Uber CEO: At Uber, If You Don’t Perform, You’re Out! Uber Was Losing $3b A Year

You come to Uber, you're gonna work your ass off. And if you're not performing, we're gonna let you know. But do you ever worry that they might not be able to deal with the truth? Then they can leave because the most important skill in life is the skill of working hard. And when you see the top athletes, Ronaldo, Michael Jordan, of course they're talented. But the thing that's different about them is they work their asses off. And that's a learned skill. That's not something you're born with. You may be smarter, more talented, etc., but I'm not gonna let anyone outwardly. With that mentality, when you joined Uber was losing three billion per year, now it generates eight point five billion in free cash flow every year. But it seems that you were forged in such a way that you were gonna be relentless. Yeah, and it really started with being born in Iran. With the Islamic Revolution in nineteen seventy eight, we were not safe there. And I remember at one point we had these revolutionary guard come into the backyard and bullets went through our living room. So my family came to the US to rebuild their lives. You were eight nine years old? Yeah, and it really destroyed my dad. Sorry.

Mm-hmm. It's tough for me. Talk about it.

Let me try again. Seeing that has put me on a road where I just wanted to make my family proud. So I studied bioelectrical engineering, and then my first job was invest in banking, and I got to see the process of big companies being built. And then I had the opportunity to take over Expedia. And in your twelve years as CEO, Expedia sales increased from two point one billion to eight point eight billion. And you were the highest paid CEO of US tech company. And I left it all behind to go to Uber. And I wanna get into practical company building, how you would get that company to work hard and create a culture of continuous improvement and all that stuff. But there's an alien that's arrived amongst us, which is AI. Now driving I think is one of the biggest employees in the world, like as of profession. I mean we've got nine and a half million drivers and couriers on our platform. Those drivers' careers that you have will be out of work.

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