Offers not just rides, but health care, payments, hotel booking, plane tickets and more. We met up with anthony tan in seattle, washington where they set up a new office to grab some of americas top tech talents. Joining me today on studio 1. 0, anthony tan and hoo ling tan, cofounders of grab. Lets start at the beginning. You met at Harvard Business school. How did you two find each other . The first year we were in Business School we were in different classes. The only times we met was when we were looking for asian food. It was only the second year we got to know each other because we both serendipitously took the same course called business at the base of the pyramid. Over that semester i discovered , this is the hardest working guy very and i was so glad he sat next to me because i was constantly looking at his notes. She did not do homework. She copied my homework. Emily are you ok with him saying that . It is the truth. Everyone knows that. [laughter] emily you came from a big auto agency in malaysia. Did you know of him . I knew of his family, not him personally. To be honest, when i first discovered he was their son, i was not keen on getting to know him too much better because i had a conception around not families, they are not always hardworking or necessarily the nicest people. Emily are you ok with her saying that . Yes, it is not too far from the truth. At one point, you know, i would imagine a long time ago i have been in those moments where i have not been the most empathetic person. I think over time learning how to pay some of my own school fees, do my own things, i worked in a factory, worked on the ground assembling cars, going to the bus at 1 30 in the morning with teammates assembling cars. Those experiences have molded me in, life lessons. And of them by the time i got to hps, thank god i was more grownup. Emily your grandfather was the founder. Your father is the ceo and you were working in marketing. Anthony first i was actually supply chain. So i ran supply chain from parts assembly, making sure all the parts were coming from all across the world, making sure it gets assembled nicely through highquality standards. Emily how about you . Hoo ling i grew up in a typical middleclass family. My father was a civil engineer, my mother a stock worker. Stockbroker. To be honest, that is what you would expect any other family to go through. Public schooling in malaysia. I only picked up english very well when i went to undergrad in england. Emily tell me how you get to hps, you meet each other, how is grab born . Hoo ling through conversation. Going back to the class that we sat next to each other at, it was about how to build sustainable businesses that have double and triple bottom lines, whether it is in health care cpg. , we learned so much. It is because of those great cases that sparked our mutual interests. My terrible experiences taking taxis in a very unsafe environment in malaysia that we realized the mobile revolution that was happening could potentially unlock a problem that many had tried to solve before but had not successfully done so. Emily this is a couple years after uber launched. How much was uber a blueprint . Anthony it was very different, wasas black cars, it everyone can have a private driver. Do we make sure that a woman like ling has the best and safest experience in an affordable way . Hoo ling if you were to google the worlds worst taxis 10 years ago, the top hit would have been kuala lumpur, malaysias capital. That is the environment we grew up in. The moment i became an adult, i was working late. I had no alternatives. I could not drive home, i would fall asleep because it was late at night. My mom and i developed a manual gps tracking system. That was during the nokia days, no smartphone or gps tracking. And i would literally text her the car plates, name of the driver and the license of the taxi i got into. And i would text whenever i hit major milestones, landmarks that we would preagree on so she , would know i was 15 minutes away, seven minutes away or just around the corner. Every single night she would sleep in front of the couch, something that looks like this, waiting for me. Emily you launch. At what point do you realize this will be big . Anthony we never thought this would be, it is a miracle. I will be up front. That where we are emily your mom was your first vc . Anthony exactly. We put in everything we had. I do not think we ever imagined it would be the company it is today. Emily talk to me about the early days growing the company. Anthony it was really rough. We would set up a table, a plastic table, that probably cost two u. S. Dollars right next to monsoon drains beside gas stations because taxis would come by gas stations. So we would say, hey give us a , shot. We will give you some rice or breakfast, a little drink that cost . 20. And if they did not have a spokehone, we flew and we with some oems to subsidize phones for us. We could not afford smartphones. Whether it was singapore, jakarta, singapore, went window by window, knocking. Whether they were lining up at the airport or gas station, we were convincing them one by one. Dara came in and said look, guys. It does not make sense to continue having this street fight. Emily by 2014 you expended to you had expanded to the philippines, singapore, thailand, vietnam. What was it like getting to these Different Countries . Hoo ling folks who like ourselves knew the Different Countries we spent time in growing up and loved to start operations. Emily what about local lawmakers, regulators . I mean, we have seen Ride Sharing Companies run into red tape around the world. Some people were not too happy. Anthony there is a process where Tech Companies think you should go ahead and shoot and ask for forgiveness later. At least in asia. Again, because i came from a Family Business that really and get abuild license to build a factory, we understood that you have to walk that journey with our garment partners. Emily is this the antiuber way of doing things . Hoo ling i would not say that. It is a very grab way. And i think the both of us grew up in an environment where we wanted to solve a problem together with others. , we it the Asian Heritage are generally more collaborative. It is the way our family teaches us to work with each other. It never struck us to take an alternative approach. We didnt want to say we know better, but follow us. Emily in thailand ride sharing is still illegal but you operate in a gray area there . Anthony we work very closely with the Thai Government and many other governments to find ways to serve the people better. Whether it is formalized or not we focus on serving the people. Emily what is grab today . It is not just a ride hailing app, it is more. Tell me about the super app vision. Hoo ling after six years of building this with the people of Southeast Asia, we were able to start working together with uber as partners. That is when we acquired southeast assets. Emily uber was struggling in Southeast Asia. Anthony uber had a great campaign. Ondemand uber ice cream. First of all, we did not think that would fly as well because one, it is very hot in the region, it melts. Getting slushy ice cream is not fun. What we said was, what do singaporeans, malaysians, love . The king of fruits, the durian. In over 30 days we sold 25 tons of the fruit making us the , biggest sellers of durian. Emily uber does not give up easily. What happened, how did you end up buying their ride hailing business . Anthony it makes a difference who is in the drivers seat. I think that number one, we both had tremendous respect for each other. Two, dara came in and said look, guys. It doesnt make sense to continue having this street fight, literally city by city, or does it make sense that one plus one equals 11 . That was when the conversation, obviously it was very secretive dara and i met away from the , office, away from media. It was just me and him in a private room. We started Building Trust that way. And we both agreed that was the best outcome for both companies. Emily uber has 20 of the grab. How much do you collaborate and how much is Dara Khosrowshahi involved in grab . Board. he is on the obviously he is quite busy as you can imagine, but he has been friend in many ways. We bounce ideas off of each other. We have toyota on our board and softbank. Emily do you worry about giving away competitive secrets to the ceos of big ride hailers in other countries . Anthony no, there is a noncompete with us as long as they are shareholders. Emily and you have no plans to expand outside Southeast Asia . Anthony no. Emily you do have offices in seattle, which is where we are. Any plans to expand in the u. S. . Anthony nope. Emily anything that would change that . Anthony nope. Emily why not . Hoo ling we have an r d center in seattle, malaysia and bangkok. U. S. , china and india great tech talent. Emily lets talk about the super app. This is so much more than a ride hailing business. What else you are delivering food. What else do you plan to do . Hoo ling we want to create a Technology Platform that can literally house multiple digital ecosystems and economies. Do foode today we delivery, parcel delivery, and payments in financial services. We now have multiple amazing partners helping us with things like health care. Care, we have Amazing Technology from china to help us enable more folks to get Health Services and products easily in Southeast Asia. We also have a partnership with happy fresh, where they do grocery deliveries with us. We also have partnerships with video and content players and other things in the works that you will hear about including booking. Com. Now if you open the app in , singapore and asia you can book hotels, airplane tickets because we have been able to partner with these folks to enable services in a matter of months. Emily you do have a competitor in your region, which is catching up in many of these businesses and also claims they are a super app. How much of a threat is that competition . Hoo ling the thing we always look at is what our customers need. And what our customers are saying. The good news is since year one, we have been the only regional player. Therefore, the only regional super app. Clearly the customers are choosing us. Emily the gojek founder has said not nice things about you. He said that you were actually classmates at harvard, i believe. The founder of gojek said, excuse me, you spend the first years of your life copying uber and the next years of your life copying gojek. What is the response . Anthony he likes drama. Look, i respect him. We both do, we respect him and the company. And i think, again, how i see it we are ine are look, we are in it for the right reasons. I cannot speak for others. We believe we want to serve east asia and societies and there is no other reason why we are here. For us it has always been about serving. Whatever our competitors say, it does not matter. It is noise. Hoo ling what i can share is that both regions are equally looking at Southeast Asia as huge potential growth areas. Emily you run a huge platform right now and on a huge platform , bad things can happen, accidents unfortunately happen. One of our bloomberg reporters got in an accident in a grab and she wrote about this and said the driver left her and she was badly injured. You actually went to visit her at home. Anthony that is right. And she is not the only person. I remember meeting a driver once , he fell off a motorbike and i went to visit. Of course it was a moment that was very emotional for both of us, seeing her daughter, her family, going to the house. And i think for us, can we do more . For sure. Now can we say factually are we the safest alternative out there . Yes. Have we built even more features after that . Yes. We have tripled down if not quadrupled down. We have dedicated tech families that just focus on safety. And right now we can say undoubtedly hand to heart, no one had more safety investments in Southeast Asia asia than we do. Emily she confronted the driver and found out what the were. Uences for him he lost his ability to drive for grab. He was fined. She wrote down what she felt to the accident cost. She said her vertebral artery. Driver, livelihood less expenses. Grab, 20. The refund they have given me after the accident. How does that strike you . Hoo ling both of us spent time to understand what we could have done better, not just from that accident, but many others which could have been prevented or was caused by external circumstances. We are constantly trying to figure out how we can make every preventable accident disappear. Emily what are some of the changes . Hoo ling there is a big need to make sure the drivers who are picking you up are the drivers that have been vetted and verified with history to be good drivers. And what we do with technology is make sure that every time they log into the app they do a selfie verification, facial recognition, to make sure that driver is the right verified driver that is trustworthy and safe. That is one example. Anthony everything we do has to be. And of course, in the case of safety can we do more, should we , have done more . Yes. And of the important part as ceos, cofounders, leadership, is to recognize we make mistakes and just put up your hand and say, i am sorry, i made a mistake. Forgive me and i will keep getting better. Emily lets talk about the money. You raised a lot of money and are trying to raise more. Valuation, billion am i right . Anthony in the ballpark. Emily where are you putting the new money . Anthony it is not just softbank. The first 3 billion was not raised by softbank, it was from toyota to hyundai to booking, to microsoft, oppenheimer. We are very,t very blessed it the global best names one can imagine. Emily why continue to raise money rather than going to the Public Market . Hoo ling because of our ambitions for a super app which , involve a broader set of services for our customers. There needs to be additional innovation and investment. And those are the investments that are partners, they identify the opportunity and they want us to do and are encouraging us to go bigger, bolder and better so we can serve Southeast Asia more consistently. Emily tell me about your relationship with masa . He said you have unlimited capital. Are noti assume you asking for unlimited capital . Anthony no. We are extremely close and we are very blessed to have a personal, mentor, friend and partner in this journey, but i will not right now need that capital or want that today because we have enough capital to invest in what we need today. Emily you recently told me you surpassed 1 billion in revenue last year and are on track to double that this year. Where will growth come from . Hoo ling in terms of countries and regions in Southeast Asia the biggest trajectory and growth is indonesia and we are doubling and tripling down there as well. Emily how far away is profitability . Anthony certain markets and to certain verticals are already profitable. For us it is really important that we build and create more value. It is easy to say you are the most popular app and then chill. Or as opposed to, we are single most popular app, but there are lots of competitors so we need to make sure we deliver more value so we can have them keep keeping us as the single most popular ridehailing app. Emily uber cannot say when it will be profitable and that has been a problem for investors. Are you learning from that . Anthony it is different. It is different. Huber, a majority of its business is ridehailing. Plus food delivery. Lyft as well. The point is we see ourselves as a super app. Emily will grab go public . Anthony right now we have no plans to go ipo. We have no need to go ipo. Again choosing longterm , strategics as part as our tech for good, working in conationbuilding, it is not five months. It is the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years. Naily given the u. S. Chi traded tensions manufacturing , leaving china and moving to Southeast Asia, does grab have a role in that . Is that an opportunity for you . Hoo ling what i can share is that both regions are equally looking at Southeast Asia as huge future potential growth areas. I think that everybody sees Southeast Asia as a region of growth for the future. And it is not shortterm. It is not for the next five years. It will be the next few decades. That is the growth we want to help drive for the rest of the country. Emily we have seen many founding themes fall apart, teams full apart blood on the , floor. You seem to have a great working relationship. How do you maintain that . Hoo ling we have an amazing relationship because we share the foundational value system and passion and vision for what we believe we can contribute back to the region. Andwe know it is unique that is why we cherish it even more. At the same time we also know there are many more opportunities to equally find the same passion. We encourage it and we are helping back in the region. We have launched something, our own accelerated program to help other startups in the region that are trying to do good, trying to find a scale. We are trying to help them as well. We are standing on the shoulders of giants and hoping to give them a boost. Emily it has been a pleasure to interview you both together and see that relationship. Thank you so much. Emily 10 years ago, Travis Kalanick and garrett camp launched uber cab, an elite black car service in san francisco. Within five years, uber had a shortened name and completed one billion rides. Two years after that, the number grew to five billion across 600 cities and 70 countries. It became one of the Fastest Growing startups ever. Services ballooned to cover nearly all modes of transportation carpool, helicopter, even water taxi. But all that growth came with many challenges. Regulators and taxi drivers fiercely protested ubers expansion. This, on top of multiple investigations for deceiving authorities, Price Transparency violations, bribery, and reports of sexual harassment. Investors pushed out kalanick, the once untouchable ceo and founder, and in 2017, Dara Khosrowshahi was brought in to fix it. He has brought in new management, worked to rebuild trust and reputation. Still, it hasnt been an entirely smooth ride. A big flashy ipo sparked excitement, but ultimately, investors were not impressed. Now the job is to prove them wrong. Joining me on bloomberg studio 1. 0 at uber headquarters in downtown san francisco, uber ceo Dara Khosrowshahi. It has been a long two years. Two years ago, it was announced that you would be replacing former ceo Travis Kalanick. And even you have admitted you were the unlikely dark horse, even accidental choice. So two years later, did they make the right choice, and did you make the right choice . Dara [laughs] i know i made the right choice, and i hope they made the right choice. Im confident that they did. This was you can never prepare yourself for a job like this, uber is a onceinageneration company. But it has been a great two years for us. We have resolved all of the governance conflicts that the company had. There were many legal issues that the company was involved with, as well. We got softbank in as a partner, and you want softbank to be behind you and a big partner and big investor, and we have a great investor base. We have taken the company public, and the company revenue, gross bookings, have grown 75 since i joined. We now have a path to profitability, i believe. So while weve had bumps on the road, and every adventure has bumps on the road, i like where we are, and i especially the like the position were in now for the next few years. Emily there have been bumps on the road, and despite all the negative stories, uber, lyft, Ridesharing Companies have been transformational. The big question for you is, can uber be as transformational over the next decade as it has over the last decade . Dara i think so. I mean, really what uber has done is brought transportation and opportunity, at this point, to what we believe is a small segment of the population. Listen, we have over four million driver partners all over the world, which is a huge number, and it is unparalleled, but we want uber to be available to everybody, and were going into the next step of introducing other transportation choices to uber. Weve always gone with pool, but for example, were testing buses in cairo now, to even bring the price of uber down to the next level, 1, 1. 50, etc. Emily i guess the question is, can the uber be so transformational and stop losing money . I mean, the prices sound very attractive, but can you create a Good Business where the rides are 1, 1. 50 . Dara yes. You look at our rideshare business, it covered our overhead less about 100 million. So the rideshare business itself is turning quite profitable and we believe the prophets of the rideshare business not only are going to grow top line, but bottom line, as well. And then there are other businesses eats, autonomous, trait, etc. These are extraordinary opportunities that were funding, but i do believe well prove to our investors that we can take, on a serial basis, big parts of our business, turn them profitable, and use those parts of the business to Fund Investments in other areas. Emily there are execution issues. You just had your biggest quarterly loss ever, 5. 2 billion, the stock has been trading below its ipo price more often than not, investors seem to love shorting it, you have got hiring freezes on various teams, you fired some or at least some of your top hires have left, so how confident are you that uber can be profitable . And how quickly . Dara i am very confident. The losses of we reported, a 5 billion loss from an accounting perspective, and from an accounting perspective, thats a lot. I live in the real world. In the real world, our ebitda loss, were lower than q1 and were on a good path in terms of ebitda losses, as well. But youre right. None of this will be easy. All of this will take excellent execution from all of our teams, marketing, technology, etc. , and we are going to be demanding our employees to be doing more with less and to execute incredibly effectively in order for us to grow the top line and bottom line, as well. Emily so is pricing the main lever that you pull to profitability, or are there other drivers . Dara scale. Scale. Its getting big when youve got over a billion rides per quarter, and you have got trips growing at 35 on a year on year basis. We think we can use technology to be more efficient. For example, instead of you having to email a Call Center Agent or call a Call Center Agent if you have issues, you can just do it in an app. These are Technology Innovations that allow customers to have a better experience, and at the same time, they bring down costs. So the combination of growing top line over 30 , Technology Innovation to delight the customer and take costs down at the same time, and then good oldfashioned efficiency, making sure corporate costs dont grow as fast as our revenue is a formula to profitability. Emily ubers market cap is 50 some billion dollars. There was talk it could be 120 billion. Your compensation is tied to that. Can you still get there . Dara i believe we can. Short term, right now, short term is nothing that we can do about the stock price. Theres an old saying that short term the stock market is a voting machine, long term its a weighing machine. I am very confident that this team can execute and create a very heavy company that can never be denied. Emily so, when . How long does it take dara i think its in the next couple of quarters are going to show a road map to investors, but it will take years. This is not a shortterm game. But i believe we can demonstrate progress. For example, i talked about our net Revenue Growth accelerating the second half of the year. Usually, Companies Like ours, you dont see Revenue Growth accelerate. I talked about our Revenue Growth accelerating in the second half of the year beyond 30 , and weve always been consistent in saying that the bottom line, ebitda, will continue to develop in a positive matter. Emily were in the midst of escalating trade tensions. How exposed is uber if the economy falters . Dara our company is much more tied in to the consumer, and the consumer, right now in the u. S. , is very strong. We are a very global company. The majority of our transactions actually are outside of the u. S. , so we really look at Global Growth, to the extent that Global Growth slows down. That could be a negative for us. Although, if Global Growth slows down, we are going to have more driver partners also wanting to come on the platform, because we expose very, very flexible labor opportunities. So i do think that the growth of the company is such that we are going to be relatively resistant to any macro slowdown, and we are certainly not seeing any slowdown with the u. S. Consumer as of yet. Emily whats plan b, if were in a fullblown trade war . Dara yep. Emily we have heard of investing in vietnam or brazil . Dara were an assetlight company, so we dont have to buy cars, etc. We will obviously be wary and make sure that our driver partners can source vehicles in an economic way. Many of them source vehicles through secondhand. Theyll source used vehicles, so to speak. So, i dont think this trade war we certainly havent felt it in very small parts of the business, where were importing bikes, for example, theres some additional expense there, but its not having a material effect on the company, and were confident about growth over the next few quarters, trade war or no trade war. Emily youve asked people to think about uber like the amazon of transportation. But amazon was an online bookstore for a very long time before they did all this other stuff. What if now is not the right time to do this other stuff . And now is the right time to focus on the core . Dara we have been in the ridesharing business for a long time, as well. And that business is developing and its profitability is developing. Were the top player in every Single Market in which we compete, and generally were either Holding Share or taking share in those market places, so we have a core business that provides the framework for us to build multibillion dollar opportunities, and i think it will be criminal if we dont take advantage of that. You are seeing more and more apps and companies that are building ecosystems, super apps, so to speak, especially in the east, for example, in china. Emily right. You have grab trying to do a super app, tencent. Is that the way to think about the future . Dara the super apps are winning, and we can be the super app of transportation, so to speak, that allows us to acquire customers at much cheaper rates than our competitors and allows us to keep customers because we have a deeper relationship with them, and we think if you can acquire customers and keep them longer, that is just a winning formula. Emily uber eats is what, 20 to 30 of the business . Dara yes and growing quickly. Bookings grew 90 on year on year basis. We are the Largest Global player out there, and we continue, in the category of food, we believe can be as large or even larger than the ridesharing category, so we love that business, and we continue to invest in it. Emily there are so many competitors that do exactly what you do in this market and other markets. What if youre just subsidizing our meals, and you dont win the market share, and this is just a giant hungry money pit . Dara so early on, i think people could have accused the rides business of the same. It turns out that the rides business, you see it with ourselves and lyft, etc. , it is moving towards a path of profitability. As you build these businesses when the potential is so big, there is subsidization that goes into the marketplace to create efficiencies. You need to get eaters, you need to get couriers, and you need to sign up restaurants, and there is investment early on. Is there competition . Absolutely. But there will always be competition in big categories. We have the advantage, because we have hundreds of millions of consumers on the ride side that we can essentially introduce to our brand, and let them know that theres more to uber than just riding, but theres eating and other areas that you can enjoy. Emily some of the business as it seems like we hear less about, like scooters, we havent heard a lot about scooters lately. Whats the likelihood you pull out of some of these businesses . Dara every business is going to have to execute and carry its weight, so to speak. Were a big believer in micromobility. Its in the early days. We believe in electric bikes. We believe in electric scooters. And, increasingly, i think the mayors of the large cities, all around the world, are going to want to be interested in ways of moving people around that dont pollute, that dont create traffic, and we believe micromobility can be part of the solution. Emily would you curtail International Expansion in the short term . Dara every part of our business has to fight for money, and if theyre not deserving money, theyre not going to get it. So believe me, internally, theres lots of creative destruction, theres lots of competition, and if one part of our business isnt carrying its own weight, we will pull back. Listen, we pulled back out of china, and we turned what was a 2 billion investment in cash into what can be a 10plus billion stake in didi, which is a very big ridesharing business in china, as well. So, we are in the end, were looking to build a business. We want to build it the right way. We want to build a business in alignment with our partner society, etc. But if somethings not working, we believe weve demonstrated the discipline to make the right call at the right time. Every management has their faults. Ive got my faults. But the fact is they built a Great Company, and now theyve handed it to me, and ive got to take that Great Company and make it even greater. Emily when we last visited, there was a driver protest outside. Democratic president ial candidate Pete Buttigieg was out there with them. He said gig is another word for jobs. That means youre a worker and you ought to be protected as a worker. There is support for legislation that would force Companies Like uber, that rely on contract drivers and delivery people, to make them fulltime. Why shouldnt they be fulltime . Dara because they dont want to be fulltime. Emily well, some do. Dara some do. More than half of our drivers in the u. S. , for example, drive less than 10 hours with us a week. Now listen, right now california has a historic opportunity. We are at the table. We are having these discussions, and we want to the get to a solution. Were offering 21 minimum an hour when youre driving on a platform. Were offering benefits, and were offering a voice as far as how youre going to be treated going forward. 21 an hour compares to 12 an hour minimum wage. This is not this is real money, and these are real rides, and you get the flexibility that every single uber driver or courier wants, because they can come into the market when they want to or out. This is an historic opportunity to, i think, revolutionize the gig economy, and i dont think gig is a type of work. To say that theres only one way to work, and Everyone Needs to be fulltime, etc. , i dont think thats correct, because it takes away flexibility, and flexibility is absolutely something that all of our drivers prize. Emily and can you give them flexibility and give drivers and riders safety at the same time . Dara if the Legislature Works in the interest of making something happen, absolutely. And you know that were making very significant investments in safety, as far as the safety center, tracking your ride, etc. And we believe we are the leader in safety as far as transportation goes in the world, and we will continue to invest aggressively there. Emily were going to talk a little bit more about the future, but before we go there, i want to talk more about the past. The uber you took over had some toxic cultural issues. Illegal payoffs to police officers, violence, sexual assaults, even murder on the platform, angry taxi drivers, and a Management Team that turned a blind eye to much of it in the name of growth at all costs, socalled brilliant jerks, if you will. And yet there are some people who say that leadership was bolder, brasher, bigger thinking, maybe better. How do you respond to that . Dara i think time will tell, and i think that you need different kinds of management for different times in the development of a company. Listen, the management every management has their faults. Ive got my faults and every Management Team at the time has their faults, but the fact is they built a Great Company, and theyve handed it to me, and ive got to take that Great Company and make it even greater. I think im up to the job. And while they made their mistakes, the fact is they built a great brand that had weaknesses and has incredible strengths. Its my job to take it to the next level. Emily anthony levandowski, the guy who ran the trucking business that uber bought, was just charged with stealing selfdriving technology from google, stealing trade secrets. What do you make of those charges . Dara i wasnt here when we brought anthony on board, but what i do know is that we went to incredible depths to make sure that any information that anthony might have acquired from google, and it sure looked like he did, didnt make it over to our company. That was our responsibility, and i think we were incredibly diligent in making sure that we were not guilty of anything that could be nefarious one way or the other. We think when you build, you have got to build the right way. Anthony is an incredibly talented person. It didnt work out, but i think we did the right thing. Emily the person who was here, and who spearheaded that acquisition, which which might cost uber 100 million, and it cost some credibility, is still on the board, Travis Kalanick. I asked you this on ipo day. Do you question travis position on the board . Dara i think that i am going to live in the here and now. Travis has an incredible amount of historical knowledge about the company. He is incredibly bright, as are our other board members, and i use him at the board hes a very strong adviser, and his background on the company is incredibly useful, and i think he is supportive. Ultimately, now, we are a public company, and the shareholders are going to get to pick their own board, and that governance process will take care of itself going forward. Emily so you talk to him often . Dara i talk to him usually during board meetings and once in a while offline, absolutely. Emily but, hes on the board for now . Dara hes on the board for now, and he is going to be on the board tomorrow. Fast forward 10 to 15 years from now, autonomous is going to be a huge part of how people get around. It will be cheaper, it will be safer. Why not invest now to make that happen . Emily lets talk about the future, then. To those who say that uber is a ridesharing and food delivery company, what is ubers next big idea . Dara i think that the ideas that we have right now in this building are plenty big ideas. Weve got ridesharing, weve got food delivery, we have micromobility, weve got autonomous. Weve got freight revolutionizing how truckers move around and how shippers ship product all over the world. Weve got elevate, as well. We have an enormous number of big ideas, and now its execution time. Emily so where do you think most of the technological innovation happening at uber . Dara it is happening all over. What is unique about our business is that we are a combination of the digital and the physical and the two coming together in unique ways. So we have very interesting, for example, Machine Learning algorithms that are looking at supply and demand, live supply and demand in a city, what riders are looking for, and where theyre located, and then giving our drivers guidelines as to where to go in order to meet that demand. This matching of supply and demand in a dynamic way, and the pricing that we have, is something thats unique. We continue to innovate there, and then we innovate in in very, very different spots, such as elevate, as to how we can bring together different modes of transportation and tie them together, walking, driving, to a helicopter, for example, now, to jfk. Emily youre in charge of not just visualizing the future of transportation but trying to get there and create that future. When you look into the future, what does the future of transportation look like . Dara we think we can bring it together. I believe we can have that singular app where, every morning when you wake up, any way that you want to get from point a to point b, we can give you the information that is relevant to you with live pricing, inventory, etc. We now have mass transit in the app, so were going to tell you mass transit you can take, subway, you can take a bus, you can take an uber, a pool, and if it is a long enough trip, you can take an elevate, as well. We are uniquely positioned to have all that information together, and we can do the same thing for transportation, we can do the same thing for local commerce, and with eats restaurants, it is only the beginning, and we can do the same thing for logistics. No other company in the world is positioned to solve local transportation, local commerce, and logistics as well, and i think were in a spearhead position to do so. Emily wheres uber in five years, 10 years . Dara with so much innovation and so much change going on, that i have a hard time predicting, for you, whats going to happen in the next year, but i do think what you will see us is increasingly going into multimodal modes of transportation. We are going to open up our marketplace to thirdparty transportation providers, because were not going to do it all ourselves. I think were going to be much deeper partners with the cities in which we operate. We want to bring demand to public transit, as well. We are going to have a much better enterprise solution, as well, both in terms of businesses and health, and what you will see with eats is moving beyond the category of just restaurants, although thats a very, very big category, into other categories of commerce, as well. Its going to be a pretty exciting time, not just for the next year or five years, but for the next 10 years here. And its really up to the the teams here. Its my job to bring together the talent who can help me envision that 10year future. Emily does the future of profitability, does profitability depend on selfdriving car technology, the advent of selfdriving car technology, or are those two things separate . Dara i think we can get to profitability before selfdriving, for example, becomes the majority of trips, but i think that if you look forward, and if you want to bring safety on the road, increase it, because the number of people who die in accidents in the u. S. And abroad theres just no reason to have that many people hurt. Most accidents are caused by human error, and we can avoid that. We can avoid that with computers and technologies, and at the same time, we can take the cost per mile down pretty significantly. So, fast forward 10 to 15 years from now, autonomous will be a huge part of how people get around. It will be cheaper. It will be safer. Why not invest now to make that happen . Emily but can you get profitability without selfdriving technology . Dara 15 years from now, no. Any Transportation Company that doesnt have selfdriving as part of its strategy, and thats why we have atg. We can build out our selfdriving technology specifically to serve our network, and thats a huge advantage that we have, but any company 15 years from now that is in the transportation space that doesnt have strong selfdriving strategy, whether they build it themselves or they work with someone, is not going to be around for long. Emily i know im asking you to think big, big picture now, but in the history of silicon valley, in the uber pantheon, how are we going to look back on today, your twoyear uberversary . Dara you will say every Great Company has to go through tough times. You know, you look at facebook, you look at amazon, even five years after their ipo, all of them went through periods where companies are tested. This is the moment where the mettle of uber is tested, and im very confident that were going to come out of this stronger than we ever have been before. Emily Dara Khosrowshahi, thank you so much for joining us here on studio 1. 0. Dara thank you very much. Appreciate it. Emily hes one of the closest confidants of the google cofounders. The leader of alphabets secretive x lab. Born eric teller, he picked up the nickname astro in childhood, with no idea he would someday be working on making socalled moonshots a reality. Raised by parents he calls hyper intellectual hippies, one of his grandfathers won a nobel prize in economics. The other, some say should have won one in physics for his work on the hydrogen bomb. Perhaps it is only fitting, then, that astro teller is working on ideas that could change the world, or more likely