Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:46:52 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Dara Khosrowshahi
[00:46:52] S0: What's the idealized end state of that part of your business, five years hence or ten years hence? [00:46:57] S2: For me, the idealized end state 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, 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 going to be there and know you. Or 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. We're already part of your experience in city. The richer we can make that experience, the better. We're starting with a booking. We've got to start someplace. But that's the uber magic I want to bring to you. [00:47:54] S0: I have the same pre mortem question, which was if this doesn't work, why would that be the case? It would have to go wrong.
00:47:59 · Dara Khosrowshahi
[00:47:59] S2: I'd say two things. One is we have debated in the past whether or not people's interaction models with our service can change from on demand to planned. 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 an 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 99 plus percent. So we're pre booking with the driver. The driver accepts, makes sure the driver is there before reserve, etcetera. And reserve now is over $5,000,000,000 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 want to pre commit to your trip. 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 your 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.
00:49:36 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Dara Khosrowshahi
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00:50:58 · Dara Khosrowshahi, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:50:58] S2: It's such a frustration. [00:51:00] S0: Didn't know that this was a thing that existed. So it's an interesting question about how you do both the brand, staying on top of everyone's mind, but also the very tactical specific, we have this cool new thing now that you should try.
00:51:11 · Dara Khosrowshahi
[00:51:11] S2: Totally. 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 team's 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 a hot coffee and the driver goes out and picks up the coffee wherever. And then it's kind of cool. You have a cup of coffee if you're on the way to the airport. The goal isn't 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 them? All of the different interactions that you can drive on the app. I have always been much more product led. So let's build this from a product led standpoint, and the job of marketing is just to get people to the app. But 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.
00:53:00 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Dara Khosrowshahi
[00:53:00] S0: 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. Want a car at this time and I want a coffee. [00:53:10] S2: I think you'll be talking [00:53:10] S0: to Uber twice in seven years. [00:53:12] S2: I think you're going to 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 is six minutes away seeing the picture and being able to track the car. I think the inbound interaction is going to move more and more away from apps. I think people are going to use apps, but the inbound interaction is going to 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 to overall averages through lots of iteration, lots of testing. And there's only one way in. Now we're going to personalize it. So when you land in a city, Uber is going to be different for you than when you're going to work. But the interaction that agents are going to make possible through AI and through words are going to be incredible. [00:54:07] S0: Thinking about the people that have influenced you the most, what did you learn from Barry Diller?