Uber Technologies, Inc. Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

All right. In the interest of time, we're going to get going. It's my pleasure to welcome back to Communacopia, Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber. Dara- Thanks for having me.

Thanks so much. Always great to sit down. Always a lot to talk about.

Always. I'm going to turn the floor over to you first because I feel like we have to start every year at the same spot.

There's always a lot going on with the company.

Always. You're always trying to move the platform and the products forward every 12 months.

Bring us up to speed. What has been the top of your agenda in terms of moving this company forward and aligning strategic priorities with where the consumer-facing products are going right now?

I think the good news for us is that our strategy has stayed fairly consistent over the past couple of years, and in some sense, because it's working. Our mission is still to allow people to go anywhere, get anything, and reinvent on-demand transportation in cities. If you look at our strategy, how we execute on the strategy, there are a couple of important elements that really drive a very specific kind of growth platform for us. Number one, I think that the interest in on-demand everything, transportation, delivery of food, now delivery of grocery and retail, et cetera, it continues to grow and be a tailwind for our growth. Within that category, we're still very focused on improving selection, having more cars, having every single restaurant available to you, improving quality, improving reliability, and reducing price as we scale.

Yeah. All of those, we are still not, in our opinion, as good as we can be, and improving reliability, improving pricing, improving quality continues to drive a tailwind in this on-demand industry.

That's table stakes that we keep focusing on. Number two for us is that we're focused on a number of growth levers, and the two that I would point out for us is, one is growth into sparse markets. Uber has always been kind of a big city service. What we're observing with our sparse markets is that, one, they're very large, and we can grow into those markets profitably, and at scale. In the core markets in which we operate, about 50% of the eligible population already use Uber one way or the other. They either use Uber or Uber Eats. In these sparse markets, that number is 10%.

We have a huge kind of opportunity to penetrate into these sparse markets, and those sparse markets are now growing 1.5 times faster than the core markets. That is we are, I'd say, we've been focused now on sparse markets, both in mobility and delivery in every single country that we operate in, really for two years. That growth lever for us has a number of years to go. Second kind of growth lever that we're quite focused on is what we call the barbell strategy, which is we're developing a set of higher-margin products, whether it's Uber for Business or it's Uber Black or now Blacklane, which is part of our family, or priority delivery or advertising.

We are using the excess margins of those businesses to drive low-cost products, to run promotions on grocery to get more people on grocery, to drive two-wheelers and three-wheeler growth in developing markets. The low-cost products tend to bring in a number of new customers that we upsell into the higher-cost products to drive margin. Our margin strategy and our new customer strategy are quite complimentary. When you combine that with on-demand growth, when you combine that with sparse markets growth, you get a pretty powerful kind of growth formula that we have. Once we get the consumers in, we want to drive engagement, and that is membership.

Yeah That is cross-platform membership.

Members spend three times more than non-members. Cross-platform players, and that is unique to us, spend three times more than non-cross-platform players. You are getting in a bunch of new customers, and you are embedding those consumers into the ecosystem, driving frequency. Within all that, we continue to introduce new products, whether it is taxi, which continues to scale at very high levels, or again, it is grocery and retail. Those new products are entirely new growth drivers for us. Autonomous is a huge opportunity both in mobility and delivery. Everyone is talking about the potential of AI to allow companies to grow faster, at scale, and drive both margin and quality as well. So that strategy, that operational strategy, that growth strategy, it is a playbook that we have been running for the last two to three years.

We have been able to grow our top line over 20% for the past four quarters. We have been able to do it while increasing margins as well. Hopefully we will keep it going for a while.