Background and career
Dara Khosrowshahi (Persian: دارا خسروشاهی, Persian pronunciation: [dɑː'ɾɑː xosɾo'ʃɑːhiː]; born May 28, 1969) is an Iranian and American business executive who is the chief executive officer of Uber. He was previously CEO of Expedia Group, a company that owns several travel fare aggregators. He is on the board of directors of BET.com and Hotels.com, and was on the board of The New York Times Company.
Khosrowshahi was born in 1969 in Iran into a prominent, wealthy family and grew up in a mansion on his family's compound. He is the youngest of three children born to Lili and Asghar (Gary) Khosrowshahi. His family founded the Alborz Investment Company, a diversified conglomerate involved in pharmaceuticals, chemicals, food, distribution, packaging, trading, and services.
In 1978, on the eve of the Iranian Revolution, his family fled Iran when he was 9 years old. Their company was later nationalized. Like many other wealthy Iranians, his family fled to France, in his case to southern France. They were planning to come back to Iran upon the political climate improving, but when that did not occur and the subsequent Iran-Iraq war started, they immigrated to the United States, eventually moving in with one of his uncles in Tarrytown, New York. Khosrowshahi's mother had very little money to support her children, and having never worked before in Iran, began working full time to contribute towards her son's education. In 1982, when Khosrowshahi was 13 years old, his father went to Iran to care for his grandfather. The Iranian government subsequently barred his father from leaving the country for 6 years, thus Khosrowshahi spent his teenage years without seeing his father.
In 1987, he graduated from the Hackley School, a private university-preparatory school in Tarrytown. In 1991, he graduated with a B.S. in electrical and electronics engineering from Brown University, where he is a member of the social fraternity Sigma Chi.
In 1991, Khosrowshahi joined Allen & Company, an investment bank, as an analyst. 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 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.
