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Uber's New CEO
- dayaz36 9y agowhy they want a 98 year old running uber is beyond me
- cjCamel 9y agoAge is just a number and should be meaningless in any discussion to do with employment. Also he's 48. Travis Kalanick is 41. Would you have preferred they got someone in their 20s or 30s? Why?
- bpicolo 9y agoIf anything, age is a positive indicator of work experience
- sctb 9y agoPlease don't post uncivilly and unsubstantively like this on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- camillomiller 9y agoAt least the name sounds female if you didn't know the guy. I guess it's a success. Edit after flagging: I forgot that you can't be snarky about the anti-feminism of Silicon Valley here on hacker news. Duly noted.
- sctb 9y ago“Don't be snarky.” https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- common_ 9y ago> Without question Uber has been horrifically served by its board of directors — all of them. Some of them are VCs. If you are raising funding, don't tell them anything confidential.
- dannyw 9y agoThis is a thoughtful analysis into the whole Uber CEO opinion, but it is opinionated. Aggregation theory is one way to derive Uber's value, but you can make a compelling argument that supply drives demand. The reason why I don't use taxis in Australia is partly because the experience is far better with Uber and the cost is cheaper, but also because Uber is the most reliable. Without drivers and such reliability, I can't use Uber even if I want to. Does demand drive supply? Yes. But does supply drive demand? Yes too. With a two sided marketplace, you can't just focus on one.
- agandy 9y agoI don't think the author makes any claims that this is anything other than a positive feedback loop. He's mainly saying that it makes sense for Uber to prioritize the user experience over anything else in order to further accelerate growth.
- erikb 9y agoWith "driving demand" you don't mean "creating demand" but "directing demand to my business instead of the competitors", right? Because it sounds a little like you want to say "creating demand", but your demand to go from A to B is already created before you choose between a Taxi and Uber. You don't decide to go to B because Uber exists.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y agoConceivably, I could decide to make three trips (to B, C, and D) instead of just two trips (to B and C) because Uber is cheaper/nicer/better/etc than other forms of travel. My demand for travel is somewhat elastic, not completely set before I know the cost of travel.
- ssalazar 9y agoIn markets with unreliable, inconvenient, or overpriced taxi service your options before Uber were to drive yourself, have a friend drive you, use public transportation, rough it in a taxi that may or may not show up and do so 30 minutes late, or simply not go. Since low quality was previously a barrier to using any taxi service at all, it absolutely creates demand.
- verroq 9y agoTo paraphrase George Soros here: >The worse things look, the easier it is for it to get better
- tinalumfoil 9y agoFor most situations I disagree. There's a term I see floating around HN occasionally called "incident pit" which I think sums a lot of situations. The idea is for many situations each unit worse things get the harder it becomes for things to get a unit better, just like getting out of a pit. Eventually escape becomes impossible. And i think Uber has been dealing with their own version of an incident pit lately.
- bravura 9y ago'Khosrowshahi will be leaving behind a ton of money at Expedia, though presumably for three tons of money at Uber, if all goes well. But I assume it's not just about the money. If you want to be the CEO of Uber, presumably it is because you like the CEO game, and want to play it at the hardest possible difficulty setting.' https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-28/tender-offers-and-ceo-searches https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-28/tender-of...
- FussyZeus 9y agoHe should start a hedge fund called Dark Souls Management.
- gghvfdggd 9y agoGbg
- cmurf 9y agohttps://twitter.com/dkhos/status/897660235313229824 https://twitter.com/dkhos/status/897660235313229824 When he was 9, he fled the Iranian Revolution, and became a refugee in the U.S. I have more respect for Uber today.
- korzun 9y agoIs this a thing now? My family fled Russia when I was around 9, but I don't share that with the general public. There are millions of people like this in the U.S. This kind of thing is nothing special, unless you are living in a hole somewhere.
- marinman 9y agoTell that to the President
- tmh79 9y agoThe CTO fled Vietnam on a boat during the Vietnam war and arrived in the US with basically nothing as a refugee. Extraordinary circumstances can make extraordinary people.
- iamcasen 9y agoThe CTO is also a ruthless, cut-throat businessman. There is a reason Travis brought him on...
- 20170319 9y agoKhosrowshahi was born in Iran[3] to a prominent family that founded the Alborz Investment Company, a diversified conglomerate involved in pharmaceuticals, chemicals, food, distribution, packaging, trading, and services.[4] He is related to Canadian billionaire Hassan Khosrowshahi. His family immigrated to the United States just prior to the Iranian Revolution in 1978 after Alborz Investment was nationalized.[3] He graduated from the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York.[5] In 1991, he graduated with a B.A. in electrical engineering from Brown University.[6][7]
- leoharsha2 9y agoCEOs often lead to partnerships and strategy. I wonder what connections in travel this new CEO is going to leverage and how that will affect the uber operations in the short term, and the ridesharing product itself in the long term. Uber's success has been about evolving a core product in an emerging category whereas Expedia is all about maximizing revenue from the existing mess of travel product categories. If uber starts to retain customers with miles or try to diversify revenue sources, I think it'd be a bad sign. But, who knows.
- dopamean 9y agoAre we just copying people's comments from previous threads now? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15113793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15113793
- 20170319 9y agolol For instance, his brother Kaveh Khosrowshahi is a managing director at Allen & Co., the investment bank best known for its ultra exclusive Sun Valley conference. A few cousins are Google execs. His cousin Amir Khosrowshahi is at Intel after Intel bought the AI company he co-founded, Nervana, last year for $400 million. His twin cousins Ali and Hadi Partovi sold their startup to MySpace back in 2009 for $20 million and went on to become power angels backing Airbnb, Dropbox, Uber, and Facebook and cofounding Code.org.
- shostack 9y agoWow. How does a whole family succeed at that level? Presumably some of it is connections, but connections only get you part of the way.
- bgun 9y agoSaying (of business) that "connections only get you part of the way" is like saying of getting into orbit that "rocket fuel only gets you part of the way". It is technically true, and a massive understatement.
- mahyarm 9y agoThe family was a wealthy merchant family in Iran before the revolution. They brought money and knowledge of how to become wealthy when they left. Look at other wealthy persians in LA and you see similar patterns.