Losing everything at 9 gave the Uber chief a chip he still carries

When Dara Khosrowshahi, the chief executive of Uber, was 9 years old, his family came to America from Iran and lost everything. They moved in with his uncle, and the adjustment for a child was not very difficult. The hard part came later, as he watched his father change.

He described his father as "a giant of a man" when he was a kid, who became "less giant" in America. His father had helped build an incredible family business in Iran, and in the United States he tried hard, trying his hand at entrepreneurship and at a lot of things, but he was not able to begin again. Khosrowshahi said his father "lost that spark."

He says the chip on his shoulder from those years is never satisfied, and that it is core to who he is.

His wife, Sid, calls him "a robot" because he does not get stressed by chaos. He connects that steadiness to losing everything and to watching what it did to his father. Overthinking things only makes things worse, he says, so he approaches problems with an engineering mindset. He lists the problems, works through each one, and tests and learns. Progress is not linear, but stress, to him, has no point.

That steadiness sits beside a restlessness. Khosrowshahi said he "always wanted to do well in school," in sports, and in everything else, and he still believes in going all in on whatever he is doing, whether that is work, sports, or family. When he is with his kids, he is with his kids, with no phone in hand and no messages being checked. He sees the same drive in many Iranian immigrants who started from behind in America and went on to succeed, competitive families determined to get ahead again.

He also learned to separate ambition from identity. He wanted to rebuild, and to give every inch he had, but he did not want fortune to break him as a person. Doing well mattered, but being changed by chaos was not allowed to happen.

Khosrowshahi said meeting Sid "finally allowed me to be the person I want to be versus the person I thought I was supposed to be." She was always the same core person, with him, with the kids, with friends, and around highly accomplished billionaires.

Watching Sid stay the same person meant a great deal to him. Khosrowshahi called it "a gift and a kindness that I could never replace."