Uber CEO: I Have To Be Honest, AI Will Replace 9.4 Million Jobs At Uber!

You come to Uber, you're gonna work your ass off. And if you're not performing, we're gonna let you know.

But do you ever worry that they might not be able to deal with the truth?

Then they can leave. Because the most important skill in life is the skill of working hard. And when you see the top athletes, Ronaldo, Michael Jordan, of course they're talented. But the thing that's different about them

is they work their asses off. And that's a learned skill. That's not something you're born with. You may be smarter, more talented, et cetera, but I'm not gonna let anyone outwork me.

With that mentality, when you joined Uber, it was losing three billion per year. Now it generates 8.5 billion in free cash flow every year. But it seems that you were forged in such a way that you were gonna be relentless.

Yeah, and it really started with being born in Iran. With the Islamic Revolution in 1978, we were not safe there. And I remember at one point, we had these revolutionary guards come into the backyard and bullets went through our living room. So my family came to the US to rebuild their lives.

You were 8, 9 years old?

Yeah.

And it really destroyed my dad.

Sorry, me.

It's tough for me to talk about it. Alright, let me try again. Seeing that has put me on a road where I just wanted to make my family proud. So I studied bioelectrical engineering and then my first job was investment banking and I got to see the process of big companies being built. And then I had the opportunity to take over Expedia.

And in your 12 years as CEO, Expedia sales increased from 2.1 billion to 8.8 billion. And you were the highest paid CEO of a US tech company.

And I left it all behind to go to Uber.

And I want to get into practical company building, how you would get that company to work hard and create a culture of continuous improvement and all that stuff. But there's an alien that's arrived amongst us, which is AI. Now driving, I think, is one of the biggest employs in the world, like as a profession.

I mean, we've got nine and a half million drivers and couriers on our platform.

Those drivers, couriers that you have will be out of work. Being honest about the situation, what do the nine million people do? Guys, I've got a quick favour to ask you. We're approaching a significant subscriber milestone on this show, and roughly 69% of you that listen and love this show haven't yet subscribed for whatever reason.

If there was ever a time for you to do us a favour, if we've ever done anything for you, given you value in any way, it is simply hitting that subscribe button. And it means so much to myself, but also to my team, because when we hit these milestones,

we go away as a team and celebrate. And it's the thing, the simple, free, easy thing you can do to help make this show a little bit better every single week. So that's a favor I would ask you. And if you do hit the subscribe button,

I won't let you down and we'll continue to find small ways to make this whole production better. Thank you so much for being part of this journey. It means the world and yeah, let's do this. Dara, you lead one of the most consequential, interesting, talked about companies of my generation. It's worth hundreds of billions of dollars, last time I checked, and it's a company that I use every single day. Thank you.

I've looked through your story. You were the CEO of Expedia at one point.

Yes.

You're currently the CEO of Uber, and you've turned that company from a loss-making company to a highly profitable company, and one that has continued to be successful through such a great time of transition. Your story starts in a very interesting way.

And I was, you know, when I start doing the research for guests sometimes, I think I come in with some kind of presumption that I grew up in California, you went to Stanford, et cetera, but that is not the case. Can you take me to that earliest context so I can understand how and why you are the way that you are?

Quite the starting questions, but I'll try. How and why you are the way that you are?

Quite the starting questions, but I'll try. I think that for me, the events that shaped my life and maybe a part of who I am really started with my being born in Iran and Iran at the time was modernizing, becoming a modern society. And my family built a pretty big industrial company that everyone was quite proud of in Iran. We lost all of that with the revolution in 1978 and my family had to come to the US to rebuild their lives. You had to come to the US?

We were not safe there. One of my uncles actually was a cabinet member of the Shahs who had just been toppled. And at one point we had these revolutionary guards come into the backyard. They were actually going after our neighbor's house and one of their guns went off. these revolutionary guards come into the backyard.

They were actually going after our neighbor's house and one of their guns went off and bullets went through our living room, shattered the glass in the living room. And at that point, my mom's like, we're not safe being here.

So we had to come to the US. And I do think that event to some extent has shaped not just me, but my family, in that the rebuilding of our lives, of our economic lives to some extent, where we're all trying to rebuild what we lost in Iran.

Do you look back on that and can you identify any sort of fingerprints that were left on you from that time that have defined you in a business capacity?

I think at my core, I never feel safe. You know, the experience of losing everything, and for the kids, I tell you, it was fine for the kids. But seeing my parents lose everything, and it really destroyed my dad. You know, it really, his losing,

his value to the world as he saw it, really hurt his inner being. And I do think to some extent, seeing that has put me on a road where I want to rebuild, I want to make my family proud, but at the same time, I never,

that feeling of having the floor, you know, the rug pulled out of you, of building everything, that's a feeling that never leaves you. I think Americans underestimate what this place represents in its ideals, right? Which is if you build something, it's yours. There's a rule of law, it can't be taken away from you. That is not true for the majority of the population of the world.

And so I think for me, there's a drive to build and it's at the same time, never, ever, ever taking anything for granted, never being satisfied, because the minute you take things for granted, then that rug can be pulled out from under you.

On your father, there was a moment where he, a couple of years, I think six years, where he got trapped in Iran and wasn't granted an exit visa.

Yes.

And I imagine at that time, your mother was raising you alone here in New York City.

Yeah, in Tarrytown, New York, 45 minutes north of New York City. But she went from a life of never having to work to she had to become a salesperson to make some money. And she did it all herself. And she really stepped up. So I think it shaped us. It was difficult in some ways.

I miss my dad. I remember when he left, he was like a giant compared to me. And then when he came back, it was my sophomore year at college. And he still saw me as a kid. And so he wanted to drive me to college, and he did.

And then he's like, he wants to hang out. I'm like, dad, can you get out of here? I want to hang out with my kids, with my friends. I was excited to go back to school. And it was just, it was sad seeing the change, you know, of a man who had gone older,

his time in Iran was really tough on him. He had a heart attack on the plane coming back. So he was a diminished person to some extent, but it was great that I had many, many years with him, you know, since then.

When he was away, when he was trapped in Iran and wasn't able to exit, your mother Lily-

Yes.

Referenced how you didn't mention him much, but when he returned, you broke down in tears.

It's okay. We are not dumpy. It's okay. Yeah, don't be. He was a very stoic man. It's okay. Sorry, he passed away a couple of years ago, so it's tough for me to talk about it. It's okay. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. He passed away a couple of years ago, so it's tough for me to talk about it. All right, let me try again. He was a very stoic man, so he kept it all inside. And we were taught to do the same thing. But we wrote letters together,

and they're beautiful letters. He wrote poetry. So I communicated with him in Iran, but there's expression of feelings and kind of frustration were not something that my family did.

You know, you just dealt with the situation. And so, yeah, I think I suffer from overstoicism and then breaking down every once in a while, as you just saw.

It's a familiar story of the men that I've interviewed that grew up with that kind of sort of emotional

composure enforced and modeled to them. Yeah, I don't know if it was enforced, like it wasn't implicitly actually, yeah, like we were a very loving family, but my father was very humble. He did not believe that just because you're in a position of power, you should kind of project that power, you should communicate that to everyone. And there was a stoicism inside my family, which is, don't complain. So it was a weird combination of stoicism and love

at the same time.

How does them, because I'm not a father yet.

Yes.

But I am approaching that.

Congratulations.

Almost.

Yeah, almost. Yeah. I've just proposed to my fiancee, and we're in the process now of bringing children into the world, hopefully. And it's one of the things I think a lot about, which is, how do I stop my own stoicism passing on to my children?

First of all, fatherhood, parenthood is so humbling. You have such a picture in your mind as to how you're gonna raise your family, what your kids are gonna be like, and they just become their own people. And it's such a beautiful process to see.

And at first there's this alarm, oh my God, I'm losing control. You know, I've done everything, you've planned everything, this is how I'm gonna raise kids, know, I've done everything. You've planned everything. This is how I'm going to raise kids. But then real life gets in the way. It is absolutely exhausting.

So you probably execute on 80% of your plan, and you're 20% imperfect because you are exhausted, and you're working, and you've got a career, or often some people do. And at some point, you see these kids kind of move off into this completely unexpected territory. And there's a point for me, it was like,

I'm a bit of a control freak. So I'm like, this is not good. They're kind of doing their own thing. But then you step back and you're like, this is absolutely gorgeous what's happening. So the advice that I would just give

in terms of being a parent is just spend the time with the kids You know it is that is the magic is not what you do Or or the particular tactics, but it's the investment in them and the time spent with them and the rest You know you can't control, but what you can't control is kind of that connection. I

am speaking of children I Went back and looked through lots of different photos of where you lived and where you grew up to try and get a picture of your world in an early context. And all these photos look incredibly, incredibly, I think that was your fifth birthday.

Oh wow, I had hair back then.

You had a lot of hair.

My mom loved to dress us up in like little doll outfits. I can tell.

Yeah, yeah. to dress us up in like little doll outfits. I can tell. That's another one of you in the government.

Oh lord, look at that.

I'm definitely not going to do that to my kids.

Age four in London. Yes.

A photo of you.

Yes.

You and your cousins there. Yes.

Another photo.

Family was everywhere for us.

And again, another one with a beautiful haircut there.

It was a great childhood.

It was a great childhood. It was amazing. I spoke to your mum, Lily.

I hope. Well, how did it go?

We'll see.

She said, I'll play the audio file just so people can hear it.

When he was very little, he told me that he wanted to do something important in the world. And he said, becoming wealthy is not his priority

But making a change is I can't say I remember that conversation But the One of my early experiences that really imprinted on me was we went to visit one of my dad's factories family factories, my dad's factories, family factories. My dad was in charge of designing factories, building them, operating them.

And the respect that that population, the factory had for him and the visit and how excited they were that his family was visiting was just really cool. And, and the way that he treated, he knew everyone's name, he treated them with such respect. It just, it really imprinted on me.

There was this care. It wasn't the boss is coming and there's fear. And so for me, like that ability to build a life where you have impact on a lot of people, but it's positive kind of building impact. You have the broad respect of these folks.

It really imprinted on me. So I always wanted, you know, when we came to the States, making money was important. I don't want to kind of BS and say like, oh, I didn't care about it because we lost everything. And so my first job was like investment banking.

What's the goal of investment banking? Have fun, but make money. And so that was a priority for me. But then as I matured in life, as I knew, I had safety in terms of, OK, yes, I know I can do that. I can make money.

I can provide for my family. I can support my mom and dad. Then building kind of an enterprise, having that feeling that I saw with my father, that connection with his team,

was something that became really important to me. And when you came to New York, you were eight, nine years old? Nine years old, yes. If I'd asked you at nine years old, when you arrived in New York, what you wanted to do when you're older,

what would you have said?

I have no idea. I want to make my dad proud. That was it. I wasn't kind of motivated for a specific target at all. I just wanted to make my family proud.

Why I want to make my dad proud?

He's always been an important figure in my life. You know, there's this, and I think part of it is that I never got to know him that well as an individual, you know, because he was obviously... When I was younger, he was working all the time. So he would show up once in a while for dinner, etc.

We always had family dinners together. And then he went away, and then I worked. So I never really got to know the person that he was. But I don't know, there's kind of this sense of duty. There's a hope that, you know, he's somewhere or maybe he's not someplace. But that making my father proud has always been a strong current, undercurrent in my life. So you're nine years old, you've arrived in New York City.

You do end up going off to college sometime later.

Yes.

Went to Brown University.

Went to Brown University, studied engineering there.

How do you think about that choice at that time and how determinant that was of your trajectory in your life, that decision to go to that university and study that subject?

My father always said, you can do anything in your life as long as either you're a doctor or an engineer.

And I picked engineering.

I just loved the problem-solving aspect of engineering and all the layers of equations, et cetera, and those equations being able to represent something in real life, and then magically, that something in real life following what it should, theoretically.

Like, the problem-sol solving aspect of engineering fascinated me. I absolutely loved it. And I think it serves me to this day. Engineers make good CEOs.

Great CEOs.

If you step back, companies are just machines, right? They're machines that are run by people. And over a period of time, you actually try to automate some of the stuff that the people do. And over a period of time, you actually try to automate some of the stuff that the people do. And then you send the people off to do new stuff

that can't be automated. We are rules-based. It's an organism and it's a machine at the same time. And to some extent, the job of the CEO is engineering. How do I set up the company to achieve the goals that I set for,

shareholders set for, my board sets for? It's a giant engineering problem. And to me, that's fascinating. Putting together the pieces to get to what you perceive to be the goal, and one of the really important things is

you gotta pick the right goals. That is one giant problem-solving engineering challenge, and it's one of the most fascinating parts of my job.

I want to get into that, the practical company building, how you organise an organisation to be a well-functioning machine, setting goals and all that stuff. After college, you go into investment banking for a period of time?

Yeah, I worked there for eight years in risk arbitrage to begin with, and then mergers and acquisition advisory work as well.

And that experience I was reading taught you about betting on people.

Yes.

Versus other things. What do you mean by betting on people? And why is that important?

It was actually a lesson that I learned from Herbert Allen, who was running Allen and Company at the time. It was the Allen's family started the company. And he always told me, and at the time I didn't really listen to him, he always said, Dara, always bet on people, companies go, there are good companies, bad companies, but great people stay great all the time. And one of the things that made Allen & Company was really

special, investment banking can be a dog-eat-dog sport. But Allen & Company really cultivated relationships with people whom they perceived to be great, both in terms of potential and in terms of character. And of all the investment banks, that loyalty, that making a bet on a person and then staying with them

through their whole careers is a pattern of how that place works. And it's definitely something that I learned there.

What is it about one's character that makes them qualify as a great person?

You look for success, honour, loyalty, people who will tell you what they're gonna do, whether it's good or bad, and then follow through on their promises.

Hard work, I'm surprised that wasn't mentioned.

Well, that comes with success. Okay, that's good to know. Talent and hard work, you put those two together.

And why did you leave Alan and company?

I left Alan because I met Barry Diller. He was a client of mine. We got to meet in a big kind of deal, unfriendly, hostile tender offer for Paramount at the time. It's, there's another one happening, I guess, for Paramount now as we speak. And he was the one person,

I thought I was going to be an Allen lifer. I thought I was going to be there forever. My older brother, Kaveh, be an Allen lifer. I thought I was going to be there forever. My older brother, Kaveh, is an Allen lifer. He has, it's the only job he's had in his life. But Barry was the one person who I thought, you know, if I get a chance to work for this person,

I'm going to jump out at it. And I did. Why?

Why Barry?

He's spectacular.

I mean, he was spectacular. He is spectacular. A doer. I met him in a circumstance where he lost. It was this giant hostile tender offer, bids going back and forth between the winner, Viacom, and Barry. Ultimately, Barry stepped away, and we

were planning an announcement. And you can imagine, these like fancy PR people sitting around a table, how do we present a loss as a win, right?

So he bid for a company, he didn't get it.

He didn't get it and he walked away. He didn't get it because he walked away, which in hindsight was a mistake. He could have paid more. And then in the release where he walked away, I think the release was, they won, we lost, next.

And he was a constant motion machine, like they won, we lost, next. What's next? Let's go. And that's the kind of person I wanted to work for.

In business, losing is part of the game.

Absolutely, absolutely. But then calling it out, you know, not bullshitting, not like, oh, we tried our best in the circumstances. They won, we lost, next.

It's okay.

Does it matter how you lose?

Absolutely it does. That absolutely it does. It's, and I find companies guilty of two things. Like one is ignoring losses, like papering over losses, et cetera, right?

And then sometimes being obsessive about the loss, inspecting it, what happened, let's do a summary, let's meet, what went wrong, et cetera. And for me, it's somewhere in the middle, which is recognize why you lost, recognize that you lost, say it because it's important that you lost, say it,

because it's important to say it, analyze it, but then move on, like, let's move on. And the next time you hope to have learned some kind of judgment to avoid that kind of a loss, but it doesn't mean you're going to avoid losing at all. Like if you're not taking shots, you're not missing,

you're going to avoid losing at all. Like if you're not taking shots, you're not missing, you're not losing. So for me, it's constantly moving and taking your shots, losing, learning, next, losing, learning, next. That constant motion is what I want to see. That constant motion and learning is what excites me.

This is business advice, but also life advice generally, because a lot of people who I meet will come up to me and ask me questions about things, often ask questions that sounded a lot like what you just said. It's dealing with rejection, dealing with taking an L, and how that L then stays with them, sometimes for a decade, sometimes for 15 years,

and holds them back, hurts their confidence, means that they don't take any more shots, and this can cause a sort of a downward confidence spiral.

Totally. And listen, I'm talking a big game, but I will tell you in my personal life, I can't deal with a rejection. I have a really hard time dealing with a rejection. Professional life, no problem whatsoever.

So it's like in the end, we're all humans after all.

You have a difficulty dealing with rejection in your personal life? Very much. What kind of rejection?

Any kind of rejection, conflict. It's something that has been, that I fought my whole life, which is because I was one of the younger cousins, because I was the youngest brother, I just kind of didn't have rights. So I was, I went with the flow.

And going with the flow means you're going with the current, et cetera. I didn't cause trouble. And that has followed me in my personal life, in my professional life. I don't have as much trouble there.

I guess my professional life, to some extent, is a mask because I get to be aggressive. I get to lose, et cetera. It's something that Sid, my wife, has really helped me with, but it is something in my personal life that generally I'm conflict-avoidant.

You're conflict-avoidant in your personal life?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting.

Definitely.

That's not good in a relationship.

No, no. That's why Sid's helping me out. I'm much better now. I'm much better, but it's when I take those issues on, I have to fight myself. There's some core, you know,

if you and I were having an issue and I was sitting down with you and saying, hey, I'm not happy about X or Y, I can feel there's a core of me saying, just let it go. But that's how resentment builds and that's how relationships over a long period of time start moving the wrong way. So it is something that is at my core, but I actively fight

And I'm getting better at it, but I'm still on the learning journey there. I'll tell you that eventually you go on to becoming the CEO of Expedia, yes, sir. Um, I mean there was a couple of CEOs that came before you but yeah, you became the third and Took that company on. Very different job going from investment banking to being a CEO.

Yeah, yeah. Now, there was a journey there, because I went from banking to running deals, and I knew that I liked how companies worked. The thing that I liked about investment banking was that I got to see a lot there.

I got to see really smart people, really cool companies build. But I couldn't go along with that journey. I was jealous of the journey that these CEOs were moving on. So then when M&A was a bridge to work at a company and build the company, I moved from M&A

to CFO, Chief Financial Officer, because that's, to some extent, finance, but it's also being the CEO's partner and helping the CEO build. So I always knew the direction that I wanted to go in, which is, hey, at some point,

I want to actually be an operator. And then I had the opportunity to take over Expedia, the CEO at the time, Eric Blatchford kind of said, yeah, big company thing, not for me. So he resigned. And honestly, Barry didn't have an alternative.

I was the CEO now of Expedia. Barry was the CEO and chairman of IAC, which was a parent company of what became Expedia, IAC Travel. The head of IAC Travel resigned. I raised my hand and said, maybe I could do it.

Barry was desperate. He had no one else. So he promoted me to be CEO of IAC Travel. And IAC Travel was going through some difficult times. So we spun it off at Expedia. So that's when I became the CEO of Expedia,

the public company, and I moved to the

Netherlands of Seattle. In your job just before you took on that role as CEO, you were buying businesses. So M&A's, mergers and acquisitions, you were buying companies. Yes. What are some of

the companies that you bought? Oh, we bought a lot of companies. We bought Ticketmaster, we bought Match.com, bought Expedia Hotels.com, and it was all about the theme that Barry and I were fascinated with was the movement of commerce online. You know, it was during that time. It was the late 90s, early 2000.

And we saw it happening with our very own eyes, really with home shopping, right? It was a flat screen. It was a television. And you were offering products. And people were calling up, buying those products

electronically. And just the medium changed. The medium changed from a TV screen to an internet screen. And instead of calling, you could use a HTTP. And so while the medium change, we kind of saw this opportunity to take advantage

of the change of platform. So Match.com, essentially in the olden days, you had online dating. But you would call a number, and you'd be like, my name is Dara, and I'm 6'2". And this is how you'd describe yourself.

And you'd hear other recordings, and you hear other kind of recordings, and you would get matched up based on someone who seemed nice. And all of that just moved online. That was what Bat.com was. Same thing with Ticketmaster, you know, in the olden days, you would go to a Tower Records.

Have you ever been to a Tower Records? You're too, yeah. So there were these things called record stores, and they also had a desk where they would sell concert tickets. So you would either call for a concert ticket

or you would physically go and buy one. Amazing. And there were lines, Tower Record lines. And all of that exactly moved online. And same thing with travel, right? You would call a travel agent.

And so all of, there was this movement of retail and phone commerce to online commerce. And we identified the early players to make that shift. And personals, ticketing, travel were the ones that we went for, because at the time, Amazon was doing everything else,

like physical fulfillment. So what we were going for were essentially electronic transactions that did not require physical fulfillment and that was travel because you know, it's a virtual good ticketing Match.com which which was personal so there was a pattern around Madness, so to speak but we went out and bought all these companies. It was a really great time

I've got two questions that emerged then. One is, again, I'm really interested to understand how you would look for talent or how you'd think about what a great company is. Are they like, we're looking at the company culture, we're looking at the founders, was there something else,

was it the profitability? And the other one is just really intrigued as to what this period of your life and thereafter taught you about how to spot opportunity in transition? Because that is a transitional moment of technology. And I think there is a certain pattern recognition one can develop as to like know what to bet on

in these moments of transition where there's huge skepticism. The internet's not gonna do anything. So two questions, one is like, how do you spot great companies? And then the second is like patterns in transition.

So I'd say that they're related, which is we would spot great companies just by observing who was taking the lead in these transitions. You know, these transitions are difficult. You can't predict exactly where things are going,

how quickly they're going, how much should you invest, what's a return, what the market, how large is the market going to be. But there were companies that were emerging as the leaders. And I just identified the leaders and cold-called these folks up and say,

I want to come in and talk to you. That was it. And to some extent, it's a self-reinforcing cycle, which is, yes, the great management teams and the great founders were the ones who were able to identify the opportunity and hit that opportunity faster than anyone

else, recognize that opportunity, and execute on that opportunity faster than anyone else. So to some extent, the companies who were in the lead, of course, had the best management teams and had the best founding teams. And when those two things matched, that was when we jumped. And then the last thing I would tell you in terms of these pattern recognitions is that we never completed a successful deal because we got the company cheap.

We actually overpaid for every single great company that we bought, but we overpaid based on what the market thought at the time, not what the reality turned out to be. So I do think one of the kind of pieces of pattern recognition with me is just humans think about success and transitions in a linear way

because time is linear.

And-

Would you put up with someone that doesn't just, they think of it going like this?

Yeah, you know, it's the, everything kind of moves this way, right? Your schedule is relatively linear, right? It's, you sleep seven hours a day. Like your life is a linear life. But company and company success and company momentum,

especially with new technologies where if there's a technology that's truly better than the other technology within the virtual world, there's absolutely no friction holding it back. These companies move in an exponential way in terms of their growth and ultimately in terms of their value. So, whereas most people kind of see things,

when they project out to the future, they see this. What actually happens is this. And that's where the opportunity is. It's the spread between the hockey stick and kind of the straight line. And it's very difficult for people to process that.

And so that was, you know, those were the companies that we identified that hockey stick and online travel was a hockey stick, personals was a hockey stick, ticketing was a hockey stick.

I heard about the, is it Jevons paradox? Yes. Which I think kind of sort of overlaps

with what you're saying there.

When things become easier, faster, cheaper, people do them not incrementally more, but like exceptionally more often.

I mean, that's the definition of Uber easier, faster, cheaper. People do them not incrementally more, but like exceptionally more

often. I mean, that's the definition of Uber and we can get to that at some point, was originally it was built as a black cab service, so to speak, a black car service.

Can you tell me that's where it came from? Because a lot of people, history has now moved

forward. A lot of people have forgotten the story of how it came to be now to some extent it was it well to a large extent It was that the founding was was before me, but it was Garrett camp who was one of the founders had this idea And I think it was born in Paris It was like a snowy day in Paris and they couldn't find a black car And it was a bunch of young young tech guys I'm like how cool would it be to like pick up my phone and call a black car? And that was the core idea, which is, hey, you can use your phone to call a black car.

He brought on Travis Kalanick. Travis was the operator and the founder. And to your point and Jevin's paradox, to some extent, people thought, well, what's the size of the black car marketplace? And it was a couple billion dollars. Or what's the size of the taxi industry? And it was more than a couple of billion dollars.

But what they didn't see at the time was that as you improve, if you radically make something either more convenient or cheaper, the market expands beyond how you calculate it. So the Uber size and scale now is way beyond the original marketplace

of black cars and or taxis. It's the company. The company today is a result of Jevons paradox.

Timing. We often don't think much about the luck of timing. Luck is an interesting word to use, but how important timing is and other sort of foundational factors are in enabling a company like Uber to exist.

When you think about the timing of Uber, what are the sort of the foundations that made it possible?

Well, it was a mobile revolution. It was mobile data technology, the iPhone coming together. In the early days, one of the geniuses of Travis was he would hire these market managers who would be GMs of new cities that they would expand into. And they would literally go to the city

with a bag full of iPhones and give away iPhones to black car drivers to get them to come on Uber. Because at the time, a lot of them didn't have smartphones, so to speak. So the onset of the smartphone was that kind of, that beautiful magic of timing coming together,

and then aggressiveness of that founding team to understand that there's a pattern here, and I'm going to replicate that pattern all the world, and raise as much capital as I have to to get there faster than anyone else. That was the magic but it was you know again it's yes there's luck in there but if that founding team hadn't been as aggressive and you know blitzscaling

which is a term that folks used all around the world company wouldn't be what it is today.

You'll transition out of investment banking into Expedia, CFO, then CEO. You know, listen, there's a stereotype in business that investment bankers and CFOs don't necessarily make the best CEOs because of, they might stereotypically.

Over-financialize.

Over-financialize. Maybe be less risk-averse, maybe be less, you know, those kinds of things. And when I spoke to Barry, he did say the following. I'll just play it for you because it's better coming from him.

He was not a natural leader because he had, his career up until then had been on the financial side of things. So he really had not yet had the experience, opportunity to manage people. That came in a difficult way to him. And he mastered it. It didn't take him all that long.

He mastered how to become a leader, and he mastered how to take ultimate responsibility for a company.

Yeah, it was growing up under Barry was, and by the way, I wouldn't be where I am today without not him as a mentor, because he's not like a mentoring kind of guy, but him as my leader, learning from him. But I'd say that the experience that really, really shaped me

as it relates to Expedia was, I did come in as more of a financial leader. Our leadership at Expedia.com failed. I had to fire the first person. I hired a second person. Complete disaster. I was 0 for 2 in terms of hiring for our largest business.

This business was 50% of our profits, and I was 0 for 2 in hiring. And so I went to Barry and the board, and I said, well, if I miss hiring the third person to run the biggest parts of our business, then you should fire me. Barry quickly agreed. Yes, of course we will.

So I said, obviously, I don't understand enough about the job to find the right person. So I think I've got to take the job myself for six months to a year to understand what is it that the job entails for me to then go in and find that person.

And so for what turned out to be, I think it was five or six years, I ran both the holding company, Expedia Inc., which is a public company, and I ran Expedia.com. I was president of the largest part of the company.

That experience taught me my operating chops. That experience actually taught me how is it that you operate a company, how is it that you run something. And that's a very different skill set from capital allocation and all the financial wizardry that people embark on, that's important. But what I discovered was operating a company,

leading a company, organizing it, operating it, setting up the goals, getting the right team together, that's the part of the job that I loved. So it took me a while to get there. Like my whole life, my whole early career was in this financial sector, which I enjoyed.

But I didn't find my true love, which is operations and running companies and running a technology company, until way, way later in my career. And I think to some extent now I've got both. I've got that financial part because it has to work,

but the operations and the leadership part of the business is something that I love. And watching Barry take responsibility, take shots, go against the grain as aggressively as he consistently did, I think has made me a much better operator

than what the counterfactual would be if I had another boss.

Three months into that role, the head of HR told you that you were scaring people.

I'd forgotten about that. I think that was my job.

What's the context there?

You know, the context was that, first of all, turnarounds in technology are really hard. We were talking about the momentum thing when momentum is positive. In the technology sector, if momentum turns negative, it is remarkably difficult to turn it around.

You know, Yahoo is hanging on, but it was the great company, and you see where it is now. It's brutal when you get it wrong. And it always takes longer than you think. And it goes to, you know, what I was talking about, linear versus exponential.

Just like the curves up are exponential, curves down are exponential as well. The first couple of years look bad,

but they're not that bad.

But you know in your mind that 10 years from now, it's going to be a fucking disaster. So what I saw with Expedia was a technology company whose technology engine was broken. Codebase was old, had not been reinvested in. Technology leadership was coasting.

And that really alarmed me. And one of the things that I learned from Barry, in terms of leadership, is that when a bell is rung, when you see something, when you see a pattern, you have to act. You can't wait for a second. So in my mind, once I figured out, oh my god,

this really is a turnaround. This isn't like a company that I've got to tune. This company, if I don't move and move hard and fast, is going to start on that exponential decay curve, I had to move quickly at that point. And I am one of the skills that I learned from Barry

is transparency. It's like, whenever he wanted to understand an issue, he wanted to go to the source. He didn't want a summary. And it didn't matter where that source was. Is it a junior analyst or a president?

He wanted to hear from the source, because what he didn't want to lose is lose the fidelity of the issue. You know, when there's an issue here and then it goes through the analyst and the associate and the vice president

and an SVP and whatever, by the time it's summarized for you as the CEO, it's just, it's lost everything. And usually their levels are like, hey, do we really want to tell him that? Why don't we phrase it this way, et cetera.

So your whole life as a CEO is kind of a, it's a version of the world that your team wants you to see. And if you got a good team, usually it has more to do with reality than not, but you are subject to your team and the information flow that gets to you.

And so Barry always wanted to go to the source. He would just cut through levels, cut through levels, get to the core of the idea. And then once he did, he would move, and he would move fast. And for me, I have held on to that, but I've also turned it the other way,

which is one of the ways in which I can depend on getting the real shit from you is my being honest with you, right? And human beings are good bullshit, you know, kind of meter, so to speak. And when you're the CEO and you're talking to your staff

and you're giving all the business talk, and we're doing this, but the last quarter, we had some certain challenges and this and that, they see you bullshitting them. And so why the hell should they tell you the truth, right? If their boss isn't telling them the good stuff,

why should they give the good stuff back to the boss? So for me, it was almost like a self-defense mechanism that as a boss, I'm gonna tell you what's going on because that's the only way I can drag the hard truths back from you. Because otherwise you're gonna filter yourself.

You're gonna be like, I don't want Darta, no. This happened. But do you ever worry that they might not be able to deal with the truth? Then they can leave. And I think that that's so, I think that's what my head of HR was saying. I was scaring the shit out of people because I'm like,

we have a real problem here and we've got to come together. And I think that, you know, there's a good decision-making framework for me is if I make a mistake, where do I want to make the mistake on? And so if I want to, if I'm going to err with my company, I'm going to err in telling the truth and potentially scaring someone away, I'll take that. Because if that person doesn't want to face the truth, if he or she's not up for the fight, then they should go someplace else.

They can have a good time. I'm sure they can have a good career, et cetera. So for me as a leader, I've always, always believed in transparency, partially because then I think you attract the right people, and partially because then I'm going to get the good information to act on. Usually, the failures I see with CEOs aren't because they made the wrong decisions.

It's because they were getting the wrong data that led to the wrong decisions. So it's incredibly important as a leader of any organization for you to build the channels and build the kind of culture that surfaces problems to you quickly. And then for me too, you always have to have your random direct channels. You know, again, if you think about organizations as organisms, they have their own incentives.

And so my staff's incentive is to control the information that gets to me. Not because they're bad people, it's just their job because I can get overwhelmed. Who do I meet with? What's my schedule? You know, is this person worthy of meeting the CEO?

And for me, my fight is, I just set up a bunch of random shit. I'll meet with, you know, engineers four levels down consistently because usually they've got the kind of personality where they don't give a shit.

They'll tell me anything and everything. And they like putting the CEO down. That's great. They like putting the CEO down. Engineers often don't like authority. And code is like the biggest authority buster.

It's like the truth, truth. So I find a lot of engineers have a personality, which is, yeah, I'm going to tell you what it's like. Like, you know, their value is in something else, but often there's a kind of a disrespect for authority that I love.

I found in my companies that there's sometimes like a 24 year old young girl who will just tell me the truth. Yeah.

And-

She's the one you wanna hang out with.

She's the one I always go and ask for an opinion. Absolutely.

So that's, you've gotta have your own channels, but the way to get transparency from your team is first, you've gotta give it to them.

What's the culture hard working when you arrived? Could you use the word coasting to describe some of the team when you arrived at Expedia?

Medium. I think the company had been successful for a long time and had coasted on that success to some extent. So I needed to turn over the team, turn over like the entire team very, very quickly and get some hungry people in there.

The entire team?

Almost the entire team, yeah, yeah. It was rough going for a while. But then you have kind of mission-oriented people who are trying to prove themselves. And it's part of the renewal that every company has to go through.

And we turned it around. It was tough going, but we really turned around. And that was when I kind of learned, hey, my love is running shit. It's great. It's the best part of my job.

How did you get that company to work hard? Because there's so many people listening right now that are in a company that might have been successful, listing, might be two decades in. And this is an ultimate question in like executive management. How do you turn around the culture of a big,

or even 200 people?

It's very difficult. And sometimes the shortcut is to change the people. Like it's very easy to say, oh, you have values, this and that. So it's finding the people who you believe will line up with your cultural mechanisms or how you work or your values, and then embodying those values and

those mechanisms as examples, and then making sure that your team embodies those values and imbues down the organization. So part of working hard is like, you know, sending emails to the team on a Saturday. And if I don't get a response on Saturday, sending them an email on Sunday with a question mark.

What's going on?

You know, I think at Expedia, in hindsight, we worked intensely and we went hard, but not as hard as I like, because Expedia was, we were selling vacations, right? It was the product that we were selling was about turning yourself off.

And so we did talk about work-life balance. And in hindsight, at Uber, I don't. You know, you come to Uber, you're going to work your ass off. We're going to be really demanding. If you're not performing,

we're going to let you know. And if you don't fix it, we're gonna push you out. But while it will be incredibly hard, you will have real agency at the company. We're a big company, but individuals can make a big difference.

And as a company that's making a difference in the world. You're going to learn so much. And while you will have worked hard, you're going to have a great time. But this is don't come here if you want to coast. And I'm very clear about that. And I should have been more clear at Expedia, but we were selling vacations, so I couldn't be quite that clear.

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Just go to shopify.co.uk slash Bartlett. I promise you, you don't need to have it all figured out. You just need to start. In your 12 years as CEO, Expedia stock rose 550% and sales increased 400% from 2.1 billion to 8.8 billion. And you were the highest paid CEO of a US tech company

with a pay of 94.1 million.

I left it all behind to go to Uber.

You left it all behind to go Uber.

It was a big options package that I'd never invested, but it's all good. It was a great run.

I'm so intrigued about this point of hard work because I think 10 years ago, saying what you just said was very taboo. Yes. It feels to me more in vogue now.

We're freed now, yes. You're freed now. Yes, indeed. I've gotten, you know, sometimes people ask me the question, what advice would you give to young people? And to me, the most important skill in life is the skill of working hard.

And it's not a skill you can't just, like, decide you're going to do it. And I think way too many people, you know, focus on should you be a computer programmer or a doctor or study the liberal arts now that anyone can vibe code? Just learn to work hard.

And it is. When you see the top athletes, of course they're talented. And their talent level is world levels. But the thing that changes that's Of course they're talented and their talent level is world levels. But the thing that changes that's different about the elite athletes than the non-elite athletes, and I'm talking elite, is they work their asses off.

They're disciplined, they're structured, they're relentless. Look at Ronaldo, look at Michael Jordan, et cetera. The same thing is true in all of life. It's true in business. It's true in personal life. And so for me, with my kids, I just

want to teach them how to work hard. And for me, like growing up, as a banker, as an executive, I'm not going to let anyone outwork me. And if that's true, then they may be smarter, more talented, et cetera, but I'm not going to let anyone outwork me. And I think that that's a huge advantage that you have and over a period of time that advantage compounds.

And I want that in our company. Like I want Uber to be an incredibly hardworking company. Comes at a cost though, no?

Working hard. Yes. It comes at a trade-off.

And we believe in flexibility. So people confuse kind of lack of flexibility to working hard. You can work hard, and at the same time, you can have flexibility. So if you want to have dinner with your family, and I'm religious about having dinners with my family

when I'm in town, you know, six to eight, absolutely spend that time with my family. But at 9.30 p.m'm checking emails. Right, when I wake up at 5.30 AM, I'm checking emails. So of course there are trade-offs. And life is about trade-offs.

I think one of the most important things I've learned from interviewing CEOs, and generally, we've gone through a transition of COVID and remote work, and then come back into everyone's in the office again, is actually the most important thing is what you just said, which is being honest with people so that they can make decisions for themselves

in their lives.

I think the thing that one might describe as toxic is when you say something publicly, but then when they arrive, it's a completely different deal. But what you're doing is you're being honest and you're therefore allowing people to make decisions for themselves in their own lives.

And I'm allowing them to be honest back to me. Yeah, and that's a company culture that someone like me would be attracted to. Absolutely. But there's lots of people listening that couldn't think of anything worse.

And that's okay.

Yes, yeah.

There are plenty of companies that they could find or plenty of causes that they can find, it's fine.

You said learn to work hard, learn.

It's a skill.

Really?

Yes, of course it is. Because you've got to, the idea of just staying focused on something, not being discouraged by failing, trying over and over again, and just working harder than others. It's not something you can turn on and off. I see it in people all the time. There's just like this grim determination. Like we at Uber, there's actually saying it's inside one of our values, embrace the grind.

You know, embrace it. That's a learned skill. That's not something you're born with. Maybe there's an element that you're born with.

Have you ever seen someone who isn't a hard worker become a really hard worker? An exceptionally hard worker?

That's a good question.

No one doesn't occur to me, have you?

No. No, I, doesn't occur to me. Have you?

No, I had, I think it might've been maybe Brian Chesky at Airbnb or Elon say that he's never seen someone who wasn't a hard worker become a really hard worker.

That's interesting.

And this is why-

I'm trying to come up with someone. I'm failing so far.

And maybe I might posit that it's somewhat to do with, you know, these photos that you have in front of you, your childhood, your early context, which you didn't choose.

I wasn't working hard here, but yeah.

But that, you were forged in such a way that you were gonna be ruthless. Sorry, relentless is the word I meant.

Yeah, I mean, ruthless to myself. Relentless,less is right. I think at one point Jeff Bezos was going to call Amazon relentless. He was thinking about that being the name of the company. And that is, when I see successful technology companies, and especially technology companies,

there is this relentlessness about them. Like at Uber, we have lots of different groups that are trying to do different things, but each and every team is built and targeted on optimizing and improving their own particular function. There isn't a piece of the company that is not improving every single day. And if they're not improving fast enough, someone else is going to take their place and going to improve it. So as an organism, every part of the company,

whether it's a payments team in terms of new payments types or payment success or the fraud team or the mobile app team in terms of conversions, et cetera, every team is set up and organized for and gold on improving everything that they do. So the whole company in small ways is constantly improving, never ever stopping, and it is that relentless nature of business.

And the minute – and it's not good enough to get better. We have to get better faster than our competitors because our competitors are all getting better as well. So it's basically like, who can adapt faster to either the reality of the market as it is today or the prediction of the market as you see it tomorrow? And it's the speed of change, and it's

the identification of the opportunity. Those are the two factors, I think, that are most important. And the speed of change, if you can work fast, you're kind of accelerating time. Every one shot that you take, I can take two shots. I've got more time than you do.

And then, of course, there's identifying the opportunity and going after it. Those are the two things you really have to get right.

If you're taking two shots, not only are you going to get two data points of information, but you're also increasing your probability of having a successful shot by 100%.

Shots on goal. Just shots on goal.

How do you create a culture of continuous improvement? Because successful companies, as you kind of highlighted earlier, they become complacent with their victories. And they like to take some time off and celebrate. And we high five, and then we chill. And then actually, the studies show

they did this big meta-analysis where they looked at successful companies. And they showed that they become risk adverse.

Totally.

Because of loss aversion. They have something to lose now. So just protect.

I think the good news, to some extent, with Uber is that we've always been a company that has had a chip on its shoulder. The company had a chip on its shoulder when it was founded and had to like fight taxi unions for its very existence. And then the disaster happened with Travis leaving and then a new CEO coming in at the time.

That was a really, really difficult time. Then we went through a period of COVID, which was again, a disaster for the company, but ultimately prepared us to do better. Then people saying, you know, it was a tough IPO. Uber's never gonna get profitable. And today, we're incredibly successful, but we've got the challenge and the opportunity

of AI and autonomous. So we've always been a company that has been, I would say, underestimated. And that feeds into our culture. This is a, we are a hungry company. And I do think we're sometimes guilty

of getting complacent in little ways. And I have a leadership team that when they see complacency more often than not, they identify it and they get it the hell out. It's a team that is not satisfied, that's always driving. And I love that about us.

How does one balance enjoying the success team that is not satisfied, that's always driving. And I love that about us.

How does one balance enjoying the success and the accomplishments? I mean, you've turned this company around, a highly profitable company. Everyone that I've spoken to, many of our mutual friends have talked lovingly about the impact

you've had on the business. I mean, the numbers speak for themselves. When you joined Uber, Uber was losing 2.5 to 3 billion per year. Now it generates 8.5 billion in free cash flow every year. How do you get people to...

9.8 in the last year.

Who's counting?

You're counting.

9.8, okay, incredible. Celebrate, chill.

Well, you can celebrate and not chill. Okay, how? We take those moments. We do sell. It's cool to run a company that's so important. It's cool to run a company that's hitting

record after record after record. And we do celebrate those records and we do celebrate those teams, maybe not enough. And again, it goes to like, what mistake would you rather make? I'd rather make the mistake of celebrating

a little bit too little and kind of being a little pissed off about life in general and pushing. But we take our moments. But the success itself, I don't know, succeeding is almost a celebration in and of itself. And when you're succeeding in such a competitive field, I just find a deep sense of satisfaction there. And I think my team does too.

How do you get the team to take those risks that they need to take? Is there something you would, do you like incentivize them on the amount of shots they take? How do you do that?

One is they're always moving fast. That's what we do. We push, we're constantly pushing the pace of the company in terms of execution. So I think that helps. But I do think that there's a mechanism that we talk now about that I've talked to Tina about, taking smart risks.

I think you're absolutely right, which is as companies get bigger and more successful, they tend to become more risk averse. And it should be the exact opposite, because you can take more risks. You can make more mistakes, because you've

got kind of this $9.8 billion of cash flow to protect yourself against some of those mistakes. So I have definitely, in the past, I would say, two years, pushed the team actively to push the envelope in terms of risk. Don't be defensive, be offensive, et cetera. And it comes from my challenging the teams, my talking about it, setting examples of sometimes failing,

and then saying it's OK, moving on. And then sometimes my taking decisions that are seen as more risky than not. That setting the example then allows a company to follow.

So if I was in one of your teams, what how do you think about goal setting for me?

All the teams have different goals, business goals. The ads team has to drive at technology-driven, incremental ad dollars per year, and or customer satisfaction, customer NPS, etc. So every team has its own goals, and they organize against those goals, and they execute those goals, and they're religiously tracked. It's the best mechanism that we have.

I just wish that there was a better one. Because the art of the goal setting becomes the issue, which is, are you setting the right goals? Are they too ambitious? Are they not ambitious enough? And sometimes people can game the system.

So we use it, but I can't tell you that it's perfect.

What about, you talked earlier about values. A lot of companies go and do an offsite So we use it, but I can't tell you that it's perfect. What about, you talked earlier about values. A lot of companies go and do an offsite and they write some words on a white wall and they say ambition, enthusiasm, courage, whatever. What do you think of that sort of corporate habit

of gulp values and stuff?

We went through the exercise, failed the first time, succeeded the second time. And we failed when it first came to Uber. Obviously, there was a view that we needed a cultural reset of the company. And so it was very important for me to go and inspect the culture of the company and change it.

It was a statement. And the culture had, I think, some cool stuff in there, some cool ideas in there. Like, for example, there was one value that was toe-stepping. And the idea of toe-stepping is what you and I talked about earlier, which is we want to challenge each other within the organization. And so if I have to step on your toes and tell you something that you don't want to hear, I'm allowed to,

even though it hurts you, because the truth is more important. So sometimes the truth hurts and that's okay. That was the idea of toe-stepping. And what happened was sometimes those values became weaponized, where toe-stepping,

whose spirit came from a place of, we want to speak the truth, became an excuse to be a jerk. So the values in and of themselves can be great or terrible based on how you execute on those values.

When I first came in, we had to redo the values. And I was there. There's a saying by Jeff Bezos that I love, which is like, the values of the company almost, they appear, the value system of the company appears to some extent. If you say thou shalt, you're going to fail,

because the company shall. And the approach that we first took was that we will actually get the value system. We had a vote for all the employees in the company What values do you think should be part of the new uber etc? We took all the signal and then we edited it and came up with a new list of values and there was one value

That I wrote myself. It was mine and it was do the right thing period It wasn't crowdsourced, it was just that. And usually with these values, you're like, there's a whole explanation. And people are like, well, what does do the right thing, period, mean?

Like, you have to figure it out. And for me, it was a message to the whole company, which was, if you work at Uber, you have a responsibility and I'm not gonna tell you exactly what to do, so use your judgment. And it's our expectation that you use your judgment

to do the right thing, and sometimes doing the right thing is not clear. Should I go after my business goals? Should I compromise on a business goal because safety is in question? Of course you should, safety comes first

before business, et cetera. But we were putting that weight and that responsibility within the employees. But the rest of the value system that was kind of crowdsourced, it was forgettable. Because it was the kind of stuff that you, passion, ambition, teamwork.

Like, what company doesn't believe in teamwork? Give me a break. So we, Nikki, Krishna Marthi, who runs People, she pushed me to reset the values four or five years in. By then, I felt like I did have a right to have a point of view.

I'd been there. We weren't quite done with the turnaround, et cetera, but I was a part of the company. And then we came up with a value set, which is different. There's one of our values. By the way, go get it was the only one that survived.

No, sorry. Do the right thing was the only one that survived. But for example, go get it is one of our top values. And the idea of go get it is, obviously, it's literally what we do. We go, we help people go or get it, right? Rise and eats.

So it's kind of fun in terms of what we do, but it's an attitude, which is we, as a company, we're go-getters. We're going to be aggressive. We're going to push. We're going to move fast.

We play to win. And so the value sets that we have, go get it, or one that I really like, great minds don't think alike. We came up with a set of values which I think is unusual and describes how we are different as a company. And it's really true to who we are.

How important is this sort of this attitude of failure and experimentation, especially in a world that's transitioning as fast as the one we're in? When you listen to people like Ray Kurzweil, his predictions of the future, he says that if you're 10 now, by the age of 60, you'll experience a year's change in,

I think it's 11 days, and just this sort of exponential acceleration.

The law of accelerating returns.

Yeah, like how do you create a culture or build a team in a world where the correct answer is changing this quickly?

I think that it is setting a culture that does embrace that change and is constantly challenging itself. And I will give Travis and the founding team credit. There's kind of this idea of everything that they did was terrible, and that's just not true. We have a very high talent bar at the company. We have always kept a high talent bar at the company and we haven't compromised and what I found is that Talented people who are also driven are on a constant hunt for the truth

So culture isn't enough. You actually need the right people the company and I think we've got a company that Does have a chip on its shoulder, was born out of the creation of a new industry, so we've experienced it. And we have a group of people who are driven and hungry and are constantly looking for change. And you've got a leader and a leadership team that's pushing the company to do so and doesn't penalize folks for challenging them. I think it's kind of the stew that you have to put together but as a combination of culture

and people. Do you have any mental case studies of great bets the company has taken that most people wouldn't have taken or thought was wrong or wouldn't have taken the risk on that transpired to be critical to your success?

Well, you know, I don't know about, well, I think it will be critical to the success, but there's a funny one, which is, taxis are one of the fastest growing parts of Uber's business. So you remember Uber, we started as the enemy of taxis

and built out this peer-to-peer ride sharing. And it was probably five or six years ago, our head of product now, Satyen, he worked on building a technology that would allow taxi companies to have their own little Uber app. And eventually he came to Uber, thank God.

And he's like, well, why don't we build that in Uber? Why don't we actually build taxis on Uber? And originally within the company, and I kept in touch with some of the founders just because I want their advice, because why not? You know, they built a great company.

I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. They said it's the most idiotic thing on earth. You can't wire up taxis. They hate us. They accept rates will be terrible. Lots of technical reasons. They had tried it earlier.

It was a total failure. But I think Satchin, having worked in the industry and then my being kind of ignorant saying, why the hell not try it? That combination allowed us to build out a taxi product and taxi is the fastest growing segment of the company and it went

Completely against the founding of the company, but now we're you know I hope to have every single taxi in the world wired up to uber. Why not?

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And if you want the link, the link is in the description below. And there's another, there's an alien that's arrived amongst us, which is AI. And you've, you know, Uber's always been somewhat powered, from what I understand, by a decent degree. But the world has changed in the last couple of years as it relates to AI. There's been a huge acceleration in investment and improvement of the technology.

What do you, aside from Uber, you talked earlier about your early childhood and how you grew up with a bit of a paranoia about losing everything, because that's what you experienced as a young man. You see this technology arrive, which is fundamentally disruptive to all of us,

including me as a podcaster. I've done the tests, and the retention isn't far off when it's me or AI, so it's slightly concerning. But how do you approach such a disruptive technology? How do you think of it broadly and the impact it's going to have on society?

And are you paranoid?

I'm not paranoid. I'm not, I guess, I was going to say I'm not built that way, but maybe I am. I think my instinct is always just to go, just to move forward. And Uber has been built out of an AI core. All of our pricing, all of our routing,

who you're matched with, whether or not a courier batches a trip, which is, do they take two orders or one order? All of our underlying systems are driven by AI. We do 40 million trips a day. That kind of orchestration can't be done by heuristic rules. And we've got to work on the streets of New York and the streets of Lagos as well.

So we have built the entire company on small AI models that have been trained on local problems and then get stitched together. That's literally what the company is. So for us, AI is kind of a core skill set. And AI can mess things up, right?

Because it's not heuristics-based, there are emergent issues that come out of an AI that works 96% of time and 4% of time. It screws up. So we're comfortable with the uncertainty layer of AI as a company.

So we are, I would say, moving headlong into AI. We're not one of the research shops. But I would say in terms of applied AI, we're not one of the research shops, but I would say in terms of applied AI, the team is driving to build AI, kind of newer AI experiences across the company. But stepping back as a person, the impact on society

is going to be enormous. And going back to Kurzweil's kind of law of accelerating returns Whereas previously society has always been able to adjust to these kinds of shifts it's been able to adjust because it had time to adjust and AI

literally quite literally thinks an AI will be able to replace the work that 70, 80% of humans can do over the next 10 years. 10 years is not a lot of time for society to adjust to that kind of an impact. Now are they going to be more expensive than humans, cheaper than humans, et cetera? Who knows? But the capability will be there.

Probably in the next 10 years for intellectual jobs, probably call it 15 years for physical, 15, 20 years for physical jobs, because physical AI is harder. You know, robots, cars, et cetera, more capital heavy, takes longer, have to deal with the physical world. So the changes in society are going to be giant, but my view is you can't slow down the rate of change.

And if you're a part of that change, at least you can have some say as to how that change imprints on society and imprints on the real world. And so for me, I'm leaning in. It's a very, very exciting time.

70 to 80% of jobs will be disrupted by AI, is like broadly what you said there. And the pace of change is going to mean that a lot of people don't have new jobs to go to. Because we haven't-

I think that's the question. The retraining challenge.

People say, well, there's going to be jobs in AI. But listen, I've got some friends that can't just do it.

They can't become researchers.

Society's always adjusted, right? Farming was a huge percentage of our labor force. Now it's less than 1%.

But the speed of which.

Yeah, I think that's a question. And you could argue that AIs will be able to retrain you, right? The job retraining is going to adjust. But I do think it raises questions, real questions.

I've not been able to get an answer on that, really, I think, from the experts in AI that I've interviewed, which is like, what do those 70% or 80% of people do? Because we're seeing it in our own business that there's many jobs which we would have hired for previously across the board that AI is now doing exceptionally well.

And every single day, literally daily, we try to see if the new model, Gemini Pro 3 or whatever, can do things that we're currently doing manually. And every day we're getting those little breakthroughs and going, oh, okay, now we no longer need to, and coding is one of those big areas you talk about a lot,

where there's been really sort of big disruption, positive disruption at Uber.

And a lot of your coders are now using AI to? Yeah, about 90% of our coders are using AI. Now, that's easy to say, but there are probably 30% of them that are power users. They are showing a clear differentiation in the number of diffs, for example, how much a diff is a code release that's different from the last code release.

So one of the measurements of productivity is just how many diffs are you putting to the code base? Uber's just a giant code base. That's what we are. And so our engineers are literally the builders of the company.

They are manufacturing the bricks that go into the system. And they're architects who are kind of thinking about what the system should look like. And so while 90% of our engineers are using AI tools of some sort. There's about 30% of them that are using them

at a completely accelerated pace. And it really is changing their productivity in a way that I've never ever seen before. Ultimately, I do think that the job of a coder is going to change more and more from actually writing the code from

to some extent orchestrating agents who are writing the code or building systems for you. It becomes more of an orchestration job versus a manual writing job. But the job will still be there. And my attitude is if my average engineer became 25% more efficient, which we haven't gone there yet, but we will get there, I'm going to hire more engineers because I want to go faster. There's still lots of unsolved problems that we haven't solved. But I can

imagine, you know, maybe five years from now, as the engineers get more and more productive, I may not decide to add engineering atcount because at that point, instead of adding an engineer, I should add agents and buy some more GPUs from NVIDIA. That may be the investment in the future. We'll see.

Because thinking about linear versus exponential as well, if we imagine a rate of improvement, I don't know. In my head, I go, well, when there come a time where you as the CEO or you in a team, an executive team, can tell an agent what you want to build. You can show it the strategy and theoretically, I mean I can't figure out how this isn't going to be possible, the agents will then build. Actually, maybe they didn't even need you to set the strategy. Maybe, no, but theoretically, you know, if you imagine any rate of improvement in the intelligence,

maybe at some point they're going to go, well, listen, there's a better strategy here, Dara. One of my team members told me that some teams have built a Dara AI, you know, so that they basically make the presentation to the Dara AI as a prep for making a presentation to me. Because you can imagine, like, you know, by the time something comes to me,

there's been a prep and a meeting, and the slide deck has been beautifully honed. So they have Dara AI to tune their prep. Are you concerned they might show Dara AI to the board? I was like, could I see the code for Dara AI?

I'm curious.

She's like, no, we're not showing it to you.

But is there anything like falsifiable in what I just said about that they're coming a time in the not so near future if we imagine exponential improvement where

I

Think I think where AI Still is missing a beat that humans and other creatures have is the ability to learn real-time right, so if you think about you and I are learning for this conversation and maybe your behavior is gonna change by 0.1% because it's actually what you learn here. And the construct of most large AI models is capture enormous amounts of data based

on the skill set that you're trying to drive, train, pre-train that model, put it into the real world, and then there's some post-training of the model based on feedback from the world. And then when the model's released, it's kind of released. And the way the model learns is 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 might have elements of 3.5 to it, et cetera. So the AI agents aren't learning. Now, a lot of what we're doing is we're building around the foundation models, then bring the signals from the real world and use the skills that the foundation models have to do good stuff.

So you can be.

Yeah.

Post-training, I'm post-training.

Exactly. So we are post-training, but we're learning real time as human beings. And when the models can learn real time, that I think is the point at which I'm going to kind of think, yeah, we are all replaceable. But at this point,

I haven't seen a model that I can learn in real time.

One of the real areas of disruption in AI has been autonomous vehicles. And just before we started recording, I was saying that I have a Tesla in LA where I live, and it's staggering that I can get in the car, press a button, and drive two and a half hours

to Joshua Tree without having to touch the wheel or the pedals. Now driving, I think, is one of the biggest employees in the world, like as a profession.

I mean, we've got nine and a half million drivers and couriers on our platform. We are the largest organizer of flexible work around the world. And I think the second largest workforce is the Chinese army.

Wow.

Yeah, it's a big group of folks that we've organized.

And statistically, there's less accidents in an autonomous Tesla than there is if a human drives it. So it's safer for my car to drive itself statistically than for me to drive it. That's true, right? That autonomous driving is currently safer.

That's true. So Waymos are safer. And then now you are a backup to the Tesla, right, as a human being. So I've got a Tesla as well. And once in a while it disengages and I've got to or I've got to disengage. So it's not necessarily the pure autonomous agent that's better than humans, but definitely the autonomous agent with a human backup, no question that's better than the pure human. And we can't be far away from it just being. I mean Waymo's there already, right? You live in LA. I've tried to.

They've got the Waymos. We work with them in Austin, in Atlanta. And by all accounts, Waymo drivers are safer than human beings. And that's going to be true of AV all over the world. You know, there are a million deaths

from driving every year in the world. In the US, it's between 35,000 and 40,000 auto fatalities. So to the extent that these autonomous agents and drivers can be better than humans, and they will be better than humans over a period of time, there's a real return on human life as a result of this.

Those 9 million drivers careers that you have will be out of work conceivably, in that, you know, talking about being honest about the situation.

Yeah, I think, again, it goes to physical AI as well, right? So I think 20 years from now, you can imagine that those nine million will be 20 million AVs maybe, but we have time between now and then, partially because we don't operate in the virtual world.

We operate in the physical world. You have to get the regulations up. You have to build the cars. You have to build the sensor stacks. The models have to get there. So there is time between now and then.

But you can imagine the majority of our trips being fulfilled by robots of some kind, probably not 10 years from now, but you go 15, 20 years from now, you're going to start getting there.

What do the 9 million people do?

I don't know. Now we are expanding the kind of work that's available on the platform partially as a result of it, right? We used to be the only work is driving, now there's delivering. You can have shoppers as well.

I think it'll be a little while at least before you get AI shoppers. And now actually we have a team called Uber AI Solutions that allows people to train these same agents and train AI agents and AI models and do all kinds of knowledge-based work on their phone as well

to kind of extend the kind of work that we offer humans on our platform and different opportunities for them to make money. So we are extending the platform, and then the question is how much of the platform gets automated and what's the velocity at which we can extend our platform into other kinds of work versus the velocity of automation.

I can't tell you which is going to go faster.

Hand on heart, though, it does appear that unemployment is going to be significantly increased in a world of AI, especially we just imagine this sort of continual rate of improvement. I just can't.

You would have to, Unless, again, historically in societies, new kinds of jobs have come up.

Knowledge jobs, physical jobs. Yeah. I mean, now we've disrupted both.

That's why there's a question here. And I do think there's a real question as to the ability of societies to retrain, the abilities of human beings to retrain themselves. AI is going to be a part of that. But the timing there, how fast is it going to go?

It's a real question mark. I think you're absolutely right. I don't think it's going to be a big issue, big issue in the next five years. But when you go five plus years, it's going to become more of an issue for society at large.

It's interesting because I was thinking, putting two and two together about your father's journey of coming to the US, losing what he had, losing his job, and the loss of meaning and purpose being really central to him. And I can see that basically from your face,

that I think what I interpreted from your face was that he struggled with, as any provider would, the loss of meaning that comes with it, because jobs aren't just about money. It's especially, you know, they give you a sense of worth. It's funny, I read a study many years ago that said when they looked at suicide letters, specifically from men,

I think it was an Australian study, in the suicide letters, that the sentiment was about not feeling worth for to your family. And the extreme of that was, I think my family would actually now

be better off without me. Interesting. And this kind of, you know, I think is probably adjacent to this conversation around job displacement, which is where are we going to find our meaning

in a world where the machines have now disrupted our intelligence and our muscles?

It's every universal income, basic income test has failed. You know, the answer that you hear from folks is, well, the robots are going to do all the work, they're going to create utility, and so our work won't have to create utility, so people will just have money. But it goes to exactly what you're saying, which is every single test they've done, no, it's not 20,

but they've done a couple of tests where certain section of the population, similar population, gets income, certain section doesn't. And every time, the ones who are getting income do worse in terms of outcomes because, well, we don't know the because.

But I think the because is related to what you're saying, which is market forces that force someone to work then create a perception of self-value, succeeding. Most people succeed. If they're driven to succeed, they will succeed.

And as they succeed, it comes with a very, very deep and important feeling of, I am creating value. I'm supporting my family. I'm building this incredible piece of art, et cetera. Whatever that value is to you and wherever that meaning comes from, I'm an incredible parent.

That value is what keeps people going. And I don't think that the government's raining money I'm an incredible parent. That value is what keeps people going. And I don't think that the government's raining money down on society is going to help.

It's refreshing to hear your perspective on this, because a lot of the time, you'll hear CEOs in the media just saying, it'll be fine. Everyone's going to figure it out. And I think that's such a cop out.

I mean, historically, we have figured it out. So maybe they're right, but you have to ask whether they're giving you the real stuff or not.

Yeah, and that's kind of what I think, because I sometimes hear about private conversations, and the private conversations, I hear about the sheer amount of disruption that they anticipate. And then when I see the one like CNBC or Davos, if they were to start ringing the bell, it might hurt their own chance of like innovating and fundraising and all those things.

But I think you sit at this sort of happy medium of being, yeah, as the CEO of Uber, you've got to pursue the opportunity and the technology. But on the other end, to be honest and say, listen, there's going to be big disruption and I don't know the answers.

I remember you were talking about CNBC anchor once, we had an interview and afterwards, she said, you know, I really like you. You actually answer my questions. And I'm thinking to myself, what am I not supposed to? There's like the PR trading is always, if you get a bad question, don't answer the question, just pivot to something else.

And for me, like I've sworn to myself, and Noah, who's up there, is probably gonna kill me afterwards. It's just, I'm gonna answer the question. I'm not gonna do the BS. And again, I have to think the anchor knows what's happening,

the audience knows what's happening. So I'm like, I'll answer the question. If it's a shitty question, I'll deal with it.

I actually don't like interviewing CEOs,

which is funny, because the name of the podcast, because active CEOs- Yeah, how did the, because I looked before I came on, I'm like, I'm gonna look up on-

The CEOs.

Yeah, the CEOs, and there aren't that many CEOs.

Well, if I looked at your diary, what would I find inside your diary? I would probably find you contending with being a father, your health. I can see you're a guy that goes to the gym. Yeah, yeah. And I think it's all interlinked. I think for you to be an exceptional CEO, you probably think a lot about your past, your childhood,

your health, how to optimize, and all these things. And so honestly, you can't do a podcast like this for 20 years and just hit the same thing every day. You need to be, I need to be intellectually stimulated. And you and me are both multifaceted creatures, I guess. So that's why it's evolved.

Until we become AIs.

Until we become AIs, yeah. Just closing off on that then, what can we do about this from an AI, AV perspective? Is it the government's responsibility? Is it collective action?

So one is, I do think that we don't talk enough in that, for example, the autonomous AI can be a force for good, right? It's these drivers are going to be safer than human beings. And those, we can take the 35,000 fatalities to 3,000 fatalities, et cetera. I do think that the AI's, the AV is going to bring down the price of transportation.

So a big part of our goal is to make on-demand transportation available for everybody. One of the folks that I was talking to was talking about how Uber has changed her mother's life. Like, her mom can get around and just wouldn't get around without it, right?

We want more moms like that. So I do think it's important to recognize that if fundamental transportation becomes safer, it becomes cheaper, going back to Jevons' paradox, that's a good thing for society, right? I don't think that the answer as it relates to society is to try to slow down the pace of change because China won't, for example, if we're talking about the West. So I think you just have to lean into it. I think that discussions like this are important. I think you look for technology leaders who are talking about it. Dario, for

example, Anthropic is talking about it, pissing some people off, but I think he's having good discussions there. And then I do think that the, the society arming up to be able to retrain large groups of people at scale is not a skill. I don't see people investing that and I don't see that as a core capability of any of our countries, et cetera. If there's one thing I can come up with,

it will be that is the retraining machine.

You've got four kids.

Yes.

They come to you, they say, dad, listen, AI, robotics, give me some advice for my future. What should I be doing?

Work hard. You're going to be fine. Work hard. It's just that, I mean, now the AIs theoretically can work harder than you, but I find one of the pieces of advice I give to young people is don't plan. OK, I wind up, we went through our history.

I wind up where I am today having not planned a thing. I didn't when I was a investment banker. I wasn't dreaming of becoming a CEO, et cetera. And what I find is that people who have too much of a career that people who have too much of a career plan, who have too much clarity

about what they're doing, they lose their curiosity. And human beings look for positive signal, right? You, whether you like it or not, anytime someone agrees with you, makes you feel a little bit better. Anytime you get signal that goes against

your preconceived notions, either you ignore it or you're like, all right, shit. I'm going to take this on. It's unpleasant. And so with career planning, what I find is people who have too clear a career plan,

they're looking for signals that feed into their career plan. I'm going to be a vice president by this much. I'm going to make x money by this much. And they're not looking around. They're not being curious. They're not looking for a signal that can change their life. And so what I tell some folks is,

before you go out and try to change a world, let the world change you first. Take input. And if you're like this, you got blinders because I'm going here, you're not going to take input. You're not going to let, you're not going to take all the stimulus coming in from the world.

So it's, you know, the one constant I see is people who are good are good. People who are good, I've never seen a successful person in a job or a career get there without working hard. And my guess is, I don't know about you, you kind of wound up where you're wound up,

kind of by accident. And people were like, well, you got lucky. I got very lucky to be here. Like I had so many kind of moments and some would say I took advantage of that luck of that luck But to some extent I was able to take advantage of that luck because I was open

Being open you jumped from Expedia to uber In part helped by some advice that our mutual friend Daniel Eck He's actually just text me I text him saying hey, can you can you send me a question to ask Daria? But he said I'm in the middle of an interview. You've been texting while we're talking, damn it. No, just before I walked in, I've just looked. He texted me back saying he's on an earnings call.

I'm like, what did he say?

Never mind. But he said, good luck with the interview. What did Daniel X say to you that helped

to form that decision to go to Uber? I was contacted by a headhunter. He recommended me to the headhunter who called me. I told him, I was actually at the Allen & Company Conference going back in a circle with him, and we were having a drink one night, and he asked me, he's like, did the headhunter call you?

There's this Uber role. And at the time, Uber was a disaster, like disaster. And everyone was reading about it. I was at Expedia. I had just gotten this wonderful contract that you said at the beginning. So I was going to stay.

And I love working for Barry. We're like, it's been the best professional partnership of my life. And I said, of course I'm not going to go. I'm so happy about what I'm doing at Expedia. And Daniel looks at me.

He's got his cold Scandinavian eyes. He's like, Dara, since when is life about being happy? It's about making impact. Uber is a great company, and you can have an impact on that company. You've got to do this. So the next day, I called the headhunter.

Previously, I said, no, I'm not interested. The next day, I called the headhunter previously. I said, no, I'm not interested. The next day, I called the headhunter, and I said, let's talk. So Daniel was the one who opened me up.

And your dad?

He gave you advice? Well, I talked to my dad, and my dad keeps things simple. And he said, Dara, and it's Farsi, when a company who's a verb tells you to run it, you just say yes. So I thought that was good advice.

And ultimately, I think people who come to Uber, stay at Uber, they come because of the challenge, but they stay because of the impact. Like we are building a company that is important to the world. And for me, I could come and I could have an,

I could have impact on impactful companies, so why the hell not?

And when he says a company that's a verb, he's referring to the fact that everybody in the taxiing or transportation category uses Uber as a verb, even if they're talking about a competitor. Exactly right. And there's always one company in every industry.

We have a closing tradition here where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is, what is one conversation that if you could rewind time and have, you would have today but can no longer have?

It was a conversation with my dad. You know, I told you I came to New York from San Francisco and it was because my dad was getting very old and he was losing his mental facilities. And I'm glad I came back and I got to spend time with him. But those last times, you know, when I spent time with him,

it wasn't really him. And I wish I could talk to him about his experiences, his younger life, the excitement of building something, and then the loss and regrets he had in life as well. I never had, you know, my relationship with him was kind of, was, there was love, no question about love.

But we didn't have the deep kind of conversations that certainly I'm hoping I get to have with my kids. So that's a conversation I'd love to have. And you can't get time back. And that's one of the tragedies of life. But it's also one of the beauties of life,

which is there are some mistakes that you make that are permanent. And you can't get that back. But my then making genuine conversations with you and connections with my friends and having a real relationship, not just with my wife and my kids, but actually with my workmates.

We having those genuine conversations and connections is my way of correcting for the conversation I never had with my dad. Dara, thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

You're a huge inspiration for me in so many ways, and even more so now, having done so much research on you in preparation for this conversation, because it is rare to find a leader who has been consistently successful You're a huge inspiration for me in so many ways, and even more so now, having done so much research on you in preparation for this conversation, because it is rare to find a leader who has been consistently successful

across different domains, who's built this really, really, in my opinion, quite rare skill stack from investing to CFO to then being able to transition to CEO, and then has repeatedly contended with moments of transition,

and given us all frameworks as founders and entrepreneurs for how to deal with that transition. And one of the great ones I take away from you is honesty.

Yeah, honesty is so powerful. And I'll tell you, I learned that skill from my wife. She's just, she's always like people are people. Doesn't matter, you know, they eat, they crap, they have to go to sleep. And she treats everybody in her life the same way,

regardless of their position. Like your dad did. Yeah, yeah. And she's... Honesty, it's just so powerful.

Thank you so much.

You're very welcome.

An unbelievable inspiration.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

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