Sources: Uber partnerships chief David Richter is leaving after more than four years, as Latin America and Asia boss Andrew Macdonald takes on some duties
Amir Efrati / The Information : Tweets: @amir Tweets: Amir Efrati / @amir : Fifth exec team departure under Dara Khosrowshahi, part of which is due to DK bringing on his own peeps. http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
David Richter's exit closes a loop that opened when he was promoted to succeed Emil Michael as Uber's business chief in June 2017, part of the post-Kalanick management rebuild. The Information counts this as the fifth executive-team departure under CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, whose tenure has been defined by installing his own leadership bench rather than retaining inherited lieutenants.
The pattern was already visible in the related coverage: the departure of chief legal officer Salle Yoo followed Kalanick's own call for a new general counsel, and the exits of COO Barney Harford and CMO Rebecca Messina continued the churn into 2019. What changes now is structural: rather than an immediate replacement hire, some of Richter's partnership duties fold into Andrew Macdonald, the Latin America and Asia boss.
First-order effects
- Richter's partnerships portfolio shifts in part to Andrew Macdonald, concentrating international operations and partner relationships under one executive instead of a dedicated business chief.
- Khosrowshahi loses another member of the pre-2017 guard he inherited, extending a replacement cycle that has already claimed the COO, CMO, and legal chief seats.
Second-order effects
- The no-immediate-replacement structure mirrors the Jason Droege handoff at Uber Eats, where a sitting VP absorbed the role — signaling Khosrowshahi prefers consolidating spans of control over backfilling titles.
- External partners and regional teams face a single point of contact whose priorities are weighted toward Latin America and Asia, potentially reordering which partnerships get attention.
Third-order effects
- If the consolidation pattern holds across the Harford, Messina, Droege, and Richter departures, Uber's C-suite is being flattened from functionally siloed chiefs toward fewer executives holding broader operational remits — a structure better suited to a profitability-focused company than a growth-at-all-costs one.
The trend: Under Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber is steadily replacing its Kalanick-era executive bench with a smaller, consolidated leadership team that absorbs departing chiefs' duties rather than hiring direct successors.