Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:49:36 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Dara Khosrowshahi
[00:49:36] S0: Your finance team isn't losing money on big mistakes. It's leaking through a thousand tiny decisions nobody's watching. Ramp puts guardrails on spending before it happens. Real time limits, automatic rules, zero firefighting. Try it at ramp.com/invest. As your business grows, Vanta scales with you, automating compliance and giving you a single source of truth for security and risk. Learn more at vanta.com/invest. Every investment firm is unique and generic AI doesn't understand your process. Rogo does. It's an AI platform built specifically for Wall Street connected to your data, understanding your process, and producing real outputs. Check them out at rogo.ai/invest. The best AI and software companies from OpenAI to Cursor to Perplexity use WorkOS to become enterprise ready overnight, not in months. Visit workos.com to skip the unglamorous infrastructure work and focus on your product. Ridgeline is redefining asset management technology as a true partner, not just a software vendor. They've helped firms five x in scale, enabling faster growth, smarter operations, and a competitive edge. Visit ridgelineapps.com to see what they can unlock for your firm. 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. [00:50:58] S2: It's such a frustration.
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?
00:54:11 · Dara Khosrowshahi
[00:54:11] S2: 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, Viacom and Paramount. I was building out the LBO sure. Right? Yeah. Exactly. And Barry didn't want to talk to the MD or the VP or the associate. He's like, who built the model? I'm gonna talk to that guy because if I'm gonna raise billions of dollars in debt, I wanna know I'm good for it. And I just remember I was like sweating. I was so nervous. I'm trying to print out this model, and I took him through it. And he wanted to hear straight from the source. And every time I've witnessed them and I worked 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 20%? What's that P95 situation? 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 him to give them an 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 modes that I see with most companies is that the higher up your organization, often you get a very thin layer That's of good 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 and 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 the best way to 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?
00:56:33 · Dara Khosrowshahi, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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, think is something that I learned for Barry and it's always stuck with me. [00:56:52] S0: What did you learn from the Allens, both the second and the third? [00:56:56] S2: Herbert Allen, very, very early on, he always told me that he makes bets on people, not companies. And you see that with the Allens. Like they're so loyal, they build friendships, 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. And I'm like 20. I'm like, yes, sir, mister Allen. It's a great learning that has kinda 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 enough. My salary was gone. I 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've made.