Uber’s CEO pick steps into brighter spotlight
The new chief executive of Uber loves his parents, does not love President Donald Trump and has successfully managed a consumer internet company in the face of fierce competition. Uber’s board, shareholders and employees can only pray that is enough.
After six months of extraordinary turmoil at the ride-hailing company, its board late Sunday selected Dara Khosrowshahi, the 48-year-old chief executive of the travel site Expedia, which confirmed the choice Monday in a letter to employees. Khosrowshahi would succeed Travis Kalanick, an Uber co-founder and the driving force in making it the world’s most valuable startup, who was forced to step down in June as the company was rocked by one scandal after another.
Khosrowshahi’s task will be to repair the internal culture, which had moved beyond the usual gung-ho startup attitude to rampant divisiveness and harassment. He must also steer a course that defends and extends Uber’s brand while preparing for a self-driving future that many other companies would like to dominate.
And he will have to do it under a much brighter spotlight than he has worked under before. Uber’s repeated stumbles have made it a public drama like few others in Silicon Valley’s history. Finally, there is the issue of Kalanick, who might seize on any trouble to mount a comeback.
Khosrowshahi was the dark horse candidate whose name did not slip out until he had the job, so his virtues and faults are little-known. Expedia is based in Bellevue, Wash., which makes him a Silicon Valley outsider. While Khosrowshahi had not commented as of Monday morning, here is one yardstick to size him up: he was president of his high school class. He was not, in other words, divisive.
At the same moment in June that Kalanick was noisily being ejected from his company, Khosrowshahi had a little problem of his own. Glassdoor, a site where employees rank their companies, released its 2017 list of the top chief executives. Khosrowshahi’s score, for whatever reason, had dropped.
His parents weighed in with that combination of celebration and criticism many immigrant children know well. As Khosrowshahi reported on Twitter, his mother said, “Nice! You made the top 100!” But his father pointed out: “#39 is good but you were #11 in 2015.”
Lili and Gary (short for Asghar) Khosrowshahi were prosperous members of the Iranian elite in the 1960s and 1970s. Gary was an executive at an industrial conglomerate, where he worked with relatives. They all had to flee Iran in 1978 as the government of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi collapsed.
They made it to Tarrytown, N.Y., and lived with relatives. “For the grownups, it was a difficult transition,” Dara Khosrowshahi told Bloomberg Businessweek this year. “The kids were able to party together, so it was fun.”
Four years later, Gary went back to Iran to take care of his ailing father, and he was detained for six years before he could return. Lili had to bring up three children by herself.
Hadi Partovi, Dara’s cousin, said in an interview that “his mom raised him to be direct with people. By far the biggest challenge he faced, which is what all of us faced, was having to come to a new country and assimilate. Being an Iranian in America in the 1980s was not pleasant. People were singing ‘Bomb bomb bomb Iran.’”
But the tense environment also pushed them to succeed. “Every one of us cousins had a chip on our shoulders, having lost everything to the new Iranian government,” Partovi said. “We had a desire to build anew as entrepreneurs.”
And they did. Partovi is an investor in Facebook, Dropbox, Airbnb and, as it happens, Uber; Dara’s brother, Kaveh Khosrowshahi, is a managing director at the investment firm of Allen & Co.; another cousin, Farzad “Fuzzy” Khosrowshahi, played a major role in the creation of Google Docs; yet another cousin, Avid Larizadeh Duggan, is a general partner at Google Ventures.