‘I wanted to be involved with changing the world’
As one of Uber’s top bosses, Barney Harford tells James Titcomb how he is helping the taxi app drive a path towards its public listing
Barney Harford decided that his future lay in Silicon Valley a long time ago. In the mid-nineties, while working as a consultant on the broadcaster NTL’S bid for a digital TV channel, the Londonborn and Manchester-raised executive proposed opening up an internal email system used at his firm to other businesses.
“What a stupid idea,” a partner at the consultancy responded, according to Harford. “Which of our clients would want to send us emails?”
Harford, however, had decided that the internet was the most important invention in decades. “I knew I wanted to be a part of that, I could see the way that was going to change the world and I determined the best place to do that was going to be on the west coast,” he says, in an accent that betrays both a northern upbringing and half of his life ensconced in American corporate life.
More than two decades later, Harford, 46, is one of the most senior British figures in the US tech industry. As Uber’s chief operating officer, a position he has held since the start of the year, Harford is effectively second in command to Dara Khosrowshahi, the chief executive who has spent the last year attempting to improve the car-hailing app’s image, its relationships with drivers and its tenuous legal status in many cities.
Under Travis Kalanick, Uber’s founder and former chief executive, Uber stumbled from one scandal to the next as the company that sought to revolutionise transport by letting passengers order cars at the touch of a smartphone screen turned into a farce. Executives routinely left, sexism and harassment were reportedly rife, and the company often found itself on the wrong side of regulators. Its licence was revoked in several cities, including London last year.
Under its new management, Uber has claimed to turn over a new leaf. Khosrowshahi and Harford have been presented as the acceptable new face of the company. Last month it even recovered its licence in London. This facelift, however, was dealt a serious blow this month when it emerged that Harford had received several internal complaints about comments he had made about women and minorities. They included questioning the authenticity of a mixedrace couple in a proposed TV advert. Harford, whose comments emerged after this interview, responded by saying he was “totally committed” to improving his behaviour.
Khosrowshahi also appeared to stand by his man, something that may come as no surprise given their close relationship, the two have known each other for 18 years. Within 24 hours of accepting the Uber job last August, Khosrowshahi had called Harford.
After leaving his consultancy job in 1998 to attend Insead, the French business school to the south-east of Paris, Harford peppered US tech companies with job applications in the hope that he could secure a move to the west coast, and landed with Microsoft, which at the time was attempting to spin out its quickly growing travel website, Expedia.
Harford became head of investor relations as Expedia went public at the peak of the dotcom bubble, before selling its stake to the internet conglomerate IAC, where Khosrowshahi was chief financial officer. In 2005 Khosrowshahi was quickly installed as Expedia’s chief executive. Harford was running its Asian business at the time, and left the company shortly after. In the press release announcing his departure, he said he wanted to spend his time “exploring the world’s greatest ski and surf locations”, although he insists this was not business talk for an orchestrated exit. “I only reported into him for a couple of months, but we got on great,” Harford says.
The two then ended up as fierce competitors when Harford was appointed as the chief executive of rival travel website Orbitz in 2009. “We were competing head-to-head and my wife was still working at Expedia, she was reporting into Dara at the time so that made for some interesting conversations. He tried to put us out of business in the first six months,” Harford says, although he points out that Khosrowshahi was still invited to his wedding. Expedia ended up buying Orbitz in 2015, bringing the pair together again, although Harford took off again, shortly after the deal closed. When Uber’s new boss called him last summer, Harford had settled into a comfortable life of directorship, sitting on six boards, including United Airlines. What drove him into joining the world’s most controversial technology company?
“I realised it was going to be an opportunity that was going to be hard to pass on,” Harford says. “The scale of the business and the transformative impact we’re having on people, the transformation of the fabric of the cities we live in, I couldn’t say no.
“We’re doing five billion trips a year, that’s more trips than all of the world’s airlines carry passengers combined. Where we are, creating a market and combined with that scale, for me it was like bees to a honeypot.”
Khosrowshahi, who had originally planned to run Uber’s business without a chief operating officer, first approached Harford about becoming its chief financial officer. The role had been unfilled at the company since 2015 and remains so to this day, a worrying sign with the company planning to go public within the next 18 months.
Harford turned it down but agreed to join part time as an adviser, and a couple of weeks later Khosrowshahi pulled him to one side. “He said ‘I’ve decided I need someone full time to run the business, there’s too much stuff to go through, are you interested?’” Harford recalls.
Uber is now planning to go public towards the end of 2019, and is cutting its gargantuan losses as that date approaches in an attempt to justify its valuation of more than $70bn (£54bn). However, Harford insists that making a profit is not Uber’s main priority.
“We’re not focused in the shortterm on ‘let’s slash costs and achieve profitability’. We have a set of investors today who have chosen to invest in the business because of the growth opportunity we see.”
Uber’s ride-hailing business is profitable, helped by exits from bruisingly-expensive markets such as China and Russia, but the company is ploughing money back into other areas, from its food delivery business to a long-haul trucking operation.
It has bought Jump, an electric bike-hire company; invested in Lime, a dockless scooter start-up; and even sought tie-ups with public transport operators. In Nice, France, the local authority is subsidising late night rides after the bus service shuts down.
The company calls this “multimodal” transport, tying it to the idea that eventually, one app will be able to replace car ownership.
“We’re aligned around a common vision for the elimination of personal car ownership,” Harford says. “In the US, for every car there’s five spaces, so if we can reduce the number of cars that allows us to have more parks and a better way to live.”
Driverless vehicles and even small electric-powered aircraft are also meant to fit into this vision, although plans for the former were pushed back when a driverless Uber vehicle killed a pedestrian in March. Harford says it will be 10 to 15 years before autonomous cars to “come to scale”.
A less technical complication is currently stopping Harford from selling the Tesla in his own garage: his children’s child seats, which are rarely seen in Uber cars.
“We have not yet solved the car seat problem,” he says. “For the elimination of car ownership, kids under five may be one of the biggest challenges.”
That may be true, but it is far from the only one.