SPEAKER_00: hey dara how are you i'm doing great how about you pretty great pretty great looks like i'm i'm stuck on another pod with two lunatics i don't know i was i was asking about this this is a real thing

SPEAKER_03: now it's amazing it's an experiment it's an experiment it's just a couple guys like it's a

SPEAKER_05: thing the the bill uh the girly in your is an experiment i love it this week in startups is

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SPEAKER_16: to this week in startup slash bg squared it's a little bit of an experiment we're doing here last week we got such a tremendous response to having uh two of my besties on the program and two legends

SPEAKER_17: here in silicon valley two of the greatest investors in the history of silicon valley of course brad

SPEAKER_18: gersner from altimeter and of course uh legendary venture capitalist uh bill gurley and friend of mine

SPEAKER_16: welcome back to the program thank you we decided this week we would try uh something new we decided we'd look for you know uh some operators people operating businesses maybe businesses at scale and see if there's anything we can learn uh from them and we thought you know interesting business

SPEAKER_18: that all three of us were involved in as investors is a taxi company called uber and their ceo dara kasar shahi is here with us how are you doing dara i am doing very well although i am quite nervous

SPEAKER_27: this is a very dangerous group to be talking about knowledge knowledge is not my friend right now but

SPEAKER_30: we'll see how it goes well easy to go up against the journalists right they have partial information

SPEAKER_18: you can use your charm but here you actually have quite paradoxically in some ways uh i was the third or fourth investor in uber bill and the seed round bill gurley of course did the series a and brad i'm not sure when you came in but i think it was when it was a private yeah yes we came in a couple rounds

SPEAKER_36: before they went public and then uh also were involved in the ipo and then have been very involved in

SPEAKER_17: the company ever since this has been quite a journey for this company we all backed it knowing that there was something special here all of us had a you know a different thesis about it but let's

SPEAKER_16: set the stage right now for uber going into 2024 the company had been pitched i think as it will never

SPEAKER_17: make money it's impossible to make money on this and great job i think dara in shepherding the company to profitability so maybe brad it would be good for you to maybe just talk a little bit about the

SPEAKER_39: the uber free cash flow story and pull up the slides while we set the stage here you know the

SPEAKER_41: interesting thing about uber is they were forced to get fit before everybody else because it's a

SPEAKER_36: travel company and covet hit in march of 2020 and dara i'm sure can tell the story but gross bookings turned upside down we still had excess capital and competition in the world and so if you look at this slide one uber free cash flow generation i think it really tells the story the company went from losing over two and a half billion or around two and a half billion when dara took over to profiting over three and a half billion and we're talking free cash flow this is not a bunch of manipulated you know kind of numbers you know last year and if you look at the consensus forecast for the business which is pretty mind-boggling it's estimated by the consensus that it'll reach almost 10 billion in free cash flow uh just a few years from now and then if you look at the second chart just on stock price and then you know kick it back over to dk but you know the stock price has reflected that there was a lot of questions jason as you talked i mean listen how many times did you and i and bill and dara talk about the fact that these headlines were that this was an impossible category would never be profitable but what really uh happened was this you know capital being used as a weapon of economic destruction

SPEAKER_46: destroying profits and so the second chart shows when that stopped happening when interest rates got real and dara's uh changes that he put in place kicked in you saw massive separation in terms of performance

SPEAKER_36: between uber and lyft and so maybe just dara take us through one or two of the key levers um and

SPEAKER_50: what part of the story maybe hasn't been told yeah absolutely uh so i i do think that the listen

SPEAKER_24: the early years with with uber we were engaging like everyone else especially private companies and private companies at scale and growth at all costs because you had this free money regime everybody was doing it uh and all valuations were based on growth rate and no one cared about profitability as long as you had some theoretical business model that you could show to investors and who who knew when when that when that would happen it kind of reminded me of um i think it was

SPEAKER_50: chuck prince he was ceo of uh citibank he's like when the music starts everyone has to get up and dance i think it was pre uh uh the real estate crash etc so i think the music was like really loud in

SPEAKER_24: the free money era and everybody was dancing and you know for us the music stopped earlier which was covid and literally overnight 85 of our business disappeared in terms of our rideshare business that was the profit generator at the time uh and it was a complete disaster and nobody knew when it was going to come back now our uber eats business actually grew and grew very very quickly uh but it was unprofitable business at the time it was much less mature uh etc so that was a toughest time in my career you know i never thought that i would come to uber to do a mass layoff but we laid off uh over 25 of our workforce when you lose 85 of your revenue you can't take kind of casual actions uh sort of speak and and more importantly than just cutting costs we actually completely got out of certain businesses or we decided to get out of certain businesses you know we were developing our own autonomous technology bill was not a fan of that and i remember uh and we totally got out of that business bikes and scooters hardware we really had to decide what our core skill set was and our core skill set is to build marketplaces matching supply and demand at great scale with the best matching and pricing technology than anyone else on earth because we've got the most uh data and so we really had to restrict back to our core and while it was very very painful and while i never want to go through that again one of the things that i sworn to myself and my team kind of we talked about it is we never ever want to have another layoff so post covid while a lot of companies started spending again when things started coming back we were actually very very disciplined in terms of costs uh and i think since 2019 you know our gross bookings have doubled but we've added about only 10 percent in terms of headcount and you know to your words brad we we stayed fit and listen it's it's been it hasn't been easy because there are a lot of demands on the team to do more and to grow the business and in the end for our business the first thing is growth right so if you look at this chart i won't comment on the the expectations but since 2017 we've more than doubled our audience this is even with covet right more than doubled our audience trips has grown about two and a half times gross bookings has grown you know basically three and a half times as well but we have the discipline as a company to keep headcount flat to be very very disciplined in investments that work that that we're making to stay in the area where we have clear advantages which is this marketplace science and a great consumer set of great consumer apps and a great set of uh earner apps and not getting out over skis and then very kind of having discipline on every single cost center right it's like credit card costs customer service costs like every single cost center for us has an owner there's real pride and i think that the heroes that the company aren't the people who you know are growing from 50 headcount to 100 headcount to 150 headcount they're the ones who keep driving and keep building and keep innovating with small teams you know the definition of heroes change within the company uh and i think the nice thing is that with success comes kind of the positive reinforcement that people are looking for and we definitely you know because we are multi-product and our rides rides business can help eats in terms of demand the east business can help our rides business in terms of supply the platform that we have the scale that we have we've you know the stock is definitely outperform

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SPEAKER_17: again that's gusto.com twist okay so bill gurley this is an incredible segue into when you hear dara and this level of competency uh and discipline and getting the company to this point uh it wasn't always that way it was a high growth company as we both know having having you know had a a seat at the table watching this you know in this massive zerp environment massive investment global takeover it was really inspiring i think uh what travis did in terms of building out the company and the speed at which he did it but you were intimately involved in dara getting selected for the slot can you take us back to the competition for the ceo slot at uber and maybe give us some inside information and take on

SPEAKER_67: what it was your champion of dara etc yeah and technically i was on the on the uh outside i wasn't great i wasn't on the board at the time matt kohler taking my spot but i would tell you this because

SPEAKER_70: i remember the conversations we had internally and there were really two issues or two two

SPEAKER_71: characteristics that we talked about that you would want in a ceo for this business and the first

SPEAKER_70: one was someone that could help put out the fire and there were a lot you know it's easy to it's easy to forget because of how far the companies come under dara's leadership just how many fires

SPEAKER_71: there were at the time but there were many states attorney generals that were upset with the company there were issues in london there was a we were losing you know market share because of what was

SPEAKER_70: going on with the brand and so it was it wasn't an easy decision i'm sure for dar just because there was

SPEAKER_71: so much work to do and then the second part was if someone could successfully put out all the fires

SPEAKER_72: you know how would you go about growing the business and would someone be be great at that

SPEAKER_74: and around that time around that time i i for some reason decided to tweet that i felt the business

SPEAKER_70: could be worth 100 billion one day and i i'm taking a lot of heat over the years for that assertion but when i was your 420 tweet yeah when i when i look and and look i think the pandemic you know made the the timing they took a little longer but when i look at where we are today and the company is today

SPEAKER_71: and 130 billion dollar market cap you know i have to give dar you know he's right here in front of us but i have to give them a plus on both of those those initiatives or characteristics that we're looking for

SPEAKER_70: so clearly the company made um the exact right choice um and it wasn't easy this this idea of competing when when capital's free we talk about the game on the field or zipper you know cash being everywhere i can remember being in it at the time and having the thought and i even had a chance to talk to some of the best business people in the history of the world they've never been through it like you could have grabbed you know warren buffett and jeff you grab all these people they haven't seen that game where where your competitor is willing to lose two billion dollars that was the first time in the history of business that people had faced something like that and so i think the degree of difficulty was you know super hard and it created um enemies of the company just for the burn alone i can remember how painful it was the morning of the ipo two legendary people from silicon valley were on cnbc just throwing shade for like three hours while they were trying to open the stock and and that was you know that was what was in vogue at the time um so it's really anyway massive hat tip dar it's really

SPEAKER_77: incredible how far the companies who was the close second bill who was the close second if there was

SPEAKER_70: the world i think meg and and jeff and all the names that were out there so yeah dara when you

SPEAKER_17: when you hear bill gurley's um sort of recap of that time period um when you had to make the decision and you're like this is going to be hard there's a lot of fires um and let's face it you you needed a

SPEAKER_16: wartime ceo to make uber even exist the fact is you had to take on every city you had to take on a lot of corruption medallions etc people who were incumbents didn't want to do this travis did an exceptional job of that but yeah it was pretty expansive and it was spending money so take us through your decision were you ever thinking this is not the juice ain't worth the squeeze here or this is just too hard i'm being set up to be the fall guy taking this company over there's just the

SPEAKER_17: cha and what did you think the chances were that you could get it to where it is now uh a little bit

SPEAKER_85: of a victory lap here it's actually funny that um and by the way we we don't count as a victory like

SPEAKER_24: every day can be a victory failure but i do remember i got a call from a headhunter at that point and my first reaction was like hell no like no way i'm i'm ceo of speedia love what i'm doing it's a great company i've been in the company for 12 13 years uh worked for a person who i i really admire barry diller um so so the initial answer was absolutely not uh but i i um i actually had drinks with the friend daniel ack who runs spotify and he's like dar i recommended you for this job i don't know where and i recommended you to this headhunter did you say yes and and uh and did he call you i'm like yeah but i said heck no and and daniel gave me a really hard time and i still remember he's like you know i i said i'm happy at xp he's like since when is life about happiness he did as like founder pitch right since when is life about happiness it's about impact and uber is you know one of the most impactful companies in the world and i would say that this is the magic of magical product right if i hadn't used uber myself if i didn't love the product and what it did for me and how it improved my life personally and how is an everyday part of my life no way i would have taken the job but the fact is that you know travis had to fight and do a lot of good and a lot of you know things that were actually cost his job in the end um but he built a company and he had to fight to build that company and yes there were messes that had to be cleaned up but but the service was a magical service it continues to be magical service and and and it was that impact in the end and it was that product in the end that convinced me you know what i think i can put out these fires i did not know everything and that's probably one of the reasons why uh i joined it's always harder on on the inside but it's been one of the greatest experiences of my professional life and i'd say like of my life it's uh it's been a great ride it's been a hard ride um but i don't i would never

SPEAKER_89: second chance that uh um uh that decision it was a great decision you seem like you wanted to add

SPEAKER_92: something there oh no i was thinking we we owe uh daniel a hat tip too i guess absolutely so i'm just

SPEAKER_96: upgrading to the family plan on spotify the random walk of life you know one of the lessons i think

SPEAKER_36: you know perhaps to come out of this i think you know at the time i was talking to dar i was talking to bill and others and whenever people brought up dar it was like oh he's running another globally complex travel business he's running expedius so that's why he mapped to potentially a good ceo but when you talk to bill gurley at the time bill's like that's not the most important thing right and i had done an interview with dar probably five four or five years before that and before we did the interview dar i don't know if you remember this at summit i asked you to take the enneagram and oh yeah dar on the enneagram is a number nine he's a peacemaker right and lots of presidents and ceos so ceos tend to fall in a couple buckets either a nine or an eight eight is kind of the frank slootman model of ceo nine is kind of the the peacemaker model and at that moment in time

SPEAKER_46: having a high integrity ceo with a north star that dar had who had dealt with really tough customers i mean yes barry diller is extraordinary but everybody knows barry is tough and victor kaufman were tough when you were cfo of usa networks and then you took the handoff from a very popular rich barton at expedia and doing that founder to ceo handoff which he had done before and we knew he was going to have to take the baton from an incredibly popular uh travis at uber and and be the ceo who

SPEAKER_36: came in after him so i would say that was the first thing for me that was the most important was who he was as a person and why that fit the needs of the company so much and the second one was which i think

SPEAKER_46: was deeply underappreciated but bill and i talked a lot about which was capital markets right dara understood capital markets he understood the value of capital assets both good and bad he understood the need to raise money and how to raise money he understood capital deployment he understood efficiency and delivering profitable growth and free cash flow because barry was you know uh you know so so instrumental in driving that 99 2000 when the world melted down it was diller who found his way

SPEAKER_36: through the door and dar was the cef cfo of that company and uber at the time was hemorrhaging cash needed to get rid of some divisions needed to focus on the core and so i think there was also a lot of confidence and a great fit in terms of your capital markets background and the needs of uber the private

SPEAKER_24: kind of spending as much as you can to put off competition like that was not my comfort zone you know i i was running a public company for 13 years and the public markets instill a disciplined is instill kind of return on uh invest the capital discipline that that i was quite comfortable in so i did have to play the game i did have to dance you know to to the music etc but this is this is like this is a great environment for me personally that i'm quite comfortable with and i'm glad that we made the transition i'm glad that we're in this environment but that you know the the free money environment

SPEAKER_51: some people had a party but it wasn't a party for me i'll tell you that listen not every business

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SPEAKER_39: qualify in less than two minutes uh girly i think this is sort of interesting for you and i to discuss

SPEAKER_17: having been there since the early days it wasn't clear to everybody until they used the product that it was magical i remember when i helped travis raise the first million dollars for the company i had 21 people at an event in uh san francisco and i said okay travis he says what do i do i said just demo the product and then tell them how much you're raising so he demoed in front of 21 investors and the demo dara you don't know the story so he took out his phone and he just said i'm ordering a cab and then he said hey everybody come to the window and everybody went to the window and they looked out the window and the cab was there and then three people i said who wants to invest and three of us raised our hand first round cyan banister myself 19 people said no it wasn't clear that this product was like as incredible as it was in until you used it uh and actually um started building it i'm curious in in

SPEAKER_16: having watched the zurp environment bill it seemed obvious to me when i watched uber go public and they were reporting oh we lost a billion dollars this quarter we did a billion rides and i just thought to myself well if you raised it two dollars would anybody stop taking ubers the answer was obviously no so why do you think there was such a messaging problem bill in terms of could this

SPEAKER_117: company ever be profitable wasn't it obvious to you bill that it would be well there's a is a really

SPEAKER_70: interesting um kind of mental math puzzle which is i used to talk with mike mosen about which is is a game theory question but if you had two companies who both believed in network effects and they were going to compete against each other how much would you spend to try and win and i think if you talk to game theorists you know you'd spend you know right up until you know you die like like like like because it's if you think it's winner take all like that's how it's going to play out and so to a certain extent mike and i had had that conversation prior to this environment showing up and then and then the real world example played out in the middle of it there were all kind of rationales that i think were wrong but like one of them was people would say oh this is a natural duopoly or triop like like with no it was just like airlines like with no no actual um rationale behind it they would just state that and so you know and it was an effort i think but but but but what finally happened i think dar mentioned moving into an environment he's more comfortable with interest rates finally came up money quit being free thankfully uh all the competitors went public i think because that helped and everyone decided that they wanted to see profitability and now you know i think you get into a position where you can see the power of the model you know david david sacks did that great napkin drawing years ago that i that i put in several of my blog posts on uber of why there would naturally be network effects because the more users the more drivers the more drivers the more coverage area faster pickup times it it's it it was meant to do this and it was meant to be profitable but when companies are losing tons of money and it was record levels of money it's very easy for the press or whoever else to say and look there have been plenty of businesses

SPEAKER_74: especially in like e-commerce and stuff where they lose a ton of money and they are selling dollars you know are selling dollars for 90 cents and they can't get to profitability so i think it's natural that people would have taken that that mindset but it's been i would tell you just as both as a shareholder and as a um kind of an intellectual business strategist i'm thrilled to

SPEAKER_124: watch this day finally arrive it's uh it is what i expected but boy it took a long time and it was

SPEAKER_126: frightening along the way and and bill and brad i'm curious and just one one comment and and this

SPEAKER_24: do you think that the valuations got into the mind of the finders or the founders of the companies because this is something that you know we were guilty of dancing as well right and part of it came

SPEAKER_50: from bill when you said this company can be worth 100 billion right and this is pre-ipo etc a lot of people made fun of you and to prove it to be true but like that goes into the back of my mind right and

SPEAKER_24: i'm like how big do i have to be in order to prove bill right and then like you actually start to do things to fit the valuation that someone made up for you and can that create poor behavior you know oh my god i've got to invest more in this business or oh my god i have to be an autonomous and i can't depend on an autonomous kind of environment like the way that we are doing right now so is there this like double loop which is not only is money free but then founders and or ceos have to do stuff to justify that elevated valuation so they actually lose discipline too 100 that is that is the negative

SPEAKER_36: reflexivity of an overpriced round i you know i i just posted in our other thread uh jason you know this uh this clip from silicon valley that's going viral oh they're sitting at the bar and they're

SPEAKER_46: talking about raised less money i i should have raised at a lower price he's like oh if i had raised a lower price i'd still have my job the company would have survived i would have never had to lay anybody off i wouldn't have had to spend money like a fool they nail it yet again the negative reflexivity that occurs when you have a headline valuation which by the way barely saves any dilution for most of these companies like if you actually do the dilution math on it it's really

SPEAKER_36: driven more by ego than it is is by dilution and we can because most of these companies aren't raising

SPEAKER_46: that much money but it what it does is it forces the business strategy to fit that outcome and worse yet dara not only do you have to get to that number you have to double that number so if the

SPEAKER_36: number is 100 billion you have to get to 200 billion if the number's a billion you got to get to 2 billion in order to raise your next round so i think it's one of the most nefarious things that occurred in the zerp environment and in 20 and 21 i remember talking to founders and i would say

SPEAKER_46: you're gonna snatch defeat from the jaws of victory here you're overpricing your company when interest rates go back up which they will as soon as cove it's over multiples will adjust down at that point in time you're going to be forced to do a 30 to 50 down round and very few silicon valley companies even the best ones survive the morale hit um and all of the challenges associated with the down round of that size and we've seen it happen and in fact we have over a thousand unicorns that are trying to work that out right now a lot of these really good companies but it's very tough when

SPEAKER_36: an instacart has to go from 39 billion to to six and a half billion so another way to frame this you

SPEAKER_70: know that and even before this all happened um this issue would come up is just and people that have been in public companies know this but but stock prices represent discounted future expectations and so if you raise a huge round the expectations in front of you are huge and to your point brad if you compound at a cost of capital of 15 over five years or whatever it's a doubling like that's what you got to get to and um too many i think founders lack of understanding it's really partially just financial like understanding how financial markets work right and and understanding you know and and if you don't have that experience you don't have that education there's no way to know another thing that really complicates um that this issue is secondaries um if founders are taking

SPEAKER_74: money off the table i have found them to be remarkably singularly focused let's say that

SPEAKER_135: it can be a distraction just right it can be a massive distraction yeah yeah well and they just

SPEAKER_71: get very price sensitive like it's it's all about the price all about price maximization and it's harder for them to think about these other issues that might affect the company in the future

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SPEAKER_50: purchase of a website or a domain do you guys think secondaries are going to be a thing in the past like when i grew up and i was not in the tech space but in investment banking etc like the founder didn't sell and then it became okay for the founder herself do you think in this more expensive environment etc that's

SPEAKER_70: going to go the other way or not when we went through this the zipper world and there were people raising billion dollar funds left and right and they were begging their way into rounds they were encouraging secretaries because the current investors didn't want to part with ownership and everyone was dilution

SPEAKER_16: sensitive so it was the only way to get in the company and it was it was even more nefarious bill there were people who would use the secondary dara to win the deal so imagine you're coming into a deal brad's offering you know whatever 100 million at a billion dollars post and then you know i come in

SPEAKER_148: and say i'll give you a hundred billion a billion dollar post but i'm also going to allow you to sell 25 the founders to sell 25 million in secondary and then those two things being in the same term sheet

SPEAKER_149: was insane when you think about the conflict of interest right bill girly i think yeah and i and

SPEAKER_70: look i think it's still an issue today i think in a in and it is still very common across a broad array of companies i think it's the number one thing that allows a company to stay private for a very long time because the the thing that eventually causes a founder to almost be forced to go public is the employees eventually say hey what about me but some of these companies are doing broad-based secondaries across the entire employee base almost on an annual basis yeah spacex would be the the

SPEAKER_135: prototypical company for this or stripe and dar i think to your question when it's fair and it's you

SPEAKER_16: know uh i guess pari parsu and everybody gets to participate and it's modest and controlled i think it's a benefit to the company because people will stay long term right you're in year six or seven

SPEAKER_17: and you got to buy your house or put a down payment on it it's it's great the problem was like uh brad you saw this up close uh in personal with poppin uh which the founder took out 200 million and yeah that was peak zerp and then the founder wasn't motivated i want to go to two issues i've seen that

SPEAKER_70: a lot like like when founders get too much off the table i mean the bird example is a great example and

SPEAKER_165: and how much did that travis take off the table i think 50. i could be wrong but i gotta tell you

SPEAKER_16: when the number starts equaling private aviation or second home that's when i think it's super

SPEAKER_149: distracting whenever you start thinking about private aviation or a second house it's very hard to focus

SPEAKER_17: at work dar let's get to two really important questions for you uh number one i think one of the myths about and the the attacks that uber just constantly even to this day to a certain extent there's some people going after this oh they're abusing drivers oh the drivers are making six

SPEAKER_149: dollars an hour it's below minimum wage all this nonsense and it was really people i remember during

SPEAKER_148: the private days it was people of such bad faith because they would say oh somebody in this on-demand world who's sitting at home waiting for a ride they waited for a ride for three hours they did a ten dollar ride therefore four hours divided by you know ten dollars equals this which is not how the on-demand

SPEAKER_16: economy works but despite that the hourly rate has gone up 15 20 30 etc there are minimums in certain markets and the number of people choosing to work for uber on a global basis is extraordinary and companies like apple walmart target starbucks are losing their employee base to people who want to work for uber or doordash or any other on-demand because it gives them flexibility and and the rates have kept going up so what's the truth the honest truth about what drivers are making and how many drivers are in the network now when compared to starbucks walmart target in those places because you you've spent a lot

SPEAKER_18: of time with drivers now that was a big part of your peace time initiative was to empathize

SPEAKER_24: with drivers more yeah and it it helped us build a better product like the the service doesn't exist without drivers uh and actually i say drivers are the number one growth driver for the company as we get more drivers the the network becomes more liquid etas come down surge comes down just the demand almost shows up it's not that simple but that's the most important element of of our growth formula so it wasn't just peacetime i was like i need to understand what it's like to drive for uber and and by the way it's a lot harder than it looks don't take the job that your drivers are doing for you for granted uh and and i think i think for us the truth is drivers are making about 30 more than they were making five years ago but so is everybody kind of you know so that that is the spot cost of labor it's gone up but drivers are absolutely doing better um our take rate it's affected by revenue recognition and kind of merchant versus agency etc that kind of the true take rate of the mobility business has stayed flat around 20 to 21 percent for the past five six years uh and and we want to grow the business without taking take rate up because it forces a discipline on the company in terms of cost structure etc you know bill if he wants to can talk about that you know rate too far take to uh take too far so to speak so we've kept that take rate flat and and while i do think we've got flexibility to take it up we don't want to that that's the last lever that that we want to use now what is happening in the u.s two things are happening in the u.s that that i do think are affecting driver perception and how they feel which is real uh that we haven't done a good enough job managing through and and we have to do better one is that uh on the driver side instead of drivers getting paid a flat rate uh based on distance and time uh in order for us to show drivers the upfront destination we now essentially algorithmically price uh a specific ride so we tell you exactly where you're going and we price out the ride and for example if you're going to the suburbs and the boondocks we will price more than what would the normal rate be because you're going to come back your utilization is going to be low you're going to have a bunch of empty miles if you're going from the airport to the center of sf and it's going to be really busy we take a little bit off that rate for the driver to fund the other the other route so our our average revenue margin stays the exact same but by pricing these two trips differently we're actually bringing in more demand into the network and you know one of the things that we haven't handled well is for that trip into the city a driver may notice that that price is lower than they're they're used to and our take may be higher for that price out into the boontocks our take rate is lower our average take rate is that is exact same people tend to you know there's this the investors like they remember pain more than they remember doing well drivers tend to remember the trips where our take is might be higher than the ones that our take is lower so for example we show drivers what's what's been our take rate for the past week etc to remind them that our take rate has stay the same but we've got to do a better job like how many drivers now and and what's the

David Friedberg: longevity of drivers uh is it a transient job or are people kind of sticking with this as a third of

SPEAKER_16: their income part-time income how would you describe i know it's not one thing but i know there's millions of drivers who are active so how many drivers are active and and how do they fall into buckets of

SPEAKER_50: sort of uh participation in the network as it were we've got six and a half million drivers uh globally

SPEAKER_24: active drivers it has active drivers globally our driver base has grown over 30 percent on a year on your basis so we have a lot of drivers coming into the system it's it's a great flexible work opportunity the majority of drivers are part-time but that changes that's different geography to geography so in a england where there's it's harder to become a driver the regulatory burden is higher a higher percentage of drivers tend to be full-time uh in a brazil a lower percentage of drivers tend to be full-time so you do have a mix of full-time part-time the majority of drivers are are part-time but there's a core of full-time drivers that are very valuable to us who really understand the system you know just as well as our top uh engineers do now now the other issue that that i do want to uh make sure that that i cover too is the cost of commercial insurance in the u.s has gone up significantly it's been a disaster there was like a wall street journal article about people not being able to get car insurance uh you know home insurance etc that so in the u.s our take rate net of those insurance costs are less than 20 percent they're 15 16 if you include that insurance cost which is really just the pass through they're north of 20 and that is a pain that drivers are feeling so in the in california for example commercial insurance costs have increased by over 60 percent over the past two two to three years it's a huge increase we've passed that on to riders most of that why has

SPEAKER_181: it gone up are there more accidents and there are more claims more litigious or it's it's it's more

SPEAKER_24: tort reform people are incredibly litigious you know lawyers fine you know people on facebook etc so i i think that there is work to be done in terms of you know these these litigation costs are are sky high for everybody um and and we need to we need to essentially get uh some control of that and it does it does involve some uh regulations etc in florida for example those costs are just too high and they're unfairly high and a bunch of tort lawyers are getting that benefit and if we can bring that cost under control then prices for riders are going to come down demand is going to come into the system and drivers are going to make more but that is absolutely one thing that's affecting perceived take rate in the u.s and it's a bad you know it's it's a it's a bad trend that we're

SPEAKER_39: doing everything that we can to reverse is there a concept of self-insuring to a certain extent or

SPEAKER_16: because uber is such a scaled business could you buy an insurance business or somehow do this

SPEAKER_24: internally we self-insure we self-insure majority of the liabilities but the liabilities are still there

SPEAKER_17: got it awesome uh girly you had some thoughts i think just on as a global question uber as a global company as you as you

SPEAKER_74: you boot scale uber in you know as a truly global company probably more global than even

SPEAKER_70: some of the uh magnificent seven um and you're also simultaneously driving down costs i'm curious how you think about employment and specifically employment in in silicon valley and i was at a i was at a conference recently and a bunch of enterprise ceos were talking and they said the valley's a

SPEAKER_74: great place to start a business but a horrible place to scale a business and they actively discussed

SPEAKER_70: moving headcount away from the bay area and then i work with startups um who who have a lot i ironically their headcount they're having the hardest time coming into the business into the office are the ones in the bay area and if you were going to hire a hybrid worker the last place on earth you would hire them is in the bay area because it's so expensive so um i'm just curious you know how you think about

SPEAKER_24: that that big picture question yeah the majority of our engineering headcount or technical headcount is in the bay area sf uh sunnyvale etc and the fact is that like there is great freaking talent in the bay area and despite what some people say it's great talent who works hard like our engineers like i have to be careful if i ask them a question on a thursday they'll they'll be up saturday 3 a.m answering the question and it's awesome right so the the power and the talent that we have is great that said the majority of our growth in headcount is coming outside the bay area and there are incredible townhubs india for example uh in brazil sao paulo for us in amsterdam so we are actively looking to diversify uh our technical talent with a core of you know rockstar ninjas in the bay area they really it like it is an excellent core but just like we've diversified our business globally we should diversify a talent base globally and sometimes you know having talent outside of the bay area can actually help you build better product and for us you know product touches drivers riders it's very very local it looks really different in brazil so having an engineering team in sao paulo who sees how our product translates

David Friedberg: there makes a lot of sense i have an important question about uh you know this cleanup work you did and divesting from a bunch of businesses well that then leads to innovation and new businesses and new business lines right now uber i believe we refer to as a three-legged stool maybe not a four-legged one obviously you have rides mobility you got food delivery and then of course you have uber freight and there's this fourth one um i noticed you ran a test and you and i talked about i was super excited

SPEAKER_17: about it of maybe workers and having uber you know i called it uber exec but i think you guys are

SPEAKER_193: calling it something else in this test and you've been public about the test maybe you could talk

SPEAKER_149: about is there going to be a fourth leg to the stool and then how do you think about innovation is now the time to think about launching new innovative products or is there just still so much growth left in terms of rides and food delivery in the competition with doordash and grab and other

SPEAKER_17: places around the world that you should just stick to the three legs of the stool so i i think that there

SPEAKER_24: there might potentially be a fourth leg but i don't have an agenda listen i want growth i want innovation i want to build cool right and so the majority of the growth that you see for example in our mobility space we have a bunch of new verticals taxi reserve uber for business low-cost high-capacity vehicles all of these businesses have been built in the past five years it's about nine billion dollars worth of gps that literally has been built in the past five years by our engineers by our product folks etc that kind of innovation which is kind of adjacencies that you have natural rights to win at we you know who would have thought that uber would now be powering new york city taxis but that's a very natural adjacency for us right like we have you've got to tune the product now they're really important tunings which is for taxis they might be full etc so we sent a blast dispatch for taxis we don't do a one-to-one match like we do with our drivers because we know when a driver is when a car is open or not with taxis we don't so we send a blast dispatch there the taxi who's open says yes the taxi was not open says no and we will work to integrate by the way with the taxi dispatch system so we can be smarter about that but that that's it's exciting it's scales it's much less expensive to go into etc same thing with each getting into grocery or getting into the direct business where we deliver for an apple or or a walmart these are greater jccs and the great thing about uber is

SPEAKER_50: they're big right groceries are five plus billion dollar business it could be a 50 billion dollar business direct you know is billion dollar business multiple billions of dollars so

SPEAKER_24: the reason why i'm a little neutral as to the fourth leg is there are very large opportunities right in my backyard so that's the stuff that we are focusing on but what you're talking about which is this work platform we do have a global work platform it's better than any other work platform and what we found is the more uh flavors of work we can offer someone the more engaged they get with our platform for example in india it's actually pretty cool we have some of our drivers now um working on artificial intelligence labeling right work from home or drive for uber during the day really you have a mechanical business in ai labeling yes high quality mechanical turk business that we're building it's a nice little adjacency i'd love for it to get to a nice big adjacency and so we are definitely working on different kinds of work because we do have this work platform flexible work platform that's absolutely

SPEAKER_17: second to none this is fascinating that i think you know in terms of a framework that i hadn't considered there's one side which is customers have the app and they have the super app experience but on the other

SPEAKER_16: side six and a half million people who you vetted and have done jobs and have been rated hey what else could they do and some of them might want to work from home hey you know i'm dropping my kids off um you know and then i do a couple of uber rides or deliver some food but there's this other opportunity hey i'm home my kids are doing homework or my kids are asleep i can't leave the house but i could do two hours of work

SPEAKER_148: the uber app gives me an alert hey do you want two hours at x dollars per hour wow that's quite

SPEAKER_202: brilliant our driver app is is the closest thing i think to a western super app there is but not that

SPEAKER_203: many people see it most people don't see the the the the drivers don't see it yeah well no let's talk

SPEAKER_17: about super apps for a second i know uber had we have uber one right a membership uh i i think that's like an incredible product but i don't hear too much talk about it from the company or from

SPEAKER_205: individuals uh so maybe you could just talk a little bit about uber one and then how how that

SPEAKER_24: fits into everything uh that we're seeing it's not exactly rocket science which is what we find is people who use more of our stuff tend to engage with our platform more they tend to stay longer they tend to spend more and so we actually have uber one which is our membership program it's growing very very well we'll have more to say about it and ernie's coming up so i don't want to say too much but

SPEAKER_176: have you ever released the number of subscribers the number or no i think the last time it's 15

SPEAKER_24: million and it's grown since uh and and more importantly i look at the percentage of gross bookings that come from uber one members and for example with eats is getting to that 50 mark and it is it's priced the same exact as our competitors and we have more content which is there's you not only get delivery benefits but you get mobility benefits so over a long period of time we think that'll be a winning uh strategy but at the same time we're constantly upselling people from a regular uber ride to a reserve uh ride for example or from a ride to eats you just got home why don't you have dinner etc we'll give you five dollars off and what's and what's fun about those kinds of upsells is it used to be a bunch of people kind of sitting around table having ideas let's do this upsell let's do that upsell and then it's like let's put this percentage of our inventory to you know upsell on safety etc all of that is now being driven by ai all of it is being targeted so you know we have algos figuring out you know is bill will he take that upsell going to work for a coffee and will brad take that upsell which is hey if you order because he's got a family he's got kids 50 order you get 10 off etc so what it started with like a bunch of people with ideas now it's all algorithmic and and again like i have no idea what the algorithms are going to come up with but we got more consumers more services than anyone else more upsells than any other player that combination

David Friedberg: is a potent combination even outside of membership is that happening and with ai right now or is it

SPEAKER_50: oh yeah oh yeah it's it's it's you know that the team is and and you always start with simple

SPEAKER_24: algorithms and the algos get get more complex but but the idea is what's the next best thing right what is here's jason what is the next what what's that pixel that we can optimize because any pixel that upsells you something takes away from your base experience and ultimately where we came from the

SPEAKER_51: realm of design and opinion we're going to a realm of data and it's just a much better place

SPEAKER_70: hey dar with with your mentioning ai that we've been through this period where i think everyone got super excited right and nvidia stock went up and everyone dove in and everyone told every ceo you got to do it in every department and all this and i think i think we're moving towards a more rational mindset of like where where's this stuff really fit where does it really add value where do you really

SPEAKER_74: get roi what what's happening inside of uber and where do you think the big early wins are

SPEAKER_50: so i i think one one no-brainer win is uh developer productivity uh so we are in and listen it's it's it's actually it sounds easier than it is because we have a bunch of developers and they're like listen i'm working hard enough don't tell me you use this thing don't tell me how to do my job just let me do

SPEAKER_24: my job let me get my diffs in etc so the we now have a subset of virtual developers who are power users uh of github copilot and it is excellent and so the job now is to to and it's and it's truly adding productivity but we now have to sell it from like 20 of those power users to 50 to 80 and and you shouldn't take that for granted like like why can't you do that tomorrow because we want developers to do their day jobs while they're training on how to get more productive that's one angle it's absolutely going to happen it's it will be a home run for everybody and and it will it'll it takes some of the um kind of bs work away from developers so they can truly be creative so i do think it's a it's a win-win uh win next for us is is customer service which is you know actually for for uber right when you call in we have to know what kind of customer you are because there's a lot of fraud in the system there are a lot of people taking advantage of the system uh second we have to understand the context what happened you know to bill in terms of his food didn't uh he said he didn't get food is that true or not and the third is what's the policy and the policy is going to be different place to place although we're trying to um make that more consistent a human being has to go through all that now essentially and we take into steps right first step is ai summarizes all of it so it's a nice little package now the ai not only summarizes it but gives the recommendation to to the customer service agent we look at those recommendations are they right are they wrong and eventually we'll be able to move much more of the customer service to to ais as well so that's another one we are building out um customer facing products as well for eats some cool stuff my instinct is the next um 24 months are going to be much more focused on back-end stuff on the customer facing uh side uh it's still too slow like you you know our responses have to be in milliseconds and there's you know even very small delays can and can cause drop off etc but i'm confident that the customer side is going to come in and

SPEAKER_51: this is a big wave it just may be a little bit slower than some people expect but the back-end stuff

SPEAKER_220: is is dynamite and dar are you are you building custom models uh to help drive these i mean you

SPEAKER_36: mentioned get github copilot obviously a microsoft product but are you i'm just curious there's this debate in the llm land whether everything's going to be large frontier models what i hear from a lot of companies is that those are very expensive and they have to figure out how to do this within the context of a you know expense side of their business that makes sense so i'm just curious are you using open source are you customizing or are you doing a combination thereof right now all of the above so

SPEAKER_24: we have an application layer uh that is our own ai layer layer and we can plug in uh public models open source models and we work with all of the larger players and and i actually think the answer is going to be all the above there's certain um highly idiosyncratic idiosyncratic use cases where a smaller custom-built model will be the right solution and then for i think a github copolets etc it might be you want more general models and some of these larger models so i don't think it's going to be an if if or it's going to depend on the circumstance i think we're going to use all that like they they are you know and when you're dealing we're we're a little bit of a unique piece which is um our data sources are changing and are so variable so quickly that these ai models are quite quite powerful with data sets that generally don't change um and and for us sometimes like we're gonna have to layer models on top of each other in order to get that right customer interaction moving down the

SPEAKER_39: docket here as we as we go uh bill i saw on uh the twitter that you are uh taking a core x now

SPEAKER_229: oh yeah sorry on x yeah exactly uh your post your post on x i reposted your post um but you're you're

SPEAKER_17: gonna join the board of zillow uh that's interesting rich barton obviously a friend of everybody here on the pod uh what what you're thinking there uh and is this going to be the trend you're going to go back

SPEAKER_70: on the uh uber board or what are you going to just start being public boards again as the world knows

SPEAKER_71: because i've announced it like a couple years ago i stopped doing new investments so i've taken boards historically um as part of of my day job and as part of investing and as i look towards the future you know you say what board would you take just because it's interesting to you as an independent you know human and and not as a venture capitalist and here here's a board that i've had an experience on um rich and lloyd and the entire team are just remarkable the the level of the strategic conversations that are had in that boardroom are very different you know from other places i've been um they are both engaged you know as as founders you know despite being a decade in they're hungry um they look at the you know we're talking about the magic of the uber app my my partner matt kohler used to say that the smartphone's a remote control for your life and the phrase one click like can you one click something and one clicking a uber ride you know or an uber meal to you is a is a magical

SPEAKER_74: experience but the the real estate industry is still far from a one click if you've been through a transaction all the different you know pieces of paper you have to fill out visits things you have

SPEAKER_71: to schedule um there's still quite a bit of of opportunity for innovation and so i'm excited to be back in the room with that incredible team and board um but but also because i know uh rich and lloyd are so hungry still at this point in their career um it's an it's an exciting problem to go work on also

SPEAKER_24: weren't you on the board you may not be able to sorry you may not be able to talk to this but um do you think this realtor the antitrust case is that is that a good thing or a bad thing for zilla

SPEAKER_74: my gut and i and i'm i'm not a lawyer and and so but my gut is that if if anything it's probably a

SPEAKER_71: positive i think i think the nar you know operates as a pseudo monopoly they've been accused of that by a

SPEAKER_74: lot by the different you know governmental agencies and um can create constraints and if you look at countries where there's not a nar i think you typically see more innovation and more um

SPEAKER_72: more market cap per home uh for the leading real estate player than you do here in the u.s

SPEAKER_135: yeah for people who don't know national association of real estate is nar and they just had a giant

SPEAKER_178: 1.8 billion dollar judgment against them uh based on as an example the the the the ridiculous

SPEAKER_70: document that you're handed by a realtor every time you want to buy a house that is a creation of nar and the primary objective function of that document is to protect your realtor from liability and that's why you have to sign it on all 35 pages and initial five different times inside to pay the 35 pages and that's all about the realtor and it's not about the consumer and so that's the kind of

SPEAKER_71: thing that i think you could see innovation that would be pro-consumer and better for the industry

SPEAKER_17: that was extraordinary to think i don't know if you guys have ever done a private market transaction but i i bought a home in a private market transaction it was 15 it was 12 000 initially and then there was like a three thousand dollar upsell from my real estate attorney and this was for a non-insignificant

David Friedberg: home uh my primary residence and i am now hated by real estate agents everywhere in my location because what would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars in commission i just bought the house from

SPEAKER_77: my friend i spent 15 000 total total uh on the purchase of the home and there was no commission

SPEAKER_70: zero commission dark going back to to even before i invested in uber i looked at a lot of the companies that were starting in taxis and because of the presence of the taxi and the taxi authority your flexibility around price and how you get the app in the car all that was regulated in a way that prevented flexibility of innovation and so that's i just think if anything um less nar means more

SPEAKER_100: innovation yeah the other the other piece of this and you know i was on that board with bill and rich and you know for probably between 2005 when we led the series b in 2010 or shortly before they went

SPEAKER_36: public as soon as chat gpt came out and this is you know bill said that they've been at this for a decade they've actually been at it for two decades now you know it's extraordinary to see founders in the case of rich barton and lloyd frank who care as much and why do they care so much in this moment chat gpt comes out rich barton text bill and i and said hey i want you guys to come to a executive offsite with me we're going to red team blue team ai what is the impact that ai is going to have on 10 blue links what is the impact that ai is going to have on vertical search we're a major vertical search engine that lives in this larger ecosystem and we think that this might

SPEAKER_46: be changing everything and so i tweeted about this at the time and rich gave me permission to do it but the blue team was this idea how do we make our existing team better how do we just go through the list of all the things we do customer service all the things dara talked about code generation and make it better red team was this idea is if we were starting today with the power of llms and we wanted to put the magic of the world's best realtor in your pocket what would it look like um and you know that that to me that story just captures right the founder-led journey of a company like zillow with rich right he's not 20 years in resting on his laurels thinking you know i've i've done great and and now it's just time to serve like he we are all enthusiastic to see what ai is going to do to actually put the

SPEAKER_36: power of that one click the power of that remote control in everybody's pocket and for those of you

SPEAKER_17: who don't know red team blue team that's like a generally a cyber i think the origin is cyber security blue team tries to protect red team tries to attack and you get you get both teams uh making a company more secure uh brad maybe we could wrap here uh since we have dara and talk a little bit about markets and just where we're at in terms of i saw the the interest rate print was a little bit hotter i think um i'm sorry the inflation print was a little bit hotter than than uh people thought it

SPEAKER_148: might be concerning not concerning and then maybe we'll go over to you dara just in terms of how do you

SPEAKER_36: how does this stuff impact you as a ceo it's amazing as we look over the last five years i think all of us spend our time thinking about technology super cycles internet mobile cloud ai how that's going to change the world but really since the start of covid we've all been overwhelmed by macro right like you know dara had to lay off 25 of the company not because anything idiosyncratic about marketplaces or mobile or anything else but we're fighting a global pandemic and rates went negative and so you know as we come out of this i think it's important for us to keep our eye on that prize you know and understand you know and i you know dara and i talk about this often is the world look

SPEAKER_46: normalized or not and i think if you look at that uh first chart you know that i that i shared with nick just the cpi glide path you know there's really nothing to see here today there was some noise this morning that it came in a little bit hotter but i mean if you just look at this longitudinally right where the the dotted line represents the consensus forecast of where inflation is going to go and bill and i talk about this all the time of course nobody knows with any degree of accuracy exactly where it's going to go but i think it's important to understand what's baked into the cake if you go to that second chart nick we've talked about this a lot 10-year tips this measures the restrictiveness in the economy so effectively think about what is the future interest rate less the future inflation rate and as you can see we're as restrictive really as we've been since 2008 and 2009 this is above the fed's neutral rate that's why we you know the the third chart i sent you which is what is the fed fund's projection we expect rates to come down this year so if you just look at the fed the the fed's own forecast a point and a half and 1.5 positive growth on gdp you know that inflation is going to follow that consensus curve and and that rates are going to come down that to me is the backdrop uh for a very healthy economy now of course there's a lot of stuff that can go wrong but you know uh yesterday i think it was feds uh uh uh williams was out and he said listen i think rates are high enough um restrictive enough remember every month that inflation goes down the effective restrictiveness of the economy goes up holding all else equal so you got to take rates down just to keep it at the same level of restrictiveness um and so i think that's where we're seeing you know we started the year mag 7 was down 10 15 percent there's a bunch of jitters around interest rates they popped up from three and a half percent back to four plus percent so we're we're coming out of this from my perspective from the cheap sheets cheap seats it seems like we're on the glide path things are normalizing um and that you know for a ceo like like dara there's a lot of predictability in the world hell of a lot more than there's been over the last four years and i guess i'll kick it over to you dara is that the way that you see it uh relative to the challenges you've had trying to manage the business through the zirp period of the last few years very much i mean i can't comment on rates and and where

SPEAKER_24: they're going but we had to fight we felt inflation hugely post covid which is the cost of bringing drivers up the cost of labor and we have to translate that into uh more expensive rides etc if you look at this year we have actually actively been trying to keep the cost of rides lower uh and essentially it's been flat we've been working with our restaurant partners if the economy weakens you know uh building out a tool set of of kind of merchant merchants able to fund promotions to being prices down so like the focus of our business is how do we create a win-win and try to keep prices down for riders and keep prices down uh for eaters uh and really drive volume uh through the system as much as we can and i say so far so good we haven't seen you know let's say inflation rearing its ugly head again but uh i've i've uh i've seen a lot of very fast changes in the marketplace so i take nothing

SPEAKER_71: for granted but by the way i wanted to give a a little nod to brad i thought using the word glide path in a cpi slide is very suggestive of a soft landing it's like a really good very subtle language

SPEAKER_273: yeah i i mean listen listen listen let's be clear he's hoping the fed listens to this just

SPEAKER_46: i know that there's some difficulties i know there's some people who told us to go into cash at the

SPEAKER_49: beginning of last year some people in our group who said hard landing mike wilson q1 go into cash and

SPEAKER_46: then surprisingly even at the end of the year they thought that that was a good decision five percent on cash versus 30 to 40 percent in the market seems like a pretty bad decision to me and i think it'll be a bad decision again this year that's not to say that there aren't risks in the world but when i

SPEAKER_36: look at the balance of risk i would say that these seem like pretty decent environments whether it's soft or medium or whatever i think it's a pretty decent environment for for for dar to build the

SPEAKER_280: business this year so with that uh thanks so much to dar for coming on and being so candid with us

David Friedberg: girly gerstner you're incredible and uh none of this is investment advice make your own decisions do your own underwriting disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer we all are absolute degenerate gamblers at the poker table and thoughtful betters on public markets that does not mean you should do what we do i have watched girly lose his entire staff with bottom set to lunatics who hit runner runner i've

SPEAKER_181: seen gerstner lay down pocket aces to people with seven high do not follow us and making bets

SPEAKER_27: make your own goddamn decisions reminder to self don't go to vegas with any of this group thank you

SPEAKER_289: do you have an interest in learning poker because we know you have a little bit of money to put to work

SPEAKER_27: now my my daily job is a gamble you know kind of running this company called uber so after that

SPEAKER_289: i like to just stay still oh you know one thing i didn't ask you it's one more thing there uh this

SPEAKER_16: is my colombo after i do the outro uh drizzly postmates you did a couple of acquisitions years ago

SPEAKER_149: um the market's been closed for acquisitions do you just put that out of your mind or are bankers calling you about acquisitions what do you think is going to happen in the next two or three years or do we have to wait for a regime change lena khan to get out of there for maybe acquisitions to happen

SPEAKER_24: again is it even on your radar do you think about it listen it should always be on our radar but but one thing that i've learned with uber is running a business in in trying to trying to integrate other businesses into a two-sided marketplace is really hard and the organic path for the company is great unless i screw it up um but it looks great so the the cost of an acquisition in terms of uh in terms of just the distraction from the from the daily grind which is a wonderful grind that we love it's it's pretty high so it would have to be awesome for us to look we should it's part of my job to look but um it's not the baseline of what the next three years is going to look like do banks

SPEAKER_298: pitch you like regularly hey buy this buy this startup buy this startup is it like a constant

SPEAKER_24: train and especially listen the the public markets are closed so they that the only m a is the way forward so i get a lot of pitches um and free drinks and you know leave it there well the public

SPEAKER_36: markets aren't closed they just think that you're dumber than the public markets and that you'll pay a bigger price but i think what they're finding the reason we don't see a lot of m a is because folks like dara aren't willing to pay the big bucks and the public market is sober and the reality is if

SPEAKER_46: you're trying to sell a business today you got to get it on the same page as the public markets your multiples going to reflect your growth rate and your profitability that's demanded by the public markets

SPEAKER_36: and all those people still living in make-believe land that there's some strategic inherent value to their business that's losing money and you know that has a really like it it's just not going to end well right you know i think we've seen it this week a bunch of layoffs again at amazon at google uh you know and others and what it tells me is you know in 2020 if 2023 was the beginning right of time to get fit i really see it kicking into high gear right now and you heard it from dara they're not growing headcount a lot amazon's not apple's not right they're doing more with less ai is enabling that um and uh you know to me m a is only going to happen uh for those companies that are accretive and profitable and you know they they're going to have options they could go public today or or they could sell their business today but the broken things um you know that are still expecting high

SPEAKER_71: prices i don't think are going to find a home i agree with that i think i think you got another year of people getting in touch with the reality that exists which is the real issue that prohibits both of

SPEAKER_39: those two transactions yeah accepting reality uh that could be a theme for 2024. all right we'll see

David Friedberg: you all next time on this roundtable with no names bye-bye bye-bye