We dont fly planes. Mr. Khosrowshahi said that because Uber is a combination of the virtual world and the real world the real world that punches you in the face all the time with its unpredictability his tech challenges are different than a site for ordering movies. But its just not what I want to be spending my time on.. And he held meetings that Kalanick never did during regulatory battles with cities around the world. Get the latest insights directly to your inbox! You can ring my bell: Mr. Khosrowshahi applauding with NYSE president Stacey Cunningham, second from left, and Uber chief legal officer Tony West, center, as Uber board member Ryan Graves, right, does the deed. 5 With the leadership of Travis as the organization's first CEO, there was an authoritative leadership style in Uber. I can completely imagine that hurting, because hed built the company. Drivers outside Ubers headquarters urging voters to rejectProposition 22. It requires a very strong core culture and our core culture is one about being different its about valuing the employee and then trusting them to do the right thing for the company and so far its worked for us. Ms. Shapiro, 43, dressed in a black linen top and pants and absently braiding and unbraiding her long blond hair, said of her mother: She was worried because I graduated college and then I wanted to go work on a farm in Costa Rica and then I went to Ozzfest as a photographers assistant and she was like, You need to settle down. I couldnt have imagined having anything in common with a C.E.O. Weve got an incredible balance sheet. It was us and about 10,000 Chinese people looking to get married because its a very, very lucky day there.. Uber plans on letting people pay for their rides with Bitcoin. National Transportation Safety Board investigators in Tempe, Arizona, examine Uber's self-driving car that hit and killed a pedestrian while it was in full autonomous mode. When his father returned to Iran to try to get his own father out, he was not allowed to leave the country for five years and missed Daras high school graduation. [4] In 1998, he left Allen & Company to work for one of his former clients at the bank, Barry Diller, first at Diller's USA Networks, where he held the positions of senior vice president for strategic planning and then president, and later as chief financial officer of IAC, another company controlled by Diller. Others left because they felt mistreated by managers. Daras soccer and math skills made assimilation easy. Dara Khosrowshahi ( Persian: , Persian pronunciation: [d' xoso'hi]; born May 28, 1969) is an Iranian-American businessman and the chief executive officer of Uber. Work-life balance and job satisfaction is a reality here!. But, as at many companies, Uber's culture reflected the personality of the person at the top: overly aggressive and willing to do anything to win. I think, just like Uber, some of them grew up too fast and some of them didnt take responsibility for their power and I think now theyre being called to reckon, and I think itll ultimately result in a better, more balanced society going forward, he said. The ripple effects would be far-reaching. After much debate and public intrigue, ride-sharing company Uber has selected Dara Khosrowshahi the current chief executive officer of travel website Expedia as the company's next CEO. Dara Khosrowshahi - Expedia Stint But a driverless future is a long way off. Virtual Embassy Iran. Which is a very strong statement. He came in listening. Their brown shingled house has the feel of a fairy tale cottage, nestled in an enchanted-looking woods. After he got his office badge, he tweeted out this photo and said, "I checked it and it works!". You decided to leave Expedia once Barry Diller made Joey Levin the chief executive of IAC. During his 12-year tenure as the public face of Expedia, DaraKhosrowshahi has been vocal about what makes for great leadership, how hes navigated the company through challenges, and his ambitions for the future. They moved to an uncles mansion in Irvington, N.Y., for a couple of months before getting a condo in Tarrytown. "He's an exceptional leader -- a rare combination of keen financial acumen, an eye for great product and incredible people leadership skills," says Expedia CEO Mark Okerstrom, who served as CFO under Khosrowshahi. If feedback is to be believed and there is no reason in which not to there is an opportunity to improve the culture at Uber. That is, Khosrowshahi would be paid with some normality. Mr. Diller said his protg has had a miserable year or two, slammed by Covid, but that Dara is a great executive. Here . Dara Khosrowshahi - Personality. Great! We have all these independent units all these independent brands that are doing their own thing. (Mr. Kalanick has a new start-up, CloudKitchens, which rents commercial space and turns it into shared kitchens for food delivery businesses.) Khosrowshahi was previously CEO of Expedia Group, a company that owns several travel fare aggregators. . "But with it came a lot of fallout.". All rights reserved. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has kept an eye on Uber's bottom line as it pursues profitability. [2], Khosrowshahi was born in 1969 in Iran into a wealthy family and grew up in a mansion on the family compound. He flew across the ocean to come to Ukraine. And Tom Ford and Elon Musk were two of the most fun, because I enjoy writing about operatic characters with out-of-this-world proclivities. He became a US citizen in 1996. She has his name tattooed in Farsi on her wrist, and he has her name tattooed in Hebrew on the back of his neck. He said he didnt have enough time to be depressed or to feel sorry. As he was frantically trying to figure out if the company already losing billions could survive losing, in some places, 85 percent of its rides business, he discovered a glimmer moving fast: Uber Eats, an arm of the business he had been pouring money into for the previous two years, despite many investors being unhappy about it. So in 2008/2009 we kept saying, the drumbeat was, the world is crazy. According to Fortune, Khosrowshahi's 2015 total pay package was approximately 4,756 times that of his team at Expedia. I learned to not make excuses, he said flatly. Previously: Meet Uber's choice. Travis Kalanick left his post and cut ties with Uber in 2019. He allowed the company to then go back to business. After the crash, industry insiders questioned Uber's safety standards and its rush to get autonomous vehicles onto public streets. It demonstrates humility. Absolutely true. I think Uber is icing on the cake. In 1979, when Dara was 9, his Muslim family fled Iran to escape the revolution, leaving the fortune they had made from their large pharmaceutical and cosmetics company. Does the incredible shrinking kingdom of Uber still dream big? Dara was previously CEO of Expedia, which he grew into one of the world's largest online travel companies. A regular member of the list of Prominent Iranian Americans since 2015, his qualities and hardships have put him in rarefied air. Mr. Kalanick on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during Ubers IPO. The Times beat me to the punch. We celebrate differences. For every issue that an Uber driver is allowed to fester on or complain about, there is a customer who might be at the receiving end. Its a universal law. But after last week's selloff of tech stocks where Uber fell 16%, Khosrowshahi's company finds itself on war footing again. Mr. Khosrowshahi, who replaced Travis Kalanick in 2017, is widely perceived as a mop-up man. Newly appointed Uber CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, said he learned a valuable leadership lesson early in his career as CEO of Expedia. My dads a lizard person, he said. In college, you introduced yourself as Darren Kay because you worried that no one could pronounce your name, but then you stopped using it because you worried that it sounded like a porn name. Some quit because they didn't want to be associated with the embarrassing scandals. "If they are eyeing an IPO, they're going to have to show not only a path to profitability but to sustained profitability," says Harteveldt. Dara Khosrowshahi is the former CEO of Expedia who took over Uber as CEO in 2017. His dad had to return to Iran to look after the crumbling family venture, and was stranded in the war-torn country for six years. Block and Khosrowshahi also discuss how companies can implement systems for privacy, trust, and safety. Lawsuits poured in, the chief executive was forced to step aside and the company was left leaderless for two months with a dysfunctional board of directors. Please try again. Were a lot of brands that came together through mergers and acquisitions and integration and M&A and innovation are not friends. Mr. Kalanick undermined his successor at the start, according to Uber insiders, but Mr. Khosrowshahi finessed the founder slowly out of the business. It lost more than 200,000 angry passengers to a #DeleteUber movement. Employees were expected to personify these values, which called for things like toe-stepping, principled confrontation and "always be hustlin'. And then, little by little, you saw that over and over and over again. Born in Iran, his family moved to the United States after his father was detained by Iranian authorities for six years. Khosrowshahi (center) met with 35 drivers at Uber's headquarters in January in San Francisco at the company's first-ever Driver Advisory Forum. [8] His cousin Amir co-founded Nervana Systems, which was acquired by Intel in 2016 for $408million. The teenager said he had found a random post on the internet about a conspiracy theory contending that his father, Queen Elizabeth, George W. Bush and Bob Hope are all lizard people. While Uber is different from what it was a year ago, it's still faces obstacles. [21], Khosrowshahi is an outspoken critic of the immigration policy of Donald Trump. "One of the hard things in 2017 was that there was so much distraction and so much dysfunction," Ting says. Board member Arianna Huffington and Uber investor Benchmark Capital didn't return requests for comment. These "employees" have become part of the over-used and quintessential definition of the so-called "gig economy." With a degree in electrical engineering from Brown University and the experience gained as an analyst at Allan and Co., an investment firm, Dara was about to embark on a stellar career path. A seasoned executive with a background in both engineering and finance, Dara oversaw a number of acquisitions that bolstered Expedias offerings and aggressively invested in mobile, which now accounts for more than half of Expedias traffic. I think that they will have less of a problem with my tax record, he said. Innovate How Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi Is the Exact Opposite of Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Startup founders and corporate CEOs have completely different leadership styles. That includes blowback from "some of Mr. Kalanick's behavior that continues to plague the company," Harteveldt says, including tension with regulators, drivers and passengers around the world. He oversaw the acquisitions of travel sites Orbitz, Travelocity and HomeAway, and quadrupled the company's revenue from $2.1 billion in 2005 to $8.7 billion in 2016. [16] He was initially viewed as a "dark horse" candidate in case the initial frontrunners, General Electric's Jeff Immelt and Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Meg Whitman, fell through. This is a BETA experience. Khosrowshahi was previously CEO of Expedia Group, a company that owns several travel fare aggregators. Ethical, in fact. by Monica Nickelsburg on August 30, 2017 at 10:42 amAugust 30, 2017 at 10:58 am. In my own research and professional life as a Chief Learning Officer and Chief Envisioner, I too know that culture can be your competitive advantage. And I think weve been able to attract a pretty diverse employee group and it really serves us., On his perspective as an immigrant:I think from a personal standpoint, maybe I appreciate a little more that there are two sides to every story and the way that the U.S. is sometimes viewed outside of the U.S. can be pretty tough, depending on the U.S.s actions. day and the scaling down, and the company was on its way to profitability. The toxic Travis culture is gone but no one seems sure of what the Dara culture is. CEO, Author, Keynote Speaker, Leadership Strategist, Poet, Seattle, Washington, U.S., on Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2016. StartupTalky is top startup media platform for latest startup news, ideas, industry research and reports, inspiring startup stories. ", Khosrowshahi is vocal about his stance on social issues, such as keeping Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in the US. Dara Khosrowshahi is an Iranian-American businessman who is currently serving as the CEO of Uber. ", Khosrowshahi rewrote those values as eight "cultural norms." "Travis had almost a Rambo-style approach to leadership, which made Uber giant," said Eric Schiffer, a brand management expert and CEO of Reputation Management Consultants. The two men have a long professional history, having worked together at Expedia when Mr Khosrowshahi was chief executive of the travel company. Setting this type of tone on day one sends a remarkable signal. Sundar Pichai is the CEOof both Alphabet and Google. I had the bright idea, he said. Before the disruption caused by the Iranian Revolution, Dara Khosrowshahi was all set to join his family business. Leadership; Media assets; Map beacon indicating location switcher. People sent in more than 1,200 submissions, which were then voted on 22,000 times. "If you take a look at Dara's background, he came out of the financial world. "It looked messy," Khosrowshahi, 48, said at a Goldman Sachs technology conference in February. People are going to start moving again and this business get anything and everything that you want in your house was going to be bigger than any of us thought it was going to be.. These descriptions just don't match up to Khosrowshahi. Isnt this fundamentally at odds with treating workers humanely? And I think sometimes leaders get this wrong which is when things are bad and you know one of your teams is having a tough time. in 2019, Mr. Khosrowshahi suggested that the company could be the Amazon of transportation. The Iranian culture is more ancient than the Islamic religion. He took them on private planes, on the best trips ever, for summer vacations and skiing.. (Kalanick famously dragged his feet on hiring a COO, because he reportedly didn't want to share duties in running the company.). In the previous six months, the ride-hailing service -- one of the world's most valuable startups -- had careened out of control, providing fodder for headline after headline. Uber Change Agent Dara Khosrowshahi Getty Images The headlines include "Uber leadership shake-up," "Uber executive reshuffling," " Uber Operating, Marketing Chiefs Leaving in Leadership. I love Dungeons & Dragons, but I dont know that character. After much debate and public intrigue, ride-sharing company Uber has selected Dara Khosrowshahi the current chief executive officer of travel website Expedia as the company's next CEO. Anywhere you want to go, anything you want to get, however you want to get it, well be there for you.. There are certain times where you should be conservative. But honestly, you know getting to 20,000 employees, getting to 30,000 employees and making sure that this is still a wonderful place to work where the individual can make a difference, where the individual can be the best person that they can be, thats a real challenge and it will continue to be a real challenge for us., On navigating crisis: We certainly had a big loss in 2008 but we leaned forward through that period. It was the first known fatality caused by a vehicle in full autonomous mode. [23][24], Khosrowshahi has two children from a first marriage; a son, Alex and a daughter, Chloe. (Uber Technologies Report, 2018) Shared values: Uber's values placed at the core of its new corporate culture by Dara Khosrowshahi include the following points: We build globally, we live locally. I wanted it to last, because it was my second marriage and Im madly in love with Syd. You would smoke a blunt on Joe Rogans podcast. at Uber, he was quick to calm down critics triggered by the acts of former C.E.O. But it doesn't mean he's meek. "You should never stop working to improve your culture, but I'm really happy to see how our new norms have slowly but surely spread positive change across the company," Khosrowshahi said in his email to me. At all of his public appearances after taking over, Khosrowshahi stressed the message, "We do the right thing. Dara grew up in Tarrytown, New York, and received his bachelors degree in engineering from Brown University. Marty Walsh, who fought Uber as mayor of Boston, now leads the Department of Labor; in April, he talked about the need to reclassify some gig workers as employees. Were going to be fine. "The question now: Can a nice guy build a better Uber? The two dont go well together. Push, push, push, focus and by the way youre going to have a job. President Biden named Lina Khan, a fan of ratcheting up regulations on tech giants, as the chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission and signed an executive order zeroing in on anticompetitive practices. From the start, Khosrowshahi wanted to hear what people at Uber had to say. When she was little, her father a fan of Joseph Campbell, Greek myths, sci-fi and George R.R. With Khosrowshahi, "Uber is less of ready, fire, aim than they have been. Kalanick didn't respond to a request for comment.Through the first half of 2017, unsurprisingly, Uber employees exited the company in droves. Every single comp committee wants to pay their C.E.O. The businessman Herbert Allen Jr., whose sons were school friends with the Khosrowshahi boys, took the family under his wing. After several deadlocked votes, Benchmark, a venture capital firm that had helped lead the effort to push out Kalanick, promised to drop a lawsuit against Kalanick if it named Whitman as CEO. With me, he was generally helpful. Dara was previously CEO of Expedia, which he grew into . The Giants game was starting, and traffic was nuts. "The final eight norms include credos like "we celebrate differences" and "we value ideas over hierarchy." Pick, Dara Khosrowshahi, Steps into Brighter Spotlight", "Uber's CEO Comes From What May Be the World's Most Techie Family", "Dara Khosrowshahi, Dad of Silicon Valley", "The amazing life of Uber's new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi from refugee to tech superstar", "Spinoff of Expedia Comes at Tough Time for Its Sector", "Dara Khosrowshahi: Executive Profile & Biography", "Here's One CEO Who Probably Justified His $94 Million Payday", "New Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi: What you need to know", "Uber picks Dara Khosrowshahi as its new boss", "6 things to know about Uber's CEO pick Dara Khosrowshahi", "Uber officially announces Dara Khosrowshahi will be its new CEO", "Uber's New CEO May Get at Least $200 Million to Exit Expedia", "Read Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi's Letter to Employees on IPO Day", "Uber CEO calls slaying of Jamal Khashoggi 'a mistake' and compares it to a self-driving car crash", "Uber CEO calls Jamal Khashoggi murder 'serious mistake', Uber gave CEO Dara Khosrowshahi $45 million in total pay last year, but it paid its COO even more, Legality of ridesharing companies by jurisdiction, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dara_Khosrowshahi&oldid=1137916332, Exiles of the Iranian Revolution in the United States, Brown University School of Engineering alumni, Pages containing links to subscription-only content, Short description is different from Wikidata, Pages using infobox person with multiple spouses, Articles containing Persian-language text, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Kathleen Grant (?2009, divorced), Sydney Shapiro (m. 2012present), This page was last edited on 7 February 2023, at 01:56. Dara Khosrowshahi knew he was going to have to clean up a spectacular mess when he became CEO of Uber last August. The description of a resourceful leader are as follows: resourceful leaders focus on what they have that is useful, have no use for any knowledge that doesn't apply, and can look stingy or selfish. Our system is called capitalism. Witnesses and court documents revealed juicy company details, like Kalanick's secretive text conversations that said things like "second place is first loser." They just do it. Were going to push. However, when Immelt flubbed his presentation, Immelt's initial supporters threw their backing to Khosrowshahi. They are part-time contractors. [12], In June 2013, he received a Pacific Northwest Entrepreneur of the Year award from Ernst & Young. He consistently rose above the ranks, winning the Entrepreneur of the Year award for the Pacific and Northwest Region in the 2013 edition of Ernst and Young awards. Its a deep culture, and there is an innate love that Iranians have for American culture and Americans. Its growth has reached its point, because of his particular management and leadership style. Under his leadership, Expedia extended its network to more than 60 countries. His work ethics drew the attention of companies like Uber who requested him to lead them in tough times. He said the company is leaning in and investing super-aggressively to bringing drivers back. Ride-sharing is a lonely job. [14] During his tenure as CEO of Expedia, "the gross value of its hotel and other travel bookings more than quadrupled and its pre-tax earnings more than doubled.