Travis Kalanick

Travis Kalanick
Born	Travis Kalanick (1976-08-06) August 6, 1976 Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Residence	San Francisco, California, U.S.
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of California, Los Angeles
Occupation	Entrepreneur
Known for	Founder & CEO of Uber
Net worth	US$5.3 billion[1]

Travis Cordell Kalanick (born August 6, 1976) is an American entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of the peer-to-peer file-sharing company Red Swoosh and the transportation network company, Uber.

In 2014, he entered the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans at position 290, with an estimated net worth of $5.3 billion.^[2]

Early life and education

Kalanick was born on August 6, 1976 in Los Angeles, California. He lived in Northridge, California, where he graduated from Granada Hills High School and later enrolled in college at the University of California, Los Angeles, to study computer engineering.^[3][4][5] His mother, Bonnie Renee Horwitz Kalanick, is Jewish. Horwitz is a surname with Ashkenazi Jewish roots.^[6] He worked in retail advertising for the Los Angeles Daily News, and his father, Donald, was an engineer. He has two half-sisters and his brother Cory is a firefighter.^[7]

Career

Scour

In 1998, Travis Kalanick dropped out of UCLA with some of his classmates to found Scour Inc., a multimedia search engine, and Scour Exchange, a peer-to-peer file-exchange service.^[8][9] In 2000, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) brought a lawsuit against Scour, alleging copyright infringement.^[10] In September of that year Scour filed for bankruptcy to protect itself from the lawsuit.^[11]

Red Swoosh

In 2001, with Scour's engineering team, Kalanick started a new company called Red Swoosh, another peer-to-peer file-sharing company. Red Swoosh software took advantage of increased bandwidth efficiency on the Internet to allow users to transfer and trade large media files, including music files and videos. In 2007, Akamai Technologies acquired the company for $19 million.^{[12][13][14][15]}

Uber

Kalanick speaking at DLD 2015 in Munich, Germany

In 2009, along with Garrett Camp, Kalanick founded Uber, a mobile application that connects passengers with drivers of vehicles for hire and ridesharing services.^[16][17][18] Uber operates in more than 100 cities around the world.^[19][20] Uber faced some controversy ^[21] in some cities in North America,^[22] like Washington DC,^[23] Chicago,^[24] Toronto,^[25] and New York City.^[26][27] The company faces fierce competition from similar services^[28] and "clone companies"^[29] in cities like London.^[30][31] In November 2014, Kalanick faced criticism for creating a "win at all costs" culture in his Uber organization. Public relations problems the firm faced included Kalanick's comments to GQ about how easy it is for him to attract women now, concern about his blasé attitude regarding safety issues for female customers, and his toleration of executive Emil Michael, who recommended creating a large budget to smear critics. While Kalanick apologized for Michael's remarks, he did not censure him severely enough to appease some critics.^[32]

Other

Kalanick speaking at the Le Web conference in December 2013

He speaks at conferences and business events,^[33] including TechCrunch Disrupt,^[34] Tech Cocktail,^[35] DLD, and LeWeb.^{[36][37][38][39]}

External reading

• Resistance Is Futile, by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin.

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Travis Kalanick.

• AngelList
• CrunchBase
• Travis Kalanick on Twitter