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Dara Khosrowshahi took the reins at Uber [NYSE: UBER] as it was in the throes of scandal, charged with remaking the culture of a company that was, at the time, the world’s most valuable startup.
But Khosrowshahi, 57, comes from a family that knows all too well how to rebuild after a catastrophe. The executive’s family fled Iran in 1978, just as the Iranian Revolution was getting underway. Khosrowshahi was nine years old at the time.
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Khosrowshahi’s family was prominent in Iran, having founded a major conglomerate that distributed pharmaceuticals, chemicals and food, according to Business Insider.
The family business “earned the Khosrowshahis a place in the Iranian aristocracy,” according to a profile in the Puget Sound Business Journal, but that success and prominence is also the reason they fled Iran.
Amid the revolution, the company was seized, nationalized by the new Iranian government, and extended members of the family also fled Iran.
Historian Abbas Milani told the Puget Sound Business Journal that the family had a reputation of being honest, treating employees with respect, and paying them good salaries.
“Long before Silicon Valley, they had a Silicon Valley-type of entrepreneurial attitude,” Milani told the Journal. “Be very selective with who you find and, once you find them, pay them well and keep them.”
Khosrowshahi shared a memory with the Journal of visiting the factory with his father as a child. Every employee greeted him, and he knew them all as well.
“That’s something I carry with me — having respect for and talking to everyone as an equal even though I may have a fancier title,” he told the Journal.
Khosrowshahi’s parents, Asghar and Lili Khosrowshahi, immigrated to the U.S. with their children in 1978. (Khosrowshahi is the youngest of three brothers.) They settled in Tarrytown, New York, and his parents, having lost everything, started over.
When his father, Asghar, returned to Iran in the late 1980s to take care of his own ailing father, he was detained, and unable to return to the U.S. for six years. His mother, Lili, had to raise her three boys alone.
Story Continues
Lili spoke about the family’s early days in the U.S. at an event in 2018, saying they “had very limited money.”
“I’d never worked before. I started working full-time, and every penny we earned was put in Dara [and two other son’s] education … and it was expensive. I remember at the time coffee was $0.15 [a cup], and I wouldn’t buy a cup of coffee for myself.”
A transformational relationship
Khosrowshahi studied electrical engineering at Brown University, but after graduating he changed his career plans — in the name of love.
According to the Puget Sound Business Journal, Khosrowshahi had fallen for a woman who lived in New York City, and his brother got him a job at investment bank Allen & Co., so that he could move to the city.
Although that relationship was short-lived, working at Allen & Co. led Khosrowshahi to meet his mentor, which changed the path of his life once again.
Billionaire businessman Barry Diller was a client of Allen & Co., and Khosrowshahi, a junior employee at the time, had been working on running the numbers for a deal of Diller’s, according to a report from Inc. Magazine.
“When Diller demanded someone explain the numbers to him, Khosrowshahi’s boss was sick, and he found himself talking through his model with the billionaire,” the report says.
When Diller launched a hostile takeover of Paramount Pictures and failed, Diller’s reaction to the news — “They won, we lost. Next.” — left an impression on Khosrowshahi.
“What really made a mark on me was how Barry accepted defeat,” Khosrowshahi told the Puget Sound Business Journal. “He could never be pushed down or beaten down.”
Khosrowshahi soon left Allen & Co. to work for Diller, who became his mentor, and Khosrowshahi rose eventually to the position of CEO at Expedia.
The best advice he says he received from Diller? “Don’t be average,” Khosrowshahi told the Journal — and if you’re early in your career, don’t over-plan.
“You never know what opportunities are gonna come up. I planned to stay at Allen & Co. my whole life,” Khosrowshahi said on the Acquired podcast. “But being open to possibilities, being open to opportunities, and then when you get that opportunity, going all in. You know, like it’s just — don’t hedge.”
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This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi fled Iran at 9 — and watched the government seize his family’s business that made them rich
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