# Uber CEO: At Uber, If You Don’t Perform, You’re Out! Uber Was Losing $3b A Year

An episode of [The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1291423644), 23 Feb 2026, 1 h 43 min.

Audio: https://pdst.fm/e/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/1390/claritaspod.com/measure/p.podderapp.com/2544644999/mgln.ai/e/1651/episode.flightcast.com/01KJ4D989FM5401TXPZZTF8A5N.mp3

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 Enjoyed the episode? Share this link and earn points for every referral - redeem them for exclusive prizes: https://doac-perks.com Follow Dara: X - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/8IAzCZd YouTube (Uber) - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/7dRAeeV Instagram (Uber) - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/CtQISla The Diary Of A CEO: ◼️Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ◼️Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://smarturl.it/DOACbook ◼️The 1% Diary is back - limited time only: https://bit.ly/3YFbJbt ◼️The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards (Second Edition): https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb ◼️Get email updates - https://bit.ly/diary-of-a-ceo-yt ◼️Follow Steven - https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: WHOOP: https://JOIN.WHOOP.COM/CEO for one month free Shopify - https://shopify.com/bartlett Wispr: Get started with 14 days of Wispr Flow for free at https://wisprflow.ai/steven

## Transcript

[0:00] You come to Uber, you're gonna work your ass off.
[0:02] And if you're not performing, we're gonna let you know.
[0:04] But do you ever worry that they might not be able to deal with the truth?
[0:07] And they can leave because the most important skill in life is the skill of working hard.
[0:11] And when you see the top athletes, Ronaldo, Michael Jordan, of course they're talented.
[0:16] But the thing that's different about them is they work their asses off.
[0:21] And that's a learned skill. That's not something you're born with.
[0:23] You may be smarter, more talented, etc.
[0:26] But I'm not gonna let anyone outworldly.
[0:28] With that mentality,
[0:29] when you joined Uber who was losing 3 billion per year,
[0:32] now it generates 8.5 billion in free cash flow every year.
[0:35] But it seems that you were forged in such a way that you were gonna be relentless.
[0:39] Yeah, and it really started with being born in Iran.
[0:42] With the Islamic Revolution in 1978, we were not safe there.
[0:46] And I remember at one point we had these revolutionary guards come into the backyard
[0:50] and bullets went through our living room.
[0:52] So my family came to the US to rebuild their lives.
[0:55] You were eight, nine years old?
[0:56] Yeah, and it really destroyed my dad.
[1:00] Sorry, me.
[1:04] It's tough for me to talk about.
[1:11] All right, let me try again.
[1:12] Seeing that has put me on a road where I just wanted to make my family proud.
[1:17] So I studied bio-electrical engineering and then my first job was investment banking.
[1:21] And I got to see the process of big companies being built.
[1:24] And then I had the opportunity to take over Expedia.
[1:26] And in your 12 years of CEO, Expedia sales increased from 2.1 billion to 8.8 billion.
[1:31] And you were the highest paid CEO of the US tech company.
[1:34] And I left it all behind to go to Uber.
[1:36] And I want to get into practical company building how you would get that company to work hard,
[1:40] and create a culture of continuous improvement and all that stuff.
[1:43] But there's an alien that's arrived amongst us, which is AI.
[1:46] Now driving, I think, is one of the biggest employees in the world, like as of profession.
[1:50] I mean, we've got nine and a half million drivers and careers on our platform.
[1:53] Those drivers' careers that you have will be out of work.
[1:55] They're honest about the situation.
[1:57] What do they nine million people do?
[2:03] Just give me 30 seconds of your time.
[2:05] Two things I wanted to say.
[2:06] The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show.
[2:10] Week after week means the world to all of us.
[2:12] And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had.
[2:14] And couldn't have imagined getting to this place.
[2:17] But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started.
[2:21] And if you enjoy what we do here,
[2:22] please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly
[2:26] and follow us on this app.
[2:29] Here's a promise I'm going to make to you.
[2:30] I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future.
[2:36] We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to
[2:38] and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show.
[2:42] Thank you.
[2:43] Dara, you lead one of the most consequential,
[2:52] interesting talked about companies of my generation.
[2:57] It's worth hundreds of billions of dollars last time I checked.
[3:00] And it's a company that I use every single day.
[3:03] Thank you.
[3:03] I've looked through your story.
[3:05] You were the CEO of Expedia at one point.
[3:09] You were currently the CEO of Uber and you've turned that company from a
[3:12] lost making company to a highly profitable company.
[3:15] And one that has continued to be successful through such a great time of transition.
[3:20] Your story starts in a very interesting way.
[3:26] And when I start doing the research for guests sometimes,
[3:29] I think I come in with some kind of presumption that I grew up in California.
[3:32] You went to Stanford, etc.
[3:33] But that is not the case.
[3:34] Can you take me to that earliest context so I can understand
[3:38] how and why you are the way that you are?
[3:44] Quite the starting questions.
[3:46] But I'll try.
[3:47] I think that for me, the events that shaped my life and maybe a part of who I am really started
[3:57] with, my being born in Iran and Iran at the time was modernizing, becoming a modern society.
[4:04] And my family built a pretty big industrial company that everyone was quite proud of in Iran.
[4:12] We lost all of that with the revolution in 1978.
[4:19] And my family had to come to the US to rebuild their lives.
[4:25] You had to come to the US.
[4:27] We were not safe there.
[4:29] One of my uncles actually was a cabinet member of the Shaws who had just been toppled.
[4:36] And at one point we had these revolutionary guards come into the backyard.
[4:43] They were actually going after our neighbor's house.
[4:46] And one of their guns went off and bullets went through our living room.
[4:51] Shattered the glass in the living room.
[4:52] And at that point my mom was like, we're not safe being here.
[4:55] So we had to come to the US and I do think that event to some extent has shaped not just me
[5:02] by my family and that the rebuilding of our lives, of our economic lives to some extent,
[5:12] where we're all trying to rebuild what we lost in Iran.
[5:15] Do you look back on that and can you identify any sort of fingerprints that were left on you
[5:20] from that time that have defined you in a business capacity?
[5:23] I think at my core, I never feel safe, you know,
[5:27] when the experience of losing everything and for the kids, I tell you, it was fine for the kids.
[5:33] But see my parents lose everything and it really destroyed my dad.
[5:38] You know, it really, his losing, his value to the world as he saw it really hurt his inner being.
[5:50] And I do think to some extent seeing that has put me on a road where I want to rebuild,
[5:57] I want to make my family proud. But at the same time, I never, that feeling of having the floor,
[6:04] you know, the rug pulled out of you, of building everything, that's a feeling that never leaves you.
[6:11] I think Americans underestimate what this place represents and its ideals, right?
[6:19] Which is if you build something that's yours, there's a rule of law can't be taken away from you.
[6:23] That is not true for the majority of the population of the world.
[6:27] And so I think for me, there's a drive to build and it's at the same time,
[6:34] never, ever, ever taking anything for granted, never being satisfied.
[6:39] Because the minute you take these for granted, then that rug can be pulled out from under you.
[6:43] On your father, there was a moment where he, a couple of years, I think six years,
[6:47] where he got trapped in Iran and wasn't granted an exit visa.
[6:50] Yes.
[6:51] And I imagine at that time, your mother was raising you alone here in New York City.
[6:55] Yeah, and Terry Downey or 45 minutes north of New York City.
[6:59] But she, she went from a life of never having to work to, she had to become a salesperson to
[7:05] make some money and she did it all herself and she really stepped up.
[7:10] So I think it shaped us. It was difficult in some ways. I miss my dad. I remember when he left.
[7:15] He was like a giant compared to me. And then when he came back, it was my sophomore year at college.
[7:23] And he still saw me as a kid. And so he wanted to drive me to college and he did.
[7:29] And then he's like, he wants to hang out. I'm like, Dad, can you get out of here? I went
[7:33] hang out with my kids. I was with my friends. I was excited to go back to school. And it was just,
[7:38] it was sad seeing the change, you know, of a man who had gone older. His time in Iran was really
[7:45] tough on him. He had a heart attack on the plane coming back. So he was a diminished person to
[7:50] some extent. But it was great that I had many, many years with him, you know, since then.
[7:57] When he was away, when he was trapped in Iran, I wasn't able to exit. Your mother Lily.
[8:02] Yes. Reference to how you didn't mention him much. But when he returned, you broke down in tears.
[8:21] It's okay. We're not don't be.
[8:24] He was a very stoic man.
[8:37] Sorry, me.
[8:40] Passed away a couple of years ago. So it's tough for me to talk about.
[8:53] All right, let me try again. He was a very stoic man. So he kept it all inside. And we were
[9:05] taught to do the same thing. But we wrote letters together in the beautiful letters. He wrote
[9:11] poetry. So I communicated with him in Iran. But there's expression of feelings and kind of
[9:21] frustration. We're not something that my family did. You know, you just dealt with the situation.
[9:28] And so yeah, I think I suffer from over stoicism and then breaking down every once in a while as you
[9:34] just saw. It's a familiar story of the men that I've interviewed that grew up with that kind of
[9:44] sort of emotional composure, enforced and modeled to them. Yeah, I don't know if it was enforced.
[9:50] Like it wasn't implicitly. Yeah, like we were very loving family. But my father was very humble.
[9:58] He did not believe that just because you're in a position of power, you should kind of project
[10:01] that power. You should communicate that to everyone. And there was a stoicism inside my family,
[10:06] which is don't complain. So it was a weird combination of stoicism and love at the same time.
[10:15] How does I'm because I'm not a father yet. Yes, but I'm approaching that. Congratulations.
[10:21] Almost. Yeah, almost. Yeah, I've just proposed to my fiancee and we're in the process now of
[10:27] you know, bringing children into the world, hopefully. And it's one of the things I think a lot
[10:30] about, which is how do I stop my own stoicism passing on to my children? First of all,
[10:39] fatherhood, parenthood is is so humbling. You have such a picture in your mind as to how you're
[10:46] going to raise your family, what your kids are going to be like. And they just become their own
[10:52] people. And it's such a beautiful process to see. And at first, there's this alarm. Oh my god,
[10:59] I'm losing control. You know, I've done everything. You've planned everything. This is how I'm going
[11:03] to raise kids, but then real life gets in the way. It is absolutely exhausting. So you probably
[11:10] execute on 80% of your plan and you're 20% imperfect because you are exhausted and you're working.
[11:15] You got a career or often some people do. And at some point, you see these kids kind of move off
[11:23] into this completely unexpected territory. And there's a point for me, it was like, I'm a bit of
[11:30] a control freak. So I'm like, this is not good. They're kind of doing their own thing. But then you
[11:35] you step back and you're like, this is, it's absolutely gorgeous. What's happening? So the advice
[11:39] that I would just give in terms of being a parent is just spend the time with the kids. You know,
[11:44] it is that is the magic is not what you do or the particular tactics, but it's the investment in
[11:53] them and the time spent with them and the rest, you know, you can't control, but what you can control
[11:58] is kind of that connection. I am speaking of children. I went back and looked through lots of
[12:04] different photos of where you lived and where you grew up to try and get a picture of your world
[12:08] in an alley context and all these photos look incredibly incredible. I think that was your fifth birthday.
[12:14] Oh wow. I had a hair back then. My mom loved to dress us up in like little doll outfits. I can
[12:21] tell. Look at that. I'm definitely not going to do that to my kids. Age four in London. Yes.
[12:31] You're in your cousins. Family was everywhere for us. And again, another one with a beautiful hair cut.
[12:40] It was a great childhood. It was amazing. I spoke to your mom. Lily. I hope, well, how to go.
[12:47] We'll see. She said, I'll play the audio file to say people can hear it.
[12:52] When he was very difficult, he told me that he wants to do something important in the world.
[13:00] And he said becoming wealthy is not as priority, but making a change is.
[13:08] I can't say I remember that conversation. But the one of my early experiences that really
[13:18] imprinted on me was we went to visit one of my dad's factories, family factories. My dad was in
[13:24] charge of designing factories, building them operating them. And the respect that that population,
[13:33] the factory had for him and the visit and how excited they were that his family was visiting
[13:38] was just really cool. And the way that he treated, he knew everyone's name. He treated them
[13:44] with such respect. It just, it really imprinted on me. There was this care. It wasn't the boss
[13:50] is coming and there's fear. And so for me, like that ability to build a life where you have
[14:00] impact on a lot of people, but it's positive kind of building impact. You have the broad respect
[14:06] of these folks. It really imprinted on me. So I was wanted, you know, when we came to the states,
[14:13] making money was important. I don't want to kind of be as and say, like, oh, I didn't care about
[14:18] it because we lost everything. And so my first job was like, invest in banking. What's a goal
[14:23] as banking? Have fun, but make money, right? And so that was a priority for me. But then as I'm
[14:31] matured in life, as I knew, I had safety in terms of, okay, yes, I know I can do that. I can make
[14:37] money. I can provide for my family. I can support my mom and dad. Then building kind of an enterprise
[14:44] having that feeling that I saw with my father, that connection with his team was something that
[14:50] became really important to me. And when you came to New York, you were eight, nine years old?
[14:56] Nine years old, yes. If I'd asked you nine years old, when you arrived in New York, what you
[14:59] wanted to do when you were older, what would you have said? I have no idea. I want to make my dad proud.
[15:06] That was it. I wasn't kind of motivated for specific target at all. I just wanted to make my
[15:12] family proud. Why? I want to make my dad proud. He's always been an important figure in my life.
[15:21] You know, there's this. And I think part of it is that I never got to know him that well
[15:28] as an individual, because he was obviously, when I was younger, he was working all the time.
[15:35] So he would throw up once in a while for dinner, et cetera. We always had family dinners together.
[15:39] And then he went away. And then I worked. So I never really got to know the person that he was.
[15:47] But I don't know. There's kind of the sense of duty. There's there's a hope that
[15:52] you know, he's somewhere or maybe he's not someplace. But that making my father proud has always
[15:58] been a strong current, undercurrent in my life. So you're nine years old. You've arrived in New York City.
[16:05] You do end up going off to college sometime later. Yes. I went to Brown University studied
[16:10] engineering there. How do you think about that choice at that time and how
[16:14] determinant that was of your trajectory in your life, that decision to go to that university
[16:17] and study that subject? My father always said, you can do anything in your life as long as
[16:23] either you're a doctor or an engineer. And I picked engineering. I just loved the problem solving
[16:29] aspect of engineering and all the layers of equations, et cetera. And those equations being able
[16:35] to represent something in real life. And then magically, that's something in real life,
[16:40] following what it should theoretically. Like the problem solving aspect that engineering
[16:45] fascinated me. I absolutely loved it. And I think it serves me to this day.
[16:50] Engineers make good CEOs. Great CEOs. If you step back,
[16:55] companies are just machines, right there. They're machines that are run by people. And over
[17:02] a period of time, you actually try to automate some of the stuff that the people do. And then you
[17:07] send the people off to do new stuff that can't be automated. Like we are rules based like it's an
[17:13] organism and it's a machine at the same time. And to some extent, the job of the CEO is engineering,
[17:21] how do I set up the company to achieve the goals that I set for shareholders, set for my board,
[17:28] sets for sets for it? It's a giant engineering problem. And to me, that's like fascinating.
[17:32] The putting together the pieces to get to what you perceive to be the goal. And one of the really
[17:39] important things is you got to pick the right goals. That is one giant problem solving engineering
[17:45] challenge. And it's one of those fascinating parts of my job. I want to get into that, the practical
[17:50] company building, how you organize an organization to be a well-functioning machine, setting goals
[17:55] and all that stuff. After college, you go into investment banking for a period of time.
[18:01] Yeah, I work there for eight years in risk arbitrage to begin with and then mergers and acquisition
[18:07] advisory work as well. And that experience I was reading taught you about betting on people.
[18:13] Yes. What do you mean by betting on people? I'm aware it's the important.
[18:16] It was actually a lesson that I learned from Herbert Allen who was running Allen and company at the
[18:22] time. It was the Allen's family start of the company. And he always told me, and at the time,
[18:30] I didn't really listen to him. He always said, Dara, always been on people. Companies go,
[18:36] they're good companies, bad companies, but great people stay great all the time. And one of the
[18:42] things that made Allen and company was really special, investment banking can be a doggy talk's
[18:48] sport. But Allen and company really cultivated relationships with people whom they perceive to be
[18:56] great, both in terms of potential and in terms of character. And of all the investment banks,
[19:02] that loyalty, that making a bet on a person and then staying with them through their whole
[19:08] careers is a pattern of how that place works. And it's definitely something bad that I learned
[19:15] there. What is it about one's character that makes them qualify as a great person? You look for
[19:20] success, honor loyalty, people who will tell you what they're going to do, whether it's good or bad,
[19:26] and then follow through on their promises. Hard work. I'm surprised that wasn't mentioned.
[19:30] Well, that comes with success. Okay. It's hard work. You put those two together.
[19:35] And why did you leave Allen and company? I left Allen because I met Barry Diller. He was a client
[19:42] of mine. We got to meet a big kind of deal, unfriendly hostile tender offer for Paramount at the time.
[19:52] It's that there's another one happening, I guess for Paramount now as we speak. And he was the one
[19:58] person. I thought I was going to be an Allen lifer. I thought I was going to be there forever.
[20:02] My older brother, Kave is an Allen lifer. It's the only job he's had in his life.
[20:08] But Barry was the one person who I thought, if I get a chance to work for this person,
[20:14] I'm going to jump out it and I did. Why? Why Barry? He's spectacular. I mean, he was spectacular.
[20:20] He is spectacular. A doer. I met him in a circumstance where he lost. It was his
[20:28] giant hostile tender offer. Bids going back and forth between the winner, Viacom and Barry,
[20:36] ultimately, Barry stepped away. And we were planning an announcement. And you can imagine,
[20:43] all these fancy PR people sitting around a table, how do we present a loss as a win, right?
[20:51] So he bid for a company. He didn't get it. And he walked away. He didn't get it because you
[20:55] walked away, which in hindsight was a mistake. He could have paid more. And then in the release
[21:01] where he walked away, I think the release was they won. We lost next. And he was a constant
[21:08] motion machine like they won. We lost next. What's next? Let's go. And that's the kind of person I
[21:14] wanted to work for. In business, losing is part of the game. Absolutely. Absolutely. But then calling
[21:22] it out, you know, not bullshitting, not like, oh, we tried our best and the circumstances,
[21:28] they won. We lost. Next. It's okay. Does it matter how you lose? Absolutely it does.
[21:34] They absolutely it does. It's an, and I find companies guilty of two things. Like one is ignoring
[21:42] losses, like papering over losses, etc. Right. And then sometimes being obsessive about the loss,
[21:49] you know, inspecting it. What happened? Let's do a summary. Let's meet what went wrong,
[21:55] etc. And, and you know, for me, it's somewhere in the middle, which is recognize why you lost.
[22:01] Recognize that you lost. Say it because it's important to say it. Analyze it. But then move on.
[22:08] Like, let's move on. And the next time you hope to have learned some kind of judgment to avoid
[22:17] that kind of a loss. But it doesn't mean you're going to avoid losing it all. Like if you're not
[22:20] taking shots, you're not missing, you're, you're not losing. So for me, it's constantly moving and
[22:27] taking your shots, losing, learning, next, losing, learning, next. That constant motion is what I
[22:32] want to see. That constant motion and learning is what excites me. This is business advice, but
[22:39] also life advice generally because a lot of people who I meet come up to me and ask me questions
[22:43] about things often ask questions. That sounded a lot like what you just said. It's dealing with
[22:48] rejection, dealing with taking an L and how that L then stays with them. Sometimes for a decade,
[22:53] sometimes for 15 years and holds them back. How it's their confidence means that they don't take it
[22:58] anymore shots. And this can cause a sort of a downward confidence spiral. And listen, I'm talking
[23:05] a big game, but I will tell you in my personal life, I can't deal with rejection. I have a really
[23:11] hard time dealing with rejection. Professional life, no problem whatsoever. So it's like in the
[23:16] end, we're all humans, after all. You have a difficulty dealing with rejection in your puzzle.
[23:20] Very much. What kind of rejection? Any kind of rejection conflict, it's something that has been
[23:27] that I fought my whole life, which is because I was one of the younger cousins. Because I was a
[23:34] youngest brother, I just kind of didn't have rights. So I was, I went with a flow. And going with a
[23:42] flow means you're going with a current, etc. I didn't cause trouble. And that has followed me in my
[23:50] personal life and my professional life. I don't have as much trouble there. I guess my professional
[23:54] life to some extent is a mask because I get to be aggressive. I get to lose, etc. It's something that
[24:01] said my wife has really helped me with. But it is something in my personal life that generally
[24:07] I'm conflict-avoidant. You conflict-avoidant in your personal life? Interesting. Yeah, definitely.
[24:12] That's not good in a relationship. No, that's why it's helping me out. I'm much better now.
[24:18] I'm much better. But it's, it's when I take those issues on, I have to fight myself. There's some
[24:26] core. You know, if you and I were having an issue and I'm sitting down with you and saying,
[24:31] 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.
[24:38] But that's how resentment builds and that's how relationships over a long period of time start
[24:45] moving the wrong way. So it is something that is in my core, but I actively fight and I'm getting
[24:51] better at it. But I'm still on the learning journey there. I'll tell you that. Eventually you go
[24:55] on to becoming the CEO of Expedia. Yes. There was a couple of CEOs that came before you,
[25:00] but you became the third and took that company on. Very different job going from investment banking
[25:06] to being a CEO. Yeah, yeah. Now, there was a journey there because I went from banking to running
[25:12] deals and I knew that I liked how companies worked. The thing that I liked about investment banking
[25:20] was that I got to see a lot there. I got to see really smart people, really cool companies built.
[25:28] But I couldn't go along with that journey. I was jealous of the journey that these CEOs were
[25:34] moving on. So then when M&A was a bridge to work at a company and built the company, I moved from
[25:42] M&A to CFO, Chief Financial Officer, because that's to some extent finance, but it's also
[25:49] being the CEO's partner in helping the CEO build. So I always knew the direction that I want to go
[25:55] in, which is hey, at some point I want to actually be an operator. And then I had the opportunity
[26:00] to take over Expedia, the CEO of the time, Eric Blackford kind of said, yeah, big company,
[26:05] not for me. So he resigned. And honestly, Barry didn't have an alternative. I was the CEO and
[26:16] chairman of IAC, which was a parent company of what became Expedia, IAC travel. The head of IAC
[26:23] travel resigned. I raised my hand and said, maybe I could do it. Barry was desperate. He had no
[26:29] one else. So he promoted me to be CEO of IAC travel. And IAC travel is going through some
[26:35] difficult time. So we spun it off at Expedia. So that's when I became the CEO of Expedia, the
[26:41] public company, and I moved to the Netherlands of Seattle. When you were job just before you took
[26:47] on that role as CEO, you were buying businesses. So M&A is mergers and acquisitions. You were buying
[26:53] companies. Yes. What are some of the companies that you bought? Oh, we bought a lot of companies.
[26:57] We bought Tickamaster. We bought match.com, bought Expedia Hotels.com. And it was all about the theme
[27:06] that Barry and I were fascinated with was the movement of commerce online. You know, it was during
[27:14] that time. It was the late late 90s, early 2000. And we saw it happening with our very own eyes,
[27:21] really, with home shopping. It was a flat screen. It was a television. And you were offering
[27:28] products. And people were calling up buying those products electronically. And just the medium
[27:33] change, the medium change from a TV screen to an internet screen. And instead of calling, you could
[27:39] use a HTTP. And so while the medium change, we kind of saw this opportunity to take advantage of
[27:48] the change of platform. So match.com is actually the olden days. You know, you had online dating,
[27:54] but you would call a number. You'd be like, my name is Dara. And I'm six foot two. And this is
[27:59] you describe yourself. And you hear other kind of recordings. And you would get matched up based
[28:06] on someone who seemed nice. And all of that just moved online. That was what batch.com was.
[28:12] Same thing with Tickamaster. You know, in the olden days, you would go to tower records. Have you ever
[28:17] been to tower records? Yes. So there were these things called record stores. And they also had a
[28:23] desk where they would sell concert tickets. So you would either call for a concert ticket or you
[28:28] would physically go and buy one. Amazing. And there are lines, tower record lines. And all of that
[28:34] exactly moved online. And same thing with travel, right? You would call a travel agent. And so all
[28:41] of there was this movement of retail and phone commerce to online commerce. And we identified
[28:47] the early players to make that shift and personal's ticketing travel were the ones that we went for.
[28:56] Because at the time, Amazon was doing everything else like physical fulfillment. So what we were
[29:02] going for were essentially electronic transactions that did not require physical fulfillment. And that
[29:09] was travel because, you know, it's a virtual good ticketing match.com, which was personal. So there
[29:16] was a pattern around madness, so to speak. But we went out and bought all these companies. This
[29:21] was a really great time. I've got two questions that emerged. That one is, again, I'm really
[29:25] interested to understand how you would look for talent or how, how you think about what a great
[29:30] company is. Are there like, we look at the company culture, we looking at the founders, was
[29:33] there something else? Was it the profitability? And the other one is just really intrigued us to
[29:38] what this period of your life and thereafter taught you about how to spot opportunity and transition.
[29:44] Because that is a transitional moment of technology. And I think there is a certain pattern
[29:50] recognition one can develop as to like know what to bet on in these moments of transition,
[29:54] whether it's huge skepticism, the internet's going to not get anything. So two questions,
[29:58] I want is like, how do you spot great companies? And then the second is like patterns in transition.
[30:02] So there, I'd say they're related, which is we would spot great companies just by observing
[30:09] who was taking the lead in these transitions. These transitions are difficult. You can't predict
[30:13] exactly where things are going, how quickly they're going, how much should you invest, what's a return,
[30:18] what the market, how large is the market going to be. But there were companies that were emerging
[30:26] as the leaders. And we would just identify the leaders and call call these folks up and say,
[30:32] I want to come in and talk to you. That was it. And to some extent, it's a self-reinforcing cycle,
[30:39] which is yes, the great management teams and the great founders were the ones who were able to
[30:45] identify the opportunity and hit that opportunity faster than anyone else, recognize that opportunity
[30:50] and execute on the opportunity faster than anyone else. So to some extent, the companies who were
[30:56] in the lead, of course, had the best management teams and had the best founding teams. And when those
[31:02] two things matched, that was when we jumped. And then the last thing I would tell you in terms of
[31:07] these pattern recognition is that we never completed a successful deal because we got the company
[31:17] cheap. We actually overpaid for every single great company that we bought, but we overpaid based
[31:25] on what the market thought at the time, not what the reality turned out to be. So I do think one of
[31:31] the kind of pieces of pattern recognition with me is just humans think about success and transitions
[31:41] in a linear way because time is linear. Which is something that doesn't just, they think of it going
[31:46] like this. Yeah, you know, it's the everything kind of moves this way, right? Your schedule is
[31:52] relatively linear, right? It's, you sleep seven hours a day, like, your life is a linear life.
[31:59] But company and company success and company momentum, especially with new technologies where
[32:06] if there's a technology that's truly better than the other technology within the virtual world,
[32:10] there's absolutely no friction holding it back. These companies move in an exponential way in terms
[32:17] of their growth and ultimately in terms of their value. So whereas most people kind of see things,
[32:24] they, when they project out to the future, they see this, what actually happens is this. That's where
[32:30] the opportunities, it's the spread between the hockey stick and kind of the straight line. And
[32:36] it's very difficult for people to process that. And so that was, you know, those were the
[32:43] companies that we identified that hockey stick. And online travel was a hockey stick,
[32:47] personal was a hockey stick, ticketing was a hockey stick. I heard about the, is it Kevin's paradox?
[32:53] Yes, which I think kind of sort of overlaps with what you're saying now, when things become
[32:58] easier, faster cheaper, people do them not incrementally more, but like exceptionally more often.
[33:04] I mean, that's the definition of Uber and we can get to that at some point was originally,
[33:10] it was built as a black cab service, so to speak, a black car service.
[33:14] Can you tell me that's where it came from? Because a lot of the, history has now moved forward.
[33:18] Yeah. People have forgotten the story of how it came to be.
[33:20] Now, to some extent, it was, well, to a large extent, it was that the founder was before me,
[33:24] but it was Garrett Camp, who was one of the founders, had this idea. And I think it was born in Paris.
[33:32] It was like a snowy day in Paris and they couldn't find a black car. And it was a bunch of young,
[33:37] young tech guys like, how cool would it be to like pick up my phone and call a black car? And that
[33:42] was the core idea, which is, hey, you can use your phone to call a black car. He brought on Travis
[33:49] Kalnik. Travis was the operator and the founder. And to your point, and Kevin's paradox is some extent,
[33:57] people thought, well, what's the size of the black car market place? And it was a couple of
[34:02] billion dollars. Or what's the size of the taxi industry? And it was more than a couple of billion
[34:07] dollars. But what they didn't see at the time was that as you improve the, if you radically make
[34:15] something either more convenient or cheaper, the market expands beyond how you calculate it.
[34:23] So the Uber size and scale now is way beyond the original marketplace of black cars and
[34:29] our taxis. It's the company, the company today is a result of Kevin's paradox.
[34:35] Timing. We often don't think much about the luck of timing. Luck is an interesting word to use,
[34:42] but how important timing is and other sort of foundational factors are in enabling a company
[34:47] like Uber to exist. When you think about the timing of Uber, what are the foundations that made it
[34:53] possible? Well, it was a mobile revolution. It was mobile data technology, the iPhone coming
[35:00] together. In the early days, one of the geniuses of Travis was he would hire these market managers
[35:07] who would be GMs of new cities that they would expand into. And they would literally go to the
[35:13] city with a back full of iPhones and give away iPhones to black car drivers to get them to come
[35:20] on Uber because at the time, a lot of them didn't have, they didn't have smartphones, so to speak.
[35:26] So the onset of the smartphone was that kind of that beautiful magic of timing coming together
[35:34] and then aggressiveness of that founding team to understand that there's a pattern here. And I'm
[35:39] going to replicate that pattern all the world and raise as much capitalite as I have to to get
[35:45] there faster than anyone else. That was the magic, but it was, again, it's, yes, there's luck
[35:51] in there, but if that founding team hadn't been as aggressive and blitz scaling, which is a term
[35:58] that folks used all around the world, company won't be what it is today. Your transition out of
[36:04] investment banking into Expedio, CFO, then CEO, you know, it's a necessary type in business
[36:10] that investment bankers and CFOs don't necessarily make the best CEOs because they might
[36:17] stereotypically overfinancialize, overfinancialize, maybe be less risk adverse, maybe be like,
[36:22] you know, those kinds of things. And when I spoke to Barry, he did say the following, I'll just
[36:28] play it for you because it's been a coming from him. He was probably actually a leader
[36:34] because he had killed him and had been on the financial side of things, so he really had not
[36:44] yet had the experience of alternative managed people. That came in a difficult way to him
[36:52] and he mastered it. It didn't take him all that long. He mastered how to become a leader,
[36:56] and he mastered how to take ultimate responsibility for a company.
[37:01] Yeah, it was growing up into Barry was, and by the way, I wouldn't be where I am today without,
[37:07] not him as a mentor because he's not like a mentoring kind of guy, but him as my leader learning
[37:13] from him. But I say that the experience that really, really shaped me as it relates to Expedio was,
[37:20] I did come in as more of a financial leader. Our leadership at Expedia.com failed. I hired a,
[37:29] I had to fire the first person, hired a second person, complete disaster. And so I was over two
[37:36] in terms of hiring for our largest business. This business was 50% of our profits, and I was over
[37:41] two in hiring. And so I went to Barry in the board and I said, well, if I miss hiring the third
[37:50] person to run the biggest parts of our business, then you should fire me. Barry quickly agreed. Yes,
[37:54] of course, we will. So I said, obviously, I don't understand enough about the job to find the
[38:00] right person. So I think I've got to take the job myself for six months to a year to understand
[38:08] what is it that the job entails for me to then go in and find that person. And so for what turned
[38:16] out to be, I think it was five or six years, I ran both the holding company Expedia Inc, which is
[38:21] a public company, and I ran Expedia.com. I was president of the largest part of the company.
[38:27] That experience taught me my operating traps. That experience actually taught me, how is it that
[38:33] you operate a company? How is it that you run something? And that's a very different skill set
[38:38] from capital allocation and all the financial wizardry that people embark on. That's important.
[38:45] But what I discovered was operating a company, leading a company, organizing it, operating it,
[38:52] setting up the goals, getting the right team together. That's the part of the job that I loved.
[38:59] So it took me a while to get there. Like my whole life, my whole early career was in this
[39:05] financial sector, which I enjoyed. But I didn't find my true love, which is operations and running
[39:13] companies and running a technology company until way, way later in my career. And I think to some
[39:20] extent, now I've got both. I've got that financial part because it has to work. But the operations
[39:27] and the leadership part of the business is something that I love. And watching Barry take
[39:33] responsibility, take shots, go against the grain, as aggressively as he consistently did,
[39:41] I think has made me a much better operator than what the counterfactual would be if I had another
[39:45] boss. Three minutes into that role, the head of H. Shaw told you that you were scaring people.
[39:50] I forgot about that. I think that was my job. What's the context then?
[39:59] You know, the context was that, first of all, turn around in technology are really hard.
[40:07] We were talking about the momentum thing when momentum is positive. In the technology sector,
[40:13] if momentum turns negative, it is remarkably difficult to turn it around. You know,
[40:20] Yahoo is hanging on, but it was the great company and you see where it is now.
[40:27] It's brutal when you get it wrong. And it always takes longer than you think. And it goes to,
[40:34] you know, while I was talking about linear versus exponential, just like the curves up our
[40:38] exponential curves down our exponential as well. The first couple of years look bad, but they're
[40:44] not that bad. But you know in your mind that 10 years from now, it's going to be a fucking disaster.
[40:52] So what I saw with Expedia was a technology company whose technology engine was broken.
[41:00] Codebase was old, had not been reinvested in, technology leadership was coasting, and that really
[41:10] alarmed me. And one of the things that I learned from Barry in terms of leadership is that when,
[41:17] you know, a bell is wrong. When you see something, when you see a pattern, you have to act. You can't
[41:24] wait for a second. So in my mind, once I figured out, oh my god, this really is a turnaround. This
[41:30] isn't like a company that I've got a tune. This company, if I don't move and move hard and fast,
[41:37] is going to start on that exponential decay curve, I had to move quickly. And at that point, and I am
[41:45] one of the skills that it learned from Barry is transparency. It's like whenever he wanted to
[41:50] understand an issue, he wanted to go to the source. He didn't want to summary. And it didn't
[41:56] matter where that source was. Is it a junior analyst or a president? He wanted to hear from the
[42:02] source because what he didn't want to lose is lose the fidelity of the issue. You know, when there's
[42:08] an issue here, then it goes through the analyst and the associate and the vice president and an SVP
[42:14] and whatever, by the time it's summarized for you as the CEO, it's lost everything. And usually
[42:21] their levels are like, hey, do we really want to tell them that? Why don't we phrase it this way,
[42:25] et cetera? So your whole life as a CEO is kind of a, it's a version of the world that your team
[42:34] wants you to see. And if you got a good team, usually it has more to with reality than not. But you
[42:42] are subject to your team and the information flow that gets to you. And so Barry always wanted to
[42:48] go to the source. He would just cut through levels, cut through levels, get to the core of the idea.
[42:55] And then once he did, he would move and he would move fast. And for me, I kind of, I have held on
[43:04] to that. But I've also turned it the other way, which is one of the ways in which I can depend on
[43:10] getting the real shit from you is my being honest with you, right? And human beings are good
[43:18] bullshit, you know, kind of, kind of meter, so to speak. And when you're the CEO and you're talking
[43:24] to your staff and you're giving all the, you know, the business talk and we're doing this,
[43:30] but the last quarter we had some certain challenges and this and that, they see you both
[43:35] shooting them. And so why the hell should they tell you the truth, right? If they're, if their
[43:40] boss isn't telling them the good stuff, why should they give the good stuff back to the boss?
[43:46] So for me, it was almost like self-defense mechanism that as a boss, I'm going to tell you what's
[43:51] going on because that's the only way I can drag the hard truths back from you. Because otherwise,
[43:58] you're going to filter yourself. You're going to, I don't want to order. No, this happened.
[44:02] But do you ever worry that they might not be able to deal with the truth? And they can leave.
[44:07] And I think that that's, so I think that's what my head of HR were saying. I was scaring the
[44:12] shit out of people because I'm like, we have a real problem here and we've got to come together.
[44:17] And I think that that, you know, there's a, I was a good decision making framework for me is,
[44:24] if I make a mistake, where do I want to make the mistake? Right? And so if I want to,
[44:31] if I'm going to air with my company, I'm going to air in telling the truth and potentially
[44:37] scaring someone away, I'll take that because if that person doesn't want to face the truth,
[44:42] if he or she's not up for the fight, then they should go someplace else. They can have a good time,
[44:47] I'm sure they can have a good career, et cetera. So for me, as a leader, I've always, always believed
[44:53] in transparency partially because then I think you attract the right people. And partially because
[45:00] then I'm going to get the good information so to act on. Usually the failures I see with CEOs
[45:07] aren't because they made the wrong decisions. It's because they were getting the wrong data that
[45:11] led to the wrong decisions. So it's incredibly important as a leader of any organization
[45:17] for you to build the channels and build the kind of culture that surfaces problems to you quickly.
[45:24] And then for me too, you always have to have your random direct channels. You know, the,
[45:29] again, if you think about organizations as organisms, they have their own incentives. And so
[45:37] my staff's incentive is to control the information that gets to me. Not because they're bad people,
[45:44] it's just their job because I can get overwhelmed. Who do I meet with? What's my schedule? You know,
[45:49] is this person worthy of meeting the CEO? And for me, my fight is I just set up a bunch of random
[45:56] shit. I'll meet with, you know, engineers four levels down consistently because usually they've
[46:01] got the kind of personality where they don't give a shit. They'll tell me anything and everything. And
[46:05] they like putting the CEO down. That's great. They like putting the CEO down. It's, you know,
[46:11] engineers often, you know, don't like authority. And code is like the biggest authority buster.
[46:16] It's like the truth truth. So I find a lot of engineers have a personality which is, yeah,
[46:21] I'm going to tell you what it's like. Like, I'm, you know, they, they, they, their value is in
[46:26] something else. But often they don't, there's a kind of disrespect for authority that I love.
[46:31] I found in my companies that there's sometimes like a 24-year-old young girl who will just tell me
[46:36] the truth. Yeah. And she's the one you want to hang out with. She's the one I always go and ask
[46:41] for an opinion. Absolutely. So that's, you've got to have your, your own channels. But the way to,
[46:48] the way to get transparency from your team is first, first, you've got to give it to them.
[46:52] What's the culture hardworking when you arrived? Because you used the word coasting to describe
[46:56] some of the team when you arrived at Expedia. Medium. I think the company had been successful for
[47:00] a long time and had coasted it on that success to some extent. So I needed to turn over the team,
[47:08] turn over like the entire team very, very quickly and get some hungry people in there.
[47:11] The entire team. Almost entire team. Yeah. Yeah. It was rough going for a while. But then you have
[47:18] kind of mission-oriented people who are trying to prove themselves. And it's part of the renewal
[47:23] that every company has to go through. And we turned it around. It was tough going but we really
[47:27] turned around and that was when I kind of learned, hey, my, my love is running shit. It's great.
[47:34] It's the best part of my job. How did you get that company to work hard? Because there's so many
[47:38] people listening right now that are in a company that might have been successful to coasting.
[47:41] Might be two decades in. And this is an ultimate question in like executive management. How do you
[47:46] turn around the culture of a big or even even even 200 people? It's very difficult. And sometimes
[47:54] the shortcut is to change the people. Like it's very easy to say, oh, you have values this and that.
[47:58] So it's it's finding the people who you believe will line up with your cultural mechanisms or how
[48:07] you work or your values. And then embodying those values and those mechanisms as examples and
[48:16] then making sure that your team embodies those values and imbues down the, down the organization. So
[48:22] part of working hard is like, you know, sending emails to the team on a Saturday and if I don't
[48:26] get a response on Saturday, sending them an email on Sunday with a question mark. It's going on.
[48:31] You know, I think at Expedia in hindsight, we we worked intensely and and we went hard.
[48:39] But bananas hard as I like because Expedia was we were selling vacations, right? It was it was the
[48:46] the product that we were selling was about turning yourself off. And so we did talk about work
[48:52] life balance. And in hindsight, at Uber, I don't. You know, you come to Uber, you're going to work
[49:01] your ass off. We're going to be really demanding. If you're not performing, we're going to let you
[49:09] know. And if you don't fix it, we're going to push you out. But while it will be incredibly hard,
[49:17] you will have real agency of the company. We're a big company, but individuals can make a big
[49:22] difference. And it's a company that's making a difference in the world. You're going to learn so
[49:26] much. And while you will have work hard, you're going to have a great time. But this is don't come
[49:33] here if you want to coast. And I'm very clear about that. And I should have been more clear at
[49:37] Expedia, but we were selling vacations. So I couldn't be quite that clear.
[49:43] New year always has a strange energy to it because people start talking about their goals,
[49:47] fresh starts, new habits. But the reality is that most people carry the same ideas they had last
[49:52] year into the new year. I'm guilty of that too. And they still don't end up doing anything with them.
[49:56] And I get why. Starting something new, especially if it's a business or a project is overwhelming.
[50:00] Before you start, you're looking for the perfect moment and to be the perfect version of yourself
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[50:40] figured out. You just need to start. In your 12 years of CEO, Expedia stock rose 550 percent
[50:49] and sales increased 400 percent from 2.1 billion to 8.8 billion. And you were the highest paid
[50:57] CEO of a U.S. Tech company with a pay of 94.1 million. I left it all behind to go over.
[51:03] You left it all behind. It was a big options package that I've never bested but it's all good.
[51:08] It was a great run. I'm so intrigued about this point of hard work because I think 10 years ago
[51:13] saying what you just said was very taboo. Yes. It feels too long. We're free now. Yes. You're
[51:20] free now. Yes indeed. I've gotten, you know, sometimes people I say the question,
[51:27] what advice would you give to young people? And to me, the most important skill in life is a
[51:34] skill of working hard. And it's not a skill. You can't just like decide you're going to do it.
[51:40] And I think way too many people focus on should be a computer programmer or a doctor or study
[51:48] the level of arts now that anyone can vibe code just learn to work hard. And it is, you know,
[51:54] that when you see the top athletes, of course they're talented and the, you know, their town level
[52:02] were levels. But the thing that changes that that's different about the elite athletes than the
[52:07] non-elite athletes. And I'm talking elite is they work their asses off. They're disciplined.
[52:14] They're structured. They're relentless. You know, look at Ronaldo, look at Michael Jordan,
[52:19] etc. That's the same thing is true in all of life. It's true in business, it's true in personal
[52:25] life. And so for me, with my kids, I just want to teach them how to work hard. And for me,
[52:32] like growing up, I as a banker, as an executive, I'm not going to let anyone outwork me. And if that's
[52:40] true, then they may be smarter, more talented, etc. But I'm not going to let anyone outwork me. And
[52:46] I think that that's a huge advantage that you have in over a period of time, that advantage
[52:50] compounds. And I want them in our company, like I want Uber to be an incredibly hard working
[52:54] company. Comes at a cost third day, working hard. Yes. It comes at a trade off. And we believe in
[53:01] flexibility. So people confuse kind of lack of flexibility to working hard. You can work hard.
[53:08] And at the same time, you can have flexibility. So if you want to have dinner with your family,
[53:12] and I'm religious about having dinners with my family when I'm in town, you know, six to eight,
[53:17] absolutely spend that time with my family. But at, you know, 9.30 pm, I'm checking emails.
[53:23] Right? When I wake up at 5.30 pm in an AM, I'm checking emails. So of course, there are trade-offs.
[53:28] And, you know, life is about trade-offs. I think one of the most important things I've learned
[53:32] from interviewing CEOs, and generally we've gone through a transition of COVID and remote work,
[53:36] and then come back into like everyone's in the office again, is actually the most important
[53:39] thing is what you've just said, which is being honest with people so that they can make decisions
[53:43] for themselves in their lives. Absolutely. I think the thing that one might describe as toxic
[53:47] is when you say something publicly, but then when they arrive, it's a completely different deal.
[53:52] But what you're doing is you're being honest, and you're therefore allowing people to make
[53:56] decisions for themselves when they're in lives. And I'm allowing them to be honest back to me.
[54:00] Yeah. And that's a company culture that someone like me would be attracted to.
[54:03] Absolutely. But there's lots of people listening and I couldn't think of anything worse.
[54:06] And that's okay. Yes. Yeah. There are plenty of companies that they could find.
[54:09] Or plenty of causes that they can find is fine. You said, learn to work hard, learn.
[54:15] It's a skill. Really? Yes. Of course it is. Because you've got to the idea that there's staying
[54:23] focused on something, not being discouraged by failing, trying over and over again,
[54:28] and just working harder than others. It's not something you can turn on and off. I see it in
[54:33] people all the time. There's just like this grim determination like we at Uber that there's
[54:39] actually saying it's inside one of our values, embrace the grind, embrace it. That's a learned
[54:48] skill. That's not something you're born with. Maybe there's an element that you're born with.
[54:52] Have you ever seen someone who isn't a hard worker that come a really hard worker?
[54:56] An exception to hard worker. That's a good question.
[55:00] No one doesn't occur to me, have you?
[55:03] No. I think it might have been maybe Brian Cheska, Airbnb, or Elon say that he's never seen someone
[55:11] who wasn't a hard worker, but come a really hard worker. That's interesting.
[55:15] And this is why I'm trying to come up with someone, failing so far.
[55:20] And maybe I might posit that it's somewhat to do with these photos that you have in front of you.
[55:26] Your childhood, your early context, which you didn't change.
[55:29] That's a working hard here. But you were forged in such a way that you were going to be
[55:35] ruthless. So, relentless is the one I'm talking about.
[55:37] Yeah, I mean, ruthless to myself. Relentless is right. I think at one point,
[55:43] Jeff Bezos was going to call Amazon Relentless. That was thinking about that being the name of the
[55:48] company. And that is when I see successful technology companies and especially technology companies,
[55:56] there is this relentless about them. At Uber, we have lots of different groups that are trying
[56:02] to do different things. But each and every team is built and targeted on optimizing and improving
[56:11] their own particular function. There isn't a piece of the company that is not improving every
[56:17] single day. And if they're not improving fast enough, someone else is going to take their place
[56:21] and going to improve it. So, as an organism, every part of the company, whether it's a payments team
[56:28] in terms of new payments types or payment success or the fraud team or the mobile app team in
[56:35] terms of conversions, etc. Every team is set up and organized for and gold on improving everything
[56:43] that they do. So, the whole company in small ways is constantly improving, never ever stopping.
[56:50] And it is that relentless nature of business. And the minute and it's not good enough to get
[56:55] better, we have to get better faster than our competitors because our competitors are all
[57:00] getting better as well. So, it's basically like who can adapt faster to either the reality of the
[57:06] market as it is today or the prediction of the market as you see it tomorrow. And it's the
[57:13] speed of change and it's identification of the opportunity. Those are the two factors. I think
[57:18] that are most important. And the speed of change, you know, if you can work fast, you're kind of
[57:24] accelerating time. You know, every one shot that you take, I can take two shots. I've got more
[57:30] time than you do. And then of course, there's identifying the opportunity going after. Those are
[57:34] the two things you really have to get right. If you're taking two shots, not only you're going to
[57:38] get two data points of information, but you're also increasing your probability of having a successful
[57:43] shot by like 100%. Shot angle. Just shot angle. How do you create a culture of continuous improvement?
[57:49] Because successful companies, as you kind of highlighted earlier, they become complacent with
[57:52] their victories. And they like to take some time off and celebrate. And, you know, we high five,
[57:57] and then we chill. And then actually the studies show they did this big metronautical analysis
[58:00] where they looked at successful companies. And they showed that they become risk-adverse.
[58:04] Totally. Because lost a virgin. They have something to lose now. So just protect.
[58:09] I think the good news to some extent with Uber is that we've always been a company that has had a
[58:15] chip on a shoulder. You know, the company had a chip on a shoulder when it was founded and it had
[58:19] to like fight taxi unions for its very existence. And then the disaster happened with Travis leaving
[58:28] and then a new CEO coming in at the time that was a really, really difficult time. Then we went
[58:32] through a period of COVID, which was again a disaster for the company, but ultimately prepared us
[58:37] to do better than people saying, you know, it was a tough IPO. Uber is never going to get profitable.
[58:43] And today we're incredibly successful, but we've got the challenge and the opportunity of AI
[58:49] and autonomous. So we've always been a company that has been, I would say, underestimated.
[58:56] And that feeds into our culture. This is a, we are a hungry company. And I do think we're sometimes
[59:05] guilty of getting complacent in little ways. And I have a leadership team that when they see
[59:12] complacency more often than not, than not, they identify it and they get it the hell out.
[59:17] It's a team that is not satisfied. That's always driving. And I love that about us.
[59:23] How does one balance enjoying the success and the accomplishments? I mean, you've turned
[59:29] this company around a highly profitable company. Everyone that I've spoken to many of
[59:33] mutual friends have talked lovingly about the impact you've had on the business. I mean,
[59:37] the numbers speak for themselves. When you joined Uber, it was losing 2.5 to 3 billion per year.
[59:42] Now it generates 8.5 billion in free cash flow every year. How do you get people to 9.8 in the
[59:49] last year? You're counting 9.8. Okay, incredible. Celebrate. Chill. Well, you can celebrate
[59:59] a nutshell. We take those moments. We do sell it. It's cool to run a company that's so important.
[1:00:06] It's cool to run a company that's hitting record after record after record. And we do celebrate
[1:00:11] those records. And we do celebrate those teams. Maybe not enough. And again, it goes to like,
[1:00:15] what mistake would you rather make? I'd rather make the mistake of celebrating a little bit too
[1:00:21] little and kind of being a little pissed off about life in general and pushing. But we take
[1:00:28] our moments. But the success itself, I don't know, succeeding is almost a celebration in and of
[1:00:34] itself. And when you're succeeding in such a competitive field, I just find a deep sense of
[1:00:40] satisfaction there. And I think my team does too. How do you get the team to take those risks
[1:00:46] that they need to take? Is there something you do like incentivize them on the amount of shots
[1:00:51] they take? How do you do that? One is they're always moving fast. That's what we do. We push. We're
[1:00:56] constantly pushing the pace of the company in terms of execution. So I think that helps. But I do
[1:01:02] think that there's there's a mechanism that we talk now about that I've talked to a team about
[1:01:06] taking smart risks. I think you're absolutely right, which is as companies get bigger and more
[1:01:10] successful, they tend to become more risk averse. And it should be the exact opposite because you can
[1:01:16] take more risks. You can make more mistakes because you've got kind of this 9.8 billion
[1:01:21] of cash flow to protect yourself against some of those mistakes. So I have definitely in the past,
[1:01:27] I would say two years push the team actively to push on the open terms of risk. Don't be defensive,
[1:01:34] be offensive, etc. And it comes from my challenging the teams, my talking about it,
[1:01:40] setting examples of sometimes failing and then saying it's okay moving on. And then
[1:01:46] sometimes my taking decisions that are seen as more risky than not. That setting the example
[1:01:51] then allows a company to follow. So if I was in one of your teams, what,
[1:01:56] how do you think about goal setting for me? All the teams have different goals, business goals.
[1:02:01] The ads team has to drive at technology driven incremental ad dollars per year and or customer
[1:02:11] satisfaction, customer MPS, etc. So every team has its own goals. And they organize guess those
[1:02:19] goals and they execute those those goals on their religiously tracked. It's a best mechanism that
[1:02:24] we have. I just wish that there was a better one because the art of the goal setting becomes the
[1:02:29] issue, which is, are you setting the right goals? Are they too ambitious or are they not ambitious
[1:02:34] enough? And sometimes people can gain the system. So we use it, but I can't tell you that is perfect.
[1:02:42] What about you talked earlier about values? A lot of companies go and do an off-site and they write
[1:02:46] some words on a white and a wall and they say ambition, enthusiasm, courage, whatever. What do you
[1:02:51] think of that sort of corporate habit of goal values and stuff? We went through the exercise.
[1:02:58] Fail the first time succeeded the second time. And when we failed, when it first came to Uber,
[1:03:07] obviously there was a view that there we needed a cultural reset of the company.
[1:03:11] And so it was very important for me to go and inspect the culture of the company and change it.
[1:03:19] It was a statement. And the culture had, I think some cool stuff in there, some cool ideas in
[1:03:25] there. For example, there was one value that was toast stepping. And the idea of toast stepping
[1:03:31] is what you and I talked about earlier, which is we want to challenge each other within the
[1:03:36] organization. And so if I have to step on your toes and tell you something that you don't want to
[1:03:42] hear, I'm allowed to, even though hurts you, because the truth is more important. So sometimes the
[1:03:48] truth hurts and that's okay. That was the idea of toast stepping. And what happened was sometimes
[1:03:53] those values became weaponized, where toast stepping, whose spirit came from a place of
[1:04:00] we want to speak the truth, became an excuse to be a jerk. So the values in and of themselves
[1:04:09] can be great or terrible based on how you execute on those values. When I first came in, we had
[1:04:18] to redo the values. And I was there, there's a saying by Jeff Bezos, that I love, which is like
[1:04:25] the values of the company almost they, they appear, the value system of the company appears
[1:04:29] to some extent. You don't, if you say thou shalt, you're going to fail because the company shall.
[1:04:35] And the approach that we first took was that we will actually get the value system we had,
[1:04:42] we had a vote for all the employees in the company, what values do you think should be part of
[1:04:46] the new Uber, et cetera. We took all the signal and then we edited it and came up with a new
[1:04:51] list of values. And there was one value that I wrote myself. It was mine. And it was do the right
[1:05:00] thing, period. It wasn't crowdsourced. It was just that. And usually with these values,
[1:05:07] you're like, there's a whole explanation and people are like, well, what does do the right thing
[1:05:11] period mean? You have to figure it out. And for me, it was a message to the whole company,
[1:05:20] which was if you work at Uber, you have a responsibility and I'm not going to tell you exactly
[1:05:25] what to do. So use your judgment. And it's our expectation that you use your judgment to do the
[1:05:30] right thing. And sometimes doing the right thing, it's not clear. Should I go after my business
[1:05:33] goals? Should I compromise on a business goal because safety is in question. Of course,
[1:05:38] you should. Safety comes first before business, et cetera. But we were putting that weight and
[1:05:42] that responsibility within the employees. But the rest of the value system that was kind of crowdsourced,
[1:05:50] it was forgettable. Because it was the kind of stuff that you passion, ambition, teamwork,
[1:05:55] like what company doesn't believe in teamwork? Give me a break. So we, Nikki, Krishna Marthy, who
[1:06:03] runs people, she pushed me to reset the values four or five years in. By then, I felt like I did
[1:06:12] have a right to have a point of view. I've been there. We weren't quite done with the turnaround,
[1:06:17] et cetera. But I was a part of the company. And then we came up with a value set, which is different.
[1:06:23] You know, there's one of our values. By the way, go get it was the only one that survived.
[1:06:28] No, sorry. Do the right thing was the only one that survived. But for example, go get it is one of
[1:06:34] our top values. And the idea of go get it is, obviously, it's literally what we do. We go, we help
[1:06:40] people go or get it, right? Rise and eats. So it's kind of fun in terms of what we do. But it's an
[1:06:47] attitude, which is we as a company, we're go getters. We're going to be aggressive. We're going to push.
[1:06:53] We're going to move fast. We play to win. And so the value sets that we have go get it or one
[1:07:00] that I really like. Great minds. Don't think alike. We came up with a set of values, which I think
[1:07:06] is unusual and describes how we are different as a company. And it's really true to who we are.
[1:07:11] How important is this sort of this attitude of failure and experimentation, especially in the
[1:07:16] world that's transitioning as fast as the one we're in. When you listen to people like Ray Curswell,
[1:07:20] his predictions of the future, he says that if you're 10 now by the age of 60,
[1:07:23] you'll experience a year's change in I think it's 11 days and just this sort of this sort of
[1:07:28] exponential acceleration. Love accelerating returns. Yeah. How do you you know,
[1:07:33] how do you create a culture, build a team in a world where the correct answers changing this
[1:07:37] quickly? I think that it is setting a culture that does embrace that change and is constantly
[1:07:47] challenging itself. And I will give Travis and the founding team credit. You know, there's kind of
[1:07:53] this idea of everything that they did was terrible. And that's just not true. We have a very high
[1:08:00] talent bar at the company. We have always kept a high talent bar at the company and we haven't
[1:08:05] compromised. And what I found is that talented people who are also driven are on a constant hunt for
[1:08:13] the truth. So culture isn't enough. You actually need to write people the company. And I think we've
[1:08:19] got a company that does have a chip on a shoulder was born out of the creation of a new industry.
[1:08:27] So we've experienced it. And we have a group of people who are driven and hungry and are
[1:08:38] constantly looking for change. And you got a leader and a leadership team that's pushing the
[1:08:43] company to do so and doesn't penalize folks for challenging them. I think it's kind of the stew
[1:08:49] that you have to put together, but it's a combination of culture and people. Do you have any mental case
[1:08:54] studies of great bets the company has taken that most people wouldn't have taken or thought was
[1:09:00] wrong or wouldn't have taken the risk on that trend transpired to be critical to your success?
[1:09:05] You know, I don't know about, well, I think it will be critical to success, but there's a funny one
[1:09:11] which is taxis are one of the fastest growing parts of Uber's business. So remember, Uber,
[1:09:19] we started as the enemy of taxis and built out this peer-to-peer ride sharing. And it was probably
[1:09:27] five or six years ago, our head of product now, Sachin, he worked on building kind of a technology
[1:09:35] that would allow taxi companies to have their own little Uber app. And eventually he came to Uber,
[1:09:40] thank God. And he's like, well, why don't we build that in Uber? Why don't we actually build
[1:09:46] taxis on Uber and originally within the company. And I kept in touch with some of the founders,
[1:09:52] just because I want their advice, because why not? You know, they built a great company. I'm standing
[1:09:57] on the shoulders of giants. They said it's the most idiotic thing on Earth. You can't wear
[1:10:02] taxis. They hate us. They separate. It will be terrible. Lots of technical reasons. They had
[1:10:07] tried it earlier. It was a total failure. But I think Sachin, having worked in the industry,
[1:10:15] and then my being kind of ignorant, saying why they hell not try it, that combination allowed us
[1:10:19] to build out a taxi product. And taxi is the fastest growing segment of the company. And it went
[1:10:24] completely against the founding of the company. But now we're, you know, I hope to have every
[1:10:29] single taxi in the world wired up to Uber. Why not? For the first 10 years that I was a founder,
[1:10:35] I didn't prioritize getting a good night's sleep at all. But over time I started to realize that
[1:10:39] it was the key metric that influenced everything in my life. I moved my focus, my ability to show up,
[1:10:43] and to think clearly and to lead well. So now with my lifestyle being pretty crazy,
[1:10:46] traveling across time zones, working late, training late, I still fight to protect my sleep,
[1:10:50] which sometimes means starting the day a little bit later. It was my work that helped me to make
[1:10:54] this connection. They are one of my sponsors for the show. And for the last four years,
[1:10:57] every day, my work has given me insights into my sleep and my recovery, the strain I'm taking on,
[1:11:01] and more broadly, how my daily behaviors influence my overall holistic health. It's the difference
[1:11:07] between guessing and knowing why I might be feeling the way that I feel. Sometimes it'll nudge me,
[1:11:12] sometimes it'll get me to slow down, sometimes it pushes me to go even harder, but all the time,
[1:11:17] it provides me with data that gives me a deeper understanding of myself. And without it,
[1:11:20] it'd be hard to optimize how I live and perform. Right now you can get one month free through my link
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[1:11:46] speak to your technology. So instead of me writing at an email, I click one button on my phone,
[1:11:50] and I can just speak the email into existence, and it uses AI to clean up what I was saying.
[1:11:55] And then when I'm done, I just hit this one button here, and the whole email is written for me,
[1:11:59] and it's saving me so much time in a day, because Whisper learns how I write, so on WhatsApp it knows
[1:12:05] how I am, a little bit more casual, on email a little bit more professional. And also there's
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[1:12:38] It will be a game change, if you. So this is something that I've made for you. I've realised
[1:12:43] that the driver's here audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health. We all have big
[1:12:48] goals that we want to accomplish. And one of the things I've learnt is that when you aim at the big,
[1:12:53] big big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable, because it's kind of like
[1:12:59] being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals
[1:13:03] is by breaking them down into tiny small steps, and we call this an R team the 1%. And actually,
[1:13:09] this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So what we've done so that you
[1:13:15] at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these 1% diaries, and we've released
[1:13:21] these last year and they all sold out. So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back,
[1:13:25] but also to introduce some new colours and to make some minor tweaks to the diaries. So now we have
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[1:13:53] And there's another, there's an alien that's arrived amongst us, which is AI. And you've,
[1:13:58] you know, it was always been somewhat powered from what I understand by.
[1:14:00] The world has changed in the last couple of years as I released AI. There's been a huge
[1:14:05] acceleration and investment and the improvement of the technology. What are you, aside from Uber?
[1:14:13] You talked earlier about your early childhood and how you grew up with a bit of a paranoia
[1:14:18] about losing everything because that's what you experience as a young man. You see this technology
[1:14:22] arrive, which is fundamentally disruptive to all of us, including me as a podcast owner. I've
[1:14:26] done the tests and the retention isn't far off when it's me or AI. So it's slightly concerning.
[1:14:32] But like, how do you, how do you approach such a disruptive technology? How do you think of it
[1:14:37] broadly and the impact it's going to have on society? And are you paranoid?
[1:14:42] I'm not paranoid. I'm not, I guess, I was going to say I'm not built that way, but maybe I am.
[1:14:47] I think my instinct is always just to go, just to move forward. And Uber has been built out of an AI
[1:14:53] core, all of our pricing, all of our routing, who you're matched with, whether or not a career
[1:15:00] batches, a trip, which is, do they take two orders or one order? All of our systems underlying
[1:15:06] systems are driven by AI. We do 40 million trips a day. That kind of orchestration can't be done
[1:15:13] by heuristic rules. And we've got to work on the streets of New York and the streets of Lagos as
[1:15:18] well. So we have built the entire company on small AI models that have been trained on local
[1:15:29] problems and then gets to together. That's literally what the company is. So for us, AI is,
[1:15:34] it's kind of a core skill set. And AI can, it can mess things up, right? It's not because it's
[1:15:39] not heuristics-based. There are emergent issues that come out of an AI that works 96% of time
[1:15:48] and 4% of time and screws out. So we're comfortable with the uncertainty layer of AI as a company. So
[1:15:55] we are, I would say, moving headlong into AI, we're not one of the research shops, but I would say
[1:16:02] in terms of applied AI, the team is driving to build AI, kind of newer AI experiences across
[1:16:10] a company. But stepping back as a person, the impact on society is going to be enormous. And
[1:16:20] going back to Kurzweil's kind of law of accelerating returns, whereas previously society has always
[1:16:27] been able to adjust to these kinds of shifts. It's been able to adjust because it had time to adjust.
[1:16:35] And AI literally, quite literally, thinks an AI will be able to replace the work that
[1:16:45] 70, 80% of humans can do over the next 10 years. 10 years is not a lot of time for society to
[1:16:52] adjust to that kind of an impact. Now, are there going to be more expensive than humans, cheaper
[1:16:57] than humans, et cetera, who knows? But the capability will be there probably in the next 10 years for
[1:17:02] intellectual jobs, probably call it 15 years for physical, 15, 20 years for physical jobs because
[1:17:08] physical AI is harder, robots, cars, et cetera, more capital heavy takes longer, have to deal with
[1:17:16] the physical world. So the changes in society are going to be giant. But my view is you can't
[1:17:26] slow down the rate of change. And if you're a part of that change, at least you can have some say
[1:17:35] as to how that change in prints on society and in prints on the real world. And so for me,
[1:17:41] I'm leaning it. It's a very, very exciting time. 70 to 80% of jobs will be disrupted by
[1:17:49] AI is like broadly what you said there. And the pace of change is going to mean that a lot of
[1:17:53] people don't have new jobs to go to because we haven't. I think that's the question.
[1:17:57] The retraining challenge. And people say, well, there's going to be jobs in AI. But like,
[1:18:00] listen, I've got some friends that can't just. Society's always adjusted, right? Farming was a
[1:18:07] huge percentage of our labor force now. It's less than 1%. At the speed of which. Yeah, I think
[1:18:12] that's a question. And you could argue that AI's will be able to retrain you, right? The job
[1:18:17] retraining is going to change. So of course, society's going to adjust. But I do think it raises
[1:18:22] questions, real questions. I've not been able to get an answer on that really, I think, from the
[1:18:26] experts in AI that I've interviewed, which is like, what do those 70 or 80% people do? Because
[1:18:31] we're seeing it in our own business that there's many jobs which we would have hired for previously.
[1:18:35] Across the board, that AI is now doing exceptionally well. Every single day, literally daily,
[1:18:40] we try to see if the new model, Gemini Pro3, whatever, can do things that we're currently doing
[1:18:45] manually. And every day, we're getting those little breakthroughs and going, oh, okay, now we
[1:18:48] no longer need to. And coding is one of those big areas. You talk about a lot where there's been
[1:18:53] already sort of big disruption, positive disruption at Uber. And a lot of your coders are now using
[1:18:59] 90% of our coders are using AI. Now that's easy to say, but there are probably 30% of them that
[1:19:07] were power users. They are showing clear differentiation in the number diffs, for example, how much
[1:19:14] a diff is a code release that's different from the last code release. So one of the measurements
[1:19:19] of productivity is just how many diffs are you putting into the code base? Uber is just a giant
[1:19:24] code base. That's what we are. And so our engineers are literally the builders of the company.
[1:19:28] They are manufacturing the bricks that go into the system and their architects who are kind of
[1:19:34] thinking about what the system should look like. And so while 90% of our engineers are using
[1:19:42] AI tools of some sort, there's about 30% of them that are using them at a completely accelerated
[1:19:49] pace. And it really is changing their productivity in a way that I've never ever seen before.
[1:19:56] Ultimately, I do think that the job of a coder is going to change more and more from actually
[1:20:03] writing the code, from to some extent, orchestrating agents who are writing the code or building systems
[1:20:11] for you. It becomes more of an orchestration job versus a manual writing job. But the job will still
[1:20:18] be there. And my attitude is if my average engineer became 25% more efficient, which we haven't
[1:20:25] gone there yet, but we will get there. I'm going to hire more engineers because I want to go faster.
[1:20:30] There's still lots of unsolved problems that we haven't solved. But I can imagine, you know,
[1:20:35] maybe five years from now, as the engineers get more and more productive, I may not decide to add
[1:20:40] engineering account because at that point, instead of adding an engineer, I should add agents and
[1:20:46] buy some more GPUs from Nvidia. There may be an investment in the future. We'll see.
[1:20:50] Because thinking about linear versus exponential as well, if we imagine a rate of improvement,
[1:20:54] I don't know, in my head, I go, when they come a time where you as the CEO or you and a team,
[1:20:59] an executive team can tell an agent what you want to build. You can show it the strategy.
[1:21:04] And theoretically, I mean, I can't figure out how this isn't going to be possible. The agents will
[1:21:08] then build. Actually, maybe they didn't even need to set the strategy. Maybe
[1:21:12] theoretically, you know, if you imagine any rate of improvement in the intelligence, maybe at
[1:21:18] some point they're going to go, well, listen, there's a better strategy here, Dara. One of my
[1:21:23] one of my team members told me that some teams have built a Dara AI, you know, so that they basically
[1:21:31] make the presentation to the Dara AI as a prep for making a presentation to me. Because you can
[1:21:38] imagine, like, you know, by the time something comes to me, there's been a prep and a meeting
[1:21:42] of the slide that has been beautifully honed. So they have Dara AI to tune their prep.
[1:21:47] Are you concerned they might show Dara AI to the board?
[1:21:52] Can I see the code for Dara AI? She's like, no, we're not showing it to you.
[1:21:58] But is there anything like falsifiable in what I just said about that they're coming a time in
[1:22:03] not so near future if we imagine an exponential improvement where I think I think where AI
[1:22:09] still is missing a beat that humans and other creatures have is ability to learn real time.
[1:22:15] Right. So if you think about you and I are learning for this conversation and maybe
[1:22:20] your behavior is going to change by 0.1 percent because it actually what you learn here.
[1:22:25] And the construct of most large AI models is capture enormous amounts of data based on the skill
[1:22:33] set that you're trying to drive, train, pre-trained that model, put it into the real world,
[1:22:40] and then there's some post-training of the model based on feedback from from the world.
[1:22:44] And then when the model's released, it's kind of released, right? And the way the model learns is,
[1:22:51] 3.5 becomes 3.8, but 3.5 didn't learn. The engineers went out and built a new model that's 3.8 that
[1:23:00] might have elements of 3.5 to it, etc. So the AI agents aren't learning now. Now a lot of what we're
[1:23:09] doing is we're building around the foundation models, then then bring kind of the signals from
[1:23:14] the real world and use the skills that the foundation models have to do good stuff so you can
[1:23:19] be post-training. Exactly. So we are post-training, but we're learning real time as human beings.
[1:23:29] And when the models can learn real time, that I think is the point at which I'm going to
[1:23:38] kind of think, yeah, we are all replaceable. But at this point, I haven't seen a model if I can
[1:23:42] learn real time. One of the real areas of disruption in AI has been autonomous vehicles.
[1:23:46] Just before we start recording, I was saying that I have a Tesla in LA where I live and
[1:23:52] it's staggering that I can get in the car, press the button, and drive two and a half hours to
[1:23:56] Joshua Tree without having to touch the wheel or the pedals. Now driving, I think, is one of the
[1:24:01] biggest employees in the world, like as a profession. I mean, we've got nine and a half million
[1:24:06] drivers and couriers on our platform. We are the largest organizer of flexible work around the
[1:24:12] world. And I think the second largest work forces of Chinese army. Wow. Yeah. It's a big group of
[1:24:19] folks that we've organized. And statistically, there's less accidents in an autonomous Tesla than
[1:24:25] there is if a human drives it. So it's safer for my car to drive itself statistically than for me
[1:24:30] to drive it. That's true, right? That autonomous driving is currently safer. That's true. So
[1:24:34] Waymos are safer. And then now you are back up to the Tesla, right, as a human beings. I've got
[1:24:40] a Tesla as well. And once in a while, it disengages, and I've got to, or I've got to disengage. So
[1:24:48] it's not necessarily the pure autonomous agent that's better than humans, but definitely the
[1:24:53] autonomous agent with a human backup. No question that's better than the pure human. And we can't
[1:24:58] be far away from it just being, I mean, Waymos are already, right? You live in LA. They've got the
[1:25:05] Waymos. We work with them in Austin, in Atlanta. And by all accounts, Waymo drivers are safer than
[1:25:12] human beings. And that's going to be true of AV all over the world. You know, there are million
[1:25:17] deaths from driving every year in the world. In the US, it's between 35,000 and 40,000 auto fatalities.
[1:25:27] So to the extent that these autonomous agents and drivers can be better than humans, and they
[1:25:33] will be better than humans over a period of time, there's a real return on human life as a result
[1:25:39] of this. Those 9 million drivers careers that you have will be out of work conceivably. And
[1:25:46] you know, talking about being honest about the situation. Yeah, I think again, it goes to physical
[1:25:50] AI as well, right? So I think 20 years from now, you can imagine that those 9 million will be
[1:25:57] 20 million AVs maybe, but we have time between now and then partially because we don't operate in
[1:26:05] the virtual world, right? We operate in the physical world. You have to get the regulations up,
[1:26:09] you have to build the cars, you have to build the sensor stacks, the models have to get there.
[1:26:13] So there is time between now and then, but you can imagine the majority of our trips being
[1:26:20] fulfilled by robots of some kind, probably not 10 years from now, but you go 15, 20 years from now,
[1:26:28] you're going to start getting there. What do the 9 million people do? I don't know.
[1:26:34] Now we are expanding the kind of work that's available on on the platform,
[1:26:40] partially as a result of it, right? We used to be the only work is driving, now there's
[1:26:45] delivering, you can have shoppers as well. I think it'll be a little while at least before you
[1:26:50] get AI shoppers. And now, actually, we have a team called Uber AI Solutions that allows people
[1:26:57] to train these same agents and train AI agents and AI models and do all kinds of knowledge-based
[1:27:06] work on their phone as well to kind of extend the kind of work that we offer humans on our platform
[1:27:14] and different opportunities for them to make money. So we are extending the platform and then
[1:27:19] the question is how much of the platform gets automated and what's the velocity at which we can
[1:27:24] extend our platform into other kinds of work versus the velocity of automation. I can't tell you
[1:27:28] which is going to go faster. Hands on heart, though, it does appear that unemployment is going to be
[1:27:33] significantly increased in a world of AI, especially we just imagine this sort of continual rate
[1:27:38] improvement. I just can't, you would have to. Unless, again, historically in societies,
[1:27:45] new kinds of jobs have come up. Knowledge jobs, physical jobs. Yeah, I mean, we've disrupted both.
[1:27:51] That's why there's a question here. And I do think there's a real question as to the ability of
[1:27:56] societies to retrain the abilities of human beings to retrain themselves. AI is going to be a part
[1:28:02] of that. But the timing there, how fast is it going to go? It's a real question mark. I think
[1:28:08] you're absolutely right. I don't think it's going to be a big issue, big issue in the next five
[1:28:14] years. But when you go five plus years, it's going to become more of an issue for society, large.
[1:28:20] It's interesting because what I was thinking, putting two and two together about your father's journey
[1:28:24] of coming to the US, losing what he had, losing his job and the loss of meaning and purpose
[1:28:28] being really central to him. And I can see that in, but basically from your face that
[1:28:32] I think what I interpreted from your face was that he struggled with as any provider would,
[1:28:38] the loss of like meaning that comes with, because it's still not just about money, though. It's
[1:28:42] especially, you know, they give you a sense of worth. It's funny. I read a study many years ago
[1:28:49] that said when they looked at suicide letters specifically from men, I think it was an Australian
[1:28:54] study in the suicide letters that the sentiment was about not feeling worth, yes, full to your family.
[1:29:03] Yeah. And the extreme of that was, I think my family would actually now be better off without
[1:29:07] me. Interesting. And this kind of, you know, I think is probably adjacent to this conversation
[1:29:14] around job displacement, which is where are we going to find our meaning in a world where
[1:29:19] the machines have now disrupted our intelligence and our muscles.
[1:29:24] It's every universal income, basic income test has failed. You know, the answer that you hear
[1:29:30] from folks says, well, the robots are going to do all the work. They're going to create
[1:29:36] utility. And so our work won't have to create utility. So people will just have money.
[1:29:42] But it goes to exactly what you're saying, which is every single test they've done. No, it's not
[1:29:47] 20, but they've done a couple of tests where certain section of the population, similar
[1:29:51] population gets income, certain section doesn't. And every time the ones who are getting income
[1:29:57] do worse in terms of outcomes because, well, we don't know the because. But I think the because
[1:30:04] is related to what you're saying, which is market forces kind of that force someone to work
[1:30:14] then create a perception of self-value, succeeding. You know, most people succeed. If they're
[1:30:20] driven to succeed, they will succeed. And as they succeed, it comes with a very, very
[1:30:26] deep and important feeling of I am creating value. I'm supporting my family. I'm building this
[1:30:33] incredible piece of art, et cetera. Whatever that value is to you and wherever that meaning comes
[1:30:37] from, I'm an incredible parent. That value is what keeps people going. And I don't think that,
[1:30:45] you know, the government's raining money down on society is going to help.
[1:30:50] It's refreshing to hear your perspective on this because a lot of the time, you know,
[1:30:54] you'll hear CEOs in the media just saying, you'll be fine. Everyone's going to figure it out.
[1:30:58] And I think that's a historically we have figured it out. So maybe they're right. But you have
[1:31:02] to ask whether they're giving you the real stuff or not. Yeah. And that's kind of what I think,
[1:31:07] because I sometimes hear private conversations and the private conversations. I hear about the
[1:31:10] sheer amount of disruption that they anticipate. And then when I see them on like CMBC or Davos,
[1:31:15] it's going to be fine and figured out. And I understand the incentive because if they were to
[1:31:18] start ringing the bell, it might hurt their own chance of like innovating and fundraising and
[1:31:23] all those things. But I think you sit at this sort of happy medium of being, yeah, as the CEO of Uber,
[1:31:28] you've got to, you've got to pursue the opportunity and the technology. But on the other hand,
[1:31:32] to be honest and say listen, there's going to be a big disruption. And we, I don't know the answers.
[1:31:37] I remember you were talking about CMBC, a CMBC anchor once. We had an interview in afterwards.
[1:31:42] She said, you know, I really like you. You actually answer my questions.
[1:31:49] Am I not supposed to? There's like the PR trading as always, if you get a bad question,
[1:31:55] don't answer the question. Just pivot to something else. And for me, like I've sworn to myself
[1:32:01] in Noah, who's up there is probably going to kill me afterwards. It's just I'm going to answer
[1:32:05] the question. I'm not going to do the BS. And again, I have to think the anchor knows what's happening.
[1:32:13] The audience knows what's happening. So I'm like, oh, I said the question. If it's a shady
[1:32:17] question, I'll deal with it. I actually don't like interviewing CEOs, which is funny because the name
[1:32:20] of the podcast, because I looked before I came on, I'm like, I'm going to look up on the
[1:32:29] CLs. And there aren't that many CLs. Well, if I looked at your diary, what would I find inside
[1:32:34] your diary? I would probably find you contending with being a father, your psychologist, might find
[1:32:39] some things in there about your health. I can see you're a guy that goes to the gym. And I think
[1:32:42] it's all interlinked. I think for you to be an exceptional CEO, you probably think a lot about
[1:32:47] your past, your childhood, your health, your how to optimize and all these things. And so
[1:32:52] honestly, you can't do a podcast like this for 20 years and just hit the same thing every year.
[1:32:58] You need to be I need to be intellectually stimulated. And you and me are both multifaceted
[1:33:03] creatures, I guess. And that's why it's evolved until we become AIs. Until we become AIs.
[1:33:10] Just closing off on that then. What can we do about this from an AI AV perspective?
[1:33:16] Is it the government's responsibility? Is it collective action?
[1:33:20] So one is I do think that we don't talk enough in that, for example, autonomous AI can be a force
[1:33:26] for good, right? It's these drivers are going to be safer than human beings. And those we can take
[1:33:32] the 35,000 fatalities to 3000 fatalities, etc. I do think that the AIs the AV is going to
[1:33:40] bring down the price of transportation. So a big part of our goal is to make on-demand transportation
[1:33:47] available for everybody. One of the folks that I was talking to was talking about how Uber has
[1:33:52] changed her mother's life, like her mom can get around and just wouldn't get around without it,
[1:33:56] right? We want more moms like that. So I do think it's important to recognize that if
[1:34:03] transferred fundamental transportation becomes safer, it becomes cheaper, going back to
[1:34:08] paradox. That's a good thing for society, right? I don't think that the answer as it relates to
[1:34:16] society is to try to slow down the pace of change because China won't, for example, if we're talking
[1:34:24] about the West. So I think you just have to lean into it. I think that discussions like this
[1:34:30] are important. I think you look for technology leaders who are talking about it. Dario, for example,
[1:34:36] anthropic is talking about it, pissing some people off, but I think he's having good discussions
[1:34:41] there. And then I do think that the society armying up to be able to retrain large groups of people
[1:34:51] at scale is not a skill. I don't see people investing in that. And I don't see that as a core
[1:34:58] capability of any of our countries, etc. If there's one thing I can come up with, it will be that,
[1:35:03] is the retraining machine. You've got four kids. Yes. They come to you. They say, Dad, listen,
[1:35:09] AI, robotics, give me some advice for my future. What should I be doing? Work hard. You're going to
[1:35:14] be fine. Work hard. It is just that. I mean, now the AI is theoretically can work harder than you,
[1:35:21] but I find one of the pieces of advice I give to young people is don't plan.
[1:35:29] Okay, I wind up. We went through a history. I wind up where I am today having not planned a thing.
[1:35:36] I didn't when I was a, that's in banker. I was in dreaming of becoming CEO, etc. And what I find
[1:35:41] is that people who have too much of a career plan, who have too much clarity about what they're doing,
[1:35:47] they lose their curiosity. And human beings look for positive signal, right? You, whether you like
[1:35:55] it or not, anytime someone agrees with you, makes you feel a little bit better. Anytime you get
[1:36:00] signal that goes against your preconceived notions, either you ignore it or you're like, all right,
[1:36:06] shit, I'm going to, I'm going to take this on. It's unpleasant. And so with, with career planning,
[1:36:13] what I find is people who have to clear career plan, they're looking for signals that feed into
[1:36:19] their career plan. I'm going to be a vice president by this much. I'm going to make X money by
[1:36:22] this much. And they're not looking around. They're not being curious. They're not looking for
[1:36:26] signal that can change their life. And so what I tell some folks is like, before you go on and
[1:36:33] try to change a world, let the world change you first. Take input. And if you're like this,
[1:36:42] you got blinders because I'm going here, you're not going to take input. You're not going to let,
[1:36:46] you're not going to take all the stimulus coming in from the world. So it's the one
[1:36:52] constant I see as people who are good or good, people who are good, I've never seen a successful
[1:36:57] person in a job or a career get there without working hard. And my guess is I don't know about you.
[1:37:06] You kind of wound up where you wound up kind of by accident. And people are like, well, you got
[1:37:11] lucky. I got very lucky to be here. Like I had so many kind of moments. And, and some would say,
[1:37:21] I took advantage of that, of that lock. But to some extent, I was able to take advantage of that
[1:37:26] lock because I was open. Being open, you jumped from Expedia to Uber. In part, helped by some advice
[1:37:33] that our mutual friend Daniela, the phone is going to forgive you. He's actually just text me.
[1:37:38] I text him saying, hey, can you, can you send me a question to our starry, but he said, I'm in
[1:37:41] the middle of an accident while we're talking. No, just before I walked in, I've just looked,
[1:37:44] he text me back saying he's on an earnings call. But he's a good luck with the interview.
[1:37:51] What did Daniela stay to you that helped to reform that decision to go to Uber?
[1:37:55] So he's the one who recommended, I think, I was contacted by a headhunter. He recommended me to
[1:38:02] the headhunter who called me. I told them I was actually at the Allen & Company conference going
[1:38:07] back in a circle with them and we were having a drink one night. And he asked me, he's like,
[1:38:11] did the headhunter call you? There's this Uber roll. And at the time, Uber was a disaster.
[1:38:17] Like disaster. And everyone was reading about it. That was at Expedia. I had just gone this
[1:38:22] wonderful contract that you said at the beginning. So I was going to stay. And I love working for
[1:38:27] Barry. We're like, it's been the best professional partnership of my life. And I said, of course,
[1:38:35] I'm not going to go. You know, I'm so happy about what I'm doing at Expedia. And Daniel,
[1:38:39] looks at me. He's got his like cold Scandinavian eyes. He's like, Dara, since when is life
[1:38:46] about being happy? It's about making impact. Uber is a great company. And you can have an
[1:38:54] impact on that company. You've got to do this. So the next day, I called the headhunter
[1:39:02] previously. I said, no, I'm not interested. The next day, I called the headhunter and I said,
[1:39:05] let's talk. So Daniel was the one who opened me up. And you dad? He gave you. Well, I talked to
[1:39:12] my dad. And as my dad is, keeps things simple. And he said, Dara, and it's Farsi,
[1:39:21] van a company who's a verb tells you to run it. You just say yes. So I thought that was good,
[1:39:30] good advice. And ultimately, I think people who come to Uber, stay at Uber, they come because
[1:39:38] of the challenge, but they stay because of the impact. Like we are building a company that is
[1:39:44] important to the world. And for me, I could come and I could have an impact on impactful company.
[1:39:50] So why the hell not? And when he says a company that's a verb, he's referring to the fact that
[1:39:54] everybody in the taxing or transportation category uses Uber as a verb to even if they're talking
[1:40:01] about a competitor. Exactly right. And there's always one company in every kind of industry.
[1:40:07] We have a closing tradition here where the long sketch leaves a question for the next guest
[1:40:10] not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is, what is one conversation
[1:40:15] that if you could rewind time and have, you would have today but can no longer have?
[1:40:19] It was a conversation with both my dad. You know, I told you I came to New York from
[1:40:30] San Francisco. And it was because my dad was getting very old and he was losing his mental
[1:40:36] facilities. And I'm glad I came back and I got spent time with him. But those last times,
[1:40:43] you know, when I spent time with him, it wasn't really him. And I wish I could talk to him about
[1:40:49] his experiences, his younger life, the excitement of building something. And then the loss and
[1:40:55] regrets he had in life as well. I never had, you know, my relationship with him was kind of,
[1:41:01] was there was love. No question about love. But we didn't have the deep kind of conversations
[1:41:08] that, certainly I'm hoping I get to have with my kids. So that's a conversation I'd love to have.
[1:41:13] And you can't get time back. And that's one of the tragedies of life. But it's also one of the
[1:41:19] beauties of life, you know, which is there are some mistakes that you make that are permanent.
[1:41:24] And you can't get that back. But my then making genuine conversations with you and connections with
[1:41:31] my friends and having a real relationship, not just with my wife and my kids, but actually
[1:41:39] like with my workmates. You know, we having those genuine conversations and connections is my way
[1:41:48] of correcting for the conversation I never had with my dad. Dara, thank you. Thank you very much.
[1:41:57] I appreciate it. You're a huge inspiration for me in so many ways and even more so now,
[1:42:01] having done so much research on your own preparation for this conversation because it is rare to
[1:42:05] find a leader who has been consistently successful across different domains who's built this really,
[1:42:10] really in my opinion, quite rare skill stack from investing to CFO to then being able to transition
[1:42:14] to CEO and then has repeatedly contended with moments of transition. And given us all frameworks
[1:42:20] as founders and entrepreneurs for how to deal with that transition and one of the great ones I take
[1:42:23] away from you is honesty. Yeah, honesty is so powerful. And I tell you, I learned that skill from
[1:42:30] my wife. She's just, she's always like people are people. Doesn't matter, you know, they eat, they
[1:42:36] crap, they have to go to sleep. And she treats everybody in her life the same way regardless of their
[1:42:42] position and like you're done. Yeah. Yeah. And she's, she's honesty, it's just so powerful.
[1:42:50] Thank you so much. You're very welcome. And unbelievable inspiration. Thank you. I appreciate it.

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