When Travis Kalanick started another startup in 2009 San Francisco as UberCab called it, did not exactly catch the hexapine market.
Ten years later, however, the company that evolved into Uber is another story. A real giant in the world of personal transport that sparks strikes and marches in whatever market it invades.
Her colossus Silicon Valley, one of the most successful companies in recent years, however, is also one of the most controversial for the methods it employs and its business strategies.
Uber now operates in more than 600 cities around the world and recently went public on the New York Stock Exchange, with its initial public offering offering raising $ 8 billion, sending its market capitalization to $ 75,5 billion. dollars.
All this turned Kalanik into a very rich man. At $ 5 billion he estimates it Forbes his personal fortune, except that his undisputed success story has a long "tail" behind it.
The 43-year-old founder is not currently the CEO of his giant, as both he and Uber have been embroiled in a whirlwind of scandals in recent years, a barrage of adventures that would end with him resigning from the leadership of the company, with a 4-month mammoth research and 20 much-praised layoffs.
But how did it all start? And what mediated the resounding resignation of Kalanik from the helm of his own company? A company that of course managed to transform into startup with the highest value in the world…
Travis grew up in a Los Angeles suburb and as a child dreamed of becoming a spy. But his "innate self-confidence and persuasion made him ideal for a sales career," as his mother once said in an earlier interview.
She worked in the commercial section of the Los Angeles Daily News and his father was an engineer. He also has a firefighter brother, but also two half-sisters. And Mom was right, since Travis actually started out as a knife salesman in his teens, taking the door to the middle-class neighborhoods of the California suburbs.
His academic performance was very good, as he was good in sports, especially track and field and rugby. At school he had suffered, however bullying, fierce at times, and so he swore that he would never be pushed back into life.
He started his first regular company at the age of 18, when he finished school and before he went to study computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Having excelled in the US University Entrance Exam (SAT), he took a series of test preparation courses. New Way Academy said the effort and claimed that the first client of the "1.500 and over" course managed to increase his score by 400 points. Kalanik had caught 1.580 and convinced many students and parents that he knew what he was saying.
Young Kalanick went to UCLA and began studying computer science. He also enrolled in the university computer club, where he got to know two of his classmates better, some Michael Todd and Vince Busam. They had already launched their own program, Scour, which helped users share files easier and faster.
The startup before the startup era was run by five friends from a Los Angeles apartment and became popular at some point, as you could share music, pictures, movies and more among the network of users. Kalanik left school in 1998 to work for Scour. Despite having a full-time job, he declared himself unemployed and received the relevant social allowance. The company was also faltering financially, as it had just found the first serious investor. That is, beyond family and friends.
One of the first users of the application was Shawn Fanning, who 18 months later would launch a similar service. You may have heard it, said Napster!
Kalanik claims in his CV that he is a co-founder of Scour, while he was just its second employee, responsible for marketing and sales, something that continues to anger the two people who did it all. Investors, however, thought he was, as he did indeed do much for the survival of the company and it was in his own time where Scour would be commercially successful.
Despite the success and the fierce competition with Napster, the company was eventually sued by the big American studios, which claimed in court no less than $ 250 billion! Scour went bankrupt in one day. The trial for the sale of her assets did not last more than 20 minutes.
Kalanik continued fearlessly founding a new company with a revanchist disposition. If it was the entertainment giants who closed Scour to him, then he would take his blood back by forcing them to become his clients. Red Swoosh said it and it was an attempt to see visual content without breaking the law Copyright.
The app was launched in 2000 with many of Scour's old associates, including Todd himself, who pardoned him on Scour's paternity. The app was subscription and had to do with online content, which they found to be outperforming cheaper than the competition.
Despite its dynamics, the ideological battles of the two co-founders and this appeal of Kalanik always pushing the limits of legality would not let her land. By August 2001, the company had run out of cash, could not pay its seven employees and owed 100 thousand to Tax office.
However, he continued until 2006, having got rid of his partner and moving his company to Thailand, for cheaper costs. And then came the waiting time: server giant Akamai took an interest in RedSwoosh and gave Kalanick $ 23 million for his company.
The young man became a millionaire in an instant…
Kalanik spent his first year as a rich man traveling the world. He went to Spain, Greece, Iceland, Greenland, Japan, Hawaii, France, Australia, Portugal, Senegal and elsewhere. And everywhere, as he complained, the taxi experience did not live up to his expectations.
In all, he had a bad experience with a taxi driver, when the two of them got into a fight, exchanged words and he jumped out of the moving vehicle! It was at the end of 2008, at another technology conference, that he was invited to speak as a successful entrepreneur, hearing for the first time the idea of Uber. As a way "to reduce the cost of taxi transport at the touch of a button".
At the same time, he was living the big life: he bought a villa, his personal chef was cooking for him and he now had a number of investors waiting for his next move. The always pompous Kalanik was now crowing for his wealth and gathering everyone in his house, for gaming, fun and brainstorming.
He heard the idea from StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp, who had just sold his network and became rich, but he disliked the $ 800 he gave for a limousine ride and said it would be nice if he could fall. somewhat the cost of personal drivers.
Camp even worked on the idea for a long time and confessed to Kalanick that if a group of wealthy young Silicon Valley businessmen shared a limousine, they would each pay less. It was the cornerstone behind Uber!
Kalanick admitted from the outset that the idea was Camp: "Garrett is the guy who invented the thing," he told one of Uber's first gatherings in San Francisco. "I want to applaud him and hug her." dot".
What Kalanick did not say was that the original UberCab system, as it was then called, was also built by Camp and two friends from the university (Oscar Salazar and Conrad Whelan). Kalanik was then invited to participate as a "key consultant", according to the company's first articles of association.
This was then UberCab, an elite taxi service that allowed you to call a taxi at the touch of a button on smartphone (or messaging), paying around 1,5 times the value of a typical San Francisco race. It was advertised as a cheap "limousine service" by Kalanik, the manager behind marketing.
In early 2010, Kalanick also hired Ryan Graves, the very soul of Uber he ran as his child. The app was launched in June 2010 by a Frisco office and caught on from the first moment…
Not that it was a bad loss, of course. Two weeks after uploading the app to App Store, the 10 UberCab drivers did just over 10 races on the weekends.
However, the Silicon Valley executives liked the idea. Kalanick anointed Graves as general manager and began looking for his next move, as investors did not seem willing to fund it.
Greek-American investor Jason Calacanis made a significant contribution here, presenting UberCab at an investment event and managing to secure $ 1,25 million in financing. With a show of hands! Among the first investors was Kalanick's old competitor, Napster Shawn Fanning himself.
Seeing the momentum, Kalanick took the helm in December as general manager and would soon have another $ 20 million in hot investment money.
After San Francisco, Uber expanded rapidly to other American cities. Launched in May 2011 in New York, one of its largest markets to date, with more than 168.000 races a day. In December 2011 he went out of America for the first time, hitting in Paris. It now operates in more than 600 cities worldwide and has been cleaning up even $ 20 million for weeks.
It was in 2015 that both Kalanick and co-founder Garrett Camp, and even Commander-in-Chief Ryan Graves, first entered the Forbes list of billionaires. At 5 billion, 4 and 1,6 are their assets today, respectively.
Uber has been experimenting with autonomous driving in Pittsburgh since 2015, although it has encountered some difficulties. In March 2018, an autonomous taxi hit her and killed a pedestrian in Arizona, forcing Kalanick to close the service for the time being…
It is a fact that many, including Uber's major investors, attribute its unexpected and rapid success to Kalanick's arrogant personality. Only at some point his make-up came and overtook him, both him and the implementation of the billions.
The first scandal arose in 2014, when in an interview with "GQ" magazine the female conqueror Kalanik claimed that the service is a "female magnet", saying that everything was done to bring him more comrades. In early 2017, a former Uber employee (Susan Fowler) claimed that sexually harassed when he worked for the firm.
In a revelation by the New York Times that year, a senior executive was badly kicked out when it became clear that the hand he extended to his female employees was not for reward. The camera of an Uber driver later caught Kalanik losing his temper in an argument with his taxi driver.
He apologized and said he would hire an executive director to deal with such petty things. Then he called the driver to his office and gave him $ 200.000 out of his own pocket!
But not all Uber scandals are sexually explicit. In the spring of 2017 he had a long-running legal dispute with Google over the paternity of autonomous driving technology, when the technology giant accused Kalanik of stealing his secret technology through an employee of Google. Both sides, Uber and Waymo (Google) found them out of court in February 2018, with Kalanick paying $ 245 million in damages.
That June, Uber fired 20 high-ranking executives accused of 215 sexual harassment cases. After the scandal, Kalanik took unpaid leave to "work with myself". At the end of the month, he resigned as CEO, citing "the request of the investors".
Kalanik remained on the board, but it became clear that he was being fired more and more. And so he went for more. In March 2018, he announced that through his investment capital of 10100, which he made with those $ 1,4 billion from a stake in which he sold, he participates in several more companies and in one of them, a startup in the real estate world. (City Storage Systems), operates as general manager.
As for Uber Technologies Inc, it recently went public with an initial public offering of $ 8 billion. A huge amount, but much less than the $ 100 billion that Uber assumed.
What Kalanik will do in the post-Uber era remains to be seen.