From Persian refugee to star Wall Street executive. The story of Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber, would make for a movie. Born in Tehran into a bourgeois family, at the age of nine Dara was forced to leave his country, just before the Islamic revolution of 1978 broke out.
A few months later, the family business, the Alborz Investment Company, a firm specialized in pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, is nationalized by the ayatollahs.
Suddenly, the Khosrowshahi clan has to start from scratch. After a brief stay in France, they choose to emigrate to New York. But for young Dara, the most difficult days have yet to come. His father moved to Iran for a family issue in 1982. But upon arrival the regime decided to detain him for six years and forbade him to travel. In this way, Dara will not be able to see his parent throughout her adolescence.
In the end, amid many economic difficulties – the family has lost everything – Dara manages to complete her studies in electronic engineering. “I just grew up in a circumstance where getting along was the way to survive,” he recalls.
After his time in investment banking at Allen
That's when Uber, in the midst of a crisis after the excesses of its founder, Travis Kalanick, notices him and chooses him to right the group in 2017. Almost seven years later, the miracle happens. The company has achieved its first positive annual results, with profits of almost 1.7 billion euros. Uber is no longer that controversial unicorn of its beginnings, but a technological benchmark on Wall Street with a market capitalization of 134,000 million, double the value on the day it went public in 2019. And, furthermore, with growth forecasts of two digits.
Much of the credit goes to its CEO. The New York Times described him in an article as “the dad of Silicon Valley.” In fact, the company's workers agree that he has been “the father” of a transformation that has also been cultural. “From an aggressive company, we have become a firm with a different spirit, with the ambition to diversify and add value,” they tell this newspaper.
To achieve profitability, the firm has chosen to raise rates (some studies estimate the increase at close to 40% in four years, much more than inflation in this period) and to reduce costs.
Regarding the controversies over the legal status of the driver, Khosrowshahi assures that “our workers do not want to be full-time employees, they prefer the flexibility of being their own bosses and deciding when and where they work.”
As a curiosity, Dara Khosrowshahi wanted to better understand the experience of his company's drivers and even adopted a covert identity under which he himself began to take trips with clients.
Perhaps his greatest intuition, after the pandemic crisis, was to turn Uber into something more than a disruptive company in the taxi business, and make it a platform that offered all types of transportation and food delivery services. For example, Uber Eats represented 10% of turnover and now it is 50%.
If Amazon is the store of everything, Khosrowshahi's Uber wants to be the everything that is in motion: from cars to bicycles, three-wheeled vehicles in India, trains, buses and also trucks. In the future, autonomous driving and AI will give the business the umpteenth turnaround. “I don't want to run the sexiest company, but the best company,” insists Khosrowshahi, who nevertheless admits defeat. He confesses that her American mother-in-law still hasn't learned to pronounce her last name correctly. Try it yourself: “Cos-rou-sha-jii”.
