Dara Khosrowshahi

Dara Khosrowshahi is an Iranian-American business executive who has served as the Chief Executive Officer of Uber Technologies since August 2017. Born in Tehran, Iran in 1969, he is the youngest of three children of Lili and Asghar (Gary) Khosrowshahi. His family founded the Alborz Investment Company, a diversified conglomerate involved in pharmaceuticals, chemicals, food, distribution, packaging, trading, and services. In 1978, on the eve of the Iranian Revolution, his family fled Iran when Dara was nine years old and eventually settled in the United States. He attended the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, for his secondary education and went on to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Brown University in 1991.

Khosrowshahi began his career as an analyst at the boutique investment bank Allen & Company in 1991, where he remained for seven years. In 1998, he left Allen & Company to join former client Barry Diller at USA Networks, where he served as Senior Vice President of Strategic Planning and later as President. He subsequently became Chief Financial Officer of IAC (InterActiveCorp), another Diller-controlled company. After IAC acquired Expedia in 2001, Khosrowshahi was named CEO of Expedia in August 2005. During his 12-year tenure, the gross value of Expedia's hotel and travel bookings more than quadrupled and pre-tax earnings more than doubled. He expanded the company to more than 60 countries and led the acquisitions of Travelocity, Orbitz, and HomeAway.

In August 2017, Khosrowshahi was appointed CEO of Uber, succeeding co-founder Travis Kalanick. He was initially recruited by a headhunter and was persuaded to pursue the role by Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek. He forfeited unvested Expedia stock options worth approximately $184 million, though Uber reportedly compensated him with over $200 million. At Uber, Khosrowshahi has steered the company through its 2019 IPO, a return to profitability, and an aggressive expansion into autonomous vehicles and AI. His total compensation for 2024 was $39.4 million. He has also served on the boards of BET.com, Hotels.com, and The New York Times Company.

Dara Khosrowshahi is a selective angel investor who deploys personal capital into early-stage startups, primarily at the seed stage. His portfolio reveals a focus on FinTech, enterprise applications, real estate technology, healthcare technology, and infrastructure software. He tends to back companies that leverage technology to streamline complex, operationally intensive processes -- mirroring the platform-based business models he has overseen at Expedia and Uber. His investment in Deel, for instance, was motivated by its ability to "streamline the complex minutiae of payments and compliance, removing the obstacles so that companies worldwide can go ahead and hire the best talent anywhere, instead of just the nearest talent to them." He also gravitates toward companies democratizing access to traditionally exclusive asset classes (e.g., Arrived in fractional real estate) and those applying AI and data infrastructure to transform industries (e.g., Nervana Systems in deep learning hardware).