Uber CEO on the Next Decade in Autonomous and Why He Isn’t Rushing to Do Big M&A

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is having a good year. Despite growing competition and the looming rise of autonomous vehicles, the company announced another quarter of solid growth and a $20 billion share buyback.

And, as he shared with me in an interview on The Information’s TITV on Wednesday, it’s all a pretty simple strategy: “We are both in ride hailing and in delivery, and we’re able to bring consumers onto one side of the business and then promote the other side, which really is an advantage that we have over the other players.”

Sounds simple. But Khosrowshahi noted that at Uber’s scale it is difficult to accelerate gross bookings, which the company is doing on delivery.

Perhaps some of his most interesting comments regarded the pace of autonomous vehicle development, where AI is having a big impact, but it will be another five to six years before the costs of the cars can come down enough in the U.S. to really scale. I also asked him about what he has learned in his years at the helm, how he weighs the fact that his autonomous vehicle partners are destined to compete with him and whether he’d be interested in a big acquisition, like Instacart.

Lightly edited transcript below.