Khosrowshahi. Dara Khosrowshahi. That’s the name of the new Uber CEO. He is Iranian-American, 48, married to Sydney Shapiro and a father of two. He was chosen over former CEO of General Electric (GE) Jeff Immelt and Chairman of HP, Meg Whitman. According to Recode, all three candidates made presentations to the Uber board and Dara had highlighted better software, AI, etc as his “plans” for the app but what stood him out was the last slide in his presentation that read, “don’t call me, i’ll call you” – a subliminal message to the (Uber) board to hands off the operations of the car hailing service and stick to it’s JD, after reports revealed that it was involved in the travails of Uber’s previous CEO Travis Kalanick.
The new CEO had worked for an American travel company, Expedia for over a decade where he was the highest paid tech CEO in US, earning $94.1million. It is hard to say what his salary at Uber will be but there are speculations Uber will not be able to afford what Expedia was paying him.
He is meeting with the company staff today amidst ongoing law suits and internal issues while former CEO Travis Kalanick makes court appearances. The show at Uber goes on and Dara Khosrowshahi remains aloof on whether or not he will involve Kalanick in his working team, though the latter remains on the board. We better start getting used to the guy. A good place to start is correctly pronouncing his name.
