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Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is making no secret of how demanding he expects his company’s culture to be, telling employees in a recent podcast appearance that weekend emails aren’t optional reading. “We’re going to be really demanding,” he said. “Don’t come here if you want to coast.”
Speaking on The Diary of a CEO podcast, Khosrowshahi described building an environment where he can “send emails over the weekend and expect a response back immediately.” For underperformers, he was equally direct about the consequences: “If you’re not performing, we’re going to let you know — and if you don’t fix it, we’re going to push you out.”
Khosrowshahi framed hard work itself as a skill to be developed rather than a personality trait some people simply have, calling it “the most important skill in life,” one that requires focus, resilience through failure, and what he described as “grim determination.”
He was careful to draw a line between working hard and having no flexibility at all, arguing the two get conflated too often. “We believe in flexibility. People confuse lack of flexibility to working hard: You can work hard, and at the same time you can have flexibility,” he said. In practice, that flexibility looks narrow: Khosrowshahi reserves 6 to 8 p.m. for family dinner, but the tradeoff shows up on either side of it, with emails checked again at 9:30 p.m. and once more at 5:30 a.m.
The comments land against the backdrop of real financial results since Khosrowshahi took over as CEO in 2017: Uber generated $9.8 billion in free cash flow last year, a turnaround from the company’s earlier cash-burning years under founder Travis Kalanick. Whether that performance vindicates the demanding culture or simply coexists with it, Khosrowshahi’s message to prospective hires is unambiguous: at Uber, the weekend is still on the clock.
