Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi | 5 Questions

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Dara Khosrowshahi, welcome to 5 Questions with a CEO.

Thank you.

You took over Uber 2017 at a time when the company was beset by a toxic culture, a lot of internal turmoil, disputes with regulators. And you've turned that around.

Yes.

To what extent did that require a change of culture? Is that what you focused a lot on?

I think very much a change of culture. Now, I would say that Uber had its strengths of culture at the time; incredibly innovative company, focused on growth, great talent at the company as well. But it was complementing that innovative culture with a view of responsible growth, which is sometimes, I tell the team, sometimes you have to slow down in order to speed up, listening to regulators' concerns, going out and meeting with the mayors of the various cities in which we operated.

And to start to drive innovation, not just in terms of product, but in terms of innovation that was serving our driver base, regulators, the cities in which we served, growing the right way, so to speak. When the two came together, then we were able to grow the company and get it to where we are now, which is a profitable large-cap company.

First profits? First operating profit 2023?

Yes, yes. Very proud of that. And hopefully, much more to come.

Inflexion point, as you said at the time, customers now can order cars, a courier service as well, Uber Eats, of course. How far do you want to go?

Well, we essentially want to power anyone to go anywhere and get anything. We're going to wire up every single vehicle that moves. So we started with Uber cars. We have taxis now. We have London black cabs available. We have buses. We have mass transit. We have two-wheelers and a lot of developing markets, tuk tuks in India as well. Anything that moves, we want to wire it up.

Actually now, you can get train tickets here in London as well on Uber and then get anything, which as we started with food, but now we have groceries available on the app, pet food, drugstores, et cetera. We want to make your life a little bit easier. Anywhere you want to go in your city and anything that you want to get, we want to empower you to do so.

So do you want to take on Amazon? Because some analysts now say that you may be trying to do too much.

Well, we don't want to take on Amazon in that we don't have warehouses. We don't store any of these goods. We want to empower the local merchants to be more competitive with Amazon. One of the disadvantages that local merchants have is they can't build the fulfilment infrastructure that Amazon has built.

Well, we have couriers on the ground in your city, and we can allow that local merchant to some extent out Amazon Amazon. Amazon will get you something the next day. Your local merchant can get you something in the next hour or two. And we also think that our users want to support their local merchants as well. So it's not us taking on Amazon, but it is empowering small local enterprises to be more competitive with Amazon.

Let's talk about Elon Musk. Uber dropped its own driverless vehicle division, but you have been working with other companies. We know that Musk is about to unveil robotaxis and may want to have his own platform. How do you compete with that?

Well, obviously, competing with Elon Musk is no easy matter, and we take nothing for granted. We really want to partner with the autonomous industry. Ultimately, we think that autonomous technology can be safer, can make rides available more affordably to people all over the world. It's going to take some time for the technology to come into the main line. But we partner with Waymo, with Cruise, with Wave here in the UK, and our hope is that to the extent that Elon and Tesla build some great technology, when it's safe and ready to use, they plug it into the Uber network, and we can all win together.

Will you have robotaxis on the Uber platform?

Well, we have robotaxis on the Uber platform today, for example, with Waymo and...

Tesla...

We'll see. I think that's up to what Tesla does. We have a lot of Teslas on the platform. They're great EVs. Drivers love it. And to the extent that they're robo Teslas, we'd love to have it on the platform. But if not, I don't think this is going to be a winner-take-all marketplace. We believe in the spirit of partnership. We'll see what Tesla does, and either we'll compete with them, or we'll work with them, or a combination thereof.

So Dara, are a more personal question. What would you tell your 25-year-old self?

I think what I would tell my 25-year-old self is people put a lot of pressure on the young people to go out and change the world and change everything around them. I would say, let the world change you. It's a time when you're young. It's a time to experience things. It's a time for you to shape yourself. And if you let the world change you, then you'll have a good life of happiness. And maybe then, you can change it back one day.

So chill? That's what you would tell yourself?

Not chill. Go out there and experience life. Go out, travel, try a bunch of different things. I think I was really focused on work and being successful a little bit too much. And maybe I missed out on some of life's experiences. So I did pretty well, but I'd definitely tell...

Not too badly, yes.

...yeah, maybe chill a little bit or run out into the world a little bit more.

Well, Dara, thank you very much.

Thank you very much.