Uber’s new CEO: Dara Khosrowshahi

Uber has been on a C-suite hiring spree. Now the embattled ride-hail company has hired Bo Young Lee to be its first-ever chief diversity and inclusion officer, sources familiar told Recode.

Uber confirmed that Lee would be starting in her new role in March.

Uber’s new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is confident a potential SoftBank investment into the company will happen.

“It hasn’t happened yet but it will,” Khosrowshahi said at the New York Times DealBook conference on Thursday. “Our making changes in governance is unquestionably good. Our bringing SoftBank in as a strategic investor at the right price [is good].”

In one of many efforts to reset the company’s much-bent-and-very-banged-up values, Uber’s new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi presented new rules of the road to the staff today at an all-hands meeting.

It included the most obvious of bromides: “We do the right thing. Period.”

Uber, which under new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is trying to pare back its losses, is shuttering its car-leasing program after realizing it was losing 18 times the amount of money per car than it expected to, Recode has confirmed.

The ride-hail company previously expected to lose $500 per car that it leased to drivers who didn’t have good or any credit, as the Wall Street Journal first reported. But managers recently informed executives and the board that the program, called Xchange leasing, was costing Uber around $9,000 per car.

Dave Clark, who has headed external affairs for Uber for several years, is leaving his job, although he will remain an adviser to the car-hailing company.

Clark confirmed he was departing and added that he would also be advising Uber co-founder Garrett Camp’s Expa startup accelerator and also Kitty Hawk, which is a “flying car” effort backed by Google founder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page. There, Clark will help with strategic development (presumably figuring out how to invent a safer Flubber).

Uber’s new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is just a month into his new job and is already battling local regulators. In an email to employees, Khosrowshahi said the company would appeal London’s decision not to renew the company’s operating license.

The city’s transportation authority, Transport for London, announced it was not renewing the license because of concerns over Uber’s lack of “corporate responsibility” with regards to reporting criminal offenses that occurred during rides and the use of the greyball software to circumvent local authorities.

Uber is asking a judge to reject Alphabet’s request to delay the first jury trial in its self-driving lawsuit, which is scheduled for October 10.

The ride-hail company claims that Alphabet is simply asking for a “do-over” because its allegations that an executive stole files and brought them to Uber has weakened.

Since Uber hired former Expedia exec Dara Khosrowshahi as CEO just a few weeks ago, he and its board have been intensely focused on bringing on more adult supervision to the car-hailing company.

That’s, of course, the cliched Silicon Valley formula to heal hot-headed young startups in need of course correction. Except, in the case of Uber, it’s a necessity given the paucity of top managers there after the departure and/or firings of many leaders.

Uber held its first all-staff meeting with its new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, today.

Recode’s own Kara Swisher hid in the Uber rafters (kidding) and live-tweeted the meeting. Here are a few of the things that were said, and what we learned.

Today, at 10 am PT, if all goes well, absolutely nothing will happen at Uber headquarters in San Francisco.

And that would be everything to the tempest-tossed employees of the car-hailing phenom, who have had perhaps the most unfortunate year on record at the massively funded startup that was supposed to be enjoying success.

In a memo to his employees at Expedia, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said he had officially taken the job as CEO of Uber.

Uber also released a memo on the hiring, after its board made an offer to him Sunday, which was first reported on Recode.

There is not much that the board of Uber has been able to agree on over the last few months. Along with an ugly lawsuit between its ousted CEO Travis Kalanick and major investor Benchmark Capital that arrives in court tomorrow, its directors have been riven into so many factions on so many issues that it’s like watching a mash-up Arya-Sansa-Littlefinger face-off on high speed and backward.

To say the directors — who include ousted CEO Travis Kalanick — have been dysfunctional is perhaps the biggest understatement in tech you could make these days.

Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber’s newly appointed CEO, will inherit a company that has been wracked with public scandal, infighting among its board members, an investigation into workplace harassment and a slew of lawsuits.

In other words, the longtime Expedia CEO has his work cut out for him.

What kind of leader will Dara Khosrowshahi be at Uber?

Time will tell, but this almost-year-old interview at the Skift travel industry conference — when Khosrowshahi was CEO of Expedia — reveals a savvy, composed, funny-enough, articulate executive, and is worth a watch:

Dara Khosrowshahi may need to divest his shares in freight startup Convoy if he accepts the CEO role at Uber. As of May 2017, the ride-hail company launched a competing freight service, called UberFreight, that matched truckers with payloads through an app.

The Expedia CEO, who was the Uber board’s choice to replace Travis Kalanick, invested in Convoy during the $2.5 million seed round, along with Jeff Bezos and Khosrowshahi’s cousins, Ali and Hadi Partovi.

The selection of a new CEO by Uber’s board of directors has not quashed the legal fight between its members.

Lawyers for ousted CEO Travis Kalanick on Monday filed new papers in the lawsuit brought by Benchmark, the venture firm that is suing Kalanick for fraud. Despite their disagreements over Uber’s direction and over the CEO search, both Benchmark and Kalanick remain on the board.

It’s a formality, but he can’t become CEO of Uber without it: Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has formally told the online travel business he has run for the last 12 years that he wants to leave.

But he hasn’t left quite yet.

Let’s hope there are no tasteless jokes at the next all-hands meeting of Uber employees, as they get to meet their expected new boss.

That would be Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Expedia, to whom the board of the car-hailing company has offered the top job after a tumultuous weekend of hiring high jinks. The activities included the tweeted departure of one high-profile candidate (General Electric’s Jeff Immelt) and much wrangling with another even higher profile one (Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman), until Uber directors finally settled on Khosrowshahi.

The proposed new CEO of Uber has spent a decade mastering one part of the travel economy. But Uber is a new and very different beast.

The selection of 48-year-old Dara Khosrowshahi to oversee the $70 billion company is going to be an enormous challenge for an executive who has no direct background in transportation.

The board of Uber has voted and wants Expedia Dara Khosrowshahi to be its next CEO. But here is a shocking twist for those who have had to endure this awful, messy and convoluted process: He has not been officially offered the job as of 15 minutes ago, said sources.

Still, most expect him to take it and he appears to be the one person dueling factions of the board can agree on. Unknown until now, Khosrowshahi was the third candidate — after Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman and former General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt.

To say Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman has the board of Uber over a barrel now that former General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt pulled out of its highly dysfunctional CEO search effort this morning is perhaps too much.

Let’s just say that she’s driving the car, deciding on the route and not paying for the gas. This, even though she has not formally presented her vision to the board or even re-entered the process.

Former GE head Jeff Immelt has pulled out of the race to become Uber CEO and just tweeted his withdrawal from the process. Immelt, who is currently in Northern California, presented his vision for the car-hailing giant in a bid to lead it on Friday.

No longer.