Uber总裁谈自动驾驶生死局与如何击败DoorDash

We're doing like 300 million trips a week. We were burning 52 million a week in China. We were competing in China with one hand tied behind our back. Andrew McDonald, he's the president and COO at Uber. He is Uber's longest tenur active employee. And today Uber is an absolute monster. They have a market cap of 160 billion, revenues of 52 billion in the full year of 2025. They have 200 million consumers that use the app monthly.

This was a behind the scenes on Uber like we haven't seen before.

Autonomy is as bad as it's ever going to be today, right? And every single day, it's going to get better. Like in the end, distribution wins. We could do everything we do today with less people in 5 years because of the power of AI. No one's been at the company longer than me at this point.

Ready to go. Mac, I am so excited for this, dude. I've wanted to make this happen. And we've been DMing for like a long time. It's It's so good to do it in person.

So great to be here. And you're right. I remember the first Twitter DM from you. And I was a bit of a fan from afar, as you probably hear often, but uh great to be here now and so glad to do it in person. So, I spoke to Dar before the show and I said, "What's his superpower?" He's been here for like over a decade, whatever, 12, 13 years,

14 years. 15 in May.

No one's been at the company longer than me at this point.

My god. Um, and I said, "What's his super?" And he said, "Oh, very simple. People really like him, but he is an execution machine, and he is very good at driving people." And I I suck at that. So can you no seriously how do you do that but retain people liking you?

I get the question in the context of career advice. People start they join Uber they say you know you've been very successful at Uber. How do I you know how should I be successful here? What what did you do to get successful? And it it's hard because like every formula is different. Um but there's a couple things I say. One is and I think the most important thing is if you genuinely are just trying to do what you think is the right thing for the company and that is your filter and you kind of build uh trust that that's what you're optimizing for all the time on every decision big decisions and small decisions that you are using the lens of what is the best thing for Uber.

You're not always going to get the decision right, but if people know that you're filtering on that, then I think that builds followership and trust over time. And then you can move people because if you're pushing on something, they know it's because you genuinely think it's the right thing to do. And then if you pair that with a deep knowledge of the business, and I' I've grown up in this business, so I know, especially ride hailing, like I know that better than anyone in the world at this point.

Um, those two things together, I think, are pretty powerful.

You do literally know it better than anyone else in the world. Yeah,

it's hard. I mean, it's only been around since 2009. I've been working on it since 2012, and you know, most folks from that time period are not working on it anymore. So,

you said when you genuinely believe it's the right thing for the company.

What did you genuinely believe was the right thing for the company and it turned out you were wrong?

Uh, I mean, the first thing I say is like I I am wrong every single day. Um, big things and small things, right? I actually love the I think it's a Bezos quote which is if you want to be right most of the time you got to change your mind a lot or something something to that effect right which is effectively like you're going to be wrong a lot and actually the people who are successful over time are willing to change their mind so I I think that's true so I'm wrong a lot this is probably the most common running debate that Dar and I will have as I think of his tenure as CEO which is and and thematically it's like the tension between short-term levers and long-term levers for the business.

So, like a short-term lever for ride hill is like price, right? Um, every dollar that we can put back into lower pricing, I think is valuable. Even uh even if long-term there may be other things you want to do like acquire new users or build a membership program or build new business units, you should be weighing those investments versus I could just put a dollar back into price. And so I think I have been too short- termist on certain issues like membership Uber Uber one for example.

I was running the mobility business. I you're smiling. So I I I suspect you maybe thought of I don't know like well I'm smiling because I said to D, what is the single when I say like biggest disagreement that you've had with Mac that comes to mind first? And he's like say it's from me. Say it's from me. Normally people like anonymize this. Say it's from me. He was reticent about membership programs and I think now he's changed

totally and and I've I've turned out to be wrong. I mean the the the the reason I've changed is because our first of all Uber one is I I think on many metrics one of the more successful membership programs in the world. I mean we're not at like Amazon Prime or Costco levels but we're we're not we're within getting to within spit spitting distance. And from a company lever perspective it's highly efficient. And when we look at efficiency, we usually look on like if I put a dollar in, you know, what am I getting back in terms of topline?

And it's one of the best levers we have. And the longer out we can measure it, the more efficient it gets and the better it stacks up versus other levers. So you're like, okay, Mac, well, like how did you get that wrong? Like if that's what the data showed you, then why why weren't you just sort of all in on membership? And when he says like when I say I wasn't all in on membership, what I mean by that is like, you know, I would constrain the capital envelope that we would have in the mobility business to invest in this.

So if I had 40 million bucks next quarter to invest, you know, my gut was always like, put as much of that into pricing as you can or put as much of that into driver supply to prove the health of the marketplace so the service is more reliable because like ride sharing at the end of the day is price, reliability, and safety. That's all it is. That's what it was 10 years ago. I think that's what it's going to be 10 years from now.

Even when it's autonomous vehicles, it's like price, reliability, safety. Um, and putting money into something like membership where people get a suite of benefits or part of which is price, but a whole other host of things like you're explicitly choosing not to put that dollar back into price. And that that's just the tension. And I probably was short- termist in my thinking there.

You said there about dollar leverage, putting in dollars to what you get out. What is the single most efficient dollar in to dollar out business for you today?

I think membership is the most efficient long-term consumer lever that we've got. Uh and the reason for that is like ultimately we we are looking at like IGB as a critical input metric for any dollar I deploy. So what's

incremental gross bookings? Think of it as incremental revenue. Okay? Right? Like if I put a dollar of incentive into the market, if I give Harry a dollar and I give a million other consumers a dollar discount, how much incremental revenue do I get back of that? And by the way, like the ROI on that is different because ROI is like if I get $2 of revenue back from Harry by offering you a dollar, um you might be like, okay, that's great.

That's a, you know, a 2:1 ratio, but actually we only make 7.5% of your dollar from a profit margin perspective. So you're still negative ROI, but you make those sorts of investments to grow the platform over time because, you know, I've increased Terry's engagement and then your LTB goes up over time. So, um, we