Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:12:05 · Dara Khosrowshahi, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:12:05] S2: 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 is awfully competitive. A lot of Iranian immigrants have come here to The US and many parts of the world have been extraordinarily successful. And, 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. [00:12:34] S0: And the selfish question because I have kids, you know, they're growing up fast. How do you think about 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 gonna have an experience like that, that might shape them in a similar way. How do you think about that as a dad?
00:12:54 · Dara Khosrowshahi, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:12:54] S2: I'm 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 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. 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 going to 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 curveballs. [00:14:04] S0: Yeah. Speaking of curveballs and challenges, if we zoom all the way to today, it's gotta be curious if you think so. It seems to me from the outside, like the most interesting time to be running this business. Oh [00:14:13] S2: my God. Yeah.
00:14:13 · Dara Khosrowshahi, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:14:13] S2: my God. Yeah. [00:14:14] S0: Because their opportunity is so massive, the threats are real, the new entrants are fascinating, AVs we'll 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?
00:14:28 · Dara Khosrowshahi
[00:14:28] S2: I tell you that every single year that I've been in 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, challenge of 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 determinative structure in terms of the interaction with the 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. But 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 value, 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, and 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.
00:15:54 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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00:17:06 · Dara Khosrowshahi, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:17:06] S2: I'm not a top down driver, so to speak. We have a bottoms up culture, which is I want people inventing all over the company. I don't want to be that single point of failure. Obviously, the CEO is important for the company, so I hesitate to drive mandates. And I would 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 I'm 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 optimize 20% of it, 30% 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 principles standpoint and the impact of AI on those. [00:18:20] S0: What's the most amazing thing you've seen someone do with the technology at Uber?