Dara Khosrowshahi |
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Wikipedia: Dara Khosrowshahi
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Biography
The following section is an excerpt from Wikipedia's Dara Khosrowshahi page on 18 June 2020, text available via the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Dara Khosrowshahi is an Iranian-American businessman and the chief executive officer of Uber. Khosrowshahi was previously CEO of Expedia Group, a company that owns several travel fare aggregators. He is also a member of the board of directors of BET.com, and Hotels.com, and previously served on the board of The New York Times Company.
Khosrowshahi is on the list of "Prominent Iranian-Americans" published by the Embassy of the United States, Tehran.
In August 2017, Khosrowshahi became the CEO of Uber, succeeding founder Travis Kalanick. He was initially viewed as a "dark horse" candidate in case the initial frontrunners, GE'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 private equity 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.
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 also serves 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."
In May 2019, Khosrowshahi led Uber in their initial public offering, which he addressed with employees in a company-wide letter.
| Date | Article | Author/Source |
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| 1 September 2017 | New Uber CEO Highlights Iranians in Tech | Michelle Quinn, VOA News |