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

"Stay here, please, you can help someone in the help of a patient"

"A study for studying in a community, a new place to study" "Or a child with a child in a trauma that will be finished" "With GoFundMe is all that possible" "GoFundMe is not only for notefellers, do you want the football team of your children?" "Or to study in a certain place to study in a certain place to study"

"GoFundMe is the ideal reality to do it" "Stay in a certain place to study in a certain place to study in a certain place to study" "So, think carefully, who could study your education?" "What is not on the other side of the subject?" "Stay in a certain place to study"

"In just a few minutes, goFundMe.com" "GoFundMe.com" "For Dining Spend an Aufruff" "This is a verbabobotraft, would it be a presentier from GoFundMe?" "You come to Uber, you're going to work your ass off"

"And if you're not performing, we're going to let you know" "But do you have a worry that they might be able to deal with the truth?" "And they can leave"

“"Because the most important skill in life is the skill of working hard"”

"And when you see the top athletes, Ronaldo, Michael Jordan" "Of course they're talented" "But the thing that's different about them is they work their asses off" "And that's a learned skill, that's not something you're born with" "You may be smarter, more talented etc"

"But I'm not going to let anyone outwardly" "With that mentality"

"When you joined Uber, it was losing 3 billion per year"

"Now it generates 8.5 billion in free cash flow every year" "But it seems that you were forged in such a way that you were going to be relapsed" "Yeah, and it really started with being born and 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, no one years old?" "Yeah, and it really destroyed my dad" "Sorry, me...

"It's tough for me to talk about it" "It's again" "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 bio-electrical engineering and then my first job was in Bestown 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 of CEO Expedia sales increased from 2.1 billion to 8.8 billion" "And you were the highest paid CEO of the US tech company" "And I left it all behind to go over"

"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 survived amongst us" "Which is AI"

“"Now driving, I think, is one of the biggest employees in the world"”

"Like as of profession" "We've got nine and a half million drivers and careers on a platform" "Those drivers' careers that you have will be out of work" "Be honest about the situation, what do the 9 million people do?" "Just give me 30 seconds of your time" "Two things I wanted to say"

"The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show" "Weak after week means the world to all of us"

"And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had"

"And couldn't have imagined getting to this place" "But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started" "And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people" "That listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app" "Here's a promise I'm going to make to you"

"I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can" "Now and into the future" "We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to" "And we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show" "Thank you"

"There" "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 are the CEO of Expedia" "Mm-hmm" "At one point" "You are currently the CEO of Uber and you've turned"

"That company from a lot of making companies to a highly profitable company" "And one that has continued to be successful through such a great time of transition" "You're story starts in a very interesting way" "And I was when I started doing the research for guests sometimes"

“"I think I come in with some kind of presumption to grow up in California"”

"You went to Stanford etc" "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" "The quite the starting questions but 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"

"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 Shaz" "who had just been toppled"

"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 and bullets went through our living room" "Shadowed the glass and the living room and at that point my mom was 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 by my family"

"And 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?" "I have defined you and business capacity"

"I think at my core I never feel safe"

"You know when the experience of losing everything and and for the kids I tell you it was fine for the kids" "But see my parents lose everything and and it really destroyed my dad" "You know it really his losing his value to the world as you 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 i think americans underestimate what this place represents"”

"And it's ideals right which is if you build something it's yours there's a rule of law 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"

"to never being satisfied because the minute you take these for granted then that rug can be pulled out from under you" "On your father there was a moment where he a couple years i think six years where he got trapped in Iran and wasn't granted an exit visa" "Yes i imagine at that time your mother was raising you alone here in New York City" "Yeah in tarry town New York 45 minutes north of New York City" "But she she went from a life of never having to work to she had to become salesperson to make some money and she did it all herself and she really stepped up"

“"So i think it shaped us it was difficult in some ways i i miss my dad i remember when he left he was like a giant compared to me and then when he came back it was my sophomore year at college"”

"And he still saw me as a kid and so he wanted to drive me to college and and he did and then he's like you want to hang out i'm like dad can you get out of here i want to hang out with my kids 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 Iran i wasn't able to exit you're mother Lily yes "reference how you didn't mention him much but when he returned he broke down into his "it's again we haven't not dumped him he was a very stoic man "it's again sorry me passed away a couple of years ago so it's tough for me to talk about it yes okay 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

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 over stoicism and then breaking down every once in a while as you just saw it's a familiar story of the the man that i've interviewed that grew up with that kind of sort of emotional commotion in forced and muddled to them yeah i don't know if it was in force like it wasn't implicit actually yeah like we were 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 you know so that it was it was a weird combination of stoicism and love at the same time how does um because i'm not a father yet yes but i i'm approaching that congratulations i'm almost yeah oh yeah i've just proposed to my fiancee and we're you know in the process now you know bringing children into the world hopefully and it's one of the things i think a lot about

which is how do i stop my own stoicism passing on to my children first of all fatherhood parenthood is is so humbling you have such a picture in your mind as to how you're going to raise your family what your kids are going to be like and they just become their own people

“and it's such a beautiful process to see and at first there's this alarm oh my god i'm losing control”

you know i've done everything you plan 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 ask you not 80

percent of your plan or you're 20 percent imperfect because you are exhausted and you're working

you 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 i'm a bit of a control freak so i'm like this is not good they're kind of doing their own thing but then you you step back and you're like this is it's absolutely gorgeous what's happening so the advice that i would just give in terms of being a parent is just spend the time with the kids

you know it is that is the magic is not what you do 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 alley context and all these photos look

incredibly incredibly I think that's your fifth bath day oh wow i had a hair back then you had a lot of my mom loved to dress us up in like little doll outfits i can tell yeah we're in the car of the board look at that i'm definitely i'm gonna do that to make it's age four in London yes you're in your cousin's family was everywhere for us and again another

one with a beautiful haircut it was a great childhood it was amazing i expect you mum

Lily i hope well how to go i'll see she said i'll play the earlier file just say people can hear it when he was very different he told me that he wants to do something important in the world and he said becoming wealthy it's not as coyotey but making it change

“this 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 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's really imprinted on me there's 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 it's positive kind of building impact you have the broad respect of of these folks it really imprinted on me so i what i was wanted you know when we

care about it because we lost everything and so my first job was like in lesson banking what's a goal of us banking have fun but make money right and so that was a priority for me but then as i matured in life as i knew i had safety in terms of okay yes i know i can do that i can make money i can provide for my family i can support my mom and dad then building kind of an enterprise having that feeling that i saw with my father that connection with his team 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 asked you nine years old when you were after New York what you wanted to do when you were older what would you've said i have no idea i want to make my dad proud that was it i wasn't kind of motivated for 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 in my life you know that 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 et cetera we always have 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 there's kind of the sense of duty there's there's a hope that you know he's he's somewhere or maybe he's not some place but that making my father proud was always been a strong current under current in my life

so your nine years old you've arrived in New York City um you do end up going off to college sometime later yes i went around university studied engineering there how do you think about that choice at that time and how determined that was of your trajectory 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 your 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 prom solving aspect of engineering fascinating i absolutely

“loved it and i think it serves me to this day engineers make good c.s great c.s if you step back”

companies are just machines right there their machines that are run by people and over per a time you actually try to automate some of the stuff that the people do and then you send the people off to do new stuff that can't be automated like we are rules based like it 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 you know i set forward shareholder

set for my board sets set forward it's a giant engineering problem and and to me that's like fascinating the putting together the pieces to get to what you perceive to be the goal and one of the really important things is you got to pick the right goals that is one giant problem solving engineering challenge and it's one of those fascinating parts of my job i want to get into that the the practical company building how you organize an organization to be a well-functioning

machine setting goals and all that stuff and after after college you go into investment banking for a period of time yeah it worked there for eight years and 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 what do you mean by betting on people and why is that important it was”

actually it was actually a lesson that i learned from Herbert Allen who was running Allen in

company at the time it was the the Allen's family started a company and he always told me and

at the time i didn't really listen to him he always said darra always bent on people companies go they're good companies bad companies but great people stay great all the time and one of the things that made Allen a company was really special no investment banking can be a doggy talks sport but Allen and company really cultivated relationships with people whom they perceived to be great both in terms of potential and in terms of character and of all the investment banks that loyalty

that making a better person and then staying with them through their whole careers is a pattern of how that place works uh and it's definitely something bad that i learned there what is that

who will tell you what they're going to do whether it's good or bad and then follow through

on their promises hot buck i'm surprised that wasn't mentioned well that comes with success okay i'm telling all the work you put it those two together and why did you leave on an company i left down them because i met Barry Diller uh he was a client of mine we got to meet a big kind of deal uh unfriendly uh hostile tender offer for paramount to the time it's that there's another one happening i guess for paramount uh now as we speak and he was the one

person i thought i was going to be Allen life er i thought i was going to be there forever my old brother kave is an Allen life er he has it's the only job he's had in his life but Barry was a one person who i thought you know if i get a chance to work for this person i'm i'm i'm gonna jump out and then i did why what Barry he is spectacular i mean he was spectacular he is spectacular a doer you know he he i met him in a circumstance where he lost it was it was his

giant hostile tender offer bids going back and forth between uh the the winner vikom and

Barry ultimately Barry stepped away and we were planning an announcement you know and you can

imagine all these like fancy PR people sitting around a table how do we present a loss as a win right so he bit 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 was a mistake he could have paid more uh and then

“in the release where he walked away uh i think the release was they won we lost next and he was”

a constant motion sheen like they won we lost next what's next let's go and that's a kind of person i wanted to work for in business losing his part of the game absolutely absolutely but then calling it out you know an apple shooting not like oh we tried our best then the circumstances

they won we lost next it's okay does it matter how you lose absolutely it does it it's

and and i find companies guilty of two things like one is ignoring losses like papering over losses etc right and then sometimes being obsessive about the loss you know inspecting it what happened let's do a summary let's meet what went wrong etc and and you know for me it's somewhere in the middle which is recognize while you lost recognize that you lost say it because it's

“important to say it analyze it but then move on like let's move on and the next time you hope to”

have learned some kind of judgment to avoid that kind of a loss but it doesn't mean you're gonna avoid losing at all like if you're not taking shots you're not missing you're 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 you 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 owl and how that owl then stays with them sometimes for a decade sometimes for 15 years and and holds them back how that's the confidence means that they don't take it any more shots and this can cause a sort of a downward confidence spiral and listen i'm i'm talking a big game but i'll tell you in my personal life i can't deal

with a rejection i've a really hard time dealing with a rejection professional life no problem whatsoever so it's like in the and we're all humans after all you have a difficulty dealing with rejection in your past very much a cognitive rejection any kind of rejection conflict like it's 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 a 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 cost trouble and that has followed me in my personal life in my professional life i don't have as my 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 said my wife has really helped me with but it is something in my personal life that generally i'm conflict avoidin you conflict avoidin yeah that's a life

“interesting yeah definitely hmm that's not good in a relationship no that's like that's why”

it's helped with you yeah i'm much better now yeah i'm much better but it's it's when i

having an issue yeah and i'm sitting down with you and saying hey i'm not i'm not happy about x or y

“i can feel there's a core me saying just let it go but that's how resentment builds and that's”

our relationships um over a long period of time start moving through on way so it is something that is in my core but i actively fight uh 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 expedient yes

um and there was a couple of CEOs that came before you but you became the third and took that company on

very different job going from investment banking to being a CEO yeah yeah now there there there was a journey there because and went from banking to running deals and i knew that i i knew that i i liked how companies worked the thing that i liked about investment banking was that i got to see a lot there i's 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

were moving on so then when mna was a bridge to work at a company and built uh the company i moved from mna to cfo chief financial officer because that's uh that's that's to some extent

finance but it's also being the CEO's partner in helping the CEO build so i i always knew the

direction that i want to go in which is hey at some point i want to actually be an operator and then i have the opportunity to take over expedient the CEO of the time Eric Blackford

“kind of said yeah big company thing not for me so he resigned and honestly i'm buried in”

have an alternative i was there uh that barri was the CEO and chairman of iac which was a parent company of what became expedient iac travel the head of ic travel resigned i raised my hand i said maybe i could do it barri was desperate he had no one else so he promoted me to be CEO of iac travel and ic travel is going through some difficult time so we spun it off as at at expedient so that's when i became the CEO of expedient the public company and i moved to the

Netherlands of uh Seattle and you would drop just before you took on that role as CEO you were buying businesses so m and a is merges and acquisitions you were buying companies yes what are some of the companies that you bought oh we bought a lot of companies uh we bought tikka master uh we bought

“match dot com uh but expedient hotels dot com and and it was all about the theme that barri and i”

were uh fascinated with was the movement of commerce online you know it was it was during that uh time it was that late late nineties early 2000 and and we saw it happening with our very own eyes really with home shopping right it was it's a flat screen it was a television and you were offering products and people were calling up buying those products electronically and just the medium change a medium change from a TV screen to an internet screen and instead of

calling you could use uh HTTP uh and so while the medium change we kind of saw this opportunity to take advantage of the of the change of platform so match dot com essentially the old and days you know you had online dating but you would call a number and you'd be like my name is dara and i'm six foot two and this is you describe yourself and you hear other kind of uh recordings and you would get matched up based on someone who seemed nice and all of that just moved online

that was what batch of commerce same thing with tikka master you know in the old and days you would go to a tower records have you ever been to a tower record 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 pile one amazing and there

are 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's this movement of retail and phone commerce to online commerce and we identified the early players to make that shift and personal's ticketing travel with the ones that we went with the web 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-a-com 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

how you would look for talent or how you think about what a great company is are they're like we we're looking at the company culture we're looking at the founders was there something I was wasn't the profitability and the other one is just really intrigued us to what this period of your life and thereafter taught you about how to spot opportunity and 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 whether it's huge skepticism internet's going to be anything it's a so two questions i want is like how do you spot

great companies and then the second is like patterns in transition so there i'd say that they're

related which is um 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 you do invest what's a return what what the what the market how large is the market going to be but there were companies that were emerging as the leaders and we would just i just identify the leaders and call call these folks out and say i want

to come in and talk to you like that was 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 the 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 the last thing i would

tell you in terms of these pattern recognition 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 which and just they think it can make you know it's the everything kind of moves this way right your schedule is relatively

“linear right it's just leave seven hours a day like your life is a linear life but”

company and company success and company momentum especially with new technologies where if there's a technology that's truly better than the other technology within the virtual world is absolutely no friction holding it back the the these companies move in an exponential way in terms of their growth and ultimately in terms of their value so whereas most people kind of see things they they when they project out to the to the future they see this what actually happens is this

and that's where the opportunities it's the it's the spread between the hockey stick and kind of 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 personal it was a hockey stick ticketing was a hockey stick i had about the is it javans paradox

“yes which i think kind of sort of overlaps of what you're saying that when things become”

easier faster cheaper people do them not incrementally more but it's like exceptionally more often i mean that 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 sort of speak a black car service you tell me that so that where it came from because a lot of the history is now before there 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 family was was before me but it was um uh Garrett camp who was one of the founders had this idea uh uh and i think it was born in Paris it was like a snowy day in Paris and they couldn't find a black car and it was bunch of young tech guys and like how cool would it be like pick up my phone and call a black car and that was the the core idea which is hey you can use your phone to call a black car he brought on uh Travis County Travis was the operator and and the

founder and to to your plan on Jevon's paradox is some extent people thought well what's the size

of the black car market place and it was a couple billion dollars or what's the size of the taxi

industry and it was uh more than a couple of billion dollars but what they didn't see at the time was that as you improve the 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

paradox timing we often um we often don't think much about the luck of timing i luck is an

“interesting way 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 so it was it was a mobile revolution it was um 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 GM's of new cities that they would expand into and they would literally go to the city with a back full of iPhones and give away iPhones to black

car drivers to get them to come on Uber because at the time a lot of them didn't have you know they

didn't have smartphone so to speak so the onset of the of the smartphone was that kind of that beautiful magic of timing coming together and then aggressiveness of that founding team to understand that there's a pattern here and i'm going to replicate that pattern all the world and raises much capital as i have to to get there faster than anyone else that was the magic but it was you know again it's yes there's luck in there but if that founding team hadn't been as aggressive

in you know blitz scaling which is a term that folks use uh all around the world company one be what it is today you're transitioning out of investment banking into expedio cFO then co you know it's a necessary type in business that um investment bankers and cFOs don't necessarily make the best co's because of they might stereotypically over financial us over financial us maybe be less risk adverse maybe be less you know those kinds of things and why spoke to Barry

he did say the following i'll just play it for you because it's a better coming from him later uh because he is clearly up to children has had been on the financial side of things so he believed it had not yet had the experience or 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 um grown up and to Barry was was and in by the way i i wouldn't be where i am today without not him as a mentor because he's not like a mentoring kind of guy but him as my leader learning from him but i say that the experience that really really shaped me uh as it relates to expedio was i did come in as more of a financial leader our leadership at expedio.com failed

i hired a i had to fire the first uh person uh hired a second person complete disaster

and so i was over two in terms of hiring for a largest business this business was 50% of our profits and i was over two in uh in hiring and so i went to Barry in the board as 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 what is it that the job entails for me to then go and find that person and so for what turned out to be i think it was five or six years i ran both the holding company expedient which is a public company and i ran expedient.com i was president of the largest

part of the company that experience taught me my operating troughs that experience actually taught me how was it that you operated company how was it that you run something and that's a very different skill set from capital allocation and you know all the financial wizard read that people embark on that's important but the what i discovered was operating a company leading a company organizing it operating it setting up the goals getting the right team together that's

the part of the job that i loved so it it took me a while to get there like my whole life my whole early career was in this financial sector which i enjoyed but i didn't find my true love 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 park as it has to”

work but the operations and the leadership part of the business is something that that i love and

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 row of head of eight trying to told you that you were scaring people

“forgot about that i think that was my job yeah what's the context then you know the context”

was that first of all turn around's 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 around you know yahu 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 i was talking about linear versus exponential just like the curves up our exponential curves down our exponential as well the first couple of years look bad but they're not that bad but you know in your mind that ten years from now it's going to be a fucking disaster so what i saw with expedient was a technology company whose technology engine was broken code base was old had not been reinvested in technology leadership was coasting

and that really alarmed me and one of the things that i learned from Barry in terms of leadership

is that when you know a bell is wrong when when you when you see something when you see a pattern

“you have to act you can't wait for a second so in my mind once i figured out oh my god”

this really is a turnaround this isn't like a company that i've got a tune this company if i don't move and move hard and fast is is gonna start on that exponential decay curve i had to move quickly and at that point and and i am one of the skills that it learned from Barry is transparency it's like whenever he wanted to understand it issue he wanted to go to the source he didn't want to 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 then associate and the vice president and svp and whatever by the time it's summarized for you as the CEO it's just it's lost everything and usually their levels are like hey do you really want to tell them that why don't we phrase it this way et cetera so your whole life as a CEO is kind of a

it's a version of the world that your team wants you see if you got a good team usually it has more do with reality than not but you are subject to your team and the information flow that

that gets to you and so Barry always wanted to go the source he would just cut through levels cut

through levels get to the core of the idea and then once he did he would move and he would move fast and for me I've kind of 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 and human beings are good bullshit you know cut cut kind of meter so to speak and and when you're the CEO and you're talking to your staff and you're giving all the you know the

business talk and we're doing this but the last quarter we had some certain challenges and this and that they see you bullshitting them and so why the hell should they tell you the truth right if they're if their boss isn't telling them the good stuff why should they give the good stuff back to the boss so for me it was almost like a self-defense mechanism that as a boss I'm going to tell you what's going on because that's the only way I can drag the hard truths back from you

because otherwise you're gonna filter yourself you're gonna I don't want to order no this happened but do you ever worry that they might be able to deal with the truth then they can leave

“and and I think that that's so I think that's what my head of HR saying I was scaring the”

shout out of people because I'm like we have a real problem here and we've got to come together and and I think that that you know there's a I was a good decision making framework for me is if I make a mistake where do I want to make the mistake up right and so if I want to

someone away I'll take that because of that person doesn't want to face the truth if here 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 etc 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 gonna get the good information so 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 that the

again if you think about organizations as organisms they have their own incentives and so

my staff's incentive is to control the the information that gets to me not because they're

bad people it's just their job because I can get over one 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 for 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 it's great they like putting the CEO down it's you know engineers often you know don't like authority and code is like the biggest authority but there is like the truth truth so I found a lot of engineers have a personality which is yeah I'm gonna tell you what it's like like I'm you know they they they their value

is in something else but often they don't there's a kind of a disrespect for authority that a lot 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 want to hang out with she's the one I always

go and ask for an opinion absolutely so that that's you've got to have your your own channels but the way to the way to get transparency for your team is first first you've got to give it to them what's the culture hardworking when you arrived because you used the word coasting to describe some of the team when you arrived to expedient medium again 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

turned over like the entire team very very quickly to get some hungry people in there the entire team almost in the team yeah yeah it was 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 around it was it was tough going but we really turned around and that was when I kind of learned hey my my love is running shit it's great

it's 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 to stick might be two decades in and this is an ultimate question in like executive management how do you turn around the culture of a big or even even even 200 people it's very difficult and sometimes a shortcut is just change of people like it's very easy 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 and bodies those values and in views down the down the organization so part of working hard is like you know sending emails to the team on a Saturday and if I don't get a response

“on Saturday sending them an email on Sunday with a question mark it's going on you know I think”

it expedient in hindsight we we worked intensely and and we went hard but but not as hard as I like because expedient was we were selling vacations right it was it was the the product that we were selling was about turning yourself off and so we did talk about work like 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 going to push you out but while it will be incredibly hard you will have real agency of the company where big company but individuals can make a big difference and it's a company that's making a difference in the world you're going to learn so much and while you will have work hard you're going to have a great time but this is don't come here

but we were selling vacations so I couldn't be quite that clear

New Year always has a strange energy to it because people start talking about their goals,

fresh starts and new habits but the reality is that most people carry the same ideas they had last year into the new year I'm guilty of that too and they still don't end up doing anything with them and I get why starting something new especially if it's a business or project is overwhelming before you start you're looking for the perfect moment and to be the perfect version

“of yourself when really what matters most is taking that first step if you had an idea for a”

while a product a store something you've been sitting on our sponsor Shopify makes it easy to get started because you can build your store sell on socials take payments use AI tools and manage everything all in one place so of twenty twenty six is the year you finally back yourself go to Shopify.co.uk/bartlet and start selling and you can sign up for a one dollar per month trial right now to just go to Shopify.co.uk/bartlet I promise you you don't need to have it all figured

out you just need to start in your twelve years of CO Expedia stock rose 550 percent and sales increased 400 percent from 2.1 billion to 8.8 billion and you were the highest paid CO of the US tech company with a pair of 94.1 million. I left it all behind to go to Uber. You left it back. It was a big option back it though I've ever invested but it's all good. It was a great run. I'm so I'm so intrigued about this point of honoured work because I think

ten years ago saying what you just said was very taboo. Yes it feels to be more than enough. We're freed now. Yes. Yes. Yes indeed. I've I've gotten you know sometimes people I see the

question what advice would you give to young people and to be the most important skill in life

is a 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 be a computer programmer or doctor”

or study the liberal arts now that anyone can vibe code just learn to work hard. And it is you know that that when you see the top athletes of course they're talented and you know their talent level is war levels but the thing that changes is that that's different about the elite athletes than the non elite athletes and I'm talking elite is they work their asses off. They're disciplined, they're structured, they're relentless. You know look at Ronaldo,

look at Michael Jordan etc. That's the same thing as true in all of life. It's true in business is true in personal life. And so for me with my kids I just want to teach him how to work hard. And for me like growing up I as a banker as an executive I'm not going to let anyone out work me. And if that's true then they may be smarter, more talented etc. But I'm not going to let it out work me. And I think that that's a huge advantage that you have in a

or a period of time that advantage compounds and I want that in our company like I want Uber to be an incredibly hard working company. It comes at a close standard working hard. Yes it comes at a tradeoff 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 you know 930 pm I'm checking emails right when I wake up at 530 am in an am I'm checking emails so of course they're

“tradeoffs and you know life is about tradeoffs. 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 in to like everyone's in the office again is actually the most important

thing is what you've just said which is being honest with people so that they can make decisions for themselves. Absolutely. 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 when they're in life and I'm allowing them to be honest back to me. Yeah and you're a that's a

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 classes that they can find is 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 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 that there's actually

that's you that's a learned skill that's not something you're born with maybe maybe there's an element that you're born with. Have you ever seen someone who isn't a hard worker become a really

“hard worker and exceptionally hard worker. That's a good question. No no doesn't occur to me have you?”

No I had this I think it might have been maybe Brian Chesket, 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've been trying to come up with selling. I'm like failing so far and maybe I might posit that it's something what to do with you know these first that you have in front of you your childhood your early context which you didn't. You're working hard here but that you were forged in such a way that you were going to be ruthless. So it relinquishes the

way. Yeah I mean ruthless to myself relentless relentless is right you know I think I think at one point Jeff Bezos was going to call him as our relentless. That was I was thinking about that being in the name of company. Right it is just and that is when I see successful technology companies and especially technology companies there is this relentless about them. I get 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 payments success or the fraud team or the mobile app team in terms of conversions etc. Every team

is set up and an 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 to change you know”

if you can work fast you're kind of accelerating time you know every one shot that you take I can take two shots I've got more time than you do and then of course there's identifying the opportunity going after those are the two things you really have to get right. If you're taking two shots no only you're going to get two data points of information but you're also increasing your probability of having a successful shot by like 100% shots on gold just shot on gold. How do you create a

culture of continuous improvement? Because successful companies as you kind of highlighted earlier they become complacent with their victories and they like to take some time off and celebrate and you know we high five and then we chill and then actually the studies show they did this big metronolysis where they looked at successful companies and they showed that they become risk adverse. Totally because of loss of virgin 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 a shoulder. You know the company had a chip on a shoulder when it was founded and it 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. That this is uh 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're not they identified and they get at the hell out. It's it's a team that is not satisfied that's always driving and I love that

about us. How does one balance enjoying this success and the accomplishments mean you've turned this company around highly profitable company everyone that I've spoken to many of mutual friends have talked lovingly about the impact you've had on the business I mean the number speak for themselves when you joined Uber it was losing 2.5 to 3 billion per year now it generates

I guess you know you you're counting. Nine point eight okay incredible. Celebrate.

Chill. Well you can celebrate in a nutshell okay how do you know we we take those moments

“we do sell it it's cool to run a company that's so important it's cool to run a company”

it's hitting record after record after record and we do celebrate those records and we do celebrate those teams maybe not enough and again it goes to like what what what mistake would you rather make I'd rather make the mistake of celebrating a little bit too little and kind of being a little pissed off about life in general and pushing but we we take our moments but that the success itself I don't know succeeding is almost a celebration in and of itself and and when you're

succeeding in such a competitive field I just find a deep sense of satisfaction there and I think my team does too. How do you get the team to take take those risks that they need to take? Is there something you do 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 but I do think that there's there's a mechanism that we talk now about that I've talked to a team about taking smart risks I think you're obviously 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 cash flow to protect yourself

again some of those mistakes so I have definitely in the past I would say two years push the team actively to push envelope in terms of risk don't be defensive be offensive etc and it comes from my challenge in the teams my talking about it setting examples of sometimes failing and then saying it's okay moving on and then sometimes my taking decisions that are seen is 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 add dollars per year and or customer satisfaction customer MPS etc so every team has its own goals and they organize yes those goals and the executors those goals on their religiously tracked it's a 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 non ambitious enough and sometimes people can gain the system so we use it but I can't tell you that it's perfect what about you talk tell you about values a lot of companies go and do an off-site and they write some words on yeah and they say ambition enthusiasm courage whatever what you think of that sort of cool

prep habit of go values and stuff we went through the exercise failed the first time succeeded the

second time we and and when it and we failed when it first came to Uber obviously there was a view that there we needed a cultural reset of the company and so it was very important for me to go and inspect the culture of the company and change it there 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 toast stepping and the idea of toast stepping is is what you and I talked about earlier

which is we want to challenge each other with them 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 hurts you

“because the truth is more important so sometimes the truth hurts and that's okay that was the idea”

of toast stepping and what happened was sometimes those values became weaponized where toast stepping who spirit came from a place of we want to speak the truth became and excuse to be a jerk right so the values in and of themselves can be great or terrible based on how you execute on those values when I first came in we had to redo the values and I was there there's a saying by Jeff Bezos that that I love which is like the the values

of the company almost they they they appear the value system of the company appears to some extent you don't if you say thou shalt you're going to fail because the company shall right and the approach that we first took was that we will actually get the value system we had we had a vote for

all the signal and then we edited it and came up with a new list of values and there was one value that I wrote myself it was mine and it was do the right thing period it wasn't crowdsourced it was just that and and usually with these values you're like there's a whole explanation and people

“are like well what does do the right thing period mean like you have to figure it out and for me”

if it it was a message to the whole company which was if you work at Uber you have a responsibility and I'm not going to tell you exactly what to do so use your judgment and it's our expectation that you use your judgment to do the right thing and sometimes doing the right thing 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 businesses etc 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 and mission team work like what company doesn't believe in teamwork give me a break so we uh Mickey uh Christian Martha who runs uh people she pushed me to reset the values four five years in by then I felt like I did have a right to have a point of view I'd been there we weren't quite done with the turnaround

et cetera but I was a part of the company and then we came up with a value set which is different you know there's uh our one of our values by the way go get it was the only one that survived no sorry uh do the right thing was the only one that survived but for example go get it is one of our top values and the idea of go get it is obviously it's literally what we do we go we help people go or get it right 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 gonna be aggressive we're gonna push we're gonna 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 us with a set of values which I think is unusual”

and describes how we are a different as a company and it's really true to who we are how I'm caught in is this sort of this attitude of failure and experimentation especially in the world that's transitioning as fast as the woman we're in when you listen to people like Ray Couswell his predictions are the future he says that if you're 10 now by the age of 60 you'll experience a year's change in I think it's 11 days and just this sort of this sort of exponential

acceleration love accelerating returns yeah like how do you how do you you know how do you create a culture build a team in a world where the correct answer is changing this quickly I I think that it is um setting a culture that does embrace that change and is constantly challenging itself and I will give uh Travis and the founding team credit you know that there's kind of this idea of everything that they did was terrible and that's just not true we have a very high

talent bar at the company we have always kept a high talent bar at the company and we haven't

compromised and what I found is that talented people who are also driven are on a constant hunt for the truth so culture isn't enough you actually need the right people the company and I think we've got a company that does have a chip on a 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 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 that is of great bets the company is taken that most people wouldn't have taken or thought

was wrong or wouldn't have taken the risk on that trend. Transferred to be critical to your success.

Well you know I don't know about um well I think it will be critical to 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 at taxis and built out this peer peer ride sharing and it's probably five or six years ago our head of product now sought such and he worked on building kind of 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 do we build that in Uber? Why do we actually build

just because I want their advice was 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 wear 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 such and having worked in the industry and then”

my being kind of ignorant saying why they held 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 for the first 10 years that I was a founder I didn't

prioritize getting a good night's sleep at all but over time I started to realize that it was the key metric that influenced everything in my life I made my focus my ability to show up and to think clearly and to lead well so now with my lifestyle being pretty crazy traveling across time zones working late training late I still fight to protect my sleep which sometimes means starting the day a little bit later it was my work that helped me to make this connection they are one of my

sponsors for the show and for the last four years every day my we've been giving me insights into my sleep my recovery the strain I'm taking on and more broadly how my daily behaviours influence my overall holistic health it's the difference between guessing and knowing why I might be feeling the way that I feel sometimes it will nudge me sometimes it will get me to slow down sometimes it

pushes me to go even harder but all the time it provides me the data that gives me a deep

understanding of myself and without it it'd be hard to optimize how I live and perform right now you can get one month free through my link at join dot whoop dot com slash CEO one month free join dot whoop dot com slash CEO this company that I've just invested in it is growing like crazy I want to

“be the one to tell you about it because I think it's going to create such a huge productivity”

advantage for you with the flow as an app that you can get on your computer and on your phone on all your devices and it allows you to speak to your technology so instead of me writing at an email I click one button on my phone and I can just speak the email into existence and it uses AI to clean up what I was saying and then what I'm done I just hit this one button here and the whole email is written for me and it's saving me so much time in a day because whisper learns how I write

so on WhatsApp it knows how I am a little bit more casual on email a little bit more professional and also there's this really interesting thing they've just done I can create little phrases to automatically do the work for me I can just say jacksling din and a cop is jacksling tin profile for me because it knows who jack is in my life this is saving the huge amount of time this company is growing like absolutely crazy and this is why I invested in the business and why they know

our sponsor of this show and whisper flow is frankly becoming the worst kept secret in business productivity on entrepreneurship check it out now at whisper flow spot w i sp r f l o w dot a i slash demon it will be a game change if you so this is something that I've made for you I realize that the diversity of audience are strivers whether it's in business or health we all have big goals that we want to accomplish and one of the things I've learnt is that when you

aim the big big big goal it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards the way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny small steps and we call this in our team the 1% and actually this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here so what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these 1% diaries and we've released

these last year and they all sold out so I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back but also to introduce some new colors and to make some minor tweaks to the diaries so now we have a better range for you so if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation that I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again and you can get yours now at the diary dot com where you can get 20% off

our black Friday bundle 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 and which is AI and you know

who has always been some apart from what I understand by the answer to that degree but the

world has changed in the last couple years as a release day I has been a huge acceleration in investment and the improvement of the technology what do you I decide for a mover you talk tell you about your early childhood and how you know you grew up with a bit of a paranoia about

“losing everything because that's what you experience as a young man you see this technology arrived”

which is fundamentally disruptive to all of us including me as a podcast I've done the tests and the retention isn't far off when it's me or AI so it's finally concerning but like how do you 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 all 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

matched with whether or not a career batches a trip which is do they take two orders or one order

“all of our systems underlie systems are driven by AI we do 40 million trips a day you know that”

kind of orchestration can't be done by heuristic rules and we've got to work on the streets of New York and the streets of Lagos as well so the this we we have built the entire company on small AI models that have been trained on local problems and then gets just together that's literally what the company is so for us AI is it's kind of a core skill set and AI can it can mess things up right it it's not because it's not heuristic based there are emergent issues that

come out of an AI that works 96% of time and 4% of time and screws up so we're comfortable with the uncertainty layer of AI's a company so we are I would say moving headlining into AI we're not one of the you know 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 you know stepping back as a as a person the impact on society is going to be enormous and going back to curls wells 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 and AI will be able to replace the work that 70% 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 physically AI is harder you know robots cars etc more capital heavy takes longer have to deal with the physical world so that 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 in princess society and in prince on the real world and so for me I'm leaning it 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 have it I think that's the question the retraining challenge and people say well this”

is going to be jobs in AI but like this and I got some friends that contested society is always

adjusted right farming was a huge percentage of our labor force now it's less than one percent at the speed of yeah that I think that's a question and you could argue that AI's will be able to retrain you right the the job retraining is going to change so of course society 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 seven

theory to people percent 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 in every single day literally daily we try to see if the new model generally pro through 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 long where there's been ready to sort of big disruption positive disruption at Uber and a lot of your code is now using AI too yeah about 90 percent of our coders are using AI now that's easy to say but but there are probably 30 percent of them that were 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 their architects who are kind of thinking about what the system should look like and so while 90 percent of our engineers are using AI tools of some sort there's about 30 percent 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

writing the code from to some extent orchestrating agents who are writing the code or building

“systems for you it becomes more of orchestration job versus a manual writing job but the job”

will still be there and my attitude is if my average engineer became 25 percent more efficient

which we haven't gone there yet but we will get there I'm going to harm more engineers because I want to go faster they're 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 more productive I may not decide to add engineering at account because at that point instead of adding an engineer I should add agents and buy some or GPUs from Nvidia there 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 how do I get what when they come a time where you as the CEO or you in a team an executive team can tell in agent what you want to build you can show it the strategy and theoretically I'm going to 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 theoretically you know if that if you're

much an any rate of improvement in the intelligence maybe at some point they're going to go well listen we there's a better strategy here Gar. What one of my one of my team members told me that some teams have built a Dara AI you know so so that they basically make the presentation to the Dara AI as a prep for making a presentation to me because you can imagine like you know by the time something comes to me there's been a prep and a meeting of the and the slide that

has been beautifully honed so they have Dara AI to tune their prep are you concerned they might show our AI to the board. I see the curve for Dara yeah she's like no we're not showing a team. But is there anything like falsifiable when 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 ability to learn real time. Right so if you think about you and I are learning for this conversation it may be your behavior

is going to change by 0.1 percent because it actually what you learn here and the construct of

most large AI models is capture you know enormous amounts of data based on the skills that that you're trying to drive train pre-trained that model put it into the real world and then there's some post training of the model based on feedback from from the world and then when the models released it's kind of released right and the way the model learns is you know three five becomes three eight but three five didn't learn the engineers went out and built you know built a new

model that's three eight that might have elements of three five to it et cetera so the AI agents aren't learning now now a lot of what we're doing is we're building around the foundation models then then bring kind of the signals from the real world and use the skills that the foundation models have to do good stuff so you can be yeah post training I'm pretty sure exactly so it well so we are post training but we're learning a 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've been seeing a model of I can learn real time one of the real areas of disruption in the AI has been autonomous vehicles and I was 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 the 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 of profession I mean we've got nine and a half million drivers

and careers on our platform we are the largest organizer of flexible work around the world and I think the second largest workforces of Chinese army wow yeah to 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 way modes are safer and then now

you are back up to the Tesla right as a human beings I've got a Tesla as well and once in a while it disengages and I've got to or I've got it disengaged so it's not necessarily the pure autonomous agent that's better than humans but definitely the autonomous agent with a human back up no question that's better than the pure human and we can't be far away from it just being

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 they're 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 these autonomous agents in 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 nine million drivers careers that you have will be out of work conceivably and 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 right we operate

“in the physical world you have to get the regulations up you have to build the cars you have to”

build the sensor stacks the models have to get there so there is time between now and then but you can imagine the majority of our trips being fulfilled by robots of some kind probably not 10 years from now but you go 15 20 years from now you're going to start getting there

what do the nine million people do? I don't know now we are expanding the kind of work that's

available on 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 the 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 to make money so we are extending the platform and 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 an unemployment is going to be significantly increased in a well of AI especially we just imagine this kind of continual rate of

improvement I just can't you you would have to I unless again historically in societies new kinds of

“jobs have come up knowledge jobs physical jobs yeah I mean 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 more more of an issue for society large it's interesting

because what I was thinking putting two and two together about you your father's journey of coming to the US losing what he had losing his job and the loss of like meaning and purpose being

really central to him and I can see that and but it basically from your face that I think what

I interpreted from your face was that he struggled with as any provider would the loss of like meaning that comes because it's not just about money there it's especially you know they give you a sense of worth as funny I've read I've read I've read a study many years ago that said when they looked suicide letters specifically from men think it was not Australian study in the suicide letters that the sentiment was about not feeling worth yeah full to your family

“yeah and the extreme of that was I think my family would actually now be better off without me”

interesting and um and this kind of you know I think it's 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 says 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 utilities 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 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

succeeding you know most people succeed if they're driven succeed they will succeed and as a 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 etc 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 you know 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 know you'll hear CEOs in the media just saying you'll be fine everyone's going to figure it out and I think that's it historically we have to figure it out so maybe they're right but but you have to ask whether

“they're giving you the real stuff or not yeah and that's kind of what I that's what I think”

because I sometimes hear private conversations and the private conversations are here about the sheer amount of disruption that they anticipate and then when I see them like CMBC or Davos it's what I have will be fine to figure it out and I understand the incentive because if they were to start ringing the bell it might hurt their own chance of innovating and fundraising and those things but I think you sit at this sort of happy medium of being yeah as the CEO Vuba you've

got to you've got to pursue the opportunity and the technology but on the other hand to be honest and say listen there's going to be big disruption and we I don't know the answers I remember

you were talking about CMBC or CMBC anchor once we had it never even afterwards she said you know

I really like you you actually answer my questions you know you know myself my not so full still though there's like the the PR trading as 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 going to kill me afterwards it's just I'm going to answer the question I'm not going to do the BS and again I have to think the anchor knows what's happening the audience knows what

what's happening so I'm like oh I said the question if it's a shady question I'll deal with it I actually don't like interview CEOs which is funny because the name of the podcast

because actors how did it how did the because I I looked before I came on I'm like I'm going to

look up on yeah the CEOs and they're aren't there many CEOs well if I look to your diary what would I find inside your diary I'd probably find you contending with being a father your psychologist might find some things in there about your health I can see your 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 your how to optimize and all

these things and so honestly you can't do a podcast like this for 20 years and just hit the same

“thing every year you need to be like I need to be intellectually stimulated and you and me are both”

it multifaceted creatures I guess and that's really it's evolved at all we become AI's until we become AI's yeah just closing off on that then um 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 etc 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 transfer to fundamental transportation becomes safer it becomes

cheaper going back to jealous 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 it 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 and Thropic is talking about it pissing some people off but I think he's having good discussions there and then I do think that the society army enough 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 etc there's one thing I can come up with it will be that is the retraining machine you've got

my future what should I be doing work hard you're gonna be fine work hard it is just that I mean

“now the AI is theoretically can work harder than you but I find one of the pieces of advice I give”

through young people is don't plan okay I wound up we went through a history I wound up where I am today having not planned a thing I didn't when I was a best and banker I was in dreaming of become a CEO etc and and what I find is that people who have too much of a career plan who have too much clarity about what they're doing they they lose their curiosity and and human beings look for positive signal right you whether you like it or not anytime so on agrees with you

may feel a little bit better anytime you get signal that goes against your pre-received notions either you ignore or you're like all right shit I'm gonna I'm gonna take this on it's unpleasant and so with with career planning what I find is people who have to clear career plan they're looking for signals that feed into their career plan I'm gonna be a vice president by this much I'm gonna make X money by this much and they're not looking around they're not being

curious they're they're not looking for signal that can change you know their life and and so what I tell some folks is like before you go on and try to change your world let the world change you first you know take input and if you're like this you got blinders because I'm going here you're not gonna take input you're not gonna let you're not gonna take all the stimulus coming in from the world so it's you know the one constant I see as people who are good or good

people are good I've never seen a successful person in in a job or career get there without

working hard and my guess is I don't know about you you kind of wound up or you're wound up kind of by accident and people are like well you got lucky I got very lucky to be here like I had so many kind of moments and and somewhat say I took advantage 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 expedient to Uber um in part helped by some advice that on mutual friend Danielac the first

of the year I he's actually just texted me I texted him saying hey can you uh can you send me a question to our star but he said I'm in the middle of the next thing when we're talking about no just before I walked in I've just looked he texted me back saying he's on an earnings call

never mind but I mean he said good luck with the interview um what did Danielac stay to you

“that helped to you full math decision to go to Uber so he's the one who recommended I think”

that I was I was contacted by Headhunter he recommended me to the headhunter who called me I told him I was actually at the Allen and Company Conference going back in a circle with them 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 that was an expedient I had just gone this wonderful contract that you said at the beginning

so I was gonna stay and I love working for Barry we're like it it's been it's been the best professional partnership of my life and of course I'm not gonna go you know I'm so happy about what I'm doing in Expedia and Daniel like looks at me it's got his like cold Scandinavian eyes it'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 previous 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 you're done he gave you it well I talked to my dad and his my dad is keeps things simple and he said Dara and it's the first he van a company who's a verb tells you to run it you just say yes so I thought that was

“good advice and 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 an impact on impactful company so why the hell not and when he says a company that survived he's referring to the fact that everybody in the the taxing or transportation category uses Uber as a verb to even if they're

talking about a competitor exactly right and there's always one company in every kind of sort of

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 both 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 spent 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 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 you know 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 like with my workmates you know we”

having those genuine conversations and connections um is my way of correcting for the conversation I

never have with my dad. Sorry 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 when you in preparation for this conversation because it is it is rare to find a leader who has been consistently successful across different domains whose book is 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 contented with moments of transition and given us all frameworks as far as one entrepreneur is

for how to deal with that transition and one of the great ones I take away from you is is honesty. Yeah honest the is so powerful and I thought I learned I learned that skill from my wife she's just

she she's always like people are people doesn't matter you know they eat they crap they have to

go to sleep and she treats everybody in her life the same way regardless of their position and and what you thought yeah yeah and she's she's honest the it's just so powerful. Thank you so much you're very welcome I'm believe a blin's inspiration thank you I appreciate it , I'm really happy with this. I'm really happy with this. I'm really happy with this. I'm really happy with this and I'm really happy with this and I'm really happy with this.