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Rapid Response
Uber's swerve on gas prices, hotels, and a driverless future, with Andrew Macdonald
00:33:58
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- [00:01]
Bob Safian
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- [00:38]
Podcast Narrator
iconic leaders reveal how they've beaten the odds.
- [00:41]
Bob Safian
Asking really strong questions is a superpower you want to show up with something
- [00:46]
Podcast Narrator
radically different and how they've grown companies to incredible heights.
- [00:50]
Jordan Harbinger
The greatest rewards always come from the greatest risks.
- [00:53]
Andrew McDonald
That's hit the gas.
- [00:54]
Podcast Narrator
Airbnb, Zillow, Microsoft, Liquid Death, and more. Hear from the founders who've changed the game. It's anything but business as usual. Find Masters of Scale on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you get podcasts.
- [01:17]
Andrew McDonald
Autonomy is existential for us, and it is somewhere between existential and massive value unlocking. And it won't be a couple of years, but it also won't be a couple of decades. And so somewhere between now and then, like how the world moves looks totally different. You should be able to get anything to your doorstep in 30 minutes or less. All local commerce. Anyone that has a storefront, a distribution center, a node, a warehouse, whatever. If you want that at your doorstep in 30 minutes, you should be able to get that.
- [01:59]
Bob Safian
That's Andrew McDonald, President and Chief operating officer of Uber. With gas prices jumping, I wanted to ask Mac how drivers across Uber's platform are responding and other signals he's picking up about the economy from the company's data. We also talk about Uber's newest move into travel and lodging via a partnership with Expedia, whether the goal is to turn Uber into a super app, and ways that Uber and Airbnb are competing. Plus what Mac sees as the inevitable shift to autonomous cars, and what responsibility Uber has to its human drivers. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.
- [02:42]
I'm Bob Safi and I'm here with Andrew McDonald, President and CEO of Uber. Andrew Mac, thanks for. Thanks for being here, Bob.
- [02:50]
Andrew McDonald
Great to be here. I'm excited to chat.
- [02:53]
Bob Safian
So Uber has gone through many waves and phases. Early disruption and attention, and a difficult period, reputationally. Darakas Rushahi was on the show a while back, Uber CEO, and he was pretty candid about the challenges of resettling the brand and the culture in recent years. It's been definitely a maturing phase growing up as a business. You've been along for much of this ride. Joining in 2012, where do you feel like Uber is in its journey for you? Are you in the midst of an ongoing phase? Is. Is a new one emerging?
- [03:30]
Andrew McDonald
Yeah, it's a great question. It's something I think about probably more than I should at this point. I'm the longest tenured employee at the company, so I have a little bit of, I guess the honor, but also the burden of carrying some of the history. And, you know, not many folks from call it uber 1.0 are around for Uber. I think we're like Uber 3.0 right now. I would say Dar's early days were Uber 2.0, but we've, we've come out of that sort of rebuild phase and now it's a phase of growth. The new phase is sort of like a technological shift more than an organizational shift. You know, for Uber, like every company, AI is topic du jour, but also probably the topic that will dominate the next few years, if not decades. Decades. We're a physical world company, an atoms company. We sit at this sort of digital physical intersection, and I think AI in the physical world is a major new frontier for us. So it's less about culture or organization. New phase, more about technology, which I think is exciting.
- [04:38]
Bob Safian
As we're talking, a lot of the news is about sort of rising gas prices. The strait of Hormuz choked off, putting pressure on everyone who drives. What are you hearing from your drivers? I mean, and what can you do to help raise rates for riders? How do you navigate that piece of this moment?
- [04:58]
Andrew McDonald
Yeah, so that's something we obviously focus on a lot. Right. We think about the people that earn money on our platform holistically. We think about what their P and L looks like, not just what our P and L looks like. I think the good news is, even though, hey, rising gas prices, that's got to be really tough for people who drive for a living. When you look at the percentage that, you know, an increase in gas prices, actually how much of that flows through to the drivers, like weekly P and L, if you will, it's actually relatively modest. Right. I'm not saying it's insignificant. Every dollar matters. But it's not necessarily the extreme flow through to price that you would see in, like an airline industry, for example. Now, that said, like, we are responsive to it. Driver sentiment is impacted when gas prices go up. We see it in our data right away. They also want to see A response from the company. In the past we've made some mistakes. You know, candidly we've done, for instance we've done direct fuel surcharges in the past where we just put a additional, call it a buck on the consumer receipt.
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Bob Safian
Charging riders a little more.
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Andrew McDonald
Yeah, charging riders, but also doing it in a very direct pass through way like put it on the receipt fuel surcharge. Here's the impact. The challenge with that for us is it's a bit of a fixed lever. Like it's, you know, when do you pull that back? If gas prices revert to, you know, pre crisis levels, is that your license to pull it back? You're still going to have folks that are unhappy if you pull it back at that moment. And so we actually try to use levers that are a bit more flexible. In some cases that means we just take some of the hit, I.e. we take lower margins, low take rates. In some cases we actually just raise underlying prices. So instead of having it be a surcharge, we just, you know, if, if the marketplace is tight, our prices go up. That's the benefit of a, a dynamic pricing marketplace like what we've got. And in other cases we'll actually just try to negotiate on the driver's behalf. So in the US we've rolled out a bunch of fuel discounts through our driver loyalty program that actually ends up offsetting most of the cost.
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Bob Safian
Is it, is it different? I mean outside the US I mean you're, you're a global business and that gas prices are much higher in some other parts of the world than they are in the US it's definitely different.
- [07:20]
Andrew McDonald
I mean this, I would say this is one of those topics that is a bit country specific. This is why we are not the normal tech company per se. We get pulled into the country level details of the 75 countries we operate in. Often the city level details and gas prices are a different story depending on where you look. I mean yes, the war obviously just puts upward pressure globally, but in many places they have huge domestic industry and production or governments subsidized gas prices. You have electrification rates which are very different. We have seven cities in Europe that are highly electrified. That is driving a lot of EVs. We call those our Spark 7 cities. The ability for those markets to absorb fuel price increases when you've got 40% of drivers in an electric vehicle is very different. And so yeah, the factors are different. And what we do is we sort of organize a global steer co where individual teams will adhere to A global set of principles, but we need solutions that work locally. We actually do have a fuel surcharge. As much as I don't love that approach. We have a fuel surcharge in Australia, for example, because there's some local factors there that make that attractive. So we vary our approach quite a bit, which is frankly a theme for our company overall.
- [08:34]
Bob Safian
I mean, Uber's an American brand. How much is it viewed that way around the world? I mean, I know some markets resisted Uber as an interloper at first. Over the last year or so, you've got us actions in the Middle east and trade policy. Are there implications about being an American brand for your business?
- [08:56]
Andrew McDonald
Yes, yes. And candidly, sometimes it's a halo for us and sometimes it's a drag. Brazil is our second largest mobility market by bookings, by dollars, and our largest mobility market by trips, volume and meaningfully so in Brazil generally, American tech companies have a halo. They're seen as high quality, aspirational, providing excellent service levels relative to local alternatives. So being in an American tech company or a Silicon Valley tech company is actually a big tailwind for us.
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Bob Safian
And when like tariffs are put on relations with Brazil, that didn't necessarily impact the way your brand is viewed.
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Andrew McDonald
It hasn't. And you know, we tend to be pretty immune to the sort of microeconomic impacts of tariffs. So much of our money flows locally. We actually don't get that impacted by things like tariffs or punitive, you know, cross border policies. If you're a customer in Brazil and you pay us 10 bucks, you know, like 950 is going into the driver's pocket. And so, you know, the money sort of stays locally and I think we actually benefit a little bit from that. Like if you're like, boycott Uber in Brazil. And because of, you know, it's an American brand, sure there'd be impact on us. But actually there's more than a million people that depend on our platform locally to earn money. So, you know, those are the folks that actually end up impacted. So we often feel more local because the face of our business locally is the restaurants that earn money on our platform, the retailers, the drivers, and that's who shows up for us when you're a customer. Now in a place like Europe, it's different, right? Some European politicians have said openly, you know, our recourse in trade policy is taxing the American tech companies. And, you know, we get bucketed into that group and that can be tough.
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Bob Safian
But it sounds like it's more about government policy than it necessarily is. About like, oh, Uber's American. I don't, I don't want to, you know, support that. That brand for that reason.
- [11:15]
Andrew McDonald
Yeah, that's minor. You know, and part of it is too. There's often not a local competitor and a local alternative. I'm from Canada originally. It's been well publicized that there's been some bi Canadian movements the last year and a half. People are like, don't use Uber. It's an American tech company. Well, the next biggest ride hailing player is Lyft, which is also an American tech company. The next biggest is Hop, which is European. Like, there's not a Canadian alternative to Uber. And in most countries that's true.
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Bob Safian
So you emphasize sort of the local nature of Uber's business. I was thinking that, you know, you serve both folks who go out for the night and those who stay in and order takeout. And in that way, your business is sort of has a barometer of the economy in some ways, of what's going on on the ground.
- [12:14]
Andrew McDonald
We're constantly looking for what's coming in our data, right? So we will slice by, you know, by zip code, whatever we know socioeconomically about our customer cohorts. We'll look at, you know, different credit card types, different payment methods, all sorts of different cuts to try to get at. Like, is the consumer weakening? And we just don't see it. I think we're a really good barometer of the labor market, actually a more pure barometer of the labor market than consumer health. Generally. The barriers to get on the Uber platform as a worker compared to other jobs are quite low. And so we tend to be a really good sign of the. The local labor market, right when there is high unemployment. And again, I would not say that at the federal level or even state level. I'd say at like a city level or even a zip code level, you see more supply come into the market and prices go down until there's like an equilibrium found between price and earnings. And when labor markets are t, you see prices go up and you know, again, that equilibrium get found at higher prices. So a lot of people study us for labor data, and right now, like, labor market's quite healthy in the US in particular, prices are not necessarily coming down as a result of excess labor supply. And so I think that shows the economy is still ticking along.
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Bob Safian
You recently announced a partnership with Expedia enabling users to book hotels through Uber. And it feels like sort of the next step in Uber, as you know, all in one super super app is, is that the strategy, the goal.
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Andrew McDonald
Yeah, I mean, this was a fun one for us, not the least of which because, you know, my boss is on the board of Expedia and used to be the CEO of Expedia. We don't use the term super app internally. We don't love it. And the reason is we're not trying to be all things to all people. Right. And you know, often super app, particularly when you use it in the context of like developing markets. You know, I think some of the biggest super app success stor or out of China or out of Southeast Asia
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Bob Safian
or India, amazing penetration in businesses.
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Andrew McDonald
They've developed 100% and usually not always, but usually payments and or messaging are at the center of those ecosystems. Right. It's often built on a wallet or it's built on a very large user base, you know, via messaging or whatever. And then they start building out adjacent services. That's how I think of a super app. We are an app about like, I think about daily usage, broad access to local commerce. And we do intend, we have built out adjacent services to core ride hailing and core on demand food delivery and now have many different flavors across mobility and delivery. And by the way, increasingly with our Uber freight business, which we don't talk about as much, serving sort of end to end logistics in cities and across countries and really it's about convenience and accessibility for the customer. And travel is a very natural use case for us to anchor in 15% plus of our, our mobility business comes through airports. We have a very high percentage of our customers that use us across multiple cities. Increasingly people are replacing room service at the hotel with Uber eats increasing. When you get to your hotel and you realize you forgot your toothpaste or your toiletries, you're doing a quick convenience order. So travel tends to be at the core of a lot of how people use our platform and so we're building around that.
- [15:54]
Bob Safian
I talked with Airbnb's Brian Chesky last fall about their efforts. They had the experiences, now they're offering car services largely from airports in Europe. How much are you. Are Uber and Airbnb sort of eyeing each other as kind of competitors as you're each moving from a core to a different place?
- [16:17]
Andrew McDonald
Yeah, so it's a great question and we have amazing respect for Airbnb through our Expedia partnership. We're making VRBO rentals available as well. So we're gonna play in that space as a channel. Now, many channels is not a new thing in the travel business. And I think frankly we all intend to grow the pie. And, and Airbnb, I think we, we watch closely what they do. We don't view them as a competitor. We view ourselves as an incremental channel to the industry. What I'd say though is, you know, just as the super apps of yore are based in like payments or messaging, which are high frequency use cases, we're building around on demand food delivery or rideshare, which is also pretty high frequency transactions for the average customer. I think going from infrequent to frequent is tougher and so I don't know what the average annual usage is of an Airbnb customer. I have a decent sense of what that looks like for the hotel operators and I think it's hard to get somebody to go from two to three personal hotel bookings a year to now using you for all sorts of things that are more about daily use. I think that's a tougher transition to make. Now we've got to prove the opposite. We've got to prove that we can go from frequent to infrequent. How do we get you to think about booking your hotel through Uber when you're used to use us for a bit more of the daily utility transaction? That is a challenge, but I think it's an easier challenge because you're just starting with more shots on goal. But it's a different challenge.
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Bob Safian
More shots on goal makes things easier, but as Mac also acknowledges, not all shots are the same. So might Uber take a shot at buying Expedia? And how big is its bet on autonomous vehicles beyond partnerships with Waymo and Zoox? We'll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.
- [18:21]
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- [19:31]
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- [20:02]
Bob Safian
Before the break, Uber COO Andrew McDonald talked about Uber's reaction to higher gas prices and what's driving its new partnership with Expedia. Now we talk about the prospect of buying Expedia outright, the role that Uber's membership program, Uber 1, might play in the future, and why he's focused on autonomous vehicles. Plus why stats about AI, including its costs, can make your head explode. Let's hop back in.
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There were rumors last year about potentially possibly an Expedia acquisition. Could this partnership be a step in that process?
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Andrew McDonald
That acquisition is, I would say, off the table for now. There's nothing live and ongoing there. But of course, as we learn about the travel space more by participating more directly in new product offerings there, to the extent we get very excited about travel, we will do more commercial partnerships, we'll grow our existing commercial partnership with Expedia, and we would be open to pushing into new verticals more directly as well.
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Bob Safian
It's early days, as you said. Early days, right.
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Andrew McDonald
You know, always says we're always exploring everything, right? Like we are listening all the time. And I think that's how you find interesting opportunities. Uber one, which is our membership program, right. And we just announced last week that we crossed 50 million members. You know, started out primarily focused on our food delivery, no delivery fee as a core value prop of Uber 1 was something that really was a clear hook for consumers. We have taken steps over the last few years to layer way more value into that program by adding mobility benefits, by adding family benefits. And now we're starting to add travel benefits. And I think the offer we've given on the hotel side is really rich. I think we have an opportunity to make Uber one the best travel rewards program, and that's an interesting hook for us as we go forward.
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Bob Safian
It's funny, it's like you're building Your Amazon prime or a Costco membership. There's that other side of the business part of what you're doing at the same time as you're sort of pushing into these other, these other verticals.
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Andrew McDonald
When you think about a, like a local membership program that you can get anything you want from really any storefront, whether that's a restaurant, a retail store, convenience store, and you can go anywhere you want. And you could do that on a bike, on a scooter, on transit, in an Uber X, in an Uber Black. And all of that is layered on top with like a local membership program. I think that's really compelling. And then if you're traveling all those benefits travel with you to explore whatever city you're going to that's unique and different. And we aspire to be alongside the Costcos and the Amazon Primes of the world for sure.
- [22:55]
Bob Safian
You recently released an intriguing paper about autonomous vehicles. That AV technology is ready, that the conversation around it kind of lags the capabilities. Can you explain that why you released this now?
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Andrew McDonald
Sure. When you're building new infrastructure in a city, which is essentially what Uber has done in rolling out transportation systems in more than 10,000 cities around the world, you have a deep responsibility to all the stakeholders that are impacted by that. It's not just about product market fit, it's not just about whether consumers love your, your, your app. It's not just about whether people enjoy earning money on the platform. It's you are impacting cities. And we think in retrospect ride sharing sort of happened to cities and then cities had to respond and often that response was combative and dragged out over multiple years and in some cases we're still paying down that debt. We've gotten a lot of things wrong over the years. We think autonomous should happen with cities. And by the way, the underlying technology is so amazing and we'll have so many knock on benefits for society from a safety perspective, from an economic value creation perspective, eventually from a cost perspective, it's going to be awesome. And I think we feel a deep responsibility to steward that future forward, having learned the lessons from our past, which means working with cities, making sure that important issues are sort of addressed head on as opposed to as an afterthought, issues like the labor transition. Right. AI is raising this question for society overall and A EVs autonomous vehicles are, you know, probably the purest form of the physical world AI. We need to make sure that as we roll out a new transportation system in a cities or a new ride hail network of sorts that we're not recreating the problems of the taxi industry of the past and all sorts of, I think, important questions that are all addressable. But actually, we'll make sure that there's not pushback against autonomous vehicles and that the progress isn't slowed, which ultimately is important to us. So, yeah, that's why we put it out there. We've learned our lessons and we want to help the world learn lessons, and we just want to put a stake in the ground of what we think good looks like.
- [25:11]
Bob Safian
I recently had Zoox CEO Aisha Evans as a guest on the show. And you've partnered with Zoox and also with Waymo. Uber shuttered its own AV effort several years ago, but you've left the door open to reviving it. As you talk about av, it sounds like you're a believer that AV fleets, they're coming, they're gonna be here. Will you need to have your own AVs in the long run? Can you just be the conduit for others?
- [25:43]
Andrew McDonald
It's a great question. And candidly, it's a question that I think we have a responsibility as a management team to continue to revisit. Like, we have 25 autonomous vehicle partnerships today, globally, and starting to work with our partners to scale, helping them build out the physical world infrastructure they need to scale, whether that's depots or charging capacity, remote vehicle management or customer support. It's no longer about, hey, let's just get a couple vehicles on the road and test that our integration works and help, you know, see the. See how your technology performs. But, like, how do we go from five vehicles to 500 to 5,000? And to me, that's a matter of when, not if. The technological problems are largely solved, it becomes a business model problem and a scaling problem. And our job is to make sure that the economic return on those assets for our partners or for whoever the ultimate vehicle owner is. Right. Because I think many models will emerge. I think you'll have fleets that will own these assets. I think you'll have financial investors that will own these assets. I think you'll have individuals that will own these assets. So whether or not we need to own vehicles directly, own fleets directly, own the technology directly, I think it's something that will get answered over time. Our position today is that that's not our role in the ecosystem. But like any management team, we should always be open to changing our mind. If the facts change or our strategy is proven to be wrong, then then we'll have to change direction.
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Bob Safian
Your current human Drivers who are worried about being replaced like, like many people are worried about, about being replaced by AI. What do you feel like is your responsibility in that transition toward those drivers compared to the responsibility of the cities, of the governments?
- [27:33]
Andrew McDonald
One of the ways you don't make this entirely a government problem is that corporations act responsibly. And so when we advocate for things like a hybrid network, when people are requesting an Uber, they may get that fulfilled by an autonomous vehicle, they may get it fulfilled by a human driver. We think a hybrid transition is a very responsible transition that allows us to continue to grow the pie. Our business is still growing north of 20% a year, and that means that human rideshare jobs and earnings are still growing. And I think they will for years to come, even as we layer in autonomous vehicles to our network. And I think that helps the transition. More than 10 million people earn money on the Uber platform globally, and we have a deep responsibility to those folks to help them have opportunities in the future. We, of course, will work with governments on this transition, but I think corporations need to lead the way.
- [28:28]
Bob Safian
Are there things you've learned in this process as you're testing, figuring out how to apply AI in a way that's effective, that others might take away from the experience? Because I mean, the equal parts excitement and fear and cost about this?
- [28:46]
Andrew McDonald
Yeah. And the first thing I'll say is I'm on a learning journey like probably everyone else on this podcast, Right. And as much as I multiple times per day have moments in my personal AI usage where I'm like, this is so cool. This is amazing. I can't believe I was just able to do that. I also suffer from the sort of inertia of there's kind of a couple of hours of learning for me to do that thing via cloud or via ChatGPT. And so I'm going to do it the old way. And like I'm trying to fight that every day. I think the way consumers are now expecting to consume AI from companies is like this chatbot format. And it's not yet clear to me how like a company like Uber or many of the other sort of consumer transaction oriented companies actually make that transition. Brian Chesky, yesterday, I think it was yesterday, tweeted about why isn't Airbnb rushing out sort of AI led interfaces for customers. And I thought he was very honest in his response was effectively with something like, it's very hard for us to make the transition from our traditional UI to a chatbot led AI or a voice LED UI without Killing conversion. And there's like more than $100 billion flowing through the Airbnb platform. And if you kill conversion on that as you make some hard fork to a totally different ui, that's billions of dollars of value destroyed in the short term. And even if you're the bravest founder led forward design thinker like Brian is, that's a hard, a hard gap. And by the way, it's not obviously better for the consumer, I'm not sure.
- [30:28]
Bob Safian
Well, that's the thing, right? You're not sure what's going to be better for the consumer. And until you're sure, like you don't want to sell them something that maybe isn't what they want.
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Andrew McDonald
We're working with pretty much all of the large model companies as they roll out, try to roll out commerce and there hasn't really been anything that's taken off yet. It doesn't mean it won't happen. But it's a year ago at our board meeting, we were worried that by this point a year later we'd be totally disaggregated because all commerce is going to be flowing through the large model codes in the form of chatbots. And that just hasn't played out yet.
- [31:07]
Bob Safian
I had an interesting discussion with Louis Von Ahn from Duolingo. I don't know if you know Louis or not, but how he's learned over the last year that some of the things he thought AI was going to make more efficient for the company doesn't necessarily, because you have to spend so much time checking it and reinforcing it. He's not finding that enormous leverage from his engineering team that he hears about that he's hoping for.
- [31:36]
Andrew McDonald
Yeah, I mean, the headline stats, you make your head explode, right? When you hear companies Talking about, hey, 25% of code commits over the last quarter were AI driven or our token usage went from X to Y or percentage of employees, all these sort of numbers. And it's amazing and I think it's like this massive transformation of society. But then you sometimes go and you talk to your senior engineering leaders and you're saying, okay, how many projects that were on the cutting room floor got moved above the line because of the, you know, productivity gains? Because 25% of our code commits were via cloud code last quarter. That link is not there yet. Right. Like you're not. I mean, I think maybe implicitly there's more that is getting shipped, but it's very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and okay, now we're actually producing like 25% more useful consumer features. Right. And that line is hard to draw. And I think over the coming quarters and years, like maybe that will become clearer. But I think today it's hard, even if some of the underlying metrics are like, trending in a really astronomical direction. Our CTO Praveen, went viral because he effectively said in an interview that we had blown through our AI budget for 2026 and it was like, you know, middle of March or something when he, when he said this and everyone was like, oh, you know, head exploding moment. We're going to have to start talking about token consumption and the associated cost versus headcount and making trades on that as an engineering organization. And so if you're not actually able to draw a direct line to how much useful features and functionality you're shipping to your users, that trade becomes harder to justify.
- [33:34]
Bob Safian
Because it's not free. AI is not free.
- [33:37]
Andrew McDonald
No, it can feel that way. And if you're just a user sitting there and coming up with interesting use cases and you don't pay the bill, it can feel that way. But somebody's paying the bill. Bill.
- [33:47]
Bob Safian
What's at stake for Uber right now?
- [33:50]
Andrew McDonald
Autonomy is existential for us, and it is somewhere between existential and massive value unlocking. And it won't be a couple of years, but it also won't be a couple of decades. And so somewhere between now and then, like how the world moves looks totally different. And I think that's amazing. I mean, I don't think my daughters, who are all, you know, little kids today, but I don't think they will end up getting a driver's license.
- [34:17]
Bob Safian
They don't need to learn to drive.
- [34:19]
Andrew McDonald
No, I don't think so. I think ultimately autonomy will go to the skies. Whether you're talking about drone delivery or you're talking about companies like Joby that are effectively building human sized drones, which will again further revolutionize how people move around. And by the way, we want to be pushing on those frontiers. And then on the delivery side, you should be able to get anything to your doorstep in 30 minutes or less. All local commerce, anyone that has a storefront, a distribution center, a node, a warehouse, whatever, if you want that at your doorstep in 30 minutes, you should be able to get that. I think that's really inspiring. And again, further changes how people experience the world and it's really compelling and exciting.
- [35:06]
Bob Safian
Well, Mac, this was great. Thanks so much for doing this.
- [35:09]
Andrew McDonald
So happy to be here. Thanks for the time, Bob.
- [35:14]
Bob Safian
This was the first time I spoke with Mac, and I was impressed by his openness about Uber's menu of reactions to rising gas prices, the pros and cons of being an American brand, and the costs around AI. It's nice to hear an acknowledgement of past mistakes by the company too, although whether those lessons can be applied to an AI future is still tbd. One clear thread in Mac's comments is around flexibility. Uber is leaving the door open on a bunch of things, from buying Expedia to creating its own AV fleet. It's a reflection of just how uncertain the future is for even successful business models. We may have goals and impact we
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want to make, whether that's a 30
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minute delivery of everything or ride sharing in the skies. But we also also have to keep our feet on the ground, ready to change our route based on the dynamic conditions around us. I'm Bob Safian.
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Thanks for listening. Rapid Response is a Wait. What? Original I'm Bob Safian. Our executive producer is Eve Trow, our senior producer is Alex Morris, and our
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associate producer is Masha Makutonina. Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastinelli and Brian Pugh. Our theme music is by Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcasts is Lital Milad.
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For more, visit rapidresponseshow.com.