Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, I got that one. What's old becomes new, what's new becomes old. What's been interesting is there's a simple idea, but then building out the tech infrastructure to be able to fit to that particular market becomes a challenge. Also it's an opportunity, which is now, for some of our competitors, is to copy that. It's taking a lot of tuning to actually get that experience to be excellent. There are some markets where we're mixing demand. You might click for an Uber X, a taxi might show up. Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? It improves marketplace liquidity. Things that seem very simple on the surface to actually make the magic happen of pushing a button and a car shows up in five minutes and you get great service is actually pretty difficult tech to build on the ground. It's really cool. That is cool. I have another corporate structure question that I'm curious about. I think you guys, between when you took the job and today, turned over basically the entire Uber shareholder base. I'm sure there are some people that still hold their shares from those early days. What is that like at the scale of a $70–$80 billion market cap company turning over a shareholder base in its entirety? Very painful. It was the displacement in terms of shareholders. It was tough. There's a certain cohort of shareholders going after hyper growth, et cetera, especially in this marketplace, where it's much more about discipline, growth, profitable growth, et cetera. That change over has been difficult, but we now have a set of shareholders like the Fidelities of the world, Capital, Morgan Stanley, et cetera, that have the capacity to own a lot of shares way more than they do today. There's a consistency about it. As we keep delivering, they keep upping their stake. We're now seeing a stock price that generally is working. I'll tell you, when we're in the middle of it, it was tough. After the IPO, after the lockup, Travis sold all those shares.…

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