Most people think about building a company as building a product. I think about it as building a system of people and incentives and culture that then builds the product. The product is an output, not the thing you're actually building.
The formula that I used was when the company is doing well, double down. When the company is doing not so well, double down. I think that's actually the right formula because the greatest risk for Uber was irrelevance. If you slow down, you get lapped.
It takes forever to really build incredible trust. It only takes a moment to break it. And that's something that we are very aware of. And AI, it just it makes it that much bigger because the use of that information can be so much more destructive if used improperly.
You'll hear Sundar say he realized he needed to rethink how Google worked a few years ago in response to ChatGPT, and he made a lot of executive changes and big decisions to get the company in a more aggressive posture.
So you have like Tim Cook operationalizing the company, making so much money from the app store, building the business, but at the same time, he just happened to be the CEO during the greatest AI winter ever, basically from 2011 to 2022, 2023 when we started getting LLM, started getting chat bots.
You have this bookending of Siri on both sides of Tim Cook's career where sort of nothing happened in an interesting way, you know, but it but the stock did fantastically well. his Tim Cook created an immense amount of value, but it was this lighter cheaper, faster, stronger.
You have this bookending of Siri on both sides of Tim Cook's career where sort of nothing happened in an interesting way, you know, but the stock did fantastically well.
When we looked at sort of the employee base, they have a lot less agency in it. So they aren't necessarily deciding on the change or part of the process. They're sort of the receivers of it. And anytime we don't have agency then we start to sort of buy in less to the change.
Your PR team will have many heart attacks uh because you're not in the world of deterministic outputs anymore. So that's going to be a big cultural shift for Apple I think in this uh non-deterministic stochastic uh AI era.
The biggest risk for Uber is that we actually don't lean into AV enough, that we're not aggressive enough in terms of our partnerships, that we're not aggressive enough in terms of building product. Because I think AV is going to happen, and I want Uber to be the biggest beneficiary of AV, not the biggest victim of AV.
The most important signal that I look for is: are the best people in the world trying to work for us? And are we retaining the best people in the world? Because if we are, we're going to be okay. If we aren't, we have a problem.
The history of Uber is really the history of navigating chaos. And I think what we've learned is that the chaos is actually a feature, not a bug. Because the chaos is what creates the opportunity for a company like Uber to come in and bring order to a market that didn't have it.
whenever anyone asks, I would say that there would be no Uber today as it is without Travis and how he was. You know, when many cities, governments, regulators are saying this is a legal stop, to have such steadfast belief that this was going to be good for riders, good for drivers, good for cities, and to still push on with that belief
Correction without connection feels like rejection. Connection is what separates our work from our worth. It's about valuing people not just for what they do, but who they are.
When we look at the gap, what we recognize is a lot of the C-suite have the ability to shape the transformation or the change. And they have a lot to gain from it typically. So there's sort of built-in incentive for them to be excited about change and historically they've usually done well in change. That's how they've gotten to where they have. When you look at sort of the employee base, they have a lot less agency in it. So they aren't necessarily deciding on the change or part of the process. They're sort of the receivers of it. And anytime we don't have agency then we start to sort of buy in less to the change.
I would say that there would be no Uber today as it is without Travis and how he was. You know, when many cities, governments, regulators are saying this is illegal stop, to have such steadfast belief that this was going to be good for riders, good for drivers, good for cities, and to still push on with that belief
Management is an ability to soften the chaos created by leaders. The notion that your AI is going to bring everybody in and they're not going to need to have contact with anybody else and the AI will manage them, tell them what to do, and at the end of the year give them their performance review and a bonus. Even if that was possible, which I don't think it is, it's a nihilistic, [ __ ] up vision of the world.
I have no leverage. Trump is me in the Hungarian forest right now. Because he never bothered to consult Congress and offended them. Because he never even signed up or even briefed European allies. Because he did not in any way coordinate anything around intelligence around the Straits of Hormuz, getting expats out of the Gulf, figuring out putting in place the right defense mechanisms.
There are people who don't have running water and who have live sewage in their front yards. And it was not until representation was present that those neighbors were actually able to be served. If you have no one at the table who is representing your interest and who is concerned about you, then you know that you will not be represented in the result.
Calm is when you get radical clarity around the mission and the vision and you get everybody lined up and bought in and have them help build that vision.
A concentration of a few good people solving problems far in advance—and at a fraction of the cost—of other groups by applying the simplest, most straightforward methods possible to develop and produce new projects.
We recorded this conversation in the middle of the Iranian contingency, and we spent most of our time on what winning actually means in a theater like Iran.
But really, the suit seems mostly to have been about Elon Musk being mad at Sam Altman — or at OpenAI, for being successful without him — and wanting him punished in some way.
A concentration of a few good people solving problems far in advance—and at a fraction of the cost—of other groups by applying the simplest, most straightforward methods possible to develop and produce new projects. All it is really is the application of common sense to some pretty tough problems.
Real optimists are not cynics. You want critics in the organization, you don't want cynics because cynics don't trust you. Critics want to challenge the logic, they want to challenge the thinking, they want to interrogate, but it's not distrustful.
What I'm talking about is the same thing that we hear from CEOs around their energy that they get from change. Um their vision that things can be better for employees and for citizens.
The biggest psychological tax cut in history would be if we elected a technocrat who maybe checked in once a month but wasn't in your face every day and dominating the table conversation at dinner.
The German chancellor publicly said the United States is being humiliated. The French president publicly said that the US president um the Russian president, the Chinese uh president are all directly against Europe uh acting together against Europe. Those are those are things that at best you usually hear with inside voices.
If Miranda Priestly were Michael Priestly, there would be no movie, the first movie. Everything she does is sort of slightly horrible, but would be kind of adorable if a man said it. But there's a special tinge of mercury around that kind of remark from a woman. It just hurts more.
For the last several years, we've basically gently ceded market share to the other players in the industry. And I came in and said, that's a no-go. That is unacceptable. We're going to win in the marketplace.
I believe at the core of conservation is love. Love for the land, love for the people of the land and most importantly, love for those who will come after us.
And the teacher said, 'No, no, the way you convey power is how everyone else in the room behaves when you enter it. You just act naturally. You just behave.' But the molecules around you — so that was the direction, that you gave me, that everybody was afraid of me.
Even Vince has acknowledged that he really enjoyed playing this character because in many ways this character was true to real life. In real life, he was philandering. He had many affairs. He was ruthless, sometimes contractually, with his wrestlers.
People don't resent billionaires. People want to become billionaires. People resent billionaires when they forget that the purpose of business is to create happiness, not who dies with the most toys.
It's the nature of business that the eulogy for a chief executive doesn't happen when they die, but when they retire, or in the case of Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that they will step up to the role of executive chairman on September 1st.
Sam Altman, against the backdrop of Silicon Valley hype culture and startups that balloon to massive valuations based on promises that may or may not come to pass in the future, and an increasing embrace of a founder culture that thinks telling different groups different conflicting things is a feature, not a bug…Even against that backdrop, Sam Altman is an extraordinary case where everyone in Silicon Valley who expects those things can't stop talking about this question of his trustworthiness and his honesty.
When people have to pitch a story, not a fifty page business case, and justify why their ideas deserve another few million dollars, they suddenly start thinking like founders instead of managers.
I wanted to do this show that didn't exist when I was a kid, and I knew the talent was out there. You know, I found Bruno Mars and put him on the show when he was two feet tall. I wanted those things that Johnny didn't do.
I'm not going to tell you what you want to hear. I'm going to tell you what I think you need to know and we're in this together rather than trying to fight each other all the time.
