Former Uber exec explains how to turn failure into innovation | Emil Michael

• Innovation requires failure. (dramatic fast-paced music) There's no person in the world, not Steve Jobs, or Elon Musk, or anyone who hasn't tried something and failed. The early versions of Teslas that had batteries that made the car stop. The Newton at Apple. "Hey, Dolph, take a memo on your Newton. Beat up Martin." - All these great leaders have failed. "Bah." "Ow." - But they've failed because they had innovators who were willing to try something. (camera clicking) And the promise by the leadership is that if you try something and it's an earnest try and you've given it everything and it fails, that's actually great, because now we know that that doesn't work and we can move quickly onto our next idea. And you're not punished for failing. You're punished for not trying.

My name is Emil Michael. I was the chief business officer at Uber. We were the fastest-growing company in the world from 2013 to '17 while I was there. (dramatic fast-paced music fades) (gentle music) (camera shutter clicking) My time at Uber was extraordinary because we had a business model that worked from day one. If you can remember back to it, the first time you tried an Uber was magical. The notion of pushing a button and a car showed up was really revolutionary at the time. It was sort of an amazing consumer experience. So we knew we were onto something from day one.

So then the question is, how do we 10x this? (gentle dramatic music) It was the first time in my career I was working with a partner, Travis Kalanick, who was the founder of Uber, who thought in an exponential way, "How do we exponentially grow this all over the world as fast as we can?" Because we thought that the winner was going to be the one who got the most customers and the most drivers the fastest. That kind of thinking from Travis was really attractive to me. I was attracted to that notion of limitless possibility.

And so part of being a great leader is ambition. Not only your own, if you're a leader with an ambitious agenda, can you communicate that to others so that you're attracting them like moths to light? It's one thing to say, "Hey, I want to fly a rocket to Mars." It's another thing to surround yourself with the best space engineers that ever lived and really spend a decade doing it. If you can, then you've got a way better shot at achieving that ambition, because no one can do that alone. (gentle music)

The way it worked between Travis and I as partners was I had a legal background and I had a finance background, and I was always thinking, "Do the numbers add up?" And he was always thinking, "How do I get into the fourth city in Italy three days from now?" And so we connected the dots on those together, and that combination made us the fastest-growing company of all time. But it allowed us to not break the rocket ship as it was going into orbit. (car whirring faintly) (gentle music)

I think the world in tech has changed dramatically in the last 10 years in that, more than ever, you have to be thinking globally, otherwise your clones or competitors are going to pop up in all these other countries. So you have to be thinking speed, ambitious, globalization. That was a really new thing for me, frankly, when I joined Uber. Every country has its own ecosystem of who has the power, who makes the rules, how the money flows, and how you fit in that system, (gentle dramatic music) and that you can't learn from afar. You have to learn by being in the middle of it.

One of the designs we did in the organization to enable that was we created what was called a Launch team. A group of people who went out and launched various countries, and they couldn't leave that country until they hired a local general manager to replace them. These people were young people, they love traveling the world, very competitive, wanting to go on to the next thing. And what we did also with them is we wrote a playbook which gave you 70% of the answer on how you launch a new country. So, for example, when Uber would launch Mexico City, what is the playbook? How does that person, who's never been to Me...