CEO · Uber · Former CEO Expedia · Tech & Finance Executive
Dara Khosrowshahi's NOMOS Lambda Deep Blue: The Engineer's Quiet Statement
Dara Khosrowshahi runs a company whose entire value proposition is frictionless movement — get from here to there, as fast as possible, with minimal complication. The watch he wears is the opposite of that pitch. The NOMOS Glashütte Lambda Deep Blue (Ref. 935) is hand-wound, unhurried, and deliberately minimal. It is a choice that says more about the man than the company.
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Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber. The diary of a ceo |
Dara Khosrowshahi was born in Tehran in 1969 and left Iran with his family following the 1979 revolution, eventually settling in the United States. He studied electrical engineering at Brown University — the foundational discipline that shaped how he approaches systems, whether they are circuits or corporations. His early career ran through the financial side of media and technology: CFO roles at IAC brought him into the orbit of Barry Diller's deal-making machine, and in 2005 he became CEO of Expedia, where he spent twelve years transforming an online travel booking site into a multi-brand global platform. When Uber came calling in 2017, it was a company in crisis — regulatory battles on multiple continents, a toxic internal culture, and a founder departure that had left the board looking for someone who could stabilise and scale simultaneously. Khosrowshahi took the role.
His tenure at Uber has been defined by the same qualities his engineering training instilled: systematic problem-solving, a tolerance for complexity, and an awareness that the most elegant solution is rarely the loudest one. He navigated Uber's 2019 IPO, steered the company through the near-total collapse of ride-sharing demand during the pandemic, and oversaw the expansion of Uber Eats into a business that rivalled the core mobility product. Through it all, he has maintained a public profile that is notably restrained for a Silicon Valley CEO — thoughtful in interviews, measured in public statements, and apparently uninterested in the performative aspects of the role.
"The best leaders are those who make the people around them better." — Dara Khosrowshahi
Timepiece
NOMOS Glashütte Lambda Deep Blue — Ref. 935
NOMOS Glashütte was founded in 1990 in the Saxon town of Glashütte — a watchmaking centre whose tradition extends back to the mid-nineteenth century and whose name is protected under German law as a designation of origin. NOMOS is the youngest of the Glashütte manufactures but has built one of the most coherent design identities in contemporary watchmaking, grounded in Bauhaus principles: geometric clarity, functional hierarchy, nothing that does not need to be there.
The Lambda sits at the top of the NOMOS range. The Ref. 935 presents a 42mm case in 18k white gold over a sunray-brushed deep blue dial — an unusual combination that lends the watch a severity that most blue dials avoid. The power reserve indicator at 12 o'clock displays the 84-hour reserve of the manually wound DUW 1001 calibre, NOMOS's in-house movement produced almost entirely in Glashütte. Small seconds sit at 6 o'clock. The strap is black shell cordovan. There is nothing else.
| Reference | 935 |
| Case | 42mm 18k white gold; sapphire crystal; black shell cordovan strap |
| Movement | DUW 1001; manual-wind; 84-hour power reserve; small seconds at 6 o'clock; power reserve display at 12 o'clock |
| Market price | Approx. $15,000–$18,000 USD (white gold reference) |
Against the Algorithm
There is a rich irony in the CEO of Uber — a company whose entire architecture is built on real-time data, location tracking, surge pricing algorithms, and continuous connectivity — choosing a watch that has no battery, no display, no notifications, and requires a human hand to wind it each morning. The Lambda Deep Blue is as far from the Uber platform as a timekeeping object can be. It does not know where you are. It does not know what time the next driver will arrive. It measures the passage of time with a manually tensioned mainspring and communicates it through two hands on a blue dial. That is all.
For an engineer-trained executive who has spent three decades building and running systems designed to eliminate friction, this is a deliberate counterweight. The NOMOS aesthetic — Bauhaus-derived, resolutely analogue, made in a small Saxon town with centuries of craft behind it — represents everything that Silicon Valley's speed culture is not. Wearing it is a signal, whether consciously sent or not: that the man running the platform has a life that exists outside of it.
Saxon Precision, Tech Restraint
The Lambda's 84-hour power reserve is, in its own quiet way, a statement about patience. Most manually wound watches offer 40 to 48 hours — wind it every day or it stops. The DUW 1001's extended reserve means Khosrowshahi can leave it unwound over a weekend and return to a watch that is still running. In a role where weekends are not always observed, that is a practical consideration. But it also suggests a relationship with time that is less anxious than the one his industry sells. Uber promises that a car is three minutes away. The Lambda promises 84 hours of uninterrupted mechanical motion, after which it will need your attention. There is a patience built into that object that the platform cannot replicate — and that the man wearing it clearly values.
And at Spot.Watch — that's always worth noticing.
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