what you just said was very taboo.
51:16 Speaker 03 Yes.
51:16 Speaker 01 It feels to me more invoked than
51:18 Speaker 03 We're freed now. Yes.
51:19 Speaker 01 your freedman.
51:21 Speaker 03 Yes. Yes, indeed. It's it I I've I've gotten um, you know, sometimes people ask you the question uh, what advice would you give to young people? And to me, the most important skill in life is the skill of working hard. And it's not a skill. You can't just like decide you're gonna do it. And I think way too many many people, you know, focus on should be uh should you be a computer programmer or a doctor or study the liberal arts now that anyone can vibe code. Just learn to work hard. And it is, you you know, the the when you see the top athletes, of course they're talented. And the the, you know, their talent level is world levels.
52:03 Speaker 03 But the thing that changes that that's different about the elite athletes than the non-elite athletes, and I'm talking elite, is they work their asses off. They're disciplined, they're structured, they're relentless. You know, look at Ronaldo, look at Michael Jordan, et cetera. That's the same thing is true in all of life. It's true in business, it's true in personal life. And so for me, with my kids, I just want to teach them how to work hard. And for me, like growing up, I, as a banker, as an executive, I'm not going to let anyone outwork me. And if that's true, then they may be smarter, more talented, et cetera.
52:44 Speaker 03 But I'm not going to let anyone outwork me. And I think that that's a huge advantage that you have in over a period of time, that advantage compounds. And I want that in our company. Like I want Uber to be an incredibly hardworking company.
52:55 Speaker 01 Comes at a cost though, no? Working hard.
52:58 Speaker 03 Yes. It comes at a trade off. And we we believe in flexibility. So people confuse kind of lack of flexibility to working hard. You can work hard. And at the same time, you can have flexibility. So if you want to have dinner with your family, and I'm I'm religious about having dinners with my family when I'm in town, you know, six to eight, uh, absolutely spend that time with my family. But at, you know, 9 30 p.m., I'm checking emails. Right? When I wake up at 5 30 and a.m. I'm checking emails. So of course there are trade offs. And, you know, life is about trade offs.
53:31 Speaker 01 I think one of the most important things I've learned from interviewing CEOs, and generally, we've gone through a transition of COVID and remote work and then come back into like everyone's in the office again. Is actually the most important thing is what you've just said, which is being honest with people so that they can make decisions for themselves in their lives.
53:44 Speaker 03 Absolutely.
53:44 Speaker 01 I think the the thing that one might describe as toxic is when you say something publicly, but then when they arrive, it's a completely different deal. But what you're doing is you're being honest and you're therefore allowing people to make decisions for themselves or in their own lives.
53:57 Speaker 03 And I'm allowing them to be honest back to me.
54:00 Speaker 01 Yeah. And you're a c that's a com that's a company culture that someone like me would be attracted to.
54:03 Speaker 03 Absolutely.
54:04 Speaker 01 But there's lots of people listening that couldn't think of anything worse.
54:06 Speaker 03 And that's okay.
54:06 Speaker 01 Yes. Yeah.
54:07 Speaker 03 There are plenty of companies that they could find, or plenty of causes that they can find. It's fine.
54:11 Speaker 01 You said learn to work hard. Learn.
54:16 Speaker 03 It's a skill.
54:17 Speaker 01 Really?
54:17 Speaker 03 Yes, of course it is.
54:19 Speaker 01 Because you
54:19 Speaker 03 Because you've got to the idea of just staying focused on something, not being discouraged by failing, trying over and over again, and just working harder than others. It's not something you can turn on and off. I see it in people all the time. There's just like this grim determination, like we uh at Uber, there's actually saying it's it's it's inside one of her values, embrace the grind. You know, embrace it. That's you you that's a learned skill. That's not something you're born with. Maybe, maybe there's an element that you're born with.
54:52 Speaker 01 have you ever seen someone who isn't a hard worker become a really hard worker? An exceptionally hard worker.
54:57 Speaker 03 That's a good question. No, no, doesn't occur to me, have you?
55:04 Speaker 01 No, I I heard a s I think it might have been maybe Brian Cheskitt, Airbnb, or Elon say that he's never seen someone who wasn't a hard worker become a really hard worker.
55:14 Speaker 03 That's interesting.
55:15 Speaker 01 And this is why I I thought
55:16 Speaker 03 Trying to come up with someone. Failing so far.
55:20 Speaker 01 And maybe I might posit that it's somewhat to do with, you know, these photos that you have in front of you. Your childhood, your early context, which you didn't choose
55:29 Speaker 03 I'm working hard here. But yeah.
55:30 Speaker 01 but that you were forged in such a way that you were gonna be ruthless. Sorry, relentless is the way I meant.
55:37 Speaker 03 Yeah. I I mean ruthless to myself. Relentless. Relentless is right. You know, I I think I think at one point uh Jeff Bezos was gonna call Amazon relentless. That was uh he was thinking about that being the name of the company. Right? It's it's just and and that is w when I see successful technology companies and especially technology companies, there is this relentlessness about them. Like at Uber, we have lots of different groups that are trying to do different things, but each and every team is built and targeted on optimizing and improving their own particular function. There isn't a piece of the company that is not improving every single day. And if they're not improving fast enough,
56:20 Speaker 03 Someone else is going to take their place and going to improve it. So, as a as an organism, every part of the company, whether it's a payments team in terms of new payments types or payment success, or the fraud team, or the mobile app team in terms of conversions, et cetera, every team is set up in and organized for and goaled on improving everything that they do. So the whole company in small ways is constantly improving, never ever stopping. And it is that relentless nature of business. And the minute, and it's not good enough to get better, we have to get better faster than our competitors because our competitors are all getting better as well.
57:01 Speaker 03 So it's it's basically like who can adapt faster to either the reality of the market as it is today or the prediction of the market as you see it tomorrow. And it's the speed of change and it's the identification of the opportunity. Those are the two factors. I think that are most important. Um, and the speed of change, you know, if you can work fast, you're kind of accelerating time. You know, every one shot that you take, I can take two shots. I've got more time than you do. And then, of course, there's identifying the opportunity and going after it. Those are the two things you really have to get right.
57:36 Speaker 01 If you're taking two shots, not only are you gonna get two data points of information, but you're also increasing your probability of having a successful shot by like 100%.
57:44 Speaker 03 Shots on goal. Just shots on goal.
57:46 Speaker 01 How do you create a culture of continuous improvement? Because successful companies, as you kind of highlighted earlier, they become complacent with their victories and they like to take some time off and celebrate. And you know, we high five and then and then we chill. And then actually the studies show they did this big meta-analysis where they looked at successful companies and they showed that they become risk adverse
58:04 Speaker 03 Totally.
58:05 Speaker 01 because they're loss aversion. They have something to lose now. So just protect.
58:09 Speaker 03 I think the good news to some extent with Uber is that we've always been a company that has had a chip on a shoulder. You know, it the company had a chip on a shoulder when it was founded and it had to like fight taxi unions for its very existence. Uh, and then the disaster happened with Travis leaving and then a new CEO coming in at the time. That was a really, really difficult time. Then we went through a period of COVID, which was again a disaster for the company, but ultimately prepared us to do better. Then people saying, you know, it was a tough IPO.
58:41 Speaker 03 Uber's never going to get profitable. And today we're incredibly successful, but we've got the challenge and the opportunity of AI and autonomous. So we've always been a company that has been, I would say, underestimated. And that feeds into our culture. We are a hungry company. And I do think we're sometimes guilty of getting complacent in little ways. And I have a leadership team that when they see complacency more often than not, they identify it and they get it the hell out. It's it's a team that is not satisfied, that's always driving. And I love that about us.
59:23 Speaker 01 How does one balance enjoying? The success and the accomplishments. I mean, you've turned this company around, a highly profitable company. Everyone that I've spoken to, many of our mutual friends have talked lovingly about the impact you've had on the business. I mean, the numbers speak for themselves. When you joined Uber, Uber was losing 2.5 to 3 billion per year. Now it generates 8.5 billion in free cash flow every year. How do you get people to
59:48 Speaker 03 9.8 in the last year.
59:52 Speaker 01 9.8 billion? Okay, incredible.
59:55 Speaker 01 Celebrate. Chill.
59:56 Speaker 03 Should well you can celebrate a nutshell.
1:00:00 Speaker 01 Okay, how
1:00:01 Speaker 03 You can do we we take those moments. We do sell it it's cool to run a company that's so important. It's cool to run a company that's hitting record after record after record. And we do celebrate those records, and we do celebrate those teams, maybe not enough. And again, it goes to like what what What mistake would you rather make? I'd rather make the mistake of celebrating a little bit too little and kind of being a little pissed off about life in general and pushing. But um we we take our moments. But the the the success itself, I don't know, succeeding is almost a celebration in and of itself. And and when you're succeeding in such a competitive field, I just find a deep sense of satisfaction there. Uh, and I think my team does too.
1:00:44 Speaker 01 How do you get the team to take take those risks that they need to take? Is there something you're do you like to incentivize them on the amount of shots they take? How do you do that?
1:00:52 Speaker 03 One is they're always moving fast. That's what we do. We push, we're constantly pushing the pace of the company in terms of execution. So I think that helps. But but I do think that there's a mechanism that we talked now about that I've talked to a team about taking smart risks. I think you're absolutely right, which is as companies get bigger and more successful, they tend to become more risk averse. And it should be the exact opposite because you can take more risks, you can make more mistakes, because you've got kind of this 9.8 billion of cash flow to protect yourself against some of those mistakes. So I have Definitely in the past, I would say, two years, push the team actively to push the envelope in terms of risk.
1:01:33 Speaker 03 Don't be defensive, be offensive, et cetera. And it comes from my challenging the teams, my talking about it, setting examples of sometimes failing and then saying it's okay, moving on. And then sometimes my taking decisions that are seen as more risky than not. That setting the example then allows the company to follow.
1:01:54 Speaker 01 So if I was in one of your teams, what how how do you think about goal setting for me?
1:01:59 Speaker 03 Um it all the teams have different goals, business goals. The ads team has to drive at technology-driven incremental ad dollars per year, andor customer satisfaction, uh, customer MPS, et cetera. So every team has its own goals uh and they organize against those goals and they execute those goals and they're religiously tracked. It's the best mechanism that we have. I just wish that there was a better one because the art of the goal setting becomes the issue. Which is, are you setting the right goals? Are they too ambitious? Are they not ambitious enough? And sometimes people can gain the system. So we use it, but I can't tell you that it's perfect.
1:02:42 Speaker 01 What about you talked earlier about values? A lot of companies go into an off-site and they write some words on a words on a white and a wall and they say ambition, enthusiasm, courage, whatever. What do you think of that sort of corporate habit of goal of values and stuff?
1:02:56 Speaker 03 We went through the exercise, failed the first time, succeeded the second time. We and and when I and we failed when it first came to Uber, obviously there was a view that there we needed a cultural reset of the company. And so it was very important for me to go and inspect the culture of the company and Change it. It was a statement. And the culture had, I think, some cool stuff in there, some cool ideas in there. Like for example, there was one value that was toe stepping. And the idea of toe stepping is what you and I talked about earlier, which is we want to challenge each other within the organization.
1:03:37 Speaker 03 And so if I have to step on your toes and tell you something that you don't want to hear, I'm allowed to, even though it hurts you, uh, because the truth is more important. So sometimes the truth hurts, and that's okay. That was the idea of toe stepping. And what happened was sometimes those values became weaponized, where toe stepping, whose spirit came from a place of we want to speak the truth, became an excuse to be a jerk. Right. So the values in and of themselves can be great or terrible based on how you execute on those values. When I first came in, we had to redo the values.
1:04:20 Speaker 03 And I was there, there's a saying by um Jeff Bezos that I love, which is like the the the values of the company almost, they they they appear, the value system of the company appears to some extent. You don't, if you say thou shalt, you're gonna fail.
1:04:32 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm.
1:04:33 Speaker 03 Because the company shall, right? And the approach that we first took was that we will actually get the value system. We had we had a vote for all the employees in the company. What values do you think should be part of the new Uber, et cetera? We took all the signal and then we edited it. And came up with a new list of values. And there was one value that I wrote myself. It was mine. And it was do the right thing, period. It wasn't crowdsourced, it was just that. And and usually with these values, you're like, there's a whole explanation. And people are like, well, what does do the right thing period mean? Like, you have to figure it out. And for me, it was a message.
1:05:18 Speaker 03 To the whole company, which was if you work at Uber, you have a responsibility, and I'm not going to tell you exactly what to do. So use your judgment. And it's our expectation that you use your judgment to do the right thing. And sometimes doing the right thing, it's not clear. Should I go after my business goals? Should I compromise on a business goal because safety is in question? Of course you should. Safety comes first before business, et cetera. But we were putting that weight and that responsibility in uh within the employees. But the rest of the value system that was kind of crowdsourced, it was forgettable. Because it was the kind of stuff that you passion, ambition, teamwork. Like, what company doesn't believe in teamwork? Give me a break. So
1:06:00 Speaker 03 we uh Nikki uh Krishnamarthy, who runs uh People, she pushed me to reset the values four or five years in. By then, I felt like I did have a right to have a point of view. I'd been there. We weren't quite done with the turnaround, et cetera, but I was a part of the company. And then we came up with a value set, which is different. You know, there's uh our one of our values. By the way, go get it was the only one that survived. No, no, sorry. Uh Do the Right Thing was the only one that survived. But for example, go get it is one of our top values. And the idea of go get it is obviously it's literally what we do. We go, we help people go or get it, right? Rides and eats.
1:06:43 Speaker 03 So it's kind of fun in terms of what we do. But it's an attitude, which is we as a company, we're go-getters. We're going to be aggressive. We're going to push. We're going to move fast. We play to win. And so the value sets that we have, go get it, or one that I really like Great Minds Don't Think Alike. We s came up with us with a set of values which I think is unusual and describes how we are different as a company. And it's really true to who we are.
1:07:12 Speaker 01 How important is um this sort of this attitude of failure and experimentation, especially in a world that's transitioning as fast as the one we're in? When you listen to people like Ray Kerswell's His Predictions of the Future, he says that if you're 10 now by the age of 60, you'll experience a year's change in, I think it's 11 days, and just this sort of this sort of exponential acceleration.
1:07:30 Speaker 03 Law of accelerating returns.
1:07:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, like how do you how do you you know, how do you create a culture or build a team in a world where the correct answer is changing this quickly?
1:07:38 Speaker 03 I think that it is setting a culture that does embrace that change and is constantly challenging itself. And I will give uh Travis and the founding team credit. You know, that there's kind of this idea of everything that they did was terrible, and that's just not true. We have a very high talent bar at the company. We have always kept a high talent bar at the company, and we haven't compromised. And what I found is that talented people who are also driven Are on a constant hunt for the truth. So culture isn't enough. You actually need the right people at the company. And I think we've got a company that does have a chip on a shoulder,
1:08:24 Speaker 03 was born out of the creation of a new industry. So we've experienced it.
1:08:30 Speaker 03 And we have a group of people who are driven and hungry and are constantly looking for change. And you got a leader and a leadership team. That's pushing the company to do so and doesn't penalize folks for challenging them. I think it's kind of the stew that you have to put together, but as a combination of culture and people.
1:08:53 Speaker 01 Do you have any mental case studies of great bets the company has taken that most people wouldn't have taken or thought was wrong or wouldn't have taken the risk on that trend transpired to be critical to your success?
1:09:04 Speaker 03 Well, you know, I I don't know about um well, uh I think it will be critical to to the success, but there's a funny one, which is
1:09:13 Speaker 03 taxis are one of the fastest growing parts of Uber's business. So you remember Uber, we started as the enemy of taxis and built out this peer-to-peer ride sharing. And probably five or six years ago, our head of product now, Sachin, he worked on building kind of um a technology that would allow taxi companies to have their own little Uber app. And eventually he came to Uber, thank God. And he's like, well, why don't we build that in Uber? Why don't we actually build taxis on Uber? And originally within the company, and and I I kept in touch with some of the founders just because I want their advice, because why not? You know, they they built a great company. I'm standing on the Shoulders of Giants,
1:09:59 Speaker 03 they said it's the most idiotic thing on earth. You can't wire up taxis. They hate us. They accept rates will be terrible. Lots of technical reasons. They had tried it earlier. It was a total failure. But I think Sachin having worked in the industry and then my being kind of ignorant and saying, why the hell not try it? That combination allowed us to build out a taxi product, and taxi is the fastest growing segment of the company. And it went completely against the founding of the company. But now we're, you know, I I hope to have every single taxi in the world wired up to Uber. Why not?
1:10:33 Speaker 01 For the first 10 years that I was a founder, I didn't prioritize getting a good night's sleep at all. But over time, I started to realize that it was the key metric that influenced everything in my life. My mood, my focus, my ability to show up and to think clearly and to lead well. So now, with my lifestyle being pretty crazy, traveling across time zones, working late, training late, I still fight to protect my sleep, which sometimes means starting the day a little bit later. It was my Whoop that helped me to make this connection. They are one of my sponsors for the show. And for the last four years, every day, my WHOOP has given me insights into my sleep, my recovery, the strain I'm taking on, and more broadly, how my daily behaviors influence my overall holistic health. It's the difference between guessing and knowing why I might be feeling the way that I feel. Sometimes it'll nudge me, sometimes it'll get me to slow down, sometimes it pushes me to go even harder, but all the time it provides me with data that gives me a deeper understanding of myself.
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1:12:41 Speaker 01 So this is something that I've made for you. I realize that the Direver CO audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health. We all have big goals that we want to accomplish. And one of the things I've learned is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny, small steps. And we call this in our team the 1%. And actually, this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So, what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these 1% diaries and we released these last year and they all sold out. So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back, but also to introduce some new colours and to make some minor tweaks to the diary.
1:13:29 Speaker 01 So now we have a better range for you. So if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, then I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again. And you can get yours now at thediary.com where you can get 20% off our Black Friday bundle. And if you want the link, the link is in the description below.
1:13:53 Speaker 01 And there's another um there's an alien that's arrived amongst us, um, which is AI. And you've you know, Uber's always been somewhat powered from what I understand by
1:14:01 Speaker 03 Very much so.
1:14:01 Speaker 01 to some degree. But um the world has changed in the last couple of years as it relates to AI. There's been a huge acceleration in investment and improvement of the technology. What do you
1:14:11 Speaker 01 Aside from Uber, you talked earlier about your early childhood and how you know you grew up with a bit of a paranoia about losing everything because that's what you experience as a young man.
1:14:21 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm.
1:14:21 Speaker 01 You see this technology arrive, which is fundamentally disruptive to all of us, including me as a podcaster.
1:14:25 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:14:26 Speaker 01 I've done the tests and the retention isn't far off when it's me or AI, so it's slightly concerning. But like, how do you how do you approach such a tech disruptive technology? Um, how do you think of it broadly and the impact it's gonna have on society? And are you paranoid?
1:14:41 Speaker 03 I'm not paranoid. I'm not I I guess I was gonna say I'm not built that way, but maybe I am. I I think my instinct is always just to go, just to move forward. And Uber has been built out of an AI core. All of our pricing, all of our routing, who you're matched with, uh, whether or not a courier batches a trip, which is do they take two orders or one order? All of our systems, underlying systems, are driven by AI. We do 40 million trips a day. That kind of orchestration can't be done by heuristic rules, and we've got to work on the streets of New York and the streets of Lagos as well. So the the s we we have built the entire company on
1:15:25 Speaker 03 small AI models that have been trained on local problems and then get stitched together. That's literally what the company is. So for us, AI is it's kind of a core skill set. And AI can it can mess things up, right? It's not because it's not heuristics-based. There are emergent issues that come out of an AI that works 96% of the time and 4% of the time, it screws up. So we're comfortable with the uncertainty layer of AI as a company. So we are I would say moving headlong into AI, we're not one of the research shops, but I would say in terms of applied AI,
1:16:05 Speaker 03 the team is driving to build AI, kind of newer AI experiences across a company. But stepping back as a person, the impact on society is going to be enormous. And going back to Kurzwell's kind of law of accelerating returns, whereas previously society has always been able to adjust to these kinds of shifts. Um, it's been able to adjust because it had time to adjust. And AI literally, quite literally, thinks an AI will be able to replace the work that
1:16:45 Speaker 03 70, 80% of humans can do over the next 10 years. 10 years is not a lot of time for society to adjust to that kind of an impact. Now, are they going to be more expensive than humans, cheaper than humans, et cetera? Who knows? But the capability will be there. Probably in the next 10 years for intellectual jobs, probably call it. 15 years for physical, 15 to 20 years for physical jobs because physical AI is harder. You know, robots, cars, etc., more capital heavy, takes longer, have to deal with the physical world. So the the changes in society are going to be giant. But my view is you can't slow down the rate of change.
1:17:29 Speaker 03 And if you're a part of that change, at least you can have some say as to How that change imprints on society and imprints on the real world. And so for me, I'm leaning in. It's a very, very exciting time.
1:17:45 Speaker 01 Seventy to eighty percent of jobs will be uh disrupted by AI is like broadly what you said there. And the pace of change is gonna mean that a lot of people don't have new jobs to go to because we haven't
1:17:56 Speaker 03 I think that's the question.
1:17:58 Speaker 01 the retraining challenge. And people say, well, there's gonna be jobs in AI, but like listen, I I've got some friends that can't just
1:18:04 Speaker 03 Society's always adjusted, right? Farming was a huge percentage of our labor force. Now it's less than 1%.
1:18:10 Speaker 01 be but the speed of w
1:18:11 Speaker 03 Yeah, that I I think that's a question. And you could argue that AIs will be able to retrain you, right? But I I do think it raises questions, real questions.
1:18:23 Speaker 01 I've I've not been able to get an answer on that, really, I think, from the experts in AI that I've interviewed, which is like what do those 70 or 80 people per percent of people do? Because we're seeing in our own business that there's many jobs which we would have hired for previously.
1:18:34 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:18:35 Speaker 01 Um across the board that AI is now doing exceptionally well. And every single day, literally daily, we try to see if the new model, Gemini Pro 3 or whatever, can do things that we're currently doing manually. And every day we're getting those little breakthroughs and going, oh, okay, now we no longer need to. And coding is one of those big areas that you talk about a lot where there's been already sort of big dis disruption, positive disruption at Uber. And a lot of your coders are now using AI to.
1:18:59 Speaker 03 Yeah, about 90% of our coders are using AI. Now, that's easy to say, but but there are probably 30% of them that were power users. They are showing a clear um differentiation in the number of diffs, for example, how much uh a diff is, a code release that's different from the last code release. So one of the measurements of productivity is just how many diffs are you putting to the code base. Uber is just a giant code base. That's what we are. And so our engineers are literally the builders of the company. They are Manufacturing the bricks that go into the system. And there are architects who are kind of thinking about what the system should look like. And so while 90% of our engineers are using
1:19:43 Speaker 03 AI tools of some sort, there's about 30% of them that are using them at a completely accelerated pace. And it really is changing their productivity in a way that I've never ever seen before. Ultimately, I do think that the Job of a coder is going to change more and more from actually writing the code from to some extent orchestrating agents who are writing the code or building systems for you. It becomes more of an orchestration job versus a manual writing job. But the job will still be there. And my attitude is if my average engineer became 25% more efficient, which we haven't gone there yet, but we will get there.
1:20:28 Speaker 03 I'm going to hire more engineers because I want to go faster. There's still lots of unsolved problems that we haven't solved. But I can imagine, you know, maybe five years from now, as the engineers get more and more productive, I may not decide to add engineering head count because at that point, instead of adding an engineer, I should add agents and buy some more GPUs from NVIDIA. That may be the investment in the future. We'll see.
1:20:50 Speaker 01 Because thinking about linear versus exponential as well, if we imagine a rate of improvement, I don't know. In my head, I go, well, won't there come a time where you, as the CEO or you and a team, an executive team, can tell an agent what you want to build? You can show it the strategy. And theoretically, I mean, I can't figure out how this isn't gonna be possible. The agents will then build. Actually, maybe they don't even need you to set the strategy. Maybe but theoretically, you know, if they're if you imagine any rate of improvement in the intelligence, maybe at some point they're gonna go, well, listen, we there's a better strategy here, Dara.
1:21:21 Speaker 03 What one of my uh uh one of my team members told me that. Uh some teams have built uh a Dara AI, you know, so so that they basically make the presentation to the Dara AI as a prep for making a presentation to me. Because you can imagine, like, you know, by the time something comes to me, there's been a prep and a meeting, and the and the slide deck has been beautifully honed. So they have Dara AI to tune their prep.
1:21:48 Speaker 01 Are you concerned they might show Dara AI to the board? Me.
1:21:52 Speaker 03 I was like, can I see the code for Dara AI? I'm curious. She's like, no, we're not showing it to you.
1:21:58 Speaker 01 But is there anything like falsifiable in what I just said about that there coming a time in the not so near future if we imagine exponential improvement where
1:22:06 Speaker 03 I think, I think where AI. Still is missing a beat that humans and other creatures have is the ability to learn real time. Right. So if you think about you and I are learning for this conversation, and maybe your behavior is going to change by 0.1% because of actually what you learn here. And the construct of most large AI models is capture enormous amounts of data based on the skill set that you're trying to drive, train, pre train that model. Put it into the real world, and then there's some post-training of the of the model based on feedback from the world. And then when the model's released, it's kind of released, right? And the way the model learns is, you know,
1:22:51 Speaker 03 3.5 becomes 3.8. But 3.5 didn't learn. The engineers went out and built, you know, built a new model that's 3.8 that might have elements of 3.5 to it, et cetera. So the AI agents aren't Learning now, now a lot of what we're doing is we're building around the foundation models, then then bring kind of the signals from the real world and use the skills that the foundation models have to do good stuff.
1:23:19 Speaker 01 me.
1:23:19 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:23:20 Speaker 01 Post training, I'm post training.
1:23:21 Speaker 03 Exactly. So well, so we are post-training, but we're learning real time as human beings. And the when the models can learn real time, that I think is the point at which I'm going to. Kind of think, yeah, we are all replaceable. But at this point, I haven't seen a model that can learn real time.
1:23:43 Speaker 01 One of the real areas of disruption in AI has been autonomous vehicles. And I was just before we start recording, I was saying that uh I have a Tesla in LA where I live, and it's staggering that I can get in the car,
1:23:54 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:23:55 Speaker 01 press a button, and drive two and a half hours to Joshua Tree without having to touch the wheel or the s the pedals. Now, driving, I think, is one of the biggest employees in the world. Like as of profession.
1:24:04 Speaker 03 I mean, we've got nine and a half million drivers and couriers on our platform. We are the largest organizer of flexible work around the world. And they I I think the second largest um workforce is a Chinese army.
1:24:17 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:24:17 Speaker 03 Yeah. It's a big group of folks that we've organized.
1:24:21 Speaker 01 And statistically, there's less accidents in an autonomous Tesla than there is if a human drives it. So it's safer for my car to drive itself statistically than for me to drive it. That's true, right? That the autonomous driving is currently safer.
1:24:34 Speaker 03 That's true. So Waymo's are safer. And then now you are a backup to the Tesla, right, as a human being. So I've I've got a Tesla as well. And once in a while it disengages and I've got to, or I've got to disengage. So in it's not necessarily the pure autonomous agent that's better than humans, but definitely the autonomous agent with a human backup. No question that's better than the pure human.
1:24:58 Speaker 01 And we can't be far away from it just being
1:25:01 Speaker 03 I mean, Waymo's there already, right? Uh you've you live in LA, uh they've got the Waymo's. We work with them in Austin, uh in Atlanta. And by all accounts, Waymo drivers are safer than human beings. And that's going to be true of AV. All over the world. There are a million deaths from driving every year in the world. In the U.S., it's between 35,000 and 40,000 autofatalities. So to the extent that these autonomous agents and drivers can be better than humans, and they will be better than humans over a period of time, there's a real return on human life as a result of this.
1:25:40 Speaker 01 those nine million drivers' careers that you have will be out of work conceivably. In the you know, talking about being honest about the situation.
1:25:48 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think uh again, it goes to physical AI as well, right? So I think 20 years from now, you can imagine that those 9 million will be. 20 million uh AVs, maybe. But we have time between now and then, partially because we don't operate in the virtual world, right? We operate in the physical world. You have to get the regulations up, you have to build the cars, you have to build the sensor stacks, the models have to get there. So there is time between now and then, but you can imagine the majority of our trips being fulfilled. By robots of some kind, probably not 10 years from now, but you go 15, 20 years from now, you're going to start getting there.
1:26:31 Speaker 01 What do the nine million people do?
1:26:33 Speaker 03 I don't know. Now we are expanding the kind of work that's available on the platform partially as a result of it, right? We used to be the only work is driving, now there's delivering. You can have shoppers as well. I think it'll be a little while at least before you get AI shoppers. And now actually we have a team called Uber AI Solutions. That uh allows people to train these same agents and train uh AI agents and AI models and do all kinds of knowledge based work on their phone as well to kind of extend the kind of work that we offer uh humans on our platform and different opportunities for the for them to make money. So
1:27:17 Speaker 03 we are extending the platform. And then the question is how much of the platform gets automated and what's the Velocity at which we can extend our platform into other kinds of work versus the velocity of automation. I can't tell you which is going to go faster.
1:27:29 Speaker 01 Hands on heart though, th th it does appear that unemployment is going to be significantly increased in a world of AI, especially we just imagine this sort of continual rate of improvement. I just can't
1:27:40 Speaker 03 Unless, again,
1:27:44 Speaker 03 historically in societies, new kinds of jobs have come up.
1:27:47 Speaker 01 acknowledge jobs, physical jobs.
1:27:49 Speaker 03 Yeah. I mean,
1:27:49 Speaker 01 Now we've disrupted both.
1:27:51 Speaker 03 that's why there's a question here. And I do think there's a real question as to the ability of societies to retrain, the abilities of human beings to retrain themselves. AI is going to be a part of that. But the timing there, how fast is it going to go, it's a real question mark. I I think you're absolutely right. I don't think it's going to be a big issue, big issue, uh in the next five years. But when you go five plus years, it's going to become more of a more more of an issue for society at large.
1:28:20 Speaker 01 It's interesting because what I was thinking, putting two and two together about your your your father's journey of coming to the US, losing what he had, losing his job, and the the loss of like meaning and purpose being really central to him. And I could see that in b i basically from your face that I think what I interpreted from your face was that he struggled with, as any provider would, the loss of like meaning that comes with it. Because jobs aren't just about money. They're it's just especially, you know, they give you a sense of worth. It's funny, I I I read um I read a study many years ago that said when they looked at suicide letters specifically from men, I think it was an Australian study. In the suicide letters, that the sentiment was about not feeling worthful
1:29:02 Speaker 03 Yes.
1:29:03 Speaker 01 to your family.
1:29:03 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:29:04 Speaker 01 And the extreme of that was I think my family would actually now be better off without me.
1:29:08 Speaker 03 Interesting.
1:29:09 Speaker 01 And um and this kind of, you know, I think is probably s uh adjacent to this conversation around job displacement, which is where are we gonna find our meaning in a world where the machines have now disrupted our intelligence and our muscles?
1:29:25 Speaker 03 It's every universal income, basic income test has failed. You know, the answer that you hear from folks is well, the robots are going to do all the work. They're going to create um utility. And so our work won't have to create utility, so people will just have money. But it goes to exactly what you're saying, which is every single test they've done. No, it's not 20, but they've done a couple of tests where certain section of the population, similar population, gets income, certain section doesn't. And every time the ones who are getting income do worse in terms of outcomes because, well, we don't know the because, but I think the because is related to what you're saying, which is
1:30:09 Speaker 03 market forces kind of. That force someone to work, then create a perception of self-value. Succeeding, you know, most people succeed. If they're driven to succeed, they will succeed. And as they succeed, it comes with a very, very deep and important feeling of I am creating value. I'm supporting my family. I'm building this incredible piece of art, et cetera. Whatever that value is to you, and wherever that meaning comes from, I'm an incredible parent. That value is what keeps people going. Uh and I don't think that, you know, the government raining money down on society is gonna help.
1:30:50 Speaker 01 It's refreshing to hear your perspective on this because a lot of the time, you know, you'll hear CEOs in the media just saying it'll be fine, everyone's gonna figure it out. And I think that's such a
1:30:59 Speaker 03 Historically, we have figured it out. So maybe they're right. But but you have to ask whether they're giving you the real stuff or not.
1:31:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, and that's kind of what I that's what I I think is I sometimes hear about private conversations, and the private conversations I hear about the sheer amount of disruption that they anticipate. And then when I see them on like CMBC or Davos, it's ever will be fine and figured out. And I understand the incentive, because if they were to start ringing the bell, it might hurt their own chance of like innovating and fundraising and all those things. But I think you sit at this sort of happy medium of being, yeah, as the C of Uber, you've got to t you've got to pursue the opportunity and the technology. But on the other hand, to be honest and say, listen, there's gonna be big disruption, and we I don't know the answers.
1:31:37 Speaker 03 I remember you were talking about CNBC, a CNBC anchor once we had an interview, and afterwards, she said, uh, you know, I really like you. You actually answer my questions. What am I not supposed to? There's like the the PR trading is always if you get a bad question, don't answer the question, just pivot to something else. And for me, like I've I've sworn to myself, uh, and Noah who's who's up there is probably gonna kill me afterwards. It's just I'm gonna answer the question. I'm not gonna do the BS. And again, I have to think. The anchor knows what's happening. The audience knows what what's happening. So I'm like, I'll answer the question. If it's a shitty question, I'll deal with it.
1:32:18 Speaker 01 I actually don't like interviewing CEOs, which is funny because the name of the podcast. Because actors,
1:32:21 Speaker 03 How did how did the the because I I looked before I came on. I'm like, I'm gonna look up on. Yeah, the CEOs. And there aren't that many CEOs.
1:32:31 Speaker 01 well, if I looked at your diary, what would I find inside your diary? I would f probably find you contending with being a father, your psychologist. Might find some things in there about your health. I can see you're a guy that goes to the gym.
1:32:41 Speaker 03 Yeah. Yeah.
1:32:42 Speaker 01 Um and I think it's all interlinked. I think for you to be an exceptional CEO, you probably think a lot about your past, your childhood, your health, your how to optimize and all these things. And so honestly, you can't do a podcast like this for 20 years and just hit the same thing every year.
1:32:57 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:32:58 Speaker 01 You need to be I need to be intellectually stimulated. And you and me are both uh multifaceted creatures, I guess. So that's why it's evolved.
1:33:05 Speaker 03 Until we become AIs.
1:33:07 Speaker 01 Until we become AIs. Yeah. Just closing off on that then. Um
1:33:13 Speaker 01 what can we do about this from an AI AV perspective? Is it the government's responsibility? Is it collective action?
1:33:20 Speaker 03 So one is I do think that we don't talk enough in that, for example, with autonomous AI can be a force for good, right? It's these drivers are going to be safer than human beings. And those we can take the 35,000 fatalities to 3,000 fatalities, et cetera. I do think that the AIs, the AV is going to Bring down the price of transportation. So a big part of our goal is to make on-demand transportation available for everybody. One of the folks that I was talking to was talking about how Uber has changed her mother's life. Like her mom can get around and just wouldn't get around without it, right? We want more moms like that. So I do think it's important to recognize that
1:34:02 Speaker 03 if fundamental transportation becomes safer, it becomes cheaper, going back to Jevyl's paradox, that's a good thing for society, right? I don't think that the answer as it relates to society is to try to slow down the pace of change because China won't, for example, if we're uh talking about the West. So I think you just have to lean into it. I think that discussions like this are important. I think you look for technology leaders who are talking about it. Dario, for example, Anthropic is talking uh about it, pissing some people off, but I think he's having Good discussions there. And then I do think that
1:34:44 Speaker 03 the society arming up to be able to retrain large groups of people at scale is not a skill. I don't see people investing that. And I don't see that as a core capability of any of our countries, et cetera. If there's one thing I can come up with that will be that is the retraining machine.
1:35:05 Speaker 01 You've got five four kids.
1:35:06 Speaker 03 Yes.
1:35:07 Speaker 01 They come to you, they say, Dad, listen, AI, robotics, give me some advice for my future. What should I be doing?
1:35:12 Speaker 03 Work hard. You're going to be fine. Work hard. It's it's just that's I mean, now the AIs theoretically can can work harder than you, but I I find one of the pieces of advice I give to young people is don't plan. Okay. I wind up, we went through a history. I wind up where I am today having not planned a thing. I didn't when I was a investment banker, I wasn't dreaming of becoming CEO, et cetera. And and what I find is that people who have too much of a career plan, who have too much clarity about what they're doing, they they lose their curiosity. And human beings look for positive signal, right? You, whether you like it or not,
1:35:56 Speaker 03 anytime someone agrees with you, makes you feel a little bit better. Anytime you get signal that goes against your preconceived notions, either you ignore it or you're like, all right, shit, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take this on. It's unpleasant. And so with career planning, what I find is people who have too clear a career plan. They're looking for signals that feed into their career plan. I'm going to be a vice president by this much. I'm going to make X money by this much. And they're not looking around. They're not being curious. They're not looking for a signal that can change, you know, their life. And so what I tell some folks is like, before you go out and try to change a world, let the world change you first. You know, take input. And
1:36:40 Speaker 03 if you're like this, you got blinders because I'm going here, you're not going to take input. You're not going to let, you're not going to take all the stimulus coming in from the world. So It's, you know, the one constant I see is people who are good are good. People are good. I've never seen a successful person in a job or a career get there without
1:37:03 Speaker 03 working hard. And my guess is, I don't know about you, you kind of wound up where you're wound up, kind of by accident.
1:37:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, things.
1:37:10 Speaker 03 And people are like, well, you got lucky. I got very lucky to be here. Like, I had so many kind of moments. And and some would say I took advantage of that luck, uh, of that luck, but to some extent, I was able to take advantage of that luck because I was open.
1:37:28 Speaker 01 Being open, you jumped from Expedia to Uber. Um in part helped by some advice that our mutual friend Daniel Eck, the founder of Spotify, gave you. He's actually just texting me. I text him saying, Hey, can you uh can you send me a question to ask Darry? But he said, I'm in the bit of a
1:37:41 Speaker 03 Texting while we're talking. Damn it.
1:37:43 Speaker 01 No, just before I walked in, I've just looked, he texts me back saying he's on an earnings call. Never mind. But um he said, Good luck with the interview. Um what did Danielek say to you that helped to you form that decision to go to Uber?
1:37:55 Speaker 03 So he's the one who recommended. I think I was I was uh contacted by a headhunter. He recommended me to the headhunter who called me. Uh I told him I was actually at the Allen and Company conference going back in a uh circle with him, and we were having a drink one night. And he asked me, he's like, did the headhunter call you? There's this Uber role. And at this at the time, Uber was a disaster. Like disaster. And everyone was reading about it. I was at Expedia. I had just gotten this wonderful contract that you said at the beginning. So I was going to stay. And I love working for Barry. We're like it, it it's been it's been the best professional partnership of my life. And I said, of course I'm not gonna go. You know, I'm so happy about what I'm doing in Expedia.
1:38:38 Speaker 03 And Daniel like looks at me. He's got got his like cold Scandinavian eyes. He's like, Dara. Since when is life about being happy? It's about making impact. Uber is a great company, and you can have an impact on that company. You've got to do this. So the next day I called the headhunter previously. I said, no, no, no, I'm not interested. The next day I called the headhunter and I said, let's talk. So Daniel was the one who opened me up.
1:39:10 Speaker 01 And your dad? He gave you advice?
1:39:12 Speaker 03 Well, I talked to my dad, and uh his my dad is. Keeps things simple. And he said, Dara, in his farcy, when a company whose verb tells you to run it, you just say yes. So I thought that was good uh good advice. And ultimately, I think people who come to Uber stay at Uber. They come because of the challenge, but they stay because of the impact. Like we are building a company that is important to the world. And for me, I could come and I could have an I can have impact on an impactful company, so why the hell not?
1:39:52 Speaker 01 And when he says a company that's a verb, he's referring to the fact that everybody in the the taxiing or transportation category uses Uber as a verb to even if they're talking about a competitor.
1:40:02 Speaker 03 Exactly right.
1:40:03 Speaker 01 And there's always one c company in every c sort of industry that owns that.
1:40:06 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:40:07 Speaker 01 We have a closing tradition here where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is what is one conversation that if you could rewind time and have, you would have today but can no longer have?
1:40:22 Speaker 03 It was a conversation with with my dad. Um, you know, I told you I came to New York from San Francisco, and uh it was because my dad was getting very old and he was losing his mental facilities. And I'm glad I came back and I got to spend time with him. But those last times, you know, when I spent time with him, it wasn't really him. And I wish I could talk to him about his experiences, his younger life, the excitement of building something, and then the loss and regrets he had in life as well. I never had, you know, my relationship with him was kind of was there was love. No question about love.
1:41:05 Speaker 03 But we didn't have the deep kind of conversations that certainly I'm hoping I get to have with my kids. So that's a conversation I'd love to have. And you can't get time back. Uh and that's one of the tragedies of life. But it's also one of the beauties of life, you know, which is there are some mistakes that you make that are permanent, um, and you can't get that back. But my then making genuine conversations with you and connections with my friends and having a real relationship, not just with my wife and my kids, but actually like with my workmates. You know, we having those genuine conversations and connections is my way of correcting.
1:41:49 Speaker 03 For the conversation I never had with my dad.
1:41:56 Speaker 03 Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
1:41:58 Speaker 01 You're a huge inspiration for me in so many ways, and even more so now, having done so much research on you in preparation for this conversation, because It is rare to find a leader who has been consistently successful across different domains, who's built this really, really, in my opinion, quite rare skill stack from investing to CFO to then being able to transition to CEO, and then has repeatedly contended with moments of transition. And given us all frameworks as founders and entrepreneurs for how to deal with that transition, one of the great ones I take away from you is honesty,
1:42:26 Speaker 03 Yeah. Honesty is so powerful. And I'll tell you, I learned I learned that skill from my wife. She's just, she, she's always like, people are people. Doesn't matter. You know, they eat, they crap, they have to go to sleep. And she treats everybody in her life the same way, regardless of their position. And and uh
1:42:44 Speaker 01 like your dad did.
1:42:45 Speaker 03 uh yeah, yeah. And she's she's uh honesty, it's just so powerful.
1:42:52 Speaker 01 Thank you so much.
1:42:53 Speaker 03 You're very welcome.
1:42:54 Speaker 01 An unbelievable inspiration.
1:42:55 Speaker 03 Thank you. I appreciate it.
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