Morning Brew Daily - Uber CEO Unveils Plan to Make Rides Cheaper, Reveals Own Uber Rating, and Launches "Party Bus"

Episode Date: May 16, 2024

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi joins Morning Brew Daily for an exclusive interview where he discusses Uber's focus on affordability, which includes scheduling UberX Shares and launching shuttles that will take customers to and from concerts and events for a lower fare. He also shares his thoughts on autonomous vehicles and EVs. And where does Uber stand on competition with Lyft and Tesla? Plus, a deep dive into Uber's ad business, their new partnership with Instacart and will Uber really pull out of Minneapolis? Then, Dara explains what his biggest challenges were when taking over for former CEO Travis Kalanick and how playing Dungeons and Dragons has inspired his leadership style. And finally, what is the CEO of Uber's.... Uber rating? 00:00 - Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi joins MBD 01:00 - Launching UberX Share 02:45 - Uber Shuttle to concerts  06:40 - Autonomous vehicles  12:40 - Uber’s EV projection  15:00 - Uber and Minneapolis  17:00 - Competition with Lyft  17:45 - Instacart deal with Uber Eats  21:00 - Surge pricing’s future  23:15 - Uber ad business 26:00 - Uber Direct  28:00 - US attracting leadership 30:15 - Taking over as Uber CEO 32:35 - Biggest regret at Uber  35:10 - Dungeons and Dragons lessons 37:25 - Dara’s Uber rating Want more interviews with CEOs of public companies? Check out After Earnings, a new podcast from Morning Brew and Stakeholder Labs: https://link.chtbl.com/s86bWrvf Get your Morning Brew Daily Mug HERE: https://shop.morningbrew.com/products/morning-brew-daily-mug?utm_medium=youtube&utm_source=mbd&utm_campaign=mug Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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pwc.com slash U.S. slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brew AI. Good morning brew daily show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howl. Today is a special bonus episode of Morning Brew Daily.

Uber CEO, Dara Koshahi, dropped by the studio. Yes, another Fortune 500 exec jumping on MBD for a surprise interview. We're making this a bit of a habit, Neil. Dara came straight from Uber's big annual product event, so he had a lot on his mind. He talked plans for making

rides more affordable, cleaning up after Travis Kalanick, kicking lifts ass. That's a real quote, by the way. And how the Eros tour helped inspire Uber's latest innovation. It was a fantastic conversation. Now, let's ride. So Dara, you just jumped off stage at your own event, but I want to start out by touching on something you said at another conference, South by Southwest, back in March. You said that Uber is a middle class or upper class product, but you wanted to get it to be more affordable for consumers. A lot of people listening to this may have had that moment where they open the Uber app and they're like, whoa, how do the features you just announced at your GoGet event address those concerns? Well, we wanted to hit those concerns head on, you know, especially in a

world where everyone's talking about inflation and inflation is hitting everyone's pocketbooks. One of our goals as a company is, like, how do we keep working to actually reduce the price of our services? Like, that's a goal for the company going forward. And for us, the key in terms of making Uber more affordable is sharing, right? And one of the lead products that, unfortunately, during the pandemic, we had to retire was UberPool. And post-pandemic now, we've launched UberX share again. You can get a discount if you pick UberX sharing, you share your vehicle, but you get a

deeper discount if you get matched up with somebody. So it's in your interest to get matched up. and we're kind of taking that sharing to the next level and the discounts of the next level. Today we announced a really cool feature, which is schedule your shared ride. Because a lot of times I think a lot of people, they feel like, hey, if I can share, when am I going to get there? You know, they're worried about availability if there's weather, et cetera. With this feature night before, you can be like, hey, I got to be at work at 9 a.m.

I'm going to schedule an UberX share at 815. We'll let you know if you're being matched or not, but you get a guaranteed discount, usually about 25% off your Uber. And you get the best of both worlds, which is you have kind of the ease of, you know, knowing that you're going to get to work on time. At the same time, you can save money. And then one other product that I'm really excited about is actually Uber Shuttle. This is actually a product that we launched outside of the U.S. We've got it running in Egypt. We've got it running in India.

And imagine it's a Uber bus, right? And it is, it's just like a bus that doesn't suck, so to speak. You know, you know when the bus is going to be there. And it brings all of the convenience and delight of an Uber. You can reserve a seat so that you know that you're guaranteed going from point A to B. But we're trying to get 10, 15, 20 people into one of these shuttles. great for congestion, good for the environment, your emission levels go down, but again, you save money. And we're introducing Uber shuttle now in the U.S., we're going to introduce it for like airport rides or going to concerts, et cetera, and then we're going to expand it from there.

But that's a pretty exciting product for us as well, which is, again, for the consumer, you're saving money, but more importantly, for cities, you're actually helping out with congestion. you're helping with the environment and it hits all of these at the same time. So Uber's getting into the party bus business. Absolutely. Absolutely. How much of that was a reaction to what happened last summer with the Erez tour and everyone kind of going to these concerts and sporting events like they hadn't been since before the pandemic? Very much so.

Listen, I think like going to a concert, Uber is so convenient for going to a concert and leaving a concert. But it's kind of crazy, especially leaving a concert. Where is my pickup location, et cetera? Where is Uber getting matched? So we wanted to bring that experience of a great quality service. And I do think that these concert events, they're social events. One of the really cool thing is you're getting like-minded people together who want to have a great time together. So why not have a great time going to the concert and leaving the concert along with, you know, the act itself?

And you've mentioned that people in other countries are way more comfortable and used to sharing cars with one another. Very much. But in the United States, we kind of want to be in our little cubicle. in our own box, in a car. Do you think Americans will ever get used to our comfortable sharing cars with other people? I hope so. Like, I grew up in Iran, and I grew up in a big family, and we went on vacations and, like, the kids would pile, you know, up on the floor, et cetera. Like, there's no, in a lot of countries outside of the U.S., personal space isn't a thing.

And when I was a kid, I was like, one of those kids who, like, got too close to you and made you feel very uncomfortable talking to you. So I learned to be an American. But I do think that that personal connection, families living together, sharing cars, et cetera, I'm hoping that we can bring some of that spirit to the U.S. Because, again, it's good for the pocketbook. And I think it's also good for life. I've never sat next to someone as close to I'm sitting next to Toby right now. We don't commute to work together.

But I have used UberShare in the mornings. Even we commute to work very early in the morning, but I've done Uber Share. So it is definitely becoming just more of a part of my life. And then I think a lot of people's lives in the city talk to the person that you're with or do you just like do your own thing. That's the big question. I feel like you read the vibe as soon as you step in the car. Like is this a talker or is this not a talker?

So far it's been mostly not talkers because of the early a.m. But I'm sure I'll get a talker one of these days. It's funny because I was, I drive sometimes at Uber. And that's exactly what you're describing, which is driving. you say hi to the person, you're like, how's your day going? And then you just have to read, which is they just want to say, I've had a good day, and then they want to get down to their work, or do they actually want to talk?

So it's that awkward moment. Hopefully you get that judgment right. It's like when you sit in an airplane seat and you look over at the person, and you're like, are we going to talk this whole time, or am I just going to put in my headphones? My headphones, come on. Right. You lock in.

Let's shift over to autonomous vehicles now. Tesla is, according to Elon, balls to the wall in pursuit of autonomous robo-taxies. Uber is a little less so. You sold off your self-driving division and are taking a partnership approach instead. Are you not as bullish or ballish, whatever you want to say, on autonomous vehicles as maybe Elon is? Well, listen, I think our approach is different, right? We sold off our autonomous division. We merged it with a company like OROS who's building really, really great tech because we concluded that we want to be good at what we're doing. And that is building a network, building a brand, having the largest audience, 150 million people,

every single month that are coming, that are looking for some kind of transportation, people, things, et cetera. And that the systems that you build around that matching, pricing, customer service, charging in every single currency known to mankind, dealing with things that inevitably go wrong, that's the value that we bring. And I think, we can bring the same value to autonomous, right? And whether there is a human driving a vehicle or a robot that's driving a vehicle, what we're building is the largest network of demand in the world and a dispatch layer that dynamically can decide, hey, for this ride, we should dispatch a person, for this other ride we may dispatch a robot, et cetera, and put it all together in a safe, reliable,

predictable way. So I do think that, you know, autonomous is definitely a part of the future, but it is going to be gradual. There are definitely going to be bumps on the road. I think regulators are going to want to be involved every step of the way, and frankly, they should be involved every step of the way. So I am very, very optimistic here. And I think a future of humans and, you know, kind of a hybrid network of humans and robots is a better future in terms of transportation going forward. Do you have any projections or estimates about how much of your fleet is going to be autonomous at a certain date in the future?

I do, and I can guarantee you it's going to be wrong. Okay, well, let's hear it anyway. Every single projection has been wrong. I think that seven to ten years from now, it's safe to say that more than 10 percent of our network is going to be robots. of some kind, how fast it scales. Depends on the technology first, obviously, but also depends on the acceptance of regulators,

of populations, et cetera. And, you know, it's anyone's guess how fast this is going to happen. Are you at all nervous, though, that if robo-taxies do become widespread, that it has the potential to turn ride-haling into almost a commoditized service at a point because a single vehicle can then toggle very easily between an Uber or the other.

apps out there, is that part of the reason that you are maybe not going, I don't want to say balls to the wall again, at a time as vehicles, does that ever like kind of cross your mind over at Uber? Yeah, of course it does. And listen, I think that there's a benefit to it being commoditized, which is it's going to lower prices, it's going to make transportation available to multiples of the population that is now. Like we started the conversation, which is making Uber not an upper middle class product, but making it, making on-demand transportation available to everyone everywhere. I think that as long as we get access to the content, right, as long as we're working with Waymo or with an Aurora or Wabi, et cetera.

There are many different companies in addition to Tesla that are working on this technology. I think we're going to be more than fine. And I think that there'll be certain circumstances where users will want to use a proprietary network. You know, brand of a network, they may use Tesla. But I think because we bring the most demand and because of all the systems that we've built, we can be a big player in the space. Last question on Tesla, though, they just rolled out their own plans to build a ride-hailing app Uber for Tesla is whatever you want to call it. Is that a competitor you take seriously? Does that make you nervous at all?

Well, listen, you've got to take anything and everything that Tesla does. does seriously. And they are a big part of our fleet. Like, we're trying to, we're trying to move our fleet over to EVs as quickly as possible. And at least in the U.S., Tesla is one of the most popular models. Outside of the U.S. and Latin America, et cetera, they're like B-YD models. They're incredible, affordable models out there. But it would be a mistake not to take Tesla seriously. And I do think that if you think about, for example, eats today, right? You've got huge brands, like McDonald's, for example, that have their own audience, have their own brand, and want to offer their service directly.

So the McDonald's app is a really cool app, et cetera. It works well for the loyalists. At the same time, McDonald's wants to be on Eats as well, you know, because essentially they're able to get more volume into that restaurant, that square called a restaurant, and you don't drive more profitability out of every single restaurant that they built. I think the same is going to be true of an autonomous vehicle. What we're seeing right now with our networks, with our partners is we can just drive much more utilization. So an autonomous vehicle that is only getting demand through its own app generally has much lower utilization than a vehicle that can get demand from its own app and can get demand from Uber.

So I think we're going to be a huge part just because we have such a big network everywhere. But we can be a compliment. and there'll be some competition. I guess you call a co-optition, right? That's like the generally accepted term. I've not heard that one. Yeah, exactly. But thank you for my segue, actually, to EVs.

A few years ago, you set a goal of having your fleet of cars in the U.S., Canada and Europe to be all-electric by 2030. I'm guessing that's probably not going to happen, given the major slowdown in EV sales, but you can correct me. What's gone wrong with electric vehicles in the U.S.? And do you have a new zero emissions target if you're not going to hit this one? Well, it's still a target out there, but I'll be frank. is going to be tough to hit the target based on the circumstances that we're seeing now.

And I do think that EV adoption has been a challenge right now. It looks like hybrids are going to be around for much longer than, let's say, some folks thought that they're going to be around. And I think that there's just the natural human nervousness about charging, timing, range of anxiety. and I think there was this early kind of rush onto EVs by folks like myself. I own a Tesla. I love the Tesla, right? And but at the same time, to get everyone else convinced to go on an EV is going to take some work. And I do think that affordability is a big issue, which is our, you know, the most popular

car on the network on Uber is a used Prius. So it's these, our drivers want affordable, dependable vehicles. Tesla's doing a great job in the U.S. There are many other models outside of the U.S., but we need more of them. We need these EVs to be cheaper. And we also need the charging infrastructure to go in more quickly and to be more dependable because especially for us, our driver's time is money. At the same time, if there's any population on Earth, you want to go electric.

You want it to be an Uber driver. The average Uber driver is driving five times the number of miles. than the average driver. So it's actually not about, a lot of people talk about, like, how many vehicles are sold. It's actually not about the number of vehicles sold. It's how many miles are traveled on EVs. So we're pushing forward. We're subsidizing out of our own pockets. We're investing $800 million in this transition. Uber's fleet is moving electric about five times faster than the general fleet of cars out there. But to hit 2030 based on what we see now is going to be a real challenge and we need everybody's help to do so. I like that. It's not just

about cars sold. It's about miles driven and Uber drivers are driving a lot of miles. I want to dig into the situation that's unfolding in Minnesota right now. You and Lyft have threatened to leave Minneapolis by July 1st because of a new minimum wage law for drivers. Take us through why Uber is threatening to make such a drastic decision in a major market like Minneapolis? Yeah, listen, we, first of all, we don't want to leave Minneapolis at all. And the issue that we have right now is the legislation, as it's written, makes rod sharing way too expensive. And we have really, really good data on pricing and, you know, what happens to demand when

prices go up and when prices go down as well. And we've seen an example of this, for example, Seattle. Seattle passed some regulations for both ride share and delivery. And as the driver and courier earnings in Seattle, for example, went up per delivery, the price of food went up. We had to pass that on to consumers. And the situation that you have in Seattle now is that the number of orders in the market are down 45%. Curriers are making more money per delivery, but they have to wait 50% more time. between deliveries. They're not nearly as busy as they used to be. And as a result, about 30% of

couriers have left the marketplace. We're hopeful that Seattle is actually going to learn from their mistakes. And we're hoping that the dialogue that we have with Minneapolis and Minnesota allows them to kind of learn from some of these mistakes and get to the right place, which is driver earnings that are healthy, protections for drivers as it relates to earnings minimum, and guarantees, but a price that's affordable. That's what we want. Lyft is your main rival, but at the same time, there seem to be always in your corner

when you're in these fights with regulators. To what extent are you kind of happy that Lyft exists to give you strength and numbers? Well, I think that Lyft, I think competition makes you better as a company, and Lyft is a tough competitor on the ground. We have a lot of respect for them. But in the end, the bigger competitor for Lyft and ourselves

is personal car ownership. Like that's what we while on a daily basis, we compete against each other. You know, on a annual basis, we're trying, we're both competing against personal car ownership. And so sometimes our interests are aligned in these kinds of issues and we work together. And then we go try to kick each other's ass the next day. Competition, co-opt. Yeah. I do want to talk about another almost competitor out there for you.

You recently inked a deal with Instacart to put Uber Eats on the Instacart app. You were trying to build a grocery delivery business and you partner up with someone who is maybe on the surface a bit of a competitor. How did that decision come about? Well, they're very much of a competitor, Instacart. And it actually came about originally because we built an Uber Eats web view on our Uber mobility app. So if you open up Uber, there's actually a little Eats tab and you can order Eats on Uber. Originally, we did it to introduce more people to Eats. We're the number two player in the U.S.

And we want to promote Uber Eats' brand with Uber, and it was working out really well. And the design spec was, hey, get someone to order on Uber Eats on the Uber app. And then as they're tracking their ride, et cetera, get them to download Uber Eats. The friction that the download of Uber Eats introduced kind of created a drop off in usage. So the engineering team decided to build a much more robust experience on the Uber app for Uber Eats. And the experience is great now. Like, it is really, really good. Sometimes I find myself using it as well.

I didn't know there was an Uber Eats app. I just used it in Uber. Yeah, exactly. And almost like 10% of use is now just on Uber, which is pretty extraordinary. And we had certain discussions with Instacart. Instacart wants a food product. Whereas grocery, building out grocery for us, while it's a challenge, it's not as much of a challenge because the market place isn't that fragmented, right? Like we introduced Costco, which is 15, 20 percent of the,

of the market with one, you know, player, admittedly huge player and a great player. So while we could build out our own grocery offering on Uber Eats and are doing so, I think it's a bit much bigger challenge for Instacard to bring on, you know, a million restaurants onto their platform. And so we thought there was a win-win there, which is we could take the technical infrastructure that we built for Uber, put it on Uber Eats, sorry, put it on Instacart. It looks great. It feels great. It's rolling out now in test and so far so good.

It's going to expand. The area of the business where we think we have the most growth ahead of us is actually suburbs. Uber is like a big city, you know, operation. But in the suburbs, Uber East penetration isn't nearly as much as it is in the cities. And lo and behold, Instacart is. has great audience in the suburbs. The crossover between Instacart's audience and actually DoorDash is much higher than it is with Uber Eats. So this was a win-win, which is we can continue building grocery on Uber Eats.

Instacart gets kind of a more fulsome offering as well. And we get that suburban mom, who is worth a lot. We got Uber Eats branding on the Instacart app, so we think it's going to be a partnership that works out for everybody. We just learned the word co. Is it co-optician? The competition? I've seen it everywhere. It's everywhere.

Let's talk surge pricing. So Uber and other ride-sharing companies have had surge pricing for years. We just accept this as a fact of life. But when other industries try to get into the game as well, I'm thinking Wendy's in fast food. These British pubs are also introducing surge pricing. Consumers pushback like crazy. So do you think surge pricing will be ever accepted beyond ride-sharing and airlines? I think it's debatable. I think that people understand with Uber. And search pricing predated me. It's a great

innovation is that Uber is surge pricing in order to improve reliability. Okay. So with search pricing, we can, we're essentially pushing a bunch of those dollars to drivers to get drivers to come out and match elevated demand. So the goal of surge pricing isn't to make more money. The goal of search pricing is actually to balance marketplace demand. And I think where consumers, I've seen consumers push back, which is with Wendy's or some of these players, if the goal is just to make more money, that kind of doesn't make sense, so to speak. So there is, it is interesting that consumers over a long period of time in travel cases, et cetera, or accept this idea of matching supply and demand in a dynamic way. I'm very happy that they do so on Uber because it is

key, key to driving reliability on the network and matching supply and demand in kind of a temporal way and a place-based way, right? Where if there's a Taylor Swift concert, we've got to put surge in a particular place at a particular time. Hopefully we'll get lots of shuttles there. But it serves a customer ultimately. You know who just came to mind is we've been talking about Starbucks and they've been struggling a little bit because in their morning rush hour, people are waiting so long to have their reports were filled. They just leave. So it looks like, I don't know, Howard Schultz, tune into this podcast right now.

Yeah, he had some things to say then. Oh, yeah. But that would just be to make more money. They can't build more Starbucks at a time because they're charging more. And that's the beauty of Uber, right? Like, we can actually shape supply to match demand. And often we're shaping supply in advance because we've got more data than anyone else. and we understand how a market is going to work under certain circumstances.

It is a unique proposition that we've got going on. So Toby and I really want to talk about this ad business. Uber recently got into the ads business, and it's on track to do more than $1 billion in revenue this year. There's this recurring joke on Twitter. I don't know if you've seen it, that over time, every tech company becomes an advertising company. Do you agree with that? It certainly seems to be the way forward, and certainly retailers, right? So I do think that if you look at overall trends, more and more of advertising money is going to that point of purchase.

And the point of purchase at Uber, especially Uber, is very, very powerful. So we had a billion dollar goal. We're going to beat it this year, thanks to a really great job for the teams. And, you know, ads on the Uber app allows essentially restaurants to meter audience based on their needs. You know, if they want more audience during certain times, they can turn on ads. The return on their ad spend is seven to eight times. So it's a great return. It is perfectly trackable.

They can turn it on or turn it off. And it's a great product that's growing very, very quickly. And we're quite optimistic about it. We were kind of joking around a little bit. Not a joke. Was there ever, okay, not a joke. Is there ever, have you ever considered a cheaper option where UberX, our consumers are just kind of inundated with ads? Kind of like Netflix introduced their ads supported tier that is a cheaper option.

So maybe there's just a world where you're surrounded by ads, but it's your cheapest ride yet. You know, it seems like a world that would suck. So I don't know if I want to. I don't want to advocate it. I was just wondering whether you guys had thought about it. You know, I mean, we, we, the way that we think about ads, for example, in mobility is typically how do we get more dollars in the pockets of the drivers? So for example, we're building a tablet's business. and tablet ads that, you know, hopefully aren't annoying like that or surrounding you.

But the goal is there essentially to get the advertising dollars and allow drivers who have a tablet in their car to make more money. That's really our design spec. And at this point, we want to be pretty religious about the customer experience. When I hear tablet in a car, yeah, annoying is definitely the first thing that comes to mind. If we're playing on that, Morning Brew Daily right there, it's good entertainment. Yeah, exactly. There we go. 4 a.m. tablet, right? It's going to be awesome. I'm hitting mute on that as soon as I get in.

Oh, give us some credit. So you do have an ads business now, but you also have a bunch of other different businesses, kind of on the periphery of rides and eats, Uber package, rental cars, freight. If we look at that other column, which one of those businesses kind of gets you most excited? God, there's so many. I think the one that probably gets me the most excited is a business that we call Uber Direct. And if you think about Uber Direct, you know, we have built a fulfillment network to be able to move packages and things for our marketplace. Demand comes into our marketplace that says, you know, I want a shake shack. We then have built a real-time fulfillment platform to fulfill that on-demand, so to speak. We are separating that fulfillment network from a marketplace.

And we want to offer those fulfillment services to third-party merchants, to any local merchants, so that we can actually arm up local merchants to out Amazon Amazon, which is not just next day delivery, but same-day delivery. So if you go to Apple now in many markets and you order that cool, new, super-thin iPad, and you want it today, you can get it delivered today. and there's an Uber courier who goes up and picks it up at the store and delivers her to your home. So we can essentially power same day on-demand delivery for every single local neighborhood merchant, whether that's an Apple or a Walmart or your corner grocery store.

That's super exciting to me. It can be a scale business, but it's empowering local businesses in your town. And I think that's a great cause. Do you think drones will ever be a significant chunk of delivery? Feels like we've been hearing about that for a decade, and there's been these test programs all over the country. Is that on your radar? Do you think that'll ever be a thing? So I think eventually, yes.

Thrones tend to be more of a hub and spoke kind of a model because there's a pickup and the pickup can be complicated in terms of loading something. And then obviously drop off can be complicated as well. but if you think about, if you look at drone economics, it is much more a hub and spoke model. So it could work for Walmart, but it's going to be harder for drones to work for a neighborhood restaurant, right? Because there's too much friction in the pickup and drop off. I think that actually autonomous, like we've got these little cute robots, serve robots in L.A. that are moving around stuff autonomously on the ground. So I think on a point to point, you're going to be more autonomous robots because the distances are going to be shorter.

And on hub and spoke for big stores, I could see these drones working. But I think it'll be limited. I think it'll be part of the solution, not the solution. All right. Let's talk about you as a CEO, as a leader. I'm sorry. I'm going to leave now. I'm sure you want to talk about yourself.

You're an immigrant from Iran, and you've achieved a lot of success here running a massive public company. You go down the line, the CEOs of the biggest U.S. companies are run by immigrants, Google, IBM, Microsoft, hundreds more. Is the U.S. doing enough to attract more people like yourself who grew up elsewhere to come work and become leaders here? Well, I think the U.S. just has to be the U.S. in order to attract. I mean, the U.S. is an enormous talent attractor. It is the place that so many people dream of being at. And I think that we really underestimate ourselves. And just like if I think about it, you know, like I'm a foreigner.

I'm a naturalized citizen, but I feel passionately American. And the magic of this society to get someone who is lucky enough to get here to be so passionate about what America represents. And like, we three, like, we look really different. But all three of us feel very American. I think that's magic. and I know people are self-critical, et cetera. This is a phenomenal place. The number of people, as you know, lining up to get into this country is overflowing.

I think we have to get the systems right. I think we've got to get the processes right. But I have no demand in terms of like if America was part of the Uber system, it would be surging big time. I'm about to go drink 10 Budweiser for now. Oh, my gosh. By the way, I think you could pull off the blonde, Dara. I don't know about that. It's too late for me.

Let's go back to 2017 a little bit. You're the CEO of Expedia. You're making a lot of money. Things are going well for you. And you get approached by someone to come run Uber, which was this fast-growing, but totally chaotic company. Why did you end up taking the job? At first, I didn't want to take the job, right? At first, I was like, hey, I've got a great job at Expedia.

Why would I ever leave? But ultimately, the reason I came, I think it's the reason why most people are Uber. It's impact. Like, it is Uber's a verb. And the cool thing about Uber's impact is we don't change your digital life. We actually change your physical life. And there are very few technology companies that actually have impact in the physical world. So I think the impact that we can have on the physical world, helping you get to work, helping over 7 million people in the world now.

earn flexibly, that is quite powerful. And then the solution space to make sure those earnings are predictable, make sure the flexibility is there, make sure that you've got your ride at 4 a.m. when you want to get here, or I guess 6 a.m., whatever you want to get here, the solution space and the technical challenges to make it happen every single time on a reliable way, it's just a very cool solution space. So, you know, I was at a great place, but I got to take on a challenge, and it's a challenge of matters. When you got there on the first day and sat down on your desk and looked through everything, was it worse off than you expected, or was it better? The challenges around culture and regulatory issues that we had were worse. And frankly,

when I was studying up on Uber, I didn't appreciate. the relationships that we have with local regulators all over the world, and then the challenges. So from that standpoint, that was tougher. The business was better. The people were phenomenal. The culture, while we had to shift the culture, you had a group of people who really believed in the product, believed in impact, were incredibly talented and just directed the right way, I think, you know, are building a great business. Any regrets, any decisions you made at Uber that you wish you could maybe do over again? Oh, yeah, lots of decisions.

You know, I would say the toughest decision I make, which wasn't really a do-over, was after the pandemic in having to, you know, fire 25 percent. I'm sure there's a better word, you know, terminate whatever really nicey, nicy word you can say. But fire 25 percent of our population was terrible. I never done it. I hope I never do it again. And so in hindsight, could I've avoided that? Did we grow too fast? Did we add, do we have too many operations that we shouldn't have been in in the first place to put people through that pain? I think that's my biggest regret. Yeah. Are there any decisions you could have made to, you know, not have that happen? Did you grow too fast? I mean, many tech CEOs are saying that they grew too fast during the pandemic. they thought that certain trends would extend years beyond what they were and they fell back to Earth.

So it sounds like you're saying the same thing. Yeah, definitely. Listen, we got into parts of the business, self-driving for us. It was a side quest, right? It wasn't the main quest. And I think it's hard enough as a main quest, self-driving. It is one of the toughest technical problems for folks to solve. If it's 10% of my time as a CEO, of course I'm not going to succeed. And of course, it's not going to succeed. So we were getting that, we were getting into payments, we were getting into Uber Air, et cetera. And the better approach and the approach that we're taking now is an approach through partnership. There is an ecosystem.

We partner with restaurants. We partner with drivers. But, you know, we can partner with these technology providers and provide the demand, provide the network, provide the orchestration layers, and we can both do well. You've talked about Uber becoming a super app. Is that a side quest of the pandemic, or is that still on the agenda? Oh, no. It's definitely on the agenda. And we want to be kind of almost building that local operating system for you.

And then for drivers have all kinds of opportunities to make money. You want to drive people. You want to deliver food. You want to deliver groceries in certain places. You can do AI labeling in India as well. So we want to be the super app in terms of your daily life in a city. and then we also want to be a super app in terms of earning flexibly the way that you want to, where you want to, when you want to. This is a very interviewy question, but you love playing Dungeons and Dragons with your kids.

What does being a dungeon master taught you about leading a big company like Uber? Oh, God. So I think that what it's taught me is the power of storytelling. Yeah. Right. It's the cool thing about Dungeons and Dragons is it gives you a framework, the game, and the Dyson, and those frameworks are, fun, but ultimately it's about the story and the interplay between the dungeon master and the characters that makes it magic.

And the best campaigns are the ones that go in a totally different direction than you expected them or someone comes up with a solution that you didn't think about it. And that interplay and that storytelling is what gets people really excited about work. And listen, work is hard. And we operate an incredibly competitive space. And we need our teams to go an inch and a half further than they would otherwise to really be creative. And ultimately, the storytelling gives a cause for our teams to really build solutions that have never been built before. It really is that side quest, main quest thing that we were just talking about.

I promise we didn't plan that. But it does, there is a main quest in Dungeons and Dragons, but then just also these side quests that you go. And that's kind of fun. Yeah, it does absolutely make sense. All right, Darry, I've been sitting on this one, all interview. But you went to Brown. I also went to Brown. Go, Bruno.

Favorite place to eat in Providence? Oh, favorite place to eat at Providence? You know, the Rattie was like, unfortunately, not my favorite place to eat, but like where I ate all the time. We have a dining hall called the Rattie. Yeah, yeah. Is that a burger joint or something? The soft serve was excellent. And then there was this like greasy spoon.

I forgot the Louise. Louis was definitely favorite place. and many, many early mornings slash late nights in Louise. I guess the turnover at Brown is not that bad. And Mike, I went to College Park in Maryland and there's none of the same restaurants that when I was there are still around.

You guys are like talking about these things that are like, the main drag has definitely gentrified. I will tell you that. My son goes to Brown now. I went to the main drag and it was just not even, I couldn't believe what I was saying. Louise has remained. And actually, I said that was our last question, but this is my real last question.

I don't know if Louise is on Uber Eats. I got to figure that one out. Get Louise on Uber Eats. We got to know. What's your Uber rating? My Uber rating, as a driver, I'm a five-star driver. Congratulations. As a rider, I'm 479, not so good. I've got to get better as a rider.

Maybe you're just trying to connect too much. Maybe the drivers do you just want to ride in silence as well. I'll be a five-star driver. There you go. Dar, this was awesome. Thank you so much for joining me. and Neil and the entire Art Morningview Daily audience. Stop by any time, but we'll let you go for now.

Are we gonna call you an Uber? Should we call you an Uber? Absolutely. Alright, let's do it. Thanks, Ira. Take care. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars.

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