WEBVTT
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85% of our volume disappeared overnight.
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We had to go through our largest layoff ever as a company.
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It was over 5,000 people that we laid off.
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It was during a really difficult, uncertain time for everybody.
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That was the definition of rock bottom for me.
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Welcome to Confession, where I invite tech veterans to share their painful lessons.
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Everybody has painful stories, and I offer an outlet to talk honestly about the lessons learned.
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I'm Ali Partovi, and I run NEO.
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a venture capital fund and mentorship community for startup founders.
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Today, I sit down with Dara Khazrashahi, CEO of Uber.
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Dara talks about his time at Uber as well as insights about the importance of transparency, courage, and honesty as a leader.
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I think you'll really enjoy this episode.
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This is Confession.
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Let's begin.
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Dara, thank you for doing this.
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Welcome to Confession.
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Happy to do it.
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I want to start at the beginning.
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Tell me where you were born.
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Tell me a bit about what young Dara was like.
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Absolutely.
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So you're a little familiar with this?
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We're second cousins.
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Yeah, exactly.
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I was born in Iran.
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in Tehran, Iran in 1969.
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And we were a part of, and you were a part of, a very, very big family.
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It was a merchant family that came to Tehran from Tabriz and built a big business.
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And this was during a period in Iran where the people
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The Shah was the ruler and he was really trying to modernize Iran and move it from where the Middle East was, which, you know, society that hadn't really been developed to a modern industrial society.
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And our family was a part of that.
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We had built a very, very big business, pharmaceuticals and consumer manufacturing and other businesses as well.
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You know, I think both of us probably, if things had been different, would be executives in the family business someplace, right?
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Slightly different paths.
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Yeah, exactly.
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And then in 1977, 1978, the Iranian Revolution happened.
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I had some family who was involved with the Shah.
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While we were not political or religious in any way, we thought it was going to be safer for us to actually go to France for the summer to let things cool down because we
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It was almost unimaginable for us to lose the lives that we had in Iran.
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And the revolution happened.
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And the Shah was toppled.
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And we were lucky enough to have an uncle here, our mutual uncle, Uncle Nasrullah.
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Here in New York.
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Yeah, here in New York, in Irvington, New York.
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And so we came to the U.S. to stay with him.
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And we've never been back.
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Myself, father, two brothers, and then other... You guys stayed in Iran for longer.
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Yeah, we were stuck there for five more years.
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Were you stuck stuck?
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Or you decided not to come out?
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So it sort of depends who you ask.
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Yeah.
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So my dad, I think, was...
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patriotic and a bit maybe naive.
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I think both of our fathers were.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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And I think he actually naive, maybe not the right, just optimistic, which I'm an optimist also.
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Like he saw that this might be a path to the people of Iran having self-determination.
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And there were elements of that for sure in the early parts.
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And so also he was a founder.
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He was a founder of a university and that was his life's work.
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And he didn't want to just ditch it.
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And so he stayed or he basically insisted on us staying.
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But I think there was also like once we basically convinced him, no, we we really need to leave.
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It was like really hard to get passports or like getting exit permission.
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It got much harder and took much longer than the smarter ones who left.
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Or the lucky ones.
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Yeah.
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And so we came to the States, Irvington, and we got our our own place in Tarotown, New York.
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Yeah.
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Edgemont condos.
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Yeah, exactly.
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Edgemont and you guys eventually came to Edgemont too, right?
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Yeah, we moved there and we ended up getting a bedroom in Jaja's house, our grandmother.
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And you were a few doors down in the same condo complex.
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Yeah, and I like to say to folks too that...
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We lost everything that the family had, but the one thing that we didn't lose was family.
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And so we were very, very lucky to be so close as a family growing up.
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And that remains to this day.
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We've got the family reunions and all that stuff, and it was what held us together.
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And it really helped me make the transition to the States.
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And we came to the States during a difficult time, but also a great time.
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It was a period during which the U.S. was open to immigration.
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And I do think that immigration is something that has made our country great.
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And we were very lucky to come then.
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But at the same time, I think it was a year after I came, there was the hostage situation in Iran.
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So the tensions between Iran and the U.S. were pretty high.
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But...
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You know, all of that allowed us to come to the to the States and probably the U.S. is the best place to kind of remake your life.
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And we were able to rebuild just like you guys have.
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For those like two years of the hostage crisis, I wasn't in the U.S.
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I was in Iran and I was I think I was like seven or eight years old.
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You must have been like 11 or something.
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Yeah, I think 9, 10.
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Yeah.
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I mean, from what I understand is like every night the news was saying, talking about how bad Iran is and how our hostages.
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Did you feel animosity or did you feel in any way like people look at you as one of the bad guys with other kids or anything like that making you feel?
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I wouldn't describe it as that in that there wasn't hostility or animosity, but it's mean things that little kids do.
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So I remember...
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at our school we would play a game called hostage crisis no way yeah and so it was very very sophisticated game that consisted of locking me the hostage up oh my god so they would like lock me up in a broom closet and like the cleaning lady would find me what the hell are you doing here you know i'm not showing up for class or or sports so that happened once in a while
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Wait, hold on.
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Low-key, this doesn't sound like a particularly healthy game.
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You weren't traumatized.
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I learned to appreciate the dark and cleaning supplies.
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I'm just, you know, put me in front of a mess and I'm excellent.
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And, you know, you can choose to make a big deal of these things or not.
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And I think at the time, maybe I was clueless.
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Maybe I worried about other things.
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It didn't mark me in any way one way or the other.
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Yeah, you felt the tension between the U.S. and Iran.
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But I tell you, people were so friendly.
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People were so friendly.
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And, again, we always had our family together.
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to come back to.
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And if you have that base, then a lot more becomes possible.
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Did you ever get into trouble as a kid?
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I was a pretty good kid.
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And again, I don't know if it went back to the sense of responsibility.
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Cave, my older brother, got me drunk when I was a freshman.
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to demonstrate that I shouldn't drink.
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You know, like just, I got into the typical kinds of trouble that young kids do.
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But I'd say I was a decent kid.
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I didn't get into anything heavy one way or the other.
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What about you?
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Were you a surface good kid?
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I was always trying to see what I could get away with and still not get into trouble.
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It's a pretty good strategy.
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I think I was mischievous, but also I had such good grades.
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And also I was friends with the teachers.
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I was definitely a teacher's pet.
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But then as a result, the mischievous side was like,
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How much can I do without getting into trouble?
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Also being an identical twin, it's like any time people learned I was a twin, it's like, have you ever...
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you know, switched with your brother.
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Have you ever like played tricks on your teachers?
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So of course we had to try that.
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Had to meet yourself one or the other.
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We definitely did things like swapping classes with each other.
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I once was in Hadi's French class and there was a pop quiz and I was like, fuck, I'm going to bomb this quiz for him.
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So I got him an F.
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mom it wasn't me it was Ali because we were financially insecure we only once we were driving we only had insurance for one of us oh wow that's great but then I had like I had a pretty serious car accident Hati and me together I was the one driving
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He was the one who was insured.
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It was, like, serious enough that police came, and the car was totaled.
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And it was, like, late night and in the rain and so on.
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And so they took us back to the station.
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And while there, Hadi and I, like, changed clothes in the bathroom.
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Oh, that's crazy.
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Because, like, he...
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I had given his ID as the driver.
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Neither of us was in any trouble.
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I'd never interacted with the police this way before.
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I didn't know what was going on.
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So it definitely felt risky.
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Like, what if they know that...
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I wasn't really insured or he's not really the driver.
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Yeah, and a few things like that.
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I actually want to ask about something else.
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And I've never asked you this.
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And I always wonder, I mean, even within our family, and I know other families that, you know, who came from Iran and the revolution, not everyone reacts to loss the same way.
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The way my parents and Hadi and I reacted, first of all, like losing all of our wealth, we went straight to like learning how to save money.
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My mom worked.
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two jobs.
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I definitely felt motivation that like, I need to somehow re-earn and rebuild.
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Well, we lost that.
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The greatness that our family once had.
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And I think, I mean, for sure, I had pride in our grandparents and, you know, someone had built...
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that all those enterprises in Iran from the ground up, they weren't like inherited wealth or royalty.
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Totally.
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They were entrepreneurs.
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And so I felt like that's in my blood.
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I can do it.
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But I'm wondering, like, did you have the similar kind of feelings of duty to build something back for the family?
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Totally.
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And the funny thing, I'm curious as to how you felt.
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It was never communicated to me.
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Yeah, same here.
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Like not once did my dad say anything about losing everything and rebuilding here or my mom.
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Or even my brothers, we didn't talk about it.
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But there was this weird undercurrent that all of us were aware of.
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And clearly you were aware of as well.
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And this almost a responsibility, which is we're getting a second chance.
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I knew that for my parents.
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Again, they were a little bit idealistic.
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or dumb, whichever one you want to say, but they didn't take their money out of Iran.
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You know, a lot of people who made their wealth in Iran took it out of Iran during those times.
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I think our family wanted to rebuild.
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They want to reinvest.
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You know, that part of it was building a local operation that could expand in the Middle East and hopefully globally.
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And so we lost everything.
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And my brothers and I knew that my parents, one, obviously, our lifestyle got much smaller.
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Yeah.
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And at the same time, my parents were investing everything that they had to send us to private school.
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And there was this unspoken sense of responsibility for, I think, all of us in our family, which in hindsight might be why we've done quite well.
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in life and careers, et cetera, to rebuild.
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It was much harder on my dad because he tried his hand at being an entrepreneur in the U.S. And for various reasons, he took a couple of shots and he missed.
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And after those couple of shots, he kind of gave up a little bit.
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He should have just been a starving researcher like my dad.
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He should have anticipated the AI revolution.
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Can you imagine?
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But my mom, she got to work.
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So just like your mom, she worked as a salesperson, et cetera.
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She got to work.
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She put her heads down.
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And then I think we as kids adjusted very quickly.
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And I think that's one of the great things about being a child.
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You can adjust.
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And while we didn't have everything we had in Iran, we had a pretty good middle-class life in the US.
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And that's certainly nothing to sneeze at.
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It's so interesting what you said about it being unspoken.
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And I had the exact same experience.
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There was one thing my mom said, and this was even before we really lost everything, but we had lost a lot.
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And my mom told me that her family had been extraordinarily wealthy before.
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And she said, however, I never let my mom or dad give me any money, like, you know, that she was proud of having.
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like built her own being independent.
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That's awesome.
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And just that my takeaway was I need to learn how does one make money?
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Exactly.
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I didn't even know the concept, but it just implanted in me that that's something to be proud of.
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I still remember my first job.
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It was at a gas station.
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Oh, yeah.
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I was literally going to say the other memory that came to my mind.
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I remember driving past this gas station and pulling over and seeing you there and being like, why is Dara the one filling our gas tank?
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And my mom being like, Dara got a job and he's earning money.
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And that for me was like, I remember being so proud of you and so impressed because like you were contributing to the family.
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It was so cool.
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Yeah.
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that sense of freedom and that satisfaction of making money.
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How old were you?
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16?
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I think 16, yeah.
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00:13:55.383 --> 00:14:01.131
Yeah, I think I worked in summer camp one summer and then started working at the gas station, and it was fun.
234
00:14:01.151 --> 00:14:03.754
Yeah, it's funny because given that,
235
00:14:04.640 --> 00:14:06.802
Uber is now obviously related to cars.
236
00:14:07.222 --> 00:14:09.804
And then also you were the one who drove us to school.
237
00:14:10.065 --> 00:14:13.708
It was not such a good driver back then, but it was okay.
238
00:14:13.768 --> 00:14:20.033
I always remember waking up at 7.30 or what I get coming out in the cold at 7.30 in the morning.
239
00:14:20.073 --> 00:14:21.674
And my Buick Bonneville ready.
240
00:14:22.155 --> 00:14:23.196
Let's fast forward a little bit.
241
00:14:23.216 --> 00:14:23.356
Sure.
242
00:14:23.716 --> 00:14:25.538
You went to school at Brown.
243
00:14:26.058 --> 00:14:27.960
When and where did you start thinking about it?
244
00:14:28.680 --> 00:14:31.003
entering the business world and what was your path?
245
00:14:31.264 --> 00:14:34.768
I was always interested in the sciences.
246
00:14:34.848 --> 00:14:38.373
I read science fiction like crazy when I was growing up.
247
00:14:38.853 --> 00:14:42.338
And when I went to Brown, I studied engineering.
248
00:14:42.853 --> 00:14:46.454
And I studied bioelectrical engineering because I don't know about your father or my dad.
249
00:14:46.474 --> 00:14:52.215
It's like, Dara, you can study whatever you want as long as you can be a doctor or an engineer.
250
00:14:52.955 --> 00:14:53.636
Take your choice.
251
00:14:53.676 --> 00:14:54.676
The world is your oyster.
252
00:14:55.196 --> 00:15:00.697
So I figured I would study bioengineering because it would give me a path to either go be a doctor, doctor, or engineer.
253
00:15:00.797 --> 00:15:02.658
You know, I was a good son.
254
00:15:03.318 --> 00:15:06.600
Lo and behold, I fell in love with a woman in New York City.
255
00:15:07.701 --> 00:15:12.224
And I had a job in Kentucky, I think was my job coming out of school, but I wanted to be with her.
256
00:15:12.704 --> 00:15:17.827
So I called up my brother, Kaveh, who worked at Allen & Company.
257
00:15:17.987 --> 00:15:19.788
And I asked him, I'm like, hey, can you get me a job?
258
00:15:19.808 --> 00:15:22.570
Because I want to be in New York City because I want to be with my girlfriend.
259
00:15:23.050 --> 00:15:26.873
So I went into the world of finance completely accidentally.
260
00:15:27.598 --> 00:15:37.677
And one of my clients was Barry Diller, who was in the entertainment business, and he had moved over to home shopping, QVC then home shopping.
261
00:15:38.532 --> 00:15:49.960
And at one point, he took control of this entity, Silver King Stations and Home Shopping, was merging it together and bought a company, USA Networks, because he wanted to bring kind of commerce and entertainment together.
262
00:15:50.980 --> 00:15:54.083
And he asked me to come work for him as his deal person.
263
00:15:54.783 --> 00:15:59.206
And I think Barry at the time was the one person in the universe that.
264
00:15:59.907 --> 00:16:02.308
that could get me to leave Alan and company.
265
00:16:02.449 --> 00:16:03.529
So I went to work for him.
266
00:16:04.530 --> 00:16:08.794
And he was half entertainment, half commerce technology.
267
00:16:09.514 --> 00:16:10.475
I was more technical.
268
00:16:10.655 --> 00:16:12.416
So I helped him on the technology side.
269
00:16:12.937 --> 00:16:15.099
And we wound up spinning off all the entertainment
270
00:16:15.739 --> 00:16:18.761
businesses and really focus on e-commerce.
271
00:16:18.861 --> 00:16:22.502
It was ticketmastermatch.com, a bunch of travel assets.
272
00:16:23.083 --> 00:16:28.405
The travel assets, we combine them all into an asset called IC Travel.
273
00:16:29.006 --> 00:16:31.407
It includes Expedia, Hotels.com, Hotwire.
274
00:16:31.907 --> 00:16:35.409
And at some point that entity ran into trouble.
275
00:16:36.869 --> 00:16:39.971
And the CEO at the time, Eric Blatchford,
276
00:16:41.196 --> 00:16:42.117
wasn't really up for it.
277
00:16:42.137 --> 00:16:43.318
He was more of the founder type.
278
00:16:43.458 --> 00:16:44.939
He was part of the founding Expedia team.
279
00:16:45.119 --> 00:16:50.263
So he decided that he was going to resign and we had no one to turn to.
280
00:16:50.864 --> 00:16:58.169
At the time, I was the CFO of IAC and I'd always want to go from kind of being a deal person to CFO.
281
00:16:58.429 --> 00:17:02.633
I liked broad business more and I was much more attracted to technology.
282
00:17:03.153 --> 00:17:04.834
So when that happened, we didn't have a CEO.
283
00:17:04.874 --> 00:17:05.615
I raised my hand.
284
00:17:05.955 --> 00:17:07.997
It was ignorance and desperation.
285
00:17:09.573 --> 00:17:13.035
It was desperation on Barry's part because he didn't have anyone else.
286
00:17:13.075 --> 00:17:16.356
And it was ignorance on my part, which is, hey, I can do the CEO gig.
287
00:17:16.956 --> 00:17:20.118
But, you know, when the two come together, sometimes crazy things happen.
288
00:17:20.578 --> 00:17:29.422
And so Barry hired me on as the CEO of IAC Travel, which then was spun off of IAC and became Expedia, the public company.
289
00:17:29.462 --> 00:17:29.642
So.
290
00:17:30.161 --> 00:17:33.283
Long road, weird road that was completely unplanned.
291
00:17:33.703 --> 00:17:35.964
It was a great choice, kind of a random choice.
292
00:17:36.424 --> 00:17:41.727
And that put me on to the course of being a proper technology executive, so to speak.
293
00:17:42.328 --> 00:17:45.529
So what are you here to confess about today?
294
00:17:46.190 --> 00:17:55.495
So my confession is actually my early, I would say, early years of CEO at Expedia.
295
00:17:56.515 --> 00:17:57.836
And I was a rookie CEO.
296
00:18:00.343 --> 00:18:03.626
Not a particularly good one at the beginning.
297
00:18:04.727 --> 00:18:09.290
The stock, when we had spun off the company, the stock was around 40, 45 bucks a share.
298
00:18:10.631 --> 00:18:12.973
And it had drifted down.
299
00:18:13.954 --> 00:18:14.694
Trends weren't great.
300
00:18:14.735 --> 00:18:15.875
Travel trends weren't great.
301
00:18:16.316 --> 00:18:19.698
A lot of sites were going direct for the first time.
302
00:18:20.079 --> 00:18:24.042
Because the first instantiation of online travel was really...
303
00:18:24.543 --> 00:18:27.504
the online travel agents, us, Travelocity, Orbitz, et cetera.
304
00:18:28.144 --> 00:18:32.026
And then the hotels and the airlines especially started getting their act together.
305
00:18:32.506 --> 00:18:37.708
And more and more of the traffic was going direct, whether it's a Delta or a Hilton or Marriott, et cetera.
306
00:18:38.168 --> 00:18:40.869
The growth of the industry really started slowing down.
307
00:18:41.049 --> 00:18:43.169
And as a result, the stock was suffering.
308
00:18:43.270 --> 00:18:45.830
And how many people worked for you at this time?
309
00:18:45.870 --> 00:18:49.632
I think at the time it was about 5,000 or 6,000 people.
310
00:18:49.752 --> 00:18:49.972
Wow.
311
00:18:50.352 --> 00:18:52.773
And it was pretty scale business.
312
00:18:53.513 --> 00:18:55.816
And it was structured as a holding company.
313
00:18:55.977 --> 00:19:02.986
We had Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Hotwire, TripAdvisor, all operating independently.
314
00:19:03.106 --> 00:19:05.790
And I wasn't an operator operator.
315
00:19:05.810 --> 00:19:07.212
I was more of a portfolio manager.
316
00:19:08.547 --> 00:19:12.768
During that time, one of our largest competitors was Priceline.
317
00:19:12.788 --> 00:19:18.950
And they had just bought a, what was then a small company called Booking.com.
318
00:19:19.330 --> 00:19:20.430
Okay.
319
00:19:20.450 --> 00:19:27.132
I had gotten to know them and we had negotiated a deal to buy them out.
320
00:19:27.553 --> 00:19:28.893
Them meaning Booking.com.
321
00:19:29.153 --> 00:19:30.295
It was Priceline at the time.
322
00:19:30.455 --> 00:19:32.157
You weren't competing to buy Booking.
323
00:19:32.297 --> 00:19:35.421
You had gotten to know Priceline and you were... And they had bought Booking.
324
00:19:35.441 --> 00:19:38.665
So this was the original mistake, if you want to call that, which is...
325
00:19:39.346 --> 00:19:40.407
But it was not my mistake.
326
00:19:41.088 --> 00:19:43.491
We didn't buy Booking.com because we poo-pooed them.
327
00:19:43.711 --> 00:19:44.552
Priceline bought them.
328
00:19:45.613 --> 00:19:51.855
And I had gotten to a deal with Priceline, not because I thought booking was going to be amazing.
329
00:19:51.935 --> 00:19:55.437
It was a nice business that was growing at respectable levels at the time.
330
00:19:55.897 --> 00:20:02.639
But because Priceline at the time, I don't know if you remember the William Shatner commercials, all that stuff, was a really big, low-cost competitor of ours.
331
00:20:03.000 --> 00:20:04.840
And I had the deal basically done.
332
00:20:06.261 --> 00:20:09.382
And we had a board meeting to essentially approve the deal.
333
00:20:11.005 --> 00:20:12.987
And I missed the quarter.
334
00:20:13.568 --> 00:20:14.328
We had earnings.
335
00:20:14.769 --> 00:20:15.589
They were terrible.
336
00:20:16.090 --> 00:20:20.674
The stock that was already in the 20s went down, I think, at like $16, $17 a share.
337
00:20:22.155 --> 00:20:34.086
And at the board meeting, when I was presenting the Priceline deal, the board started pushing back, including Barry, and I think rightfully so, and said that...
338
00:20:35.456 --> 00:20:47.979
hey, Dara, if you can't get your own house in order in terms of the earnings of the business, the growth of the business, why should we give you another billion and a half dollars to go buy this other company price line?
339
00:20:48.079 --> 00:20:50.440
So shouldn't you get your own house in order first?
340
00:20:51.620 --> 00:20:55.201
And I think that the board did it.
341
00:20:57.228 --> 00:21:02.912
Because they were making a proper case and a board should act as a check for the CEO.
342
00:21:03.773 --> 00:21:09.117
But I think they were partially doing it to test the veracity of my wanting to go forward with us.
343
00:21:09.457 --> 00:21:12.259
You know, they were pushing back to see how much I wanted this deal.
344
00:21:13.260 --> 00:21:21.806
And, you know, I asked Barry about it one day, which is if I had laid my body down on the train tracks,
345
00:21:23.063 --> 00:21:24.685
I'm sure they would have approved the deal.
346
00:21:25.826 --> 00:21:28.188
But I lost confidence.
347
00:21:28.809 --> 00:21:31.011
I was first-time CEO.
348
00:21:31.892 --> 00:21:35.436
It had been a rough year, year and a half.
349
00:21:36.717 --> 00:21:39.020
And I just backed off.
350
00:21:39.810 --> 00:21:41.573
So you were just like, they're not going to approve it.
351
00:21:41.593 --> 00:21:42.775
I'm not going to push for it.
352
00:21:43.055 --> 00:21:44.097
I didn't push hard enough.
353
00:21:44.217 --> 00:21:46.601
I am sure if I push hard enough, I would have gotten it.
354
00:21:46.861 --> 00:21:47.682
I would have gotten it done.
355
00:21:48.103 --> 00:21:49.405
But I didn't push hard enough.
356
00:21:49.425 --> 00:21:50.967
Now, yes, they were pushing back.
357
00:21:51.027 --> 00:21:52.410
Why should we do this, et cetera.
358
00:21:52.930 --> 00:21:54.393
But they were making all the typical questions.
359
00:21:54.919 --> 00:21:57.662
arguments that you should when you're testing someone else.
360
00:21:58.323 --> 00:22:00.745
I said, you know, we're going to wait for a quarter or two.
361
00:22:00.845 --> 00:22:01.406
It's fine.
362
00:22:01.446 --> 00:22:03.488
I'm going to get my own house in order, et cetera.
363
00:22:04.189 --> 00:22:08.013
By the time we did, Priceline was also suffering to some extent for the same reasons.
364
00:22:08.633 --> 00:22:12.017
And by the time we did, that stock price had gone up.
365
00:22:12.177 --> 00:22:13.558
They weren't willing to do the deal.
366
00:22:14.559 --> 00:22:22.442
And that, you know, if you look at now Booking.com, Priceline renamed itself Booking.com because the Booking.com business has completely taken over.
367
00:22:22.462 --> 00:22:25.583
You know, that company is worth $140, $150 billion.
368
00:22:25.603 --> 00:22:25.983
No way.
369
00:22:26.983 --> 00:22:31.945
So it was a very, very, very expensive mistake.
370
00:22:33.165 --> 00:22:35.248
of mine, whether the mistake is missing the quarter.
371
00:22:35.288 --> 00:22:40.133
But I think the real mistake was not being confident in my own convictions.
372
00:22:40.514 --> 00:22:41.976
And I knew it was a good deal.
373
00:22:41.996 --> 00:22:44.419
How did you know it was a good deal?
374
00:22:44.959 --> 00:22:51.407
Like if you take yourself, if I was in Dara's body, you know, going back down, like what would I be feeling?
375
00:22:51.687 --> 00:22:54.069
I knew that the travel business was a great business.
376
00:22:54.109 --> 00:22:56.090
Travel would grow a GDP plus.
377
00:22:56.711 --> 00:23:02.014
I knew it was very, very early in the adoption of online travel.
378
00:23:02.235 --> 00:23:06.598
Probably travel, you know, online is probably 60% of travel market, probably 10%.
379
00:23:07.038 --> 00:23:12.582
So you knew that all of the long-term metrics were on your side and there was wind at your back.
380
00:23:13.668 --> 00:23:18.150
But I was just, I was, I let myself be off balance because of a bad quarter or two.
381
00:23:18.810 --> 00:23:20.871
It was absolutely the right bet to make.
382
00:23:21.252 --> 00:23:24.853
And you knew it and you had worked on it and built the deal.
383
00:23:24.873 --> 00:23:25.153
I knew it.
384
00:23:25.193 --> 00:23:27.314
And you know, my background was banking.
385
00:23:27.394 --> 00:23:31.757
So I was pretty good at the deal business, but I just lost confidence.
386
00:23:32.017 --> 00:23:32.997
What were you afraid of?
387
00:23:33.077 --> 00:23:36.699
Like what was at stake if you had pounded the table?
388
00:23:36.739 --> 00:23:38.940
They were pushing back against me and, and,
389
00:23:40.423 --> 00:23:47.366
I don't know if this is in you, but I think there's something culturally about being Iranian, which is this is like being deferential to your elders.
390
00:23:48.107 --> 00:23:48.307
Yeah.
391
00:23:49.047 --> 00:23:51.488
And I was a young CEO at the time.
392
00:23:52.069 --> 00:23:53.269
This is the board.
393
00:23:53.309 --> 00:23:58.132
There are a bunch of gray haired 50, 60 year olds who had had a ton of experience.
394
00:23:58.992 --> 00:24:08.897
And I think sometimes, like, especially in technology, especially in our business, you have to actually have a lack of respect for experience.
395
00:24:09.870 --> 00:24:17.072
Because where you create value and where there's a greatest value creation opportunity is when history doesn't repeat.
396
00:24:17.152 --> 00:24:20.072
Now, sometimes history rhymes, et cetera, so you should take those lessons.
397
00:24:20.512 --> 00:24:24.873
But the biggest, biggest opportunities are when something's fundamentally different, right?
398
00:24:24.933 --> 00:24:26.454
AI is fundamentally different.
399
00:24:27.254 --> 00:24:35.196
And the people who recognize it as such and stuck to their convictions for saying, oh, this is just some other wave, they're the ones who succeeded.
400
00:24:35.216 --> 00:24:36.636
So you just have to know.
401
00:24:37.516 --> 00:24:38.777
When to go against the grain.
402
00:24:39.178 --> 00:24:39.398
Yeah.
403
00:24:39.938 --> 00:24:41.339
And you've got to hold on.
404
00:24:42.440 --> 00:24:46.524
And I think back then, I just wasn't brave enough.
405
00:24:46.704 --> 00:24:52.549
You know, there was this deferential quality, which is, well, these people who know a lot are pushing back.
406
00:24:52.589 --> 00:24:54.110
So I've got to question myself.
407
00:24:54.530 --> 00:24:56.932
And they're not going to respect you if you insist.
408
00:24:57.033 --> 00:25:00.395
It was just, you know, I was putting more weight into their experience than my own.
409
00:25:01.476 --> 00:25:12.683
Uh, and, and I had lost some confidence as a result of the stock price coming down and as a result of the missed quarter and then put my body across those railroad tracks.
410
00:25:13.364 --> 00:25:20.428
And you know, that you, you don't have that many moments as a CEO or as an executive where you have to do that.
411
00:25:20.949 --> 00:25:22.089
But sometimes you have to do that.
412
00:25:22.109 --> 00:25:30.475
Like the, the, the biggest, I'll tell you like another, another lesson that, that I got from Barry when I was there is, you know, once he told me, Hey, Dara, I'm going to
413
00:25:31.365 --> 00:25:33.611
I didn't hire you to be average.
414
00:25:34.753 --> 00:25:35.014
Okay.
415
00:25:35.094 --> 00:25:39.425
And as a leader, whether you're a CEO or another leader,
416
00:25:41.123 --> 00:25:46.446
When you recognize those moments, when you see some kind of dislocation, you have to take those.
417
00:25:47.046 --> 00:25:49.248
And by design, they're lonely.
418
00:25:49.988 --> 00:25:51.089
Yeah.
419
00:25:51.109 --> 00:25:58.973
And this was a moment, again, I think I had the power to convince the board, but I didn't have the confidence or the veracity to do it.
420
00:25:58.993 --> 00:26:00.373
And it was a big mistake.
421
00:26:00.653 --> 00:26:01.654
Very expensive mistake.
422
00:26:02.334 --> 00:26:03.035
But I've learned from it.
423
00:26:03.894 --> 00:26:10.096
I wish I could say I am deferential to the elders, but I think my... You didn't suffer from that disease?
424
00:26:10.416 --> 00:26:11.176
At least not as much.
425
00:26:11.336 --> 00:26:11.896
Yeah.
426
00:26:11.936 --> 00:26:14.957
Why should I listen to a bunch of extinct fossils?
427
00:26:15.317 --> 00:26:17.198
You're in startup land.
428
00:26:17.238 --> 00:26:22.459
By definition, you know, the definition of startup is you're coming up with ideas that no one else had.
429
00:26:22.619 --> 00:26:22.839
Yeah.
430
00:26:22.979 --> 00:26:25.380
But every day is going against the grain.
431
00:26:25.400 --> 00:26:26.400
Otherwise, you know...
432
00:26:26.420 --> 00:26:29.481
I probably would have insulted all the board members and get fired on the spot.
433
00:26:30.762 --> 00:26:31.822
I wish I had you with me.
434
00:26:32.442 --> 00:26:33.683
Well, thank you for sharing.
435
00:26:33.703 --> 00:26:34.904
And is this public knowledge?
436
00:26:35.104 --> 00:26:35.845
I don't think so.
437
00:26:36.165 --> 00:26:36.405
No.
438
00:26:36.705 --> 00:26:41.309
I mean, you know, Barry always tells the truth, so I'm sure he would confirm it.
439
00:26:41.689 --> 00:26:43.771
But it's not something that we talk about.
440
00:26:43.951 --> 00:26:44.312
Yeah.
441
00:26:44.332 --> 00:26:47.374
It wouldn't have been filed or disclosed.
442
00:26:47.654 --> 00:26:51.998
It was considered and rejected, but it sits kind of in the back of my mind.
443
00:26:52.018 --> 00:26:52.858
Oh, my gosh.
444
00:26:53.199 --> 00:26:53.419
Yeah.
445
00:26:54.159 --> 00:26:56.501
Expedia could have been even more, even bigger.
446
00:26:56.561 --> 00:26:57.022
Yeah.
447
00:26:57.042 --> 00:26:58.023
It could be even more successful.
448
00:26:58.043 --> 00:27:00.985
We did well, but we could have done a lot better had I not backed down that day.
449
00:27:01.826 --> 00:27:05.492
Although, who knows, you might still be at Expedia then instead of Uber.
450
00:27:05.632 --> 00:27:06.513
Sure.
451
00:27:06.954 --> 00:27:12.122
Speaking of Uber, by the way, I still remember when Uber was beginning to search for a new CEO.
452
00:27:12.402 --> 00:27:17.270
Like long before they chose you, like Hadi and I were in Seattle telling you like,
453
00:27:18.445 --> 00:27:22.627
They should choose you as the CEO, but they never would because no one's heard of you.
454
00:27:23.527 --> 00:27:24.887
You had such a low profile.
455
00:27:25.508 --> 00:27:29.629
You were kind of the person lurking in the shadows.
456
00:27:29.749 --> 00:27:32.470
I so remember that conversation with you guys.
457
00:27:32.490 --> 00:27:36.011
It was a hottie's house in Seattle and in Bellevue.
458
00:27:37.012 --> 00:27:40.113
And I was dying to tell you guys.
459
00:27:41.133 --> 00:27:42.994
But I was CEO of Expedia.
460
00:27:43.014 --> 00:27:44.634
They had just reached out to me.
461
00:27:45.074 --> 00:27:46.714
Who had Uber had Uber had.
462
00:27:47.034 --> 00:27:47.295
Yeah.
463
00:27:47.315 --> 00:27:47.435
Yeah.
464
00:27:47.495 --> 00:27:48.135
Oh, my God.
465
00:27:48.175 --> 00:27:49.175
When we were discussing.
466
00:27:49.215 --> 00:27:49.455
Yes.
467
00:27:49.475 --> 00:27:50.895
They were just reached out to me.
468
00:27:51.015 --> 00:27:53.956
And at the time I thought that they were crazy.
469
00:27:54.836 --> 00:27:56.377
And so at first I said no.
470
00:27:56.437 --> 00:28:02.058
But then actually Daniel Ek convinced me to say, yes, you brought that up during the no phase.
471
00:28:02.078 --> 00:28:02.198
Yeah.
472
00:28:02.953 --> 00:28:10.317
And so I thought, oh, my God, like I can't even risk remotely that anyone finds out about this.
473
00:28:10.337 --> 00:28:12.639
So I didn't come out and confess to you guys.
474
00:28:12.659 --> 00:28:14.760
But, God, I was dying to talk to you about it.
475
00:28:14.860 --> 00:28:16.761
And plus, I thought it wasn't going to happen.
476
00:28:17.281 --> 00:28:19.082
I really thought at that time it wasn't going to happen.
477
00:28:19.122 --> 00:28:24.745
But then I remember the discussion being like, yeah, the names that are floating in the press are this and that and the other.
478
00:28:24.926 --> 00:28:26.306
Meg Whitman, Jeff Immelt.
479
00:28:26.366 --> 00:28:27.547
I'm like, who the hell am I?
480
00:28:27.567 --> 00:28:28.548
These famous names.
481
00:28:28.648 --> 00:28:28.768
Yeah.
482
00:28:28.788 --> 00:28:28.888
Yeah.
483
00:28:29.328 --> 00:28:41.764
But Hadi and I were both like, if they were smart, they would hire someone like Dara, who's not famous, but like would actually come in and, you know, roll up his sleeves and like do a good job.
484
00:28:41.964 --> 00:28:44.468
Someone said you've got an eye for picking the right talent.
485
00:28:44.608 --> 00:28:44.808
Yeah.
486
00:28:45.745 --> 00:28:46.346
I guess I do.
487
00:28:46.506 --> 00:28:46.767
Yeah.
488
00:28:47.067 --> 00:28:58.063
So I also remember when you first joined Uber, there was a press article that quoted you saying, I'm a little bit scared.
489
00:28:58.243 --> 00:28:58.964
Do you remember that?
490
00:28:59.185 --> 00:29:00.386
And what was behind that?
491
00:29:00.406 --> 00:29:01.328
Because that really...
492
00:29:02.349 --> 00:29:10.030
really stuck with me in a good way because you just, you don't see CEOs confessing to being scared that way.
493
00:29:10.070 --> 00:29:10.291
Yeah.
494
00:29:10.671 --> 00:29:13.851
I think it was in my goodbye email to Expedia.
495
00:29:14.351 --> 00:29:16.592
And I said, I was afraid or something about.
496
00:29:16.712 --> 00:29:17.772
So you put it in writing.
497
00:29:17.972 --> 00:29:18.632
I put it in writing.
498
00:29:18.652 --> 00:29:18.832
Yeah.
499
00:29:18.852 --> 00:29:27.534
It was, it was my farewell email and, and you know, Ali through my life, both personal life and then professional life.
500
00:29:28.674 --> 00:29:37.559
I found that being completely truthful and transparent is the best way to build relationships.
501
00:29:38.159 --> 00:29:44.963
And especially for a CEO is to build a deeper relationship with your employees.
502
00:29:45.003 --> 00:29:48.285
You know, like the companies that are great companies.
503
00:29:49.412 --> 00:29:51.914
they're not just jobs, they're missions.
504
00:29:52.435 --> 00:30:00.542
And there's an emotional pull to the company and they're real emotional connections between the team members.
505
00:30:01.603 --> 00:30:12.972
And if you're sitting there being all corporate and BSing your team about how you really are and how you really feel, you're going to just get the same stuff back.
506
00:30:13.833 --> 00:30:15.855
And so what I found is
507
00:30:17.016 --> 00:30:24.966
Like admitting weakness or admitting fear is actually a bigger lift for a leader because you're not supposed to be weak.
508
00:30:25.246 --> 00:30:26.428
You're not supposed to be afraid.
509
00:30:26.708 --> 00:30:28.290
But in the end, we're all human beings.
510
00:30:28.911 --> 00:30:34.938
And if you can, as a leader, communicate that transparently and that honestly with your team,
511
00:30:35.980 --> 00:30:38.702
One, it creates kind of a deeper connection with them.
512
00:30:39.442 --> 00:30:46.527
But second is it allows them to communicate that same transparency and honesty back to you.
513
00:30:47.528 --> 00:30:58.235
And I found that when CEOs make mistakes or leaders make mistakes, often it's not a mistake of judgment, but it's a mistake because they actually didn't have all the information.
514
00:30:58.995 --> 00:30:59.796
Tell me what you mean.
515
00:30:59.996 --> 00:31:03.458
Because, you know, the higher up you are in an organization –
516
00:31:05.008 --> 00:31:09.752
To some extent, unless you really combat it, the less you really know what's going on.
517
00:31:10.432 --> 00:31:14.255
You know, all of the communication, I've got a chief of staff.
518
00:31:14.295 --> 00:31:18.198
And so my schedule is completely manufactured, right?
519
00:31:18.218 --> 00:31:22.702
And it's manufactured by incredibly well-meaning people who are trying to
520
00:31:24.565 --> 00:31:27.628
allocate my time based on, again, what all of them think.
521
00:31:27.848 --> 00:31:31.351
But also, I guess, shield the bad news from reaching you until they fix it.
522
00:31:31.411 --> 00:31:36.256
Not necessarily shield the bad news, but they're deciding what's appropriate for me to hear.
523
00:31:36.716 --> 00:31:39.398
And I think they're doing it based on their best judgment.
524
00:31:39.478 --> 00:31:43.962
And we have a culture like we don't shield the bad news unless you as an executive
525
00:31:44.743 --> 00:31:52.731
are constantly hiding the bad news, your own bad news, your own fears, your own weaknesses, your team isn't going to communicate that to you.
526
00:31:53.872 --> 00:31:57.696
I've always had a policy of like, I'm just dead honest to people.
527
00:31:58.116 --> 00:32:00.058
And everyone has a bullshit meter, right?
528
00:32:00.239 --> 00:32:03.362
Everyone knows when you're being all corporate-y to them.
529
00:32:03.762 --> 00:32:04.623
I just tell the truth.
530
00:32:05.306 --> 00:32:06.647
Like, why waste time?
531
00:32:06.807 --> 00:32:07.487
I tell the truth.
532
00:32:07.607 --> 00:32:12.169
And that allows me to get the truth from my team members as well.
533
00:32:12.669 --> 00:32:18.632
And then to the point of like the curation, I actually structurally have a bunch of random meetings.
534
00:32:19.152 --> 00:32:20.653
I don't just meet with my directs.
535
00:32:20.873 --> 00:32:22.813
I meet with a bunch of engineers, etc.
536
00:32:23.214 --> 00:32:24.394
I make sure I talk with them.
537
00:32:24.554 --> 00:32:25.695
What are they up to?
538
00:32:26.395 --> 00:32:28.356
You know, 80% of the time, it's a waste of time.
539
00:32:29.333 --> 00:32:35.980
From a business decision standpoint, but you get to know people and you get channels that are untraditional channels.
540
00:32:36.280 --> 00:32:36.401
Right.
541
00:32:36.421 --> 00:32:37.402
Information back to you.
542
00:32:37.962 --> 00:32:39.484
And those are incredibly valuable.
543
00:32:39.724 --> 00:32:43.108
When you talked about the hypothetical of someone saying like.
544
00:32:44.456 --> 00:32:47.078
This competitor is kicking our ass in this other country.
545
00:32:47.598 --> 00:32:54.342
I guess what I was thinking is that for that person to tell you the stark facts would also would be scary.
546
00:32:54.502 --> 00:32:58.804
Like it's like safer to, you know, give you the rose tinted version of it.
547
00:32:58.864 --> 00:33:02.927
And they would have to overcome fear to tell the honest truth.
548
00:33:04.223 --> 00:33:10.244
It seems like you're also saying like you had to overcome for you to be honest, but that's giving everybody else the strength.
549
00:33:10.484 --> 00:33:10.905
Exactly.
550
00:33:10.925 --> 00:33:11.385
To be honest.
551
00:33:11.405 --> 00:33:13.465
And the person in power has to do it first.
552
00:33:13.525 --> 00:33:13.725
Right.
553
00:33:13.745 --> 00:33:14.405
Right.
554
00:33:14.425 --> 00:33:15.886
Because they're not going to come to me first.
555
00:33:16.026 --> 00:33:18.906
And, you know, I hear some people saying, oh, don't come to me with questions.
556
00:33:18.946 --> 00:33:19.827
Come to me with answers.
557
00:33:20.407 --> 00:33:22.847
If you haven't figured it out, I want you to tell me.
558
00:33:23.287 --> 00:33:23.407
Right.
559
00:33:23.428 --> 00:33:27.248
Because then maybe we can work together and we can jam and we can come up with strategies.
560
00:33:27.288 --> 00:33:31.229
Like if you make a mistake, I want you to tell me so I can learn from that mistake.
561
00:33:31.269 --> 00:33:33.670
Like that's really useful data for me to have.
562
00:33:34.290 --> 00:33:44.118
And I do think one thing that we've done, and it was part of Uber culture before I joined too, is, you know, there was a cultural norm called toe-stepping.
563
00:33:45.567 --> 00:33:48.349
which was about like, say the unpleasant stuff in a meeting.
564
00:33:49.049 --> 00:33:51.351
It was- Don't be afraid to step on someone's toes.
565
00:33:51.391 --> 00:33:52.051
Yeah, yeah.
566
00:33:52.091 --> 00:33:53.132
Don't be afraid to disagree.
567
00:33:53.412 --> 00:33:54.653
It was a different context.
568
00:33:54.973 --> 00:33:55.173
Yeah.
569
00:33:55.453 --> 00:33:59.196
And it was weaponized to some extent because it became okay to be a jerk to some extent.
570
00:33:59.216 --> 00:34:04.699
Some people took that as a translation layer, even though that was not the intent of the value.
571
00:34:05.100 --> 00:34:06.941
So Uber came from a place that I think
572
00:34:08.179 --> 00:34:10.720
valued honestly and transparent communication.
573
00:34:11.221 --> 00:34:17.984
And I wanted to keep it going because usually the larger you get one, the troublemakers usually are rejected from organization.
574
00:34:18.064 --> 00:34:19.185
And I love the troublemakers.
575
00:34:19.205 --> 00:34:20.426
You've got to keep the troublemakers.
576
00:34:21.535 --> 00:34:35.239
And then two, the more kind of layers of communication you have in an organization, and usually these organizations get larger, there are more layers, the more the facts get muted and edited by the time that they get to you.
577
00:34:35.359 --> 00:34:46.962
And that editing destroys what I feel is the good stuff, which are the sharp edges of every single problem, because the sharp edges are usually give you a clue as to what's the best way to solve that problem.
578
00:34:47.342 --> 00:34:49.284
You want to project confidence to your team.
579
00:34:49.324 --> 00:34:52.166
You want to project confidence to your investors, et cetera.
580
00:34:52.206 --> 00:35:03.096
But being truthful about the problems of a company, like even when I talk to investors, of course, I talk about the good things that we're doing because there's a lot of good things that we're doing.
581
00:35:03.596 --> 00:35:11.363
But I also talk about the problems that we're facing and where we're not doing as well competitively because to me, that's an opportunity.
582
00:35:12.352 --> 00:35:14.335
And so, of course, I present it as an opportunity.
583
00:35:14.795 --> 00:35:18.800
My policy is just to be more straight than I would say most people.
584
00:35:20.062 --> 00:35:21.684
It's how I've decided to live my personal life.
585
00:35:23.106 --> 00:35:24.788
And it just makes things easier.
586
00:35:24.808 --> 00:35:25.509
It makes things simpler.
587
00:35:26.289 --> 00:35:29.453
I want to live a life where I can be honest to my friends.
588
00:35:30.093 --> 00:35:35.639
And, you know, whether I'm in the office or you and I are having a drink, you know, I don't want to bullshit you.
589
00:35:36.420 --> 00:35:37.101
It's a waste of time.
590
00:35:37.781 --> 00:35:38.382
I admire that.
591
00:35:38.422 --> 00:35:41.085
It takes strength, but it's definitely the better path.
592
00:35:41.666 --> 00:35:43.728
Has there ever been a time when you hit rock bottom?
593
00:35:46.100 --> 00:35:48.122
Yeah, COVID was rough.
594
00:35:48.642 --> 00:35:51.904
COVID was rough both personally, but professionally as well.
595
00:35:52.425 --> 00:35:54.887
At the time, Uber was deeply unprofitable.
596
00:35:55.327 --> 00:35:58.409
And at the time, the competitive field was really tough.
597
00:35:58.469 --> 00:36:00.951
Didi was competing against us.
598
00:36:02.091 --> 00:36:07.755
Chinese, you know, the Uber China in Latin America and was competing very aggressively.
599
00:36:07.775 --> 00:36:08.956
And by the way, they still are.
600
00:36:09.537 --> 00:36:13.900
And Lyft had been gaining share against us in the US as well.
601
00:36:14.640 --> 00:36:15.881
We were losing $2 billion a year.
602
00:36:16.582 --> 00:36:28.351
Post-COVID, our mobility business, which was the profit generator of the business, and we were using those profits to invest in technology and also invest in Uber Eats.
603
00:36:28.951 --> 00:36:32.414
Overnight, 85% of our volume disappeared overnight.
604
00:36:33.715 --> 00:36:39.940
And we went from losing, you know, probably a billion and a half, $2 billion a year to losing a run rate of $4 to $5 billion a year.
605
00:36:40.360 --> 00:36:42.922
And I think at the time I had like $8 to $10 billion in the bank.
606
00:36:46.712 --> 00:36:49.654
It was a very, very difficult time.
607
00:36:50.355 --> 00:36:52.537
Personally, obviously, we were all cut off from the world.
608
00:36:53.057 --> 00:36:55.899
We had to go through a very large layoff.
609
00:36:57.300 --> 00:37:03.305
And I remember I was having a bunch of meetings with my staff, Zoom meetings with my staff.
610
00:37:04.426 --> 00:37:10.751
And I wanted to kind of talk it over with them, what should we do, et cetera, because it was such a tough decision.
611
00:37:10.831 --> 00:37:13.653
And I think in hindsight for me, I was trying to put off.
612
00:37:14.053 --> 00:37:38.389
the decision right and so the way to put off decision is ask for more data talk some more about it etc you're dreading it of course because i had to make like really really deep cuts into into the company nelson uh shea our cfo at the time he said dara you know we've talked about a a bunch why don't you just tell us what you want to do and we respect your judgment
613
00:37:39.407 --> 00:37:40.889
And we're behind you.
614
00:37:42.291 --> 00:37:44.693
And that was like a bell was rung.
615
00:37:45.354 --> 00:37:45.835
Oh, my God.
616
00:37:45.995 --> 00:37:47.336
And we just had that meeting.
617
00:37:47.577 --> 00:37:55.025
And I just kind of told, said, my wife, you know, said very well, as I said, I've got to think tonight on some stuff.
618
00:37:55.065 --> 00:37:57.388
So I just spent a bunch of time alone.
619
00:37:57.888 --> 00:38:02.970
And I came back and, you know, we had to go through our largest layoff ever as a company.
620
00:38:03.550 --> 00:38:07.991
We shut down a bunch of businesses, decided to offload a bunch of businesses.
621
00:38:08.611 --> 00:38:11.192
But, you know, it was over 5,000 people that we laid off.
622
00:38:11.532 --> 00:38:12.173
Oh, my God.
623
00:38:12.853 --> 00:38:16.774
And it was during a really difficult, uncertain time for everybody.
624
00:38:17.314 --> 00:38:23.436
That was the definition of rock bottom for me because I felt like I was letting a lot of people down.
625
00:38:25.245 --> 00:38:32.695
During the time when you, as a company, you don't want to let people down, but it was a matter of survival for us.
626
00:38:33.817 --> 00:38:41.127
In hindsight, it was super important for us in terms of actually like leaning out the company.
627
00:38:41.562 --> 00:38:42.883
bringing discipline to the business.
628
00:38:42.943 --> 00:38:48.467
Our Uber Eats business then completely exploded in a good way, not in a bad way.
629
00:38:49.148 --> 00:38:54.692
And our Uber Eats business, which before COVID was probably 10% of the business, now it's 50% of the business.
630
00:38:54.772 --> 00:38:58.054
And I think actually it's going to be bigger than the mobility business.
631
00:38:58.414 --> 00:39:01.917
Maybe not profit-wise, but definitely in terms of scale and volume.
632
00:39:02.557 --> 00:39:04.579
But those COVID days were really, really dark days.
633
00:39:04.619 --> 00:39:07.281
You said that you felt like you were letting people down.
634
00:39:07.801 --> 00:39:16.003
The deepest connection that I have is with my team, the employees at Uber, right?
635
00:39:16.063 --> 00:39:18.824
It is, I want to do great for the shareholders.
636
00:39:18.924 --> 00:39:19.804
I'm a huge shareholder.
637
00:39:19.844 --> 00:39:24.185
So like that is absolutely something that you have to do.
638
00:39:24.745 --> 00:39:26.465
Now, our team members are shareholders.
639
00:39:26.665 --> 00:39:26.785
Right.
640
00:39:26.966 --> 00:39:30.726
And the thing, you know, most of our shareholders, they have a portfolio, stocks, et cetera.
641
00:39:31.006 --> 00:39:32.007
They're making a bet on you.
642
00:39:32.067 --> 00:39:32.747
And that's awesome.
643
00:39:33.537 --> 00:39:41.524
But people who work at Uber, they're making a bet on you with 100% of their time during the most productive years that they have.
644
00:39:42.065 --> 00:39:47.470
And with the talent that we attract, they have a lot of great alternatives.
645
00:39:48.416 --> 00:40:01.283
So I just feel a really deep sense of responsibility to my team members because, you know, Ali, the one thing that you can never get back, like we, our family lost a ton of money.
646
00:40:01.563 --> 00:40:02.564
We were able to make it back.
647
00:40:03.124 --> 00:40:04.925
The thing that you can never have back is your time.
648
00:40:05.205 --> 00:40:05.405
Yeah.
649
00:40:06.346 --> 00:40:13.350
And the Uber team members are investing their time during, you know, during the peak of their careers.
650
00:40:14.010 --> 00:40:16.691
And so I feel a really deep responsibility for them.
651
00:40:18.123 --> 00:40:21.445
Many of the ones that we laid off had made a bet on us.
652
00:40:22.666 --> 00:40:29.070
And yes, there was an act of God or a lab or whatever you want to call it that caused this.
653
00:40:29.850 --> 00:40:31.351
But we weren't able to stand up.
654
00:40:31.431 --> 00:40:34.433
Like, I believe that we absolutely did the right thing.
655
00:40:34.453 --> 00:40:37.095
And without that decision, we probably wouldn't have survived to this day.
656
00:40:37.575 --> 00:40:39.637
So I would have made the same decision were I there.
657
00:40:40.237 --> 00:40:42.699
But yeah, I felt like I let down our team members.
658
00:40:42.739 --> 00:40:43.259
And that's tough.
659
00:40:44.023 --> 00:40:45.924
Well, Dara, thank you for sharing all this.
660
00:40:45.944 --> 00:40:53.066
You talked about being locked in a closet, working at a gas station, your dad's entrepreneurial failures.
661
00:40:53.707 --> 00:40:54.487
Great to have you on.
662
00:40:54.787 --> 00:40:55.047
Awesome.
663
00:40:55.247 --> 00:40:55.727
Thanks, cuz.
664
00:40:56.628 --> 00:41:01.850
If you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe to Confession wherever you get your podcast.
665
00:41:02.470 --> 00:41:08.133
In an upcoming episode, I'll be interviewing Luana Lopez Lara, co-founder of Kalshi.
666
00:41:08.353 --> 00:41:15.056
She has an amazing story and shares a lot of intimate moments behind the ups and downs of building Kalshi.
1
00:00:00.371 --> 00:00:02.713
85% of our volume disappeared overnight.
2
00:00:03.113 --> 00:00:06.295
We had to go through our largest layoff ever as a company.
3
00:00:06.315 --> 00:00:09.057
It was over 5,000 people that we laid off.
4
00:00:09.318 --> 00:00:12.620
It was during a really difficult, uncertain time for everybody.
5
00:00:13.080 --> 00:00:15.042
That was the definition of rock bottom for me.
6
00:00:15.822 --> 00:00:20.325
Welcome to Confession, where I invite tech veterans to share their painful lessons.
7
00:00:20.806 --> 00:00:26.690
Everybody has painful stories, and I offer an outlet to talk honestly about the lessons learned.
8
00:00:27.050 --> 00:00:29.332
I'm Ali Partovi, and I run NEO.
9
00:00:29.852 --> 00:00:33.474
a venture capital fund and mentorship community for startup founders.
10
00:00:33.914 --> 00:00:37.816
Today, I sit down with Dara Khazrashahi, CEO of Uber.
11
00:00:38.116 --> 00:00:45.699
Dara talks about his time at Uber as well as insights about the importance of transparency, courage, and honesty as a leader.
12
00:00:46.019 --> 00:00:47.820
I think you'll really enjoy this episode.
13
00:00:48.100 --> 00:00:48.921
This is Confession.
14
00:00:49.181 --> 00:00:49.661
Let's begin.
15
00:00:50.241 --> 00:00:51.383
Dara, thank you for doing this.
16
00:00:51.443 --> 00:00:52.525
Welcome to Confession.
17
00:00:52.805 --> 00:00:53.506
Happy to do it.
18
00:00:54.027 --> 00:00:55.148
I want to start at the beginning.
19
00:00:55.229 --> 00:00:56.811
Tell me where you were born.
20
00:00:56.971 --> 00:00:58.834
Tell me a bit about what young Dara was like.
21
00:00:59.014 --> 00:00:59.515
Absolutely.
22
00:00:59.555 --> 00:01:01.197
So you're a little familiar with this?
23
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We're second cousins.
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Yeah, exactly.
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I was born in Iran.
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in Tehran, Iran in 1969.
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And we were a part of, and you were a part of, a very, very big family.
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It was a merchant family that came to Tehran from Tabriz and built a big business.
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And this was during a period in Iran where the people
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The Shah was the ruler and he was really trying to modernize Iran and move it from where the Middle East was, which, you know, society that hadn't really been developed to a modern industrial society.
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And our family was a part of that.
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We had built a very, very big business, pharmaceuticals and consumer manufacturing and other businesses as well.
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You know, I think both of us probably, if things had been different, would be executives in the family business someplace, right?
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Slightly different paths.
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Yeah, exactly.
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And then in 1977, 1978, the Iranian Revolution happened.
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I had some family who was involved with the Shah.
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While we were not political or religious in any way, we thought it was going to be safer for us to actually go to France for the summer to let things cool down because we
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It was almost unimaginable for us to lose the lives that we had in Iran.
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And the revolution happened.
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And the Shah was toppled.
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And we were lucky enough to have an uncle here, our mutual uncle, Uncle Nasrullah.
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Here in New York.
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Yeah, here in New York, in Irvington, New York.
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And so we came to the U.S. to stay with him.
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And we've never been back.
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Myself, father, two brothers, and then other... You guys stayed in Iran for longer.
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Yeah, we were stuck there for five more years.
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Were you stuck stuck?
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Or you decided not to come out?
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So it sort of depends who you ask.
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Yeah.
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So my dad, I think, was...
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patriotic and a bit maybe naive.
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I think both of our fathers were.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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And I think he actually naive, maybe not the right, just optimistic, which I'm an optimist also.
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Like he saw that this might be a path to the people of Iran having self-determination.
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And there were elements of that for sure in the early parts.
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And so also he was a founder.
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He was a founder of a university and that was his life's work.
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And he didn't want to just ditch it.
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And so he stayed or he basically insisted on us staying.
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But I think there was also like once we basically convinced him, no, we we really need to leave.
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It was like really hard to get passports or like getting exit permission.
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It got much harder and took much longer than the smarter ones who left.
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Or the lucky ones.
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Yeah.
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And so we came to the States, Irvington, and we got our our own place in Tarotown, New York.
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Yeah.
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Edgemont condos.
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Yeah, exactly.
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Edgemont and you guys eventually came to Edgemont too, right?
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Yeah, we moved there and we ended up getting a bedroom in Jaja's house, our grandmother.
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And you were a few doors down in the same condo complex.
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Yeah, and I like to say to folks too that...
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We lost everything that the family had, but the one thing that we didn't lose was family.
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And so we were very, very lucky to be so close as a family growing up.
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And that remains to this day.
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We've got the family reunions and all that stuff, and it was what held us together.
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And it really helped me make the transition to the States.
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And we came to the States during a difficult time, but also a great time.
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It was a period during which the U.S. was open to immigration.
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And I do think that immigration is something that has made our country great.
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And we were very lucky to come then.
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But at the same time, I think it was a year after I came, there was the hostage situation in Iran.
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So the tensions between Iran and the U.S. were pretty high.
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But...
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You know, all of that allowed us to come to the to the States and probably the U.S. is the best place to kind of remake your life.
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And we were able to rebuild just like you guys have.
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For those like two years of the hostage crisis, I wasn't in the U.S.
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I was in Iran and I was I think I was like seven or eight years old.
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You must have been like 11 or something.
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Yeah, I think 9, 10.
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Yeah.
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I mean, from what I understand is like every night the news was saying, talking about how bad Iran is and how our hostages.
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Did you feel animosity or did you feel in any way like people look at you as one of the bad guys with other kids or anything like that making you feel?
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I wouldn't describe it as that in that there wasn't hostility or animosity, but it's mean things that little kids do.
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So I remember...
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at our school we would play a game called hostage crisis no way yeah and so it was very very sophisticated game that consisted of locking me the hostage up oh my god so they would like lock me up in a broom closet and like the cleaning lady would find me what the hell are you doing here you know i'm not showing up for class or or sports so that happened once in a while
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Wait, hold on.
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Low-key, this doesn't sound like a particularly healthy game.
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You weren't traumatized.
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I learned to appreciate the dark and cleaning supplies.
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I'm just, you know, put me in front of a mess and I'm excellent.
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And, you know, you can choose to make a big deal of these things or not.
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And I think at the time, maybe I was clueless.
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Maybe I worried about other things.
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It didn't mark me in any way one way or the other.
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Yeah, you felt the tension between the U.S. and Iran.
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But I tell you, people were so friendly.
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People were so friendly.
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And, again, we always had our family together.
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to come back to.
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And if you have that base, then a lot more becomes possible.
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Did you ever get into trouble as a kid?
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I was a pretty good kid.
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And again, I don't know if it went back to the sense of responsibility.
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Cave, my older brother, got me drunk when I was a freshman.
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to demonstrate that I shouldn't drink.
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You know, like just, I got into the typical kinds of trouble that young kids do.
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But I'd say I was a decent kid.
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I didn't get into anything heavy one way or the other.
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What about you?
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Were you a surface good kid?
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I was always trying to see what I could get away with and still not get into trouble.
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It's a pretty good strategy.
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I think I was mischievous, but also I had such good grades.
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And also I was friends with the teachers.
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I was definitely a teacher's pet.
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But then as a result, the mischievous side was like,
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How much can I do without getting into trouble?
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Also being an identical twin, it's like any time people learned I was a twin, it's like, have you ever...
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you know, switched with your brother.
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Have you ever like played tricks on your teachers?
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So of course we had to try that.
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Had to meet yourself one or the other.
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We definitely did things like swapping classes with each other.
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I once was in Hadi's French class and there was a pop quiz and I was like, fuck, I'm going to bomb this quiz for him.
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So I got him an F.
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mom it wasn't me it was Ali because we were financially insecure we only once we were driving we only had insurance for one of us oh wow that's great but then I had like I had a pretty serious car accident Hati and me together I was the one driving
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He was the one who was insured.
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It was, like, serious enough that police came, and the car was totaled.
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And it was, like, late night and in the rain and so on.
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And so they took us back to the station.
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And while there, Hadi and I, like, changed clothes in the bathroom.
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Oh, that's crazy.
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Because, like, he...
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I had given his ID as the driver.
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Neither of us was in any trouble.
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I'd never interacted with the police this way before.
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I didn't know what was going on.
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So it definitely felt risky.
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Like, what if they know that...
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I wasn't really insured or he's not really the driver.
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Yeah, and a few things like that.
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I actually want to ask about something else.
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And I've never asked you this.
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And I always wonder, I mean, even within our family, and I know other families that, you know, who came from Iran and the revolution, not everyone reacts to loss the same way.
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The way my parents and Hadi and I reacted, first of all, like losing all of our wealth, we went straight to like learning how to save money.
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My mom worked.
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two jobs.
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I definitely felt motivation that like, I need to somehow re-earn and rebuild.
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Well, we lost that.
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The greatness that our family once had.
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And I think, I mean, for sure, I had pride in our grandparents and, you know, someone had built...
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that all those enterprises in Iran from the ground up, they weren't like inherited wealth or royalty.
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Totally.
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They were entrepreneurs.
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And so I felt like that's in my blood.
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I can do it.
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But I'm wondering, like, did you have the similar kind of feelings of duty to build something back for the family?
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Totally.
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And the funny thing, I'm curious as to how you felt.
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It was never communicated to me.
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Yeah, same here.
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Like not once did my dad say anything about losing everything and rebuilding here or my mom.
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Or even my brothers, we didn't talk about it.
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But there was this weird undercurrent that all of us were aware of.
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And clearly you were aware of as well.
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And this almost a responsibility, which is we're getting a second chance.
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I knew that for my parents.
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Again, they were a little bit idealistic.
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or dumb, whichever one you want to say, but they didn't take their money out of Iran.
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You know, a lot of people who made their wealth in Iran took it out of Iran during those times.
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I think our family wanted to rebuild.
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They want to reinvest.
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You know, that part of it was building a local operation that could expand in the Middle East and hopefully globally.
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And so we lost everything.
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And my brothers and I knew that my parents, one, obviously, our lifestyle got much smaller.
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Yeah.
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And at the same time, my parents were investing everything that they had to send us to private school.
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And there was this unspoken sense of responsibility for, I think, all of us in our family, which in hindsight might be why we've done quite well.
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in life and careers, et cetera, to rebuild.
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It was much harder on my dad because he tried his hand at being an entrepreneur in the U.S. And for various reasons, he took a couple of shots and he missed.
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And after those couple of shots, he kind of gave up a little bit.
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He should have just been a starving researcher like my dad.
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He should have anticipated the AI revolution.
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Can you imagine?
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But my mom, she got to work.
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So just like your mom, she worked as a salesperson, et cetera.
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She got to work.
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She put her heads down.
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And then I think we as kids adjusted very quickly.
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And I think that's one of the great things about being a child.
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You can adjust.
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And while we didn't have everything we had in Iran, we had a pretty good middle-class life in the US.
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And that's certainly nothing to sneeze at.
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It's so interesting what you said about it being unspoken.
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And I had the exact same experience.
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There was one thing my mom said, and this was even before we really lost everything, but we had lost a lot.
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And my mom told me that her family had been extraordinarily wealthy before.
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And she said, however, I never let my mom or dad give me any money, like, you know, that she was proud of having.
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like built her own being independent.
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That's awesome.
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And just that my takeaway was I need to learn how does one make money?
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Exactly.
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I didn't even know the concept, but it just implanted in me that that's something to be proud of.
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I still remember my first job.
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It was at a gas station.
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Oh, yeah.
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I was literally going to say the other memory that came to my mind.
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I remember driving past this gas station and pulling over and seeing you there and being like, why is Dara the one filling our gas tank?
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And my mom being like, Dara got a job and he's earning money.
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And that for me was like, I remember being so proud of you and so impressed because like you were contributing to the family.
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It was so cool.
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Yeah.
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that sense of freedom and that satisfaction of making money.
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How old were you?
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16?
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I think 16, yeah.
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Yeah, I think I worked in summer camp one summer and then started working at the gas station, and it was fun.
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Yeah, it's funny because given that,
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Uber is now obviously related to cars.
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And then also you were the one who drove us to school.
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It was not such a good driver back then, but it was okay.
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I always remember waking up at 7.30 or what I get coming out in the cold at 7.30 in the morning.
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And my Buick Bonneville ready.
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Let's fast forward a little bit.
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Sure.
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You went to school at Brown.
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When and where did you start thinking about it?
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entering the business world and what was your path?
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I was always interested in the sciences.
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I read science fiction like crazy when I was growing up.
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And when I went to Brown, I studied engineering.
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And I studied bioelectrical engineering because I don't know about your father or my dad.
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It's like, Dara, you can study whatever you want as long as you can be a doctor or an engineer.
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Take your choice.
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The world is your oyster.
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So I figured I would study bioengineering because it would give me a path to either go be a doctor, doctor, or engineer.
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You know, I was a good son.
254
00:15:03.318 --> 00:15:06.600
Lo and behold, I fell in love with a woman in New York City.
255
00:15:07.701 --> 00:15:12.224
And I had a job in Kentucky, I think was my job coming out of school, but I wanted to be with her.
256
00:15:12.704 --> 00:15:17.827
So I called up my brother, Kaveh, who worked at Allen & Company.
257
00:15:17.987 --> 00:15:19.788
And I asked him, I'm like, hey, can you get me a job?
258
00:15:19.808 --> 00:15:22.570
Because I want to be in New York City because I want to be with my girlfriend.
259
00:15:23.050 --> 00:15:26.873
So I went into the world of finance completely accidentally.
260
00:15:27.598 --> 00:15:37.677
And one of my clients was Barry Diller, who was in the entertainment business, and he had moved over to home shopping, QVC then home shopping.
261
00:15:38.532 --> 00:15:49.960
And at one point, he took control of this entity, Silver King Stations and Home Shopping, was merging it together and bought a company, USA Networks, because he wanted to bring kind of commerce and entertainment together.
262
00:15:50.980 --> 00:15:54.083
And he asked me to come work for him as his deal person.
263
00:15:54.783 --> 00:15:59.206
And I think Barry at the time was the one person in the universe that.
264
00:15:59.907 --> 00:16:02.308
that could get me to leave Alan and company.
265
00:16:02.449 --> 00:16:03.529
So I went to work for him.
266
00:16:04.530 --> 00:16:08.794
And he was half entertainment, half commerce technology.
267
00:16:09.514 --> 00:16:10.475
I was more technical.
268
00:16:10.655 --> 00:16:12.416
So I helped him on the technology side.
269
00:16:12.937 --> 00:16:15.099
And we wound up spinning off all the entertainment
270
00:16:15.739 --> 00:16:18.761
businesses and really focus on e-commerce.
271
00:16:18.861 --> 00:16:22.502
It was ticketmastermatch.com, a bunch of travel assets.
272
00:16:23.083 --> 00:16:28.405
The travel assets, we combine them all into an asset called IC Travel.
273
00:16:29.006 --> 00:16:31.407
It includes Expedia, Hotels.com, Hotwire.
274
00:16:31.907 --> 00:16:35.409
And at some point that entity ran into trouble.
275
00:16:36.869 --> 00:16:39.971
And the CEO at the time, Eric Blatchford,
276
00:16:41.196 --> 00:16:42.117
wasn't really up for it.
277
00:16:42.137 --> 00:16:43.318
He was more of the founder type.
278
00:16:43.458 --> 00:16:44.939
He was part of the founding Expedia team.
279
00:16:45.119 --> 00:16:50.263
So he decided that he was going to resign and we had no one to turn to.
280
00:16:50.864 --> 00:16:58.169
At the time, I was the CFO of IAC and I'd always want to go from kind of being a deal person to CFO.
281
00:16:58.429 --> 00:17:02.633
I liked broad business more and I was much more attracted to technology.
282
00:17:03.153 --> 00:17:04.834
So when that happened, we didn't have a CEO.
283
00:17:04.874 --> 00:17:05.615
I raised my hand.
284
00:17:05.955 --> 00:17:07.997
It was ignorance and desperation.
285
00:17:09.573 --> 00:17:13.035
It was desperation on Barry's part because he didn't have anyone else.
286
00:17:13.075 --> 00:17:16.356
And it was ignorance on my part, which is, hey, I can do the CEO gig.
287
00:17:16.956 --> 00:17:20.118
But, you know, when the two come together, sometimes crazy things happen.
288
00:17:20.578 --> 00:17:29.422
And so Barry hired me on as the CEO of IAC Travel, which then was spun off of IAC and became Expedia, the public company.
289
00:17:29.462 --> 00:17:29.642
So.
290
00:17:30.161 --> 00:17:33.283
Long road, weird road that was completely unplanned.
291
00:17:33.703 --> 00:17:35.964
It was a great choice, kind of a random choice.
292
00:17:36.424 --> 00:17:41.727
And that put me on to the course of being a proper technology executive, so to speak.
293
00:17:42.328 --> 00:17:45.529
So what are you here to confess about today?
294
00:17:46.190 --> 00:17:55.495
So my confession is actually my early, I would say, early years of CEO at Expedia.
295
00:17:56.515 --> 00:17:57.836
And I was a rookie CEO.
296
00:18:00.343 --> 00:18:03.626
Not a particularly good one at the beginning.
297
00:18:04.727 --> 00:18:09.290
The stock, when we had spun off the company, the stock was around 40, 45 bucks a share.
298
00:18:10.631 --> 00:18:12.973
And it had drifted down.
299
00:18:13.954 --> 00:18:14.694
Trends weren't great.
300
00:18:14.735 --> 00:18:15.875
Travel trends weren't great.
301
00:18:16.316 --> 00:18:19.698
A lot of sites were going direct for the first time.
302
00:18:20.079 --> 00:18:24.042
Because the first instantiation of online travel was really...
303
00:18:24.543 --> 00:18:27.504
the online travel agents, us, Travelocity, Orbitz, et cetera.
304
00:18:28.144 --> 00:18:32.026
And then the hotels and the airlines especially started getting their act together.
305
00:18:32.506 --> 00:18:37.708
And more and more of the traffic was going direct, whether it's a Delta or a Hilton or Marriott, et cetera.
306
00:18:38.168 --> 00:18:40.869
The growth of the industry really started slowing down.
307
00:18:41.049 --> 00:18:43.169
And as a result, the stock was suffering.
308
00:18:43.270 --> 00:18:45.830
And how many people worked for you at this time?
309
00:18:45.870 --> 00:18:49.632
I think at the time it was about 5,000 or 6,000 people.
310
00:18:49.752 --> 00:18:49.972
Wow.
311
00:18:50.352 --> 00:18:52.773
And it was pretty scale business.
312
00:18:53.513 --> 00:18:55.816
And it was structured as a holding company.
313
00:18:55.977 --> 00:19:02.986
We had Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Hotwire, TripAdvisor, all operating independently.
314
00:19:03.106 --> 00:19:05.790
And I wasn't an operator operator.
315
00:19:05.810 --> 00:19:07.212
I was more of a portfolio manager.
316
00:19:08.547 --> 00:19:12.768
During that time, one of our largest competitors was Priceline.
317
00:19:12.788 --> 00:19:18.950
And they had just bought a, what was then a small company called Booking.com.
318
00:19:19.330 --> 00:19:20.430
Okay.
319
00:19:20.450 --> 00:19:27.132
I had gotten to know them and we had negotiated a deal to buy them out.
320
00:19:27.553 --> 00:19:28.893
Them meaning Booking.com.
321
00:19:29.153 --> 00:19:30.295
It was Priceline at the time.
322
00:19:30.455 --> 00:19:32.157
You weren't competing to buy Booking.
323
00:19:32.297 --> 00:19:35.421
You had gotten to know Priceline and you were... And they had bought Booking.
324
00:19:35.441 --> 00:19:38.665
So this was the original mistake, if you want to call that, which is...
325
00:19:39.346 --> 00:19:40.407
But it was not my mistake.
326
00:19:41.088 --> 00:19:43.491
We didn't buy Booking.com because we poo-pooed them.
327
00:19:43.711 --> 00:19:44.552
Priceline bought them.
328
00:19:45.613 --> 00:19:51.855
And I had gotten to a deal with Priceline, not because I thought booking was going to be amazing.
329
00:19:51.935 --> 00:19:55.437
It was a nice business that was growing at respectable levels at the time.
330
00:19:55.897 --> 00:20:02.639
But because Priceline at the time, I don't know if you remember the William Shatner commercials, all that stuff, was a really big, low-cost competitor of ours.
331
00:20:03.000 --> 00:20:04.840
And I had the deal basically done.
332
00:20:06.261 --> 00:20:09.382
And we had a board meeting to essentially approve the deal.
333
00:20:11.005 --> 00:20:12.987
And I missed the quarter.
334
00:20:13.568 --> 00:20:14.328
We had earnings.
335
00:20:14.769 --> 00:20:15.589
They were terrible.
336
00:20:16.090 --> 00:20:20.674
The stock that was already in the 20s went down, I think, at like $16, $17 a share.
337
00:20:22.155 --> 00:20:34.086
And at the board meeting, when I was presenting the Priceline deal, the board started pushing back, including Barry, and I think rightfully so, and said that...
338
00:20:35.456 --> 00:20:47.979
hey, Dara, if you can't get your own house in order in terms of the earnings of the business, the growth of the business, why should we give you another billion and a half dollars to go buy this other company price line?
339
00:20:48.079 --> 00:20:50.440
So shouldn't you get your own house in order first?
340
00:20:51.620 --> 00:20:55.201
And I think that the board did it.
341
00:20:57.228 --> 00:21:02.912
Because they were making a proper case and a board should act as a check for the CEO.
342
00:21:03.773 --> 00:21:09.117
But I think they were partially doing it to test the veracity of my wanting to go forward with us.
343
00:21:09.457 --> 00:21:12.259
You know, they were pushing back to see how much I wanted this deal.
344
00:21:13.260 --> 00:21:21.806
And, you know, I asked Barry about it one day, which is if I had laid my body down on the train tracks,
345
00:21:23.063 --> 00:21:24.685
I'm sure they would have approved the deal.
346
00:21:25.826 --> 00:21:28.188
But I lost confidence.
347
00:21:28.809 --> 00:21:31.011
I was first-time CEO.
348
00:21:31.892 --> 00:21:35.436
It had been a rough year, year and a half.
349
00:21:36.717 --> 00:21:39.020
And I just backed off.
350
00:21:39.810 --> 00:21:41.573
So you were just like, they're not going to approve it.
351
00:21:41.593 --> 00:21:42.775
I'm not going to push for it.
352
00:21:43.055 --> 00:21:44.097
I didn't push hard enough.
353
00:21:44.217 --> 00:21:46.601
I am sure if I push hard enough, I would have gotten it.
354
00:21:46.861 --> 00:21:47.682
I would have gotten it done.
355
00:21:48.103 --> 00:21:49.405
But I didn't push hard enough.
356
00:21:49.425 --> 00:21:50.967
Now, yes, they were pushing back.
357
00:21:51.027 --> 00:21:52.410
Why should we do this, et cetera.
358
00:21:52.930 --> 00:21:54.393
But they were making all the typical questions.
359
00:21:54.919 --> 00:21:57.662
arguments that you should when you're testing someone else.
360
00:21:58.323 --> 00:22:00.745
I said, you know, we're going to wait for a quarter or two.
361
00:22:00.845 --> 00:22:01.406
It's fine.
362
00:22:01.446 --> 00:22:03.488
I'm going to get my own house in order, et cetera.
363
00:22:04.189 --> 00:22:08.013
By the time we did, Priceline was also suffering to some extent for the same reasons.
364
00:22:08.633 --> 00:22:12.017
And by the time we did, that stock price had gone up.
365
00:22:12.177 --> 00:22:13.558
They weren't willing to do the deal.
366
00:22:14.559 --> 00:22:22.442
And that, you know, if you look at now Booking.com, Priceline renamed itself Booking.com because the Booking.com business has completely taken over.
367
00:22:22.462 --> 00:22:25.583
You know, that company is worth $140, $150 billion.
368
00:22:25.603 --> 00:22:25.983
No way.
369
00:22:26.983 --> 00:22:31.945
So it was a very, very, very expensive mistake.
370
00:22:33.165 --> 00:22:35.248
of mine, whether the mistake is missing the quarter.
371
00:22:35.288 --> 00:22:40.133
But I think the real mistake was not being confident in my own convictions.
372
00:22:40.514 --> 00:22:41.976
And I knew it was a good deal.
373
00:22:41.996 --> 00:22:44.419
How did you know it was a good deal?
374
00:22:44.959 --> 00:22:51.407
Like if you take yourself, if I was in Dara's body, you know, going back down, like what would I be feeling?
375
00:22:51.687 --> 00:22:54.069
I knew that the travel business was a great business.
376
00:22:54.109 --> 00:22:56.090
Travel would grow a GDP plus.
377
00:22:56.711 --> 00:23:02.014
I knew it was very, very early in the adoption of online travel.
378
00:23:02.235 --> 00:23:06.598
Probably travel, you know, online is probably 60% of travel market, probably 10%.
379
00:23:07.038 --> 00:23:12.582
So you knew that all of the long-term metrics were on your side and there was wind at your back.
380
00:23:13.668 --> 00:23:18.150
But I was just, I was, I let myself be off balance because of a bad quarter or two.
381
00:23:18.810 --> 00:23:20.871
It was absolutely the right bet to make.
382
00:23:21.252 --> 00:23:24.853
And you knew it and you had worked on it and built the deal.
383
00:23:24.873 --> 00:23:25.153
I knew it.
384
00:23:25.193 --> 00:23:27.314
And you know, my background was banking.
385
00:23:27.394 --> 00:23:31.757
So I was pretty good at the deal business, but I just lost confidence.
386
00:23:32.017 --> 00:23:32.997
What were you afraid of?
387
00:23:33.077 --> 00:23:36.699
Like what was at stake if you had pounded the table?
388
00:23:36.739 --> 00:23:38.940
They were pushing back against me and, and,
389
00:23:40.423 --> 00:23:47.366
I don't know if this is in you, but I think there's something culturally about being Iranian, which is this is like being deferential to your elders.
390
00:23:48.107 --> 00:23:48.307
Yeah.
391
00:23:49.047 --> 00:23:51.488
And I was a young CEO at the time.
392
00:23:52.069 --> 00:23:53.269
This is the board.
393
00:23:53.309 --> 00:23:58.132
There are a bunch of gray haired 50, 60 year olds who had had a ton of experience.
394
00:23:58.992 --> 00:24:08.897
And I think sometimes, like, especially in technology, especially in our business, you have to actually have a lack of respect for experience.
395
00:24:09.870 --> 00:24:17.072
Because where you create value and where there's a greatest value creation opportunity is when history doesn't repeat.
396
00:24:17.152 --> 00:24:20.072
Now, sometimes history rhymes, et cetera, so you should take those lessons.
397
00:24:20.512 --> 00:24:24.873
But the biggest, biggest opportunities are when something's fundamentally different, right?
398
00:24:24.933 --> 00:24:26.454
AI is fundamentally different.
399
00:24:27.254 --> 00:24:35.196
And the people who recognize it as such and stuck to their convictions for saying, oh, this is just some other wave, they're the ones who succeeded.
400
00:24:35.216 --> 00:24:36.636
So you just have to know.
401
00:24:37.516 --> 00:24:38.777
When to go against the grain.
402
00:24:39.178 --> 00:24:39.398
Yeah.
403
00:24:39.938 --> 00:24:41.339
And you've got to hold on.
404
00:24:42.440 --> 00:24:46.524
And I think back then, I just wasn't brave enough.
405
00:24:46.704 --> 00:24:52.549
You know, there was this deferential quality, which is, well, these people who know a lot are pushing back.
406
00:24:52.589 --> 00:24:54.110
So I've got to question myself.
407
00:24:54.530 --> 00:24:56.932
And they're not going to respect you if you insist.
408
00:24:57.033 --> 00:25:00.395
It was just, you know, I was putting more weight into their experience than my own.
409
00:25:01.476 --> 00:25:12.683
Uh, and, and I had lost some confidence as a result of the stock price coming down and as a result of the missed quarter and then put my body across those railroad tracks.
410
00:25:13.364 --> 00:25:20.428
And you know, that you, you don't have that many moments as a CEO or as an executive where you have to do that.
411
00:25:20.949 --> 00:25:22.089
But sometimes you have to do that.
412
00:25:22.109 --> 00:25:30.475
Like the, the, the biggest, I'll tell you like another, another lesson that, that I got from Barry when I was there is, you know, once he told me, Hey, Dara, I'm going to
413
00:25:31.365 --> 00:25:33.611
I didn't hire you to be average.
414
00:25:34.753 --> 00:25:35.014
Okay.
415
00:25:35.094 --> 00:25:39.425
And as a leader, whether you're a CEO or another leader,
416
00:25:41.123 --> 00:25:46.446
When you recognize those moments, when you see some kind of dislocation, you have to take those.
417
00:25:47.046 --> 00:25:49.248
And by design, they're lonely.
418
00:25:49.988 --> 00:25:51.089
Yeah.
419
00:25:51.109 --> 00:25:58.973
And this was a moment, again, I think I had the power to convince the board, but I didn't have the confidence or the veracity to do it.
420
00:25:58.993 --> 00:26:00.373
And it was a big mistake.
421
00:26:00.653 --> 00:26:01.654
Very expensive mistake.
422
00:26:02.334 --> 00:26:03.035
But I've learned from it.
423
00:26:03.894 --> 00:26:10.096
I wish I could say I am deferential to the elders, but I think my... You didn't suffer from that disease?
424
00:26:10.416 --> 00:26:11.176
At least not as much.
425
00:26:11.336 --> 00:26:11.896
Yeah.
426
00:26:11.936 --> 00:26:14.957
Why should I listen to a bunch of extinct fossils?
427
00:26:15.317 --> 00:26:17.198
You're in startup land.
428
00:26:17.238 --> 00:26:22.459
By definition, you know, the definition of startup is you're coming up with ideas that no one else had.
429
00:26:22.619 --> 00:26:22.839
Yeah.
430
00:26:22.979 --> 00:26:25.380
But every day is going against the grain.
431
00:26:25.400 --> 00:26:26.400
Otherwise, you know...
432
00:26:26.420 --> 00:26:29.481
I probably would have insulted all the board members and get fired on the spot.
433
00:26:30.762 --> 00:26:31.822
I wish I had you with me.
434
00:26:32.442 --> 00:26:33.683
Well, thank you for sharing.
435
00:26:33.703 --> 00:26:34.904
And is this public knowledge?
436
00:26:35.104 --> 00:26:35.845
I don't think so.
437
00:26:36.165 --> 00:26:36.405
No.
438
00:26:36.705 --> 00:26:41.309
I mean, you know, Barry always tells the truth, so I'm sure he would confirm it.
439
00:26:41.689 --> 00:26:43.771
But it's not something that we talk about.
440
00:26:43.951 --> 00:26:44.312
Yeah.
441
00:26:44.332 --> 00:26:47.374
It wouldn't have been filed or disclosed.
442
00:26:47.654 --> 00:26:51.998
It was considered and rejected, but it sits kind of in the back of my mind.
443
00:26:52.018 --> 00:26:52.858
Oh, my gosh.
444
00:26:53.199 --> 00:26:53.419
Yeah.
445
00:26:54.159 --> 00:26:56.501
Expedia could have been even more, even bigger.
446
00:26:56.561 --> 00:26:57.022
Yeah.
447
00:26:57.042 --> 00:26:58.023
It could be even more successful.
448
00:26:58.043 --> 00:27:00.985
We did well, but we could have done a lot better had I not backed down that day.
449
00:27:01.826 --> 00:27:05.492
Although, who knows, you might still be at Expedia then instead of Uber.
450
00:27:05.632 --> 00:27:06.513
Sure.
451
00:27:06.954 --> 00:27:12.122
Speaking of Uber, by the way, I still remember when Uber was beginning to search for a new CEO.
452
00:27:12.402 --> 00:27:17.270
Like long before they chose you, like Hadi and I were in Seattle telling you like,
453
00:27:18.445 --> 00:27:22.627
They should choose you as the CEO, but they never would because no one's heard of you.
454
00:27:23.527 --> 00:27:24.887
You had such a low profile.
455
00:27:25.508 --> 00:27:29.629
You were kind of the person lurking in the shadows.
456
00:27:29.749 --> 00:27:32.470
I so remember that conversation with you guys.
457
00:27:32.490 --> 00:27:36.011
It was a hottie's house in Seattle and in Bellevue.
458
00:27:37.012 --> 00:27:40.113
And I was dying to tell you guys.
459
00:27:41.133 --> 00:27:42.994
But I was CEO of Expedia.
460
00:27:43.014 --> 00:27:44.634
They had just reached out to me.
461
00:27:45.074 --> 00:27:46.714
Who had Uber had Uber had.
462
00:27:47.034 --> 00:27:47.295
Yeah.
463
00:27:47.315 --> 00:27:47.435
Yeah.
464
00:27:47.495 --> 00:27:48.135
Oh, my God.
465
00:27:48.175 --> 00:27:49.175
When we were discussing.
466
00:27:49.215 --> 00:27:49.455
Yes.
467
00:27:49.475 --> 00:27:50.895
They were just reached out to me.
468
00:27:51.015 --> 00:27:53.956
And at the time I thought that they were crazy.
469
00:27:54.836 --> 00:27:56.377
And so at first I said no.
470
00:27:56.437 --> 00:28:02.058
But then actually Daniel Ek convinced me to say, yes, you brought that up during the no phase.
471
00:28:02.078 --> 00:28:02.198
Yeah.
472
00:28:02.953 --> 00:28:10.317
And so I thought, oh, my God, like I can't even risk remotely that anyone finds out about this.
473
00:28:10.337 --> 00:28:12.639
So I didn't come out and confess to you guys.
474
00:28:12.659 --> 00:28:14.760
But, God, I was dying to talk to you about it.
475
00:28:14.860 --> 00:28:16.761
And plus, I thought it wasn't going to happen.
476
00:28:17.281 --> 00:28:19.082
I really thought at that time it wasn't going to happen.
477
00:28:19.122 --> 00:28:24.745
But then I remember the discussion being like, yeah, the names that are floating in the press are this and that and the other.
478
00:28:24.926 --> 00:28:26.306
Meg Whitman, Jeff Immelt.
479
00:28:26.366 --> 00:28:27.547
I'm like, who the hell am I?
480
00:28:27.567 --> 00:28:28.548
These famous names.
481
00:28:28.648 --> 00:28:28.768
Yeah.
482
00:28:28.788 --> 00:28:28.888
Yeah.
483
00:28:29.328 --> 00:28:41.764
But Hadi and I were both like, if they were smart, they would hire someone like Dara, who's not famous, but like would actually come in and, you know, roll up his sleeves and like do a good job.
484
00:28:41.964 --> 00:28:44.468
Someone said you've got an eye for picking the right talent.
485
00:28:44.608 --> 00:28:44.808
Yeah.
486
00:28:45.745 --> 00:28:46.346
I guess I do.
487
00:28:46.506 --> 00:28:46.767
Yeah.
488
00:28:47.067 --> 00:28:58.063
So I also remember when you first joined Uber, there was a press article that quoted you saying, I'm a little bit scared.
489
00:28:58.243 --> 00:28:58.964
Do you remember that?
490
00:28:59.185 --> 00:29:00.386
And what was behind that?
491
00:29:00.406 --> 00:29:01.328
Because that really...
492
00:29:02.349 --> 00:29:10.030
really stuck with me in a good way because you just, you don't see CEOs confessing to being scared that way.
493
00:29:10.070 --> 00:29:10.291
Yeah.
494
00:29:10.671 --> 00:29:13.851
I think it was in my goodbye email to Expedia.
495
00:29:14.351 --> 00:29:16.592
And I said, I was afraid or something about.
496
00:29:16.712 --> 00:29:17.772
So you put it in writing.
497
00:29:17.972 --> 00:29:18.632
I put it in writing.
498
00:29:18.652 --> 00:29:18.832
Yeah.
499
00:29:18.852 --> 00:29:27.534
It was, it was my farewell email and, and you know, Ali through my life, both personal life and then professional life.
500
00:29:28.674 --> 00:29:37.559
I found that being completely truthful and transparent is the best way to build relationships.
501
00:29:38.159 --> 00:29:44.963
And especially for a CEO is to build a deeper relationship with your employees.
502
00:29:45.003 --> 00:29:48.285
You know, like the companies that are great companies.
503
00:29:49.412 --> 00:29:51.914
they're not just jobs, they're missions.
504
00:29:52.435 --> 00:30:00.542
And there's an emotional pull to the company and they're real emotional connections between the team members.
505
00:30:01.603 --> 00:30:12.972
And if you're sitting there being all corporate and BSing your team about how you really are and how you really feel, you're going to just get the same stuff back.
506
00:30:13.833 --> 00:30:15.855
And so what I found is
507
00:30:17.016 --> 00:30:24.966
Like admitting weakness or admitting fear is actually a bigger lift for a leader because you're not supposed to be weak.
508
00:30:25.246 --> 00:30:26.428
You're not supposed to be afraid.
509
00:30:26.708 --> 00:30:28.290
But in the end, we're all human beings.
510
00:30:28.911 --> 00:30:34.938
And if you can, as a leader, communicate that transparently and that honestly with your team,
511
00:30:35.980 --> 00:30:38.702
One, it creates kind of a deeper connection with them.
512
00:30:39.442 --> 00:30:46.527
But second is it allows them to communicate that same transparency and honesty back to you.
513
00:30:47.528 --> 00:30:58.235
And I found that when CEOs make mistakes or leaders make mistakes, often it's not a mistake of judgment, but it's a mistake because they actually didn't have all the information.
514
00:30:58.995 --> 00:30:59.796
Tell me what you mean.
515
00:30:59.996 --> 00:31:03.458
Because, you know, the higher up you are in an organization –
516
00:31:05.008 --> 00:31:09.752
To some extent, unless you really combat it, the less you really know what's going on.
517
00:31:10.432 --> 00:31:14.255
You know, all of the communication, I've got a chief of staff.
518
00:31:14.295 --> 00:31:18.198
And so my schedule is completely manufactured, right?
519
00:31:18.218 --> 00:31:22.702
And it's manufactured by incredibly well-meaning people who are trying to
520
00:31:24.565 --> 00:31:27.628
allocate my time based on, again, what all of them think.
521
00:31:27.848 --> 00:31:31.351
But also, I guess, shield the bad news from reaching you until they fix it.
522
00:31:31.411 --> 00:31:36.256
Not necessarily shield the bad news, but they're deciding what's appropriate for me to hear.
523
00:31:36.716 --> 00:31:39.398
And I think they're doing it based on their best judgment.
524
00:31:39.478 --> 00:31:43.962
And we have a culture like we don't shield the bad news unless you as an executive
525
00:31:44.743 --> 00:31:52.731
are constantly hiding the bad news, your own bad news, your own fears, your own weaknesses, your team isn't going to communicate that to you.
526
00:31:53.872 --> 00:31:57.696
I've always had a policy of like, I'm just dead honest to people.
527
00:31:58.116 --> 00:32:00.058
And everyone has a bullshit meter, right?
528
00:32:00.239 --> 00:32:03.362
Everyone knows when you're being all corporate-y to them.
529
00:32:03.762 --> 00:32:04.623
I just tell the truth.
530
00:32:05.306 --> 00:32:06.647
Like, why waste time?
531
00:32:06.807 --> 00:32:07.487
I tell the truth.
532
00:32:07.607 --> 00:32:12.169
And that allows me to get the truth from my team members as well.
533
00:32:12.669 --> 00:32:18.632
And then to the point of like the curation, I actually structurally have a bunch of random meetings.
534
00:32:19.152 --> 00:32:20.653
I don't just meet with my directs.
535
00:32:20.873 --> 00:32:22.813
I meet with a bunch of engineers, etc.
536
00:32:23.214 --> 00:32:24.394
I make sure I talk with them.
537
00:32:24.554 --> 00:32:25.695
What are they up to?
538
00:32:26.395 --> 00:32:28.356
You know, 80% of the time, it's a waste of time.
539
00:32:29.333 --> 00:32:35.980
From a business decision standpoint, but you get to know people and you get channels that are untraditional channels.
540
00:32:36.280 --> 00:32:36.401
Right.
541
00:32:36.421 --> 00:32:37.402
Information back to you.
542
00:32:37.962 --> 00:32:39.484
And those are incredibly valuable.
543
00:32:39.724 --> 00:32:43.108
When you talked about the hypothetical of someone saying like.
544
00:32:44.456 --> 00:32:47.078
This competitor is kicking our ass in this other country.
545
00:32:47.598 --> 00:32:54.342
I guess what I was thinking is that for that person to tell you the stark facts would also would be scary.
546
00:32:54.502 --> 00:32:58.804
Like it's like safer to, you know, give you the rose tinted version of it.
547
00:32:58.864 --> 00:33:02.927
And they would have to overcome fear to tell the honest truth.
548
00:33:04.223 --> 00:33:10.244
It seems like you're also saying like you had to overcome for you to be honest, but that's giving everybody else the strength.
549
00:33:10.484 --> 00:33:10.905
Exactly.
550
00:33:10.925 --> 00:33:11.385
To be honest.
551
00:33:11.405 --> 00:33:13.465
And the person in power has to do it first.
552
00:33:13.525 --> 00:33:13.725
Right.
553
00:33:13.745 --> 00:33:14.405
Right.
554
00:33:14.425 --> 00:33:15.886
Because they're not going to come to me first.
555
00:33:16.026 --> 00:33:18.906
And, you know, I hear some people saying, oh, don't come to me with questions.
556
00:33:18.946 --> 00:33:19.827
Come to me with answers.
557
00:33:20.407 --> 00:33:22.847
If you haven't figured it out, I want you to tell me.
558
00:33:23.287 --> 00:33:23.407
Right.
559
00:33:23.428 --> 00:33:27.248
Because then maybe we can work together and we can jam and we can come up with strategies.
560
00:33:27.288 --> 00:33:31.229
Like if you make a mistake, I want you to tell me so I can learn from that mistake.
561
00:33:31.269 --> 00:33:33.670
Like that's really useful data for me to have.
562
00:33:34.290 --> 00:33:44.118
And I do think one thing that we've done, and it was part of Uber culture before I joined too, is, you know, there was a cultural norm called toe-stepping.
563
00:33:45.567 --> 00:33:48.349
which was about like, say the unpleasant stuff in a meeting.
564
00:33:49.049 --> 00:33:51.351
It was- Don't be afraid to step on someone's toes.
565
00:33:51.391 --> 00:33:52.051
Yeah, yeah.
566
00:33:52.091 --> 00:33:53.132
Don't be afraid to disagree.
567
00:33:53.412 --> 00:33:54.653
It was a different context.
568
00:33:54.973 --> 00:33:55.173
Yeah.
569
00:33:55.453 --> 00:33:59.196
And it was weaponized to some extent because it became okay to be a jerk to some extent.
570
00:33:59.216 --> 00:34:04.699
Some people took that as a translation layer, even though that was not the intent of the value.
571
00:34:05.100 --> 00:34:06.941
So Uber came from a place that I think
572
00:34:08.179 --> 00:34:10.720
valued honestly and transparent communication.
573
00:34:11.221 --> 00:34:17.984
And I wanted to keep it going because usually the larger you get one, the troublemakers usually are rejected from organization.
574
00:34:18.064 --> 00:34:19.185
And I love the troublemakers.
575
00:34:19.205 --> 00:34:20.426
You've got to keep the troublemakers.
576
00:34:21.535 --> 00:34:35.239
And then two, the more kind of layers of communication you have in an organization, and usually these organizations get larger, there are more layers, the more the facts get muted and edited by the time that they get to you.
577
00:34:35.359 --> 00:34:46.962
And that editing destroys what I feel is the good stuff, which are the sharp edges of every single problem, because the sharp edges are usually give you a clue as to what's the best way to solve that problem.
578
00:34:47.342 --> 00:34:49.284
You want to project confidence to your team.
579
00:34:49.324 --> 00:34:52.166
You want to project confidence to your investors, et cetera.
580
00:34:52.206 --> 00:35:03.096
But being truthful about the problems of a company, like even when I talk to investors, of course, I talk about the good things that we're doing because there's a lot of good things that we're doing.
581
00:35:03.596 --> 00:35:11.363
But I also talk about the problems that we're facing and where we're not doing as well competitively because to me, that's an opportunity.
582
00:35:12.352 --> 00:35:14.335
And so, of course, I present it as an opportunity.
583
00:35:14.795 --> 00:35:18.800
My policy is just to be more straight than I would say most people.
584
00:35:20.062 --> 00:35:21.684
It's how I've decided to live my personal life.
585
00:35:23.106 --> 00:35:24.788
And it just makes things easier.
586
00:35:24.808 --> 00:35:25.509
It makes things simpler.
587
00:35:26.289 --> 00:35:29.453
I want to live a life where I can be honest to my friends.
588
00:35:30.093 --> 00:35:35.639
And, you know, whether I'm in the office or you and I are having a drink, you know, I don't want to bullshit you.
589
00:35:36.420 --> 00:35:37.101
It's a waste of time.
590
00:35:37.781 --> 00:35:38.382
I admire that.
591
00:35:38.422 --> 00:35:41.085
It takes strength, but it's definitely the better path.
592
00:35:41.666 --> 00:35:43.728
Has there ever been a time when you hit rock bottom?
593
00:35:46.100 --> 00:35:48.122
Yeah, COVID was rough.
594
00:35:48.642 --> 00:35:51.904
COVID was rough both personally, but professionally as well.
595
00:35:52.425 --> 00:35:54.887
At the time, Uber was deeply unprofitable.
596
00:35:55.327 --> 00:35:58.409
And at the time, the competitive field was really tough.
597
00:35:58.469 --> 00:36:00.951
Didi was competing against us.
598
00:36:02.091 --> 00:36:07.755
Chinese, you know, the Uber China in Latin America and was competing very aggressively.
599
00:36:07.775 --> 00:36:08.956
And by the way, they still are.
600
00:36:09.537 --> 00:36:13.900
And Lyft had been gaining share against us in the US as well.
601
00:36:14.640 --> 00:36:15.881
We were losing $2 billion a year.
602
00:36:16.582 --> 00:36:28.351
Post-COVID, our mobility business, which was the profit generator of the business, and we were using those profits to invest in technology and also invest in Uber Eats.
603
00:36:28.951 --> 00:36:32.414
Overnight, 85% of our volume disappeared overnight.
604
00:36:33.715 --> 00:36:39.940
And we went from losing, you know, probably a billion and a half, $2 billion a year to losing a run rate of $4 to $5 billion a year.
605
00:36:40.360 --> 00:36:42.922
And I think at the time I had like $8 to $10 billion in the bank.
606
00:36:46.712 --> 00:36:49.654
It was a very, very difficult time.
607
00:36:50.355 --> 00:36:52.537
Personally, obviously, we were all cut off from the world.
608
00:36:53.057 --> 00:36:55.899
We had to go through a very large layoff.
609
00:36:57.300 --> 00:37:03.305
And I remember I was having a bunch of meetings with my staff, Zoom meetings with my staff.
610
00:37:04.426 --> 00:37:10.751
And I wanted to kind of talk it over with them, what should we do, et cetera, because it was such a tough decision.
611
00:37:10.831 --> 00:37:13.653
And I think in hindsight for me, I was trying to put off.
612
00:37:14.053 --> 00:37:38.389
the decision right and so the way to put off decision is ask for more data talk some more about it etc you're dreading it of course because i had to make like really really deep cuts into into the company nelson uh shea our cfo at the time he said dara you know we've talked about a a bunch why don't you just tell us what you want to do and we respect your judgment
613
00:37:39.407 --> 00:37:40.889
And we're behind you.
614
00:37:42.291 --> 00:37:44.693
And that was like a bell was rung.
615
00:37:45.354 --> 00:37:45.835
Oh, my God.
616
00:37:45.995 --> 00:37:47.336
And we just had that meeting.
617
00:37:47.577 --> 00:37:55.025
And I just kind of told, said, my wife, you know, said very well, as I said, I've got to think tonight on some stuff.
618
00:37:55.065 --> 00:37:57.388
So I just spent a bunch of time alone.
619
00:37:57.888 --> 00:38:02.970
And I came back and, you know, we had to go through our largest layoff ever as a company.
620
00:38:03.550 --> 00:38:07.991
We shut down a bunch of businesses, decided to offload a bunch of businesses.
621
00:38:08.611 --> 00:38:11.192
But, you know, it was over 5,000 people that we laid off.
622
00:38:11.532 --> 00:38:12.173
Oh, my God.
623
00:38:12.853 --> 00:38:16.774
And it was during a really difficult, uncertain time for everybody.
624
00:38:17.314 --> 00:38:23.436
That was the definition of rock bottom for me because I felt like I was letting a lot of people down.
625
00:38:25.245 --> 00:38:32.695
During the time when you, as a company, you don't want to let people down, but it was a matter of survival for us.
626
00:38:33.817 --> 00:38:41.127
In hindsight, it was super important for us in terms of actually like leaning out the company.
627
00:38:41.562 --> 00:38:42.883
bringing discipline to the business.
628
00:38:42.943 --> 00:38:48.467
Our Uber Eats business then completely exploded in a good way, not in a bad way.
629
00:38:49.148 --> 00:38:54.692
And our Uber Eats business, which before COVID was probably 10% of the business, now it's 50% of the business.
630
00:38:54.772 --> 00:38:58.054
And I think actually it's going to be bigger than the mobility business.
631
00:38:58.414 --> 00:39:01.917
Maybe not profit-wise, but definitely in terms of scale and volume.
632
00:39:02.557 --> 00:39:04.579
But those COVID days were really, really dark days.
633
00:39:04.619 --> 00:39:07.281
You said that you felt like you were letting people down.
634
00:39:07.801 --> 00:39:16.003
The deepest connection that I have is with my team, the employees at Uber, right?
635
00:39:16.063 --> 00:39:18.824
It is, I want to do great for the shareholders.
636
00:39:18.924 --> 00:39:19.804
I'm a huge shareholder.
637
00:39:19.844 --> 00:39:24.185
So like that is absolutely something that you have to do.
638
00:39:24.745 --> 00:39:26.465
Now, our team members are shareholders.
639
00:39:26.665 --> 00:39:26.785
Right.
640
00:39:26.966 --> 00:39:30.726
And the thing, you know, most of our shareholders, they have a portfolio, stocks, et cetera.
641
00:39:31.006 --> 00:39:32.007
They're making a bet on you.
642
00:39:32.067 --> 00:39:32.747
And that's awesome.
643
00:39:33.537 --> 00:39:41.524
But people who work at Uber, they're making a bet on you with 100% of their time during the most productive years that they have.
644
00:39:42.065 --> 00:39:47.470
And with the talent that we attract, they have a lot of great alternatives.
645
00:39:48.416 --> 00:40:01.283
So I just feel a really deep sense of responsibility to my team members because, you know, Ali, the one thing that you can never get back, like we, our family lost a ton of money.
646
00:40:01.563 --> 00:40:02.564
We were able to make it back.
647
00:40:03.124 --> 00:40:04.925
The thing that you can never have back is your time.
648
00:40:05.205 --> 00:40:05.405
Yeah.
649
00:40:06.346 --> 00:40:13.350
And the Uber team members are investing their time during, you know, during the peak of their careers.
650
00:40:14.010 --> 00:40:16.691
And so I feel a really deep responsibility for them.
651
00:40:18.123 --> 00:40:21.445
Many of the ones that we laid off had made a bet on us.
652
00:40:22.666 --> 00:40:29.070
And yes, there was an act of God or a lab or whatever you want to call it that caused this.
653
00:40:29.850 --> 00:40:31.351
But we weren't able to stand up.
654
00:40:31.431 --> 00:40:34.433
Like, I believe that we absolutely did the right thing.
655
00:40:34.453 --> 00:40:37.095
And without that decision, we probably wouldn't have survived to this day.
656
00:40:37.575 --> 00:40:39.637
So I would have made the same decision were I there.
657
00:40:40.237 --> 00:40:42.699
But yeah, I felt like I let down our team members.
658
00:40:42.739 --> 00:40:43.259
And that's tough.
659
00:40:44.023 --> 00:40:45.924
Well, Dara, thank you for sharing all this.
660
00:40:45.944 --> 00:40:53.066
You talked about being locked in a closet, working at a gas station, your dad's entrepreneurial failures.
661
00:40:53.707 --> 00:40:54.487
Great to have you on.
662
00:40:54.787 --> 00:40:55.047
Awesome.
663
00:40:55.247 --> 00:40:55.727
Thanks, cuz.
664
00:40:56.628 --> 00:41:01.850
If you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe to Confession wherever you get your podcast.
665
00:41:02.470 --> 00:41:08.133
In an upcoming episode, I'll be interviewing Luana Lopez Lara, co-founder of Kalshi.
666
00:41:08.353 --> 00:41:15.056
She has an amazing story and shares a lot of intimate moments behind the ups and downs of building Kalshi.
