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Right now, Darak kazer Shahi, the CEO of Uber, sitting down with Tom Giles in conversation live on Bloomberg.
Let's listen.
It came out of Uber earlier this week. Thank you Natalie Lung for breaking that story about some changes upper management. You promoted Andrew McDonald to chief operating disser. You were quick to say you're not going anywhere anytime soon. You also said in your note something that was a little bit of a little enigmatic to those of us on the outside that with Max stepping up, I intend to put focus on our six strategic shifts, spending more time with our tech teams.
Tell us about what are the.
Six strategic shifts and why do you need to spend more time with the tech teams.
Well, I think if I talked about all six would be here the whole time. But for example, one that we talk about for us is coming much more of a company in terms of the lifetime relationship with our customers. And one of the reasons why actually I wanted to bring back in as president COO. He's been at Uber longer than I have, for thirteen years. He's an incredible veteran incredible operator. Is that the power we see in
the Uber platform continues to increase. Now what I mean by that is we have a relationship with you on the ride side, a lot of you using Uber to
come here, Thank you very much. And then are Uber eats business is almost as large as an Uber rides business and growing very very quickly and accelerating if anything, and looking at a customer right now, the way the business was built, we essentially had a mobility business that mac ran delivery business that Pierre Dmitri ran did a terrific job, and it was almost like two businesses interacting
with you as a customer. And now the focus for us is really moving to lifetime interaction with a customer, looking at you not just as an Uber customer Uber Ease customer, but overall as an Uber customer, and how do we continue to build that relationship. For example, the membership program that we've got Uber one gives you no
delivery fees and discounts on rides. We've got thirty million members, and people who use multiple products on Uber tend to have, you know, transact with us much more, tend to have much more satisfaction with the product. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to get an experience operating executive to really focus on the overall relationship with a customer rather than separate p and ls.
I think you said one in five of your customers are using both mobility and delivery.
It's about now. It's closer to a third now, So it's increasing statilist, so it's moving.
In the right direction, right, What do you do to get that number higher? And where do you want it to be in say three years.
Well, listen, we want to get to fifty percent. And once we get to fifty percent, I want to go higher than that. And it's about the little interactions every day. For example, when I got a ride to the office the other day and along the way, I was offered a coffee from Phills to be ready for me along the way to the office, right, And so it's those
little interactions that are value add to the consumer. It's like, great, of course I want my morning coffee and if it can be ready for me right on the way to work, that's awesome. That is also a way to kind of get me to use Uber East. For example, if I didn't use it now. I use EAS all the time. But it's these little interactions powered by AI, power by personalization, understand the context of where you're going and there's a
coffee shop close by to give you that opportunity. It's those experiences that we have to build more and more, which is one of the reasons now I'm going to work more with the tech teams because you know they're they're the ones building these experiences.
I want to spend a little bit of time talking about your relationship with Autonomous Yeah. Sure, it's been a up and down for Uber over the years, even preceding your tenure. You have stakes, and a lot of AV companies talked recently about wanting to monetize some of those. Can you tell us a little bit or your stakes and your equity stakes? Generally you didn't specify av's but I am curious. Have you identified where you want to focus where? What do you want to free the cash up?
Is it about developing deeper relationships with a select number of AV partners.
What's the strategy? So we want to essentially support the AV ecosystem and continue to help that ecosystem develop and then av's penetrate into the marketplace. Av we think represents a safer way of transportation. Ultimately, we think it'll expand the marketplace as it makes kind of safe transportation and cities available to everybody. So we're big fans of AV and generally we're working with multiple partners in the ecosystem waymore for example, in Austin and Atlanta coming up wave AVRI.
There are probably eighteen partnerships that we have in the AV ecosystem, and we want to help these players develop by investing in them in some cases, but really by working with them to bring their product to market. These are technologies that are unbelievably promising, but they've taken billions of dollars to develop and you know, ten plus years, and it's one of those overnight successes that's kind of taken twenty years of development, but it's finally ready to
hit market, and we want to help the ecosystem get there. Separately, we have large stakes in many companies, you know, well over five billion dollars that we think we can take some of those steaks and essentially recycle them into additional investments in the AV ecosystem. So over a period of time we'll get it right, We've got a ton of free cash fow of the companies one way or the other. You know, the goal is to build up the av ecosystem around our network.
Build up the av ecosystem. You guys have the UI for example, that works really well. You have that customer relationship that maybe some of them don't. So is the idea you really want to kind of concentrate on a fewer number or is it just keep the broad brush broad number of av partners.
I mean, obviously we want to make sure that we partner with the right players, and I'd say safeties is the most important area. We want to make sure that they pass with flying colors through our safety case, which is actually pretty tough. But to the extent that the tech is there, the team is there, safety is part of the culture we want to work with them. So there's a right now there are a number of promising partners and you'll probably see the number of partners increase for us.
Okay, you mentioned your relationship with Waimo. We had Sundar last night. Asked him about when when he's going to be able to take away from Mountain View all the way up to San Francisco, We're not quite there yet, but there are genuine concerns about the ways that you
are both a partner and a competitor to Weaimo. What is the conversation like internally and with your board over how you continue to deepen that what is a valuable relationship as far as I can tell, but also keep it from becoming something that starts to undermine your business.
Well, the relationship with Weimo. I think the press and to some extent investors love to create drama because well the hell. But you know, the type of relationship that we have with Weaimo is very similar, for example, to the type of relationship we'll have with a Starbucks coffee. They're a great partner with Uber Eats, and at the same time, Starbucks wants to have its own app and wants to have interactions directly with the customer. And it
isn't an either or it's an ant. So we offer Starbucks and Eats and they compete with us in some ways with a Starbucks app and with their loyalty program, and that's fine. That's the way business goes. Same thing with Dominos Dominoes three years ago, was it going to work with the platforms now works with the platforms and in the same way. In San Francisco, yes, we compete with Weamo to get rides here, but in Austin Atlanta,
we absolutely work with them. And what we're seeing in Austin is, frankly, the launch is going better than we expected. Number one is safety and obviously Wemo's the best at it. And number two is customer love. And our customers are loving kind of the delight and surprise of getting Awamo and they're coming back. So I do think that this is going to be It's not either or we're going
to be working together. Weimo is developing its own channels and at the same time we can work together very constructively as.
We head toward an increasingly a the future. I know you've been asked about this before, but what are some of the new ways that you're seeking to overcome that challenge of reassuring drivers who are still an incredibly important part of your ecosystem very much You have their backs, but we also love these way moods that have no driver in.
Them very much. So. So one is growth helps a lot, right, So our business is growing almost twenty percent a year, and on average we're going to need more drivers on the platform for the next couple of years, and I see that continuing for some period of time. So I think drivers generally on our platform are going to be more busy, are going to have more to do, and the number of drivers on our platform and caurers on
our platform is going to grow. That's one. The second though, is we're putting significant efforts in creating more work and earnings opportunities for drivers and couriers. Right we started with driving who we might to delivery. Now you can actually shop, and there's a subsegment of careers et cetera who you know will love their local Walmart, for example, or Albertson's and you know shopping those stores or for Walmart, we
deliver those packages. And now we're actually going further where we're developing now what we call Uber AI solutions, where drivers are actually now labeling maps, translating language, looking at AI answers, and grading AI answers. So, you know, one way to look at Uber is that we are essentially a transportation platform will help you go anywhere, get anything.
Another way to look at Uber is that we are the largest on demand work platform on Earth and the first use case for US is actually transportation, and now we're expanding use cases into other use cases and knowledge work is one of them. So I think as long as we grow, as long as we are honest with our drivers and couriers in terms of our expectations and now expand the number of opportunities to them, I think will be more than fine.
You're you're actually getting your drivers, You're encouraging your drivers to help the AI and make it smarter. The AI that's gonna it's it's going to be put.
Yeah, it's going to be a part of our life going forward. And this is it's good work. And uh, you know, certainly our drivers are qualified to do it.
How much of how much of their time do you find their spending doing I assume this is like in the course of a of a day's drive.
It's very it's very small compared to the overall workload. Right, we're doing over thirty three million trips a day now in terms of our main line segments. But it's a Uber AI Solutions is a very very promising segment growth segment for US, and I think in five ten years it will be a significant part of the overall opportunities that we're giving to our drivers and careers.
I want to talk about Bill Ackman sure his relationship with Uber. It's nice to have a an activist who's friendly as far as I can tell us about the ways that you are interacting with Bill and how he is encouraging Uber to be better.
Yeah. So Bill is one of the legendary investors out there, and so I was very happy, Like I'm a fan of his kind of investing fundamentals, long term, making big bets. So I've always admired Bill. So when we found out that he was a shareholder, is like right on. And the cool thing about Bill as a shareholder is he uses the product. He is intensely interested in the product's and he's talking to his drivers, so he gives me a lot of feedback and actually a couple of features.
You know, for example, he was leaving dinner one night and he wanted to order ubers for his kids and his parents, and for some technical reasons, we couldn't do that at the time, and we built that feature based on that idea, and it's proven to be a really cool feature. So you want the kind of long term investor that Bill is. But what's cool about it is that he's actually, you know, he's brilliant, but he uses a product and he uses in a constructive way. And we've got a great relationship.
Speaking of relationships with folks on the East coast, you you know, Silicon Valley has this really interesting relationship with the Trump administration right now, this need to engage, but also recognizing that there are policies that the Trump administration, like any administration, is pursuing, that may not work so well for the tech industry. No taxes on tips something that's part of the legislation, something that you would say
you support. Can you talk about kind of the dialogue that you have with the president and what kind of feedback are you giving him on that, what kind of feedback are you giving him on the tax bill more generally?
Yeah, so we want is taxes on tips is we think a terrific piece of legislation. It will, if passed, save our drivers and caurers hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes that they would have otherwise paid. So we are big supporters of that.
And I've put a specific number on that over a time period, it's.
In the hundreds of millions. I don't know the specifics, but it's significant, and we think it's a appropriately targeted, you know, to a segment of the population that we all want succeed. And I've been very supportive of that directly with the President and our folks, with the staff, and I see generally we engage with every administration out there, both in on a federal level and on a state level.
We certainly engage with the Trump administration, and what I like in terms of what I'm seeing is that it is a pro growth, pro business in terms of kind of common business interest administration, and we'll continue to engage with them constructtively going forward.
There's a lot of rhetoric around immigration and a lot of policies around immigration that have a mixed effect. What's your message to the Trump administration when it comes to limitations on immigration. You rely on immigrations, immigrants for build drivers, for your engineers, across the board.
Yeah. So I think I'm an immigrant. You know, I came here when I was nine years old. So I am absolutely pro immigration generally for the US. But I think there's no question that we should secure borders, and so I think from that standpoint, we're very supportive our drivers and couriers have been quite supportive of President Trump
as well for similar reasons. And I think with immigration, you know, there is a dialogue for us to be had, which is what is the right level of immigration in this country, How you know, we select, how we qualify, et cetera. That I'm hoping that we get to have that dialogue as a country. And I think that dialogue suffers from kind of the two sides shooting at each other. But I think that if we can just come together and recognize that this is a largely immigrant nation and
immigration done right can benefit society. Done wrong, it can go the other way. So let's just focus on doing it right well.
For example, and it's not necessarily that we're building a wall on the northern border, but you, on your earnings called talked about the ways that some of this sort of unwillingness to come to the United States because of some of its political stances toward foreign countries starting to affect your business.
We've definitely seen Canadian immigration into the travel to the US come down from historical levels. The good news for Uber is that we're a global company, so to the extent that Canadians are traveling to Europe. They use Uber in Canada and they'll be able to use Uber in Europe as well. So for US, the effect on the
business is changing business mix. Okay, But as long as people travel and the global economies are doing well, which they are, we're going to interact with consumers one way or the other.
Have you seen any shifts since the last weight in on this topic?
The biggest one is a Canadian shift and that has there was a i say initial significant effect and we're seeing some of that continue, not all of it continue.
You talked about the consumer sentiment holding up. What have you seen since you last talked to the public about that.
Well, I'm not going to update obviously we're in the middle of a quarter. But generally we have seen for the past two years and that has continued until last quarter. The consumer remains strong. We're not seeing any effects in terms of, you know, lack of confidence, et cetera. We look to see if consumers are trading down first am, all the kinds restaurants that they're eating at, or are reducing the size of let's say, the shopping baskets. We
don't see any signal whatsoever. The US consumer and generally the global consumer has remained resilient, and obviously I'm hoping that continuing.
I want to take just a couple of seconds before I get kicked you get and I get kicked off, I.
Get kicked off. I think you're staying.
I understand that you are considering stable coin as a vehicle or uber.
Talk about where.
Your considerations are and how that might benefit your business.
Yeah, we're still in the study phase, I say, but I think stable coin is one of the for me, more interesting instantiations of crypto that has a practical benefit other than crypto's a store value. You know, obviously you can have your opinions on bitcoin, but it's a proven commodity, will and you know, people have different opinions on where
it's going. But I do think that stable coin is quite promising, especially for global companies that are moving money around globally, to create a mechanism for us to essentially reduce costs in terms of moving money internationally. So that's super interesting to us and we're definitely going to take a.
Look taking a look at it closely. Dara, thank you so much for joining us, Thank you for having tech is great to have you here. Please, thank you for giving me a round the block.
That was Bloomberg Senior Executive editor for Global Technology Tom Giles, sitting down with the CEO of Uber, Dara Kosher shahe at the Bloomberg Tech Summit out in San Francisco. Seen and heard live here on Bloomberg TV and radio.