Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi

27:04Is it still that supply acquisition cost is bigger than demand acquisition cost for you guys? Yes. Yeah. Yes. I mean, it is. We are a supply -led business at this point. Probably two years ago, we could have added 25 % more drivers and couriers into the platform they would all be like super busy instantly, right? Now our supply generally is growing faster than demand because it's catching up to demand. And the average driver who's on the platform is working more because the experience is better. Earnings levels are really good. So at this point, probably supply is still trailing demand by 5 % or so, but the marketplace is now getting to a point where it's balanced.

27:48But it's that compounding that really starts working. I was reading through the most recent earnings and you have a chart where on average over the last five years or so, drivers make more money per hour. If we entered some economic environment where a whole bunch of people were out of work and they wanted to become Uber drivers, but that would make it so that the average earnings across the whole platform would plunge because you have a whole ton of new drivers coming on, would you guys sort of gate it and be like, hey, we want to make sure that we don't sort of flood the supply side of the marketplace?

28:22No, because one of our core philosophies is this is an open platform. And if your background check comes in okay, etc., then you can have access to earnings opportunities. That's a core belief for us. The economics take care of themselves, right? When you look at mid -cycle, long cycle, if earnings come down on the platform, then it becomes a less attractive platform to drivers, and they will do something else. There is this counter -cyclicality about our marketplace, which is during really good times, it becomes harder for us to recruit drivers. So the cost of supply goes up. So while revenue and gross bookings are growing and univolumes are strong, our supply base becomes more expensive.

29:06during softer economic times, you get more drivers coming into the platform, ETAs come down, prices come down, the price becomes cheaper. So actually our unit volumes accelerate. So if you look like our Q1 unit volumes, they grew 24 % versus 19 % in Q4. So we accelerated trip growth, which is not something that you see at our scale, but it's some of this stuff working out. Right, so it's sort of the invisible hand of the market theory. that sort of self -regulates this for you. Yeah, it's not a theory. It happens. Yeah, I guess like, yeah. It's this very cool experiment. Yeah. Economists like to talk about things in theory, but you actually have one of the largest data sets in human history of people doing work and other people consuming services.

29:52Yeah, if you ask our top economist at Uber, he would say that we actually don't control the price to the consumer. that it's actually the spot price for this kind of labor the marketplace sets based on the supply of labor coming in and the demand for transportation. And so there's this, you know, people say like Uber's setting prices. He'd say, we're not setting prices. The marketplace is setting its own price. So what do you do then? Like you have to have some levers at your disposal. You're getting a lot more profitable. Yes. I mean, certainly, I think in 20, whenever we did the IPO episode, Uber had lost like close to $3 billion the year before going public.

30:34You said in the episode that it was the most that a company had ever lost before going public in history. Yes. I don't know if that's true, but attributed to Ben Gilbert at the time. But now - Uber of magnitude, that's true. Depending on what profitability metric you look at, you guys are a break -even or slightly positive business and increasingly getting more profitable and looking like a self -sustaining business. So what can you do then if you aren't in the business of deciding what a ride should cost? Well, I think we're in the scale business, right? Which is we essentially wire up every form of transportation of whether it's people or things and, you know, it's increasingly people and then shared taxis, et cetera, right?

31:20There are four and a half million taxis in the world. Who would imagine that Uber would be working with taxis, but we're going to wire up every single taxi in the world, right? And then on the - The curbs and the cabuluses and the flywheels. And by the way, we work with them, right? A lot of times we will connect through them as intermediaries, again, to wire up these taxis. And then we've gone from food to alcohol to groceries, et cetera. And then we have a freight business as well. So the more we wire up, the more demand - You guys have boats now? I'm sorry? You have boats now, I hear? We have boats in Mykonos, which is pretty cool.

31:55We have boats on the Thames, too. It's just like if it moves and it carries people and things, we're going to wire it up and make it available on demand. That usually brings in the demand for transportation, et cetera. And then it's like math. You have to do it in a more and more efficient way. I think one of the secret sauces that we have is we have a very large and capable marketplace team. These are ML engineers who are building out the systems that match price all of this connectivity. And when you're working over an ecosystem of 2 billion transactions a quarter, the data sets that we have, the experimentation that we can do in terms of what's the most optimal match, how do you price, etc., it's just a bigger database than anyone else.

32:52So every year when I can't speak to how our competitors are matching and pricing, but every year matching and pricing probably improves by 5 % a year. So you improve the marketplace throughput by about 5%, everything else being the same. And that's like free growth. And when it's on top of, you know, call it $120, $130 billion run rate, it gets big. And again, it's compounding like every year this machinery gets better. So then just to make sure I'm understanding right, the reason why, because you talk to anybody and you're like, oh, what should I ask Dara? And they're like, ask them why Ubers are more expensive than they used to be.

33:31And I'm like, because it's a good business now. But actually, I don't think, it sounds like that's not actually the right answer. That the reason rides have gotten more expensive over time is A, inflation, but B, just that there is more demand for those rides than there is supply to serve them. Correct. The cost of labor has gone up, right? I mean, how much you have to pay for any kind of blue -collar job. Everybody's talking about it, right? A bunch of retailers were having trouble hiring enough people, restauranteurs, et cetera. And then it did become more expensive to bring drivers into the Uber ecosystem.

34:07Earnings expectations have gone up. And by the way, I think that's a healthy thing, right? That it's, if you kind of step back, you know, the increase in salary and wages for blue -collar jobs hasn't kept up with the salary of, like, tech workers or, you know, capital, et cetera. So I think the catch -up is a really healthy catch -up. That is the reason why Ubers are more expensive now. Now, in this environment where we are adding supply faster than demand because the supply is really coming into the marketplace, prices in Uber now, year -on -year, are down. Yeah, my Uber to the airport in San Francisco this morning was the cheapest it's been in months.

34:45So, thank you. Pretty cool. Well, specifically not thank you, thank the invisible hand at work. Thank you, Mr. Market. Yes, exactly. How has the complexity of Uber relative to Expedia matched up with your expectations coming in? so there's complexity in terms of all of the stakeholders that you have to think about and that's like it's a difference between chess and like four -dimensional chess it is like expedia travel agency you're bringing demand to your supply base etc and and you have to think about the travel ecosystem but with uber uber is like a incredibly important service to the cities of the world.

35:31And also Expedia, you weren't providing the service. Yes. You were a marketplace layer. You're not operating the airplanes. Exactly. You're not making up the hotel rooms. Exactly. The drivers are providing the service, right? But we're much more responsible end -to -end. But you're responsible for your customers. We have a very, very important responsibility to driver and courier community, these over 5 million people who are making an earning or making kind of a side earnings on Uber. And then the responsibility in terms of like regulators and governments, et cetera, that consideration set is just, it's so much bigger.

36:13So from that standpoint, it's tough, but also really interesting and satisfying in some ways. Were you ready for it? Was I ready for it? Yeah. No, I had no idea. Is this one of those, like, if you knew you wouldn't have done it, but now you've done it, and so all this value has been created and, like, great. I'm so glad I did it. It was a friend of mine. I was like, hey, are you having fun? I'm like, no, I'm not having fun. Like, I love it. You know, like, the job is too hard to, like, it's not fun, but it's so cool. It's such an interesting space. You really feel like you're having impact. But everyone at Uber, we always talk like you don't come to Uber for easy.

36:56Like you don't come here for an easy job. It's complicated. It's hardcore. People work their asses off. But like you love it. And it's not fun. Like it ain't fun. But people love being at the company. That's something I didn't know. And then the dynamic real -time nature of the marketplace and how we balance the marketplace and the pricing, et cetera, is unique, right? It's Thursday night, there's a Taylor Swift concert, all hands on deck. We gotta figure things out, that operational nature, but how dynamic and fast it is. Does Uber HQ plan for Taylor concerts ahead of time as they're happening?

37:39Yeah, I mean, Uber HQ doesn't, but there are ops teams on the ground. Yes. And, you know, they're the heroes. Like, they're on the ground, city by city, work their ass off. And they are kind of where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, to use a transportation metaphor. So David asked this interesting question that I want to dig a little bit deeper on, the were you ready for it? What kind of diligence did you get to do on the opportunity when this job came on the market in the national news in a very prominent way, in a very short time period? First, when did you first get contacted? about like how did you how did you enter the uber orbit so um i was reading around the news just like everyone else was right it was just all over the place and it was it was meg whitman it was a public everything going on and what led to it you know the the battle between travis and benchmark and all that stuff it was it was fascinating as an observer i never ever ever imagine that I would then play a part and a headhunter called me about this role so not a board member directly a headhunter headhunter headhunter headhunter called me it was a structure process I'm like no way like no thank you goodbye happy in Seattle yeah 13 years I got my place on Wimpy I love working for Barry like it was I was good this is fun yeah and then and Yeah, exactly.

39:14It was fun. And then I was at the Sun Valley Conference, the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, and having drinks with Daniel Leck. And he's like, Dara, you know, did you get the call from that headhunter about the Uber job? I think you'd be perfect for the job. And I didn't know where the headhunter, why the headhunter called. It turned out Daniel. I'm like, dude, why would I ever do that? Like, I'm happy. Like, why would I ever jump into that mess? So Daniel gave the headhunter your number. Yes. And I'm like, no way. He tipped him off. No way. And he looks at me like with those like piercing Scandinavian eyes.

39:56He's like, Dara, since when is life about having fun? It's about having impact. It's important. Like, you can do this. And I'd had a couple of drinks and the alcohol was flowing and we were having fun. And my wife says, like, yeah, you can do this. I'm like, yeah, I can do this. So the next day, I called the headhunter back and I said, let's talk. And the next step was for me to meet a board member. And we had dinner. And he was very charming. And he kind of started the recruitment. It was pretty cool. And how long between then and when you accepted the job? God, I think it was about two months.

40:36It was over the summer. Wow. how do you keep it secret nobody knew i told them i said listen up front um i have a job and it's a great job so the nanosecond that my name shows up in the news i'm out of here so i just want you to know like the nanosecond it shows up in the news i'm out of here but i had to be realistic that it could show up in the news it's amazing that that it didn't so actually at that point i called up barry because i couldn't put barry in a situation or myself in a situation like i've worked with him 13 years probably 20 years at iec and then even before as a banker like he and i have an incredible relation i always like so much to him i couldn't take the risk of his seeing it in the press and you know the consequences of that um and and the and the loss of trust so i called him up i said barry had on a call me about uber um i'm gonna talk to them and he's like you're effing crazy hung up on me i told i told said like oh my god i'm gonna get fired and nothing dead silence you weren't gonna get fired because what was barry gonna do like step in and be ceo himself he wasn't gonna he's maybe he would maybe he would i didn't know we worked together for a long time call him the next day he said uh speaking as the chairman of expedia it would be a real mistake but speaking as a friend i understand why you're interested i would be too how can i help and that's the definition of who he is yeah you know because we weren't in the news it was like we gossip about it it's like oh did you hear like meg is this and so it was a fun thing that we gossiped about but he actually there was a point in time when i had to make a presentation to the uber board this was like my big presentation and and i heard that the other candidates were coming in to present as well so this was a big day and i told him i think it was a saturday or sunday that i'm coming in making presentations he's like show me the presentation no it was a powerpoint so i showed him powerpoint and he actually helped me in the powerpoint he's like this is good this is good you have to add add this page uh so it's just it It shows you the kind of person he is, which is he put friendship in that case over his own business interests.

43:11Maybe it was sick of me. I don't know. But it was. Just calculate. Yeah, it just shows you the kind of person. That is true personal loyalty. Yeah. And there's an element to it, too, where if he got to collaborate with you on it, then there was a chance you would stick around on the Expedia board and remain a friend of the company even though you're not in the seat. Yes. And I still am on the board. It's, you know, I love the company. But it's weird being on the board as a former CEO. Like, it's a strange experience. Did you do anything to prepare for that? No, like, usually my life, it's like stumble into something and then figure it out.

43:43You're also a busy dude. Yeah, but it was, I wanted to stay on the board. I wanted to help. And, you know, the company's going through its own journey now. So hopefully to greatness. Did you consider, I mean, this sort of famously was an issue in the Microsoft transition and has been an issue in the Disney transition. Did you consider, hey, actually, maybe it would be better for the company if I didn't serve on the board just to give enough space for new leadership? I talked to Barry about it, and it's ultimately up to him, right? And I think he decided that he wanted me there, and I try to be helpful.

44:13But I think it's absolutely right, which is the job of the new CEO, to some extent, is to be the CEO and do something different from the old CEO. That's definitional. and the... You know a little bit about that. Yeah, exactly. There could be hesitancy at a board meeting, etc., because the old person's there. And so that, it was, I think on a net -net, I trust that Barry's judgment, it does feel weird sometimes because I've moved on, but it's working. I think it's working, but it's complicated. I bet. All right, listeners, it's time to talk about another one of our favorite companies, Statsig. Since you last heard from us about Statsig, they have a very exciting update.

44:58They raised their Series C, valuing them at $1 .1 billion. Yeah, huge milestone. Congrats to the team. And timing is interesting because the experimentation space is really heating up. Yes. So why do investors value Statsig at over a billion dollars? It's because experimentation has become a critical part of the product stack for the world's best product teams. Yep. This trend started with Web 2 .0 companies like Facebook and Netflix and Airbnb. Those companies faced a problem. How do you maintain a fast, decentralized product and engineering culture while also scaling up to thousands of employees?

45:36Experimentation systems were a huge part of that answer. These systems gave everyone at those companies access to a global set of product metrics, from page views to watch time to performance. And then every time a team released a new feature or product, they could measure the impact of that feature on those metrics. So Facebook could set a company -wide goal like increasing time in app and let individual teams go and figure out how to achieve it. Multiply this across thousands of engineers and PMs and boom, you get exponential growth. It's no wonder that experimentation is now seen as essential infrastructure.

46:09Yep, today's best product teams like Notion, OpenAI, Rippling, and Figma are equally reliant on experimentation. But instead of building it in -house, they just use Statsig. And they don't just use Statsig for experimentation. Over the last few years, Statsig has added all the tools that fast product teams need, like feature flags, product analytics, session replays, and more. So if you would like to help your team's engineers and PMs figure out how to build faster and make smarter decisions, go to statsig .com slash acquired or click the link in the show notes. They have a super generous free tier, a $50 ,000 startup program and affordable enterprise contracts for large companies.

46:50Just tell them that Ben and David sent you. All right, so back to the reverse diligence question. Yes. What did you get to learn about Uber? And I mean, to directly ask, did you get to talk to Travis? Like, did you get to talk to any of the sort of departing leadership? Well, I talked to Travis a couple of times. I talked with Ryan and Garrett, who were the other founders. I talked to a couple of other board members. I did financial diligence, et cetera. And for me, it was ultimately about the opportunity. It's such an important company. I always tell people, I look for three things, right? It's, do you work with people whom you like and you can learn from?

47:28Can you use an individual to make an impact? And then, is the place or the company that you're at going to make an impact? I wasn't sure number one but I was a CEO so I could build my own team and as it turned out there have been like great folks there who have stayed who were there before me and then new folks like uh you know Tony West and Nelson Che that we brought etc so the new team's like a combination of new and old which is great and definitionally as a leadership team we can have an impact on Uber and Uber is a company that it's unique in terms of its impact on the ground in the city so So it all checked off and the financials, you know, it was still a really young company.

48:09So the financials for me, yeah, could I do diligence? Even though it was 10 years in, right? Yeah. Less than that, probably. Yeah, probably. It was just about 10 years. Okay. Yeah, there you go. You know better than I do. I imagine you had to have been feeling like, God, if we can make this work, the opportunity here is just like, you know. All turn -downs are hard. Tech turnarounds are especially hard. But I think Uber had a global position, a talent pool, a brand that was absolutely exceptional. That was just going through a really, really hard time. It was a verb. Yeah, exactly. And so that was actually advice that my dad gave me.

48:50Like, when a company who's a verb asks you to run it, just say yes. I'm like, all right. So sometimes you can overcomplicate things. And it's like, hey, do you want to take a shot? I want to take a shot. It's so funny you say turnaround. I literally, it never occurred to me that you could construe Uber as that. But it might be the only turnaround in history where it was growing incredibly fast, had $10 billion of revenue, had some of the smartest people in the world working at it, had all this momentum, of course, burning money, catastrophe in the boardroom, catastrophe in the C -suite. So it is a turnaround in that sense.

49:28And it was losing a bunch of share to lift. right so that that was delete uber yeah delete uber yeah moments etc so that that was a tough thing which is you're burning a bunch of cash and at the same time you were losing category position to you know what's a tough competitor and and a strong brand tell me if you agree with this statement in the u .s you no longer really have a formidable competitor in ride sharing but in food delivery, you have a tremendously formidable competitor. I think Lyft is stronger than people give it credit for. Yeah, it's definitely going through a tough time. I mean, the new CEO is, you know, he's like moving.

50:11He's making moves. He's super aggressive. We'll see where that ends up. I feel way better today than I did five years ago, but I wouldn't count them out. Lyft is such a great example of a story we see over and over again on Acquired of like, It's never over till it's over. It's never over till it's over. It was over for Lyft. Yeah, and then they came back. And then it was not over. And now they're having a tough time. We'll see. But DoorDash is a tough competitor. DoorDash is larger than we are in the US. We are focused on keeping share in the US and then gaining a bunch of share outside the US.

50:48And then over a period of time, using the structural advantage. One, build profit pools outside the US. Use that to attack the US over a period of time. and then use the structural advantage that we talked about in terms of customer acquisition over a period of time to hopefully gain category position against DoorDash. But they're a tough competitor. We respect them. We don't like them, but we respect them. Is there something in particular that you think they've done? I mean, when I think about them, I think about what you were saying about booking, just like being an execution machine. I'm curious from your perspective.

51:19I think it comes to like these company biases, which are pretty important. they made a bet on the suburbs and they made a bet on selection restaurant selection uber was an urban company we operate in the big cities transportation etc the business and suburbs is much lower so we want to leverage a customer base that was an urban customer base so we went after the urban restaurants etc and uber was about cheap and fast right so the if you think about it, if what you're trying to do is optimize for speed, let's say delivering 15 or 20 minutes, the radius of restaurants that you can deliver front is smaller.

52:02So you make a sacrifice in terms of selection in order to optimize for speed. As it turned out, one, the suburbs in terms of food are bigger than cities. Yeah, big families, et cetera, big demand, et cetera. So we, We because of our urban biases, we didn't look at the overall market. We're like, what's our market? How can we leverage our demand, et cetera? That I think in hindsight was a mistake. And this is like a 2013 to 16 decision that everyone's still sort of living with now. I mean, now we've corrected that. Yeah. But listen, it was I was running the same playbook 2018, 2019, too. So I don't want to blame it on, oh, this is, you know, it was happening all along.

52:47It's just like usually you focus on the things that you're good at. And we were really good at urban, and we were really good at fast and cheap, right? And we now are much more focused about building out selection. As we built out selection in urban centers, our category position versus DoorDash is actually quite constructive, really strong. We are looking to break into the suburbs, and there we got some work to do. And the suburbs are a very, very strong position. It's kind of their profit pools, right? And then we're building our profit pools outside and international. And, you know, kind of the battle is happening in the big cities.

53:27Yeah, it's interesting. I would imagine the suburbs, there are so much more weighted to food delivery than rideshare. Totally. Yeah. Totally. Now, we are expanding rideshare into the suburbs now. And it's a pretty fast -growing part of our business. So maybe, like, we'll get there over time. but definitely it was an early aim of the business. We now specifically are aiming in certain suburbs and you have to build out your courier base, your restaurant supply, demand. So all of it has to come together, which is difficult and DoorDash has done a good job. Yeah. Not the end of the story though. I'm curious, there's so much of this strategy that if you connect the dots looking backwards and to use the Steve Jobs parlance, it just makes so much sense this uh expand internationally leverage the fact that you're sort of the leading global player generate cash use it to compete domestically eats feeds ride sharing which feeds you know you can sort of use this flywheel we haven't talked about freight yet but i'm curious like of the three pillars today of ride sharing uber eats and freight and divesting everything else all the autonomy all of the self i guess self -driving cars is autonomy well so you guys divest all International bikes and scooters.

54:42Planes, right? A VTOL. Elevate. Yeah, Elevate. Elevate, et cetera, yeah. What of today's strategy was in your pitch to the board when you were joining as CEO? And what is an emergent thing that's happened while you're in the seat? So the pitch to the board was really different in that it wasn't about strategy. It was about operations and how you take the business to break even and profitability, et cetera, right? It was presenting myself as a mature operator and my track record at Expedia. I think now things have changed, which is we have become much more focused on those three segments. And if you look at rides, we have a number of growth bets, which is there's this base business, UberX, which is going to be 50 % of our growth.

55:32then about 15 % of our growth are international countries where the business model as we had it wasn't legal. So the attitude at the time was, well, if our business model isn't legal, then we're not coming in until we're invited in. And we took a different tack, which is, well, what business model is legal? And let's adjust our business model to the country versus have the country, adjust to the business model. And once you're in and you build trust within a country and you build a voice, et cetera, maybe then the business model can change over a period to benefit drivers, couriers, et cetera.

56:11So we're in Germany, we're in Spain, we're in Japan, we're in Korea, we're in Turkey. There's a bunch of countries that we're expanding into with tweaks to the business model to make sure that we're expanding into those countries the right way. And then there's a whole host of new bets that we're making in terms of transportation, taxi, which is huge, low cost, hairlables, two wheelers, three wheelers, Uber for business, health, transportation, all of these different segments. That whole kind of the new bets portfolio will be 35 % of our growth. So if we do it right, we will 50 % of our growth will come from these new initiatives that really didn't exist.

56:51and on the Eats side, obviously it was about food and kind of the general expansion of that business, but it's really about getting into the other categories, getting into grocery, liquor, etc. And one of the parts that I'm super excited about is we've always had kind of, call it an integrated offering. If you think about Eats, there's a marketplace offering. You come to Uber Eats and Eats is bringing you demand. And then there's the fulfillment of that demand, right the my bringing wine here and delivering it right thank you this is delicious by the way that has nothing to do with demand necessarily but it's fulfillment these are two separate businesses that got stapled together exactly so so we have now we're separating the tech stack right so that now we can offer we can go to merchants and say if you want marketplace great but if you want fulfillment we can offer you fulfillment in a separable way so for example Walmart isn't in our marketplace because they're Walmart, they have an incredible brand, etc.

57:52But they use our fulfillment services. And more and more, our vision is we essentially want the local grocer to out Amazon, Amazon. Every single local business can deliver same day, which is better the next day. If we can connect that to marketplace, that's great. But that can also be a separate part of our business that can grow and thrive. It's so funny how much of this goes back to the original 10 years ago, 15 years ago vision for Uber. It just takes so long to realize these things. It does. It's complex. It looks great on paper, and then real life is a lot more difficult, right? Are there activities that you've sort of thought about where you used to need to do something different or counterposition the market in order to be successful, where now you sort of look around and you're like, actually, in this area, we're the incumbent.

58:42So there's a different strategy that we need to lean into as an incumbent. Our working with taxis was an interesting twist, right? Which is to some extent, they have been definitely the competition or we have been the competition or the challenger to those incumbents. At some point, we became much bigger than taxi. but in the end if you remove yourself from the emotions etc and you know we're competing against x or y we're in the job of wiring up you know vehicles and drivers who want to drive people to places and that includes taxi like there are four and a half million of them and if you take the hypothesis which is the the days of old where you wave your arm to you know wave a taxi down like things are changing, then it was a move that was obvious.

59:33But at the same time, like the beauty of Uber is when you get into the actual challenges, like for example, we launched taxi and the way that we match generally Uber is one -to -one. So you hail for an Uber, we will match you, we'll make an offer to a specific driver, driver says yes, driver comes pick you up, et cetera. What we found in taxi markets is that when we made the one -to -one match, if we weren't integrated into the taxi meter, and that's something that we'll build over a period of time, the taxi might be full, but the acceptance rate of the taxis was much, much lower, and we didn't know why.

1:00:09And if the acceptance rate is lower, you might wait for a long time to get matched because we're going to send offer, offer, offer, offer before you get a match. So the team built a technology blast dispatch, which is instead of a one -to -one match, it's a, you know, we'll make a dispatch of 10 different tassies. One of them accepts. Just like the old taxi dispatch system. Totally. Totally. Like who's, you know, there's a pickup on 54 Leonard Street and someone says, Joey says yes. I got that one. Yeah, I got that one. So like what's old becomes new, what's new becomes old. but what's been interesting is there's a simple idea but then building out the tech infrastructure to be able to fit to that particular market becomes a challenge but also it's an opportunity which is now for some of our competitors to copy that one is it's taking a lot of tuning to actually get that experience to be excellent there are some markets where we're mixing demand You might click for an UberX, a taxi might show up.

1:01:12Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? It improves marketplace liquidity. And things that seem very simple on the surface to actually make the magic happen of pushing a button and a car shows up in five minutes and you get great service, it's actually pretty difficult tech to build on the ground. It's really cool. That is cool. I have another sort of corporate structure question that I'm curious about. I think you guys, between when you took the job and today, turned over basically the entire Uber shareholder base. I'm sure there's some people that still hold their shares from those early days.

1:01:47But what is that like at the scale of a $70, $80 billion market cap company turning over a shareholder base in its entirety? Very painful. It was the displacement in terms of shareholders. It was tough, right? And there's a certain cohort of shareholders going after hyper growth, et cetera, especially in this marketplace where it's much more about disciplined growth, profitable growth, et cetera, that that changeover has been difficult. But we now have a set of shareholders like the Fidelities of the World, Capital, Morgan Stanley, et cetera, that have the capacity to own a lot of shares, way more than they do today.

1:02:30And there's a consistency about it. As we keep delivering, they keep upping their stake. And we're now seeing a stock price that generally is working. But I'll tell you, when we're in the middle of it, it was tough. After the IPO, after the lockup, Travis sold all his shares. and those days like those were not heavy days probably 15 of the company it was a lot there are moments when you remember that stock prices are a function of supply and demand and when 15 of a company's outstanding shares hit the market all at once or two percent or two percent or what yeah right like that's yeah i mean like i think in hindsight I think it was a good move by him because it created separation.

1:03:21He wanted to move on. And so in hindsight, I respect what he did. And in hindsight, I didn't see it at the time. I was like pissed, right? And people were panicking. Oh, my God, Travis is selling. What does that mean? Et cetera. And everyone wants to create drama around Uber. So it's difficult as a leader to keep the team focused and believing. Right. Because it's very easy to keep score based on the stock price. And the stock price is definitely moving in the wrong direction. And Travis, whether you like him or not, you respect him. He's a really smart person. He's a founder of the company. That was a tough time.

1:03:59But I think we're now in a good place, which is the shareholding is moving from either some of the startup folks or hedge funds to fundamental long -only players who hopefully they'll be shareholders for the next 10 years. one of the things that we heard from many people as we were researching that time period was just the immense uh degree of the stakes involved for the whole ecosystem like this went beyond just the drama in the press that's one level right but like the number of university endowments who through the venture funds that were invested in uber had large portions of their whole a university endowment that were dependent on the private mark of Uber.

1:04:49And fund of funds where compensation had already been paid out as if this was a liquid security, but it's not a liquid security. And sovereign nations that were, you know, not dependent, but like paid attention to this. Were you aware of that? Did you feel that? Oh, yeah. Obviously, Benchmark and Travis were in this power struggle. but there was this heavy feel like when you talk to the benchmark folks, there's this responsibility, which is this was one of the hits of the century. Like this is a category defining company and investment and benchmarks had a lot of good ones, but this one was a great one.

1:05:29And while I wouldn't say it was a probability, there was a much higher than non -zero possibility that it could all go. It could all go poof. So I think that was a very, very heavy weight on Benchmark and some of the other startups, et cetera, which led to all events that ultimately led to like they're bringing in an unknown outsider. Those are some heavy decisions to make. I wasn't there. I was kind of at the tail end of all that drama. But then you had to deal with the shareholder -based turnover, which was the unwinding of that expectation. Well, one cool kind of – it wasn't cool at the time, but one really interesting kind of dynamic that played out when I got in was there was all this stuff happening.

1:06:22Like I had to go to London, TFL, they revoked our license, and there had been a data breach, and we had to deal with that. And just like it was craziness, right? And at the same time, SoftBank was looking to invest in the company, right? And this is the vision fund days. And SoftBank, the only way they came in was heavy. Like there was no TikTok. It's like, let's talk. And the issue that we had to deal with was one where Benchmark and Travis and the founders, they all had high vote shares. And they both wanted to control the company. And if you sold your shares, they would flip into low vote. So there was this game of chicken, which is SoftBank wanted in.

1:07:14And in typical Masa fashion, it was like, hey, if you don't let us invest in you, we're going to invest in that pink company. Right? And it's billions of dollars. And so we had to get SoftBank in. they wanted to invest in uber because it was top brand had top tech etc but the same time none of the shareholders wanted to sell because there was this game of chicken whoever sold might lose control etc and so we had to go around to all of the high vote shareholders and we literally had to like get everyone to agree to blow up the high vote shares i think it's it's actually the only time when tech a tech company like they blew up all of the high votes and so every like we literally had to go shareholder shareholder and like ben said he would say yes and jord like like everybody and if anyone said no none of it would work and you know salt bank would go to game to you know club pink which would be a disaster wow so that was a really interesting kind of this it was like all or none, right?

1:08:20And in the end, we got everyone, including Travis, Benchmark, everyone agreed to essentially switch over high vote to low vote. And that, one, it got SoftBank in, but it stopped the power struggle because then no one could control a company. And that was actually a real secondary benefit, which is then it became like, how do we build a great company versus who's going to get control and who's going to have more impact. We did it for SoftBank, but in hindsight, it was a really important move, which is, okay, no more board control. This is no longer going to be a control company. Let's go build.

1:08:56This was an $80 billion prisoner's dilemma. Yeah. Yeah. Because if anyone said, actually, I'm going to move in my own self -interest here, actually, long -term, it would have blown up the deal. Everything would have blown up. And you might have had a Lyft who was gaining category position against us with a $10 billion investment from SoftBank. That's right. It was $10 billion. It was actually, I think, $15. Oh. And some secondary and some primary. Wow. It would have been like that. That would be maybe it would have been life or death. Who the hell knows? And I mean, Uber had raised the most money of any company, any startup at that point.

1:09:36It was just it was a very, very high stakes game. And it was, we had the old person, Cam, who, like, did hero's work. Like, just talk to everyone. And then he would, like, kind of bring me in as a nice guy and, you know, say all the nice things. But, you know, in the end, like, it worked. It was a big move. And everybody, everybody converted, which is pretty awesome. Wow. This is, like, a little bit of echoes of, you know, Sumner Redstone and your early, you know. It was good training. It would be good training, right. It was good training. I love the operating side of the business, the tech, et cetera.

1:10:12That's the stuff that I love. But I have to say the investment banking background that I had helped. Even the concept of, hey, how do we get out of this issue? The way to get out of this control issue is everyone blows up the shares. And everyone's like, wait, that'll work? We're like, yeah, that could work. Show me the bottom. No, then going after, starting to call people. Wow. It was awesome. It was cool. Humility is great and all, but, you know, were you proud of yourself when that went through? No, because the next day there was another crisis. Like, it was like, you know, breathe for two minutes, you know, drink more wine, and then off to the next battle.

1:10:49Now is a great time to thank good friend of the show, ServiceNow. We have talked to listeners about ServiceNow's amazing origin story and how they've been one of the best performing companies the last decade. But we've gotten some questions from listeners about what ServiceNow actually does. So today, we are going to answer that question. Well, to start, a phrase that has been used often here recently in the press is that ServiceNow is the quote -unquote AI operating system for the enterprise. But to make that more concrete, ServiceNow started 22 years ago focused simply on automation. They turned physical paperwork into software workflows.

1:11:30initially for the IT department within enterprises. That was it. And over time, they built on this platform going to more powerful and complex tasks. They were expanding from serving just IT to other departments like HR, finance, customer service, field operations, and more. And in the process over the last two decades, ServiceNow has laid all the tedious groundwork necessary to connect every corner of the enterprise and enable automation to happen. So when AI arrived, well, AI kind of just by definition is massively sophisticated task automation. And who had already built the platform and the connective tissue within enterprises to enable that automation?

1:12:12ServiceNow. So to answer the question, what does ServiceNow do today? We mean it when they say they connect and power every department. IT and HR use it to manage people, devices, software licenses across the company. Customer Service uses ServiceNow for things like detecting payment failures and routing to the right team or process internally to solve it. Or the Supply Chain org uses it for capacity planning, integrating with data and plans from other departments to ensure that everybody's on the same page. No more swivel chairing between apps to enter the same data multiple times in different places.

1:12:44And just recently, ServiceNow launched AI agents so that anyone working in any job can spin up an AI agent to handle the tedious stuff, freeing up humans for bigger picture work. ServiceNow was named to Fortune's World's Most Admired Companies list last year and Fast Company's Best Workplace for Innovators last year. And it's because of this vision. If you want to take advantage of the scale and speed of ServiceNow in every corner of your business, go to servicenow .com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Thanks, ServiceNow. I'm very curious about how you operate your Twitter account.

1:13:17On the one extreme, there's like an Elon Musk type operating a Twitter account. There's only one Elon Musk type operating Twitter. There is no type. Yeah. It's a singular point. There is one in, I don't know how many MDOs they have, but one in some hundred million data point of tweeting whatever comes to your mind, no matter the consequences. So much so that he bought the company. Yes. and then on the complete other side there's like barack obama and tim cook and i'd say you're like one click in from the barack obama tim cook and i'm curious like consider that compliment like you definitely operate your public persona with sort of a head of state grace and i'm curious if you ever think about letting it fly a little bit more do you have a full drafts folder like how Do you ever wish you could express yourself a little more?

1:14:11What I really think, Twitter feed? Do you have a burner account? So I tweet mostly myself. There's some stuff that folks say, we did this. It's me. I don't have someone running the account. And I mix it up with some personal stuff and then some business stuff because you want to keep it entertaining. But at the same time, I'm not using Twitter to express myself. I'd rather have a long form discussion like this. Like this is to me much more interesting. And so Twitter tweets can be taken out of context, et cetera. So I'm not there to stir the pot. Right. So maybe that's what comes out in terms of my Twitter persona.

1:14:52I'll take Obama -esque or Clinton -esque. Tim Cook works for him. Yeah, like that's quite a compliment. All right. Next, we're kind of in like a lightning round here. So next random lightning round topic, you were on the board of the New York Times. Yes. What are some of your biggest learnings from being involved with that company? It was definitely my favorite board to be on. It was a really interesting time at the New York Times because they were really becoming a top technical company in terms of being a publisher. Like, it's a pretty extraordinary learning organization. And they wanted me as like the tech person.

1:15:32and I was coming from Expedia and, you know, optimization, all that stuff. And their capacity to learn, like super traditional company, capacity to learn was pretty awesome. One of the fascinating parts about the company, and it's both a superpower or it could be a weakness, is total separation of church and state in terms of content and business. Right? So, like, when I asked, well, what's the cost of certain kinds of content and then how much traffic, you know, can we have the connection between cost of content and traffic? It was like, no, you cannot ask that question because the content is separate.

1:16:09So it's just a fascinating organization. And the bet that they made on subscriptions was amazing. It was not obvious because the advertising business was much bigger at the time, but it was an enterprise bet based on a core identity of the company, which is we believe in quality content. And I thought that was one of the most impressive bets because it was totally non -obvious at the time. Like all, every single news organization, et cetera, was advertising, advertising. This is the BuzzFeed days, right? It was quick content, et cetera. But I think that the bet that they made in quality was very much a bet on their identity that wasn't backed up by data and certainly wasn't backed up by their financials.

1:16:58But the company went all in and they really benefited. Do you think that could have happened in a company that wasn't family controlled? Like, did that have something to do with how they could make a bet like that without the data to support it? Yeah. I think they're very sure of that core, the quality of the content that they're building. And that allows them to make those kinds of business bets because in the end, they know that the content is going to win. Absolutely. A little bit like Netflix, too. It's like quality content, focus on subscriptions. Now they are going to the advertising, right?

1:17:34So you can't have a forever strategy or be so dogmatic as to not to understand that markets change. Strategies have to change at the time. But it was absolutely the right bet at the right time. Well, I'm curious how much this was an explicit boardroom conversation. The Times also made a very explicit bet on scale of quality content. You could argue maybe Wall Street Journal. But other than maybe them, maybe, maybe The Post, maybe, nobody else has aggregated quality content at scale. Globally, people might think of the political stuff or the news stuff. The New York Times company covers every vertical, every geography, has at least twice as many reporters employed as any other news organization in the world, I think.

1:18:20Like, how much was that a discussion in the boardroom? There was absolutely a view of the management and the board agreed and I have to be careful because it was a boardroom and it's confidential, etc., which is if there's going to be a top global brand for quality news, that should be the New York Times. Like, why would it not be the New York Times? They're very clear out about that and they're quite determined to achieve that. And I think they're doing a great job. Yeah, and it's interesting, right? Like the company's called The New York Times. And yet it's a global, you know, it really was a, in a way that, you know, in video and with Netflix, I think it was a more, an easier leap to make.

1:19:03For news, I think it was a really unique leap that The Times made. Well, it will be interesting to see, which is they, you know, Netflix is building like Korean content that then extends globally. New York Times isn't necessarily doing that, right? It's English language content that is relevant to the world, but is probably relevant, especially international, to a subsegment, right? It's higher end consumer, et cetera, who can't afford the price. But again, it's been an absolute winner of a strategy and what's been a tough business. Yeah. I mean, there's a graveyard in the middle between the independent publisher with a low cost structure and the New York Times, and there's not much in between.

1:19:45The middle is where you go to die. Yeah. More lightning round. I remember hearing in 2013 that it was cool that I was in 2013, because 2014, one year away, was going to be the year of self -driving cars. And here we are in 2023. Is next year the year? How close are we? Oh, that is a, it's an unanswerable question. I mean, it is because there's the last 2 % of use cases, the tail use cases. it's unknowable what it'll take to get past that last 2%. And there's this pretty interesting philosophical question, which is how safe does a robot have to be? In the US, I think there are 40 ,000 deaths as a result of car accidents.

1:20:31Let's say that robot cars are 10 times safer. And I think highway accidents are one of the top two or three causes of death in the United States, period period so like something 10 times safer yeah if you're 10 times safer you know fast forward 25 years from now like who knows what it'll be 4 000 deaths a year right so little more than 10 a day and like if you have four companies that are responsible for for the marketplace five five companies right and there are 10 deaths a day like a good day is hey we only had one fatality That's a good day. Like, it's just, I can't imagine that. And so there's this, well, does it have to be 10 times better?

1:21:17I don't think that's good enough. Does it have to be 100 times better? Maybe that's not good enough. So like, from a societal standpoint, of course, if it's 100 times better, we should go forward with it. But that would mean there are 400 fatalities a year, one every single day. And I don't know how society would deal with that. society is very i'll call forgiving but like they understand humans are human and humans make mistakes i think you must have experience with this already with you yeah i mean listen we we had this unbelievably unfortunate circumstance in in phoenix and it caused us to completely redesign how we built for safety first etc ultimately because of the pandemic we decided to get out of self -driving, which I think is, it was a good decision because our core skill set is like building this demand network, connecting demand to supply in a dynamic way, et cetera.

1:22:12And we now get to work with a bunch of partners and like Waymo's a partner, Aurora's a partner, et cetera. So we get to work with a much larger ecosystem. But I think the question of that last 2 %? And then what is society ready? What safety will society underwrite to? Those two questions are, for me, unanswerable. My instinct is that you will see small scale, continued experiments kind of get bigger over the next five years, but it's going to take a good 10 years for it to be a material part of our network or transportation at large. But that's a guess. i'm curious too also uh i want to ask given both your job and uh you and i both live in san francisco something crazy has happened in the past six eight months that like it's now happening in san francisco like we went from a for 15 years everybody's been like yeah self -driving cars it's happening tomorrow and like yeah yeah yeah but like have you ever taken a ride in one i haven't yeah but like every day you walk down the street you're like there's cars going by with no driver in the seat it's pretty extraordinary and it's it's become just so commonplace that like i don't even think about it anymore but then friends come visit and they're like what what's going on here yeah but still like the the service for certain originations and destinations it works the the pickup you know again it's it's okay for a human driver to double park for a pickup not okay for a robot so there's like again when you get into the detail if you look at our ride share service for example, if our fulfill rate, which is the percentage of time someone asks for a ride and then there's a car available, if that's less than, call it 98%, that's like all hands on deck.

1:23:59Like, it's a disaster. So like, we are available all the time, everywhere, et cetera. And there's a lot of work that goes into that. For any singular ride share provider to provide that kind of coverage is going to be really, really difficult, which why ultimately we think the better solution is for the Waymos of the world, Auroras of the world, et cetera, mobilize to work with us so that you have this kind of hybrid transition state where you can still have this 98 % coverage everywhere, no matter what weather it is, et cetera. But we have this smart kind of switching layer. Sometimes a human should come pick you up.

1:24:39Sometimes a robot should come pick you up. But the transition is going to take a while. But it is happening. It's cool. All right. Last lightning round question. And then I have a closing segment. If you could only own Uber Eats or Uber, the transportation business, which one would you rather own? Also, Eats is a transportation business. It's just transportation of stuff. You can't ask me that. You're like, choose between your children. Like, is it George or is it Donnie? Like, come on, you can't be serious. You could Own a business with a 20 % take rate or a business with a 30 % take rate? Which one would you rather own?

1:25:19So I will answer somewhat seriously, which is high take rates are dangerous. So our job as a company is to grow volume as much as we can as fast as we can and make our shareholders happy enough. Yep. Minimizing the take rate, which is taking as much of that dollar and giving it to drivers and couriers. Like last quarter, gross bookings grew over 22 % or so, which is really good. The money that drivers and couriers, including tips made on the platform, grew by 30 % higher. And at the same time, we were able to expand our margins, be free cash flow positive. So So the design spec that we're building is how do you torture the organization?

1:26:11Because sometimes it is torture. Watch every single nickel and dime be incredibly efficient in everything that you do. Automate everything, get fraud out of the system, et cetera, so that you can actually operate a business at scale at the lowest take rate possible. Talking about Booking .com and one thing that we learned, when I started Expedia, Expedia's take rate was 25 % and Booking's take rate was 15%. And over like a torturous 13 years, we took Expedia's take rate from 25 % to the teens. It was like 17, I think, or so when I left. And those are like pure margin dollars that you're taking out.

1:26:48Like there's no goodness that comes out of it. And so it's just really hard work to do. And as a result, we're pretty hardcore, which is any quarter I can deliver anything on the bottom line if I can move my take rate up a little bit. But like it's too easy. It's too tempting. Yeah. And so we're very hardcore about like, no, no, no. We got to keep take rate low and you got to do the hard work to be able to keep take rate low. So I'd say I take the 20 % take rate business. Like it's, it's more lasting. The growth can go on for much, much longer. Yep. I asked it in a tongue in cheek way, but I completely understand that and see the, it's the NZS capital thing.

1:27:29It's the do you want a business with... Bill Gurley wrote that blog post years ago about a rig too far. You build more durability by leaving more on the table for your ecosystem partners. Or maybe more accurately, you make yourself too vulnerable if you get too greedy. It takes oxygen out of the room. It's like what's the saying? Fat pigs get slaughtered, right? Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. Exactly. And you can't You don't want to put yourself in that position. It's very tempting. It's very, very easy. There's this temptation, obviously, this quarterly kind of treadmill that you're on, etc.

1:28:06And there's like, you can make someone happy by increasing take rate and throwing it to the bottom line. And we really, really culturally try to resist that notion. Cool. Well, the last segment that I have here is giving you the floor. You know, we're at the end of a long form podcast. So anybody that's still listening appreciates nuance. And so if there's something that you feel is often misunderstood or that you want to say to people that are willing to let a long -form argument soak in, what do you think is misunderstood about the company or you or the industry or this time that we're in right now?

1:28:43Really anything you want to talk about? I don't know if it's misunderstood, but it's certainly something that's top of mind for us is that we ultimately, the future of the business as it stands now depends on our building the best platform for earners. And it goes to like the take rate, right? If the take rate goes up too much, then we're taking too much of the service, et cetera. And the fact is that I think Uber was guilty of taking earners for granted because when I first came in and for much of the company, like we were in a state of oversupply. We had too many drivers. It goes to instead of gating them, et cetera.

1:29:21We just didn't really invest in the driver experience and the courier experience the way that we should have. And then the way that we organized the company around the earner experience was pretty standard in terms of a B2C business, right? There's a team, there's a team that runs the Uber app, there's a team that runs the Eats app, and the team that runs the driver app. And you do all the typical stuff, which is analytics and measurements and A -B test, et cetera, in order to optimize throughput in the marketplace, et cetera. But as we step back, we don't A -B test what the 401k match should be for employees.

1:30:03right like it was equivalent some of the experimentation that we were doing on the earner side is like you know yeah should we match a three percent or six percent and let's look at employee turnover cool experiment maybe you could optimize but when you're building a product that people are making a living off of or are earning money that they have to earn with there's a different duty of care and the amount of time that they're spending on the app most of uber employees myself too like order rides all the time order eats all the time you know you get in get out etc but a driver will be spending four hours five hours six hours with the app every single day so the consequence of like all this coming together and our building for drivers the way that we essentially build for consumers, which is like pretty cool and techy, et cetera.

1:30:58You know, one is like the P95 experience. Usually like you build, you don't look at P50 because averages lie. And then you look at P95. Well, that's the worst experience. Well, the probability percentage. Yeah, the probability percentages. You know, drivers, an average driver who's driving a week experienced like a P95 circumstance every single week, multiple times a week because they spent a lot more time on that. So there's been a pretty important culture change of the company, which is like higher duty of care, actually slowing down in terms of how we build for earners, being a lot more humble, listening to them, their experience, et cetera.

1:31:36The fact is that when you have 5 .6 million earners on the platform, there's this marketplace, which is it works for some earners and it doesn't, right? So there's always going to be 10%, which is like half a million people who are not happy with experience, but we've got to make sure that 90 % are and we're getting more people who like the experience into the platform. But because of where we came from, it's actually pretty new muscle for us to build this earner experience. And I do think as I step back and I think about what am I going to be proud of at the company, and there's a lot to be proud of in terms of turning around the business and the team that we built and the service that we built.

1:32:18I think there's a sense which is like tech is out of touch with the real world. And it's a lot like tech is, you know, you're building for the virtual world. And Uber is unique in that it's a technology company that like built for the real world. And the impact that we have, especially as it relates to earners, is like it's real people. And so what I would be most proud of, one is there's a practical reality, which is if we build a company that is has the best product and experience for earners, we're going to win long -term. But if we're that technology company that's very much connected, not with the elite, but with an earner base and the broad population, not just in San Francisco, but all over the world, that's a company to be proud of.

1:33:09But at the same time, I think the muscle we've been developing in the last two to three years, we have a long way to go. Is Uber the largest earner platform in the world? Yeah, I think we're the largest source of work anywhere by far. And growing pretty fast. That's a crazy statement. Yeah. Because the largest companies who, like even if you just look at employees, companies that employ people employ max like 2 million. Max, yeah. And Uber has how many earners on the platform? 5 .6 million. And as of the last quarter, it's growing. That's a lot of earners. What is the federal government employee?

1:33:49It's like on par with, it's got to be on par with that. Now, the vast majority are quite part -time. But it's still, the scope is pretty extraordinary. Wow. And it's everywhere. So cool. Well, thank you, Dara. You're very welcome. It was a pleasure. Thank you for treating me to the wine. Well, no, I mean, you treated us. And I'm glad you decided to stay after dropping it off. You gave me a good tip. It all worked out. Oh, David, that was a blast. So fun. Funny, it's like you were just here next to me in Seattle, and now you're there in San Francisco. The magic of the internet. I'm really missing that delicious wine that Dara brought us.

1:34:28I know. Listeners, you can tell us if you liked that bit or not, or if it was too campy. If you want more of David and I, we recently did an episode on My First Million, and it was really fun. We went behind the scenes of Acquired, and we sort of talked about acquired's business our journey turning it from a podcast into a business why we think the podcast works and listeners you might have your own ideas but where our differentiation is in the market of content out there today and i know it's just a blast sam and sean are really fun to talk to so if you are interested in hearing that you can click the link in the show notes to specifically go to that episode or search any podcast player for My First Million.

1:35:11They also did episodes recently with a couple friends of the show, David Senra from the Founders Podcast, and actually, David, one of you and my favorite YouTubers, Doug DeMuro in the car category for anyone interested in cars. Doug is such, such a nice guy. Yeah. Check out ACQ2. It's our interview show where we talk to folks who are on the cutting edge of what's next, figuring out things like where is the defensibility in AI for B2B SaaS companies or, you know, our interview with the CEO of Angelus talking about how they're deploying AI at their company. I know AI is a buzzword, but like it is just dominating how every company is making moves these days.

1:35:51And it's great to talk to the protagonists who are actually in the arena right now making all of these moves. So that's on ACQ2. Check out the Slack. It's where we're talking about this episode and every other acquired .fm slash Slack. and if you want to come closer into the kitchen and be a part of what David and I are building here, become an LP, acquired .fm slash LP. Current benefits include once a season, you guys will pick an episode. Y 'all picked Lockheed Martin, which is shaping up to be one of our biggest episodes ever. So thank you. And I had a blast researching that one. So thanks to our LPs.

1:36:24And David, we got to schedule an LP call here in the next month or so. Let's get it on the books. Yep. With that, listeners, thanks so much. And we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now?