Uber's New CEO Shares His Immigrant Experience

CEO Dara Khosrowshahi's Iranian roots are key to understanding his approach to business.

- David Peisner

When Dara Khosrowshahi was a child, he lived in a sprawling family compound in Farmanieh, a hilly enclave in northern Tehran. His great-grandfather, grandfather, and great-uncles had started a pharmaceutical business in the 1950s that had grown to become a massive conglomerate. The family was one of Iran’s wealthiest, one of the few whose fortunes weren’t tied to oil or the monarchy. Their compound had multiple houses, where Khosrowshahi’s extended family resided. It also had a soccer field, tennis courts, and multiple swimming pools, including a double-decker one where he, his two brothers, and many cousins liked to leap from the upper, shallower pool to the lower, deeper one.

In 1979, when Khosrowshahi was 9, violent protests had forced the country’s autocratic ruler, Mohammad Reza Shah, to flee, and ushered in a new, Islamic regime. The Khosrowshahi family had generally steered clear of politics, although one of Khosrowshahi’s great-uncles did serve as the shah’s Minister of Commerce between 1977 and 1978. Revolutionary Guard members patrolled the neighborhood. Khosrowshahi remembers a friendly guardsman letting him hold his AK-47, and being struck by the sheer weight of it. One day, the Revolutionary Guard stormed a house across the street, where the shah’s cousin lived. When they scaled a wall, one soldier’s gun discharged, spraying bullets through the Khosrowshahi family’s living room window. “We were all on the ground, terrified,” Khosrowshahi tells me. “That was when my mom said, ‘We’re leaving.’ I’ve never been back.”