Indian Born Businessman in the race for Uber CEO post

BW Online Bureau Jul 17, 2017

The vacated throne for the post of Uber CEO is yet to be occupied with a heir. Uber is making a pitch to potential CEO candidates after Travis Kalanick, the firm’s co-founder was ousted last month. Prestigious names in the industry such as Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg, CEO and Chairman of General Electric Jeff Immelt, Ford’s Alan Mulally, COO of Twitter Adam Bain, CEO of Google's YouTube division Susan Wojcicki are among the list. According to Business Insider India, Barack Obama, Former President of United States of America was named among the most suited candidates for the Job.

Former Google and Softbank executive Nikesh Arora is eyeing the post of CEO of Uber as per The New York Times. After Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai, the Indian origin businessperson is creating the buzz in the market. Let’s have a look at the timeline of the only Indian candidate for the designation.

Nikesh Arora completed his schooling from The Air Force School (Subroto Park), in Delhi. Arora graduated as an Electronic Engineer from IIT BHU in 1989. He enrolled himself at Northeastern University, Boston to pursue MBA.

He took up a job with Wipro following his graduation but quit it soon in order to pursue his higher education in United States. Arora began his career at Fidelity Investments in 1992, holding a variety of finance and technology management positions, ultimately serving as Vice President, Finance of Fidelity Technologies.

Bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, in 2000 he founded his own venture T- Motion PLC that was providing certain value added services for the newly launched 3G services of the German company. However, within two years T-Motion was merged into Deutsche Telekom as a part of T-Mobile.

He was looking to start another company in 2004 when he learnt of a small company that was looking for someone to manage its European business. The company was internet giant Google, which had just recently gone public.

Arora oversaw Google's European operations from 2004 to 2007 and was later looking after Middle East and African markets. Arora has been Google’s highest paid executive as per Bloomberg Businessweek Arora received a compensation package of $57.1 million or Rs 344 crore (almost Rs one crore per day) in 2013. According to Fortune, he was responsible for Google's entire $29 billion in revenue.

He quit Google in 2014 to join SoftBank as President and Chief Operating Officer. There he was considered the heir apparent to the SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son. During his stint at SoftBank, he credited with investing more than $2 billion in India across the startup sector. Some of his major investments were in Snapdeal, Housing.com and Oyo Rooms.