Travis Kalanick

Travis Cordell Kalanick (born August 6, 1976) is an American businessman best known as the co-founder and former chief executive officer (CEO) of Uber.

Kalanick was born on August 6, 1976, and grew up in the Northridge neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Kalanick's parents are Bonnie Renée Horowitz Kalanick (née Bloom) and Donald Edward Kalanick.

Bonnie, whose family were Viennese Jews who immigrated to the U.S. in the early 20th century, worked in retail advertising for the Los Angeles Daily News.

Donald, from a Slovak–Austrian Catholic family whose grandparents immigrated to the United States from the Austrian city of Graz, was a civil engineer for the city of Los Angeles.

Kalanick has two half-sisters, one of whom is the mother of actress Allisyn Ashley Arm, and a brother who is a firefighter.

In middle and high school, Kalanick was known to be competitive and driven to win.

As a teenager, Kalanick sold knives door-to-door for direct sales company Cutco.

At 18, he started a test preparation company called "New Way Academy" with the father of a classmate.

After graduating from Granada Hills Charter High School, Kalanick studied computer engineering and business economics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

While studying at UCLA, Kalanick was a member of Theta Xi fraternity.

In 1998, he dropped out to work at the start-up Scour full-time.

In 1998, Kalanick, along with Michael Todd and Vince Busam, dropped out of UCLA to work for Dan Rodrigues, founder of Scour Inc., a multimedia search engine, and Scour Exchange, a peer-to-peer file sharing service.

Kalanick handled sales and marketing for Scour.

He has referred to himself as a co-founder of the company, but the other co-founders have disputed this.

After months of growth, Scour was strapped for cash and sought funding from venture capitalist investors Ronald Burkle and Michael Ovitz.

Negotiations were contentious and Ovitz eventually sued Scour for breach of contract.

Scour was forced to accept unfavorable terms for the investment, and Ovitz acquired majority control over the company.

The situation would sour Kalanick's view of investor-founder relations.

In 2000, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) brought a $250 billion lawsuit against Scour, alleging copyright infringement.

In September 2000, Scour filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy to protect itself from the lawsuit.

In 2001, with Michael Todd, Kalanick started Red Swoosh, another peer-to-peer file-sharing company.

Kalanick called it his "revenge business" against the MPAA and RIAA for the lawsuit that killed Scour.

Kalanick's business model was that media companies would pay Red Swoosh to provide legitimate copies of media files like music and videos to customers, and the company developed technology to make the transfer of such large files more efficient.

Kalanick had difficulty securing funding as the company was launched right after the dot-com bubble burst.

As a result, Red Swoosh ran with minimal month-to-month cash flow, and by August 2001, some employees had gone months without a paycheck.

In September 2001, Red Swoosh used approximately $110,000 of the company's payroll tax withholdings to fund day-to-day operations.

There are differing accounts of what led to the decision and the fallout that ensued.

Previously he worked for Scour, a peer-to-peer file sharing application company, and was the co-founder of Red Swoosh, a peer-to-peer content delivery network that was sold to Akamai Technologies in 2007.

Kalanick was CEO of Uber from 2010 to 2017.

In 2014, Business Insider reported that Kalanick publicly accused co-founder Michael Todd of making the decision without his knowledge, while Todd stated it was a decision they made together.

The article noted that "an email sent by Kalanick at the time and obtained by Business Insider appears to demonstrate his participation in the tax plan."

He resigned from Uber in 2017, after growing pressure resulting from public reports of the company's unethical corporate culture, including allegations that he ignored reports of sexual harassment at the company.

Following the sale, in 2017, Kalanick was ranked 238th on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, with a net worth of $2.6 billion.

In a 2017 article for The New York Times, Mike Isaac reported that Kalanick and Todd made the decision together, and that "friends and advisors" had warned Kalanick that using tax withholdings in this way could be considered tax fraud.

In 2018, Kalanick started a venture fund named 10100, intended to invest in e-commerce, innovation and real estate in emerging markets like China and India.

That same year, Kalanick announced an investment of nearly $150 million in real estate redevelopment company City Storage Systems; he also announced that he would serve as its CEO.

The company operates a ghost kitchen startup under the name CloudKitchens, which was valued at $15billion as of 2021.

Kalanick retained his seat on the board of directors until he resigned the seat on December 31, 2019.

In the weeks leading up to the resignation, Kalanick sold off approximately 90% of his shares in Uber, for a profit of about $2.5 billion.