Dara Khosrowshahi CEO of Uber

Now they are the world's largest ride-sharing company, and it's also the company that has taken me to most different places. We own over 1 of Uber. This translates to over 5 billion kroner, or 600 million U.S. dollars. Dara is a very impressive leader. But how will Uber adapt to autonomous vehicles?

And what does he think about teleportation? Stay tuned.

So Dara, very welcome to this podcast. It's an honor to have you on. you know you are already a bit of a legend, so wonderful.

And for me, it's terrific in terms of putting yourself in the shoes of the driver and the courier. Understanding what the experience is like and understanding how our product works for the driver or the courier. Because I think that most people, obviously you've used the Uber app to go someplace, many have used the Uber Eats app to order something. But identifying and understanding the driver and the courier experience was something that was super important to me. It's becoming much more important for us as a company, making sure that our employees also understand the merchant experience, the courier experience.

And I think it's going to be a pretty important key to our growth going forward.

For example, we just had an innovation which shows them the upfront fare and the destination of where people are going. We will sometimes forward, dispatch you, so before you finish a ride, we'll send you another offer for another ride that happens to be close to you. Highly efficient for the network and makes sense for the driver often as well. But there's just a lot of information overload coming to the driver and the driver is supposed to be safely driving on the road. That has been something that we've been working on as it relates to engineers.

But it's really the nitty gritty, and then I'll tell you, it's weird being rated every time, so when I....

And you feel like you're being graded on your work every single day, every single ride, and you and I are being graded on our work. Obviously professionally. But it's different getting graded on your work on every single ride.

And since then, I've been living in the U.S. Grew up on the East Coast, studied engineering in school, got into investment banking. And the rest is history, as far as my road to where I am now.

At the same time, once the company started having success, started growing up. At some point, the company transitioned from a disruptor to call an incumbent. From a company that had very little power to a company that wielded enormous power. And with that power, and with that incumbency, comes responsibility. And it all happened so fast in the early years of Uber that I don't think that the company realized or made that switch in terms of disruption. To call it responsibility. Now you're a truly scale player and you've got to operate in a different way. And I think that was the cultural challenge and the cultural shift that the company had to go through.

Sometimes people can't make those shifts quick enough. Uber wasn't able to. So I had to come in as a new leader to retain the entrepreneurial spirit, the drive to innovate.

The drive to continue to expand and build new product, but combine that with a newfound responsibility. A responsibility not just to think about the company, but to think about all of our constituents, to think about the driver and courier experience. To make sure that we take input from regulators and the mayors of the cities in which we operate. And to understand that your responsibility expands as your scope and scale of a company expand as well. That was a cultural reset that was required, and I think we are well along that path. But it's a big responsibility running a company like Uber, and we cannot take that for granted.

I think I was fortunate in that I came in during a period of enormous disruption, so I had permission to come in and reset the culture. There wasn't anyone who would say when I came in, Hey, we've got no problem. Why can't you just leave things as they are? So I do think that I got lucky.

While it was a challenging environment, the brand had suffered, and rightly so, because of some of the things, some of the practices that we had in the past. I had permission to come in as a new CEO and reset the culture. And one of the interesting exercises that we went through was that I had to move fast in terms of the cultural reset. But I didn't feel like I had the ability to redefine the culture of the company because I was too new. You know, it's if you've got to really know and understand a company in order to change its culture, or to reset its culture into something that's constructive. That also represents some reality of who the company is. So we actually went out and crowdsourced amongst our employees to get feedback regarding what are the cultural norms. That employees thought represented Uber, but also represented the ambition of the Uber that they wanted to be a part of.

We took all that input and then we as a senior team took what stood out to us, took what was common and reshaped it into a new set of cultural norms. It's still their norms that we're working on, so we're constantly shifting our cultural norms to kind of get to the right norms. One of the most important cultural values that we've got is that we do the right thing, period. And it's a very, very important statement of intent, which is anytime you take action, take it. Understanding your responsibility. As an employee of Uber, you're representing the company and think about doing the right thing, not just for the company, but all of our constituents.

And we combine that with a very, very strong technical engineering group. What's unusual about our company as a technology company is that we build technology that shows up in the real world. It's not, you know, we're not building email clients, we're not building social networking that, you know, is very much a virtual business. These are, you know, you push a button and a car shows up in five minutes.

In the real world is a challenging place in which to build a digital product. So the combination of strong technical acumen by engineers and then incredibly strong operators on the ground. And city by city by city, who understand the pulse of the city and can really keep an eye on how the technical product translates into the real world. That I think is the Uber magic. And there's constant tension between the two, but that tension ultimately creates a much, much better product.

And we think by far the best ride sharing product and delivery product on a global basis.

In terms of what you're looking for, you might say, well, I want to search for a new pizza place that where I can get dinner for under $40. That can be now ML powered versus you're going through a menu and or a filter, et cetera. We think that's pretty exciting. We think that description of restaurants can be personalized on a one-to-one basis.

And the interactions with Uber when something goes wrong? As opposed to standard interactions, we can now essentially build the perfect interaction for you, and the perfect conversational interaction for our customers as well. We think we are at the very, very beginning of using machine learning, really, in every way in which we connect with the world.

If you imagine there are cars that move people, there are cars and bikes that move food, there are trucks that move enormous payloads all over the world. There are bikes that are available to rent, taxis that want to carry people, buses, subways, et cetera. What we are doing now is wiring up everything that moves in a city and is available to move either people or things, and connecting them in an intelligent way. With all of the demand in the world, whether that demand is coming from a person, or it's coming from a restaurant, or it's coming from an Apple store that wants to deliver a phone to you. Or it comes from a dry cleaner who wants to get you your dry cleaning, or it comes from an Anheuser-busch who wants to deliver their product to stores. We're essentially wiring up all of the movement and all of the demand in the world, and then intelligently pricing, routing, matching it in a way that I think no other company can. We think it will create much more efficiency in terms of miles traveled on the road, it will take away from empty legs, so to speak. So that to the extent that you're using energy to move things around, you're using that energy much more efficiently.

We're very much now engaged in the transformation to EV and electric, where we've committed to by 2030 in the U.S. Canada and Europe, for our fleet to be entirely electric. So that we are doing our part to help with the global warming crisis that we're all seeing and feeling around us.

What's your take on autonomous vehicles? How are you preparing for this?

That cannot happen. So I think that's one of the challenges that not only are you solving for the tail, but the hurdle is much higher. You can be perfectly logical and say a robot that's three times better than a human should be something that we embrace as a society. I don't think we're prepared for that.

We're piloting with various players now. I think inside of three to five years. We will have some autonomous vehicles as part of the fleet, and specific originations and destinations during specific times. And I think there will be a significant period of hybrid, autonomous and non-autonomous that will stretch out for a good 50 to 20 years. So autonomous is coming, but I think autonomous at scale will be a 10-year affair.

Our business is a business that has a total addressable market of over a trillion dollars in mobility, well over a trillion dollars in food. We're getting into grocery and obviously trucking as well, digital brokerage as well, so these are large markets and the competition is intense. That said, with the newer market environment, with a higher cost of capital and the greater demand for cash flow and proper profits, now we do see the competitive environment rationalizing.

Competitors are spending less on average, competitors are more focused on profitability, on creating models that are no longer dependent on raising capital in the markets. Because the cost of that capital has gone up significantly, or, in some cases, there's no capital out there. So we think the competitive environment benefits the larger players like Uber. We have the additional benefit of not only being global, not only typically being a leader in our marketplaces, but being multi-product and being a leader in mobility and delivery, where we can essentially acquire a customer and sell them into our mobility product set and delivery product set.

That's the same thing for drivers, drivers in the U.S. You can deliver, or you can move people around or both, or you can shop, for example. So our scale and our position puts us in a place where this is actually a competitive environment that I think is quite good for Uber. And I think we as a company recognize the change early. And we started to drive towards profitability a bit faster than many of our competitors. Which I think has put us in a good place right now in terms of competition and in terms of total market size.

And that, for me, has translated into a leadership style, which is quite transparent with my team. And when I talk about my team, it's not my direct team, it's the whole company. Because the only way that I figured out how to get the real stuff, how to get real signal, to be able to talk to an engineer who's three levels down for her or him to tell me actually what they really think versus what they think. I want to hear is to be entirely truthful and transparent to them about what the issues are, what are our challenges, what are our key strengths, where can we go going forward? So what you will find with me as a leader is we have all hands of the company. Every two weeks, we open it up to questions from everybody and there's a dialogue that's going on with the company.

That's a very frank, transparent, truthful dialogue, because then that allows me to have a real relationship with my employees. It's not, you know, sometimes it's polite, sometimes it's impolite. Because they're telling me not just what I want to hear, but also what I don't want to hear. As a.

And I said, You know, I think we've got the right plan going forward, and he tells me, No, no, you don't. I'm like, What do you mean? I just told you. I think we have the right plan going forward, he said. There's something wrong.

There's something wrong, what's going on? And he nailed it. And I wasn't feeling great about our plans going forward. And I didn't want to go against my team because it was a plan that they had spent hours and hours on.

But I was feeling uncomfortable with the direction, and here's Barry Diller telling me that I'm feeling uncomfortable with the direction. And that exchange actually led me to go back to the team and say, we've got to start over again. You know, this is, this is not where I want to be, et cetera. And we grinded our way into a much better plan going forward.

So with Barry, you know, he's not a person who kind of sits down and gives you a speech on what to do. He just does it. And either you learn from that or you don't. I was lucky enough to learn from that. And I think that listening and really hearing people out one. I think people who are heard, who believe that they have been able to represent what they truly think. I think that they you can align with them much better.

You can disagree, but at least you know you heard them out. And and also it allows you again to get that signal. So that when it's time to make that key decision, you're working with the whole data set, not a edited part of the data set. And you know, if you're not the editor, then someone is deciding what you're going to hear, and that is not a position that you want to be in.

And what I learned from Barry is he was very willing. He would judge you not based on your skill set, but he would judge you based on your capability. What kind of person are you? How do you? How do you operate not just in a good environment, but also in difficult environments? How do you react when you're challenged?

Do you fight for your convictions? are you stubborn in your convictions? do you not listen? et cetera? So what I found with Barry in terms of mentorship was his mentorship was a pattern of challenging and then creating opportunity. And that's what I try to follow with my team as well.

It's not sitting down and giving a speech, it's listening, understanding the person. And then putting them in increasingly challenging or foreign roles so that they can learn and shape themselves in the way that's right for them. Because I will tell you that one piece of advice that I give leaders is just take what feels right for you, don't try to be someone else. I still remember I had read it was a I think it was a fortune article about a CEO that I really admired. Who talked about walking the halls and going out there, meeting with his employees, et cetera. Really, talking to them, having conversation with them.

And I thought, Wow, this is. This is a great practice, you know? I'm going to start walking the halls as well. And and I started scheduling. My assistant started scheduling walk the halls time for me, and I would go walk around, talk to people.

And it was so awkward, it was it just. It completely didn't work for me. Why am I my assistant? Just it was because it was for me. It felt like a fake encounter.

So I like you and I are sitting down. We're having a real discussion and we're going to talk about the real stuff and listen that that's what works for me. A five minute casual conversation, talking about the weather and what are you up to today? And then moving on is not a rich interaction for me. So the point is that I find that learning by doing the job of the mentor is to advise, to challenge, to push. But ultimately, I think that the best way people learn isn't because someone else is telling them something.

It's because they figure it out themselves over a long period of time.

And that can be a difficult challenge if you're coming in and you don't have the right team and you've got to recruit a bunch of folks.

And if you find yourself with different needs going forward and as a result a different team, so finding that the right team, the right mix.

They may have another job, or they may be a caregiver, et cetera.

It's about 15 percent of the overall population are women, about 85 percent are men, and we're trying to have more women come onto the platform much more. And we have a significant share of immigrants of different ethnicities as well. Which makes the driver very much a part of the general population, and certainly the blue collar population in most countries out there.

They're signing up so that they can make that extra money to be able to afford their groceries or their gas, et cetera. That type of driver is coming in and out of the marketplace quite, quite quickly.

And if I learned from that person, then I would, you know, meet another person that I could learn from. And kind of move from person to person and really shape myself as a result of those interactions. And I think the second factor, and this is entirely practical, and I'm an engineer and I think about these things. As usually, if you make a bet on a smart person who's successful, that person is going to move up as well. And usually they will take their team up with them. So, you're not only benefiting from the fruits of your own labor and your own understanding and knowledge, but you're also leveraging the person that you're working for as well. And that has always served me well.

I've never cared about what I'm doing. My goal has been to go work for someone smart and that has always been a good decision in my life.