An entrepreneur and seasoned business professional with over 15 years of operations, technology, and leadership experience, Zuhairah Washington is passionate about building innovative and profitable businesses with teams that democratize access to vital customer needs.

Working with global Fortune 500 companies, VC-backed startups, and government and nonprofit organizations, Zuhairah has built innovative businesses and led strategic initiatives to drive unprecedented growth. As an early executive at Uber, she grew businesses from startup to scale and ran one of the top five US markets. In this capacity, she had full people management and P&L responsibility, led the successful launches of uberPOOL and uberEATS, and grew the core business to a $1 billion run rate. Prior to Uber, she was founder & CEO of an innovative, VC-backed relationship startup.

Internationally, Zuhairah has lived and worked in Barcelona, Dubai, and London, where she led business development partnerships for Europe’s largest local search and user-generated review website, which was subsequently acquired by Yelp. Prior to entering the field of technology, she served as a regional vice president at MacFarlane Partners, a high-growth real estate private equity firm with $20 billion in assets under management.

Zuhairah is deeply and actively committed to enhancing the availability of capital and entrepreneurial opportunities in low-income communities, as well as supporting efforts to increase diversity and inclusion in business and technology leadership roles. To this end, she is an active angel investor and currently sits on the US board of Accion, a nonprofit organization that supports microfinance institutions in their work to provide financial services to low-income entrepreneurs. A native of Los Angeles, she holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from UCLA and a joint JD/MBA from Harvard.