Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi fled Iran at 9 — and watched the government seize his family's business that made them rich

Historian Abbas Milani told the Puget Sound Business Journal that the family had a reputation of being honest, treating employees with respect, and paying them good salaries.

“Long before Silicon Valley, they had a Silicon Valley-type of entrepreneurial attitude,” Milani told the Journal. “Be very selective with who you find and, once you find them, pay them well and keep them.”

Khosrowshahi shared a memory with the Journal of visiting the factory with his father as a child. Every employee greeted him, and he knew them all as well.

“That’s something I carry with me — having respect for and talking to everyone as an equal even though I may have a fancier title,” he told the Journal.

Khosrowshahi’s parents, Asghar and Lili Khosrowshahi, immigrated to the U.S. with their children in 1978. (Khosrowshahi is the youngest of three brothers.) They settled in Tarrytown, New York, and his parents, having lost everything, started over.

When his father, Asghar, returned to Iran in the late 1980s to take care of his own ailing father, he was detained, and unable to return to the U.S. for six years. His mother, Lili, had to raise her three boys alone.

Lili spoke about the family’s early days in the U.S. at an event in 2018, saying they “had very limited money.”

“I’d never worked before. I started working full-time, and every penny we earned was put in Dara [and two other son’s] education ... and it was expensive. I remember at the time coffee was $0.15 [a cup], and I wouldn’t buy a cup of coffee for myself.”

A transformational relationship

Khosrowshahi studied electrical engineering at Brown University, but after graduating he changed his career plans — in the name of love.

According to the Puget Sound Business Journal, Khosrowshahi had fallen for a woman who lived in New York City, and his brother got him a job at investment bank Allen & Co., so that he could move to the city.

Although that relationship was short-lived, working at Allen & Co. led Khosrowshahi to meet his mentor, which changed the path of his life once again.

Billionaire businessman Barry Diller was a client of Allen & Co., and Khosrowshahi, a junior employee at the time, had been working on running the numbers for a deal of Diller’s, according to a report from Inc. Magazine.