Uber Confirms Dara Khosrowshahi as CEO

Dara Khosrowshahi is the new CEO of Uber Technologies, according to Bloomberg. The ride-hailing company has confirmed the reports, as well as comments he made to the press. The selection of Expedia’s outgoing CEO concludes a months-long search to replace Travis Kalanick.

Uber took the early part of the week to wrap up negotiations and paperwork, following a contentious yet ultimately unanimous board vote. Khosrowshahi was the dark-horse candidate, and his name didn’t appear in public while other high-profile candidates such as Hewlett Packard’s Meg Whitman and General Electric Chairman Jeffrey Immelt were known to be in the running for the job.

“Dara is the best person to lead Uber into the future building world-class products, transforming cities, and adding value,“ Uber said in a statement that had the names of Kalanick, co-founder Garrett Camp and other board members and executives.

Although Khosrowshahi called his new job “the opportunity of a lifetime“, he’s facing a long list of challenges. The company is losing hundreds of millions of dollars a quarter. It’s staring down two Department of Justice investigations, one into the company’s Greyball software that obscured drivers from law enforcement officials and then a second into bribes paid to foreign officials.

Benchmark, the company’s largest shareholder, is locked in a legal fight with Kalanick over the allocation of board seats. To top it off, many of the executive ranks sit empty; there’s no chief financial officer, no chief marketing officer and no general counsel.

Still, as far as CEO searches go, the selection of Khosrowshahi was a fairly prompt process that took fewer than 12 weeks after Kalanick’s June 20 resignation. Yet amid the headlines over the presumably secret search process, Uber employees were ready for it to be over, and official. The company, which has been run by a 14-person executive committee, is ready for a single leader again.

With its $69 billion valuation, the company has effectively made an enormous promise to investors that it will be a once-in-a-generation technology company. There are signs that Uber, despite its many challenges, has a path to achieve its grand ambitions. Last year, Uber generated $20 billion in bookings and that number is growing each quarter.