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the driving force behind one of America's most influential companies. Record high today for Uber. 100% up last
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year. Whimo and Uber have announced a partnership. When you have a CEO that's done what DAR has done, you set the bar
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higher and higher. The impact we have on society is significant. We hope to keep building on
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that impact going forward and I'm quite optimistic about what the future's going
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to bring. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Uber CEO Darra Kazer Shahi. [Music]
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Good see. All right, Dar, I wasn't sure if you were aware, but I was an early investor in Uber.
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You I've heard you say it once or twice, and I'm curious how my investment's doing.
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I don't know. Okay. Based on today, today's looking pretty good. Um, so, uh, autonomy is the discussion I think
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everybody wants to have in the timeline. How many partners does Uber have in autonomy today?
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So, we have over 20 partners across both mobility and the delivery business. Uh,
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I'd say mobility now is in the field as we speak. Obviously, we've got a partnership with Whimo, who is uh I
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think the best of the best in Atlanta and Austin. Uh but there are a number of other players that we are partnered
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with. A number of Chinese players, Autonomy in China is uh hitting the big time and a lot of these companies that
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want to expand outside of China, we're partnering with. And then in the US, uh even in in the second half of this year,
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uh we will have a couple of partnerships kind of hit the road in Texas. uh and then in Europe and the rest of the
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world. So you will see we've announced a bunch of partnerships. We're doing a ton
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of work with these partners. You'll see these cars hit the road with safety drivers eventually and the safety
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drivers will come out this year and especially going into next year. We're going to have significant number of cars
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on the road. How many people in China have level four no safety driver today? And what's your
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assessment of those companies and their safety record? You know, it's a different market obviously. So there are
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uh bu uh wery pony are all on the road today. No safety driver. We are partners with all of them. Their capabilities are
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amazing. You can imagine driving in China in these big cities is quite a complex uh undertaking. Uh they take
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safety just as seriously as uh the western companies do. So I think their safety record is excellent. Ultimately,
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we think autonomous can be both superhuman in terms of safety and can save uh millions of lives over the
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course of time on the road and over a period of time as the cost of especially the hardware stack comes down. We think
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that it can bring the cost of mobility down and make mobility on demand available to many many more people than
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it is now. So, it's going to be a very big kind of market expander for us. So that was the debate, Dar, that maybe
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kind of exploded a little bit on X between you and Elon where you guys I mean very respectfully just debating the
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pros and the cons. Maybe just set it up for the folks in the audience the difference between um Elon's approach
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and the Whimo approach and maybe the the relative pros and cons as you see it. Yeah. I mean I think they're the ones
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building the cars. So I'm to some extent a very very very interested bystander. But but the way that that I put it is um
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Elon's approach uh depends on excellent software right to do a bunch of the heavy lifting in
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that there are some you know early on whenever you're building product there may be some cheat codes that you
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undertake. So for example, you could call it uh cheat codes or you know good engineering. Some of the things you see
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in early systems is one is uh camera uh radar LAR. So multiple sensors uh sensors redundancy on the sensor
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stack to make sure that your perception algos are seeing the world as it really is. Uh Elon is doing camera only. Uh
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tougher on the software, cheaper for the hardware. Okay. Second, I would say big
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difference is many of the players use HD maps. And what HD maps do is is essentially you map out an area so that
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it's much easier for the software to determine what are permanent aspects of a certain view. You know, the uh the
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lines on the road, uh traffic lights, etc. Because of the HD maps, it's very very easy for that piece of software to
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determine what's permanent and then what's impermanent, vehicles, people, etc. So, it makes the job of the
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software much easier to figure out what's going on and then and then determine what to do. Uh Elon's approach
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doesn't depend on HD maps. Uh and again, it makes a Java solver harder. And then
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the other I would say significant um uh factor is the compute. So when you look at the compute and many of the
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other players the compute in terms of flops and memory etc in the back of the card uh car is pretty expensive pretty
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extensive uh and I think Tesla's approach is with a much tighter compute stack. Do you see
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a world where you try to pour your distribution into all those solutions assuming that everybody's amendable to
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working with you and it meets your threshold for what you're looking for? Yeah, I think safety or cost or
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exactly I'd say safety comes number one. So we have a certain safety case that we
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want to make sure that our partners adhere to or exceed and sorry just is that an eval or is
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that like is that certain rates that they have to publish to you or how do they demonstrate to you? It's it's the
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technical approach and the eval together. And listen, it is a dialogue, right? Because different people take
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different approaches to safety. We want to make sure that showing up on the Uber
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platform, it is as safe as it can be. And our def definition of safety is multiple site times safer than a human
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being, which is achievable. Whimo is showing that it's achievable. Many of the Chinese players are showing that
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that it's achievable as well. So if it meets our safety criteria and the economics are attractive and the
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economics as the cost of hardware comes down, you know, LAR was 20 30,000 bucks a pop like 5 6 years ago. Now solid
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state LAR is 300 to 500 bucks a pop. So the cost of hardware is coming way down.
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It is going to need to continue to come down because these cars are very expensive. Then we'll do business with
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them. We we want to be the platform and and we want to essentially help the entire AV ecosystem thrive and we think
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there's enough economics uh for the network player to have a great business and uh the software
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providers and the vehicle owners to have a great business. And then obviously there's fleet operations in terms of
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housing the cars, recharging the cars, you know, all of the um kind of in the world uh work that's necessary as well.
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When you you're going to get to a tipping point, I'm going to assume in driver miles, let's say, where one of
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the most interesting things that I've thought of is could you tell a city how it should
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actually be designed for optimal traffic? So we work I wouldn't say for optimal traffic
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I think theoretically it's possible but you know something a Google could there are lots
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of other players uh who can help with that but we're certainly helping cities in
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terms of uh where you should put charging infrastructure for example uh parking drop offs etc uh to help traffic
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flows I think we can be a partner for cities and we do have a small operation where essentially we offer data a for
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free for cities to embark on city planning so to speak. Do they take it? They don't.
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Some do. Some do. Some of the more sophisticated cities take it, but I wouldn't call it a big part of our
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business. So, Dar, I want to ask you about the uh the business model impact of um of
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basically robo taxis or self-driving. In the old world, um, uh, Uber's network effect was a marketplace effect where
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you connected drivers and riders. And if you had the most geographic density in an area, then you could promise riders
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faster pickups and the drivers got higher utilization. And that was a very powerful network effect. But we're
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moving into a new world where anyone who has a fleet of self-driving cars in theory could just make them available to
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the public and start competing. How do you see that impacting your mode? And and do you have to go from being an
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asset light business to now owning all these these cars and deploying them? And is that a good thing or a bad thing for
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your business? So this I think that the same economics apply, right? Which is if we have uh
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that fleet owner um is not going to have as many vehicles available in a certain
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market than let's say a network uh like ours and we will have a hybrid network. We're going to have humans and
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autonomous cars together and that's going to continue for a while. You know, the the autonomous the machines are
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going to aren't going to replace all humans at least for the f for Zipil future. So for us um if you're part of
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our network, you are going to get more requests than the player who's doing a standalone because we already have the
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demand. The request is going to come from much closer. So instead of, you know, a pickup who's 15 minutes away for
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a 10-minute ride, you're going to get a pickup that's 3 minutes away for a 10-minute ride. So the utilization in
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terms of the revenue generating miles as a percentage of total miles driven is much much higher on on our network. So
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the player that you know if you have fleet player A who's going direct standalone fleet player B who's working
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with us fleet player B will have much more business will have many more miles that are that are creating revenue as a
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percentage of the total miles driven and as a result each of their cars are going
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to get much more revenue per car per day than than the fleet player who isn't working with us. So I mean that
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ultimately is you know even if you if you think about Uber Eats right there's this drama which is hey do you go direct
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only or do you work with a marketplace and the fact is every major food player McDonald's has a direct channel but they
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have a box and they want that box to create as much revenue as possible so they have a direct channel and they work
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through our marketplace Door Dash marketplace other marketplaces as well because that's how you drive
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utilization. And so I think that most of these players, there are going to be some
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players like a Whimo, like a Tesla who can build their direct channel, but we think if they want to drive maximum
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economics out of these really expensive cars for now, they're going to also want
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to work with us. Do you think you will need to buy and deploy your own fleets or can you rely
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purely on third party fleet owners? So I think that um there's going to ultimately if you look at the end state
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I think all of these cars are going to be financable. So if you look again in the hotel business I used to be in the
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travel business a Hilton or a Marriott who's the brand doesn't own any of their hotels. Those hotels are owned by
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financial only players. And I think 10 years down the line you know there are these things called REITs real estate
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investment trusts. You're going to have fleets. You're going to have financial owners that own big fleets of cars that
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are on our network, maybe on other networks. The new the new enterprise kind of a
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thing. I'd say it's going to be more financial players. So, it's not, you know, Hertz
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and uh enterprise are operators. These these are going to be like pure stones of of the world and they own fleets and
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they're just trying to monetize those fleets as much as possible. That's the end state. Between now and the end
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state, we will take balance sheet risk because we can sign up. We know exactly how much revenue a car can produce in
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said market because that because cars are already producing revenue. So we can sign up for the revenue. We will prove
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out the business model. We'll use our business we'll use our balance sheet to prove out the business model and then at
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some point the whole thing is going to get financialized and we'll be able to take it off balance sheet.
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Is is Whimo willing to work with you? actually Whimo is working with us now in Austin and Atlanta.
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Okay. So, in Austin, Atlanta, if you're using Uber, uh you can be picked up uh with a
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Whimo. Our customers love it. Uh is it the driverless aspect of it that they love or
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you know, they're so I think I think one is they're new cars. They're really nice
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cars. Yeah. Um it's kind of freaking cool. Yeah. Uh and you do have privacy in that car
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as well. So I think the combination of it works out really well. We see customers who experience the product,
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they rate it really high highly, they use it again. Uh and so it's just it's just an absolute
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dynamic product. So we've we've mostly only spoken about the XY axis and we have a couple of our friends
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who've built businesses that are, you know, trying to launch these EV tall businesses,
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some of our other friends who are experimenting with small drone delivery. tell us where all of those things play
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in your infrastructure going forward. So we're we're absolutely believer in uh EV tall. We're an investor in Joby uh
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and we are going to work with them as those vehicles become available. We know that there are some other vehicles but I
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think that the kind of Z uh axis if you if you want to call that makes a ton of sense. Listen in cities of the world
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essentially they have built in the third dimension because there's only so much that you can expand you know in the x
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and y dimension. So businesses have expanded in third dimension uh residences have expanded in the third
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dimension but our transportation uh uh infrastructure has only expanded in two dimensions.
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So it's no wonder that traffic just keeps getting worse and worse and worse because that third dimension is isn't
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available. So we are absolutely believers in uh both EV talls uh and drone delivery. Now I think on the
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delivery side that there are two areas that we're working on. One is sidewalk robots. It's easier tech to develop.
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Explain what that is. A sidewalk robot. So sidewalk robots um there are some of them in LA and Santa Monica. They are
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autonomous vehicles that uh drive on the sidewalks. They drive pretty slowly. They're very, very safe. Uh they look
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kind of cute. Uh and they're appropriate for deliveries that are a mile or less uh long. So deliveries in a tight space.
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And so there's a certain addressable market for us in deliveries where those sidewalk robots work. And we're working
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with Serve, Cardan, and number of other players in the US, in Japan, in a number
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of other markets. Then on the other side is drone delivery. and drone delivery is
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appropriate for markets where, you know, they're more spread out, suburban, no highrises, etc. Those two together we
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think can cover 50 plus% of our delivery uh TAM so to speak. But then there's another 50% that we're going to have to
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work on in terms of the first and the last mile, you know, coming out of the restaurant and then getting the the food
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into your apartment as well. Humans take care of their own first and last mile, but you need something to take care of
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the first and last mile of the food. That's where the challenge is going to come in. And we're working with a number
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of players to see how we can get that first and last mile for food. I want to talk to you for a minute, if I
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may, about the balance sheet. Um, one of the great, you know, sort of early uh insights we
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had at Uber was around profitability and the press and the narrative was, "Oh, Uber could never be profitable." And I
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would talk to TK about it and and and William and all the Josh in New York and they're like, "Yeah, we could flip it at
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any moment in time to $2 more a ride. We would lose no rides and it would be wildly profitable." And in fact, under
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your stewardship, Uber has become a money printing machine to the point at which you announced a $20 billion stock
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buyback. Yes. And I saw it and I said, "Wow, this is just incredible." However, did you tweet about it by chance?
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I might have. I might once in a while I'll retweet you and and give you a little shine. Um, but I did have this
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thought that um, and I had Chris from Neuro on the program and you have this great
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partnership to put 20,000 Lucids on the road. Um, what wrong podcast, but keep going.
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The other podcast. Um, and so I'm wondering how you think about the war chest, the money printing
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machine and deployment of that asset. How do you decide $20 billion stock buyback versus putting 300 million into
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Nuro or we had Travis on the podcast and he said um he's had many opportunities to look at things like Pony which has
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been in the press and um it would be pretty great to have the original founder maybe I don't know you've got a
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couple of billion laying around and maybe help him have Pony come to the west so how do you think about deploying
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that capital in order to you know continue to grow from Where are we at? 1% of rides globally are ride sharing
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approximately a little more, but it's between 1 and 2%. It's a very low number. It's clear it's going to go to 20 with
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autonomy. And so if we all believe that and that's obvious, is that the best use of the capital? How
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do you make that decision? So I I think the good news for us is it's not either or. We can walk and chew
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gum at the same time. Uh in the past 12 months, we've had over 8.5 billion of cash flow. the business is growing you
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know top line 18% bottom line 35%. So that cash flow is going to grow by a lot over the next 3 to 5 years and we
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announced the 20 billion buyback because in looking forward to areas in which we
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could invest aggressively for example in AV because we should because it's an enormous opportunity whether it's
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vehicles or fleets etc. We are very comfortable that we've got enough uh capital to be super aggressive there
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appropriately and at the same time buy back our stock. There's a great company we know of. Uh management team can get a
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little better but they're okay and we think it's a great deal. So it's not it's not an either or. It's it's it's an
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and for us and we're lucky to be in that position at this point. You um have a very big business in Uber
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Eatats. Um it competes with folks like Door Dash. Mhm. When Travis was on the pod a few weeks
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ago, maybe a month ago, he he talked about sort of the robotization of food and all of that.
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Can you just talk to us about your vision of where all of that stuff goes to? And
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so, we're we actually work with Travis uh and his cloud kitchens business. He's also built a a restaurant tech business
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in in Otter as well. And I do think that you are, you know, any food business that is not deep in delivery is going to
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lose share period for the foreseeable future. So every single player, food player, grocery player, even now retail
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player has to get into delivery and has to get into on demand delivery. Otherwise, they're kind of missing the
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most attractive segment of of consumers out there. Uh and I think as the cost of
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labor is going up um all of these businesses are building are uh investing increasingly in roboticization. It's not
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something that we are getting into but as more food healthy food delicious food becomes more available lower prices then
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our delivery business kind of will benefit a lot. I'm hearing consistently from you and you can just tell me if
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this this is wrong that you are becoming increasingly an asset light highly liquid distribution network like you
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have this incredible network effect. You have these hundreds of millions maybe approaching a billion users and you can
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just pour them into all of these things. We we are essentially we bring demand to
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the assets that are driving the movement of people and things and food and grocery and these are all asset heavy
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businesses. So the next incremental piece of demand that comes from our network is incredibly valuable for them
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and we can do so staying largely capital light at the same time to the extent that I can use my capital to invest in
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the AV ecosystem or fleets etc. We can also do that. There's one company that wants to go on
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go on its own. A friend of ours runs it. Um I'm think that you probably have had
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some conversations obviously publicly you have. What's the best pitch to Elon to put a 100,000 robo taxis into the
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Uber fleet while still doing his own because his app is doing spectacularly well and the and the pilots are doing
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well so he'll obviously figure it out. But what's your best pitch to him to joining the Uber network? Uh I think
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listen the the pitch is simple which is if you're looking to maximize the revenue of those robo taxis
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today uh today we are your ticket to the maximization of that revenue to the extent that you're looking to have these
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fleets owned by people you know kind of the digital shepherds which is is an amazing vision that that Elon has to the
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extent that those uh owners are not able to monetize their assets on the Uber network they will under monetize and if
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there's a competitor who is offering those vehicles to be on the Uber network, the monetization of those
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vehicles are going to be superior and those digital shepherds are going to go elsewhere. So I think that is the pitch
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and again Elon is you know he kind of believes in full stack. Yes. um and he's proven it and and I
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think that this market is large enough for there to be multiple winners but in the end to the extent that you know we
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would love to partner with them uh but at this point they're looking to go it alone and I think the market is
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large enough to carry a number of winners in this I see a tough question about uh humans I
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was talking to Will Barnes who ran um originally in Los Angeles and then half of the country for for Travis
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and uh Will Barnes had a pretty amazing insight which Because in the early days,
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we had humans protesting humans competing for, you know, the taxi drivers versus the ride share drivers.
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Um, in China, in Wuhan, in fact, there's been a lot of civil unrest. And they're
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talking about limiting the number of licenses for self-driving cars because of the disruption that would happen if
00:23:05
young men who have those jobs are not able to have a job. And we saw the Whimos get called to their death here in
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Los Angeles. And that was a pretty clear message as well. How do you think about
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that group of people losing their jobs? These drivers who built the Uber network, who built Lyft, who built Door
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Dash and China's overwhelming concern about this um because these are robots taking human jobs and there's an you
00:23:31
know there there's a lot of discussion about this and I think maybe in the tech industry we don't talk about it headon.
00:23:35
I think listen this is it's a big issue for AI in general and uh job displacement. You see it with younger
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graduates as well. I think for us at least for the next 5 years uh the number of robot cars coming onto the platform
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are not going to be displacing people because the platform is just growing so quickly that we can very easily take
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that take that demand and and there is a natural turnover of our driver base. So
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in a market like in Austin uh or other markets in which we're launching uh uh autonomous we will turn down the driver
00:24:13
recruitment uh machine so the robots can come in and the drivers who are currently driving in the platform can
00:24:20
make as much money. So Austin drivers now are making as much or more money than they were before we introduced
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Whimo. So I think for the next 5 to seven years we're we're going to have more human drivers and delivery people
00:24:32
just because we're going so quickly. But I think you know 10 to 15 years from now
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this is going to be a real issue. And Jason I don't have a neat answer for it. Now we're finding like other kinds of
00:24:43
work. We've got uh drivers and couriers uh you know uh labeling AI labels and looking uh you know uh we have a whole
00:24:52
Uber AI solutions business. So we're essentially one way to look at Uber is we are a platform for work and
00:25:00
transportation is the first kind of work and now we're expanding into other kinds
00:25:04
of ondemand work as well to uh be able to adjust the kind of work available to people who uh want to earn our own
00:25:12
platform. But I think longterm this is a big big societal question that we're going to have to struggle with and lots
00:25:18
of others are going to struggle with too. Absolutely. All right. Thank you very much.
00:25:23
Thank you. really appreciate it. Great. Crushed it. Thank you, my brother.