Skift Take
Khosrowshahi's financial acumen will be crucial to Uber's turnaround, especially after just giving Uber an 18- to 26-month window to go public. The first step is to find a way to become profitable.
New Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi's career has been defined by deal-making.
His stints at Allen & Co., InterActiveCorp, and heading up Expedia Inc. show his approach towards building a public company through acquisitions, and later spinning off the brands that have outperformed their peers and can create additional shareholder value.
This strategy hasn't always been wildly successful, as we've seen with the recent IPO of Expedia-controlled Trivago, although that's still a work in progress. Yet Khosrowshahi hasn't been afraid to take risks throughout his career.
"If you're always going to go with the flow you're going to be a perfectly average company and that's certainly not necessarily something that I want to say after my career, that I was perfectly average," Khosrowshahi told Skift of his time before heading up Expedia. "There's a comfort in that. There's a comfort in knowing, you know what, I'm not making the typical decision, I'm making a different decision. I know t