Who is Dara Khosrowshahi, the Iranian American CEO of Uber?
Independent Aggregator of Iran-related news/Events, Kodoom.com: According to Business Insider, on Sunday, Uber's board offered the top job at the company to Dara Khosrowshahi, the Iranian American CEO of Expedia. The job represents just another milestone for the 48-year old Khosrowshahi, who has lived an extraordinary life of both hardship and influence. Shervin Pishevar, another Iranian American and an early Uber investor believes Dara Khosrowshahi is the perfect choice for Uber:
Born in Iran, Khosrowshahi, 48, has made an incredible journey from refugee to tech mogul. He was born into a prominent and wealthy family, founders of a major Iranian conglomerate seized and nationalized during the 1979 Iranian revolution. Khosrowshahi arrived in the US when he was nine years old, an Iranian refugee. His family moved in with one of his uncles in Tarrytown, New York, a town with upscale roots on the eastern shore of the Hudson River, 25 miles north of Manhattan.
He and his cousins, including entrepreneurs Hadi and Ali Partovi, attended an Ivy league private prep school in Tarrytown called Hackley School. Previous students included George Hamilton and oil billionaire Fred Koch. He remembers those early years in the US fondly. "For the grown-ups, it was a difficult transition. The kids were able to party together, so it was fun.”
Four years later, Khosrowshahi's father Gary went back to Iran to take care of his ailing father, and he was detained for six years before he could return. Khosrowshahi's mother, Lili, raised three children alone for about six years.
“His mom raised him to be direct with people,” said Mr. Partovi, the cousin. “By far the biggest challenge he faced, which is what all of us faced, was having to come to a new country and assimilate. Being an Iranian in America in the 1980s was not pleasant. People were singing ‘Bomb bomb bomb Iran.’ ”
But the tense environment also pushed them to succeed. Hadi Partovi and his twin brother Ali were early investors in Facebook, Dropbox, Airbnb and, as it happens, Uber; Dara’s brother, Kaveh Khosrowshahi, is a managing director at the investment firm Allen & Company; another cousin, Farzad “Fuzzy” Khosrowshahi, played a major role in the creation of Google Docs; yet another cousin, Amir Khosrowshahi, is an executive at Intel; and Avid Larizadeh Duggan, also a cousin, is a general partner at Google Ventures. Another one of his uncles is the billionaire Hassan Khosrowshahi, who chose to go to Canada when the family fled from Iran. Hassan founded an electronics company called Future Shop (sold to Best Buy) and then created a conglomerate holding company that licenses pharmaceuticals and music.
After earning an electrical engineering degree at Ivy league school Brown University, Dara Khosrowshahi began his career in finance, working at Allen & Co through the 1990s. Barry Diller was a client, and Mr. Khosrowshahi eventually went to work for the media mogul. In 2001, Mr. Diller acquired Expedia, a travel booking site founded by Microsoft. Four years later, Mr. Khosrowshahi became Expedia’s chief executive. The site has flourished, acquiring three major competitors in 2015 alone. Shares in the company, which is now publicly traded, have risen 35 percent over the last year, despite competition from Priceline on one flank and Airbnb on another.
Mr. Khosrowshahi’s experiences as an immigrant gave him a personal perspective on the executive order that President Trump signed restricting travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries this year. Expedia, along with Amazon, gave early support to a lawsuit filed by Washington State’s attorney general objecting to the travel ban. Around the same time, Mr. Khosrowshahi described his early experience as an immigrant in an email to employees.
“We sure didn’t feel like refugees, but in hindsight I guess we were — my father and mother left everything behind to come here — to be safe and give their boys a chance to rebuild a life,” he wrote.
He has repeatedly expressed concerns about Mr. Trump, most recently on Aug. 15, when he tweeted: “I keep waiting for the moment when our Prez will rise to the expectations of his office and he fails, repeatedly.”
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