I think the most dangerousat thing that can happen for a musician is to think that everything you write is good. Thats the most dangerous thing, is to lose yourself in thinking well, i know what i am doing, look how many songs ive written that have been successful. Thats when you lose it and you leuses the secret sauce. Rose jean liu and bruno mars when we continue. Funding for charlie rose is provided by the following bank of america. Life Better Connect the. And by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and Information Services worldwide. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Rose jean liu is here, the president of didi chuxing, china and the Worlds Largest ride sharing company, also offers Services Like bike shairg and car rentals, ago i baba apple and soft bank are among her investors, didi also has stakes in other companies around the world. Im pleased to have jean liu at this table for the firs time, welcome. Thank you for having me here. Rose we have so looked for to. This you have said a very interesting thing. You said it is really a worldclass dilemma how to move around 800 million urban chinese. How are you solving this dilemma . Yes, actually, thats one of pie biggest motivation, joining this Company Three years ago. I give you a story right after i joined didi there is this woman coder coming to my office saying i want to resign. I asked her why, and she said i got pregnant. I said you know, you can still work here if you get pregnant. She said no, its commute thats killing me. And you know, she was spending three hours switching between buses and subways every day. And there are many, many people like that in china. 800 million chinese that ride 1. 4 billion times every day. So for us, when we know how many people have these much need, we basically design a product for them. So the difference between us and a lot of other players is we offer a full range of services. So not just a private car share like here in the states, but also taxi. Rose bicycles. Bicycle because not a lot of people can afford private car ride in china. So bicycles and minibus, carpooling. There are a lot of very interesting local products we are trying to connect with people. Rose mow how many cities in china are you operating. 400 cities. Yeah. And a lot of them are mega cities, very different from cities here. When you think about cities here, i think new york is a huge city already. But there are more than 15 cities in china that are bigger than new york. Rose how many . 15. Rose 15 cities bigger than new york. Bigger than new york. And i think in terms of population, there are six cities in the states that are bigger than the 6 million population, but that number in china is 44. Here in the states, ride share is nice to have, you know, lyft and ub remember all doing great. But almost every family here in the states have one or two cars. If you dont have ride share, you can still drive yourself, right. Rose sure. But in china, only 10 people have cars did but people still want to have a desent ride. Rose right. When you spend two hours on the road. So commute, i would say is number one challenges. And then you know, the pollution, of course, coming out of when you have mega cities, right, the air, i see my kids playing, every day when its bad weather, it just pains me to see that. And also safety is another thing we should be really mindful about. Especially there are so many people on the street, the road accidents, the rate actually just increase higher. So there are just a a lot of issues coming out of it. But we feel, you know, the industry we are in is so impactful that there is something we can do to help to solve this issue. Rose you made a speech at the Bloomberg Business forum. Yeah. Rose at the plaza hotel. About the future cities. Yes. Rose what did you tell them . Yes, basically you know, the Bloomberg Forum is for people i understand for people to come together and talk about the world challenges and how we can collaborate together. And one of the key challenges i see is as we just talked about, your first question, you know, when the cities become bigger, when there is more population, Everyone Wants a very good quality lifestyle. But at the same time how can we solve the resource issue. How can we know when a city becomes bigger, show we feel theres less space and time for us. Everybody, right. And you know, how can we basically utilize the resource more efficiently, right. Make people feel living in the city life can still make me feel happy and inner peace. And my key point is the future cities should be around people, should be built around people rather than built around parking lots. Rather than built around vehicles. So lets do something, lets adopt some technology to make that happen. Rose both in terms of attacking urban problems as well as attacking business challenges, Artificial Intelligence, and the use of big data, have become tools, yes . Yes. Rose how so . Well, you know in our business that puts away the jar begans. Lets say a passenger standing in the street, in our business, you know, turn on our app and click a button. And he wants a ride now, as fast as possible, right. But however, always, all the time when it is peak hours, bad weather there is not a car around, right. You cannot get it, so there are two things. Number one is the deep learning technology, basically, we are training the system, that can predict in the next 20 minutes in every corner of the city how many rides requests were coming out. So even before this person pressed this button we dispatch a car to arrive to meet him. So that is the predictive capability. That is part of the Artificial Intelligence capability. And secondly, a lot of people think oh, why dont you just depatch dispatch the closest car to you. But we tell you, you know, on the map its closest but could be, you know, when a u. N. Event, there are roadblocks. In a very difficult road situation theres traffic control, theres one way situation, you know, the closest car may not be the most efficient one, right. So you know, we just know the system keeps learning what is going on in the local of each region. This might sound a bit boring but if you think about it, this technology is really helping everybody to get a ride faster. And if you times that to 25 million rides a day, cuz we are completing 25 million rides a day. Thats actually. Rose are you completing 25 million rides a day. 25 million rides a day, so every second in the peak hour, 600 ride, every second there are 600 rides delivered. And theres, you know, millions of, you know, times of calculation underneath it. So i think that is one application when people talk about ai, you know, ai sounds leak a very big word. But you know, in real life, in our industry, the application actually helps, you know, people to commute better. And i think thats the beautiful part of it. Rose there was a giant competition between uber and didi in china. So how did you beat them . How did you beat the scary uber . Well, first of all, i should clarify some thing as china ride share market or China Internet market has always been very, very competitive. Rose so you beat other people before you got to uber. When we started this business, there were 30 players doing exactly the same thing. Rose right. But we did relatively well or relatively better because. Rose how did you do it . We understand the local, you know, users need better than others. A lot of time people get carried away by competition. Sometimes competition is so much fun, right. You talk about winning and losing, catch the headline news. Everyone is so excited about it. But from my perspective, for our perspective, the real competition is how can you serve your customers better, right . Driver or passenger, right. So for our business we see look, there are so many people who cant get a ride share,s that a carpool, lets use ai. Even during the competition we launched three different businesses. We see there are people who want to grab a drink after work, but its extremely dangerous if you, you know, theres a dui situation. So we say we send you a a designated driver to meet you at the bar or at a party and he can drive you back home, so you dont need to drive, right. Rose so you just send a driver. We send a driver to you. Rose take your car here, drive you home. Park your car and will make his own way back to wherever. Exactly. Its better for safety, right. So you wont hit any passengers on the road, right. So you know, like minibus, how we can, it is a supercarpooling concept. How we can put more people, so everyone can enjoy more affordable ride, you know. So these are the things we ininnovated or created during the competition. Rose there is wonderful stories about. Because generally so many of the companies are certainly in your area, transit, transportation, have a relationship to the big three companies. Uhhuh. Rose tensein, alibaba and bido. In one way or another, yes, we actually not only just alibaba and tensin, we also have very nice relationship with apple. Rose oh, apple. Such fies relationship. Cook signed a billion dollar check to invest in your company. Yes, were thankful for that, and also to soft bank, and masai and also to. Rose this is what tim cook said about you in Time Magazine 100 list which is an annual list of the people he considers the most influential. Jean liu is a disrupter and not only threur her ambitious efforts to change the way people in china commute, travel and connect with one another, with didi chuxing, the ride sharing taxi hailing startup, she leads along side chengwui it its name meets beep beep, it offers convenience and flexibility. She and her team are succeeding ride innovative big data algorithms that aim to improve the efficiency of didis service and so ease the congested roadways by analyzing computer patterns the way ocean graphic track the city, didi may help traffic jams go the way of the flip phone. Is that possible . You can have if you succeed, traffic jams will be eliminated because you are eliminating the number of cars. Not just that. Let me share with you some example. First of all, tim was very nice to give me those comments. I would say that too if someone invested a billion dollars in me. Actually, you know, we are working with 20 cities in china right now. And the mayors, were working to on some common project. One common goal we have together is how can we cut congestion, its a top problem brothering them every day, so we say lets redesign the traffic signal system and the vehicle length system. Because the old system was very outdated and with our new technology we can help with you thatz with ai and big data. With deep learning, everything. And in the test zone, the result is extremely encouraging, after only three months of work. The congestion time got reduced by 20 to 40 , just after three months of work. Think about it, 20 of anyones time on the road, if you add upping to, thats tremendous. And its only a short period of time. When we share this result with other cities, everyone feel wow, lets do this too in our city. We want that too. And when we talk to our partners in brazil, as you may know, we have invested in seven local champions. Rose local what . Champions, we call champions. And they all say why dont you you know, come to our city and lets do it together, right. Cuz gone guess congestion, it kills pollution, its good. We do believe with the ride application of technology we can kill congestion. Rose if you cure congestion are you also curing some of the environmental issues. Yes, with carpooling as you just mentioned, right. We poll 4 million passengers every day and the number is very fast, 4 million, what does it mean . It means every year it takes away millions of tons of carbon emission when you have, you know, it is very intuitive. So that is why i think why tim mentioned about us. Rose one of the other things you do, your company does is that you invest in a lot of startups too. You make Global Investments around the world. Yes. Rose in terms of people that you believe have a startup that might be successful and have an impact. Uhhuh. Rose is that the Selection Process . I mean are you looking for certain kinds of companies you want to invest in other than those that have a very Good Business model and probability of success . Sure. Actually, we are still very focused on solving the commute issue. Rose all the startups have to do with that. Yes, thats our mission, we feel. We are here to solve the commute issue. Right. So we go around the globe and we see who shares the same passion. Who also wants to solve this issue, who is worried about it day and night like us, and also another perspective is this industry is so young. Although everyone is talking about the competition, and everything. Everyone knows so much about this. But people may not know, this industry is so young. The penetration is only 1 percent. So you know. Rose in other words, in terms of the potential market you have only penetrated 1 percent. Only 1 percent. Rose that is a Good Business to be in. It is a Good Business to be in and if we want more people to benefit from the technology, the algorithm, the good thing about didi is we are based in china. China is a complex market, so huge and also hard case. Imagine beijing is such a mega city and the complications in the calculation, in the algorithmim, if we tested the algorithm here, we tested product here, we can share the best practice with a lot of Young Companies on other side of the world. And also productwise, for example, the minibus is ver well in brazil. So thats the philosophy of this collaboration which we deeply believe in, thats why, you know, we are going global. Rose so some people raised the question whether in fact you are investors in other startups that are will that in anyway distract from your disrupter edge . Very interesting, very interesting question. How we see it, again, is you know, this industry grow faster than the regulation. Rose right. And you know then the policies. And in each injures diction it is all very, very different. So from our perspective, the key is at the same time you bring top notch Disruptive Technology but at the same time we need to collaborate as many people as possible. Otherwise this industry wont be sustainable. Thats why when we started we collaborated with taxi industry. That is the difference between us and a lot of others. Taxi, there are millions of taxi drivers getting their income from didi and we charge nothing. We dont charge anything from taxi drivers. We also create our product to tailer make for them. Rose what you are doing is providing the information of people, you are giving them information where there are riders. Not just that. I give you one example. For example, the taxi drivers, one of their biggest headache is every night the last ride is the biggest problem for them. Because if the last ride is going to the opposite of home, then you know, in beijing, then it will waste them a lot of gas to drive empty car back. So a lot of them in order to save some cost they actually sleep in the car for the whole night. And the next morning they can pick up passengers. So its extremely hard for a taxi driver. So we create this go home button. You know, the driver say okay, you know, i will go home now, i press this button. So the system only dispatch the passengers on their way home to them. And this extremely popular to taxi drivers. So thats. Rose you push that go home button so the passengers that know about you, are passengers are on the way to where you are going. Yes, yes, so we basically just send a passenger on the way home to the driver. So to them. So they like this so much. Rose i would like it too, way yns so these are the the collaboration were talking about. And also other collaboration like you know, we work with the city mayors on the Smart Transportation system which we just talked about, with local champions. So we believe in this. So i dont think theres a conflict between being Disruptive Technology provider at the same time collaborate with others. Rose okay. China, well, first this. There was news today or yesterday that uber run into a bit of problem in london. What does that say to you . Yeah, i just learned it from the newspaper as well. I understand uber is appealing. Rose yes. Formally. Rose but is this an ongoing conflict between Ride Sharing Companies and local municipalities . Right. Rose i mean is that is always a relationship that has some tension to it or not . Well, my first sense is that there is in different injures dictions the rules are very different. And we first need to understand it. And secondly there is always some Common Ground between us and the policy makers. What is our Common Ground here. I think for the cities in china what do we find is we both sides worry about congestion, both sides worry about pollution. Both sides worry about safety, right. Us and the policy makers. So lets do something together. For example, in china you may just know Chinese Government is promoting the electric vehicle because it is more environmental friendly. So we go talk to the city mayors saying look, didi is the largest fleet of electric vehicles globally. You know why . Because drivers love it. Drivers drive ten times a day. They think the cost saved from buying an ev makes so much sense, electric vehicle, makes so much sense. They dont need to spend money on too much gas, right. So we talk to the city policy maker saying lets both promote the ev in this city, right, in this platform. So there are a lot of Common Ground things we can reach and i think im being optimistic in i do believe technology in the long run will transform the transportation industry. Rose meaning autonomy . Autonomy is you know, a very popular topic. I do think you know, lets look at the purpose of autonomy. Why autonomy, right . Why not with very good human driver. I think the key purpose here is really about safety and i believe in it because there are 1. 3 Million People die every year from road accidents. Thats more than drugs anwars. Right. And its not supposed to be like that i think 30 years down the road when we look bac