Uber CEO: At Uber, If You Don’t Perform, You’re Out! Uber Was Losing $3b A Year

10:18Dara Khosrowshahi:But I'm approaching that. Congratulations. Almost. Yeah, almost, yeah. I've just proposed to my fiance, and we're in the process now of 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 stoicism passing on to my children?

10:37Steven Bartlett:First of all, fatherhood, parenthood is so humbling. You have such a picture in your mind as to how you're going to raise your family, what your kids are going to 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 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 because you are exhausted and you're working, you got a career, or often some people do.

11:19Steven Bartlett: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'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 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. 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.

11:57Steven Bartlett:But what you can't control is kind of that connection.

12:01Dara Khosrowshahi: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. And all these photos look incredibly, I think that was your fifth birthday.

12:14Steven Bartlett:Oh, wow. I had hair back then. You had a lot of hair. My mom loved to dress us up in, like, little doll outfits. I can tell. Yeah, yeah. Oh, Lord. Look at that. I'm definitely not going to do that to my kids.

12:27Dara Khosrowshahi:Age four in London? Yes. Another photo of you? Yes. You and your cousins? Yes. Another photo.

12:34Steven Bartlett:Family was everywhere for us.

12:35Dara Khosrowshahi:And again, another one with a beautiful haircut there.

12:39Steven Bartlett:It was a great childhood. It was amazing. I spoke to your mom. I hope well how'd it go we'll see she said

12:50Dara Khosrowshahi:I'll play the audio file just so people can hear it

12:52Steven Bartlett:when he was very little he told me that

12:56Dara Khosrowshahi:he wants to do something important in the world

13:00Steven Bartlett:and he said becoming wealthy is not his priority but making a change is I can't say I remember that conversation but the one of my early experiences that really imprinted on me was we went to visit one of my dad's factories family factories my dad was in charge of designing factories building them operating them and the respect that that population the factory had for him and the visit and how excited they were that his family was visiting was just really cool. And the way that he treated, he knew everyone's name. He treated them with such respect. It just, it really imprinted on me. There was this care.

13:48Steven Bartlett:It wasn't the boss is coming and there's fear. And so for me, like that ability to build a life where you have impact on a lot of people, but it's positive kind of building impact, you have the broad respect of these folks, it really imprinted on me. So I always wanted, you know, when we came to the States, making money was important. I don't want to kind of BS and say like, oh, I didn't care about it because we lost everything. And so my first job was like, invest in banking. What's the goal of invest in banking? Have fun, but make money, right? And so that was a priority for me. But then as I matured in life, as I knew I had safety in terms of, okay, yes, I know I can do that.

14:37Steven Bartlett:I can make money. I can provide for my family. I can support my mom and dad. Then building kind of an enterprise, having that feeling that I saw with my father, that connection with his team, was something that became really important to me.

14:53Dara Khosrowshahi:When you came to New York, you were eight, nine years old?

14:56Steven Bartlett:Nine years old, yes.

14:57Dara Khosrowshahi:If I'd asked you at nine years old when you arrived in New York what you wanted to do when you were older, what would you have said?

15:02Steven Bartlett:I have no idea. I want to make my dad proud. That was it. I wasn't kind of motivated for a specific target at all. I just wanted to make my family proud.

15:14Dara Khosrowshahi:Why I want to make my dad proud?

15:17Steven Bartlett:He's always been an important figure in my life. You know, there's this, and I think part of it is that I never got to know him that well as an individual, you know, because he was obviously, when I was younger, he was working all the time. So he would show up once in a while for dinner, et cetera. We always had family dinners together. And then he went away. And then I worked. So I never really got to know the person that he was. But I don't know. There's kind of this sense of duty. There's a hope that, you know, he's somewhere or maybe he's not someplace. But that making my father proud has always been a strong current, undercurrent in my life.

16:02Dara Khosrowshahi:So you're nine years old. You've arrived in New York City. You do end up going off to college sometime later.

16:08Steven Bartlett:Yes. Went to Brown University, studied engineering there.

16:11Dara Khosrowshahi:How do you think about that choice at that time and how determinate that was of your trajectory in your life, that decision to go to that university and study that subject?

16:19Steven Bartlett:My father always said, you can do anything in your life as long as either you're a doctor or an engineer. And I picked engineering. I just loved the problem-solving aspect of engineering and all the layers of equations, et cetera, and those equations being able to represent something in real life and then magically that something in real life following what it should theoretically. Like the problem-solving aspect of engineering fascinated me. I absolutely loved it. And I think it serves me to this day.

16:50Dara Khosrowshahi:Engineers make good CEOs.

16:52Steven Bartlett:Great CEOs. If you step back, companies are just machines, right? 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. We are rules-based. It's an organism and it's a machine at the same time. And to some extent, the job of the CEO is engineering. How do I set up the company to achieve the goals that, you know, I set for shareholders, set for my board sets for it? It's a giant engineering problem. And to me, that's like fascinating. The putting together the pieces to get to what you perceive to be the goal.

17:38Steven Bartlett:And one of the really important things is you got to pick the right goals. That is one giant problem-solving engineering challenge, and it's one of the most fascinating parts of my job.

17:48Dara Khosrowshahi:I want to get into that, the practical company building, how you organize an organization to be a well-functioning machine, setting goals and all that stuff. After college, you go into investment banking for a period of time?

18:01Steven Bartlett:Yeah, I worked there for eight years in risk arbitrage to begin with, and then mergers and acquisition advisory work as well.

18:09Dara Khosrowshahi:And that experience I was reading taught you about betting on people. Yes. What do you mean by betting on people? And why is that important?

18:16Steven Bartlett:It was actually a lesson that I learned from Herbert Allen, who was running Allen and company at the time. It was Allen's family started a company. And he always told me, and at the time I didn't really listen to him. 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.

19:01Steven Bartlett: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. And it's definitely something that I learned there.

19:16Dara Khosrowshahi:What is it about one's character that makes them qualify as a great person?

19:19Steven Bartlett:You look for success, honor, loyalty, people who will tell you what they're going to do, whether it's good or bad, and then follow through on their promises.

19:29Dara Khosrowshahi:Hard work. I'm surprised that wasn't mentioned.

19:30Steven Bartlett:Well, that comes with success. Okay. Talent and hard work. You put those two together.

19:35Dara Khosrowshahi:And why did you leave Allen and company?

19:37Steven Bartlett:I left Allen because I met Barry Diller. He was a client of mine. We got to meet in a big kind of deal, unfriendly, hostile tender offer for Paramount at the time. There's another one happening, I guess, for Paramount now as we speak. And he was the one person. I thought I was going to be an Allen lifer. I thought I was going to be there forever. My older brother, Kaveh, is an Allen lifer. He is. 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 going to jump at it. And I did.

20:16Dara Khosrowshahi:Why? Why Barry?

20:18Steven Bartlett:He's spectacular. I mean, he was spectacular. He is spectacular. A doer. You know, he, he, I met him in a circumstance where he lost. It was this giant hostile tender offer, bids going back and forth between the winner, Viacom, and Barry. Ultimately, Barry stepped away, and we were planning an announcement. And you can imagine all these fancy PR people sitting around a table. How do we present a loss as a win, right? So he bid for a company. He didn't get it. He didn't get it, and he walked away. He didn't get it because he walked away, which in hindsight was a mistake. He could have paid more.

20:59Steven Bartlett:And then in the release where he walked away, 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.

21:17Dara Khosrowshahi:In business, losing is part of the game.

21:19Steven Bartlett:Absolutely. Absolutely. But then calling it out. You know, not bullshitting. Not like, oh, we tried our best in the circumstances. They won, we lost. Next. It's okay. Does it matter how you lose? Absolutely it does. Absolutely it does. 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 for me, it's somewhere in the middle, which is recognize why you lost. Recognize that you lost.

22:03Steven Bartlett:Say it because 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 going to avoid losing at all. Like if you're not taking shots, you're not missing, 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 want to see. That constant motion and learning is what excites me.

22:38Dara Khosrowshahi:This is business advice, but also life advice generally, because a lot of people who I meet will come up to me and ask me questions about things, often ask questions that sounded 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 15 years, and holds them back. Hurts their confidence, means that they don't take any more shots. And this can cause a sort of a downward confidence spiral. Totally.

23:04Steven Bartlett:And listen, 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.

23:17Dara Khosrowshahi:You have a difficulty dealing with rejection in your personal life? Very much. What kind of rejection?

23:23Steven Bartlett:Any kind of rejection, conflict. Like it's something that has been, that I fought my whole life, 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, but it is something in my personal life that generally I'm conflict-avoiding.

24:08Dara Khosrowshahi:You're conflict-avoiding in your personal life? Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. That's not good in a relationship. No, no. That's why it's helping me out.

24:17Steven Bartlett:I'm much better now. I'm much better. But it's when I take those issues on, I have to fight myself. There's some core. If you and I were having an issue and I was sitting down with you and saying, hey, I'm not happy about X or Y, I can feel there's a core of me saying, just let it go. but that's how resentment builds and that's 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 the learning journey there i'll tell you that

24:54Dara Khosrowshahi:eventually you go on to becoming the ceo of expedio yes um there was a couple of ceos that came before you but you became the third and took that company on very different job going from investment banking to being a CEO.

25:07Steven Bartlett:Yeah, yeah. Now, there was a journey there because I went from banking to running deals. And I knew that I liked how companies worked. The thing that I liked about investment banking was that I got to see a lot there. I got to see really smart people, really cool companies build. But I couldn't go along with that journey. I was jealous of the journey that these CEOs were moving on. So then when M &A was a bridge to work at a company and build the company, I moved from M &A to CFO, Chief Financial Officer, because that's to some extent finance, but it's also being the CEO's partner and helping the CEO build.

25:52Steven Bartlett:So I always knew the direction that I wanted to go in, which is, hey, at some point I want to actually be an operator. And then I had the opportunity to take over Expedia, the CEO of the time. Eric Blashford kind of said, yeah, big company thing, not for me. So he resigned. And honestly, Barry didn't have an alternative. Barry was the CEO of Expedia. Barry was the CEO and chairman of IAC, which was a parent company of what became Expedia, IAC Travel. The head of IAC Travel resigned. I raised my hand and said, maybe I could do it. Barry was desperate. He had no one else. So he promoted me to be CEO of IAC Travel.

26:33Steven Bartlett:And IAC Travel was going through some difficult times. So we spun it off at Expedia. So that's when I became the CEO of Expedia, the public company, and I moved to the Netherlands of Seattle.

26:46Dara Khosrowshahi: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. Yes. What are some of the companies that you bought?

26:56Steven Bartlett:Oh, we bought a lot of companies. We bought Ticketmaster. We bought Match.com. Bought Expedia, Hotels.com. And it was all about the theme that Barry and I were fascinated with was the movement of commerce online. You know, it was during that time. It was the late 90s, early 2000. And we saw it happening with our very own eyes, really with home shopping, right? It was 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. A medium changed from a TV screen to an internet screen. And instead of calling, you could use a HTTP.

27:41Steven Bartlett:And so while the medium changed, we kind of saw this opportunity to take advantage of the change of platform. So Match.com, essentially in the olden days, 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 describe yourself and you hear other kind of recordings and you would get matched up based on someone who seemed nice. and all of that just moved online. That was what Backshot.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? Yeah.

28:18Steven Bartlett:So there were these things called record stores. And they also had a desk where they would sell concert tickets. 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. What's that? 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 for because at the time, Amazon was doing everything else like physical fulfillment.

29:01Steven Bartlett:So what we were going for were essentially electronic, transactions that did not require physical fulfillment. And that was travel because, you know, it's a virtual good, ticketing, match.com, 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.

29:22Dara Khosrowshahi:I've got two questions that emerged there. One is, again, I'm really interested to understand how you would look for talent or how you think about what a great company is. Are there like, we're looking at the company culture, we're looking at the founders, was there something else was at the profitability. And the other one is just really intrigued as to what this period of your life and thereafter taught you about how to spot opportunity in transition. Because 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 not going to do anything.

29:57Dara Khosrowshahi:So two questions I want is like, how do you spot great companies? And then the second is like patterns in transition.

30:02Steven Bartlett:So I'd say that they're related, which is 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 a return, 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 just identify the leaders and call these folks up and say, I want to come in and talk to you. Like that was it. 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.

30:53Steven Bartlett: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 last thing I would tell you in terms of these pattern recognition 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, 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.

31:44Dara Khosrowshahi:Would you mean by that for someone that doesn't just, they think of it going like this?

31:47Steven Bartlett:Yeah, you know, it's the, everything kind of moves this way, right? Your schedule is relatively linear, right? It's you sleep seven hours a day. Like 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 to see things, when they project out to the future, they see this, what actually happens is this.

32:29Steven Bartlett:A hockey stick. And that's where the opportunity is. It's the spread between the hockey stick and kind of the straight line. 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.

32:50Dara Khosrowshahi:I heard about the, is it Jevons Paradox? Yes. which I think kind of sort of overlaps with what you're saying there. When things become easier, faster, cheaper, people do them not incrementally more, but like exceptionally more often.

33:04Steven Bartlett:I mean, that's the definition of Uber, and we can get to that at some point, was originally it was built as a black cab service, so to speak, a black car service.

33:14Dara Khosrowshahi:Can you tell me where it came from? Because a lot of people, history has now moved forward. People have forgotten the story of how it came to be.

33:20Steven Bartlett:Now, to some extent, it was, well, to a large extent, And it was that the founding was before me. But it was Garrett Camp, who was one of the founders, had this idea. 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 tech guys. Like, how cool would it be to, like, pick up my phone and call a black car? And that was the core idea, which is, hey, you can use your phone to call a black car. He brought on Travis Kalanick. Travis was the operator and the founder. And to your point on Jevon's paradox, to some extent, people thought, well, what's the size of the black car marketplace?

34:01Steven Bartlett:And it was a couple billion dollars. Or what's the size of the taxi industry? And it was more than a couple billion dollars. But what they didn't see at the time was that as you improve, 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. The company today is a result of Jevons Paradox.

34:35Dara Khosrowshahi:Timing. We often don't think much about the luck of timing. Luck is an interesting word to use, but how important timing is 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?

34:54Steven Bartlett:Well, it was a mobile revolution. It was mobile data technology, the iPhone coming together. In the early days, one of the geniuses 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 didn't have smartphones, so to speak. So the onset 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 as I have to to get there faster than anyone else.

35:47Steven Bartlett: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 all around the world, company wouldn't be what it is today.

36:03Dara Khosrowshahi:You'll transition out of investment banking into Expedia, CFO, then CEO. You know, listen, there's a stereotype in business that investment bankers and CFOs don't necessarily make the best CEOs because they might stereotypically.

36:18Steven Bartlett:Over-financialize.

36:19Dara Khosrowshahi:Over-financialize. Maybe be less risk-averse, maybe be less, you know, 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 better coming from him.

36:31Steven Bartlett:He was probably back to the labor.

36:36Steven Bartlett:because his career until then had been on the financial side of things. So he really had not yet had the experience, 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. night yeah it was um growing up under barry was was and by the way i wouldn't be where i am today without not him as a mentor because he's not like a mentoring kind of guy but him as my leader learning from him but i'd say that the experience that really really shaped me uh as it relates to xpedia was i did come in as more of a financial leader our leadership at xpedia.com failed i I hired a – I had to fire the first person.

37:31Steven Bartlett:I hired a second person. Complete disaster. And so I was 0 for 2 in terms of hiring for our largest business. This business was 50 % of our profits, and I was 0 for 2 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. 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 is it that the job entails for me to then go in and find that person.

38:12Steven Bartlett:And so for what turned out 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, the financial wizardry that people embark on. That's important. But what I discovered was operating a company, leading a company, organizing it, operating it, setting up the goals, getting the right team together.

38:55Steven Bartlett:That's the part of the job that I loved. So 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. And I think to some extent now I've got both. I've got that financial part because it has to work. But the operations and the leadership part of the business is something that I love. And watching Barry take responsibility, take shots, go against the grain 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.

39:46Dara Khosrowshahi:Three months into that role, the head of HR told you that you were scaring people.

39:51Steven Bartlett:I'd forgotten about that. I think that was my job. What's the context there? You know, the context was that, first of all, turnarounds in technology are really hard. We were talking about the momentum thing when momentum is positive. In the technology sector, if momentum turns negative, it is remarkably difficult to turn it around. You know, Yahoo is 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.

40:41Steven Bartlett:The first couple of years look bad, but they're not that bad. But you know in your mind that 10 years from now, it's going to be a fucking disaster. So what I saw with Expedia was a technology company whose technology engine was broken. Codebase 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 a bell is rung, 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.

41:29Steven Bartlett: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 going to start on that exponential decay curve. I had to move quickly. And at that point, and I am one of the skills that I learned from Barry is transparency. 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 SVP and whatever, by the time it's summarized for you as the CEO, it's just it's lost everything.

42:20Steven Bartlett:And usually their levels are like, hey, do we really want to tell them 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 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 on to 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.

43:15Right? And human beings are good bullshit kind of meters, so to speak.

43:21Steven Bartlett:And when you're the CEO and you're talking to your staff and you're giving all 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 boss isn't telling them the good stuff, why should they give the good stuff back to the boss? So for me, it was almost like a self-defense mechanism that as a boss, I'm going to tell you what's going on. Because that's the only way I can drag the hard truths back from you. Because otherwise, you're going to filter yourself.

43:59Steven Bartlett:You're going to be like, I don't want Dara to know this happened.

44:02Dara Khosrowshahi:But do you ever worry that they might not be able to deal with the truth?

44:05Steven Bartlett:Then they can leave. 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 because I'm like, we have a real problem here and we've got to come together. And I think that, you know, there's a – a good decision-making framework for me is if I make a mistake, where do I want to make the mistake on? Right? And so if I want to – if I'm going to err with my company, I'm going to err in telling the truth and potentially scaring someone away. I'll take that. because if that person doesn't want to face the truth, if he or she's not up for the fight, then they should go someplace else.

44:46Steven Bartlett: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 because then I think you attract the right people and partially because then I'm going to get the good information 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.

45:24Steven Bartlett:And then for me too, you always have to have your random direct channels. You know, again, if you think about organizations as organisms, they have their own incentives. And so my staff's incentive is to control the information that gets to me. Not because they're bad people. It's just their job because 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 because usually they've got the kind of personality where they don't give a shit.

46:03Steven Bartlett:They'll tell me anything and everything, and they like putting the CEO down.

46:08Dara Khosrowshahi:That's great. They like putting the CEO down.

46:10Steven Bartlett: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. So I find a lot of engineers have a personality, which is, yeah, I'm going to tell you what it's like. Like, you know, their value is in something else, but often there's a kind of a disrespect for authority that I love.

46:31Dara Khosrowshahi:I found in my companies that there's sometimes like a 24-year-old young girl who will just tell me the truth. Yeah. And she's the one you want to hang out with. She's the one I always go and ask for an opinion.

46:42Steven Bartlett:Absolutely. So you've got to have your own channels. But the way to get transparency from your team is first you've got to give it to them.

46:52Dara Khosrowshahi:Was the culture hardworking when you arrived? Because you used the word coasting to describe some of the team when you arrived at Expedia.

46:58Steven Bartlett:Medium. I think the company had been successful for a long time and had coasted on that success to some extent. So I needed to turn over the team, turn over like the entire team very, very quickly and get some hungry people in there.

47:11Dara Khosrowshahi:The entire team?

47:13Steven Bartlett:Almost the entire team. Yeah, yeah. It was rough going for a while. But then you have kind of mission-oriented people who are trying to prove themselves. And it's part of the renewal that every company has to go through. And we turned it around. It was tough going, but we really turned around. And that was when I kind of learned, hey, my love is running shit. It's great. It's the best part of my job.

47:35Dara Khosrowshahi: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. It might be two decades in. And this is an ultimate question in executive management. How do you turn around the culture of a big or even 200 people?

47:51Steven Bartlett:It's very difficult. 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 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 organization. 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.

48:30Steven Bartlett:What's going on? You know, I think at Expedia, in hindsight, we worked intensely and we went hard, but not as hard as I like because Expedia was, we were selling vacations, right? It was the The product that we were selling was about turning yourself off. And so we did talk about work-life balance. And in hindsight, at Uber, I don't. You know, you come to Uber, you're going to work your ass off. We're going to be really demanding. If you're not performing, we're going to let you know. And if you don't fix it, we're going to push you out. but while it will be incredibly hard you will have real agency of 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 going to learn so much and while you will have worked hard you're going to have a great time but this is don't come here if you want to coast and i'm very clear about that and i should have been more clear at expedia but we were selling vacation so i couldn't be quite that clear

49:43Dara Khosrowshahi:new year always has a strange energy to it because people start talking about their goals fresh starts 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 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.

50:21Dara Khosrowshahi:So if 2026 is the year you finally back yourself, go to shopify.co.uk slash Bartlett and start selling and you can sign up for a$1 per month trial right now too. just go to shopify.co.uk slash Bartlett. I promise you, you don't need to have it all figured out. You just need to start. In your 12 years as CEO, Expedia stock rose 550 % and sales increased 400 % from 2.1 billion to 8.8 billion. And you were the highest paid CEO of a US tech company with a pay of 94.1 million.

51:01Steven Bartlett:I left it all behind to go to Uber. You left it all behind? It was a big options package that I never bested, but it's all good. It was a great run.

51:10Dara Khosrowshahi:I'm so intrigued about this point of hard work because I think 10 years ago, saying what you just said was very taboo. Yes. It feels to be more in vogue now. We're freed now, yes. You're freed now.

51:21Steven Bartlett:Yes, yes, indeed. I've gotten, you know, sometimes people ask you the question, 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 can't just, like, decide you're going to do it. And I think way too many people, you know, focus on, 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 know, when you see the top athletes, of course they're talented. And, you know, their talent level is world levels. But the thing that changes that's different about the elite athletes than the non-elite athletes, and I'm talking elite, is they work their asses off.

52:12Steven Bartlett: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, with my kids, I just want to teach them how to work hard. And for me, like growing up, as a banker, as an executive, I'm not going to let anyone outwork me. And if that's true, then they may be smarter, more talented, et cetera. But I'm not going to let anyone outwork me. And I think that's a huge advantage that you have in a period of time, that advantage compounds.

52:51Steven Bartlett:And I want that in our company. Like I want Uber to be an incredibly hardworking company.

52:55Dara Khosrowshahi:It comes at a cost though, no? Working hard.

52:58Steven Bartlett:Yes. It comes at a tradeoff. And 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 want to have dinner with your family, and 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 9 30 p.m i'm checking emails right when i wake up at 5 30 and in a.m i'm checking emails so of course there are trade-offs and you know life is about trade-offs i think one of the most important things i've

53:32Dara Khosrowshahi: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. I think 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 within their own lives.

53:57Steven Bartlett:And I'm allowing them to be honest back to me.

54:00Dara Khosrowshahi:Yeah. And that's a company culture that someone like me would be attracted to. Absolutely. But there's lots of people listening that couldn't think of anything worse. And that's okay. Yes. Yeah. There are plenty of

54:08Steven Bartlett:companies that they could find or plenty of causes that they can find.

54:11Dara Khosrowshahi:It's fine. You said learn to work hard, learn?

54:15Steven Bartlett:It's a skill. Really? Yes, of course it is. Because 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'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, at Uber, There's actually saying it's inside one of our values. Embrace the grind. Embrace it. That's a learned skill. That's not something you're born with. Maybe there's an element that you're born with.

54:52Dara Khosrowshahi:Have you ever seen someone who isn't a hard worker become a really hard worker, an exceptionally hard worker? That's a good question. No one doesn't occur to me. Have you? No. So I think it might have been maybe Brian Chesky at Airbnb or Elon say that he's never seen someone who wasn't a hard worker become a really hard worker. That's interesting. And this is why I'm trying to come up with someone. Failing so far. And maybe I might posit that it's somewhat to do with, you know, these photos that you have in front of you. Your childhood, your early context, which you didn't choose. I also am working hard here.

55:30Dara Khosrowshahi:But you were forged in such a way that you were going to be ruthless. Sorry, relentless is the word I meant.

55:37Steven Bartlett:Yeah, I mean, ruthless to myself. Relentless is right. I think at one point Jeff Bezos was going to call Amazon relentless. He was thinking about that being the name of the company. And that is, when I see successful technology companies, and especially technology companies, there is this relentlessness about them. At Uber, we have lots of different groups that are trying to do different things, but each and every team is built and targeted on optimizing and improving their own particular function. There isn't a piece of the company that is not improving every single day. And if they're not improving fast enough, someone else is going to take their place and going to improve it.

56:22Steven Bartlett:So as an organism, every part of the company, whether it's a payments team in terms of new payments types or payment success or the fraud team or the mobile app team in terms of conversions, et cetera, every team is set up and organized for and gold on improving everything that they do. So the whole company in small ways is constantly improving, never, ever stopping. And it is that relentless nature of business. And at the minute, and it's not good enough to get better, we have to get better faster than our competitors. Because our competitors are all getting better as well. So it's basically like who can adapt faster to either the reality of the market as it is today or the prediction of the market as you see it tomorrow.

57:12Steven Bartlett:And it's the speed of change and it's the identification of the opportunity. Those are the two factors, I think, that are most important. And the speed of change, you know, if you can work fast, you're kind of accelerating time. You know, every one shot that you take, I can take two shots. I've got more time than you do. And then, of course, there's identifying the opportunity and going after it. Those are the two things you really have to get right.

57:36Dara Khosrowshahi:If you're taking two shots, not only are you going to get two data points of information, but you're also increasing your probability of having a successful shot by like 100%. Shots on goal. Just shots on goal. 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. And, you know, we high five 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.

58:05Dara Khosrowshahi:Totally. Totally. Because loss aversion, they have something to lose now. So just protect.

58:09Steven Bartlett:I think the good news to some extent with Uber is that we've always been a company that has had a chip on his shoulder. You know, the company had a chip on his shoulder when it was founded and had to like fight taxi unions for its very existence. 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 do better. Then people saying, you know, it was a tough IPO. Uber is never going to get profitable. And today we're incredibly successful, but we've got the challenge and the opportunity of AI and autonomous.

58:50Steven Bartlett:So we've always been a company that has been, I would say, underestimated. and that feeds into our culture. 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, they identify it and they get it the hell out. It's a team that is not satisfied, that's always driving. And I love that about us.

59:23Dara Khosrowshahi: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$2.5 to$3 billion per year. Now it generates$8.5 billion in free cash flow every year. How do you get people to— 9.8 in the last year. You're counting. 9.8 Okay, incredible. Celebrate.

59:56Steven Bartlett:Chill. Well, you can celebrate and not chill. Okay, how? We take those moments. We do celebrate. 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 mistake would you rather make? 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 we take our moments. But the success itself, I don't know, succeeding is almost a celebration in and of itself.

1:00:35Steven Bartlett:And when you're succeeding in such a competitive field, I just find a deep sense of satisfaction there. And I think my team does too.

1:00:44Dara Khosrowshahi:How do you get the team to take those risks that they need to take? Is there something you would do like incentivize them on the amount of shots they take? How do you do that?

1:00:52Steven Bartlett: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 I do think that there's a mechanism that we talk now about that I've talked to a 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$9.8 billion of cash flow to protect yourself against some of those mistakes.

1:01:24Steven Bartlett:So I have definitely in the past, I would say, two years pushed the team actively to push an 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. And then sometimes my taking decisions that are seen as more risky than not. That setting the example then allows a company to follow. So if I was in one of your teams, how do you think about goal setting for me? All the teams have different goals, business goals. The ads team has to drive technology-driven incremental ad dollars per year and or customer satisfaction, customer MPS, et cetera.

1:02:14Steven Bartlett:So every team has its own goals, and they organize against those goals, and they execute 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 non-ambitious enough? And sometimes people can game the system. So we use it, but I can't tell you that it's perfect.

1:02:42Dara Khosrowshahi:What about, you talked earlier about values. A lot of companies go and do an off-site and they write some words on a wall and they say ambition, enthusiasm, courage, whatever. What do you think of that sort of corporate habit of values and stuff?

1:02:56Steven Bartlett:We went through the exercise. failed the first time, succeeded the second time. And we failed when it first came to Uber. Obviously, there was a view that 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. For example, there was one value that was toe-stepping. And the idea of toe-stepping 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 because the truth is more important.

1:03:47Steven Bartlett: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. Right? So the values in and of themselves can be great or terrible based on how you execute on those values. When I first came in, we had to redo the values. And I was – there's a saying by Jeff Bezos that I love, which is like the values of the company almost – they appear. The value system of the company appears to some extent. If you say thou shalt, you're going to fail because the company shall, right?

1:04:35Steven Bartlett:And the approach that we first took was that we will actually get the value system. We had to 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 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 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.

1:05:15Steven Bartlett:And for me, it was a message to the whole company, which was, if you work at Uber, you have a responsibility, and I'm not going to 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, it's 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 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.

1:05:56Steven Bartlett:Like what company doesn't believe in teamwork? Give me a break. So we, Nikki Krishnamarthy, who runs 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 one of our values. By the way, Go Get It was the only one that survived. No, no, sorry. Do the right thing was the only one that survived. But for example, go get it is one of our top values.

1:06:35Steven Bartlett: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? Rise 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 going to be aggressive. We're going to push. We're going to move fast. We play to win. And so the value sets that we have, go get it, or one that I really like, great minds don't think alike. We came up 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.

1:07:11Dara Khosrowshahi:How important is 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 10 now by the age of 60, you'll experience a year's change in, I think it's 11 days and just this sort of exponential acceleration.

1:07:30Steven Bartlett:The law of accelerating returns.

1:07:31Dara Khosrowshahi:Yeah, like how do you create a culture or build a team in a world where the correct answer is changing this quickly?

1:07:39Steven Bartlett:I think that it is setting a culture that does embrace that change and is constantly challenging itself. And I will give Travis and the founding team credit. You know, 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 a shoulder, was born out of the creation of a new industry.

1:08:27Steven Bartlett:So we've experienced it. 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.

1:08:53Dara Khosrowshahi: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 transpired to be critical to your success? You know, I don't know about – well, I think it will be critical to the success.

1:09:10Steven Bartlett:But 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 and built out this peer-to-peer ride-sharing. and it was probably five or six years ago, our head of product now, Sachin, he worked on building kind of a technology that would allow taxi companies 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 I kept in touch with some of the founders just because I want their advice, because why not?

1:09:54Steven Bartlett:You know, they built a great company. I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. They said it's the most idiotic thing on earth. You can't wire up taxis. They hate us. They accept rates will be terrible. Lots of technical reasons. They had tried it earlier. It was a total failure. But I think Sachin, 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 hope to have every single taxi in the world wired up to Uber.

1:10:31Steven Bartlett:Why not?

1:10:33Dara Khosrowshahi:For the first 10 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.

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1:12:43Dara Khosrowshahi: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 learned 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 1%. 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 1 % diaries and we released these last year and they all sold out.

1:13:23Dara Khosrowshahi: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 20 % off our Black Friday bundle. And if you want the link, the link is in the description below. And there's another, there's an alien that's arrived amongst us, which is AI.

1:13:57Dara Khosrowshahi:And you've, you know, Uber's always been somewhat powered from what I understand by to some degree. but the world has changed in the last couple of years as it relates to AI. There's been a huge acceleration in investment and improvement of the technology. What do you, aside from Uber, you talked earlier about your early childhood and how you grew up with a bit of a paranoia about losing everything because that's what you experienced as a young man. You see this technology arrive, which is fundamentally disruptive to all of us, including me as a podcaster. I've done the tests and the retention isn't far off when it's me or AI, so it's slightly concerning.

1:14:32Dara Khosrowshahi:But like, how do you approach such a disruptive technology? How do you think of it broadly and the impact it's going to have on society? And are you paranoid?

1:14:41Steven Bartlett:I'm not paranoid. I'm not, I guess I was going to say I'm not built that way, but maybe I am. 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, whether or not a career batches a trip, which is do they take two orders or one order? All of our systems, underlying systems, are driven by AI. We do 40 million trips a day. You know, that kind of orchestration can't be done by heuristic rules, and we've got to work on the streets of New York and the streets of Lagos as well. So we have built the entire company on small AI models that have been trained on local problems and then get stitched together.

1:15:30Steven Bartlett:That's literally what the company is. So for us, AI is kind of a core skill set. And AI can mess things up, right? It's not because it's not heuristics-based. There are emergent issues that come out of an AI that works 96 % of the time and 4 % of the time and 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 research shops, but I would say in terms of applied AI, the team is driving to build newer AI experiences across the company. But stepping back as a person, the impact on society is going to be enormous.

1:16:18Steven Bartlett: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, 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 70, 80 % of humans can do over the next 10 years. 10 years is not a lot of time for society to adjust to that kind of an impact. Now, are they going to be more expensive than humans, cheaper than humans, et cetera? Who knows? But the capability will be there. Probably in the next 10 years for intellectual jobs, probably call it 15 years for physical, 15, 20 years for physical jobs because physical AI is harder.

1:17:10Steven Bartlett:You know, robots, cars, et cetera, more capital heavy, takes longer, or have to deal with the physical world. So the changes in society are going to 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. It's a very, very exciting time.

1:17:45Dara Khosrowshahi:70 to 80 percent of jobs will be disrupted by AI is like broadly what you said there and the pace of change is going to mean that a lot of people don't have new jobs to go to because we haven't I think that's the question the retraining challenge and people say well there's going to be jobs in AI but like listen I've got some friends that can't just

1:18:05Steven Bartlett:society's always adjusted right farming was a huge percentage of our labor force now it's less the 1%. But the speed of which... Yeah, I think that's a question. And you could argue that AIs will be able to retrain you, right? The job retraining is going to change. So of course, society is going to adjust. But I do think it raises questions, real questions.

1:18:23Dara Khosrowshahi: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 70 or 80 % of people do? Because we're seeing it in our own business that there's many jobs, which we would have hired for previously, across the board, that AI is now doing exceptionally well. And every single day, literally daily, we try to see if the new model, Gemini Pro 3 or 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 that you talk about a lot, where there's been really sort of big disruption, positive disruption at Uber.

1:18:57Steven Bartlett:And a lot of your coders are now using AI to? Yeah, about 90 % of our coders are using AI. Now, that's easy to say, But there are probably 30 % of them that were power users. They are showing a clear differentiation in the number of diffs, for example, how much 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 is 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.

1:19:32Steven Bartlett:and their architects who are kind of thinking about what the system should look like. And so while 90 % of our engineers are using AI tools of some sort, there's about 30 % of them that are using them at a completely 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.

1:20:16Steven Bartlett:But the job will still be there. and my attitude is if my average engineer became 25 25 more efficient which we haven't gone there yet but we will get there i'm going to hire more engineers because i want to go faster there's 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 account because at that point instead of adding an engineer i should add agents and buy some more GPUs from NVIDIA, that may be the investment in the future. We'll see.

1:20:50Dara Khosrowshahi:Because thinking about linear versus exponential as well, if we imagine a rate of improvement, I don't know, in my head, I go, well, when 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 going to be possible. The agents will then build, actually, maybe they didn't even need you to set the strategy. Maybe, but theoretically, you know, if you imagine any rate of improvement in the intelligence, maybe at some point they're going to go, well, listen, there's a better strategy here, Dara.

1:21:21One of my team members told me

1:21:25Steven Bartlett:that some teams have built a Dara AI, you know, so that they basically make the presentation to the Dara AI as a prep for making a presentation to me. Because you can imagine, like, you know, by the time something comes to me, There's been a prep and a meeting, and the slide deck has been beautifully honed. So they have Dara AI to tune their prep. Are you concerned they might show Dara AI to the board? I was like, can I see the code for Dara AI? I'm curious.

1:21:55Dara Khosrowshahi:She's like, no, we're not showing it to you. But is there anything falsifiable in what I just said about that they're coming a time in the not so near future, if we imagine exponential improvement, where?

1:22:06Steven Bartlett:I think where AI still is missing a beat that humans and other creatures have is the ability to learn real time. So if you think about you and I are learning for this conversation and maybe your behavior is going to change by 0.1 % because of actually what you learn here. And the construct of most large AI models is capture 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 model based on feedback from the world. And then when the model's released, it's kind of released, right?

1:22:48Steven Bartlett:And the way the model learns is, you know, 3.5 becomes 3.8, but 3.5 didn't learn. The engineers went out and built, you know, built a new model that's 3.8 that might have elements of 3.5 to it, et cetera. So the AI agents aren't learning. Now, a lot of what we're doing is we're building around the foundation models and then bring kind of the signals from the real world and use the skills that the foundation models have to do good stuff. Sounds like me. Yeah.

1:23:20Dara Khosrowshahi:Post-training, I'm post-training.

1:23:21Steven Bartlett:Exactly. So we are post-training, but we're learning real-time as human beings. and when the models can learn real time, that I think is the point at which I'm going to kind of think, yeah, we are all replaceable. But at this point, I haven't seen a model that can learn real time.

1:23:43Dara Khosrowshahi:One of the real areas of disruption in AI has been autonomous vehicles. And just before we started recording, I was saying that I have a Tesla in LA where I live, and it's staggering that I can get in the car, press a button, and drive two and a half hours to Joshua Tree without having to touch the wheel or the pedals. Now, driving, I think, is one of the biggest employees in the world, like as a profession.

1:24:04Steven Bartlett:I mean, we've got nine and a half million drivers and couriers on our platform. We are the largest organizer of flexible work around the world. And I think the second largest workforce is a Chinese army.

1:24:17Dara Khosrowshahi:Wow.

1:24:17Steven Bartlett:Yeah. It's a big group of folks that we've organized.

1:24:20Dara Khosrowshahi: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 autonomous driving is currently safer.

1:24:33Steven Bartlett: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 got a Tesla as well. And once in a while it disengages and I've got to or I've got to disengage. So 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.

1:24:58Dara Khosrowshahi:And we can't be far away from it just being.

1:25:00Steven Bartlett:I mean, Waymo's there already, right? You live in LA. I've tried it. They've got the Waymo's. We work with them in Austin, in Atlanta. And by all accounts, Waymo drivers are safer than human beings. And that's going to be true of AV all over the world. You know, there are a million deaths from driving every year in the world. In the U.S., it's between 35 ,000 and 40 ,000 auto fatalities. So to the extent that these autonomous agents and drivers can be better than humans, and they will be better than humans over a period of time, there's a real return on human life as a result of this.

1:25:40Dara Khosrowshahi:Those 9 million drivers' careers that you have will be out of work, conceivably. You know, talking about being honest about the situation.

1:25:48Steven Bartlett:Yeah, I think, again, it goes to physical AI as well, right? So I think 20 years from now, you can imagine that those 9 million will be 20 million AVs maybe. But we have time between now and then, partially because we don't operate in the virtual world. 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 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 10 years from now, but you go 15, 20 years from now, you're going to start getting there.

1:26:30Dara Khosrowshahi:What do the 9 million people do? I don't know.

1:26:34Steven Bartlett:Now, we are expanding the kind of work that's available 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 little while at least before you get AI shoppers. And now actually we have a team called Uber AI Solutions that allows people to train these same agents and train AI agents and AI models and do all kinds of knowledge-based work on their phone as well. to kind of extend the kind of work that we offer humans on our platform and different opportunities for them 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.

1:27:27Steven Bartlett:I can't tell you which is going to go faster.

1:27:29Dara Khosrowshahi:Hand on heart, though, it does appear that unemployment is going to be significantly increased in a world of AI, especially we just imagine this sort of continual rate of improvement. I just can't. You would have to.

1:27:41Steven Bartlett:Unless, again, historically in societies, new kinds of jobs have come up. Knowledge jobs, physical jobs.

1:27:49Dara Khosrowshahi:Yeah.

1:27:49Steven Bartlett:Now we've disrupted both. 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 going to go? It's a real question mark. I think you're absolutely right. I don't think it's going to be a big issue, big issue in the next five years. But when you go five plus years, it's going to become more of an issue for society at large.

1:28:20Dara Khosrowshahi:It's interesting because what I was thinking, putting two and two together about your father's journey of coming to the U.S., losing what he had, losing his job, and the loss of meaning and purpose being really central to him. And I could see that basically from your face that I think what I interpreted from your face was that he struggled with, as any provider would, the loss of like meaning that comes with, because jobs aren't just about money. Especially, you know, they give you a sense of worth. It's funny, I read a study many years ago that said when they looked at suicide letters specifically from men, I think it was an Australian study.

1:28:55Dara Khosrowshahi:in the suicide letters that the sentiment was about not feeling worth. Yes. For to your family.

1:29:04Steven Bartlett:Yeah.

1:29:04Dara Khosrowshahi:And the extreme of that was, I think my family would actually now be better off without me. Interesting. And, and this kind of, you know, I think it's probably adjacent to this conversation around job displacement, which is where are we going to find our meaning in a world where the machines have now disrupted our intelligence and our muscles?

1:29:25Steven Bartlett:It's every universal income, basic income test has failed. You know, the answer that you hear from folks is, well, the robots are going to do all the work. They're going to create utility. And so our work won't have to create utility. So people will just have money. But it goes to exactly what you're saying, which is every single test they've done. Now, it's not 20, but they've done a couple of tests where certain section of the population, similar population gets income. Certain section doesn't. And every time the ones who are getting income do worse in terms of outcomes because, well, we don't know the because.

1:30:03Steven Bartlett:But I think the because is related to what you're saying, which is market forces kind of that force someone to work then create a perception of self-value. Succeeding, you know, most people succeed. If they're driven to succeed, they will succeed. and as they succeed, it comes with a very, very deep and important feeling of I am creating value. I'm supporting my family. I'm building this incredible piece of art, et cetera. Whatever that value is to you and wherever that meaning comes from, I'm an incredible parent. That value is what keeps people going. And I don't think that, you know, the government's raining money down on society is going to help.

1:30:50Dara Khosrowshahi:It's refreshing to hear your perspective on this because a lot of the time, you know, you'll hear CEOs in the media just saying, it'll be fine. Everyone's going to figure it out. And I think that's such a cop-out.

1:30:59Steven Bartlett:I mean, historically, we have figured it out. So maybe they're right. But you have to ask whether they're giving you the real stuff or not.

1:31:05Dara Khosrowshahi:Yeah, and that's kind of what I think because I sometimes hear about private conversations. And the private conversations, I hear about the sheer amount of disruption that they anticipate. And then when I see them on like CNBC or Davos, it's going to be fine and figure it out. And I understand the incentive because if they were to start ringing the bell, it might hurt their own chance of innovating and fundraising and all those things. But I think you sit at this sort of happy medium of being, yeah, as the CEO of Uber, you've got to pursue the opportunity and the technology. But on the other end, to be honest and say, listen, there's going to be big disruption and I don't know the answers.

1:31:37Steven Bartlett:I remember you were talking about CNBC, a CNBC anchor once. We had an interview afterwards. She said, you know, I really like you. You actually answer my questions. And I'm thinking to myself, what am I not supposed to? There's like the PR trading is always, if you get a bad question, don't answer the question, just pivot to something else. And for me, like I've sworn to myself and Noah, who's up there, is probably going to kill me afterwards. It's just I'm going to answer the question. I'm not going to do the BS. And again, I have to think the anchor knows what's happening. The audience knows what's happening.

1:32:15Steven Bartlett:So I'm like, I'll answer the question. If it's a shitty question, I'll deal with it.

1:32:18Dara Khosrowshahi:I actually don't like interviewing CEOs, which is funny because the name of the podcast, because active CEOs. Yeah, how did the – because I looked before I came on.

1:32:25Steven Bartlett:I'm like, I'm going to look up on the CEOs. And there aren't that many CEOs. Well, if I looked at your diary, what would I find inside your diary?

1:32:35Dara Khosrowshahi:I would probably find you contending with being a father, your psychologist. You might find some things in there about your health. I can see you're a guy that goes to the gym. Yeah, yeah. And I think it's all interlinked. I think for you to be an exceptional CEO, you probably think a lot about your past, your childhood, your health, how to optimize and all these things. And so, honestly, you can't do a podcast like this for 20 years and just hit the same thing every year. You need to be like, I need to be intellectually stimulated. And you and me are both multifaceted creatures, I guess. So that's why it's evolved.

1:33:05Dara Khosrowshahi:Until we become AIs. Until we become AIs. Yeah. Yeah. Just closing off on that then, what can we do about this from an AI, AV perspective? Is it the government's responsibility? Is it collective action?

1:33:20Steven Bartlett:So one is I do think that we don't talk enough in that, for example, the autonomous AI can be a force for good, right? It's these drivers are going to be safer than human beings. And those we can take the 35 ,000 fatalities to 3 ,000 fatalities, et cetera. I do think that the AIs, the AV is going to bring down the price of transportation. So a big part of our goal is to make on-demand transportation available for everybody. One of the folks that I was talking to was talking about how Uber has changed her mother's life. Like her mom can get around and just wouldn't get around without it, right?

1:33:57Steven Bartlett:We want more moms like that. So I do think it's important to recognize that if fundamental transportation becomes safer, it becomes cheaper, going back to general paradox, that's a good thing for society, right? I don't think that the answer as it relates to society is to try to slow down the pace of change because China won't, for example, if we're talking about the West. So I think you just have to lean into it. I think that discussions like this are important. I think you look for technology leaders who are talking about it. Dario, for example, Anthropic is talking about it, pissing some people off, but I think he's having good discussions there.

1:34:41Steven Bartlett:And then I do think that the society arming up to be able to retrain large groups of people at scale is not a skill. I don't see people investing that. And I don't see that as a core capability of any of our countries, et cetera. If there's one thing I can come up with, it will be that is the retraining machine.

1:35:05Dara Khosrowshahi:You've got four kids.

1:35:06Steven Bartlett:Yes.

1:35:07Dara Khosrowshahi:They come to you, they say, dad, listen, AI, robotics. Give me some advice for my future. What should I be doing?

1:35:12Steven Bartlett:Work hard. You're going to be fine. Work hard. It's just that. I mean, now the AIs theoretically can work harder than you. But 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 a CEO, et cetera. 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 lose their curiosity. 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.

1:36:00Steven Bartlett:Anytime you get signal that goes against your preconceived notions, either you ignore it or you're like, all right, shit, I'm going to take this on. It's unpleasant. And so with career planning, what I find is people who have to clear a career plan, they're looking for signals that feed into their career plan. I'm going to be a vice president by this much. I'm going to make X money by this much. And they're not looking around. They're not being curious. They're not looking for a signal that can change, you know, their life. And so what I tell some folks is, like, before you go out and try to change your world, let the world change you first.

1:36:37Steven Bartlett:You know, take input. And if you're like this, you got blinders because I'm going here, you're not going to take input. You're not going to let, you're not going to take all the stimulus coming in from the world. So it's, you know, the one constant I see is people who are good are good. People are good. I've never seen a successful person in a job or a career get there without working hard. And my guess is, I don't know about you, you kind of wound up where you're wound up. Kind of by accident. Yeah, I didn't expect that. And people are like, well, you got lucky. I got very lucky to be here. Like, I had so many kind of moments.

1:37:19Steven Bartlett:And some would say I took advantage of that luck. But to some extent, I was able to take advantage of that luck because I was open.

1:37:28Dara Khosrowshahi:Being open, you jumped from Expedia to Uber. In part, helped by some advice that our mutual friend, Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, gave you. He's actually just texted me. I texted him saying, hey, can you send me a question to ask Daria? But he said, I'm in the middle of a night. You've been texting while we're talking? He did. No, just before I walked in. I've just looked. He texted me back saying he's on an earnings call.

1:37:47Steven Bartlett:What did he say? Never mind.

1:37:49Dara Khosrowshahi:But he said, good luck with the interview. What did Daniel X say to you that helped you form that decision to go to Uber?

1:37:55Steven Bartlett:So he's the one who recommended. I think I was contacted by a headhunter. He recommended me to the headhunter who called me. I told him I was actually at the Allen & Company conference going back. in a circle with him and we were having a drink one night and he asked me he's like did the head hunter call you there's this uber role and at the time at the time uber was a disaster like disaster and everyone was reading about it i was at expedient i had just gotten this wonderful contract that you said at the beginning so i was gonna stay and i love working for barry we're like it it's been it's been the best professional partnership of my life and i said of course i'm not going to go.

1:38:36Steven Bartlett:You know, I'm so happy about what I'm doing at Expedia. And Daniel like looks at me, he's 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 called the headhunter previously. I said, 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. And your dad, he gave you advice? Well, I talked to my dad and his, my dad is, keeps things simple. And he said, daughter, and it's Farsi, when a company who's a verb tells you to run it, you just say yes.

1:39:27Steven Bartlett:So I thought that was good, good advice. 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 impact on impactful company. So why the hell not?

1:39:52Dara Khosrowshahi:And when he says a company, that's a verb. He's referring to the fact that everybody in the taxi or transportation category uses uber as a verb to even if they're talking about a competitor exactly right um and there's always one company in every sort of industry yeah 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

1:40:18Steven Bartlett:have today but can no longer have it was a conversation with both my dad um you know i told you I came to New York from San Francisco, and it was because my dad was getting very old, and he was losing his mental facilities. 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 life as well. I never had, you know, my relationship with him was kind of, there was love.

1:41:03Steven Bartlett: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 time back. 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, 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 is my way of correcting for the conversation I never had with my dad.

1:41:55Dara Khosrowshahi:Dara, thank you.

1:41:56Steven Bartlett:Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

1:41:58Dara Khosrowshahi: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 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 honesty.

1:42:26Steven Bartlett:Yeah, honesty is so powerful. And I'll tell you, I learned that skill from my wife. She's just, 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.

1:42:44Dara Khosrowshahi:Like your dad did.

1:42:45Steven Bartlett:Yeah, yeah. And she's, honesty, it's just so powerful.

1:42:52Dara Khosrowshahi:Thank you so much.

1:42:53Steven Bartlett:You're very welcome.

1:42:54Dara Khosrowshahi:An unbelievable inspiration.

1:42:55Steven Bartlett:Thank you. I appreciate it.

1:43:15Bye.