The Uber CEO who arrived in the US with nothing

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PLUS: Andy Rubin's OS for everything, Sheryl Sandberg's accidental Facebook revolution, and Microsoft's Satya Nadella. View this email in your browser logo 11.26.17 Like it or not, Silicon Valley companies often make themselves in the image of their leaders. Apple was all Steve Jobs: part genius, part headphone-jack-thieving jerk. The ousted Travis Kalanick was Uber incarnate: swaggeringly confrontational, in love with just crossing the lines of law and decency. But who is Dara Khosrowshahi? Before Khosrowshahi was the CEO of Uber, he was an immigrant who had lost his home and country to the Iranian Revolution. Bullets ricocheted through his family's once luxurious compound as gunmen targeted wealthy neighbors; the Khosrowshahi family fled to France, and their manufacturing business was nationalized. By the time they reached America, they had to make their lives completely anew. Which might explain why he was up for taking the helm at the toxic-cultured, lawsuit-beleaguered ride-hail company: "When you've lost everything, and my family really did lose everything, you learn that loss is a part of life," he told Backchannel writer Steven Levy. "Loss is an opportunity to regroup and rebuild, and it makes you less afraid of failure." Also: from our archives, our inside looks at other Silicon Valley titans, from Andy Rubin to Sheryl Sandberg. Backchannel The Uber CEO Who Arrived in the US with Nothing By Steven Levy There's truth in the stereotype that immigrants often get handed jobs others would avoid like the plague. For most of his career, Dara Khosrowshahi, who came to the United States from Iran when he was nine, didn't fit that category. Then came his most recent job: becoming the CEO of Uber. Profiles Sheryl Sandberg's Accidental Revolution By Jessi Hempel Sandberg's whole self was always a bit more polished than everyone else's. She was a paragon of efficiency. She remembered names. She hosted dinner parties in her home, seamlessly multitasking so she could put her kids to bed and then join three dozen Silicon Valley women for a salon. As former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who taught Sandberg at Harvard and later hired her as his chief of staff, once told The New Yorker, "Sheryl always believed that if there were 30 things on her to-do list at the beginning of the day, there would be 30 check marks at the end of the day." Then she lost her husband. Intelligent Design Inside Andy Rubin's Quest to Create an OS for Everything By David Pierce Rubin doesn't employ human security guards. He doesn't think he needs them. The 54-year-old tech visionary (who, among other things, coinvented Android) is pretty sure he has the world's smartest house. The homebrew security net is only the beginning: There's also a heating and ventilating system that takes excess heat from various rooms and automatically routes it into cooler areas. He has a wireless music system, a Crestron custom-­install home automation system, and an automatic cleaner for his pool. Get Wired Don't Let the Future Leave You Behind. Get 6 Months of WIRED Magazine for Just $5. SUBSCRIBE NOW Big Plans Satya Nadella's Got a Plan to Make You Care About Microsoft. The First Step? Holograms By Jessi Hempel Nadella squats in front of a dinged-up black laminate coffee table and sketches three concentric circles on a piece of scratch paper. A wiry man with a shaved head and black-framed eyeglasses, he has a voice with a range of octaves but only one moderate volume. The outer ring, he explains, is Concepts—the vision that allows the company to think up new things like Project HoloLens. Inside this, he labels the second circle Capabilities—the engineering and design skills necessary to make things. Nadella pauses on the smallest circle, the center of the bull's-eye, which he labels Culture. "You need a culture that is fundamentally not opposed to new concepts and new capabilities," he says. Watch that language Instagram's Kevin Systrom Wants to Clean Up the Internet By Nicholas Thompson As the CEO of a service with 700 million users, Systrom recognizes that he's something like the benevolent dictator of a country more than twice the size of the US. The choices he makes affect the lives of all his users—some of whom are insecure teens, some of whom are well-adjusted adults, some of whom are advertisers, and some of whom are pop singers dealing with an infestation of snakes. From the Archives How Russian Tycoon Yuri Milner Bought His Way Into Silicon Valley By Michael Wolff The more successful Milner has gotten, and the faster he has compounded his success—beginning with his night-raid investment in Facebook in 2009 and now encompassing major positions in Zynga, Groupon, Twitter, and Spotify—the more suspect and outré he has come to seem. He's definitely not your conspicuous non-consumption Valley billionaire. Exclusive Tony Fadell's Next Act? Taking on Silicon Valley—From Paris By Adam Fisher Fadell is the star of the show, and he knows it. His self-confidence is well earned but can come across as overweening—especially to those who suddenly find themselves in his shadow. "Any VC who tells you that you have to move to Silicon Valley," Fadell says at one point, gesticulating wildly, "is being very lazy." This email was sent to you by WIRED. 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