Dara Khosrowshahi - Uber's Bet on AVs, AI, and Building a Super-App - [Invest Like the Best, EP.476]

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/a2e48d4f50bfa8dd

And welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money.
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My guest today is Dara Kazrashahi.
The CEO of Uber.
Before Uber Dar ran Expedia for thirtien's.
We start with why he took this job in two thousand seventeen, and a big part of that story is Daniel Eck, who told him that life is not about happiness, it's about impact.
We talk about what the chaos felt like on day one and how his family leaving Iran when he was nine shaped the way he handles pressure today.
We spend most of our time on autonomous vehicles and Uber's role as the demand aggregator in a world of physical AI. Dara explains why Uber is a supply led company, what it will take to win, and why he expects many winners in A Vs rather than just one.
We also discuss Uber's$10 billion in free cash flow, the push towards a single app for everything, and what he has learned from Allen and company, Barry Diller, and Reed Hastings.
Please enjoy my great conversation with Dara Kazra Shahi.
So I think I have to begin with the story you were just telling me about
How you took the job here, how you heard about it.
And the reason I start there is because I want to know what the company felt like to you when you showed up.
How that's evolved.
And then very importantly, what the current moment feels like, which I think is the most interesting question for the business possible. But I love the origins. So I would love to hear.
How did you hear about this job in the first place?
What was the backstory? Yeah, so I've been an expedient for thirteen years.
CO working with Barry Diller and love the experience and I loved where I was.
At the time, like Uber was in the news all the time, right? It was in the business news if you're interested.
So obviously I was reading about the situation at Uber, it seemed pretty chaotic and pretty difficult.
And then a headhunter called me out of the blue.
And said
Are you interested in the
Uber CO job.
And at the time I said
You know.
No F and Way. Who would even think about it at the time, and I had a considerably lower profile, as you can imagine.
So I kinda blew it off.
I was at the Sun Valley Conference, Allen Company conference.
and was having a drink with Daniel Eck and my wife. And Daniel said
Hey Dar, did a headhunter call you? I recommended you for the job. I thought you'd be great for the job.
And I was like, Oh, that's why it happened. Like, what are you crazy?
He said, Well, I think you'd be great for the job. And I said, Listen, I've been at Expedia for thirteen years. I'm so happy with what I'm doing.
And I remember Daniel looks at me, he's like, Dara, since when is life about happiness? Interesting comment. He's like, it's about impact.
Uber is a company that
has impact on the world, it's important, it's in trouble.
Why wouldn't you take a shot at this? I think you'd be great.
I think a lot of people come to Uber because of the impact that the company has in the world.
We are
Shaping how the world moves, we're a huge part of people's lives. You've got over 10 million couriers and drivers on the platform.
And I just want to.
Go to a place where I could make a difference.
And I wanted to go to a place that was making a difference. When I started investment banking and I own a company, it was amazing. It was the best company in the world.
But I was like, investment banking is a really changing the world.
So for me it was about
having impact at a company that was having fundamental impact in how people lived.
We'd had a couple of beers and my wife was there sit and she'd had a couple of beers and we talked about it and
The next morning, actually, in the parking lot.
I remember calling the headhunter and I said
Tell me more. So that's how it all started.
Wow. Okay, so you show up.
There's a process. What is the impression on day one through ten or something like this? Like what did it feel like?
Complete chaos. Travis.
had not been a the lead of the company for some period of time.
And there was a group of executives, uh, a committee, if you want to call that, who had been running the company for a few months.
And obviously the company was in the
public sphere in many, many bad ways.
Lots of things going on both internally, externally, and the business itself.
was very dynamic
HULE Competitive.
So it would have been difficult enough if
there weren't any of the external distractions going on coming into
the business which I think fundamentally was strong.
But was going through a lot of change.
It was just a lot of chaos, both in terms of the board and what the board wanted.
In terms of the stability of the management team.
And then getting structure around the business as well.
But with time.
And with a lot of work and working with my team.
we were able to bring some order to the chaos, both externally and internally, and
It's turned out to be.
A great right.
How did you do that? If you were teaching a college seminar or something, an HBS seminar on
A leader
Bringing and establishing some order and structure in a chaotic situation. What is the how?
The most important how is
Simplifying the situation and breaking down what seems like an unassailable problem into its component parts.
Vector mathematics if you have a three dimensional complex
Interaction.
You can just break it down to each
dimension
And if you solve each dimension and you bring it all together, you can actually solve
Прі комплекс.
Issues into its component.
parts. And the same is true in business.
When I got into Uber there were very distinct areas that I had to take care of. One
А та бор лево, до боргой фрон.
And you had a board that was focused on who's going to control the future of the company.
versus what the future of the company was going to be.
And so for example
We brought in a new chairman, Ron Suger.
who has become my partners through all of the years and really brought the board together. This isn't about
Who controls it. This is about the fate of the company.
I mean the company lost trust with stakeholders, with regulators, with the public.
So we went out and
First went on a listening tour?
to understand what the issues were and then
started listening, started acting based on that impact and started communicating.
Both internally and externally, which is the concerns of stakeholders.
Externally were just as important as our own concerns as well.
And then with employees, it's putting together a team and
There was a lot of talent inside of Uber.
But there were some folks who kinda were stuck in the old world who had to get off.
And then there was an incredible talent base, Andrew McDonald, who is our president CO.
Predated me and has come through many many years мені other.
have been with me.
Since before day one?
And then bringing in new management members like a Tony West as well, who's been with me ever since. So
I think if you
Focus on each
Distinct problem.
Вот сімслай кас.
can become small surmountable problems that you take on
You set initiatives against each of them, and over a period of time.
You can't control what gets solved when.
But over a period of time things get better. And I think things got better.
In situations like that, and I'm sure there's been many others at Expedia and sense.
What do you learn about managing your own stress so that you don't get
personally overwhelmed by chaos.
I think I'm lucky. Say my wife calls me a robot.
Which is I don't get stressed out by situations.
We lost everything when we came here from Iran.
And I saw destroy my father. How old were you?
I was nine years old.
My father built
Along with his family, an incredible family business. We came here, we lost everything.
But then we rebuilt.
And
I think for whatever reason yes doesn't help.
Overthinking things doesn't help. It only makes things worse.
And
I'm able to approach things kind of from an engineering mindset. I studied engineering school, which is oh, what are the problems? Let me list them.
and let me have an approach to solving them.
Test and learn.
And not everything improved in a linear path.
But being stressed out like
What's the point of it? Who cares? Can you say a little bit more about what that experience was like, like watching your dad go through that at that young age? For us, we came to the States, we got to stay with my
Uncle Nasi
The adjustment for us was not very difficult, but as I grew up, I observed my father who
When I was a kid, he was kind of a giant of a man.
become less trying because I was getting bigger as well. And he just lost that spark. He wasn't able to
begin again here in the US.
He did his very best. He was an entrepreneur. He tried his hand at a lot of things.
And I think that one
It drove myself and my brothers and my family to rebuild. You know, many immigrants have a chip on our shoulder and
I had a particularly big one.
But at the same time, I didn't want to be in the same situation, which is
for
Work.
For
fortune.
to
Break me.
as a person. So I was able to separate the two, which is
Yeah, do I want to do well?
Absolutely. Am I gonna give it every
inch that I've got absolutely
But in the end I know who I am and I'm always gonna be that same person. I'm not gonna let the chaos of the world
affect me mentally. What have been the chapters the chip? Why has the chip on the shoulder evolved? Like what satisfied it early on and how has what satisfied it changed or is the chip still It's never satisfying.
I don't know what it is.
I always
Mante to do well in school.
Sports
For me
I just believe in being all in in anything that you do.
When I'm with my kids
I'm with my family.
I don't have this thing around, I'm not checking messages, I'm not getting distracted.
I believe in if you're going to do something, whether that's work, whether that's sports, whether that's personal life.
Just go all in.
Get rid of the distractions.
And I think you'll lead a happier, more effective life.
Do you think the chip is the roughly the same today as it was when you're
It's core.
I don't know.
Whether I would have been the same person.
you know, the counterfactual if I were in Iran.
But
I know my family's awfully competitive. A lot of Iranian immigrants have come here to the US and many parts of the world.
have been extraordinarily successful.
And yes, of course.
starting from behind and knowing that you're starting from behind and having the desire to
Get ahead again, it absolutely plays a part in your life.
And the selfish question'cause I have kids, you know
They're growing up fast.
How do you think about it?
Your kids
My guess is you wouldn't press the red button to undo
the experience you had because it made you who you are. Totally. And so I think about this a lot as it relates to kids that maybe are not going to have an experience like that.
That might shape them in a similar way. How do you think about that as a data?
Um
figuring it out as we go. I think being a parent is so humbling.
But I think we're doing our kids a disservice by
giving them too much, being around too much.
I don't know about you as a kid, but
On the weekends my mom would be like, Get out of here and come back for dinner. Figure it out.
And I think this the helicopter parenting
Being around your kids all the time.
You want to love your kids, you want to know that they're absolutely loved and appreciated.
But it's the challenges in life that form you.
And it's the overcoming of these challenges that give
I think
humans a profound satisfaction.
And if you as a parent are overcoming these challenges for your kids
you're actually doing them a disservice long term, whereas short term
You think that you're doing them a favor or you're giving them an easier life.
A happy life is not necessarily an easy life.
And so for me it is a challenge because I love my kids.
Sid and I co parent in a way which is
We're not gonna do everything for the kids.
They come home, they're responsible for their homework, where they've got to learn
How to make it in this world themselves within the scope of family.
which will prepare them for the outside world, which as you know
can throw you a lot of curve balls. Yeah. Speaking of curveballs and challenges, if we zoom all the way to today, it's gotta be I'm curious if you think so. This seems to me from the outside like the most interesting time to be running this building. Because
The opportunity is so massive, the threats are real, the new entrants are fascinating. A Vs will talk a lot about, I'm sure. What does it feel like ground us today? What feels like the central question to answer?
As the leader of the business.
I tell you that.
Every single year that I've been an Uber has been a challenge and there have been so many answers to question and we interact with the world in so many ways.
Obviously the challenge on the opportunity now is
The rise of AI both as an internal tool as to how we build
And what's different about Uber than many other companies is
We don't just exist in the digital sphere. Our experiences
encompass digital first in terms of your interaction with our platform.
But then they are
Delivered or fulfilled in the real world.
where all kinds of things happen. So you've got kind of terminative structure in terms of the interaction with app.
But then probabilistic outcomes.
And we always have to deal with those outcomes and the things that go wrong in the real world, traffic, driver canceling, your food being late.
We have always used in that probabilistic world.
AI tools to build out our system.
For much longer than most companies out there.
But now with the onset of AI
both in the digital world, the ability to build much larger models that know much more about you can anticipate what you want more accurately.
Can really drive
utilization and can drive
People work and
Make an engineer into super engineer.
to then the rise of physical AI.
Autonomous vehicles, drones, is how they are going to change.
how we interact with consumers in the real world.
I've never ever seen a pace of change so fast and it's incredibly exciting. What's your mandate to your team given how fast things are changing and how much more each person can now do?
А на топ двер, со спик.
We have a bottoms up culture.
Which is
I want people inventing all over the company. I I don't want to be that single point of failure. Obviously
The CEO's important for the company, so
I hesitate to draw mandates and I will tell you that.
AI adoption of the company, just because we are the AI native.
company or ML native company in terms of where the technology has come from.
It's been occurring all parts of the business, whether it's engineers
And how they scope projects, how they build debugging
platform migrations, all of that now.
has enormous AI adoption to our legal team to our marketing team. So it is happening everywhere.
Where I come in is them pushing the teams to fundamentally
Use the power of AI.
to
Rebuild systems and processes from the bottoms up.
And by the way, it could be a decent first step.
to take a process and have AI optimized.
twenty percent of it, thirty percent of it in terms of speed or effectiveness or cost.
But to rebuild it from the ground up.
That's much harder.
And that's where I'm coming in and really pushing the teams to think about
processes from a first principle's standpoint.
And the impact of AI on those. What's the most amazing thing you've seen someone do?
with the technology at Uber.
Most
Amazing thing that I've seen is
I'm seeing the impact show up in all kinds of random corners.

What we're seeing now is we've got devs in India.
Who all of a sudden are
driving 10x the code commits that they used to. They're using autonomous agents all over the place. So
The uptake of the tools that we're seeing.
is not at all predictable.
In terms of
Who is racing ahead?
with this new technology versus
What we typically saw.
And so I think you're gonna have very, very unpredictable patterns within the company. It's up to us to find it.
And it's up to us to kinda promote those individuals who
are kinda the rebels inside the company. We want the rebels to win here.
One of the interesting questions today is what is the actual latent demand for intelligence? Like it's such a weird question. Yeah.
I'm curious if you've had an experience like me where at first you like tell your team, burn tokens, like let's use as much intelligence as possible.
And then there's a moment where you're like, wow, this is expensive. Intelligence is expensive. How do you think about the trade-off between it seems like an unbridled good to have more intelligence?
But right now it's quite costly. We're dealing with it now, actually it blew through our AI budget in a quarter for the whole year, essentially.
And it is forcing us to adjust. You know, we are going to
meet or head count increases.
Because to the extent that my engineers are getting
much more efficient. Their throughput is increasing. They're becoming hu superhum in terms of their output.
There's a cost to that, and it's a significant cost.
And at the same time we're metering the increase in heck count. So
My view right now is
Drive adoption.
Encourage usage across the company.
We do believe in efficiency here.
We've got over ten billion dollars in free cash flow, which is great.
But it's on well over ten billion trips a year.
So we are not a high margin business.
We want to really drive efficiency in order to lower prices.
For writers.
to give more earnings to her earners, et cetera.
So I do think it's a combination for us right now of encouraging adoption, but then driving efficiency. And the way that I put it is
We're using the more expensive models to explore.
Hey, let's try a new interaction here.
And obviously
these frontier models, whether it's a open AI model or a cloud model, they really are terrific.
And they're great to experiment against.
Once we scale
some of these experiences and interactions were looked to bring in
more efficient models that are more efficient on a token basis or open source.
Again, lower costs. So
Exploration.
Is go go go.
But then efficiency and scaling is something that we're also talking about.
So you're one of a few companies
Many of them amazing companies with amazing leaders that are in this sort of like AI meets the physical world zone.
where you've got a scaled brand and distribution, you're an aggregator of demand in many ways.
And I have so many questions about this, but I guess the first one is
Just what that
is like how you think about that.
challenge that problem, that opportunity.
as one of the small handful of companies that has the right to win.
in how that new technology lakes up to the physical world. Yeah. I think the first is there's an enormous opportunity in just it's boring, but it's wonderful boring, which is just building larger models. So
building our models in terms of our feed models or search models now.
are probably ten thousand times bigger than our older models and they're just able to take much more data about you.
And make predictions about
What are you gonna search for? Now we have universal search, for example, if you search for something
It's not just classified as rides or eats or grocery.
we can show you everything that we have available across our services. So
First it's just like
The tooling has gone better, the capabilities have gone better and
Today we can guess when you take an Uber ride.
three quarters of the time we can guess where you're going and it's just the one tap.
Interaction.
that can only improve based on these larger models.
And
As it relates to the real world.
We can anticipate what's happening in the real world much more effectively now.
And then
the form factor with which you operate.
is going to change as well, and more and more, and it's gonna take a while.
You'll have drones getting your food to your home, or you'll have A Vs delivering you from
Place A to place B.
So everything is changing about it.
Some of it is immediate opportunity now.
But we think there's a ton of opportunity going forward.
to win the demand aggregator.
You know, top slot in A V specifically. Supply.
So we are a supply led company. The more drivers we have.
in the marketplace the more restaurants that were wiring up for you
a more latent demand that we have. And it's one of the lessons that I learned when it came from Spedia to Uber.
at expedient, we were really focused on
demand, how many consumers can we get to the website, et cetera.
And we were demand first company, and then we would build out hotel inventory and flight inventory in response to demand.
At Uber, everything is upside down.
One of our
very, very significant growth opportunities right now is
building at our surface.
Not just in the big cities.
But in the sparse markets in
all of the suburbs of the world and smaller cities of the world, not the top ten cities in a country.
But the next fifty cities, the next two hundred cities in the country.
Wa w the first thing we do
is actually go out and recruit drivers.
recruit merchants in restaurants.
Groceries, couriers.
And then just the demand shows up. I don't mean
It's not that easy.
But
The biggest
opportunity and challenge we have is making sure that we secure every single supply, every single car out there that's gonna take you from point A to B, every single restaurant.
Every single retailer.
Every single
Grosser.
If we do that, the demand will take care of itself.
In A V specifically, what does that feel like?
It feels obviously like we're just at the very early, early part of the S curve.
I'm sure that if the answer is supply.
You want to just be the demand aggregator with the most supply.
What does that feel like? Like what does the state of A Vs feel like to you?
It's very early, but it's moving very fast. So we've got over thirty partnerships now with
Incredible art nurs like a Waymo.
to a neural and lucid to an NVIDIA that is building
not just compute and sensors, but also a software driver now to companies like Wabi and Wave.
We rides of the world, Pony AIs of the world.
Just like you're seeing in the foundation model space.
There isn't gonna be a single winner. There are gonna be many players on the foundation models, they'll be open source models as well.
We're seeing the same kind of acceleration in the development of A V.
And as a result
We want to be your go to market solution.
for companies that are building out these digital drivers.
But we're allowing these companies is to really focus on building the driver.
We are building services around them. We're going out and securing depots and charging in
cities in which we see kind of the regulatory landscape moving in the right way.
We're working with fleet partners, we're
Securing financing. We just announced uh
billion dollar financing line with Santander for EV fleets.
And A B fleets.
We're working on autonomous insurance as well.
So we're building the entire ecosystem.
So someone who builds a driver
can get those cars in the road and then
We have all the supporting infrastructure.
We are collecting data as we speak in the streets that we can feed to the model.
And then when they hit markets.
We've got instant demand for them. And what we're seeing is
Consumers love the product.
And A Vs that are on our network.
are thirty percent or more busy
than let's say one P A Bs who aren't using our network. That 30% in terms of trip per vehicle per day, in terms of revenue per vehicle per day.
can make a huge difference in terms of your ROI of investing in these expensive cars.
What has surprised you most so far about
the product of A Vs. Like you get to see all this interesting the 30% thing makes me wonder about this question. What is interesting to you about the nature of the product?
And the physical cars themselves.
And the consumer experience versus the more traditional experience.
So the one thing that
is surprising in a different way is
How quickly
Magic turns to normal.
When I first
experienced Uber
It was a New York City.
I was
Out of experience, I'm like, Oh my God, this thing is absolutely magical. Push a button and a car shows up in five minutes. You're like, Where's my damn car? Yeah, exactly. You're like it was six and a half minutes. I can't believe that. How dare they?
And
With A Bs
You get in them.
And it's magical. The cars are nice. There's a sense of privacy, peace. You play your own music.
And for the first two minutes you're like Oh my God, this is amazing. Look at what's happening.
Then at three?
Here you are, doing the same thing. So
I think what's incredible is what's magical now is going to seem normal to all of us ten years from now.
And then it's about getting you from point A to B safely.
Efficiently, affordably, we want to make sure that these AVs aren't just available for rich people in the middle of the cities. We want to make sure that they're available everywhere.
But I think this technology, the speed to market's gonna be fast and the interactions are gonna normalize faster than you think. I'm so interested by the whole like build partner buy decision that I'm sure you're making a million ways every day.
You've got these advantages. You've got all this capital, all this free cash that you can allocate, all this infrastructure, and of course the demand aggregation that you've already built, which are huge advantages for creating liquidity, et cetera. How do you think about partnering with companies like Awaymo or something that
You could certainly see being a competitor in part of what you do. If they get a big enough network and the service is good enough, you know, people are always gonna buy for huge markets. What is that like navigating
And that specific example are in general right now with A V is partnership versus having your own fleet.
It's a coexistence that frankly I'm quite used to coming from the travel business. If you think about OTAs.
These online travel agents they compete with the Marriott, they compete with the Delta.
for the consumer. They compete with a
independent hotel as well.
All of whom are building
a direct channel for the consumer, many of whom have loyalty programs.
But at the same time
They want incremental consumers coming from the platforms.
Because they have a big box to fill.
And they wanna drive as much utilization of that box as possible and the returns.
For a hotel that has seventy percent of its rooms filled.
versus ninety percent.
It's night and day.
You will take the ninety percent every single day.
The same is true, for example, in Uber Eats.
It's
We work with McDonald's, we work with Starbucks, we work with Chipotle.
All of these companies to some extent.
also compete with Uberies as well.
And the same will be true of a subset of
A V, which is a Waymo.
Of course they want to build their own brand and their own channel.
But the same time
We are able to draw more utilization for them.
When their cars are on our network.
The same will be true of Zooks.
The same will be true of Neuro, et cetera. So we're gonna have some players
For example, a wave who's focused on building
one end to end model that they licensed to OEMs.
And we will be responsible essentially for
All the demand.
So there are gonna be lots of bottles, but I don't think it's gonna be black or white, which is
Do we only compete?
Or do we only work together?
We think there's gonna be an amalgamation of business models. There already is in travel, there already is in food.
Same thing will happen in transportation. What's your pre mortem for this going wrong?
It's five years from now and Uber has screwed up this opportunity. What do you think the most likely reason for it is?
I don't think it's necessarily Uber thing. I a big question for the industry. You've seen
How
powerful AI is.
But at the same time, how unpopular it is with the general public.
And
folks like you and me in the corporate world we're just amazed and we're driving utilization at
The way that these AI models interact with the average person is yeah, search got a little bit better.
But if it's driving up, or I think it's going to drive up my electricity costs, or if it's gonna cost my cousin's job.
That doesn't feel that good.
And I think the same will be true of A Bs, which is
It's terrific technology. It is going to be safer than human beings.
But how does it interact with emergency service providers?
How do we make sure that the technology is available to everybody, not just the wealthy?
We've got to have these dialogues with regulator.
With real people living in cities with our drivers whose earnings may get affected now.
drivers in Austin and Atlanta, where we have two big partnerships with Waymo.
drivers on the Uber platform, they're making more money.
The number of drivers joining the platform is increasing.
because it looks like A Vs are actually adding incremental demand to the platform.
So we have good news early.
But we've got to communicate and we've got to go at the pace that society is.
Prepared for us to move.
Otherwise there will be a backlash and
You're kinda seeing in a some of the
Public perception out there.
I'm sure your answer is something like not on my watch, but if I were to assume that the public
out of your control thing is solved.
Can you imagine what
The same pre mortem answer would be
Through something that you do control.
Think it's what I said, access to supply. And that's why we have a partnership with basically every A V provider, whether it's in mobility or delivery or even freight.
We need access to supply and we're investing.
Time we're investing capital.
And I think we're in a great position.
to make sure that we are the largest amalgamator of A V supply, just like we are the largest amalgamator of
transportation services around the world.
We now assume the the success scenario where Uber is the clear demand aggregator winner of A Vs.
What does that
unlock, do you think, on the other side of that?
Whether that's consumer experiences or or other things that aren't currently possible.
We think it's another trillion dollar marketplace. We think that over a long period of time.
as we see the cost of A V software come down. And usually
We see the cost of hardware come down. This is universal, but usually thirty to forty percent.
Per generation. We think um the lucid mid size that they are building for us in Neuro together.
It'll be sixty, seventy thousand dollar car.
А до канц прийз
You can actually bring the cost of transportation down.
for the population, and what we see is as we bring the cost of our services down.
Demand goes up.
Uber was introduced early on, people were sizing the market.
Based on the taxi market.
Were multiple times bigger than the taxi market.
And I see the same potential with A V, both in terms of the cost of transportation, reliability.
Safety
All of which are going to improve.
And then think about delivery.
If delivery is done with a drone
And instead of a twenty five minute to thirty minute delivery, you get habituated.
The magic is a ten to fifteen.
Minute delivery.
Cheaper?
Faster.
better, it will change how
Society operates.
Do you think there should be some sort of Foxconn like business for A Vs?
The stat I heard in San Francisco, someone asked me the quiz question of how many women's do you think are driving around? And I overestimated by some crazy percentage. I was really surprised by that. And so it seems like
You can be hyper efficient with these things.
Which is cool. But the downside of that is maybe you can't hit your amount of production to get this cost down and all this sort of thing. Should there be a Foxconn contract manufacturer type thing?
For A V.
It's happening as we speak.
Any of the OEMs, the traditional OEMs that we're talking to.
are now seeing that el four
driving is absolutely a reality that is much closer than they think and
And
seeing the services and how popular they are with consumers.
They are investing in L4 ready systems.
So I think you'll see the traditional players
Get there over the next
Two to four years.
Right now the cars are being manufactured in the hundreds and the thousands.
It'll get to the tens of thousands, it'll get to the hundreds of thousands.
Each of these vehicles probably drives three to four times.
What a human does.
So the
efficiency and efficacy of one A V vehicle is substantially higher than a human based on how much humans drive as well.
And then we are seeing
newer generation companies coming in.
All the Fox Cons now.
The Foxcons exist in China. The Chinese players in terms of their capabilities and bill of materials.
Із інкреди, інкреди опросив.
And we need that kind of a low cost player in the Western hemisphere.
It's being worked on, but we're not there yet. The Chinese capabilities in terms of manufacturing, both in terms of quality.
And cost at this point is unrivaled.
Can you teach me about drones? I'll never forget that Amazon video from like 10 years ago.
Where it feels like, oh my God, the future's happening, it's coming, my drone's getting me my sandwich in five minutes or whatever, and no drone has yet to show up at my house. What's the story with?
the technology. I've watched Zipline very closely. I think that's a really interesting company. It seems
Obvious and yet it hasn't happened and I'm curious
If you could teach us why that is.
The biggest issue is battery density and the ability of essentially battery to lift itself and then lift the payload and what that payload looks like and then
the requisite range and recharging needs of those drones as well.
Joby is building drones for people.
That's happening.
And I think drones for
Food and other grocery are going to start
hitting
real scale over the next two to five years.
It is going to cost more than a human delivery to start with.
But the ramp the technology in terms of
payloads being larger in terms of being able to operate in whatever
whether there is, and then being able to very, very accurately get you a payload right in front of your house.
all of it is moving in the right direction. So
Is it gonna be a big part of our lives two years from now? No.
About five to ten years from now?
It's gonna become more and more normal.
I'm always really interested in the regional differences as well. I'm curious what you've learned watching A V start to happen in the US versus Europe versus the Mid East and anywhere else that you know you've had the experience.
What is regional differences teaching you?
Middle East is going fast.
So the Middle East, especially if you look at
Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Saudi Arabia.
They are on it. The regulators are
Very entrepreneurial.
They want to lean into new technology.
So you're gonna see those services.
They are happening today. No vehicle operators in Abu Dhabi, Dubai.
The US is certainly happening, the California's of the world, Texas is of the world, but we wanna make sure kind of the right discussions are happening at at a regulatory level. It's gonna take longer in a New York. It's gonna take longer in a Boston, for example.
And Europe is starting to happen.
We are starting commercial
Robo taxi.
In Europe, and I think we will have pilots.
For example, in London before the end of the year. So Europe is starting to recognize that they can't be left behind.
European OEMs.
certainly are a huge player in terms of manufacturing capability and employment in Europe as well.
So Europe is cashing out.
Another interesting like US versus international story with Uber has been
As you've gone international with Uber Eats specifically. Yes.
You've actually won or gotten to the number one position.
More often.
I'm curious what the US experience in that category has taught you that's impacted how you approach strategy when going to an international market.
The basics are the same. You've got to get selection right, you've got to sign up your merchants and
When I look at the serviceable addressable market in the cities in which we operate.
probably signed up around forty to fifty percent of the restaurants and or merchants that can be on our platform.
So it's about
getting uh selection and then making sure that you've got the right reliability every time when you order something, we get it right. We don't make mistakes, we deliver it to you within
Thirty minutes.
And for us, our magic sauce is cross platform.
We started with mobility.
And we are now able to increasingly
Upsell the mobility customer the delivery product.
Ветер орнатион Убер і.
Or they actually when you open your mobility app now on Uber, you're gonna see Eats right there.
And about thirteen percent of East bookings are actually coming from the mobility business.
in larger international markets and the US.
You've gotta get the basics right, but the platform for us is a structural advantage we have.
versus other model players. We get a bunch of
Free customers from our mobility business.
And then we have our Uber One membership program.
fifty million members now.
growing fifty percent year on year.
Every company has a membership program.
But the way I look at it is we're kinda like Netflix.
For the same price you get more content than anyone else.
You get discounts on mobility, you get search protection.
You get free delivery, you get no fees on grocery sixty dollars or more.
now you're getting ten percent back on your hotel. So
If we can build this
loyalty program that is just bigger than anyone else's.
And we have this cross platform magic.
We think we can get to the number one position.
And at the same time have higher margins than our competitors and we're proving it out in market after market after market.
So much of the story is being good at getting the supply.
What does excellence look like there?
What makes
the best parts of Uber that do this the best.
What makes them stand out? What is the key to being great at aggregating supply?
I think honestly we're okay at it.
I think we can get a lot better at it. I think one is
I want to get more of our team members.
To put themselves in the shoes.
Over suppliers to drive more.
to go stand behind the counter of a restaurant.
All of our employees are crazy users of Uber Eats and Uber Rides.
But we don't put ourselves in the shoes of our merchants.
After Covid.
partially because I was going fricking crazy at home.
But partially because I wanted to understand, well, what does a driver career experience feel like?
I bought an e bike and started delivering food in San Francisco.
And
Our drivers and couriers and merchants are on our platform.
Much longer than the typical consumer. Typical consumer, year in, year out, maybe use us once a day, twice a day.
Hopefully three times a day.
But the interaction is like thirty second interaction.
A driver will have her app.
Open.
Six hours, eight hours, ten hours a day.
And as a result, the premium that we have to put on quality, making sure everything goes right.
Like a P ninety five bug?
happen to consumers.
Once a month, maybe for a loyal consumer.
A P ninety five buck is happening.
Every single week.
for a driver who's on the app six hours a day.
We are getting much better.
We've got to put ourselves in the shoes.
of our merchant partners, of our delivery partners.
I learned so much delivering food.
those couple of years in San Francisco driving people on my Tesla in San Francisco.
I think that's what it takes to be a better
Builder.
and be better at amalgamating supply, so to speak.
We have a value at our company which is building with heart.
I'm an engineer at heart. I'm very numerical in how I look at things.
But
There's a craft building.
There's a humanity in our service.
And we have to make sure that we keep building with heart and I think we can get better there.
What surprised you most when you were doing the deliveries, all that experience?
How hard it was.
Going into the restaurant, figuring out where to pick up, making sure that you got your orders right.
About fifty percent of her orders are batched.
So actually you pick up two deliveries sometimes at the same restaurant or another restaurant.
And just making sure that you get everything right. There's a reason why things go wrong in the real world.
There's a lot to process for couriers for drivers, and then you have to deal with the real world traffic as well.
So just all of the things that you have to process for a consumer
You push a button, car shows up, you push a bun, your food shows up.
It's all easy.
But for that driver and courier, there's a lot more going on and processing everything.
Can be a challenge.
The thing that you said is interesting is the membership concept, fifty million people.
It feels like this is the feature every big business with lots of people on it would want.
And some of them have been great stories in business history, Costco and Amazon.
What does each side get out of a great membership program and how much do you have to tweak and design that thing versus it being kind of straightforward of what people want?
We've been at it for a while.
The ideal membership program is one where
Essentially, you have a fixed cost base.
So a Netflix.
is investing a certain amount in programming
and the cost of selling a membership is customer acquisition.
And there is no cost for the services that you render.
There's no variable cost for the services you render.
the benefits of membership programs, travel membership programs are often
Upgrade to rooms that were empty anyway.
or upgrades to seats that were empty anyway. So
Those membership programs are ideal, and that's why membership started.
in the travel business and entertainment, for example, as well.
Cable is a membership program, if if you want to call it that.
It becomes much more challenging if the cost to serve is a variable cost. And I think Amazon is the first one that took that on.
Which is the cost of an Amazon Prime membership.
is higher the more you use that membership.
And
Amazon was able to walk through this valley of despair.
As
Many people in the public markets didn't understand what it was doing and the losses kept increasing.
But they understood the юніт.
economics of membership and they stuck with it and they were able to brave through those early days.
And I took a lot of inspiration from that example.
In the early days of Uber One and when we acquire member.
You're less profitable. We're essentially trading. We're making a prediction which is
you're gonna spend more on our platform, even though your first transaction, second transaction, third transaction is gonna be much less profitable because we're giving you back a bunch of money.
over the lifetime you will be more profitable.
And we're seeing that. So the membership program took some time to get up to speed.
It is solidly profitable now, but the first year of membership is a year where we lose money on you.
But we're gonna make money on you two, three, four years from now.
The next leg of hooking this platform up to the entire real world is hotels. So interesting that you've gone full circle.
Walk us through the decision logic here.
I have a question behind the question, which is how you decide to do these big things in the first place.
We started the conversation with used to have this bet sport at Spotify. There's all these different ways that capital allocators decide what to bet on. I'd like to talk about
that strategy as well, but starting with hotels.
Why do it in the first place? What was your thinking?
We tend to be pretty dat oriented and
What we've seen, and it's relatively obvious, is that
People who travel a lot tend to use Uber a lot. We're available in over seventy countries.
What's the first thing that you do when you land at an airport often is you open up your Uber app.
Just last year we completed one and a half
billion trips for people outside of their home city. About fifteen percent of our trips are to and from airports. So
We can identify travelers. It was a use case that was a headline use case. Can we start thinking to ourselves?
Hey, what more can we do for the travelers? And what differentiates Uber from some of the other places.
Again.
It's not just about the booking experience, but it's about
delivering that experience in a reliable way in the real world. We also go much deeper into the fulfillment stack than that say the typical
Online travel agent.
We decided as you're able to target more, et cetera.
Let's look at other travel products. Started with trains.
We've launched it in the UK and Spain.
And we saw the same thing that we see over and over again, which is
The more you interact with our platform, the more services you have, the more you interact with those services, the more you come back.
So more content.
meant more retention.
And so we said, Well
What content can we find and travel?
It was very natural for us to go into hotels.
It's a high value decision that you're making.
We went out there talked to the various
Travel companies.
to make sure that we had the best supply in the business and
We happened to make a deal with Expedia, my old company.
And we're essentially
giving the vast majority of the economics of that deal.
back to Uber One members. The design spec of hotels is
Again, how can I make sure that as a person your life is more deeply integrated with our services?
Ten percent off hotels, twenty percent off.
Ten thousand hotels.
That's a great deal that you're not gonna find elsewhere. And it's another reason for you to join Ober One.
What's the idealized end state of that part of your business five years hence or ten years hence?
For me, the idealized and said is obviously we want to bring a lot of value to you.
As it relates to the booking experience.
But I want the value to carry into the market.
You book a hotel in San Francisco.
We go through your email if you open up for us and we
already collect your information on your flight.
We pre book an Uber to the airport.
We pre book an Uber from the airport to your hotel because we already know where you're staying.
And ideally
When you get to the hotel, we know you're approaching the hotel, either we give the front desk a heads up
that you're going to be there, Patrick is gonna be there, I know you.
You know.
We allow you to completely bypass the front desk, go to your room, maybe you can use your Uber app as a key.
I want to bring some in market magic to you as part of your travel experience.
Were already part of your experience in city.
The richer we can make that experience, the better.
We're starting with the booking, we've got to start someplace.
But that's the Uber magic I wanna bring to you.
I have the same premise question, which was if this doesn't work, why would that be the case? It would have to go wrong.
I'd say two things. One is
We have debated in the past
Вена
people's interaction models with their service can change from on demand.
plant.
People get very wet. Like our brand has always been known as on demand. Push a button.
Get a car, push a button, get your delivery.
There was a question mark, could we go from on demand to planned?
And we started moving in that direction with actually Uber Reserve. In the olden days, Uber Reserve actually we allowed you to reserve a car, but it was kind of a
on demand dispatch
to try to get you that car when you expected it to be there.
We have changed the back end to really drive reliability ninety nine plus percent. So
We're pre-booking with a driver, the driver accepts, make sure the driver is there before reserve, et cetera.
And reserve now is
Over five billion dollar run rate.
It didn't exist five, six years ago.
If we gave a tangible benefit, in this case higher reliability for higher price.
Clearly we were able to move both demand and supply. Drivers weren't a
pre commit to your trip.
So that gave us the opening to say
Wow, this pre commit thing is another angle that we can explore.
and travel became natural for us. So
I think the question is
Is reserving your ride just fundamentally different from thinking about your vacation two or three months from now.
Can we stretch that pre commit and can we stretch a brand?
In that temporal direction.
I think it's an open question. I think we can.
We're giving you great deals.
To make that plan on Uber, but it's not a slam dunk.
What have you learned about marketing excellence?
Two sources of the question. One is just marketing Uber in general.
But the second is as you do more and more stuff.
Making sure that even your customers know that it exists. It's a I didn't know that this was
a thing that existed. So
It's an interesting question about how you do both the brand
staying top of everyone's mind, but also the very tactical specific. We have this cool new thing now that you should try.
Totally. The surface that we have on this phone is very limited. And
I've changed my mind on this. Originally I had the hypothesis which is
The marketing teams
job is to get as many people onto the apps as possible.
And then it's a product team's job.
To
surface the right product to you at the right time. And a small example of that is
with reserve now we offer the ability for you to order hot coffee.
And the driver goes out and picks up the coffee wherever, and then it's kinda cool, you have a cup of coffee if you're on the way to the airport.
The гоol ізn'
to get you coffee on that ride.
The goal is
To make you understand that
You can get coffee on Uber.
And or
Other stuff. It's not about the ride. It's about the lifetime value, the interaction, the
Introduction of a new service.
Not in a way that feels like an upsell to you.
But feels delightful. This is really cool. Uber knows me. Why not do more with that?
All of the different irrations that you can drive on the app.
I have always been much more product led. So let's build this from a product lad standpoint. And the job of marketing is just to get people to the app.
Бат
My marketing team.
Who told me I was an idiot and I loved it.
They are building out
Storylines.
Uber teens.
Getting your kid from their game home.
And the human interaction of when your kid comes home.
Either if they did well in that.
game or not well in that game.
There are very human stories that are part of Uber in every way.
Our marketing team are telling the stories about teens.
about a reserve about grocery delivery and the convenience then.
And those stories are helping people realize that Uber
isn't just about getting a ride, it's about
giving you your time back across a broad array of services.
On a local basis.
What do you think is more likely in seven years? That I do that
whatever the next great version of that coffee thing is, or that I just type into my Uber text, I want a card this time and I want a coffee.
I think you'll be talking to you in seven years. I think you're gonna have apps because there's many circumstances where
the communication back to you is much more efficient in the written word or in pictures. It's not compelling to say your Uber six minutes away, seeing the picture and being able to
track the car. So I think the
Inbound interaction.
is going to
move more and more away from apps. I think people are gonna use apps, but the inbound interaction is gonna be much more unstructured.
And AI makes it possible. You historically built UIs.
for a specific interaction based on
optimizing for the overall average. Our booking experience on Uber
It may not be optimized to you exactly.
But it's optimized the overall averages through lots of iteration, lots of testing.
And there's only one way in. Now we're gonna personalize it.
So when you land in a city, Uber's gonna be different for you than
When you're going to work.
But the interaction that agents are gonna make possible through AI and through words are going to be incredibly
Think about the people that have influenced you the most. What did you learn from Barry Diller?
He's incredible. He's been my business mentor and in many ways a personal mentor as well. I'd say that the thing that I learned from Barry is
The value of getting
The truth.
From the source material.
The way that I first met Barry, I was a analyst at Allen and company.
working on the LBO model for Paramount. There was a hostile tender offer, Viecom and Paramount.
I was building out the LCMP. Yeah, exactly.
And
Barry didn't want to talk to the M D or the VP or the social. He's like, Who built the model?
I'm gonna talk to that guy'cause if I'm gonna
raise billions of dollars in debt. I wanna know I'm good for. And I just remember I was like,
sweating. I was so nervous. I'm like trying to print out this model and
It took him through it and he wanted to hear
straight from the source and every time
I've witnessed them and I work
for him for twenty plus years.
It's the filtering.
That gets the edge out of
the story or out of the situation. And it's often the edge that gives you an edge. Not the average. Everyone is going to have the same
reaction to the average.
It's what's that twenty percent? What's that P ninety five situation? So Barry always insisted on going to the source.
Getting unfiltered data.
It was sometimes unpleasant. It took more time.
But
Getting to the ground truth.
would help his decision making.
And would allow'em to give them edge to kind of
Go against the grain. And I've taken that with me.
I've seen in larger companies, most people who run companies
They're smart.
They're capable, they're driven.
And the failure most that I see with most companies is that
The higher up your organization often
You get a very thin layer of what's going on. Yeah. And everything has been processed for you. Like my schedule today, it's determined by
A bunch of well meaning people.
Who want to give me the best information and have me
Use my time in the best way.
But it's processed.
And so it's very important for you to cut through
that process sometimes and get to that ground truth.
You've got to create some randomness in your interactions in your information flow.
And Barry
Often painfully.
Drove to that source.
And it's always for me been very, very important part of how I manage, which is
That's what it
Get to the truth.
is first of all, as a leader, tell the truth.
I'm brutally frank with my team. What's going on? What's a good, what's a bad, what's okay.
Where do I not know the answers?
And that helps me then get that truth back from them.
Sometimes requires me to dig and that can be unpleasant both for me and the team.
But getting to the ground truth, I think, is something that I learned for Barry.
And it's always stuck with me.
What did you learn from the Allen's, both the second and the third?
Herbert Allen.
very, very early on, he always told me that he makes bets on people.
Not companies. And you see that with Alons. Like they're so loyal. They build friendships and then they stay with those friendships.
And Herbert always told me companies can do well during periods or companies can do poorly during periods, but great people always stay great.
And I'm gonna make a bet on people.
I'm like twenty something. I'm like, Yes, sir, Mr. Allen.
It's a great learning that is kind of soaked into me thirty years too late.
Regardless of the circumstance, I made a bet on Barry.
I was going to stay at our own company for
All my life, but he was the one guy.
that I told myself, if I have an opportunity to work with that one person and it was not my salary was gone. It went through this
completely entrepreneurial new entity that he was building.
But I'd bet on a person.
And in my life
My bets on people and those personal bets are probably
The best ones I made.
Daniel has this thing that he's famous for, which is that he would go shadow. I think he might still do it.
go shadow CEOs of companies for long periods of time and watch how they operate and work.
So if I were to go ask the same question I'm asking you about Barry and the Allen.
But that's the question about you.
What do you think if I were to shadow you for a couple of weeks?
I would take away from how you prosecute.
Your life.
What do you think the ingredients that I could take away for
My own recipe. What do you think I'd write it down? I think number one is the transparency that I talked about. I want the truth from everybody and I tell the truth. I'm very, very open to the company.
Whatever level that I taught to.
I have a lot of fun working with our product leads and engineers.
That is the best part of my job.
The last thing I say is you see a lot of random interactions.
I don't want to have too structured a day.
I don't want to meet with just my direct reports.
I build out random interactions within the company.
So that I get that information as well. Is the same that I say, like
I look for the troublemakers in the company.
As companies get larger.
There's always this incentive for people to get along.
You have a single culture.
Everyone is true to the culture of the company. There are processes that get built.
There are certain ways of interacting.
And certainly the troublemakers often get chased away.
I wanna find those troublemakers and I wanna bring'em in.
Because
Every company's like an organism.
Organisms evolve by mutating.
And companies that don't mutate.
That just
sit and with a single process, with a single information flow.
Those are the companies that die.
So I'm looking for those mutations, I'm looking for those trouble makers constantly.
And that requires random interactions that
are less efficient than the structured processes that have been put in front of me.
But it's those random interactions that often give me the best signal that
Sometimes I may not act on it, but I'll take it in.
At some point if the signal becomes strong enough, I'll move.
That's a cool idea that the troublemakers are the mutations.
Companies need to change. And by the way, with AI now, the rate of change
inside companies in terms of how information flows.
in terms of how we work every single day, the rate of change uh is accelerated by five X.
And it's the companies that are comfortable with that change.
That are going to adapt.
to this new reality.
And the companies that are like, Hey, we do things a certain way.
They're gonna have a hard time.
One of my favorite charts from this era of business has been the
time series of capex of the big technology companies where it all looks like this except for Apple that just looks like this.
They basically haven't changed. They've decided not to play the specific game. And the debate around Uber early on was like, Well, these guys ever make any money. They're losing money on all these rides, blah, blah, blah. Now you've got 10 billion dollars plus free cash flow. So you're a capital allocated.
And you have to make a decision of what to do with this money in this high rate of change environment.
How do you prosecute that decision? You've done big buybacks, you've authorized really big buybacks before, which traditionally have done really good things for shareholder value and things like this through business history. But now you have all these opportunities to spend money.
To expand demand, to get new supply, to use these new technologies.
How do you weigh the trade off between old school stuff like buybacks and free cash flow generation and share reduction and things like that, with just wow, this is the most interesting investing.
Guess I'm asking are you Amazon or are you Apple?
Somewhere in between. And I take capital allocation.
I think it's more of an art versus a science. You can
read papers on it, but I think
You have to use your judgment in real life.
And my view is that
My priority is first organic.
investment and growth.
Uber Eats when I joined was
doing under a billion dollars in gross bookings, it's over a hundred billion now.
That took an enormous amount of organic investment. Now the company has cash flow beyond that organic investment in
The math is simple, which is you want to make sure that your costs grow slower than your revenue and good things happen over a long period of time.
And I think for me
Because I came from
Banking, I'm very comfortable with the power of compounding.
And so the first thing is you just have to get your core metrics right.
Starting with the user matrix.
get to the financial metrics, make sure your expenses
Unless there's a long term benefit or growing slower than your
Revenue duh?
And when it comes to excess capital.
Today our priorities are gonna be
Keep building the services that we're building now.
Invest in algorithms, invest in
More engineers.
We are hiring.
And then really invest in the new realities of A V.
whether it's investments in our partners.
Or it's making commits to tens of thousands of A V vehicles.
Those
Commitments will be financialized. We just announced a deal with Santander, for example, to finance
both E Vs and A Vs.
But
We've got to be the ones developing the market.
So we are going to make those capital commitments.
And the fortunate thing in all this is
We've got
Plenty of cash left over for buybacks. But
I prioritize growth, I prioritize innovation over buybacks.
If you're building the company right.
You'll do both.
You strike me as a very confident but not cocky
person and leader.
What if anything are you insecure about?
in the business or as a leader.
Right now.
I'm not insecure, so to speak, but I'm curious. Again, I'll go back to Barry.
I found in my life that
The more successful you are
The more you tend to talk.
And the less you tend to listen. Totally. I see executives who
They don't want to be talked back to.
Because they view
Don't you know who I am? I've got authority and authority.
doesn't mean that you're right, but so many people do.
Embarry's the opposite.
If you get into argument with him and oh my God, it's gonna be unpleasant, but you bang it out, and at the end of that conversation, minority of time, but sometimes it happens, he realizes he's wrong. He's delighted, he lights up.
Because he just learned what kind of a world is an interesting world if you're right all the time.
The magic happens when you learn
So for me
It's not that I'm not confident. I'm confident
I'm comfortable in my own skin.
But I'm a learning creature. And for me the delight comes from learning.
And often that learning has the kind of pain.
And the pain of being wrong.
The pain of hearing something that you don't want to hear.
The pain of something unexpected happening today or tomorrow or the next day.
That's what gets me going and
If I'm not wrong, if I'm not making mistakes, it's just not very interesting.
I've loved the Barry story so much. Is there anyone else that comes to mind as someone that's just heavily influenced?
your way of thinking or behaving.
I'm a bit of a student of business, came from my investment banking background. I just love how companies
Shape themselves.
But I'd say one CEO who I really admire is Reed, who built Netflix into the company that it is
He is so logical. I think I watched him talking with you a while ago.
He is so logical and structured in his thinking.
But at the same time
He's an engineer.
But then once in a while he's a gambler.
And some of those don't work. Like he was talking about some of the gambles that didn't work. So
I find that there's a superpower in being
structured in your thinking.
But then not too structured.
In that you're always going with a flow.
to be able to again listen to the troublemakers and have those wild
Ideas
outside of the conventional wisdom.
those two often go together. You need the crazy scientists to do so.
Reed is anything but a crazy scientist, but he has innovated in a very structured, deliberate way and
I love what he did with his company and as a person.
I just love how he thinks.
So you're a student of businesses and I think Uber is just one of the most interesting business stories by all accounts.
The way that Travis willed this thing into existence as just like a breakdown walls entrepreneur. And then the way that you've matured it into this behemoth of a business and all these exciting new things. It's so cool to hear about. Firsthand, I love doing this with you. When I have these conversations, I asked everyone the same traditional closing question. What is the kindest thing that someone's done for you?
I guess it's Sid, my wife, taking me in.
We talked about my origin where I came from and having a chip on the shoulder and until I met her
I was always living the life
than I thought I was supposed to.
And I was always the person who I thought you wanted me to be.
When I met her and observed her, she was always the same person with me.
With the kids.
With her friends.
Or the Sun Valley Conference where there are like these unbelievably accomplished billionaires around.
She was always the same core person. She never changed who she was.
And meeting her and seeing her.
Operate.
I think finally allowed me to
Be the person I wanna be.
versus the person I thought I was supposed to be, and that was a gift and a kindness that I could never replace. I have a shockingly similar experience with my wife. It's a beautiful place to end. Thanks so much for your time.
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