>Over the past year, we set out to answer these questions. We created a database of approximately 8,500 CEOs and their characteristics, each individually mapped to their respective companies for the duration of their tenure, and pulled company fundamentals from Compustat, stock returns from the University of Chicago's Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP), CEO tenure and education from BoardEx, and long-form CEO biographies from Capital IQ. We then ran a battery of tests on the new data set, looking for correlation, persistence, and predictive power.

...Nevermind that, I heard that some guy took the job because he liked challenges.

Maybe Dara was already wealthy and the marginal utility of the money at Uber wasn't a factor? Maybe this would lead him to beleive that his own decision making an knowledge would be superior and he wouldnt listen to his peers. Soooo many variables.

It never ceases to amaze me we can dismiss data driven ideas in a blink of an eye because it doesn't fit a narrative we've developed through anecdotes.