When deciding who should succeed the disgraced Travis Kalanick at Uber back in 2017, the board did not at first think Dara Khosrowshahi was the right person for the job.
Jeff Immelt, former chief executive of General Electric, was a frontrunner until a fluffed presentation. Meg Whitman, who at that time was the boss of HP, was next in line — only to lose out due to board squabbles. And so it was, as described in Super Pumped, the seminal book on Uber’s history, that Dara Khosrowshahi, the mild-mannered, silkily-spoken Iranian-American, took the reins at what was then one of the US’s most controversial companies.
As chief executive, Khosrowshahi’s first task was to change that view. His second was to carry Uber to an IPO. Then came perhaps the biggest challenge of all: making the company profitable.