High Flyers

This month, in our CPA Australia interview series featuring exceptional business leaders, David Rohrsheim, Uber’s general manager for Australia and New Zealand, reveals how Silicon Valley rewired his thinking.

How would you reflect on your upbringing in Adelaide? Being the youngest of six kids is a tough spot and my brothers and sisters set quite a high standard. My father was in the military and went away on several tours of duty and all three of my brothers spent time in the military. That means a lot of hard work and a lot of discipline. Did joining the military appeal to you? When your father and all your brothers do it... I gave it a lot of thought. For many of them, it was a means to support themselves. I was lucky that with my IT hobby, I was able to get a job to pay my way through university. I had an alternative. You did engineering. Did you ever work as one? Engineering is what I still like to do, which is to build, but I got good advice back in 2000 that technology and business would be a powerful combination so I studied both at The University of Adelaide. To this day, I’m doing a bit of both. When did you head to Silicon Valley? My first job was in Sydney with the management consulting firm Bain & Company, which was a great education in business, but then I got an opportunity to work with a venture capital firm in San Francisco. Spending all day meeting entrepreneurs and working with early-stage companies was a privileged place to be and see how the best get it done. I was there when the GFC set in, which made it a powerful learning experience. Startups were being born at a time when money wasn’t easy to get so they learnt how to survive in very tough conditions. What did you learn from that? Focus and speed; mostly speed. Trying ideas and quickly figuring out if they’re good or bad, then doubling down on the good, is essential. Does the Australian startup community differ? There is a higher risk tolerance in San Francisco. People are more willing to fail and others are more sympathetic to those who do fail. They see it as an education. When I was an investor, if someone who already had two failed startups came to us, the perspective was, “Well, they have learnt millions of dollars of lessons with someone else’s money.” Whereas it would be more typical in Australia for someone to say, “They failed. I don’t want to be the next one.” That’s a significant cultural difference. It isn’t what my parents taught me, which was to put your head down and get good grades. Silicon Valley rewired me. Could Uber have started in Australia? No. But Uber was born in 2010 and the Australian startup world has come a long way since then. There are many entrepreneurs who have returned from the United States. We went there and learnt some stuff but felt passionate about starting something in Australia. Now there’s a lot more funding available and if you look at the Mike Cannon-Brookeses and Scott Farquhars [founders of Atlassian] of this world, people can see it’s true that you can start a business and, at the extreme, end up a billionaire. Historically, the model for most people I knew was to join a good firm, work hard and one day you’ll make partner and life will be good. Or people got rich through speculative activity in the mining sector. They were the role models. Now you’re starting to see some tech role models. Do you think there’s a problem with our best brains leaving to go to San Francisco and other startup hubs around the world? I highly endorse it. To go on tour is a very Australian thing and I wouldn’t argue against that. Specifically, I studied at one of the United States’ best institutions [Stanford University, for an MBA]. I learnt from the best and I’m superproud to bring it home. When you pitched to Uber’s then CEO Travis Kalanick the idea of expanding into Australia in 2012, did you go to that meeting with any trepidation, given he’s famously fiery? I knew that neither Travis nor Ryan [Graves, Uber’s senior vice-president of global operations] had been to Sydney, which gave me confidence that I was the expert on that. And I’d been someone in the city on a Friday night, trying to get home. So it was very real to me and very easy to articulate to them and to get excited about. After the presentation, they walked out of the room, came back five minutes later and said, “Let’s do this.” That set the tone. At that point, was Uber already a rival to taxis? It was early days for Uber – in 20 cities, mostly in the US, with about 100 employees. It was a luxury alternative to taxis that was cool but unlikely to really change transport worldwide. We’ve been through expansions since, none of which I could have imagined when I joined. So you didn’t foresee how big Uber would become? No-one did. It was a premium product that cost more than a taxi. It was fancier and more convenient but UberX was not on the agenda.

Travis Kalanick resigned in June after months of upheaval in the company [including findings of a culture of sexual harassment]. Was the Australian operation independent of that? Travis was last here in 2012 for the launch. Uber delegates responsibility far out to the edge of the organisation. So Australia and New Zealand has its own vibe, as does Shanghai. That said, the revelations in San Francisco prompted us to take a thorough look at everything we do. Diversity has been identified as an issue... Not just diversity but also inclusion. We resisted publishing our diversity statistics – not because there were numbers to be hidden but for too long we thought it wasn’t the right thing to focus on. We’ve now released them and they’re no different to the rest of the tech industry. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room to improve. Does a successful startup have to break the rules, break the law? No. The successful startup has to serve its customers better than everyone else. Is there a better way to get someone from A to B? Is there a better use of the cars that Sydney already has? That was critical when the taxi industry was not welcoming. Because consumers really wanted it, they wrote to their MPs, they got on Twitter. That is what’s necessary for a startup to succeed. You’ve previously said you dislike businesses describing themselves as “the Uber of”. Why? They’re often not focused on what was the magic of Uber: “I want it and I want it now.” First that was a fancy car. And food delivery [UberEATS] is catching on fast. But we’re just getting started. We can see that millennials are less likely than ever before to have a driver’s licence, because they’re saying, “I don’t want to maintain a car. I don’t want to park it. I want to press a button.” You look at the data and you see lots of journeys that are similar: two people heading in the same direction at the same time. We can lower the journey cost with the option to share rides – UberPOOL – which is a big deal for congestion. And people will think twice about whether they need to own a car. We’re going to keep pushing forward on that and autonomous, one day, will help bring it to life. Meaning self-driving cars? Would you like to take a stab at how far off they might be? I won’t. We have trials underway in San Francisco. And in Pittsburgh, you can be a passenger in a self-driving Uber with a safety driver behind the wheel. We’re investing huge money in it. So far there have been five billion Uber trips worldwide. Uber has clearly become a lot bigger than I’d ever imagined.

“In San Francisco, people are more willing to fail and others are more sympathetic to those who do fail.” DAVIDROHRSHEIM