Dara Khosrowshahi stands in the wings of an airy, modern corporate event space in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. It’s the first anniversary of his taking the CEO reins at the iconic ride-sharing company, and he’s celebrating like a Silicon Valley suit---with a set of product announcements. Men dressed in black are serving avocado toastettes, tiny scoops of salmon tartar, and caramelized-onion-and-cheese biscuits to a crowd of journalists filling in a dozen rows of blond oak chairs. At exactly 10:30, the thumping of the bass softens, and he springs up to the stage, looking like the most boring tech executive in the room. Jeans. Black wingtips. A suit jacket over a white button-down shirt, no tie. “I’m officially no longer a rookie CEO,” he declares, “and there’s no place I’d rather be!”

Khosrowshahi has been perfecting his brand of boring for 365 days, and adhering to brand, he’s using this anniversary to promote a new set of safety features. It’s a bit like serving spinach and broccoli at a children’s birthday party. To my right is is a “museum” of exhibits dedicated to them. There’s the Ride Check feature, set to roll out in pilots later this year, which provides tools for Uber to check on riders and drivers when it detects an accident, and follow up afterward with a phone call, among other things. There’s a hands-free feature that lets drivers accept rides and communicate with passengers with voice messaging. Uber has also added two-step verification for accounts, and expanded its 9-1-1 integration to several new cities. And it’s taking steps to better protect passenger safety by concealing specific pickup and drop-off addresses, and providing approximations of locations to drivers.

They’re smart and necessary changes—changes, one Uber employee points out to me, “that Lyft hasn’t made”—but none seem exceptional. These are the types of features one should expect of a ride-sharing company valued at $72 billion that aims to vault itself into everyone’s subconscious as the definitive app for arranging all types of future transportation.

The event, like most corporate product launches, is just more than 30 minutes. No one mentions #BoycottDidi, the social media hashtag that took off in China last week as people deleted the Chinese ride-hailing app after one of its drivers raped and murdered a young female passenger. (Uber owns 17.7 percent of Didi Chuxing.) No one brings up concerns about women’s safety generally. Instead, they keep the conversation upbeat, focused on both accountability and privacy for riders and for drivers.

Khosrowshahi has been on a first-anniversary media tour this week, and after the event we grab a few minutes to chat. Khosrowshahi understands implicitly that he is the best face of Uber’s future—reliable and dependable, he’s a guy who makes dad jokes and tends to stay on message. But as much as Khosrowshahi has cleaned up the company’s culture and addressed some of its emergencies, Uber is far from the market leader it was two years ago. For Khosrowshahi to grow Uber into a company that is worth the figure at which it is valued, and that can make good on its promise to be the de facto transportation application for bikes, buses, scooters, and any other here-to-there alternative, he will need to confront some significant challenges in the year to come:

Self-driving technology: After a fatal crash in March, Uber paused its self-driving program, and shuttered its Phoenix testing site, before resuming driving in manual mode (with human drivers) on public streets in Pittsburgh in mid-July. In late August, Toyota invested $500 million in Uber for a partnership that will combine the Toyota’s carmaking expertise with Uber’s autonomous tech and ride-hailing platform. The companies have announced plans to develop self-driving Toyota Sienna minivans and deploy them on Uber’s network, starting in 2021. The company will continue to partner with other companies as well, Khosrowshahi tells me.