Inside Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s 4-year quest to root out the toxic culture that nearly sank the world’s most valuable startup

• Dara Khosrowshahi made fixing Uber’s culture his top priority when he became CEO in 2017.
• Since then he’s aimed to make Uber more ethical and transparent.
• He’s largely been successful at changing Uber’s culture, Uber employees and a Wall Street analyst told Insider.

Dara Khosrowshahi was shopping for groceries in August 2017 when his phone rang. It was Arianna Huffington, an Uber board member. She had good news and bad news.

He asked for the good news first, he recalled in an interview with Recode in 2018. He was going to be Uber’s next chief executive, Huffington said. The bad news was the board’s decision had already been leaked to the press.

Khosrowshahi, who was 12 years into a successful but quiet tenure as the CEO of Expedia, was about to become a household name, whether he liked it or not. “I think what I was most scared of is this – the public profile of the job,” Khosrowshahi said in an interview with Vanity Fair in 2018.