Dara Khosrowshahi: Why decline can compound just like growth

1. 0:00 – 3:33

   Intro

   1. DKDara Khosrowshahi0:00

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

   2. SBSteven Bartlett0:04

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

   3. DKDara Khosrowshahi0:07

      Then they can leave, because the most important skill in life is the skill of working hard. And when you see the top athletes, Ronaldo, Michael Jordan, of course they're talented, but the thing that's different about them is they work their asses off, and that's a learned skill. That's not something you're born with. You may be smarter, more talented, et cetera, but I'm not gonna let anyone outwork me.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett0:28

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

   5. DKDara Khosrowshahi0:39

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

   6. SBSteven Bartlett0:55

      You were what, eight, nine years old?

   7. DKDara Khosrowshahi0:57

      Yeah, and it really destroyed my dad. [voice breaking] Sorry, he... [exhales] It's tough for me to talk about it.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett1:07

      All right.

   9. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:11

      Sorry. All right, let me try again. Seeing that has put me on a road where I just wanted to make my family proud. So I studied bioelectrical engineering, and then my first job was investment banking, and I got to see the process of big companies being built, and then I had the opportunity to take over Expedia.

   10. SBSteven Bartlett1:26

       And in your twelve years as CEO, Expedia's sales increased from two point one billion to eight point eight billion, and you were the highest paid CEO of a US tech company.

   11. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:34

       And I left it all behind to go to Uber.

   12. SBSteven Bartlett1:36

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

   13. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:50

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

   14. SBSteven Bartlett1:53

       Those drivers, couriers that you have, will be out of work. Being honest about the situation, what do the nine million people do? [dramatic sound effect] Guys, I've got a quick favor to ask you. We're approaching a significant subscriber milestone on this show, and roughly sixty-nine percent of you that listen and love this show haven't yet subscribed for whatever reason. If there was ever a time for you to do us a favor, if we've ever done anything for you, given you value in any way, it is simply hitting that Subscribe button, and it means so much to myself but also to my team, 'cause when we hit these milestones, we go away as a team and celebrate. And it's the thing, the simple, free, easy thing you can do to help make this show a little bit better every single week. So that's a favor I would ask you, and, um, if you do hit the Subscribe button, I won't let you down, and we'll continue to find small ways to make this whole production better. Thank you so much for being part of this journey. It means the world, and, uh, yeah, let's do this. [upbeat music] Dara, you lead one of the most consequential, interesting, talked-about companies of my generation. It's worth hundreds of billions of dollars last time I checked, and it's, uh, it's a company that I use every single day.

   15. DKDara Khosrowshahi3:05

       Thank you.

   16. SBSteven Bartlett3:05

       I've looked through your story. You were the CEO of Expedia-

   17. DKDara Khosrowshahi3:09

       Mm-hmm.

   18. SBSteven Bartlett3:09

       -at one point.

   19. DKDara Khosrowshahi3:10

       Yes.

   20. SBSteven Bartlett3:10

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

   21. DKDara Khosrowshahi3:26

       Mm-hmm.

   22. SBSteven Bartlett3:28

       And I was-- You know, when I start doing the research for guests sometimes, I, I, I think I come in with some kind of presumption.

2. 3:33 – 10:17

   Why Fleeing Iran Shaped My Risk Tolerance And Resilience

   1. DKDara Khosrowshahi3:33

      Sure.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett3:33

      You, like, grew up in California, you went to Stanford, et cetera, but that is not the case. Can you take me to that earliest context so I can understand how and why you are the way that you are?

   3. DKDara Khosrowshahi3:44

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

   4. SBSteven Bartlett4:27

      You had to come to the US?

   5. DKDara Khosrowshahi4:28

      We were not safe there. One of my uncles actually was, um, a cabinet member of the Shahs, who had just been toppled, and at one point, we had, uh, uh, these revolutionary guards come into the backyard. They were actually going after our neighbor's house, uh, and one of their guns went off, and bullets went through our living room, uh, shattered the glass in the living room, and at that point, my mom's like: "We're not safe being here," so we had to come to the US, and I do think that event, to some extent, has shaped not just me, but my family, in that the rebuilding of our lives, um, of our, uh, economic lives to some extent, we're, we're all trying to rebuild what we lost in Iran.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett5:17

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

   7. DKDara Khosrowshahi5:25

      I think at my core, I never feel safe. You know, when the, the experience of losing everything... And, and for the kids, I, I tell you, it was fine for the kids, but seeing my parents lose everything, and, and it really destroyed my dad. You know, it really-- His losing his value to the world as he saw it, um, really hurt his inner being. And I do think to some extent, seeing that has put me on a road where I wanna rebuild, I wanna 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 in its ideals, right? Which is, if you build something, it's yours. There's a rule of law, it can't be taken away from you. That is not true for the majority of the population of the world. And so I think for me, there's a drive to build, and it's at the same time, never, ever, ever taking anything for granted, never being satisfied, because the minute you take things for granted, then that rug can be pulled out from under you.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett6:45

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

   9. DKDara Khosrowshahi6:52

      Yes.

   10. SBSteven Bartlett6:53

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

   11. DKDara Khosrowshahi6:57

       Yeah, in Tarrytown, 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 a salesperson to make some money, and she did it all herself, and she really stepped up. So I think it shaped us. It was difficult in some ways. I, 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, uh, 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 ex- uh, with my friends." I was excited to go back to school, and it was just... It, it was sad seeing the change, you know, of a man who had gotten older. Uh, 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. Um, but it was great that I had many, many years with him, you know, since then.

   12. SBSteven Bartlett7:58

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

   13. DKDara Khosrowshahi8:04

       Yes

   14. SBSteven Bartlett8:05

       ... referenced how you didn't mention him much, but w- when he returned, you broke down in tears. [sniffs] It's okay.

   15. DKDara Khosrowshahi8:23

       Ooh. Yeah, no, don't be. He was a very stoic man.

   16. SBSteven Bartlett8:33

       It's okay.

   17. DKDara Khosrowshahi8:39

       Sorry. He [exhales] passed away a couple of years ago, so it's tough for me to talk about it.

   18. SBSteven Bartlett8:46

       It's okay.

   19. DKDara Khosrowshahi8:57

       All right, let me try again. He was a very stoic man, um, so he kept it all inside, and we were taught to do the same thing. Uh, but we wrote letters together, and they're beautiful letters. He wrote poetry. So I communicated with him in Iran, but there's, um, expression of feelings and kind of, uh, frustration, uh, were not something that my family did. You know, you just dealt with the situation, and so, yeah, I, I think I suffer from, uh, over-stoicism and then breaking down every once in a while, as you just saw.

   20. SBSteven Bartlett9:39

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

   21. DKDara Khosrowshahi9:47

       Mm

   22. SBSteven Bartlett9:47

       ... enforced and, um, modeled to them.

   23. DKDara Khosrowshahi9:50

       Yeah, I don't know if it was enforced. Like, it wasn't-

   24. SBSteven Bartlett9:52

       Implicitly enforced

   25. DKDara Khosrowshahi9:52

       ... actually- yeah, like, we were a very loving family, but my father was very humble. Um, 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? Um, so they... It was, it was a weird combination of stoicism and love at the same time.

3. 10:17 – 16:52

   The Hardest Realization About Having Kids And Their Future

   1. SBSteven Bartlett10:17

      How does, um... 'Cause I'm not a father yet-

   2. DKDara Khosrowshahi10:19

      Yes

   3. SBSteven Bartlett10:20

      ... but I, I'm approaching that [chuckles] now.

   4. DKDara Khosrowshahi10:22

      [chuckles] Congratulations. Almost.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett10:23

      Yeah, almost, yeah. I've just proposed to my fiancée, and we're, you know, we're in the process now of r- 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 st- stoicism [chuckles] passing on to my children?

   6. DKDara Khosrowshahi10:39

      First of all, fatherhood, parenthood is, is so humbling. You have such a picture in your mind as to how you're gonna raise your family, what your kids are gonna be like, and they just become their own people, and it's such a beautiful process to see. And at first, there's this alarm, "Oh, my God, I'm losing control." You know, I've, I've done everything. You've planned everything. This is how I'm gonna raise kids. But then real life gets in the way. It is absolutely exhausting. So you probably execute on 80% of your plan, and you're 20% imperfect 'cause you are exhausted, and you're working, and you got a career, uh, 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, um, 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 control is kind of that connection.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett12:01

      Mm. I, um, speaking of children, I went back and looked through lots of different photos of where you lived and where you grew up, to try and get a picture of your world in an early context.

   8. DKDara Khosrowshahi12:10

      [chuckles]

   9. SBSteven Bartlett12:10

      And all these photos look incredibly, incredibly-

   10. DKDara Khosrowshahi12:13

       [chuckles]

   11. SBSteven Bartlett12:13

       ... I think it was your fifth birthday?

   12. DKDara Khosrowshahi12:15

       ... Oh, wow! I had hair back then. [laughing]

   13. SBSteven Bartlett12:18

       [laughing] You had a lot of hair.

   14. DKDara Khosrowshahi12:19

       My mom loved to dress us up in, like, little doll outfits.

   15. SBSteven Bartlett12:22

       I can tell.

   16. DKDara Khosrowshahi12:23

       Yeah, yeah.

   17. SBSteven Bartlett12:23

       There's another one of you in the garden, I believe.

   18. DKDara Khosrowshahi12:25

       Oh, Lord, look at that. I'm definitely not gonna do that to my kids.

   19. SBSteven Bartlett12:29

       Age four in London-

   20. DKDara Khosrowshahi12:31

       Yes

   21. SBSteven Bartlett12:31

       ... a photo of you.

   22. DKDara Khosrowshahi12:32

       Yes.

   23. SBSteven Bartlett12:33

       You and your cousins there-

   24. DKDara Khosrowshahi12:34

       Yes

   25. SBSteven Bartlett12:35

       ... another photo.

   26. DKDara Khosrowshahi12:35

       Family was everywhere for us.

   27. SBSteven Bartlett12:37

       Can I get another one with a s- a beautiful haircut there?

   28. DKDara Khosrowshahi12:40

       [laughing] It was a great childhood. It was amazing.

   29. SBSteven Bartlett12:43

       I spoke to your mum, Lily.

   30. DKDara Khosrowshahi12:46

       I hope, uh... Well, how'd it go? [laughing]
4. 16:52 – 18:11

   Do Engineers Actually Make Better CEOs — Or Worse?

   1. SBSteven Bartlett16:52

      Engineers make good CEOs?

   2. DKDara Khosrowshahi16:54

      Great CEOs. I- if you step back, companies are just machines, right? They're, they're machines that are run by people, and over a period of time, you actually try to automate some of the stuff that the people do, and then you send the people off to do new stuff that can't be automated. Like, we are rules-based. Like, it's, it's an organism, and it's a machine at the same time, and to some extent, the job of the, the, the CEO is engineering, "How do I set up the company to achieve the goals that, you know, I set for or shareholders set for or my board sets, sets for it?" 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 gotta pick the right goals.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett17:43

      Mm-hmm.

   4. DKDara Khosrowshahi17:43

      Um, that is one giant problem-solving engineering challenge, and it's one of the most fascinating parts of my job.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett17:50

      I wanna get into that, the, the practical company building, how you organize, um, an organization to be a, a well-functioning machine, setting goals and all that stuff. Um, after, after college, you go into investment banking for a period of time?

   6. DKDara Khosrowshahi18:02

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

5. 18:11 – 19:17

   How To Spot The One Person Worth Betting Your Career On

   1. SBSteven Bartlett18:11

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

   2. DKDara Khosrowshahi18:15

      Yes

   3. SBSteven Bartlett18:15

      ... versus other things. What do you mean by betting on people, and why is that important?

   4. DKDara Khosrowshahi18:18

      It was, uh... It, it was actually a lesson that I learned from-... Herbert Allen, who was running Allen & Company at the time. It, it was the, the, uh, the Allens', uh, family started the company, and he always told me, and, and at the time, I didn't really listen to him. He, he always said, "Dara, always bet on people. Companies go- there are good companies, bad companies, but great people stay great all the time." And one of the things that made Allen & Company was really special... You know, investment banking can be a dog-eat-dog sport, but Allen & Company really cultivated relationships with people whom they perceived to be great, both in terms of potential and in terms of character. And of all the investment banks, that loyalty, that making a bet on a person and then staying with them through their whole careers, is a pattern of how that place works, uh, and it's definitely something that,

6. 19:17 – 20:52

   What Separates A Good Employee From A Truly Great One

   1. DKDara Khosrowshahi19:17

      that I learned there.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett19:17

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

   3. DKDara Khosrowshahi19:21

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

   4. SBSteven Bartlett19:30

      Hard work, I'm surprised that wasn't mentioned as-

   5. DKDara Khosrowshahi19:32

      Well, that comes with success.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett19:34

      Okay.

   7. DKDara Khosrowshahi19:34

      Right? Talent and hard work-

   8. SBSteven Bartlett19:35

      Grouped together.

   9. DKDara Khosrowshahi19:35

      -you put it, those two together.

   10. SBSteven Bartlett19:36

       And why did you leave Allen & Company?

   11. DKDara Khosrowshahi19:39

       I left Allen because I met Barry Diller. Uh, he was a client of mine. We got to meet in a big kind of deal, uh, unfriendly, uh, hostile tender offer for Paramount at the time. It's-- There's another one happening, I guess, for Paramount, uh, now as we speak, and he was the one person... I thought I was gonna be an Allen lifer. I thought I was gonna be there forever. My older brother, Kaveh, is an Allen lifer. He has-- It's the only job he's had in his life. But Barry was the one person who I thought, you know, "If I get a chance to work for this person, I'm, I'm, I'm gonna jump at it," and I did.

   12. SBSteven Bartlett20:17

       Why? Why Barry?

   13. DKDara Khosrowshahi20:19

       He, he's spectacular. I mean, he was spectacular. He is spectacular. A doer, you know, he, he... I, I met him in a circumstance where he lost. It was, it was this giant hostile tender offer, bids going back and forth between, uh, the, the winner, Viacom, and, and Barry. Ultimately, Barry stepped away, and we were planning, uh, an announcement. You know, and, and you can imagine all these, like, fancy PR people sitting around a table, "How do we present a loss as a win,"

7. 20:52 – 26:48

   Why Rejection Is The Hidden Engine Behind Every Successful Business

   1. DKDara Khosrowshahi20:52

      right?

   2. SBSteven Bartlett20:52

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

   3. DKDara Khosrowshahi20:54

      He didn't get it, and, and he walked away. He didn't get it 'cause 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 machine. Like, "They won, we lost. Next. What's next? Let's go." And that's the kind of person I wanted to work for.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett21:19

      In business, losing is part of the game.

   5. DKDara Khosrowshahi21:21

      Absolutely. Absolutely. But, but then calling it out, you know, not bullshitting, not like, "Oh, we tried our best, and the circumstances..." "They won, we lost. Next." It's okay.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett21:33

      Does it matter how you lose?

   7. DKDara Khosrowshahi21:35

      Absolutely, it does. That- absolutely it does. It, it's... And, and I find companies guilty of two things like, one is ignoring losses, like papering over losses, et cetera, right? And then sometimes being obsessive about the loss, you know, inspecting it, "What happened? Let's do a summary. Let's meet. What went wrong?" Et cetera. And, and, y- you know, for me, it's somewhere in the middle, which is recognize why you lost, recognize that you lost. Say it, 'cause 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 wanna see. Um, that constant motion and learning is what excites me.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett22:40

      This is business advice, but also life advice generally, because a lot of people, um, who I meet or come up to me and ask me questions about things, often ask questions that sound a lot like what you just said. It's dealing with rejection, dealing with taking an L, and how that L then stays with them, sometimes for a decade, sometimes for fifteen years, and b- and holds them back, hurts their confidence, means that they don't take a- any more shots, and this can cause a, a sort of a downward confidence spiral.

   9. DKDara Khosrowshahi23:05

      Totally. And, and listen, I'm, I'm talking a big game, but I will tell you, in my personal life, I can't deal with rejection. I have a really hard time dealing with rejection. Professional life, no problem whatsoever, so it's like, in the end, we're all humans after all.

   10. SBSteven Bartlett23:19

       You have a, a difficulty dealing with rejection in your personal life?

   11. DKDara Khosrowshahi23:22

       Very much. Yeah, yeah.

   12. SBSteven Bartlett23:23

       What kind of rejection?

   13. DKDara Khosrowshahi23:25

       Any kind of rejection, conflict, like, it's, it's something that has been, uh... that I've fought my whole life [chuckles] which is because I was one of the younger cousins, because I was the youngest brother, I just kind of didn't have rights. So I was- I went with the flow, and going with the flow means you're going with the current, et cetera. I didn't cause trouble, and that has followed me in my personal life. In my professional life, I don't have as much trouble there. I guess my professional life, to some extent, is a mask because I get to be aggressive, I get to lose, et cetera. It's something that Sid, my wife, has really helped me with, uh, but it is something in my personal life that generally I'm conflict-avoidant.

   14. SBSteven Bartlett24:10

       You're conflict-avoidant-

   15. DKDara Khosrowshahi24:11

       Yeah

   16. SBSteven Bartlett24:11

       ... in your personal life?

   17. DKDara Khosrowshahi24:12

       Yeah.

   18. SBSteven Bartlett24:12

       Oh, interesting.

   19. DKDara Khosrowshahi24:12

       Yeah, yeah, definitely.

   20. SBSteven Bartlett24:14

       Hmm, that's not good in a relationship. [chuckles]

   21. DKDara Khosrowshahi24:16

       No, no.

   22. SBSteven Bartlett24:16

       I know. [chuckles]

   23. DKDara Khosrowshahi24:16

       That's why, that's why Sid's helping me out. I'm much better now.

   24. SBSteven Bartlett24:19

       Yeah.

   25. DKDara Khosrowshahi24:20

       I'm much better. But it's, it's when I take those issues on-... I have to fight myself. There's some core, you know, w- if, if you and I were having an issue-

   26. SBSteven Bartlett24:31

       Yeah.

   27. DKDara Khosrowshahi24:31

       - and I was 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-

   28. SBSteven Bartlett24:43

       Hmm

   29. DKDara Khosrowshahi24:43

       ... how relationships, um, over a long period of time, start moving the wrong way. So it is something that is at my core, but I actively fight, uh, and I'm getting better at it, but I'm still on a learning journey there, I'll tell you that.

   30. SBSteven Bartlett24:56

       Eventually, you go on to becoming the CEO of Expedia?
8. 26:48 – 32:52

   How To Spot Big Transitions Before Everyone Else Does

   1. SBSteven Bartlett26:48

      In your job, just before you took on that role as CEO, you were buying businesses, so M&As, mergers and acquisitions, you were buying companies.

   2. DKDara Khosrowshahi26:55

      Yes.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett26:56

      What are some of the companies that you bought?

   4. DKDara Khosrowshahi26:58

      Oh, we bought a lot of companies. Uh, we bought Ticketmaster, uh, we bought Match.com, uh, bought Expedia, Hotels.com, and, and it was all about the theme that Barry and I were, uh, fascinated with, was the movement of commerce online. You know, it was, it was during that, uh, time. It was the late, late '90s, 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 changed. The medium changed 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.com, essentially, in the olden 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'd describe yourself, and you'd hear other kind of, uh, recordings, and you would get matched up based on someone who seemed nice.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett28:10

      Hmm.

   6. DKDara Khosrowshahi28:10

      And all of that just moved online. That was what Match.com was. Same thing with Ticketmaster. You know, in the olden days, you would go to a Tower Records. Have you ever been to a Tower Records?

   7. SBSteven Bartlett28:19

      No.

   8. DKDara Khosrowshahi28:19

      You're too-- Yeah.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett28:20

      [chuckles]

   10. DKDara Khosrowshahi28:20

       So there were these things called record stores, and they also had a desk where they would sell concert tickets.

   11. SBSteven Bartlett28:26

       Hmm.

   12. DKDara Khosrowshahi28:27

       So you would either call for a concert ticket, or you would physically go and buy one. Amazing, and there were lines, Tower Record lines.

   13. SBSteven Bartlett28:34

       What's that? [chuckles]

   14. DKDara Khosrowshahi28:34

       And all of that, exactly, moved online, and same thing with travel, right? You would call a travel agent, and so all of... There was this movement of retail and phone commerce to online commerce, and we identified the early players to make that shift, and personals, ticketing, travel were the ones that we went w- went for because a- 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 f- fulfillment, and that was travel because, you know, it's a virtual good, ticketing, uh, Match.com, which, which was personal. So there was a pattern around madness, so to speak, but we went out and bought all these companies. It was a really great time.

   15. SBSteven Bartlett29:23

       I've got two questions that emerged then. One, one is, again, I'm really interested to understand how you would look for talent or how, what... how you'd think about what a great company is. Are there like, were you, were you looking at the company culture? Were you looking at the founders? Was there something else? Was it the profitability? And the other one is just, uh, really intrigued as to what this period of your life and thereafter taught you about how to spot opportunity and transition. 'Cause that is a transitional moment of technology, and I think there is a certain pattern recognition one can develop as to, like, know what to bet on in these moments of transition, where there's huge skepticism. "The internet's gonna not be anything."

   16. DKDara Khosrowshahi29:58

       Oh.

   17. SBSteven Bartlett29:58

       It's a... So two questions there. One is, like, how do you spot great companies, and then the second is, like, patterns in transition.

   18. DKDara Khosrowshahi30:03

       So they're, uh, I'd say they're, 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 should you invest, what's the return, what, uh, 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'd just identify the leaders and cold call these folks up and say: "I wanna come in and talk to you."

   19. SBSteven Bartlett30:35

       Mm.

   20. DKDara Khosrowshahi30:35

       Like, that was, that was it. A- 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, uh, recognitions i- 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-

   21. SBSteven Bartlett31:29

       Mm

   22. DKDara Khosrowshahi31:29

       ... not what the reality turned out to be. So I do think one of the kind of pieces of pattern recognition with me is just humans think about success and transitions in a linear way, because time is linear. And-

   23. SBSteven Bartlett31:46

       Would you- but for someone that doesn't... Just they think of it going like this?

   24. DKDara Khosrowshahi31:48

       Yeah. You know, it's, it's the... Everything kind of moves this way, right? So your, your schedule is relatively linear, right? It's you sleep seven hours a day. Like, uh, your life is a linear life. But company and company success and company momentum, especially with new technologies, where if there's a technology that's truly better than the other technology, within the virtual world, there's absolutely no friction holding it back, 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 f- to the future, they see this, what actually happens is this.

   25. SBSteven Bartlett32:31

       A hockey stick.

   26. DKDara Khosrowshahi32:31

       And that's where the opportunity is. It's the, it's the spread between the hockey stick and kind of the straight line.

   27. SBSteven Bartlett32:37

       Mm-hmm.

   28. DKDara Khosrowshahi32:38

       Uh, 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 sticked, and online travel was a hockey stick, personals was a hockey stick, ticketing was a hockey stick.

9. 32:52 – 39:48

   The Jevons Paradox: Why Efficiency Can Backfire

   1. SBSteven Bartlett32:52

      I heard about the j- is it Jevons paradox?

   2. DKDara Khosrowshahi32:55

      Yes.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett32:55

      Which I think kind of sort of o- overlaps with what you're saying there. When things become easier, faster, cheaper, people do them not incrementally more, but ex- like, exceptionally more often.

   4. DKDara Khosrowshahi33:06

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

   5. SBSteven Bartlett33:16

      Can you, can you tell me that so- that where it came from? 'Cause a lot of pe- history has now moved forward-

   6. DKDara Khosrowshahi33:19

      Yeah

   7. SBSteven Bartlett33:20

      ... many people have forgotten the story of how it came to be.

   8. DKDara Khosrowshahi33:22

      Now, to some extent, it was... Well, to a large extent, it was, the founding was, was before me, but it was, um, uh, Garrett Camp, who was one of the founders, had this idea, 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 a bunch of young, young tech guys like, "How cool would it be to, 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 Kalanick. Travis was the operator and, and the founder. And to, to your point on Jevons paradox, to some extent, people thought, "Well, what's the size of the black car marketplace?" And it was a couple billion dollars. "Or what's the size of the taxi industry?" And it was, uh, more than a couple of billion dollars. But what they didn't see at the time was that as you improve the con- if you radically make something either more convenient or cheaper, the market expands beyond how you calculate it. So the Uber size and scale now is way beyond the original marketplace of black cars and/or taxis. It, it's the company... The company today is a result of Jevons paradox.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett34:37

      Timing. We often, um, we often don't think much about the luck of timing. Uh, luck is an interesting word to use, but how important timing is-

   10. DKDara Khosrowshahi34:45

       Sure

   11. SBSteven Bartlett34:45

       ... 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?

   12. DKDara Khosrowshahi34:56

       Well, 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 Trav- of Travis was he would hire these market managers who would be GMs of new cities that they would expand into, and they would literally go to the city with a bag full of iPhones and give away iPhones to black car drivers to get them to come on Uber. Because at the time, a lot of them didn't have, you know, they, they didn't have smartphones, 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 raise as much capital i- 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, blitzscaling, which is a term that folks used, uh, all around the world, company wouldn't be what it is today.

   13. SBSteven Bartlett36:05

       Your transition out of investment banking into Expedia, CFO, then CEO, you know, listen, there's a stereotype in business that, um, investment bankers and CFOs don't necessarily make the best CEOs-

   14. DKDara Khosrowshahi36:16

       Yeah

   15. SBSteven Bartlett36:16

       ... because of they might stereotypically-

   16. DKDara Khosrowshahi36:20

       Over-financialize

   17. SBSteven Bartlett36:21

       ... Over-financialize.

   18. DKDara Khosrowshahi36:21

       Yeah. Oh.

   19. SBSteven Bartlett36:22

       Maybe be less risk-averse, maybe be less, you know-

   20. DKDara Khosrowshahi36:24

       Yeah

   21. SBSteven Bartlett36:24

       ... those kinds of things. And when I spoke to Barry-... he did say the following. I'll just play it for you because it's, uh, better coming from him. [chuckles]

   22. SPSpeaker36:33

       He was not a natural leader, uh, because he had, uh, his career up until then has, had been on the financial side of things, so he really 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.

   23. DKDara Khosrowshahi37:03

       Yeah, it was, um... Growing up under Barry was, was-- And, and by the way, I, I wouldn't be where I am today without not him as a mentor, 'cause he's not like a mentoring kind of guy, but him as my leader, l- learning from him. But I'd say that the experience that really, really shaped me, uh, as it relates to Expedia was, I did come in as more of a financial leader. Our leadership at expedia.com failed. I hired a-- I had to fire the first, uh, person. I hired a second person, complete disaster, and so I was oh for two in terms of hiring for our largest business. This business was fifty percent of our profits, and I was oh for two in, uh, in hiring. And so I went to Barry and the board and I said, "Well, if I miss hiring the third person to run the biggest parts of our business, then you should fire me." Barry quickly agreed, "Yes, of course, we will." [chuckles] 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, and find that person. And so for what turned out [chuckles] to be, I think it was five or six years, I ran both the holding company, Expedia Inc., which is a public company, and I ran expedia.com. I was president of the largest part of the company. That experience taught me my operating chops. That experience actually taught me how is it that you operate a company? How is it that you run something? And that's a very different skill set from capital allocation and, you know, all the financial, uh, wizardry 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, 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. Uh, and I, I think to some extent now I've got both. I've got that financial part, 'cause it has to work, but the operations and the leadership part of the business is something that, that I love, and, and watching Barry take responsibility, take shots, go against the grain, um, as aggressively as he consistently did, I think has made me a much better operator than what the counterfactual would be if I had another boss.

10. 39:48 – 46:54

    Why Radical Transparency Makes You A Stronger CEO

    1. SBSteven Bartlett39:48

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

    2. DKDara Khosrowshahi39:53

       [laughing] I'd forgotten about that. [laughing]

    3. SBSteven Bartlett39:56

       [laughing] What's the context?

    4. DKDara Khosrowshahi39:57

       I think that was my job, yeah. [laughing]

    5. SBSteven Bartlett40:00

       [laughing] What's the context there?

    6. DKDara Khosrowshahi40:01

       You, you know, the context was that I-- f- first of all, turnarounds in technology are really hard. Uh, we were talking about the momentum thing, when momentum of po- is positive. In the technology sector, if momentum turns negative, it is remarkably difficult to turn it around. You know, Yahoo! was 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, when I was talking about linear versus exponential, just like the curves up are exponential, curves down are exponential as well. The first couple of years look bad, but they're not that bad.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett40:47

       Mm.

    8. DKDara Khosrowshahi40:47

       But you know in your mind that ten years from now, it's gonna be a fucking disaster.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett40:53

       Mm-hmm.

    10. DKDara Khosrowshahi40:54

        So what I saw with Expedia 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 rung, 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 to 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- o- o- one of the skills that I learned from Barry is transparency. It, it's like whenever he wanted to understand an issue, he wanted to go to the source. He didn't want a summary, and it didn't matter where that source was. Is it a junior analyst or a president? He wanted to hear from the source because what he didn't want to lose is lose the fidelity of the issue. You know, when there's an issue here, and then it goes through the analyst, and the associate, and the vice president, and then SVP, and whatever, by the time it's summarized for you as the CEO, it's just-- it's lost everything. And usually, their levels are like, "Hey, do we really want to tell him that? Why don't we phrase it this way?" Et cetera. So your whole life as a CEO is kind of a-... it's a version of the world that your team wants you to see. And if you've got a good team, usually it has more to do with reality than not. But you are subject to your team and the information flow that, that gets to you. And so Barry always wanted to go to the source. He would just cut through levels, cut through levels, get to the core of the idea, and then once he did, he would move, and he would move fast. And for me, I've kind of-- I have held onto 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, ki- ki- kind of meters, so, 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 their, 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, it was almost like a self-defense mechanism that, as a boss, I'm gonna tell you what's going on because that's the only way I can drag the hard truths back from you. 'Cause otherwise, you're gonna filter yourself. You're gonna be like: I don't want Dara to know this happened.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett44:04

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

    12. DKDara Khosrowshahi44:07

        Then they can leave. And, and I think that that's... So I think that's what my head of HR was saying. I was scaring the shit out of people 'cause I'm like: "We have a real problem here, and we've gotta come together." And, and I think that, that, i- you know, uh, there, there's a... Uh, I was-- A good decision-making framework for me is, um, if I make a mistake, where do I wanna make the mistake at, right? And so if I want to-- If I'm gonna err with my company, I'm gonna err in telling the truth and potentially scaring someone away. I'll take that because if that person doesn't wanna face the truth, if he or she's not up for the fight, then they should go someplace else. They can have a good time. I'm sure they can have a good career, et cetera. So for me, as a leader, I've always, always believed in transparency, partially 'cause then I think you attract the right people-

    13. SBSteven Bartlett44:59

        Mm-hmm.

    14. DKDara Khosrowshahi44:59

        ... and, uh, 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, the, 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, the information that gets to me, not because they're bad people. It's just their job, 'cause I can get overwhelmed. Who do I meet with? What's my schedule? You know, is this person worthy of meeting the CEO? And for me, my fight is, I just set up a bunch of random shit. I'll meet with, you know, engineers four levels down consistently 'cause usually they've got the kind of personality where they don't give a shit. They'll tell me anything and everything, and they like putting the CEO down. That's great, right?

    15. SBSteven Bartlett46:10

        They like putting the CEO down.

    16. DKDara Khosrowshahi46:12

        It's... You know, engineers often, you know, don't like authority, and code is, like, the biggest authority buster. It's like the truth-truth. Uh, so I find 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 I love.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett46:33

        I've found in my companies that there's sometimes, like, a twenty-four-year-old young girl who will just tell me the truth.

    18. DKDara Khosrowshahi46:38

        Yeah.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett46:38

        And-

    20. DKDara Khosrowshahi46:40

        She's the one-

    21. SBSteven Bartlett46:41

        [chuckles] Yeah

    22. DKDara Khosrowshahi46:41

        ... you wanna hang out with.

    23. SBSteven Bartlett46:42

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

    24. DKDara Khosrowshahi46:44

        Absolutely. A- so that, that's-- You've gotta have your, your own channels, but the way to, the way to get transparency from your team is first, first, you've got to give it to them.

11. 46:54 – 49:44

    Can You Really Turn A Comfortable Team Into A Hungry One?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett46:54

       Was the culture hardworking when you arrived? 'Cause you used the word 'coasting' to describe some of the team when you arrived at Expedia.

    2. DKDara Khosrowshahi47:00

       Medium.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett47:00

       Medium.

    4. DKDara Khosrowshahi47:00

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

    5. SBSteven Bartlett47:13

       The entire team?

    6. DKDara Khosrowshahi47:14

       Almost the entire team. Yeah, yeah. It was, uh, it was rough going for a while, but then you have kinda mission-oriented people who are trying to prove themselves. Um, and it's part of the renewal that every company has to go through. And we turned it around. It was, it was tough going, but we really turned around, and that was when I kinda-- I learned, hey, my, my love is running shit. It's great. It's the best part of my job.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett47:37

       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-

    8. DKDara Khosrowshahi47:42

       Yeah

    9. SBSteven Bartlett47:42

       ... coasting, 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 if, even two hundred people?

    10. DKDara Khosrowshahi47:53

        It's very difficult. Um, and sometimes the shortcut is to change the people. Like, it's very easy to say, "Oh, you have values," this and that. So it's, it's finding the people who you believe will line up with your cultural mechanisms, or how you work, or your values, and then embodying those values and those mechanisms as examples, and then making sure that your team embodies those values and imbues down the, down the organization. So part of working hard is, like, you know, sending emails to the team on a Saturday, and if I don't get a response on Saturday, sending them an email on Sunday with a question mark: "What's going on?" You know, I think at Expedia, in hindsight-... we, we worked intensely, and, and, and we went hard. But, but not as hard as I like, because Expedia 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-life balance. Uh, and in hindsight, at Uber, I don't. You know, you come to Uber, you're gonna work your ass off. We're gonna be really demanding. If you're not performing, we're going to let you know, and if you don't fix it, we're gonna push you out. But while it will be incredibly hard, you will have real agency at the company. We're a big company, but individuals can make a big difference, and it's a company that's making a difference in the world. You're gonna learn so much, and while you will have worked hard, you're gonna have a great time. But this is... Don't come here if you wanna coast, and I'm very clear about that, and I should have been more clear at Expedia, but we were selling vacations, so I couldn't be quite that clear. [paper rustling]

12. 49:44 – 51:11

    Ads

    1. SBSteven Bartlett49:44

       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 a 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've 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 if twenty twenty-six is the year you finally back yourself, go to shopify.co.uk/bartlett and start selling, and you can sign up for a one dollar per month trial right now, too. Just go to shopify.co.uk/bartlett. I promise you, you don't need to have it all figured out. You just need to start. [paper rustling] In your twelve years as CEO, Expedia stock rose five hundred and fifty percent, and sales increased four hundred percent from two point one billion to eight point eight billion, and you were the highest paid CEO of a US tech company with a pay of n- ninety-four point one million.

    2. DKDara Khosrowshahi51:03

       I left it all behind to go to Uber. [chuckles]

    3. SBSteven Bartlett51:05

       You left it all behind to go- [chuckles]

    4. DKDara Khosrowshahi51:05

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

13. 51:11 – 57:38

    The Career Advice Young People Need — But Rarely Hear

    1. SBSteven Bartlett51:11

       I'm so, I'm so intrigued about this point of hard work because I think ten years ago, saying what you just said was very taboo.

    2. DKDara Khosrowshahi51:17

       Yes. [chuckles]

    3. SBSteven Bartlett51:18

       It feels to me more in vogue now. [chuckles]

    4. DKDara Khosrowshahi51:20

       We're freed now, yes.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett51:21

       [chuckles] You're freed now.

    6. DKDara Khosrowshahi51:22

       Yes. Yes, indeed.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett51:23

       [chuckles]

    8. DKDara Khosrowshahi51:24

       It's, it... I've, I've gotten, um... You know, sometimes people ask me the question, uh, "What advice would you give to young people?" And to me, the most important skill in life is the skill of working hard, and it's not a skill. You, you can't just, like, decide you're gonna do it, and I think way too many pe- many people, you know, focus on, "Should you be a, should, should you be a computer programmer or a doctor or study the liberal arts now that anyone can vibe code?" Just learn to work hard. And it is... You, you know, the, the-- when you see the top athletes, of course, they're talented, and th- the, you know, their talent level is world levels. But the thing that changes 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, et cetera. That's-- the same thing is true in all of life. It's true in business. It's true in personal life, and so for me, w- w- with my kids, I just want to teach them how to work hard. And, and for me, like, growing up, I, as a banker, as an executive, I'm not gonna let anyone outwork me, and if that's true, then they may be smarter, more talented, et cetera, but I'm not gonna let anyone outwork me. And I think that that's a huge advantage that you have, and over a period of time, that advantage compounds, and I want that in our company. Like, I want Uber to be an incredibly hardworking company.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett52:57

       Comes at a cost, though, no, working hard?

    10. DKDara Khosrowshahi52:59

        Yes. It, it comes at a trade-off, and, and we, 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 wanna have dinner with your family, and I'm, I'm religious about having dinners with my family when I'm in town, you know, six to eight, uh, absolutely spend that time with my family, but at, you know, nine-thirty pm, I'm checking emails.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett53:24

        Mm-hmm.

    12. DKDara Khosrowshahi53:24

        Right? When I wake up at five-thirty am, in the am, I'm, I'm checking emails. So, of course, there are trade-offs, and, you know, life is about trade-offs.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett53:32

        I think one of the most important things I've learned from interviewing CEOs, and generally, we've gone through a transition of COVID and remote work and then come back into, 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 in their lives.

    14. DKDara Khosrowshahi53:45

        Absolutely.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett53:46

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

    16. DKDara Khosrowshahi53:59

        And I'm allowing them to be honest back to me.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett54:01

        Yeah, and you're a... That's a com- that's a company culture that someone like me would be attracted to.

    18. DKDara Khosrowshahi54:05

        Absolutely.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett54:05

        But there's lots of people listening that couldn't think of anything worse.

    20. DKDara Khosrowshahi54:07

        And that's okay.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett54:08

        Yes. Yeah.

    22. DKDara Khosrowshahi54:09

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

    23. SBSteven Bartlett54:13

        You said learn to work hard. Learn.

    24. DKDara Khosrowshahi54:17

        It's a, it's a skill.

    25. SBSteven Bartlett54:19

        Really?

    26. DKDara Khosrowshahi54:19

        Yes, of course it is.

    27. SBSteven Bartlett54:20

        Because you, you-

    28. DKDara Khosrowshahi54:21

        Because you, you've got to... The idea of just staying focused on something, not being discouraged by failing, trying over and over again, and just working harder than others, it- 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, uh, at Uber, there, there's actually a saying, it's, it's ins- it's inside one of our values: "Embrace the grind." You know, embrace it. That's y- that's a learned skill. That's not something you're born with. Maybe, maybe there's an element that you're born with.

    29. SBSteven Bartlett54:53

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

    30. DKDara Khosrowshahi54:59

        Ah, that's a good question. [chuckles] No, no, doesn't occur to me. Have you?
14. 57:38 – 1:01:55

    How To Build A Culture Of Continuous Improvement That Never Stalls

    1. SBSteven Bartlett57:38

       If you're taking two shots, not only are you gonna get two data points of information, but you're also increasing your probability of having a successful shot by, like, one hundred percent.

    2. DKDara Khosrowshahi57:46

       Shots on goal. Just shots on goal.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett57:48

       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.

    4. DKDara Khosrowshahi57:57

       Yeah.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett57:57

       And, you know, we high-five, and then, and then we chill. And then, actually, the studies show- they did this big meta-analysis where they looked at successful companies, and they showed that they become risk adverse-

    6. DKDara Khosrowshahi58:06

       Totally

    7. SBSteven Bartlett58:07

       ... because of-

    8. DKDara Khosrowshahi58:07

       Totally

    9. SBSteven Bartlett58:07

       ... the loss aversion. They have something to lose now, so just protect.

    10. DKDara Khosrowshahi58:11

        I think the good news, to some extent with Uber, is that we've always been a company that has had a chip on its shoulder. You know, it, it-- the company had a chip on its shoulder when it was founded, and it had to, like, fight taxi unions for its very existence. Uh, 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, to do better. Then people saying, you know, "It was a tough IPO," uh, "Uber's never gonna g- 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 a-- we are a hungry company, and I do think we're sometimes guilty of getting complacent in little ways. And I have a leadership team that when they see complacency, more often than not, than not, they identify it, and they get it the hell out. It's, it's a team that is not satisfied, that's always driving, and I love that about us.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett59:25

        How does one balance enjoying the success and the accomplishments? I mean, you've turned this company around, a highly profitable company. Everyone that I've spoken to, many of our mutual friends, have talked lovingly about the impact you've had on the business. I mean, the numbers speak for themselves. When you joined Uber, Uber was losing two point five to three billion per year. Now it generates eight point five billion in free cash flow every year. How do you get people to-

    12. DKDara Khosrowshahi59:50

        Nine point eight in the last year, but who's counting? [laughing]

    13. SBSteven Bartlett59:52

        [laughing] You, you're counting.

    14. DKDara Khosrowshahi59:53

        [laughing]

    15. SBSteven Bartlett59:53

        Nine point eight. Okay, incredible. Y- celebrate. Chill.

    16. DKDara Khosrowshahi59:58

        Sh- Well-

    17. SBSteven Bartlett59:59

        [laughing]

    18. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:00:00

        ... you, you can, you can celebrate and not chill.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:02

        Okay, how?

    20. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:00:02

        You can-- We, we take those moments. We do cele-- It, it's cool to run a company that's so important. It's cool to run a company that's hitting record after record after record, and we do celebrate those records, and we do celebrate those teams. Maybe not enough. And again, it goes to, like, what, what, what mistake would you rather make? I'd ma- 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, um, we, we take our moments. But the, the, 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, uh, and I think my team does, too.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:45

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

    22. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:00:54

        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 the team about, taking smart risks. I think you're absolutely right, which is, as companies get bigger and more successful, they tend to become more risk-averse. And it should be the exact opposite, because you can take more risks, you can make more mistakes, because you've got kind of this nine point eight billion of cash flow to protect yourself against some of those mistakes. So I have definitely, in the past, I would say two years, pushed the team actively to push the envelope in terms of risk. Don't be defensive, be offensive, et cetera. And it comes from my challenging the teams, my talking about it, setting examples of sometimes failing and then saying, "It's okay, moving on." Uh, and then sometimes my taking decisions that are seen as more risky than not. That setting the example then allows the company to follow.

15. 1:01:55 – 1:06:58

    Why Most Teams Fail At Goals — And How To Set Ones That Actually Work

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:55

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

    2. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:02:00

       Um, it-- all the teams have different goals, business goals. The ads team has to drive ad technology-driven, incremental ad, uh, dollars per year, and/or customer satisfaction, uh, customer NPS, et cetera. So every team has its own goals, uh, and they organize against those goals, and they execute those, those goals, and they're religiously tracked. It's the best mechanism that we have. I just wish that there was a better one, because the art of the goal setting becomes the issue, which is: Are you setting the right goals? Are they too ambitious? Are they not ambitious enough? And sometimes people can game the system. So we use it, but I can't tell you that it's perfect.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:02:44

       What about, uh... You talked earlier about values. A lot of companies go and do an off-site, and they write some words on a-

    4. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:02:48

       Yeah

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:02:48

       ... words on a white-- on a wall, and they say, "ambition, enthusiasm, courage," whatever. What do you think of that sort of corporate habit of goal, values and stuff?

    6. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:02:58

       We went through the exercise, [chuckles] failed the first time, succeeded the second time. We-- and, and when it-- and we failed. When I 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. It was a statement. And the culture had, I think, some cool stuff in there, some cool ideas in there. Like for, for example, there was one value that was, um, toe-stepping. And the idea of toe-stepping is, is what you and I talked about earlier, which is we want to challenge each other within the organization. And so if I have to step on your toes and tell you something that you don't want to hear, I'm allowed to, even though it hurts you, uh, because the truth is more important. So sometimes the truth hurts, and that's okay. That was the idea of toe-stepping. And what happened was sometimes those values became weaponized, where toe-stepping, whose spirit came from a place of, "We want to speak the truth," became an excuse to be a jerk.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:06

       Mm.

    8. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:04:07

       Right? So the values in and of themselves can be great or terrible, based on how you execute on, on those values. When I first came in, we had to redo the values, and I was-- There, there's a saying by, um, Jeff Bezos that, that I love, which is, like, the, 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 gonna fail-

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:34

       Mm-hmm

    10. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:04:34

        ... 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 employees in the company: "What values do you think should be part of the new Uber?" et cetera. We took all the signal, and then we edited it and came up with a new list of, 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, it, it, it, it was a message to the whole company, which was, if you work at Uber, you have a responsibility, and I'm not gonna tell you exactly what to do, so use your judgment. And it's our expectation that you use your judgment to do the right thing, and sometimes doing the right thing is not clear. Should I go after my business goals? Should I compromise on a business goal because safety is in question? Of course you should. Safety comes first, before business, et cetera. But we were putting that weight and that responsibility in, uh, within the employees. But the rest of the value system that was kind of crowdsourced, it was forgettable, because it was the kind of stuff that you... Passion, ambition, teamwork. Like, what company doesn't believe in teamwork? Give me a break. So we, uh... Nikki Krishnamurthy, who runs, uh, People, she pushed me to reset the values four or five years in. By then, I felt like I did have a right to have a point of view. I'd been there. We weren't quite done with the turnaround, et cetera, but I was a part of the company. And then we came up with a value set, which is different. You know, there's, uh... Our-- One of our values-- By the way, "go get it" was the only one that survived. [chuckles]

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:30

        Mm-hmm.

    12. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:06:30

        No, 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? Rides 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.

16. 1:06:58 – 1:13:54

    What Happens When Leadership Alignment Breaks Down

    1. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:06:58

       And so the value sets that we have, go get it, or one that I really like, great minds don't think alike.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:04

       Mm.

    3. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:07:05

       We s- came up with a s- with a set of values which I think is unusual and describes how we are different as a company, and it's really true to who we are.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:13

       How important is, um, this sort of, this attitude of failure and experimentation, especially in a world that's transitioning as fast as the one we're in? When you listen to people like Ray Kurzweil, his predictions of the future, he says that if you're ten now, by the age of sixty, you'll experience a year's change in, I think it's eleven days, and just this sort of, this sort of exponential acceleration.

    5. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:07:31

       The law of accelerating returns.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:33

       Yeah.

    7. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:07:33

       Yeah.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:33

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

    9. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:07:40

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

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:55

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

    11. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:09:06

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

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:23

        Mm

    13. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:09:24

        ... and built out this peer-to-peer ride-sharing. And it's probably five or six years ago, our head of product now, Sa- Sachin, he worked on building kind of, um, a technology that would allow taxi companies to, to have their own little Uber app, and eventually he came to Uber, thank God, and he's like: "Well, why don't we build that in Uber? Why don't we actually build taxis on Uber?" And originally, within the company, and, and I, I kept in touch with some of the founders just 'cause I want their advice, 'cause why not? You know, they, they built a great company. I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. Uh, they said, "It's the most idiotic thing on Earth. You can't wire up taxis. They hate us. The, like, acceptance rate will be terrible," lots of technical reasons. They had tried it earlier. It was a total failure. But I think Sachin, uh, having worked in the industry, and then my being kind of ignorant, saying, "Why the hell not try it?" That combination allowed us to build out a taxi product, and taxi is the fastest-growing segment of the company, and it went completely against the founding of the company. But now we're, you know... I, I hope to have every single taxi in the world wired up to Uber. Why not?

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:10:34

        [paper rustling] For the first ten 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. My mood, 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 WHOOP 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 WHOOP has given me insights into my sleep, my recovery, the strain I'm taking on, and more broadly, how my daily behaviors 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'll nudge me, sometimes it'll get me to slow down, sometimes it pushes me to go even harder, but all the time it provides me with data that gives me a deeper 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.whoop.com/ceo. One month free: join.whoop.com/ceo. [paper rustling] This company that I've just invested in 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. Wispr Flow is 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 out 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 when 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 Wispr 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, "Jack's LinkedIn," and it copies Jack's LinkedIn profile for me because it knows who Jack is in my life. This is saving me a huge amount of time. This company is growing like absolute crazy, and this is why I invested in the business and why they're now a sponsor of this show. And Wispr Flow is frankly becoming the worst-kept secret in business, productivity, and entrepreneurship. Check it out now at Wispr Flow, spelled W-I-S-P-R F-L-O-W, .ai/stephen. It will be a game changer for you. [paper rustling] This is something that I've made for you. I've realized that The Diary Of A CEO 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 at 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 one percent. 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 one percent diaries, and we 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 diary. 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, then I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again. And you can get yours now at thediary.com, where you can get twenty percent off our Black Friday bundle. And if you want the link, the link is in the description below. [paper rustling]

17. 1:13:54 – 1:18:53

    How AI Is Reshaping Our Business — And What We’re Doing Next

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:55

       And there's another, um-- there's an alien that's arrived amongst us, um, which is AI, and you've-- you know, Uber's always been somewhat powered, from what I understand, by-

    2. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:14:02

       Very much so.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:03

       - to some degree. But, um, the world has changed in the last couple of years as it relates to AI.

    4. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:14:06

       Yeah, yeah.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:06

       There's been a huge acceleration in investment and improvement of the technology. What are you-- U- aside from Uber, you talked earlier about your early childhood and how y- you know, you grew up with a bit of a paranoia about losing everything because that's what you experienced as a young man.

    6. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:14:22

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:23

       You see this technology arrive, which is fundamentally disruptive to all of us, including me as a podcaster.

    8. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:14:27

       Yeah.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:27

       I've done the tests, and [chuckles] the retention isn't-

    10. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:14:29

        Oh, is it? [laughing]

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:30

        ... the retention isn't far off when it's me or AI, so [laughing]

    12. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:14:32

        [laughing]

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:32

        - it's slightly concerning. But, like, how do you, how do you approach such a tech-- disruptive technology? Um, how do you think of it broadly and the impact it's gonna have on society? And are you paranoid?

    14. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:14:43

        Uh, I'm not paranoid. I, I'm not-- I, I guess, I was gonna say I'm not built that way, but maybe I am. I, I think my instinct is always just to go, just to move forward. And Uber has been built out of an AI core. All of our pricing, all of our routing, who you're matched with, uh, whether or not a courier batches a trip, which is, do they take two orders or one order? All of our systems, underlying systems are, are driven by AI. We do forty million trips a day. You know, that kind of orchestration can't be done by, uh, heuristic rules, and we've got to work on the streets of New York and the streets of Lagos as well. So the, the s-- we, we have built the entire company on small AI models that have been trained on local problems and then get stitched together. That's literally what the company is. So for us, AI is, it's kind of a core skill set, and, and AI can... It can mess things up, right? It, it's not because it's not heuristics-based, there are emergent issues that come out of an AI that works ninety-six percent of the time, and four percent of the time, it screws up. So we're comfortable with the uncertainty layer of AI as a company. So we are, I would say, moving headlong into AI. We're not one of the, 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. Uh, but, you know, stepping back as a, as a person, the impact on society is going to be enormous. And going back to Kurzweil's kind of law of accelerating returns, whereas previously, society has always been able to adjust to these kinds of shifts, um, 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 seventy, eighty percent of humans can do over the next ten years. Ten years is not a lot of time for society to adjust to that kind of an impact. Now, are they gonna be more expensive than humans, cheaper than humans, et cetera? Who knows, but the capability will be there probably in the next ten years for intellectual jobs, probably call it fifteen years for physical, fifteen to twenty years for physical jobs, because physical AI-

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:17:11

        Robots

    16. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:17:11

        ... is harder. You know, robots, cars, et cetera, more capital-heavy, takes longer, have to deal with the physical world. So the, the changes in society are gonna be giant, but my view is you can't slow down the rate of change, and if you're a part of that change, at least you can have some say as to how that change imprints on society and imprints on the real world. And so for me, I'm leaning in, and it's a, it's a very, very exciting time.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:17:47

        Seventy to eighty percent of jobs will be, uh, disrupted by AI, is, like, broadly what you said there, and the pace of change is gonna mean that a lot of people don't have new jobs to go to because we haven't-

    18. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:17:58

        I think that's the question.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:17:59

        The retraining challenge.

    20. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:18:00

        Yeah.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:00

        And people say, "Well, there's gonna be jobs in AI," but, like, listen, I, I've got some friends that can't just [laughing] become researchers.

    22. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:18:06

        Society's always adjusted, right? Farming was a huge percentage of our labor force, now it's less than one percent.

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:12

        But the speed of which-

    24. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:18:13

        Yeah, that, I, I think that's a question. And you could argue that AIs will be able to retrain you, right?

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:17

        Mm-hmm.

    26. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:18:17

        The, the job retraining is going to change, so of course, society is gonna adjust, but I, I do think it raises questions, real questions.

    27. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:25

        I've, 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 seventy or eighty people, p- 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-

    28. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:18:36

        Yeah

    29. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:36

        ... um, across the board, that AI is now doing exceptionally well. And every single day, literally daily, we try to see if e- the new model, Gemini Pro 3, 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-

    30. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:18:52

        Totally
18. 1:18:53 – 1:23:44

    Why 90% Of Our Coders Now Rely On AI — And What That Changes

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:53

       you talk about a lot, where there's been already sort of big dis- disruption, positive disruption at, uh, Uber.... and a lot of your coders are now using AI tools?

    2. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:19:01

       Yeah, about ninety percent of our coders are using AI. Now, that's easy to say, but, but there are probably thirty percent of them that are power users. They are showing a clear, um, differentiation in the number of diffs. For example, how much... A, 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, uh, and there are architects who are kind of thinking about what the system should, should look like. Uh, and so while ninety percent of our engineers are using AI tools of some sort, there's about thirty percent of them that are using them at a completely a- accelerated pace, and it really is changing their productivity in a way that I've never, ever seen before. Ultimately, I do think that the job of a coder is going to change more and more from actually writing the code from, to some extent, orchestrating agents who are writing the code or building systems for you. It becomes more of an orchestration job versus a manual writing job, but the job will still be there, and my attitude is, if my average engineer became twenty-five, twenty-five percent more efficient, which we haven't gone there yet, but we will get there, I'm gonna hire more engineers 'cause I wanna go faster. There, there are still lots of unsolved problems that we haven't solved, but I can imagine, you know, maybe five years from now, as the engineers get more and more productive, I may not decide to add engineering headcount, because at that point, instead of adding in an engineer, I should add agents and buy some more GPUs from Nvidia. That may be the investment in the future. We'll see.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:20:51

       'Cause thinking about linear versus exponential as well-

    4. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:20:53

       Yeah

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:20:53

       ... if we imagine the rate of improvement, I don't know, in my head, I go, "Well, won't there come a time where you as the CEO or you and a team, an executive team, can tell an agent what you want to build?" You can show it the strategy, and theoretically, I mean, I can't figure out how this isn't gonna be possible, the agents will then build... Actually, maybe they didn't even need you to set the strategy. Maybe- [laughing]

    6. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:21:15

       [laughing]

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:16

       No, but theoretically, you know, if they- if you imagine any rate of improvement in the intelligence, maybe at some point they're gonna go, "Well, listen, we, there's a better strategy here, Dara."

    8. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:21:23

       One, one of my, uh, uh, one of my team members told me that, uh, some teams have built a, a Dara AI,

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:30

       [chuckles]

    10. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:21:31

        you know, so, so that they basically make the presentation to the Dara AI as a prep for making a presentation to me.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:39

        [chuckles]

    12. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:21:39

        'Cause you can imagine, like, you know, by the time something comes to me, there's been a prep and a meeting, the, and the slide deck has been beautifully honed, so they have Dara AI to tune their prep.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:49

        Are you concerned they might show Dara AI to the board? [laughing]

    14. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:21:52

        [laughing] I was like, I was like, "Can I see the code for Dara AI, Kira?" She's like, "No, we're not showing it to you."

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:00

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

    16. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:22:06

        Yeah

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:06

        ... where-

    18. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:22:08

        I think, I think where AI still is missing a beat that humans and other creatures have is the ability to learn real time, right? So if you, if you think about you and I are learning for this conversation, and maybe your behavior is gonna change by point one percent, because of actually what you learn here. And the construct of most large AI models is capture enorm- enormous amounts of data based on the skill set that you're trying to drive, train, pre-train that model, put it into the real world, and then there's some post-training of the, of the model based on feedback from, from the world, and then, when the model's 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, 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.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:23:20

        Sounds like me.

    20. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:23:21

        Yeah. [chuckles]

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:23:22

        Post-training. I'm post-training.

    22. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:23:23

        Ex- exactly. So it... Well, so we are post-training, but we're learning real time as human beings. And the- when the models can learn real time-

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:23:35

        Mm-hmm

    24. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:23:35

        ... that, I think, is the point at which I'm going to kinda think, yeah, we are all replaceable, but at this point, I haven't seen a model that

19. 1:23:44 – 1:35:06

    Will AI Replace 9.5 Million Uber Drivers — Or Create Something Bigger?

    1. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:23:44

       can learn real time.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:23:45

       One of the real areas of disruption in AI has been autonomous vehicles, and I was-

    3. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:23:48

       Yes

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:23:48

       ... just before we started recording, I was saying that, uh, I have a Tesla in LA, where I live, and it's staggering that I can get in the car-

    5. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:23:56

       It's cool. Yeah

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:23:56

       ... press a button, and drive two and a half hours to Joshua Tree without having to touch the wheel or the s- the pedals. Now, driving, I think, is one of the biggest employers in the world, like, as a profession.

    7. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:24:05

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

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:24:18

       Wow!

    9. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:24:19

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

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:24:22

        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 the autonomous driving is currently safer?

    11. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:24:35

        That's true. So Waymos are safer, and then now you are a backup to the Tesla, right, as a human being. So I've, I've got a Tesla as well, and once in a while, it disengages, and I've got to or I've got to disengage. So and it's not necessarily the pure autonomous agent that's better than humans, but definitely the autonomous agent with a human backup, no question that's better than the pure human.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:25:00

        And we can't be far away from it just being-

    13. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:25:02

        ... I mean, Waymo's there already, right? Uh, you've- you live in LA.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:25:06

        I've tried it, yeah.

    15. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:25:06

        Uh, they've got the Waymos. We work with them in Austin, uh, in Atlanta, and by all accounts, Waymo drivers are safer than human beings, and that's gonna be true of AV all over the world. You know, there, there are a million deaths, uh, from driving every year in the world. In the US, it's between thirty-five thousand and forty thousand, uh, auto fatalities. So to the extent that these, these autonomous agents and drivers can be better than humans, and they will be better than humans over a period of time, uh, there's a real return on human life as a result of this.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:25:42

        Those nine million drivers' careers that you have will be out of work c- conceivably, in the... You know, talking about being honest about the situation.

    17. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:25:50

        Yeah, I think, uh, again, it goes to physical AI as well, right? So I think twenty years from now, you can imagine that those nine million will be twenty million, uh, 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, 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 ten years from now, but you go fifteen, twenty years from now, you're gonna start getting there.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:26:32

        What do the nine million people do?

    19. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:26:35

        I don't know. Now, we are expanding the kind of work that's available on, 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, a little while at least before you get AI shoppers, and now actually, we have a team called Uber AI Solutions that, uh, allows people to train these same agents and train, uh, AI agents and AI models, uh, and do all kinds of knowledge-based work on their phone as well to kind of extend the kind of work that we offer, uh, humans on our platform and different opportunities for them, for them to, to make money. So we are extending the platform, and then the question is: how much of the platform gets automated, and what's the velocity at which we can extend our platform into other kinds of work versus the velocity of automation? I can't tell you which is gonna go faster.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:31

        H- hand on heart, though, the, the... It does appear that un- unemployment is gonna be significantly increased in a world of AI, especially we just imagine this sort of continual rate of improvement. I just can't-

    21. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:27:41

        You, you, you would have to. I, u- unless, again, historically in societies, new kinds of jobs have come up.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:49

        Knowledge jobs, physical jobs-

    23. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:27:51

        Yeah, I mean-

    24. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:51

        And now we've disrupted both.

    25. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:27:53

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

    26. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:22

        It's interesting because what I was thinking, putting two and two together about your, your, your father's journey of coming to the US, losing what he had, losing his job, and the, the loss of, like, meaning and purpose being really central to him, and I could see that in b- basically from your face, that m- m- I think, uh, what I interpreted from your face was that he struggled with, as any provider would, the loss of, like, meaning that comes with-

    27. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:28:42

        Yes

    28. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:42

        ... because jobs aren't just about money. The- it's es- especially, you know, they give you a sense of worth. And it's funny, I, I've, I've read, um, I've read a study many years ago that said when they looked at suicide letters specifically from men, I think it was an Australian study, in the suicide letters, the, the sentiment was about not feeling worth-

    29. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:29:04

        Yes

    30. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:04

        ... ful to your family.
20. 1:35:06 – 1:43:16

    The Best Advice For Thriving In An AI-Dominated Future

    1. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:35:06

       machine.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:07

       You've got four kids?

    3. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:35:08

       Yes.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:09

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

    5. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:35:14

       Work hard. You're gonna be fine. Work hard. It's, it's just that's-- I, I mean, now the AIs theoretically can, can work harder than you. But I, I find one of the pieces of advice I give to young people is: don't plan. Okay, I wind up... We went through our history. I wind up where I am today having not planned a thing. I didn't... When I was a investment banker, I wasn't dreaming of becoming CEO, et cetera. 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 someone agrees with you, makes you feel a little bit better. Anytime you get signal that goes against your preconceived notions, either you ignore it or you're like, "All right, shit, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take this on." It's unpleasant. And so with, with career planning, what I find is people who have too clear a, uh, 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, and so what I tell some folks is like, "Before you go out and ch- try to change the world, let the world change you first." You know, take input, and if you're like this, you got blinders, 'cause 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 i-t it's, you know, the one constant I see [chuckles] is people who are good are good. People who are good, I've never seen a successful person in, in a job or a career get there without working hard. And my guess is, I don't know about you, you kinda wound up where you're wound up, kinda by accident.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:37:11

       Yeah, I think it's fair to say, yes.

    7. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:37:11

       And people are like, "Well, you got lucky." I got very lucky.... to be here. Like, s- I had so many kind of moments, and, and some would say I took advantage of that lu- of, of that luck, but to some extent, I was able to take advantage of that luck because I was open.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:37:30

       Being open, you jumped from Expedia to Uber, um, in part helped by some advice that our mutual friend, Daniel Ek, the founder-

    9. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:37:37

       [laughing] Yeah

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:37:37

        ... of Spotify, gave you. Uh, he's actually just texted me. I texted him saying, "Hey, can you, uh, can you send me a question to ask Dara?" But he said, "I'm in the middle of an-"

    11. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:37:43

        You're texting while we're talking? [laughing] Damn it!

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:37:45

        [laughing] No, just before I walked in. I've just looked, he texted me back saying he's on an earnings call. [laughing]

    13. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:37:48

        [laughing]

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:37:50

        Never mind! But, um, he said, "Good luck with the interview." Um, what did Daniel Ek say to you that helped to you form that decision to go to Uber?

    15. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:37:57

        So he's the one who recommended... I think I was, I was, uh, contacted by a headhunter. He recommended me to the headhunter who called me. Uh, I told him I was actually at the Allen & Company conference, going back in a, a circle with him, and we were having a drink one night, and he asked me, he's like: "Did the headhunter call you? There's this Uber role." And at the ti- at the time, Uber was a disaster, like disaster, and everyone was reading about it. I was at Expedia. I had just gotten this wonderful contract that you said at the beginning, so I was, I was gonna stay, and I love working for Barry. We're-- Like, it, it, it's been, it's been the best professional partnership of, of my life. And I said: "Of course, I'm not gonna go. You know, I'm so happy about what I'm doing at Expedia." And Daniel, like, looks at me, and he's g- got his, like, cold Scandinavian eyes. He's like, "Dara, since when is life about being happy? It's about making impact. Uber is a great company, and you can have an impact on that company. You've got to do this." So the next day, I had called the headhunter. Previously, I said, "No, 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.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:11

        And your dad, he gave you advice?

    17. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:39:13

        Well, I talked to my dad [chuckles] and, uh, his-- My dad is... keeps things simple. And he said, "Dara," in his Farsi, "when a company who's a verb tells you to run it, you just say yes." So I thought that was good, uh, 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 impact on an impactful company, so why the hell not?

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:53

        And when he says a company that's a verb, he's referring to the fact that everybody i- in the, the taxiing or transportation category uses Uber as a verb to... even if they're talking about a competitor.

    19. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:40:03

        Exactly right.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:40:04

        Um, and there's always one co- company in every co- sort of industry-

    21. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:40:07

        Yeah, yeah

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:40:09

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

    23. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:40:24

        It was a conversation with, with my dad. Um, you know, I told you I came to New York from San Francisco, and, uh, it was because my dad was getting very old, and he was losing his mental facilities.

    24. SBSteven Bartlett1:40:38

        Mm-hmm.

    25. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:40:39

        And I'm glad I came back, and I got to spend time with him, but those last times, you know, when I spent time with him, it wasn't really him, and I wish I could talk to him about his experiences, his younger life, the excitement of building something, and then the loss and regrets he had in, in life as well. I never had... You know, my relationship with him was kind of, was-- There was love, no question about love, but we didn't have the deep kind of conversations that certainly I'm hoping I get to have with my kids. So that's a conversation I'd love to have. And you can't get, uh, time back, uh, 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, um, 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 had with my dad.

    26. SBSteven Bartlett1:41:57

        Dara, thank you.

    27. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:41:58

        Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

    28. SBSteven Bartlett1:42:00

        You're a huge inspiration for me in so many ways, and even more so now, having done so much research on you in preparation for this conversation, because it is, it is rare to find a leader who has been consistently successful across different domains, who's built this really, really, in my opinion, quite rare skill stack, from investing to CFO to then being able to transition to CEO, and then has repeatedly contended with moments of transition and given us all frameworks as founders and entrepreneurs for how to deal with that transition. And one of the great ones I take away from you is, is honesty.

    29. DKDara Khosrowshahi1:42:27

        Yeah, honesty is so powerful, and I'll tell you, 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 in, in, uh-

    30. SBSteven Bartlett1:42:46

        Like your dad did.

Episode duration: 1:43:16