David i dont consider myself a journalist, and nobody else would consider myself a journalist. I began to take on the life of being an interviewer, even though i have a day job running a private equity firm. How do you define leadership . What is it that makes somebody tick . David you have been the ceo of uber for how long now . Dara two years. David two years . And you enjoy it . Dara i love it. David when you came in, the company was not a public company. You have taken it public, and you have received a lot of publicity about the ipo. Obviously you know that. The company now has a higher market capitalization, roughly 72 billion. Something like that. Higher market capitalization than any company in american capitalism history, except for facebook, this short a time after its ipo. Why are so many people criticizing you for having a 72 billion market cap . Dara [laughter] i think there are many critics out there, especially for a large company. That is a fact of life. I think what is different about some of the Technology Companies of our generation that are coming public, the socalled unicorns, is that we have stayed private for longer. And we have raised more money over a longer period of time. And as a result, when we come public, we generally have bigger scale than companies who went public, lets say, the last generation of companies that went public, as well. But my view on this is, we wanted to go public. We needed to make sure we are wellcapitalized for the next five years for the company, and we achieved that. Now the time is to put your head down and get the real work done. David after the company did go public, while i kind of pointed out you have very high market capitalization so soon after its ipo, it did go down by about 11 , which is a record decline after an ipo. Did you think the Investment Bankers did not price it correctly . What do you think the problem was on the ipo . Dara i love how this interview is starting. [laughter] dara i appreciate that. I think that is actually the timing of our ipo was very much aligned with the president s tariff wars the same day. I think we got caught up in a bit of a market swirl, and there is nothing you can do about that, and what i tell the team is shortterm, the market can be a voting machine, but longterm, it is a weighing machine. And we are focused on the weighing. And i am very confident that if we as a team execute, the market will appreciate it. David how did you come here . You didnt take an uber, did you . Dara unfortunately, when i come here i need professional security. David do you take uber from time to time . Dara this weekend, the family is taking ubers all over the place. Absolutely. David when you take an uber, do they know who you are . Dara its about 5050. David and the ones that dont know you, do you give them comments on how good they are . Dara i make sure i am very polite. I make sure i dont slam the door. Ask them how they are doing. If i get on a phone call, i ask them, is it ok to make a phone call . I try to be as nice as i can because im trying to improve my uber rating. [laughter] dara it is not as good as i want it to be. David you said people should not slam the doors. Is that a big problem . Dara if you are driving a car, and youve got 10, 20 passengers coming in, the car is an asset of yours. David your company has roughly 22,000 employees, but you have 3 million drivers. Dara almost 4 million drivers and couriers on a global basis. David you are in 63 countries, 585 cities . Dara you have been briefed very effectively. Impressive. David today in the u. S. , is it increasing in terms of usage or is it going steady, going down . Dara no, it is increasing in every single market. The growth rates, we as a company in the last quarter, we announced as a newly public company, we announced that on an morning that on a Foreign Exchange neutral basis, we grew our bookings 41 year over year. This is off of an impressive rate of bookings. Almost 15 billion run rate on a quarterly basis, so the business is growing at very big scale, impressive rates. David last quarter when you had your earnings announcement, you did lose 1 billion during the previous quarter. Dara yes. David im sure you know this. Dara those are details that are important. [laughter] david how much longer can you lose 1 billion a quarter and keep going . Dara we have a very significant amount of cash in the bank. David youve got 8 billion in the ipo, and you already had some money. Dara yeah, we already had some money. The company at this point is incredibly wellcapitalized to keep investing. And the markets we are going after, the transportation of people, food, freight these markets represent 16 trillion markets we are going after. If you look at even uber, the rideshare business itself, when you look at the audience in countries in which we operate, typically we are addressing no more than 2 of the population of these countries. So, we think it is time to lean forward. The business itself can be quite profitable, we are confident of that. But the next two, three, four years are going to be about growth, and then we will flip it over as the market demands. David if i wanted to have a rideshare right after this interview, why should i pick uber versus your competitors . Lets say lyft or via . Dara we have lots of competitors who are very good at what they do. I think we typically, in most markets, pretty much every market we operate, we have the greatest number of drivers on the market. We have the best liquidity. So you are probably going to get the best e. T. A. You will get the quickest driver to pick you up. The choices that we have are pretty impressive. For example, in d. C. Now, we have transit schedules right on the app. We really want to move from a ridehailing app to essentially your transportation partner. If you are trying to get from a to b, we will give you all the information you have, which many of our competitors do not do, to be able to get from a to b with the tradeoff of time, convenience, and price. David right now, you have many different businesses. Ridesharing is the one you are most famous for, but actually, more profitable for you is uber eats. Is that right . Dara no, ridesharing is more profitable in most markets. It is the more mature part of the business. The uber eats business is 20 of our business. It is growing over 100 on a year on year basis. The run rate is now enormous. We are now the largest food delivery player in china. We entered this business three years ago. David as a revenue percentage, it is what percentage . Dara it is about 20 of our booking. David how many cities . Dara eats is now in over 500 cities. David what is the most popular food . Dara Fried Chicken is magic. [laughter] david how do you keep the grease from kind of going through . Dara david, im covering that in my next Monthly Business review. I have not gotten to Fried Chicken grease yet. David that is the most popular. [laughter] david a lot of people in the company own more stock than you. You are the ceo. Do you think you are underpaid . Was that a problem for you . Dara it is i would never claim that i am underpaid. David lets talk about some of your other businesses. Over here, you have your scooter business and your electric bike business. The scooter business is all over the united states, around the world, or . Dara it is in about 25 cities. And expanding mostly in the u. S. , but we are expanding into europe pretty quickly as well. David you have a scooter that is manufactured just for you . Is it different from scooters that other Companies Use . Dara we are building a scooter that is manufactured for us. The bike is manufactured by us and designed by us. Totally proprietary. David some people say scooters are dangerous. What do you say about that . Dara i think that that it is something we are watching pretty carefully. We are working on technologies to modulate those issues. For example, when scooters get to very busy parts of town, we will slow them down. Some of these scooters early on, they went as high as 20 miles an hour. Now we are working with cities to say, how fast do you think is a responsible speed . We encourage our riders to wear helmets. David you have a new product which is helicopters. Dara yes. David you have launched that in a couple cities so far. Dara in new york city, we have. It is service from downtown new york to jfk. David is there great demand for that . Dara we will see. As you may know, going to jfk during rush hour in new york city is a mess. And really what we are trying to david what does that cost to do if you want to go from Downtown Manhattan to jfk . What does that cost . Dara in an uber copter . About 200. If you are going from downtown new york to jfk with an uber black, it is going to cost close to 200 anyway. The magic of being able to do it in a helicopter is that we are bringing in demand from thousands of users who are going to jfk, and we are matching three or four users and putting them in the same vehicle. One of the keys in terms of traffic is most people drive alone, and that is a huge waste of our roads. It is a huge waste of gas, etc. And we have a product called pool where we match two or three or four riders into one car. And essentially, our uber copter is pool for the air. And what you will see is these helicopters will be replaced by a generation of electrically powered vertical takeoff and landing. David will they ever be driverless . Dara they will eventually be driverless, but we are absolutely going to start with pilots. I think it is a safer way to go. You can expect that in the Aviation Industry in general, they are absolutely taking a look at either computers assisting pilots more and more. There are controversies with that. Or over a long period of time, going pilotless. David lets talk about your driverless or autonomous business. You took a lot of people from carnegie mellon. Dara yes, we did. David their robotics department. You have said recently you think it is not going to happen so quickly as people have previously said. How long will it be before your ride program, or your driver program, is one where there is no drivers . Dara no drivers, i think it will be 15plus years. I think it will take a long time. There is this drama around robots replacing humans. And i think the reality of life is that the better thing than humans alone and robots alone are humans and robots working together. Robots are very well designed for replacing repetitive, predictable behaviors. Most of driving is not either repetitive or predictable, but there is a subset of routes that are. What you will see with our driverless program is, one, we will be incredibly careful and we will make sure safety absolutely comes first. But we are building our driverless program by the way, we are working with third parties as well within a context of a network. For example, in d. C. , we have data scientists who know what are the 1 easiest trips in d. C. And an easy trip in d. C. Maybe avoid a roundabout. Avoid an unprotected left turn. Stay away from airports. Stay on areas that are well mapped. There are a set of routes that are incredibly easy to drive. What you will see with us as far as our driverless program is, we will get the machines to do the simple stuff, and then we will have the humans do the difficult stuff. And the two are going to coexist for 10, 15 years, a long period of time, versus the drama of the press report. David your 15year answer was intended to mean no drivers at all, but you expect to have some driverless or Autonomous Vehicles within the next year or two, or three or four . Dara the next five years. You will see some driverless vehicles out in the market in a limited way. David you spun off your autonomous or driverless part of your company to a separate company. Why did you do that . Dara we created a separate company where we were able to bring in some investors and some partners. Toyota, who is, as you know, a huge oem. We have a terrific partnership with toyota. Denso, a Toyota Company very strong in manufacturing kits and sensors and other parts of the car. And really bring in toyota was about building these Autonomous Vehicles at scale. Then we also brought in mazda and softbank as a Financial Partner as well. David softbank is your biggest single investor. Dara yes. David they went in at a valuation that is above or right where you currently are . Dara below. Softbank got a decent deal. I think it will get more decent with time. David when was the Company Actually first started . And who actually started the company . Dara the company was started about nine years ago, and it was started by garrett camp, who is an entrepreneur and still on the board. He is an unbelievably smart guy. So he brought on travis kalanick, who is our former ceo and one of the founders as well. Garrett and travis and ryan really teamed up to build this thing. David many of the people there at the beginning own a lot of stock. In fact, a lot of people in the company own more stock than you do. You are the ceo. Do you think you are underpaid . Because you have taken it public and you do not own as much as some people working for you. Is that a problem for you . Dara i would never claim i am underpaid. [laughter] david did you tell barry diller you were interviewing for this . Dara i did very early. As you know, the press was all over the place. David you dont think you could have kept it a secret . Dara i have gary to thank for pretty much everything in my professional career. And i could not bear the possibility of him hearing about this from some news report. So, he was the first person i called. David you grew up not in the united states. Where were you born . Dara i was born in iran. David ok. And why did you leave iran . Dara i left iran in 1978. I was nine years old. And this was when the iranian revolution happened. My family was an industrial family, well off, and when the shah was overthrown, folks like my family were no longer welcome in iran. So we left iran, and we went to france actually to wait until things calmed down, and things never calmed down. And then we went from france to irvington, new york, where we stayed at my uncles house because we had no other place to stay. David you went to high school in dara in tarrytown, new york. David and then you went to brown. Dara yes, i studied bioelectrical engineering at brown, and then threw it all away to be an investment banker in new york city. So, go figure. David you didnt want to go into private equity. The higher calling of Investment Banking was good enough . Dara you know, it was a question of how evil i wanted to be. [laughter] dara i wanted to be a little less evil. [applause] david you could have gone into hedge funds. Dara that is the ultimate. With that i would have had horns. David you are minding your own business in allen company, and then all of a sudden you go to work for barry diller. How did he know of you . Dara i was a grunt analyst on a deal for him. Barry diller, he was bidding against sumner redstone, a big battle on wall street. He was bidding for paramount. It was a backandforth. It was an unfriendly bid. He was not wanted. But we put up a big fight. And i got to know barry over that period of time. I thought to myself, if i ever have the chance to work for that person, i want to work for that person, and i got the chance eventually. David you went to work for him. Then ultimately, one of the companies he owned was expedia. Dara yes. David did he own it before you joined . Dara i went to work for him as the deal person. And so, we did a bunch of deals and brought in companies in the travel space. We bought both hotels. Com and expedia, and they were part of the family to some extent because the deals i did when i came in. David you became the ceo of expedia. Dara i did, yes. David did you have experience being a ceo . Why did he think you would be good at being ceo . Dara he was desperate. We were in a situation where one of the founders of expedia who was running expedia at the time decided this stuff happens very naturally founding a company, building a company is different from managing it and moving it into a mature state. This person decided, i am not up for the ceo gig anymore. Barry, can you find a replacement . David you were not the first choice . Dara i have no idea, i never asked him. But i raised my hand, and he said yes. David at one point, the expedia board gave you Stock Options worth 180 million. Dara i guess they did, based on theoretical value. David and then all of a sudden, while you are doing a good job, and maybe going to get 180 million in theoretical value at some point, somebody asked you to interview for the job of being the ceo of uber. Is that right . Dara yeah. David did you say, i already have a job . Dara yeah. At first when i got called, i said no way. But then i talked to a couple of friends. You dont get too many chances as a professional or otherwise to work at and especially lead a company that i think is a part of how we live life. And i decided in this case, this is a onceinalifetime opportunity. David did you tell barry diller you were interviewing for this . Dara i did. I did very early. As you know, the press was all over the place. David you dont think you could have kept it a secret, i guess . Dara i couldnt. I have barry to thank for pretty much everything in my professional career, and i could not bear the possibility of his hearing about this from some news report. So he was the first person that i called. He was pretty unhappy at the beginning, but then, he called me back. We had a series of conversations. He called me back and he said, i understand why you are doing this. Let me know how i can be helpful, and he was genuinely helpful as we went along this journey, and we are where we are now. David he did not remind you of the 180 million in Stock Options . [laughter] david he didnt remind you of that . Dara he understood the reason was not necessarily monetary. David when you came in, you were replacing travis kalanick. He was one of the founders and one of the biggest shareholders, but he was still on your board. Dara yes. David was it awkward to be the ceo replacing somebody on the board . Was that easy to do . Dara listen, i feel the same way. I am on the board of expedia. And i am the former ceo. There is a new ceo who i picked who is the board ceo. And i will tell you, being a former ceo, it is little weird sitting there and having someone else do something differently with your baby. Because i think uber feels like travis baby. And expedia felt like mine. And it is a little weird. But you know what . You are respectful. You get out of the way. You give the ceo support, and i think travis has done the same for me. Is it weird . Yes. But are we in a situation where we are respectful and comfortable and is he there for me when i need his advice . Yes. David what is the biggest challenge you see the Company Facing . Dara the biggest challenge we have is a common challenge with some of the large Technology Companies out there. There is an increasing Regulatory Burden that is coming on some of the tech companies. Some of it deserved. David lets suppose i have some extra money and wanted to buy into a company like yours. Why should i buy your dara i think you have some extra money, dont you . [laughter] david never have enough, but why should i buy your stock . Is it likely to go up from where it is . And why would it outperform some of your competitors . Dara i have no idea where it is going next week or next month, but over a long period of time, we are at the cusp of a transportation revolution. We are the player that is global. We are the player that is multiproduct in terms of moving people, food, things. We have a much larger scope than any of the other players out there. And i will tell you that ourselves and many of our competitors are going to do great, because this is about replacing car ownership. This is about redefining how cities are shaped. This is about shaping how people move in urban centers. David to summarize, what would you like the average person who is listening to know about uber and its future . Dara i think what i want you to know is that we essentially want to be your partner in terms of your everyday life in a city. When you want to go to work, we want to be there. When you are coming back for work, we want to be there. We want to be there to feed you. And we want to be your everyday utility in your use. And we will do so in a responsible way. This is a company that wants to be great, but wants to do good for the world as well, and we know we have a lot of work ahead of us. Abigail coming up, the stories that shaped the week in business around the world. 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