Expedia CEO greets Uber employees at all-hands meeting in San Francisco
SAN FRANCISCO — Uber started a new ride Wednesday, as incoming CEO Dara Khosrowshahi took over from co-founder Travis Kalanick at an all-hands headquarters meeting.
In audio leaked to Yahoo, a subdued Kalanick can be heard haltingly reciting Khosrowshahi’s resume — born in Tehran, emigrated to New York’s Westchester County at age 9, educated at Brown University, star at Expedia.
«So Uber’s next chapter begins today, » Kalanick says. «And we have an inspiring leader take us there. His name is Dara. Let’s clap.»
While Expedia’s outgoing CEO pledged to maintain the corporate drive for which Uber, often controversially, became known, the 48-year-old also vowed to address the toxic cultural issues that rocked the company this year.
«This company has to change, » Khosrowshahi said, according to a tweet posted by Uber’s communications team. «What got us here is not what’s going to get us to the next level.»
Khosrowshahi, who addressed staffers in conversation with Uber board member and Kalanick supporter Arianna Huffington, added that the company’s legacy of sexism and aggressiveness as outlined in Susan Fowler’s explosive February blog post had to be changed at a grass roots level.
«If culture is pushed top down, then people don’t believe in it, » he said, according to an Uber tweet. «Culture is written bottoms up.»
Another tweet indicated that Khosrowshahi wants to bring in a chairman who can serve as his «partner at the board level.» Uber’s myriad issues include recent board infighting that affected the CEO search.
Uber investor Benchmark Capital, which has a seat on the board, is suing Kalanick for mismanagement. On Wednesday, a judge ruled that in Kalanick’s favor that the dispute needs to be resolved through arbitration and not a trial.
Khosrowshahi also is likely to take advantage of multiple C-suite openings to create an inner circle capable of executing his marching orders for the ride-sharing company.
The vacancies include chief operating officer, chief marketing officer and chief financial officer. The last of these is likely to be a priority for Khosrowshahi, who before taking the reins at Expedia in 2005 served as CFO of Barry Diller’s IAC Travel, which bought Expedia in 2003.
The all-hands meeting was a private event. But tweets from a range of reporters sketched out a few salient details.
These included a flurry of tweets by The Information’s Amir Efrati, whose source at the meeting revealed that Khosrowshahi believes privately held Uber, whose $70 billion has taken a hit of late, should go public in «18 to 36 months, » that Uber needs to “stabilize” and then decide “if we narrow the focus or continue with big bets, and which ones, » and that the new CEO will start work next Tuesday.
Efrati also tweeted out a group photo from the event, showing a smiling Khosrowshahi — decked out in a black Uber T-shirt — standing next to Huffington and Kalanick.
Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment on these details.
Khosrowshahi takes over as Uber continues to deal with controversy. On Tuesday, reports surfaced that the Justice Department was looking into allegations that company officials violated U. S. laws on bribing foreign officials.
Uber has been known to play fast and loose with regulatory rules, and already is under investigation for Greyball, a now-discontinued technology that allowed Uber executives to deceive regulators. Controversy also swirls around how medical records of an Indian woman who was raped by her Uber driver made their way to Kalanick and other senior executives.
While Uber’s service has mushroomed globally thanks to both ease of use and potentially artificially low prices, it also has angered both drivers and riders over the course of its eight-year run to ride-hailing supremacy.
The company has been trying to address some of those issues. This week, it changed its privacy settings to give riders more transparency about when and whether their ride locations are tracked.
And over the past three months, Uber has unveiled a host of changes for drivers, including adding tipping (a longtime staple of rival Lyft, which has made market gains during Uber’s woes) and granting greater ride destination choice.
On the eve of Wednesday’s staff meeting, Uber’s board sent a letter to employees saying it was «confident that Dara is the best person to lead Uber into the future building world-class products, transforming cities, and adding value to the lives of drivers and riders around the world while continuously improving our culture.»
Kalanick also issued a statement, saying that «casting a vote for the next CEO was a big moment for me and I couldn’t be happier to pass the torch to such an inspiring leader.»
Khosrowshahi grabs the reins of a tech start-up whose runaway growth almost took it into a ditch. In eight years, Uber has grown from a San Francisco company offering black town car rides to a global disruptor of mobility solutions in more than 80 counties.
But the price of that incessant growth was a neglect of core cultural issues centered on the company’s sexist, cut-throat culture.
Ultimately, Kalanick was seen as the source of both Uber’s fuel and its flames. The CEO cultivated a «baller» culture in which female employees often felt overlooked at best and harassed at worst. Although the CEO vowed to clean up his act and hire a COO, Uber investors ultimately prevailed in getting Kalanick to resign in June.
In Expedia’s longtime CEO, Uber gets a season chief executive whose passion for tech, travel and dealmaking helped propel the Seattle-based online travel company to a leading position over rival Priceline.
One tech veteran and family relative says Uber has the right man for the job.
“Uber needs a tech innovator who can grow it 10 times, which he did at Expedia, and it needs (non-bro) leadership, ” says Khosrowshashi’s cousin, Hadi Partovi, CEO of Code.org, which helps students from underrepresented backgrounds get the knowledge and skills to pursue careers in computer science.
