Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2014; its figures date from then, including Uber’s $18 billion valuation, its $1.5 billion funding round, operations in more than 130 cities in 45 countries, the driver requirements and Cabify’s €3.17 million round. Kalanick resigned as Uber CEO in 2017.
Today Uber, the company giving taxi drivers a headache, is valued at $18 billion, which makes Travis Kalanick, its founder and CEO, a new billionaire.
But Uber is just one of many companies Travis has started, although it is the only one that has been a huge success. Only a few years ago, according to Business Insider, Travis had filed for bankruptcy for an earlier company, leaving him completely broke and forced to sleep at his parents’ house.
And what do we do when failure crosses our path? We get back up, with the experience we have gained. In Travis’s case, though, as we will see, he does seem to have a particular knack for founding controversial companies.
This is the fascinating life and career of the founder of Uber.
Travis Kalanick grew up in Northridge, California, a suburb on the outskirts of Los Angeles. As a child he wanted to be a spy, but in the end he followed in the business footsteps of his mother, who worked in sales.
Travis’s first job was selling knives door to door. He went to university to study computer engineering, but in 1998 he decided to drop out to help create Scour, a search engine.
After raising money from angel investors and friends, the project began to take off, but it was not long before they faced a $250 billion lawsuit from several entertainment companies, and they decided to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States.
Travis quickly started a new business, Red Swoosh, a networking software company. But once again he ran into trouble with the law, this time over tax irregularities, as the company had not withheld its employees’ taxes. In 2007, faced with the problems he was having, he sold the company for $23 million.
After that good deal Travis was already a millionaire, and he decided to buy a big house and take a year off to travel the world. He went to Spain, Japan, Greece, Hawaii, Australia…
The idea behind Uber
At the end of 2008, while attending a technology conference, Travis heard for the first time a business idea similar to what Uber is today. His first vision was to bring down the price of a private chauffeur service.
In other words, any executive could use their phone to get a luxury car with a suited chauffeur.
Together with several other entrepreneurs (Oscar Salazar, Garrett Camp and Conrad Whelan), they decided to build UberCab, the first version of what is now Uber: a service that cost more than a taxi, where all anyone had to do was send a text and press a button to request a private car.
In early 2010, Travis hired Ryan Graves as general manager of the company, a man whose vision for the project led to Travis becoming CEO and taking UberCab to success in San Francisco.
Even so, private investors were reluctant to put money into the company, especially given Travis’s track record: he had a reputation as a “problem entrepreneur”, since all his ideas had ended in lawsuits.
But Uber kept growing, and a few months later, in the summer of that same year, 2010, the company decided to raise a funding round. It brought in $1.25 million, much of it put up by Shawn Fanning, co-founder of Napster.
From then on, Uber began to expand its business model to major cities, eventually reaching Spain as well, and it has now raised another $1.5 billion in funding.
The company is currently valued at $18 billion, which makes Travis a billionaire.
People who know Travis Kalanick describe him as a very arrogant and reckless person. And those may well be the very qualities that have made him successful with Uber. Today the company operates in more than 130 cities in 45 different countries, and it is once again facing legal problems over its business model.
Even so, the company is proud of having created tens of thousands of jobs, offering the chance to earn money or start their own business to anyone over 23 with a driving licence and a four-door car in good condition.
Of course, Uber is also accused of using an unfair advantage to compete with the taxi industry.
On top of its problems with the taxi sector, Uber now also has to deal with new competition that is emerging strongly, such as Cabify, a new company with a similar business model that recently raised €3.17 million in funding.
Further reading
- How much can you really earn as an Uber driver?
- The fascinating life and career of Mark Cuban
- The fascinating life and career of Richard Branson
Featured image: cellanr, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
