Every single year that I've been in Uber has been a challenge and obviously the challenge and the opportunity now is the rise of AI. You don't just exist in the digital sphere, right? Our experiences encompass digital first in terms of your interaction with our platform, but then they are delivered or fulfilled in the real world. The rise of physical AI, autonomous vehicles, drones, etc., they are going to change how we interact with consumers in the real world. We think it's another trillion dollar marketplace. It will change how society operates.
So I think I have to begin with the story you were just telling me about how you took the job here, how you heard about it. And the reason I start there is because I want to know what it was like, what the company felt like to you when you showed up, how that's evolved. I'll ask all sorts of questions around this and then very importantly like what the current moment feels like, which I think is the most interesting question for the business possible. But I love the origins. So I would love to hear how did you hear about this job in the first place? What was the backstory?
Yeah. So I've been at Expedia for 13 years, CEO working with Barry Diller, and loved the experience and I loved where I was. And at the time, Uber was in the news all the time, right? It was in the business if you're interested. So obviously I was reading about the situation at Uber. It seemed pretty chaotic and pretty difficult. And then a headhunter called me out of the blue and said, 'Are you interested in the Uber CEO job?' And at the time I said, you know, no effing way, like who would even think about it at the time. And I had a considerably lower profile as you can imagine. So I kind of blew it off. And I was at the Sun Valley conference, Allen Company conference, and was having a drink with Daniel Ek and my wife.
And Daniel said, 'Hey Dara, did a headhunter call you? I recommended you for the job. I thought you'd be great for the job.' And I was like, 'Oh, that's why it happened. Like what? Like what are you crazy?' And he said, 'Why? I think you'd be great for the job.' And I said, 'Listen, I've been at Expedia for 13 years. I'm so happy with what I'm doing.' And I remember Daniel, he looks at me, he's like, 'Laura, since when is life about happiness?' Interesting comment. He's like, 'It's about impact.' And Uber is a company that has impact on the world. It's important. It's in trouble. Why wouldn't you take a shot at this? I think you'd be great. I think a lot of people come to Uber because of the impact that the company has in the world. You know, we are shaping how the world moves. We're a huge part of people's lives. We've got over 10 million couriers and drivers on the platform. And I just wanted to go to a place where I could make a difference.
And I wanted to go to a place that was making a difference. You know, like when I started investment banking at Allen Company, it was amazing. It was the best company in the world. But I was like, investment banking isn't really changing the world, right? And so for me, it was about having impact at a company that was having fundamental impact in how people live. And you know, we'd had a couple of beers and my wife was there, Sid, and she'd had a couple of beers and we talked about it. And the next morning, actually, in the parking lot, I remember calling the headhunter and I said, you know, tell me more. So that's how it all started.
Wow. Okay. So you show up, there's a process. You take a job, you show up. What is the impression on day 1 through 10 or something like this? Like what did it feel like?
I mean, complete chaos. Travis had not been the lead of the company for some period of time. And there was a group of executives, a committee if you want to call it that, who had been running the company for a few months. And obviously the company was in the public sphere in many, many bad ways. Lots of things going on both internally, externally, and the business itself was very dynamic, hugely competitive. So it would have been difficult enough if there weren't any of the external distractions going on coming into the business, which I think fundamentally was strong but was going through a lot of change, a lot of chaos both in terms of the board and what the board wanted in terms of the stability of the management team and then getting structure around the business as well. But you know, with time and with a lot of work and working with my team, we were able to bring some order to the chaos both externally and internally and it's turned out to be a great ride for me.
How did you do that? Like if you were teaching a college seminar or something, an HBS seminar on a leader bringing and establishing some order and structure in a chaotic situation, like what is the how?
I think the most important how, because every situation is different, but the most important how is simplifying the situation and breaking down what seems like an unassailable problem into its component parts. You know, it's vector mathematics, right? If you have a three-dimensional complex interaction, you can just break it down to each dimension. And if you solve each dimension and you bring it all together, you can actually solve pretty complex issues and equations into its component parts. And the same is true in business, right? So when I got into Uber, there were very distinct areas that I had to take care of. One, at the board level, the board was fighting for control. And you had a board that was focused on who's going to control the future of the company versus what the future of the company was going to be.
And so, for example, we brought in a new chairman, Ron Sugar, who has become my partner through all of the years and really brought the board together. This isn't about who controls it. This is about the fate of the company. I think the company lost trust with stakeholders, with regulators, with the public. And so we went out and first went on a listening tour to understand what the issues were and then started acting based on that impact and started communicating both internally and externally, which is the concerns of stakeholders externally were just as important as our own concerns as well. And then with employees, is putting together the team. There was a lot of talent inside of Uber, but there were some folks who kind of were stuck in the old world who had to get off. And then there was an incredible talent base. Andrew McDonald, who is our president, COO, you know, kind of predated me and has come through many, many years. Many others have been with me since before day one. And then bringing in new management members like a Tony West as well who's been with me ever since. So I think if you focus on each distinct problem, what seems like chaos can become small surmountable problems that you take on and you kind of, you know, you set initiatives against each of them and over a period of time, you can't control what gets solved when, but over a period of time things get better. And I think things got better.
In situations like that, and I'm sure there's been many others at Expedia and since, what have you learned about managing your own stress so that you don't get personally overwhelmed by chaos?
I think I'm lucky. Sid, my wife, calls me a robot. Which is I don't get stressed out by situations. We lost everything when we came here from Iran. Absolutely lost everything and I saw it destroy my father.
I was 9 years old.
And you know, my father built along with his family an incredible family business. We came here, we lost everything. But then we rebuilt. And I think for whatever reason, fast doesn't help. Like overthinking things doesn't help. It only makes things worse. And I'm able to approach things kind of from an engineering mindset. I studied engineering school, which is what are the problems? Let me list them and let me have an approach to solving each of them. Test and learn. And not everything improved in a linear path, but being stressed out, like what's the point of it? Who cares?
Can you say a little bit more about what that experience was like? Like watching your dad go through that at that young age.
For us, we came to the states, we got to stay with my uncle Nasi. The adjustment for us was not very difficult, but as I grew up, I observed my father who when I was a kid, he was kind of a giant of a man become less giant because I was getting bigger as well. And he just lost that spark, you know, he wasn't able to begin again here in the US. He did his very best. He was an entrepreneur. He tried his hand at a lot of things and you know, I think that one, it drove myself and my brothers and my family to rebuild. You know, many immigrants have a chip on our shoulder and I had a particularly big one. But at the same time, I didn't want to be in the same situation, which is for work, for fortune to break me as a person. So, I was able to separate the two, which is, yeah, do I want to do well? Absolutely. Am I going to give it every inch that I've got? Absolutely. But in the end, I know who I am, and I'm always going to be that same person. I'm not going to let the chaos of the world affect me mentally.
What have been the chapters of the chip like, you know, how has the chip on the shoulder evolved? Like what satisfied it early on? And how has what satisfied it changed or is the chip still...
It's never satisfied. I don't know what it is. I always wanted to do well in school, sports, you know. I just for me I just believe in being all-in in anything that you do. You know, when I'm with my kids, I'm with my family. I don't have this thing around. I'm not checking messages. I'm not getting distracted. I believe in, you know, if you're going to do something, whether that's work, whether that's sports, whether that's personal life, just go all-in, get rid of the distractions, and I think you'll lead a happier, more effective life.
You think that chip is roughly the same today as it was when you were...
Yeah, it's core. Like I don't know whether I would have been the same person, you know, the counterfactual if I were in Iran, but I know my family is awfully competitive. A lot of Iranian immigrants have come here to the US and many parts of the world have been extraordinarily successful. And yes, of course, starting from behind and knowing that you're starting from behind and having the desire to kind of get ahead again, it absolutely plays a part in your life.
How do you, again, the selfish question because I have kids, you know, that are growing up fast. How do you think about your kids? Like, my guess is you wouldn't press the red button to undo the experience you had because it made you who you are.
And so I think about this a lot as it relates to kids that maybe are not going to have an experience like that that might shape them in a similar way. How do you think about that as a dad?
God, I'm figuring it out as we go. I think being a parent is so humbling, but I think we're doing our kids a disservice by giving them too much, being around too much. You know, I don't know about you as a kid, but on the weekends, my mom would be like, 'Get out of here and come back for dinner, you know, figure it out.' And I think this kind of the helicopter parenting, etc., being around your kids all the time. You want to love your kids. You want to know that they're absolutely loved and appreciated. But it's the challenges in life that form you. And it's the overcoming of these challenges that give I think humans a profound satisfaction. And if you as a parent are overcoming these challenges for your kids, you're actually doing them a disservice long term, whereas short term you think that you're doing them a favor. You're giving them an easier life. A happy life is not necessarily an easy life. And so for me it is a challenge because I love my kids but Sid and I co-parent in a way which is, you know, we're not going to do everything for the kids. They come home, they're responsible for their homework. They've got to learn how to make it in this world themselves within the scope of family which will prepare them for the outside world which as you know can throw you a lot of curve balls.
Most software companies try to maximize your time on their app to juice engagement. Ramp does the exact opposite. Ramp understands that no one wants to spend hours filing expense reports, reviewing expense reports, and checking for policy violations. So, they built their tools to give that time back using AI to automate 85% of expense reviews with 99% accuracy. And since Ramp saves companies 5%, it's no wonder that Shopify runs on Ramp, Stripe runs on Ramp, and my business does, too. To see what happens when you eliminate the busy work, check out ramp.com/invest.
OpenAI, Cursor, Anthropic, Perplexity, and Vercel all have something in common. They all use WorkOS. And here's why. To achieve enterprise adoption at scale, you have to deliver on core capabilities like SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and audit logs. That's where WorkOS comes in. Instead of spending months building these mission critical capabilities yourself, you can just use WorkOS APIs to gain all of them on day zero. That's why so many of the top AI teams you hear about already run on WorkOS. WorkOS is the fastest way to become enterprise ready and stay focused on what matters most, your product. Visit workos.com to get started.
Every investor should know about Rogo because Rogo AI's platform is not just another generic chatbot. Instead, it was designed to support how Wall Street bankers and investors actually work. From sourcing, diligence, and modeling to turning analysis into deliverables. For me, three key things differentiate Rogo. First, it connects directly to your systems so it can work with your actual data. Second, it understands your workflows, how work really happens across a deal or an investment. And third, it runs end to end and produces real outputs the way the best people do. Auditable spreadsheets, investment memos, diligence materials, and slide decks that match your standards. This all comes from the fact that Rogo is built by finance professionals for finance professionals. And it's already being adopted by some of the most demanding institutions in the world. To learn more, visit rogo.ai/invest.
Speaking of curveballs and challenges, so if we zoom all the way to today, it's got to be, I'm curious if you think so. It seems to me from the outside like the most interesting time to be running this business because the opportunity is so massive. The threats are real. The new entrants are fascinating. AVs we'll talk a lot about, I'm sure. What does it feel like ground us today? Like what feels like the central question to answer as the leader of the business?
It's, you know, I tell you that every single year that I've been in Uber has been a challenge and there's been another, you know, there have been so many answers to question and we interact with the world in so many ways. Obviously, the challenge and the opportunity now is the rise of AI both as an internal tool as to how we build. And what's different about Uber than many other companies is like we don't just exist in the digital sphere, right? Our experiences encompass digital first in terms of your interaction with our platform, but then they are delivered or fulfilled in the real world where all kinds of things happen. So you've got kind of a determinative structure in terms of the interaction with the app, but then probabilistic outcomes and we always have to kind of deal with those outcomes and the things that go wrong in the real world, traffic, driver cancelling, your food being late. So we have always used kind of in that probabilistic world AI tools to build out our system for much longer than most companies out there.
But now with the onset of AI both in the digital world, the ability to build much larger models that know much more about you, can anticipate what you want more accurately, can really drive utilization and can drive how people work and make an engineer into a super engineer, to then the rise of physical AI, autonomous vehicles, drones, etc. and how they are going to change how we interact with consumers in the real world. I've never ever seen a pace of change so fast and it's incredibly exciting.
What's your mandate to your team given how fast things are changing and how much more each person can now do?
I'm not like a top-down driver so to speak. We have a bottoms-up culture which is I want people inventing all over the company. I don't want to be that single point of failure. Obviously the CEO is important for the company. So I hesitate to drive mandates and I would tell you that AI adoption at the company just because we are kind of an AI native company or ML native company in terms of where the technology has come from, it's been occurring all parts of the business whether it's engineers and how they scope projects, how they build, debugging, on-call, platform, migrations, all of that is now has enormous AI adoption to our legal team, to our marketing team. So it is happening everywhere. Where I come in is that I'm pushing the teams to fundamentally use the power of AI to rebuild systems and processes from the bottoms up. And by the way, it could be a decent first step to take a process and have AI optimize 20% of it, 30% of it in terms of speed or effectiveness or cost. But to rebuild it from the ground up, that's much harder. And that's where I'm coming in and really pushing the teams to think about processes from a first principles standpoint and the impact of AI on those.
What's the most amazing thing you've seen someone do with the technology at Uber?
The most amazing thing that I've seen is that I'm seeing the impact show up in all kinds of random corners of the company. You know, what we're seeing now is like we've got devs in India who all of a sudden are driving 10x the code commits that they used to. They're using autonomous agents all over the place. So the uptake of the tools that we're seeing is not at all predictable in terms of who is racing ahead with this new technology versus what we typically saw. And so I think you're going to have very, very unpredictable patterns within the company. It's up to us to find it and it's up to us to kind of promote those individuals who are kind of the rebels inside the company. We want the rebels to win here.
One of the interesting questions today is what is the actual latent demand for intelligence? Like it's still a weird question. I'm curious if you've had an experience like me where at first you're like tell your team you burn tokens, like let's use as much intelligence as possible and then there's a moment where you're like wow this is expensive. Intelligence is expensive. How do you think about the trade-off between it seems like an unbridled good to have more intelligence but right now it's quite costly.
We're dealing with it now actually. We blew through our AI budget in a quarter, you know, for the whole year essentially. And it is forcing us to adjust. You know, we are going to meter headcount increases because to the extent that my engineers are getting much more efficient, their throughput is increasing. They're becoming superhuman in terms of their output. We, you know, one, there's a cost to that and it's a significant cost and at the same time we're kind of metering the increase in headcount. So my view right now is drive adoption, encourage usage across the company. We do believe in efficiency here. We've got over $10 billion in free cash flow, which is great, but it's on well over 10 billion trips a year.
So these are, we are not a high margin business. We want to really drive efficiency in order to lower prices for riders, to give more earnings to our earners, etc. So I do think it's a combination for us right now of encouraging adoption but then driving efficiency. And the way that I put it is we're using the more expensive models to explore, hey let's try a new interaction here and obviously, you know, these frontier models whether it's an OpenAI model or a Claude model, they really are terrific and they're great to experiment against. Once we scale some of these experiences and interactions, we'll look to bring in more efficient models that are more efficient on a token basis or open source and again lower cost. So exploration is go, go, go but then efficiency and scaling is something that we're also talking about.
So you're one of the few companies, many amazing companies with amazing leaders that are in this sort of like AI meets the physical world zone where you've got a scaled brand and distribution. You're an aggregator of demand in many ways. And I have so many questions about this, but I guess the first one is just what that is like. Like how you think about that challenge, that problem, that opportunity as one of the small handful of companies that sort of has the right to win in how that new technology links up to the physical world.
Totally. So I think the first is there's an enormous opportunity in just, it's boring, but it's wonderful boring, which is just building larger models, right? So building, you know, our models in terms of our feed models, our search models now are probably 10,000 times bigger than our older models and they're just able to take much more data about you and make predictions about what are you going to search for. Now we have universal search. For example, if you search for something, it's not just classified as rides or eats or grocery. We can show you everything that we have available across our services. So, first it's just like the tooling has gotten better, the capabilities have gotten better, and today we can guess when you take an Uber ride. 3/4 of the time we can guess where you're going and it's just a one-tap interaction that can only improve based on these larger models. And as it relates to the real world, we can anticipate what's happening in the real world much more effectively now. And then the form factor with which you operate is going to change as well and more and more and it's going to take a while, you know, you'll have drones getting your food to your home or you'll have AVs delivering you from place A to place B. So everything is changing about it. Some of it is immediate opportunity now but we think there's a ton of opportunity going forward.
What do you think has to be true for Uber to win the demand aggregator, you know, top slot in AV specifically?
Supply. So, we are a supply company. The more drivers we have in the marketplace, the more restaurants that we're wiring up for you, the more latent demand that we have. And it's one of the lessons that I learned when I came from Expedia to Uber. At Expedia, we were really focused on, you know, demand, how many consumers can we get to the website, etc. and we were a demand-first company and then we would build out hotel inventory and flight inventory in response to demand. At Uber, everything is upside down. One of our very, very significant growth opportunities right now is building out our surface not just in the big cities but in the sparse markets in all of the suburbs of the world and smaller cities of the world. Not the top 10 cities in a country but the next 50 cities, the next 200 cities in the country. Well, the first thing we do is actually go out and recruit drivers, recruit merchants and restaurants, groceries, couriers, and then just the demand shows up. I don't mean it's not that easy, but the biggest opportunity and challenge we have is making sure that we secure every single supply, every single car out there that's going to take you from point A to B, every single restaurant, every single retailer, every single grocer. If we do that, the demand will take care of itself.
In AV specifically, what does that feel like? Like we're, it feels obviously like we're just at the very early, early part of the S-curve. And I'm sure that if the answer is supply, you want to just be the demand aggregator with the most supply. What does that feel like? Like what is the state of AVs feel like to you?
It's very early, but it's moving very fast. So we've got over 30 partnerships now with incredible partners like a Waymo to a Nuro and Lucid to an Nvidia that is building not just compute and sensors but also a software driver now to companies like Waabi and WeRide of the world, Pony AI's of the world. You know, just like you're seeing in the foundation model space, there isn't going to be a single winner. There are going to be many players in the foundation models. There'll be open-source smaller models as well. We're seeing the same kind of acceleration in the development of AV. And as a result, we want to be your go-to market solution for companies that are building out these digital drivers.
And we're allowing these companies to really focus on building the driver. We are building services around them. We're going out and securing depots and charging in cities in which we see kind of the regulatory landscape moving in the right way. We're working with fleet partners. We're securing financing. We just announced a billion dollar financing line with Santander for EV fleets and AV fleets. We're working on kind of autonomous insurance as well. So we're building the entire ecosystem so someone who builds a driver can get those cars in the road and then we have all the supporting infrastructure. We are collecting data as we speak in the streets that we can feed to the model and then when they hit market we've got instant demand for them. And what we're seeing is consumers love the product and AVs that are on our network are 30% or more busy than let's say AVs who aren't using our network. That 30% in terms of trips per vehicle per day, in terms of revenue per vehicle per day can make a huge difference in terms of your ROI of investing in these expensive cars.
What has surprised you most so far about the product of AVs? Like you get to see all this interesting, the 30% thing makes me wonder about this question. Like what is interesting to you about the nature of the product and the physical, you know, the cars themselves and the consumer experience versus the more traditional experience.
So the one thing that is surprising and in a different way is how quickly magic turns to normal, right? You know, it was when I first experienced Uber, it was in New York City. I was at Expedia. I'm like, 'Oh my god, this thing is absolutely magical.' Push a button and a car shows up in 5 minutes, etc. Next day, you're like, 'Where's my damn car?'
Yeah, exactly. You're like, 'It was 6 and a half minutes. I can't believe that. How dare they?'
And you know, with AVs, you get in them and it's magical. The cars are nice. There's a sense of privacy, peace. You play your own music. And you know, for the first two minutes, you're like, 'Oh my god, this is amazing. Look, look at what's happening.' And then minute three, here you are, you know, doing the same thing. So, I think what's incredible is what's magical now is going to seem normal to all of us 10 years from now. You know, in the end, it's about getting you from point A to B safely, efficiently, affordably. We want to make sure that these AVs aren't just available for rich people in the middle cities. We want to make sure that they're available everywhere. But I think this technology, the speed to market is going to be fast and the interactions are going to normalize faster than you think.
I'm so interested by the whole like build, partner, buy decision that I'm sure you're making in a million ways every day. You've got these advantages. You've got all this capital, all this free cash that you can allocate, all this infrastructure and of course the demand aggregation that you've already built, which are huge advantages, right, for creating liquidity, etc. How do you think about partnering with companies like a Waymo or something that you could certainly see being a competitor in part of what you do if they get a big enough network and the service is good enough, like, you know, people are always going to fight for huge markets. What is that like navigating either in that specific example or in general right now with AVs, partnership versus having your own fleet?
It's a coexistence that frankly I'm quite used to coming from the travel business. Right? If you think about OTAs, these online travel agents, they compete with a Marriott, they compete with a Delta for the consumer, they compete with an independent hotel as well. All of whom are building a direct channel for the consumer, many of whom have loyalty programs, etc. But at the same time, they want incremental consumers coming from the platforms because they have a big box to fill and they want to drive as much utilization of that box as possible. And the returns for a hotel that has, you know, 70% of its rooms filled versus 90% is night and day, right? You will take the 90% every single day. The same is true, for example, in Uber Eats, right? We work with McDonald's, we work with Starbucks, we work with Chipotle. All of these companies to some extent also compete with Uber Eats as well. And the same will be true of a subset of AVs which is a Waymo. Of course they want to build their own brand and their own channel but at the same time we are able to drive more utilization for them when their cars are on our network. The same will be true of Zoox, the same will be true of Nuro, etc. So we're going to have some players, for example, Waabi is focused on building one end-to-end model that they license to OEMs and we will be responsible essentially for all the demand. So there are going to be lots of models but I don't think it's going to be black or white which is do we only compete or do we only work together. We think there's going to be an amalgamation of business models. There already is in travel, there already is in food. Same thing will happen in transportation.
What's your premortem for this like going wrong? Like for if it's 5 years from now and Uber has like screwed up this opportunity. What do you think the most likely reason for it is?
I don't think it's necessarily an Uber thing. I think it's a big question for the industry. You know, you've seen how powerful AI is, but at the same time, how unpopular it is with the general public. And folks like you and me in the corporate world, we're just amazed and we're driving utilization. And the way that these AI models interact with the average person is, yeah, search got a little bit better. But if it's driving up, or I think it's going to drive up my electricity cost or if it's going to cost my cousin's job, that doesn't feel that good. And I think the same will be true of AVs, right? Which is it's terrific technology. It is going to be safer than human beings, but how does it interact with emergency service providers? How do we make sure that the technology is available to everybody, not just the wealthy? We've got to have these dialogues with regulators, with real people living in cities, with our drivers whose earnings may get affected. Now, drivers in Austin and Atlanta where we have two big partnerships with Waymo, drivers on the Uber platform, they're making more money. The number of drivers joining the platform is increasing because it looks like AVs are actually adding incremental demand to the platform. So we have good news early but we've got to communicate and we've got to go at the pace that society is prepared for us to move otherwise there will be a backlash and you know, you're kind of seeing in some of the public perception out there.
I'm sure your answer is something like not on my watch. But if I were to assume that the public out of your control thing is solved. Can you imagine what the same premortem answer would be through something that you do control?
