Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Salesforce Co-CEO Keith Block on Leadership, Technology, and Data Privacy

Michael Rivo: From Salesforce Studios, this is Blazing Trails. Welcome to Blazing Trails. I'm Michael Rivo from Salesforce Studios. Today's guest is Uber CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi. On the eve of the Iranian Revolution in 1978, Dara's family fled to the United States. Dara was just nine years old, fast forward four decades and today Dara's sits at CEO of one of the world's most recognizable companies. In today's episode, Dara shares what it was like moving to the U. S. and how that experience has influenced where he is today. He also shares his plans for Uber's future and what systems they're putting in place to increase privacy trust and safety. But before we get to Dara's conversation a word about WordPress VIP, who is making this show possible. WordPress VIP is the digital publishing solution that powers the world's top media companies, as well as marketing platforms for some of the best known brands like TIME and Facebook. Later on in this episode, you'll hear more of our conversation with their CEO, Nick Gernert. And now let's jump into the conversation with Dara Khosrowshahi and Salesforce co- CEO Keith Block.

Keith Block: All right. I have a very important question.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Please.

Keith Block: And I've always wanted to ask you this question, but I never had the courage to do it until right now. You know that Uber rating that you have as a customer.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Yes, of course.

Keith Block: How do I get mine higher?

Dara Khosrowshahi: Just tip more generously, it's easy.

Keith Block: Seriously, it's all about cash.

Dara Khosrowshahi: No, it's actually we display the tips to our drivers afterwards after they rate you, because we don't want that to affect your rating. It's just being nice to the other person and respecting them.

Keith Block: Okay. And I do that a lot.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Yeah, you might be on the phone too much. One of the tricks, tricks of the trade is when I get on my phone and I'm taking an Uber ride, I ask permission of the driver and say, " Do you mind if I make a call?" And that has helped my Uber rating move up a little bit. I don't know if it's directly affecting it, but that was a great tip that I heard from a driver. Ask your drivers.

Keith Block: What's your Uber rating, I want to know?

Dara Khosrowshahi: I've got some work to do four, seven, eight.

Keith Block: Okay.

Dara Khosrowshahi: What's yours?

Keith Block: It's a little bit higher than that. I think I'm four eight five. But you're inaudible.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Well, then you got to tell me what to do?

Keith Block: No, I'll tell you what I do. I get in and I start playing music.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Nice.

Keith Block: Yeah. And I say, " What's your favorite band or who's your favorite artist?" And if I don't like it, I don't play their music. I play my music.

Dara Khosrowshahi: That's very cool.

Keith Block: And they're always very, very nice to me because they start singing and that inaudible.

Dara Khosrowshahi: My cousin is a four, nine, nine and whenever she finishes a ride she goes, " Five stars." And then she leaves and it just works. It's like a Jedi mind trick on Uber.

Keith Block: Well, I take Uber home every day and I'm going to do the five star thing.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Thank you.

Keith Block: And if I don't get to a four, nine, five, I'm going to say, " I know your CEO, I'll tell you what you said." Anyway, thanks for joining us.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Happy to do.

Keith Block: All right. Lots of good stuff. You actually have a really cool story about how he came to the United States and I would love the audience to hear. You want to share that?

Dara Khosrowshahi: Sure. My family left Iran upon the eve of the Iranian Revolution in 1978 when I was nine years old. And we left around because we had to, because our family certainly wasn't welcome in the country anymore. And we had to flee the country to be safe. And we were lucky enough to come to the U. S. when the U. S. welcomed immigrants, certainly times have changed. And I had an uncle who lived in the U. S. who had married an American woman and lived in the U.S. and we came to the U.S. and stayed with them. And my family lost everything in Iran, but we were lucky enough to come to the States, and this was a country where you can rebuild. And we were lucky enough to get great education and the rest is history. But this is a, I don't think people understand, Americans don't understand in many ways just how good we have it. The idea that for example, with my father and mother, everything that they worked for just was taken away from them. That is a completely foreign concept unless you're a billionaire and Elizabeth Warren wins. But it's, it was a joke.

Keith Block: That's why I'm laughing.

Dara Khosrowshahi: The whole idea of being in a country with rule of law where you are safe, where your sound and hardworking can get you somewhere. It is so precious. And it's something that I always hold to be precious because I've experienced the opposite and certainly my parents have.

Keith Block: So not many people have gone through that experience just now you suggest.

Dara Khosrowshahi: No.

Keith Block: I think in this country, not to make it any, turn this into a political conversation. But there are many things that we can always do better. There is a long list of what can we do in this country to make it a better country. This is why our company certainly thinks the things that you've done at Uber we're trying to impact the world. We think business is a great platform for change. But sometimes I think we should just take a step back and say, we should be grateful.

Dara Khosrowshahi: This is a good place.

Keith Block: It's a good place, but now we have work to do. You know what I mean? But it's a powerful story that you have and it's influenced your leadership and how you lead your company. Do you want to share your leadership style on that?

Dara Khosrowshahi: I think that it's affected me in a lot of ways. But one is that I came to this place with a view of an outsider. And I think that until you're on the outside, you can't really understand what it feels like to be an outsider. What it feels like to be different? And Uber is such a global company. We have so many different views and so many different countries in which we operate and so many leaders who come with different backgrounds. And it's easy to say that you're going to be an inclusive culture. You're going to be inclusive company, you're going to be inclusive leadership team. But I think that when you have been excluded and you've had to make your way in, I think the influence that it's had on me as a leader is always to really notice in a meeting when someone isn't being included to invite people into the conversation, to invite different points of view into a conversation. And listen, I think it makes for better and engaged workforce, but it's actually very much in my interest as a leader. I think one of the universal laws of life as a manager is the higher up you move in a company, the less you really know what's going on. And especially when you become senior, if your vice president or CEO, the information that actually gets to you becomes filtered through multiple layers. And every time it gets filtered through these layers, you lose some of the fidelity, you lose the real stuff. And you almost have this group that not for good or bad reasons, they want to control the information that gets to you. You start losing touch with actually the heart of the company and the people who are doing the real work at the company as well. For me, it's been a little bit of a design spec coming as an outsider, understanding what it feels like, working hard to now be where I am, bring in the voice of the outsider. One, I think creates a better culture of inclusivity within a company. But second allows me to hear these diverse voices, which allows me to understand what's actually going on in the company so that I don't get surprised or I don't get hit by the side, et cetera. It actually works both ways. Helps me and I think makes the company a better company and a better place to work.

Keith Block: It's in a sense it's building a culture of leadership within the company?

Dara Khosrowshahi: Absolutely. And I think people confuse leadership and management. Now, management is a contract based on where you are in an organizational chart. I'm your manager because I have that title, I'm up here on the organizational chart, et cetera. And management it's a skill, management it's about the brain. But leadership is actually anyone at the company can lead. You can lead to me, the person who works in a Greenlight Hub these are physical places that we have where drivers come if they have issues with our car, et cetera. Our Greenlight Hub worker who works his or her ass off to help our drivers, those are leaders at our company. I think that part of this view of kind of an outsider, understanding what it's like to be outside, et cetera, is I'm always wanting to put our company in a position where anyone can lead. And leadership is actually different from management and people feel empowered and they feel like they can make a difference. And it's very important I think that our managers or managers are there serve their teams. Their teams aren't there to serve them. The higher up you go at a company the more of service you have to be, and then you let leadership happen at all levels of the company.

Keith Block: Yeah. I think that's a great message. I'm listening to this and I'm thinking about what Obama said this morning about, " Identifying leaders and the leaders, leaders." Like you create multiple waves, multiple levels of leadership as part of that culture and that process. And it reminded me as I'm listening to you, and I was listening to him about this book this historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote about Lincoln, called a Team of Rivals, which is essentially how Lincoln assembled his cabinet with people who are equal to or better than him, even though they were rivals during the presidential campaign. Imagine that happening today, that was a joke. Anyway, probably wouldn't happen, but it's this culture of leadership that you're talking about. You've had a lot of influences in your life. You've had an interesting journey. You've had mentors that I think would be really interesting. Do you stay in touch with your mentors who are mentors? Who are your mentors?

Dara Khosrowshahi: Definitely. I'd say the most impactful mentor for me, certainly in my professional career is Barry Diller. He was a media titan. He moved from the media business to the commerce business and really made an extraordinary adjustment. I worked with him for over 20 years, we stay in touch. I'm still on his board, on Expedia board, where I used to work. It's been an extraordinary relationship and for me, he's been extraordinary mentor. And for me, what was interesting about Barry as a mentor is that he was the one who was always pushing you to go further. Studies that show that really you learn by doing as a person. There's some learning that you get by reading, et cetera, by being trained. But the greatest learning that you have in life is actually doing, that's how you learn. And Barry is would and continues to take people who don't have experience in a certain sector, throw them into the deep end, and then let them learn to swim because the best way to learn swim is actually make them swim.

Keith Block: Right.

Dara Khosrowshahi: It's been a great relationship for many, many years.

Keith Block: It's hard to believe this, but Uber is actually 10 years old.

Dara Khosrowshahi: I guess it is. Yeah, it is.

Keith Block: I'm thinking of, wow, it's only been around for a couple of years. And you've been the CEO for over two years.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Yes.

Keith Block: And this is your company. And you have-

Dara Khosrowshahi: Our company, but very luck to be the.

Keith Block: Okay. Well, very gracious of you. But you are one of the leaders of your company to our last conversation.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Yes.

Keith Block: You have a vision for the company and where the company is going to be and the Uber that you want it to become. Nobody's heard this before, here's your chance to tell them.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Where we want to take Uber is Uber started as a ride hailing company, essentially a black car hailing company. And the way that we're thinking about Uber going forward is to make this transition from a ride share company to really a mobility on demand company. Which is anyway, our job is actually to get you from point A to point B in a city, in a town, et cetera. And more and more, we want to give you, we want to open up our system just like Salesforce has built out this open platform, essentially for companies. We want to build out an open transportation platform for transportation providers to essentially put their services into our platform and make that transition from being a rideshare business to a mobility on demand services as well. Transit providers, taxi companies, Lime bikes, and scooters, our own bikes and scooters. Basically, we want to have any way for any transportation method, whether it's ours or third parties to come into this app. And at the same time, we're looking to drive this transportation, this transition of our Eats business, which is about food, et cetera. Food, anything you want fast to be about essentially powering all local commerce. You think about a restaurant and a restaurant delivery restaurant is a box with probably 30 skews of inventory. It's hot inventory that has to get to your home very, very quickly, but you can extend that definition to be anything. And for example, we bought a company called Cornershop, which powers grocery stores and getting groceries, small Cornershop grocery stores to your home. Essentially, we have these two big platforms. One, is making the transition from rideshare to mobility on demand. The other one is making a transition from food to essentially anything that you want in your life at home. And you put that under umbrella anywhere you want to go in your city, anything that you want from your city, we will either get you there or we'll get it to you. And that vision is one that we call essentially, the operating system for your everyday life. We want to power your life. You want to go from A to B, you want to get anything you want in the city. We want to power that and we want to become that trusted partner for you every day to make life easier for you and essentially give you your time back.

Keith Block: I love the concept of painting it as the operating system for your life, because it is a mobile world. People move, people want to be able to move in intelligent and safe ways and that's really your concept.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Absolutely. And you really do the fascinating part of our company is that we are building technology and ours is a tech enabled company out there. But it's not technology that just lives in the digital sphere. It's actually technology that combines the digital and the physical. And the physical world, physical world is a mess. For us, everything that you have to do in order to push a button and have a car show up within five minutes, push a button and have your big Mac show up within 30 minutes, et cetera. Everything that you have to build in order to make that experience predictable, repeatable and within a trusted ecosystem of services of riders and drivers and restaurants, et cetera, that technology challenge of almost digitizing the physical world is incredibly challenging, but it's really, really rewarding as well.

Michael Rivo: We're going to take a quick break now to bring you a conversation with CEO, WordPress VIP, Nick Gernert. WordPress VIP is the leading provider of enterprise WordPress. And they power companies like Facebook, Spotify, and more. My colleague, Matt Jaffe sat down with Nick at Dreamforce to discuss how his company is grappling with topics like the future of work, digital transformation, and more.

Matt Jaffe: I want to get into artificial intelligence, AI. I think that's something that a lot of people hear and they don't really know what that means. They're not quite sure what that's all about. How are you guys using AI or WordPress VIP?

Nick Gernert: I think you hit on something critical there, which is there's something that is almost intimidating to folks about thinking about something like they're hearing these words, machine learning or artificial intelligence or personalization. Concepts that you're hearing are important and that are into the future. But when it comes to practical application of those things, it's also somewhat unknown in terms of like, " Give me, where is this happening practically?" I'm hearing-

Matt Jaffe: How can I see it in my daily life?

Nick Gernert: Yeah. I'm just not seeing it in my daily life maybe in that and that sort of thing. And it's that sort of tension that I always want to really empathize with folks and think how do we help them through this, because it's actually through that sort of tension that sometimes people make the wrong decisions about doing something, where they're like, " Okay, now I've got an AI vendor and we're working together and we're going to come up with something because I need to be able to say that we're focused on AI." And I really want us to challenge everybody to think more critically about like, where does this stuff? Where is the practical application? Where is it going into the future? Because there absolutely are really exciting things happening here. But it's also, let's be practical about like what's the end result?. What are you trying to do? What are the goals and the objectives? And let's make sure that AI and ML are in support of what that is in doing that. But some of the things that we're doing like really exciting stuff that we're able to do on our side. We run a massively distributed WordPress platform globally distributed and highly available. And one of the things that we have to be just prepared for is the unknown when it comes to traffic and be ready for whatever maybe needed at any given moment. We are the platform behind a 538 or things like this, where at an election or on a major sporting event there's going to be massive traffic spikes. And how do you sort of predict and be available and have everything sort of ready?

Matt Jaffe: And you can see it coming. You know ahead of time, " Hey, this is going to be huge for us."

Nick Gernert: Yeah. And what's been interesting for us from an AI perspective is thinking about how do we apply that to resource provisioning so that we actually get ahead of when like a spike. Because there are things like we know when an election night is going to be or we know in the super bowl is and we can plan and be ready for that. But things that we may not see under the surface are like, what's just happening like at a seasonality level that we haven't actually taken into account for and how do we provision resources? We're leveraging AI to help us in a resource allocation so that we're maintaining uptime and availability and performance through peak usage, but we're not sort of waiting for the thundering herd to get there. The systems are working daily.

Matt Jaffe: You better be able to deal with the unexpected.

Nick Gernert: Absolutely. I was talking at an event a couple of weeks ago, that's WordCamp. And I was showing an example of what News Corp is doing with AI from a content production standpoint, breaking news is super important to what they're trying to do. And in a breaking news event they're trying to get that content out quickly. And often what happens is you sort of sacrifice on the production value of the content. You may just want to get a paragraph and publish and ship it and you're not going to necessarily maybe link off to other things while you're producing that content, because that's time that you could just get the article out there and you can come back to that. What we've actually been working on with them is they're now leveraging AI to scan the content and create relationships to where that content already exists within their applications. And it may be a breaking news event about let's say, it's California and we've been hearing about fires. Maybe I'm doing a post about that. It's going to scan through that and then it's going to look through our content indexes. Ad it's going to relate those contents in auto link a lot of this stuff for them. They can go through and just quickly say, " Hey, I do want this to be linked or I don't." But they're not having to go back and go through the process of finding that. And a big part of what's driving them is when somebody lands there, how do we not just lose them at that one thing? Can we direct them onto more to keep them engaged with what we're delivering?

Matt Jaffe: How do we keep it doing?

Nick Gernert: Yeah. How do we keep engagement? And this is one of those areas where it's kind of exciting to see when you're talking about millions of pieces of content that they're managing across a network. How do I leverage something like AI to make sense of a massive catalog of content, and then help me sort through and create those relationships and serve like personalized content to that user without having to spend a bunch of time sorting through an archive that is impossible to really sort through and doing that.

Matt Jaffe: I think you hit on an important point, which is a lot of people hear AI, they hear future of work and they think they're coming from my jobs.

Nick Gernert: Right.

Matt Jaffe: But it's not about that.

Nick Gernert: No.

Matt Jaffe: It's about an improved user experience at the end of the day.

Nick Gernert: Yeah, it is. It is about an improved. And one thing that's just run consistent through my entire career has been, there's always been something that felt like it was coming for your job. Even something like WordPress. If you look at what WordPress is trying to do it's lowering the barriers to getting a message out to your customers on the web. And there's a way to think about that and say like, " Oh, well, if that didn't exist, it would be slightly more technical. And then that might keep then I can just focus on doing that." But what that allows you to do is say like, " No, we can solve that problem. And now we can focus on new and other interesting problems." The same story with AI like this is something where we're solving new problems. And then we get to focus on what's next after that. And that's what's exciting about this. It's like, let's solve the challenges, let's normalize those things so that people can really succeed with the current tool set. But then let's also see like, let's think three years, five years down the road what's going to be necessary. Let's focus on that. Let's not focus on how do we make sense of large data sets if we can solve for that today.

Michael Rivo: That was Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP. To find out more visit wpvip.com. And now back to Dara Khosrowshahi and Keith block.

Keith Block: Shifting gears here a little bit. The good news is that congratulations, you're a verb. We talked about that before you came out. But the importance of culture and in your business, for whatever reason, Uber seems to be a target. People have their comments about Uber. And you could use the expression lightning rod, if you want. But I know that when you came on as the CEO, a big focus area for you was culture.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Yeah.

Keith Block: And your leadership of culture. And how do you focus on culture of trust, which is so important given how people sometimes probably unfairly view Uber.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Listen, I think that is an unfair affair. You talked about our company being 10 years old, right? And our company has the growth of this company in 10 years and how we have been a part of this changing ecosystem of cities all over the world has been pretty extraordinary. And I do think that we went through this stage of listen, we were the rebels. We were the pirates, we were the change agents, we're going against like taxi interests, et cetera. And that building something truly from the ground up against kind of this structured interests that didn't want things to change that required a certain, almost rebellious behavior. It's an Apple rebellious pirate army kind of early days. And I think that the business grew so fast that we moved from rebel to incumbent and we didn't even know it. And once you do become a service, a company, that's a multibillion dollar business, we do 15 million rides a day now. And once you get of size how you act the responsibility that you have in terms of communication, transparency to your drivers, to your riders, to the cities in which you operate, to the governments with which you work, et cetera, that that responsibility becomes really significant. And the fact is we had to catch up to that realization because we just grew too fast.

Keith Block: Yeah.

Dara Khosrowshahi: I think some of the, you being a lightning rod, et cetera, that's deserve it. And it wasn't because I think that there were people who didn't have the best intentions, we just grew up too fast. And then sometimes that happens as a company. And now as a company, we are making that shift. We do understand that there are stakeholders, we're a company that we've got over four and a half million drivers and couriers who are on our system, who depend on us sometimes in some countries for full time work more often in the U. S. for part time work for earnings. And they're on the system because they value the flexibility, but they also value the earnings as well. There's a deep responsibility there to these four and a half million users of our platform. There's a deep responsibility that we have to our riders. There's a real responsibility that we have to our cities and the changing traffic flows, et cetera. And we are now working very, very hard to pay back some of the debt bad occurred and really becoming a trusted partner. And I think that you lose trust much more quickly than you can gain it back. And I think it's hard work to get it back, but I will tell you that the people who work at this company are determined for Uber to be seen as what we truly think we are, which is a company that is responsible and a company that truly is going to improve the lives of all stakeholders that we're responsible to.

Keith Block: And we were talking backstage about improving the lives. And with that many people you're a large city. When you think about four and a half million people who are part of your network, the volume of people who go through the Uber system on a daily basis it's incredible.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Yeah. We move more people as a company than all of the airlines in the world move people on a daily basis.

Keith Block: Yeah.

Dara Khosrowshahi: I don't think people realize that. And there is a responsibility huge to your employees, to the people in the network, to your passengers. And I know you are passionate about this.

Keith Block: Yes. Super passionate about privacy and safety. You should share that passion with this audience.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Certainly on the privacy front, it is incredibly important for us to get it right, which is we have location information, realtime location information and identity. And listen that as precious cargo that belongs to the user for the user. One of our core ethos is we will use that information if we see that you're taking Ubers and going home every day after work your home will come up as the top destination, et cetera. But we're essentially going to use your data to serve you versus to serve ourselves. I think that's incredibly important for us. And then for our safety now is eight huge priority for the company and we're making enormous investments in safety now both for the driver and for the rider as well. I think a lot of people think about rider safety, but driver's safety is just as important. There are two people in a car and things can go wrong. And for example, in the past two years, we have been by far the leader in terms of our developing our safety ecosystem. Having 911 button in the app right there on the map. Essentially, you can now text 911. And if you texted 911, your location will be transmitted live. The make and model of your car will be transmitted live. You can now with my daughter I can track her rides now. I know when she gets picked up, when she gets dropped off, I promised her that I wouldn't criticize the time at which she gets picked up and dropped off. It's an agreement there, but I know that she's safe and that's a big deal for us as well. We are now developing technology and there's a pilot that we have in Brazil, for example, that based on permission, we'll take an audio recording of your ride and I'll ask permission for the driver and the rider for the audio recording. And the goal there is if something goes wrong, first of all, if you have ill intent. People who have ill intent usually look for dark corners to kind of apply their trade. We want to light everything up in an Uber. We want to shine light upon your ride so that someone who has ill intent hopefully doesn't do anything or go someplace else. That feature for example, to record your ride it's you can't access the recording, but if something happens, if an incident happens it can go to us and we can do something about it. If you start and end a trip if you say you're going home, we know how long the trip is going to take. We know the route that you're supposed to take. If for some reason the car stops in the middle of your route. We now have ML algorithms that will reach out to you and say, " Keith, is everything okay?" These are all investments that we made on the safety front. They're very, very significant. And it is making sure because we do 50 million rides a day, we want to make sure that the one in a million doesn't happen and more.

Keith Block: It sounds like if you think about core values of the company, trust is certainly could be your number one value probably is.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Enormous.

Keith Block: Privacy, core value, safety.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Absolutely.

Keith Block: Core value. This feature where you can actually track where people are going, I'm going to tell you a story. This is my other personal story. My 24 year old is using Uber and she has my wife's account. And it's one o'clock in the morning and we're watching on the phone as it says, " Bridget is going to Joe's pub. Bridget is going to Ralph's bar." She was going on a bar crawl, whatever those things are. And we just watched the whole thing. Thank you for that. We're really appreciate.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Perfectly safe.

Keith Block: And she got home. Thank you. Thank you for that. But it's actually kind of cool functionality. Anyway, sustainability.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Sustainability for us is another passion, which is, we're in the transportation business, but we want to make sure that our transportation as sustainable as possible. One area that we're very excited about is actually London. In London, we are collecting a fee for every ride that's happening now, That fee goes into an account that our drivers can use in order to purchase electric vehicles, to drive environmental sustainability in London. By 2025, we are going to be all electric in London. And we're hoping that that can become a model for other countries as well. And we're essentially using our revenue to go out and fund a much more sustainable way method of transportation as well. But the future that we see is it's got to be shared and we think sharing is absolutely going to increase sustainability. It's got to be shared. It's got to be electric. And eventually it will be autonomous because autonomous will be safer some period of time forward here. I think by 2050 for us, we think that a shared electric and autonomous fleet can reduce emissions by 80% and actually reduce the number of cars that we have on the road by 90%.

Keith Block: Wow.

Dara Khosrowshahi: There's no, if you look at a car right now, the utilization of the average car that people own is 5%. It's 5% utilization, 95% of the time cars not used. You think about all of the parking, et cetera, that's required in the cities, all of this infrastructure that is not serving people, but it's actually serving these cars that are utilized 5% of the time. That is not something that makes sense for society. And for us driving that utilization and essentially removing the need for car ownership, miss something that we think is great for the individual, but it's also going to be great for the cities in which we operate.

Keith Block: Uber does a lot of things for a lot of different organizations in the cities. And these are stories that have come out and they will come out. One that you and I somewhat got involved in was with Carnegie Mellon in the city of Pittsburgh and they're like any city. Pittsburgh is not unlike any other city. There are some pretty bad areas that are underserved. There's no transportation, no public transportation, bad. When I use the word bad I mean bad in the sense that the city is not doing the job that it should to take care of those areas and to help them out. And Uber did something really cool where people who are living in this area, they can't find work because there are no jobs in that particular section of the city, but they could go with your help because Uber provided vouchers to travel to other areas to find jobs. And magically, what happened to that area? The economy got better, health got better, crime went down, it was all goodness, but this is something you do.

Dara Khosrowshahi: And every city has its transportation deserts. We say are transit deserts in the cities. And listen, they tend to be not in city centers. You and I are lucky enough to live in city centers where there's plenty of access to transportation of all kinds, buses, transit, et cetera, but not everyone is that lucky. Uber systematically in general, we are growing much faster in these transportation deserts. And we are actively going out and working with different cities to have voucher programs, et cetera, so that you can provide. Transportation represents freedom, transportation represents opportunity and we want to be an active participant and making sure that opportunity is available for everybody. The unfortunate byproduct of some of the things going on in cities, for example, in New York city, is that New York city has put some legislation together that essentially limits the amount of drivers that we can have at one time, which increases prices for a service. And also if you limit them out of Uber supplies, all of the cars then go to the center of the cities. Because that's where you've got the greatest number of hails, the greatest number of rides, et cetera. Actually some of the difficulty that we're having in kind of talking to our constituencies, like New York city to serve the whole city, but then serve our drivers as well is that if you actually restrict the number of drivers out there, the drivers go to the middle of the city and the people who live in the city outskirts, the people who can't afford higher rates actually are the ones who are hurt the most. We want to make sure again, you talk about kind of stakeholder capitalism. We're a company, ultimately we have to make money, et cetera, but there are so many stakeholders to serve here and these cities they're living organisms and we have to make sure that as we go forward and work with our cities we don't decrease our availability of transportation and mobility to these neighborhoods who need it most.

Keith Block: Yeah. Which is a great story. And this sounds like a perfect example of where the public sector and the private sector can work.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Absolutely.

Keith Block: To do the right thing.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Absolutely.

Keith Block: And everybody benefits.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Absolutely. And actually, for example, we're now working with a lot of transit providers on taking on providing bike ride, scooter rides, sometimes Uber's to a transit hub, so that then someone can take the rest of their ride using transit as well.

Keith Block: Very cool. All right. You've run two digital first companies. You did the Expedia thing, you did the Uber thing, you see the future, what's the future? What's the next generation of companies?

Dara Khosrowshahi: I can tell you what's going to happen tomorrow, but I can't tell you much beyond that.

Keith Block: Well, we'll take it.

Dara Khosrowshahi: For me, what's fascinating and it's a challenge. You and I were talking about this backstage is that companies like ours, digital companies, but especially like Uber that's digital, but working in the physical world as well. We really have to make sure that we are building services that do serve all of our stakeholders out there. And I think that the success of some technology companies have been too focused in areas like San Francisco, you know like it's the success and the capital and all the fruits of these labors have been too restricted. There has been too smaller population. And we have to make sure that as we win our stakeholders win. And that takes a lot of effort, it takes a lot of dialogue. And ultimately, I think that for the next generation technology company to succeed all of the stakeholders and societies around them have to succeed as well. That's a must have for us going forward and it's easier frankly said than done.

Keith Block: I think that's a great message for everybody. We've got a lot of young people who are aspiring CEOs in the audience, do you have any advice?

Dara Khosrowshahi: You're going to have to give them advice as well. I'd say the one thing that I keep telling young people are actually, don't over plan your life. All of us have had biases. And when you make these longterm plans, listen, the world now is changing so fast that I think one of the greatest determinants of success is going to be actually how quickly you can react to the changes rather than having a plan and then blindly following that plan. One thing I would tell young people is don't over plan because when you over plan and I've seen people make mistakes all the time. I've got to be VP by X age or I've got to make X amount of money by Y age. I've got to have this title I'm looking for a title, et cetera. That creates a biased view of your future. That very often is going to prevent you from seeing the opportunity right next to you. That's staring at you in the face because you want to go there. Keep your head on a swivel, look for opportunity. And the other thing that I tell you that's really served me through my whole life is I've always focused on whom I'm going to work for rather than what I'm to do. And by focusing on whom I'm going to work for so many things change in life. But what I've seen is unchanging is great people stay great. And my going and working for great people has allowed me one, sometimes they succeed so I get to kind of bask in their success as well. I get to ride on their wake. And then I learn from them and I can kind of create my own wake as well. Don't over plan, focus on whom you are going to work for rather than what you're going to do. Those would be my two pieces of advice. What about you?

Keith Block: I think that's great advice. We could talk about this all night. I would give two pieces. One is follow your passion and understand what your true north is and follow that. And typically, your gut is right. Your instincts are good. And if you stay true to that, it will bring you down to the right path. I think following your passion is really important, whatever that passion is. The other is when you do become CEOs, because you will become CEOs is that when you create that company, create a culture based on very strong values. Because no matter what happens in that company, as long as you stick to those values, whenever things hit a rocky patch and trust me, they will, because every company hits a rocky patch, everything can be grounded back into those core values. I think follow your passion, understand who you are, your true north, and then establish those values for your company. And I think that makes a huge difference.

Dara Khosrowshahi: It's good advice.

Keith Block: My friend final thoughts for this group.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Final thoughts is do what he said.

Keith Block: All right, Dara. Thanks for being with us.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Thank you very much

Keith Block: Thank you.

Michael Rivo: That was Dara Khosrowshahi CEO of Uber and Keith Block co- CEO of Salesforce at Dreamforce 2019. If you enjoyed this conversation a lot more like it, be sure to hit subscribe on Apple podcasts or your favorite podcast app. That'll do it for another episode of Blazing Trails. Thank you for listening and thank you to WordPress VIP for presenting the show with us. We'll be back next Thursday with more great conversations like these. Blazing Trails is a production of Salesforce, a customer relationship management solution committed to helping you deliver the personalized experiences customers want. They'll keep coming back again and again. Salesforce bringing companies and customers together. Visit salesforce.com/ learnmore.