Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi shares the most common career mistake young people make
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- Having a career plan is great, but you don't want to overdo it.
- Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says the most common mistake he sees young people make is overplanning.
- Instead, he says to keep an open mind, as stubbornly sticking to a plan can lead to missed opportunities.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has one piece of advice for those just starting off in their career: keep an open mind.
"I always tell people that the most common mistake I see in young people is that they overplan their career," Khosrowshahi said on a recent podcast of Acquired.
"There's this human bias which is to look for a signal that agrees with the plan that you have and ignore everything else that doesn't agree with it," he added. "So my advice for young people is don't overplan, you never know what opportunities are going to come up."
Khosrowshahi's advice stems from experience.
Khosrowshahi's started off his career in the early 1990s at the investment bank Allen & Company.
Khosrowshahi said he was just a few years out of college when he first started working with Barry Diller as a client. At the time, Diller was trying to acquire Paramount, and Khosrowshahi was put on the deal.
"I was a lowly analyst, and I got assigned to this deal," he said. "The person who I worked for, the VP, she got sick, and so I had to kind of step up and work with Barry directly, making these pitches to Barry."
Khosrowshahi said that at some point Diller demanded to meet the person who was running the numbers together and Herbert Allen, the former president of Allen & Company, came to Khosrowshahi and asked him to print off his model and come talk to Diller.
"I had to print off my whole LBO model, bidding model, etcetera, and holy shit. The only question in my mind was when am I going to get fired, right? This is a disaster. An analyst is not supposed to talk to a CEO," Khosrowshahi said.
"But then I met him, and I remember thinking 'Hey, if there is ever a person that I want to work with, I want to work with that person.'"
Even though Diller didn't end up acquiring Paramount, Khosrowshahi did end up working for him.
Khosrowshahi left Allen in the late 1990s to join USA Networks, which was run by Diller, and later he joined IAC, which was also in Diller's portfolio. IAC ended up buying Expedia in 2001, and four years later, Khosrowshahi became CEO of the travel booking company. He left Expedia in 2017 to become the CEO of Uber.
"I planned to stay at Allen & Co my whole life, it was my place. But being open to possibilities, being open to opportunities, and then when you get that opportunity, going all in," Khosrowshahi said. "Don't hedge. If you are going to be in something, go all in. And do what's required of you and then 50% more. Blow people away. And then tomorrow, maybe something else comes up and you get there, but while you are in, you go all in. But at the same time, keep your eyes open because you never know."
Go check out the full interview with Uber's CEO Dara Khosrowshahi here.