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Dara Khosrowshahi

Also Known As Khosrowshahi

CEO of Uber

Education

  • - Brown University
  • - Hackley School

Overview

Dara Khosrowshahi is the CEO of Uber Technologies, Inc. 

While still a junior employee at the firm, when Khosrowshahi's boss fell sick one day, Khosrowshahi was thus tasked with explaining the numerical figures of a major company deal to Barry Diller. The chance meeting with the billionaire thereafter made a deep impression on Khosrowshahi.

In 1998, he left Allen & Company to work for 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.

In 2001, IAC purchased Expedia, and in August 2005, Khosrowshahi became Expedia's chief executive officer.Ten years later, in 2015, Expedia gave him $90 million in stock options as part of a long-term employment agreement, conditioned on him staying with the company until 2020.

In 2012, during his tenure as CEO of Expedia In June 2013, he received a Pacific Northwest Entrepreneur of the Year award from Ernst & Young.

In 2016, he was one of the highest paid CEOs in the United States. 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." Under Khosrowshahi, Expedia extended its presence to more than 60 countries and acquired Travelocity, Orbitz, and HomeAway.

Khosrowshahi was not considering a career move, and initially when approached by a headhunter refused to apply as Uber CEO, but Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek persuaded him during their meetings in 2017.

In August 2017, Khosrowshahi became the CEO of Uber, succeeding co-founder and billionaire Travis Kalanick.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. However, when Immelt flubbed his presentation, Immelt's initial supporters threw their backing to Khosrowshahi. This included Kalanick, even though Khosrowshahi had made clear that under his watch, Kalanick would have no role in Uber's daily operations; as he put it in one of his slides, "there cannot be two CEOs." 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. Several of the directors read the announcement as blackmail. One of Whitman's supporters switched his vote to Khosrowshahi, breaking the deadlock and making him Uber's second full-time CEO.: 321–324 

Khosrowshahi speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in 2018.He forfeited his un-vested stock options of Expedia, then worth $184 million, but Uber reportedly paid him over $200 million to take the CEO position. He is on Uber's board of directors.

Khosrowshahi's main task was to clean up the image of a company that had become one of the most despised in the country, in part due to revelations about Uber's corporate culture. He replaced Kalanick's once-inviolable 14 values, which contained such items as "super pumped" and "always be hustlin'," with eight values focusing on "customer obsession". At all of his public appearances after taking over, Khosrowshahi stressed the message, "We do the right thing. Period." 330–331 

In May 2019, Khosrowshahi led Uber in its initial public offering, which he addressed with employees in a company-wide letter.

Uber Technologies Inc reported in 2023 that Khosrowshahi’s total compensation last year rose 22% to $24.3 million. Khosrowshahi is on the list of "Prominent Iranian-Americans" published by the U.S. Virtual Embassy Iran. 

Early Life

Dara Khosrowshahin was born on 28 May 1969 in Tehran, Iran

Career

  • Uber Technologies, Inc - CEO

Reference

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