The discussion centers on Uber's strategy and future in the rapidly evolving autonomous vehicle and delivery landscape, emphasizing a hybrid approach and platform expansion.
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The robo taxi race is heating up. How
you going to win that race?
>> Well, when you joined taking the mantle
of Uber, I think Uber was losing $4.5
billion a year. Today, it's earning over
$10 billion a year. You really focused
the organization.
>> Autonomous uh technology and autonomous
vehicles, they are increasingly a
reality on the streets as we speak.
There isn't going to be this kind of
binary outcome. It's going to develop in
a hybrid way.
>> Yeah. And you are going to have fleets
in cities that consist of some
autonomous vehicles and then many
human-driven vehicles as well.
>> 100 years ago, we had this massive shift
from horse and buggy to cars. And it
took about 15 years to make the
transition where 50% of the vehicles
were cars. How long do you expect that
transition to take where 50% of the cars
>> now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.
>> Quite the greeting. Wow.
>> Yeah. Uh, the energy is awesome and and
you deserve it, pal. First of all, you
look amazing.
>> Thank you very much.
>> Staying in good health.
>> Yes. Trying. >> Excellent.
>> Excellent.
>> Trying. Well, looks look so far so good.
I mean, the biggest challenge we have is
uh stress levels
>> and way too much travel. So, you know, I
want to not take it for granted. Thank
you for coming out.
>> Happy for you.
>> I'm grateful for your friendship. You
know, we've known each other since uh
you were at Expedia. Um and uh you know,
you had an incredible success story
there, right? One of the highest, if not
the highest paid CEO. Uh you actually
walked away from a $200 million stock
package from Expedia to take the mantle
of Uber. And I remember I just looked
looked this the other day. Uh when you
joined taking the mantle of Uber, I
think Uber was losing uh what's the
number out? $4.5 billion dollars a year.
And that was quite the buzzaw to walk
into. And today I mean this is the
hallmark of an extraordinary CEO. Today
it's earning over $10 billion a year.
What a turnaround. Amazing story.
>> Thank you. Thank you. really um really
extraordinary and just the scope of what
it's done. Right. I was I remember um
you know you really focused the
organization. I think one of the things
that a lot of companies fail about is
doing too much at once.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
>> Right. And I think we were definitely
guilty of that as well. And one of the
great pieces of advice that I got from a
good friend of mine, Barney Harford, was
strategy is just as much about what
you're do, what you're doing, and what
you choose not to do. It's very easy to
say yes to another idea. It's very
difficult to say no. But sometimes the
nos then amplify the yeses. And and it's
about pointing the company, having a
point of view, pointing the company in a
singular direction, and then putting
everything you've got behind it.
>> Yeah. Well, you've done that and with
huge success and now you're going back
to the stuff that you left on the table before.
before. >> Yeah.
>> Yeah.
>> Which is we'll talk about flying cars
and all of that. Um, so the robo taxi
race is heating up.
>> Definitely. Yes.
>> And uh and so I'm going to start with
the uh the hard question. How you going
to how you going to win that race?
>> Well, we are going to win that race with
the autonomous community. So autonomous
uh technology and autonomous vehicles
they are increasingly a reality on the
streets as we speak. Uh it's been 15 16
years of development
>> since the DARPA
>> exactly with with lots of long tales uh etc.
etc.
uh and Whimo is a leader and a big
partner of ours in Austin and Atlanta.
And what we view is that there isn't
going to be this kind of binary outcome
which is either all all autonomous or no
autonomous that really the world as
autonomous technology develops we are
going to it's going to develop in a
hybrid way.
>> Yeah. And you are going to have fleets
in cities that consist of some
autonomous vehicles and then many
human-driven vehicles as well. And that
ultimately that transition and the part
that we play in that transition because
of the incredible demand that we bring
to both human drivers and robot drivers,
we will have a big uh part to play in
that transition as well. So we partner
with Whimo, but we've got over 20
partners now in the autonomous space
including Nvidia for example, Wide,
Pony, um, uh, Wabby amongst others. And
just like we want every
terrific licensed human driver on the
platform, we're going to want every
terrific licensed robot driver on the
platform as well. uh and we'll be in 15
cities by the end of the year with our
partners. Uh and by 2029
uh we think that we will facilitate more
autonomous and robo taxi rise than
anyone else in the world.
>> Mason, do you ever think Elon would come
on on platform or is he just I'm doing
it all on my own? He doesn't play well
with others usually.
>> You know, his I I think Elon's approach
typically has been a vertical approach,
right? They even own their own refinery.
Um, again, when when the day comes, when
the day comes when those Teslas are safe
with a camera only approach, we'd love
to have those Teslas on our platform as
well. We've got uh tens of thousands of
Teslas on our platform now. And some of
our drivers use FSD. Sure.
>> Uh so we've got a lot of data. It's a
great car. It's a safe car. Uh we'd love
to work with them as to whether we will
or will not is TBD, but there are plenty
of other partners in the space. uh and
we think there are going to be many many winners.
winners. >> Yeah.
>> Yeah.
>> When you talk about platforms and for
you know when Peter and I wrote this
book exponential organizations Uber is a
poster child the of an organization that
scales as fast as technology scales and
you're turning it into a platform. You
have to have so many sockets and
connectors to all of these different
hybrid robo taxi human etc. How do you
think about that and what are the major
obstacles in building that platform?
Well, the platform actually what we're
finding is that humans are actually much
more complicated than robots, right?
That there are many more um uh
unexpected behaviors. Uh there are very
significant differences as to how you
set up your platform to be able to be uh
operational in Bangalore and also be
operational in San Francisco as well. Uh
so with our autonomous partners, there
are standard APIs that uh you can put
out there. uh we are a very big partner
in terms of data collect the amount of
uh data that we are collecting to to
help in training of the models where you
should pick up where you should uh drop
off fleet management services you know
if you think about uh an Uber driver
they drive the car they take care of the
car they own the car they repair the car
they clean the car etc all of those
services are going to have to be kind of
uh a part of the of the autonomous ecosystem
ecosystem
uh and we are essentially providing all
of those uh services so that our
partners can focus on the core which is
how do you build a safe uh and
affordable autonomous driver and we can
take care of everything else.
>> So I'm curious I I saw the announcement
you had with Lucid and Nvidia at I think
at CE
>> Lucid and Neuro actually but we we also
had another announcement with Nvidia as well
well
>> I guess both at the same time at at CE.
Can you talk a little bit about your
your uh tech ecosystem, your car, your
automotive ecosystem? Who are the major
players that you're you're building
relationships with?
>> So, so there are a number of players. If
you think about the ecosystem, there's
the demand aggregator which is Uber.
Then there is the the autonomous driver
and there are many players who are
building out the autonomous driver. Uh
whether it's a Whimo, a Wii ride, uh
Pony.ai, AI, Nvidia is building out its
own autonomous driver uh Neuro Avide uh
and many many more uh Wabby uh for
example. So there are many companies
that are building out the driver and we
are helping them in different ways of
building out the driver. Zuks uh is
another one building out the driver.
>> We're going to play with Zuks as well.
>> Uh well we certainly would love to uh
work with them. So there there's some
that we're working with and and some
that we're in discussions with or
different uh different places in terms
of uh partnership discussions. Then you
actually need the car right and the the
car needs to have uh very very
sophisticated compute needs to have
redundant steering braking etc. So the
needs of the car are different and we're
working with Lucid for example uh has a
great car that already has a bunch of
the redundancy and the sensor uh systems
already built into that car as well
which is one of the reasons why we
partnered with Lucid. But you can expect
many other partnership announcements as
well. Uh OE uh OEM announcements and
then you need essentially the fleet
management uh and fleet ownership as
well. Early on we will go out and buy
cars. Y
>> but then over a long period of time just
like Marriott doesn't own any hotels.
It's actually financial players these
kind of real estate investment trusts
that own the hotels that Marriott uh
manages. We think that autonomous will
also kind of move into this asset light
uh uh model where we'll be operating the
fleets, we'll be repairing the cars,
we'll be cleaning the cars either
ourselves or through partners and then
there will be financial players, you
know, the Blackstones of the world who
are going to own large fleets of cars
that, you know, give a 9% yield. Yeah.
So to speak. So, it's a big ecosystem
that we're building and we're
essentially working with everyone in
that ecosystem and and we think it's
going to be another trillion dollar
marketplace and we're very very excited
for autonomous to become a reality. Not
to also mention that the streets are
going to be safer, right? These these
cars, they don't get these drivers don't
get distracted, they don't get tired. uh
and uh we do think that kind of the
regulation is coming to place that will
make sure that the safety case is one
where the autonomous drivers
>> the data is in it's 10 times safer to be
on in a Tesla FS
>> the the the early data certainly
suggests that that it's quite safe now
most of those Teslas have a driver as
well as a backup but there's no doubt
that eventually the drivers are going to
come out the human drivers are going to
come out
>> how do you handle the liability side,
you know, when a Whimo gets in an
accident, it's very clearly the fault of
the Whimo. When something happens on
Uber's platform, who's liable there? How
do you handle that? Do you have special
insurance that navigates that?
>> So, as it relates to on our platform,
you know, liability laws are different
every everywhere, but we provide
essentially commercial
uh insurance for drivers, human drivers
who are on our platform. uh and I think
that with the autonomous model more uh
the way it looks is Whimo's for example
responsible for for their own drivers
you know they are building a software
driver and they speak to the safety of
those drivers these cars are very expensive
expensive
>> but um we are quite confident that the
driver is going to be much safer than a
human being so ultimately liability is
going to come down in the industry and
it'll be savings that we can pass on to
the consumer essentially
I'm curious. A Whimo right now, the
numbers I've seen come in at like 150K
for a car, something on that order of magnitude.
magnitude.
>> And then Cyber Cab is saying they're
coming in at 30K. >> Um,
>> Um,
you know, how how important is the asset
cost going to be for a a profitable
business? And I let me ask you a
different question. How many different
providers do you expect there to be on
the streets of LA a decade from now? Put
it that way.
>> So, I I think if if you think about 10
years from now, I think every single new
car sold is going to have autonomous
software associated with it. Sure.
>> And just like, you know, we we like uh
GM's on on the Uber network and we like
Toyotas on the Uber network, we're
essentially going to have every single
model, autonomous model on the network
as well. So I think it'll be, you know,
10 plus different providers. Now the
software space may consolidate to some
extent, right? So I don't know if
there'll be uh 10 plus software
providers. Uh but there's no reason to
think that this won't be a very very big
fragmented industry just like the OEM.
The car manufacturing business is a very
large fragmented industry.
>> I can't wait till your original uh
position of Expedia overlaps with Uber
because my autonomous vehicle is going
to become my hotel room and it's going
to transport me from Las Vegas to LA,
right? And obviously
>> you'll be able to get a real hotel room
as well. But yes, the uh you know we we
are in some ways in the business of
wiring up things that move. >> Yeah.
>> Yeah.
>> Right. And and we've tiptoed into
travel. So for example, you can take uh
in the UK and Spain, you can take trains
on Uber as well. You can take boats on
Uber, etc. You know, for us, it's just
like reimagining the way the world
moves. Anything that moves, we're going
to wire it up. uh or anything that you
want to move, whether it's food or it's
groceries or your local drugstore, etc.
We're going to be there to wire it up to
make your life just a little bit easier.
>> Are there are there um certain services
like you do health, you do eats, uh are
there other services you've got planned?
>> Um we have our hands full right now in
terms of moving people in every single
way and then moving things in every
single way. I'd say the focus right now
is, you know, eat started obviously as
online food delivery. What we're seeing
now is a friend of mine, a VC kind of uh
who was involved with Uber early on. He
said never un underestimate the power of
human laziness, right? And and you can
build huge businesses there. So what
we're seeing is that people want
anything and everything delivered to
their home and they want it now.
>> Yes. So the expansion of Uber Eats and
we've debated ourselves does Uber Eats
travel to non-food items what we're
seeing the expansion into grocery into
every single part of retail whether it's
Best Buy or makeup at Sephora etc has
been has been growing much much faster
than we expected. Uh and so that that
I'd say is a focus for us which is
delivery of anything and everything to
your home uh within within an hour. That
business is is just exploding for us.
>> 100 years ago we we had this massive
shift from horse and buggy to cars and
it took about 15 years to make the
transition where 50% of the vehicles
were cars. How long do you expect that
transition to take where 50% of the cars
are self-driving cars autonomous? So I I
do think that in the next 10 years
uh I think every single new car sold is
going to have autonomous uh driving
software on it and it'll have a sensor
stack. You know the cost of lighter is
really coming down. Cost of cameras are
coming down. So within 10 years every
new car is going to be autonomous ready.
Now there's going to be a huge inventory
of existing cars
>> and the average life of a car in the US
is over 10 years. Yeah.
>> So, it's going to take a very very long
time. You know, the the lifetime of
cars, you know, is is I guess similar to
horses, too. Horses can live for a
while. But I think I think it'll take a
while for that fleet to turn over. Uh
and then I do think that the this this
product it is a relatively expensive
product right today. Now, the cost
curves are going to come down and you
will see autonomous become a very very
big part of developed markets. But also
keep in mind that we operate in 70 plus
countries and a lot of developing
markets autonomous is going to take a
while to penetrate.
>> There was a moment when I did the some
of the research years ago and looked at
that electric autonomous car could be
four times cheaper than owning a car.
>> I think ultimately we think the promise
of autonomous is exactly that which is
it's just not going to make sense for
you to own your own car. Um, as these
cars proliferate, the cost of autonomous
is going to the cost per trip is going
to come down. Safety per trip is
absolutely going to come up. You'll have
your own privacy. You'll be able to have
your stuff essentially loaded up in the
car in terms of your music or whatever
you like. Uh, so we do think that
autonomous is an enormous opportunity in
terms of the expansion of the of the tan
for uh uh for both mobility and delivery
of all kinds. Let me give you my vision
of what it looks like uh five years from
now. So you're sitting at breakfast with
your kids um and you stand up from your
breakfast table and you start walking
breakfast delivered by Uber Eats, but
you know,
>> let's do that. And you start walking
towards the front door. Uh your AI knows
your calendar. Uh it has cameras in your
home. It sees you walking toward the
front door and automatically, it's my
favorite term, uh and an autonomous Uber
pulls in front. You didn't have to call
it. You didn't have to ask it. And you
you hop into it and it knows that you
didn't get a good night's sleep last
night from your Uber data. So, it it
decided to bring you a car with a lie
down bed in the back as well.
>> So, that's tie me up, Peter.
>> Yeah, I'm just going to give you some
product advice here. Um, so in the
international side you just brought up,
uh, where are we going to see these roll
out? obviously US and China, but what
countries are most pro- autonomous
vehicles you think?
>> So, I'd say the Middle East is actually
the most open and leaning forward in
terms of
>> investment in Lucid.
>> Yeah. Innovation of all kinds. I mean,
it's not just autonomous, but you look
for example at Joby vertical takeoff and
landing vehicles. the the whether it's
uh Abu Dhabi or Dubai or or uh uh KSA
Kingdom Saudi Arabia, these are all
countries that recognize the
transformational power of technology. Um
they are they're kind of run by
governments and administrations that are
very young and incredibly tech-savvy and
they want to lead. >> Yeah.
>> Yeah.
>> And so we are seeing the Middle Eastern.
So for example, we are in uh Abu Dhabi
as we speak uh with autonomous vehicles
with our uh with our partner uh Wide uh
and you will see many more um autonomous
vehicles uh on Uber in the Middle East
and I'd say Europe is also opening up.
Europe is leaning forward. Which country
in Europe do you think would
>> I think well uh there are a number but
we're pretty excited about the potential
uh in in the UK with Wave who is
>> um a terrific partner. Uh they have
incredible AI talent and they're
essentially building a software stack
that they will sell to any and all OEM.
So we're very excited about that model.
Uh, and
>> I still remember when France made Uber
illegal and I I was like, okay, that's a
message to entrepreneurs out there not
to start your company or tech
entrepreneurs there.
>> Fortunately, things in France are much
better now. But but I do think there's
real promise in in the UK and and and uh
there'll be some exciting announcements
coming from from Wave, who's uh one of
our great partners.
>> People forget the secondary benefits,
right? I remember there was this big
issue where the finance minister in
France was trying to shut down Uber
>> and around Paris you have what called
the Bonu the suburbs of radicalized uh
folks in drugs etc.
>> Not not the kind of place you you usually
usually
>> central LA in the 80s like that and it
it the French government had spent $40
billion trying to solve that problem
with zero uh impact. It was but was
worse than I've ever been. And then Uber
comes in and 18 months later the crime
rate has dropped 10x because they're all
out driving, right? And so they're
trying to shut down Uber while you're
saving them a $40 billion problem. It's
just incredible to watch
>> earning a flexible living. And you know,
same thing for example, trunk drunk driving
driving
>> and uh as when we enter into markets uh
the incidents drunk driving incidents go
down significantly. So that there are
many many ways. It's one of the reasons,
you know, getting back to how we started
the conversation, why I wanted to come
to Uber is, you know, this is a company
that is having real impact on society
and how society moves and I think with
autonomous revolution even more so.
>> Amazing. I remember uh I was one of the
first speakers at the first Uber elevate conference.
