Dara Khosrowshahi
Dara Khosrowshahi speaking at the 2016 GeekWire Summit in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Dan DeLong)

Dara Khosrowshahi is going to be a little busy trying to fix the things that need fixing at Uber. So the newly minted CEO of the ride-hailing giant decided he’d step away from his role as a board member at The New York Times.

Khosrowshahi’s intention to do so was revealed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Thursday.

On September 7, 2017, Dara Khosrowshahi informed The New York Times Company (the “Company”) that, in light of his new role and increased responsibilities as Chief Executive Officer of Uber Technologies, Inc., he would resign from the Company’s Board of Directors, effective immediately. Mr. Khosrowshahi had served as a director since 2015, and was a member of the Audit Committee and Technology & Innovation Committee.

Khosrowshahi, who spent 12 years leading Bellevue, Wash.-based online travel giant Expedia, was revealed as the choice to take control of Uber on Aug. 27. By Aug. 29, he was emailing his soon-to-be-former employees to tell them it was one of the toughest decisions of his life.

An Aug. 30 opinion piece in The Times spelled out what Khosrowshahi must do to save Uber, saying that the company’s troubles run deeper than former CEO Travis Kalanick’s “flubs and scandals” and that the new CEO will have to “confront the reality that Uber’s business model simply doesn’t work.”

Mike Isaac, a technology reporter for The Times based in San Francisco, reacted on Twitter to Khosrowshahi’s decision to step away from the newspaper’s board:

Seattle tech executive Brian McAndrews, the former CEO of aQuantive and Pandora, has been on The Times board since 2012.

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