Uber has selected Dara Khosrowshahi, the chief executive of Expedia, to serve as its new CEO. After two months of inner battles, controversies, lawsuits and leaks, the Silicon Valley giant appears set to take a new ride. Travis Kalanick, who had founded the taxi hailing service, was ousted in June this year, and ever since then, an 8-member board was running the company. The board had been struggling for quite some time to find a new CEO, and that is when names like Meg Whitman of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Jeff Immelt of General Electric came up. Meanwhile, both of them tweeted that they did not want the position. Khosrowshahi has been the CEO for Expedia, an American travel company, for over 12 years now.
Khosrowshahi is not oblivious to the transportation industry as he has been heading a travel company itself. Expedia is known for its car rental and other transportation companies. It is a service that even Uber has intended to do. But Khosrowshai will initially be expected to restore the image of Uber, after the crisis the cab riding service company went through. He will also have to repair relations of the company with investors, boost the morale of its employees and most importantly turn around a company which has reportedly been making losses for the past 7 years.
Khosrowshahi is not a star CEO from Silicon Valley since Expedia was based in Bellevue in Washington. This is probably why you may not have heard much about him. But, in 2015, Khosrowshahi was the highest paid CEO in the US. Additionally, he also serves as a board member of the New York Times Company and sports merchandise company Fanatics Inc. He led Expedia through a string of acquisitions since 2014, buying Airbnb rival HomeAway Inc for $3.9 billion, Orbitz Worldwide Inc for $1.3 billion and Travelocity for $280 million, cobbling together an online travel empire. Expedia is the world’s largest online travel agency by bookings.
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Khosrowshahi is an immigrant from Iran who came to the US in 1978. After getting an engineering degree from Brown University, he started working in investment bank Allen and Co. Interestingly, Khosrowshahi has been quite vocal against the US President Donald Trump. He supported a lawsuit against the travel ban in late January. According to a report in Fortune, he ended Expedia’s quarterly earnings call by saying: “Hopefully we will all be alive to see the end of next year. He told the Financial Times earlier this year, “It is important to have safe borders, but at the same time we can’t forget what brought us here. This is an immigrant nation.”
It will not be easy for Khosrowshahi changing Uber’s culture that has included sexual harassment and allegations of deceit and corporate espionage. Apart from that he has to control losses, which are growing ever more because of Uber’s investment in self driven cars.