The business story
Dara Khosrowshahi is a professional chief executive rather than a founder. His career has been built on taking over complex or troubled companies and making them run well: first Expedia, which he grew through acquisitions, and then Uber, which he was hired to stabilise after its founder's exit. He offers a useful contrast to the founder stories that dominate business writing.
His strength is integration and discipline rather than original invention.
Early life and background
Khosrowshahi was born in Tehran in 1969 into a prosperous family. After the 1979 revolution the family fled and rebuilt their lives in the United States, initially in far more limited circumstances than they had known in Iran. He has often pointed to that experience of starting again as formative.
He graduated from the Hackley School in New York in 1987 and earned a degree in electrical engineering from Brown University in 1991. Like many technically trained graduates of the period, he went into finance rather than engineering.
Before Uber
From 1991 to 1998 he worked at Allen & Company, the investment bank known for its media relationships. There he came to know Barry Diller, and in 1998 he joined Diller's IAC and the businesses around USA Networks, staying until 2005. Diller is widely seen as his most important mentor, and the approach Khosrowshahi learned there, managing a group of acquired assets as an active portfolio, shaped the rest of his career.
In 2005 he became CEO of Expedia Group, by then an independent public company. Over twelve years he brought Travelocity, Orbitz and HomeAway into the group, consolidating a fragmented market across hotels, flights and holiday rentals. He left with a strong reputation in his industry but little public profile.
Building Uber's turnaround
In August 2017 Khosrowshahi became CEO of Uber, a company with explosive growth and a damaged culture after a run of scandals and its founder's forced departure. He reworked leadership and stated values, settled lawsuits, softened the most combative regulatory stances and took Uber public in May 2019. He is widely credited with putting it on a path to profitability.
The tenure has had serious missteps. In a November 2019 interview he compared the killing of Jamal Khashoggi to a fatal self-driving incident, then quickly retracted the remark and apologised. Uber's CEO-to-median-worker pay ratio, reported at 292 to 1 in 2023, drew criticism, though the company argues the median is skewed by part-time drivers.
