Uber says it has hired Barney Harford, former CEO of online travel site Orbitz that was acquired by Expedia in 2015, as its COO
Harford becomes company's second-highest ranking executive — Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi worked with Harford at Expedia — Barney Harford …
Context & Ripple Effects
Four months after the board pulled Dara Khosrowshahi out of Expedia's CEO chair to lead Uber, he is rebuilding the C-suite around people he already trusts: Barney Harford, who ran Orbitz through its 2015 sale to Expedia and overlapped with Khosrowshahi there, becomes chief operating officer and the company's second-highest ranking executive.
The hire matters because of what Harford did next — within a week he was laying out an efficiency agenda for the Financial Times centered on reining in promotions and discounts, signaling that the new leadership team intends to manage Uber for margins rather than subsidized growth.
First-order effects
- Harford takes the number-two job at Uber, giving Khosrowshahi an operations deputy drawn from his own Expedia orbit rather than from ride-hailing or Silicon Valley incumbents.
Second-order effects
- Harford's stated plan to cut promotions and discounts raises effective prices for riders and trims driver-side subsidies, shifting Uber's competitive stance from buying share with cash to defending unit economics.
Third-order effects
- If the Expedia playbook holds, Uber's cost discipline becomes the template for the whole post-founder executive layer — though the seat itself proved unstable, with Harford and CMO Rebecca Messina both gone by mid-2019 [[a:942555]], underscoring how quickly operational chiefs have turned over under the new CEO.
The trend: Uber's post-2017 rebuild is importing Expedia's margin-focused operating culture into ride-hailing, trading subsidized growth for efficiency even as its top operations roles churn.