Travis Kalanick helped found Uber in 2009. He stepped down from the company’s helm in June 2017 under pressure from investors after a string of setbacks.
He came from a middle class family in Northridge, California where his father was a civil engineer – inheriting his head for numbers and strong analytical skills.
From his mother, who worked as an advertising executive at the Los Angeles Daily News, Kalanick learned the charisma that won over her clients and he became a natural salesman.
By the time he was in middle school, he was highly competitive, learned to code, but suffered ‘relentless’ bullying because he was a math wiz.
He scored a 1580 in his SATs, 20 points shy of perfect, and went to UCLA to double major in computer science and economics.
Travis Kalanick came from a middle class family in Northridge, California before helping to turn Uber into the world’s largest ride-services company. He will resign from the board of the company next week
Kalanick became obsessed with the Internet and built a Napster-like search engine to find music online called Scour, dropping out to work full time on the project.
He managed to get $4million from venture capitalists but under grossly unfair terms – he would never forget that either – and Scour ultimately went bankrupt in 2000 when the recording industry sued it for $250million.
A year later Kalanick tried to launch another version called Red Swoosh which he sold in 2007 for $20million, earning him $2million.
He then dabbled as an angel investor until he met fellow budding tech entrepreneur Garrett Camp, who had sold his now-defunct social network StumbledUpon to eBay for $75million in 2007.
Kalanick idolized tech pioneers like Jeff Bezos and ripped off the Amazon founder’s 14 principles, only with a distinctly Uber-like twist.
Number 1 on Bezos’s list was ‘customer obsession’ while Kalanick’s was ‘always be hustlin’.
At Number 8 on Bezos’ list was ‘dive deep’. In the same position on Uber’s version was ‘Super Pumped’.
By 2012 Uber was in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Paris, with London soon to follow.
Kalanick had few friends outside of work and drove himself hard with 18-hour days and employees were expected to do the same.
But his pugnacious style turned Uber into the world’s largest ride-services company that revolutionized the taxi industry and challenged transportation regulations worldwide.
‘Very few entrepreneurs have built something as profound as Travis Kalanick did with Uber. I’m enormously grateful for Travis’ vision and tenacity while building Uber, and for his expertise as a board member,’ Uber Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement.
But his brashness was also blamed for a string of scandals and complaints over his leadership, resulting in a shareholder revolt to push him out.
Other Uber executives buying shares in the company include current Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, pictured left on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) during the company’s IPO in May
When Kalanick resigned in the summer of 2017, the company had been through a bruising six months during which employees accused the former CEO of fostering a toxic work culture that encouraged sexual harassment and bullying.
At the time, Uber was also the target of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice over trade secret theft in connection to its self-driving unit.
‘Uber has been a part of my life for the past 10 years. At the close of the decade, and with the company now public, it seems like the right moment for me to focus on my current business and philanthropic pursuits,’ Mr Kalanick said in a prepared statement on Tuesday.
‘I’m proud of all that Uber has achieved, and I will continue to cheer for its future from the sidelines.’