Travis Kalanick

Kalanick grew up in Los Angeles and studied computer engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In 1998, he and several classmates dropped out to work on Scour full-time.⁠[1][2]

Scour was a peer-to-peer search and file-sharing service that let users search for and download files, videos, movies, and images from other people’s computers; Shawn Fanning, who later founded Napster, was an early user. Because users could download content for free, film and record companies jointly sued Scour for $250 billion; Scour filed for bankruptcy protection in 2000.⁠[1][3][3][3][2]

Kalanick then founded the networking software company Red Swoosh and served as its chief executive officer from January 2001 to April 2007. He called the company a “revenge business,” with the aim of turning the 33 litigants that had sued Scour into paying customers. He said on David Senra’s show that he took no salary for the company’s first four years and repeatedly ran out of money. In April 2007, Red Swoosh was acquired by Akamai Technologies in a deal worth $23 million in total, of which $19 million was in stock and $4 million in earn-outs.⁠[4][3][5][3]

After selling Red Swoosh, Kalanick invested most of the proceeds in startups founded by friends, becoming the first investor in the expense-reporting software company Expensify.⁠[5]

Uber was founded in 2009 by co-founders Kalanick and Garrett Camp; the idea of booking private cars through a mobile app was originally conceived by Camp, the founder of StumbleUpon. The popular founding story holds that on a winter night in Paris in 2008, the two could not find a cab. Kalanick was 33 when he started Uber.⁠[4][2][6][1][5]

In the summer of 2010, UberCab launched in San Francisco, initially with only a small fleet of cars and a handful of employees. Shortly after launch, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency issued it a cease-and-desist order, citing among other reasons the company’s use of the word “cab” in its name without a taxi license. Kalanick ignored the order and the company kept operating, but dropped “cab” from its name. The company was incorporated in Delaware as Ubercab, Inc. in July 2010 and changed its name to Uber Technologies, Inc. in February 2011. Kalanick served as a director from July 2010 and as chief executive officer from November 2010.⁠[1][1][1][7][4][4][4]

Kalanick later said on David Senra’s show that he personally took part in pricing Uber’s first 20 to 30 cities, using each city launch to refine an expansion playbook that could eventually operate without him.⁠[5]

In February 2011, Uber closed an $11 million funding round led by Benchmark Capital at a post-money valuation of $60 million, and Benchmark partner Bill GurleyBill GurleyBill Gurley is a venture investor, author and podcast host who spent many years as a Benchmark general partner, investing in and serving on boards of technology businesses including Uber and Zillow. He moved from computer engineering to securities research and became known for internet marketplace investments, the Above the Crowd blog and the career book Runnin’ Down a Dream.Open the full entry joined the board. That same year, Kalanick had intended to sell 12% of the company to Marc AndreessenMarc AndreessenMarc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, a co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). While in college he helped develop the graphical web browser Mosaic, then co-founded Netscape and Loudcloud (later renamed Opsware), and has long served as a director of Meta; he has also published essays such as “Why Software Is Eating the World.”Open the full entry at a valuation of $375 million, but after a dispute over revenue projections and Andreessen lowering the valuation to $220 million, he pulled out of the deal at the last moment. In December 2011, Kalanick announced at the Le Web conference that Uber had closed $32 million in Series B funding led by Menlo Ventures, Jeff Bezos, and Goldman Sachs.⁠[6][6][1][1][8]

By the end of 2014, the five-year-old Uber was valued at around $40 billion, with operations in 53 countries and more than 200 cities; that December, Uber was ordered to stop operating in Delhi after one of its drivers was accused of raping a passenger, taxi drivers protested in Paris, and its “surge pricing” during the Sydney hostage crisis drew public criticism. Kalanick called his hard-line stance toward local governments, licensing authorities, and the taxi industry “principled confrontation,” and he regarded regulations unfavorable to Uber as outdated rules in need of reform.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1]

In January 2017, Uber was accused of intending to profit from protests against the Trump administration’s executive order restricting the entry of refugees and immigrants, which sparked the #DeleteUber social media campaign, and hundreds of thousands of users stopped using Uber within days. In February of that year, former engineer Susan Fowler published a blog post describing the sexual harassment and gender discrimination she had experienced at the company and alleging that its culture was “toxic.” Uber then commissioned former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to lead an investigation into the company’s workplace culture.⁠[4][4][9][4][10]

In June 2017, Uber’s board voted unanimously to adopt the recommendations of the Holder investigation, which were released on June 13. They included to “review and reallocate” Kalanick’s responsibilities, hire a chief operating officer to run the company alongside the CEO, add independent directors, and abolish company values such as “Principled Confrontation” and “Always Be Hustlin’” that were seen as having excused misconduct. That same day, Kalanick announced an indefinite leave of absence; in an email to employees he said he needed to take time off from the day-to-day to reflect, work on himself, and build out a world-class leadership team: “If we are going to work on Uber 2.0, I also need to work on Travis 2.0.”⁠[9][9][9][9][9][9][9][9]

A week into his leave, five investors that together held more than a quarter of Uber’s stock, Benchmark, First Round Capital, Lowercase Capital, Menlo Ventures, and Fidelity Investments, sent Kalanick a letter demanding his immediate resignation. Kalanick then resigned as chief executive officer but kept his board seat. He said in a statement: “I love Uber more than anything in the world and at this difficult moment in my personal life I have accepted the investors’ request to step aside so that Uber can go back to building rather than be distracted with another fight.” At the time Uber operated in 662 cities worldwide and was valued at nearly $70 billion.⁠[10][10][10][10][11]

Shortly after Kalanick’s resignation, early investor Benchmark sued him, alleging that he had misled Benchmark about the state of the company when Benchmark agreed to give him the power to add board seats. During the lawsuit, Kalanick exercised his rights to appoint Ursula Burns and John Thain to the remaining board seats. In January 2018, the lawsuit was dismissed as one of the conditions of SoftBank’s investment in Uber; the SoftBank deal gave both Benchmark and Kalanick an opportunity to sell significant Uber stakes.⁠[12][12][12][12]

Since March 2018, Kalanick has served as chief executive officer of City Storage Systems. The company, formerly called CloudKitchens, acquires distressed real estate such as parking lots and abandoned strip malls and turns it into spaces suited for new industries such as food delivery and online retail. CloudKitchens later became its business operating shared delivery kitchens.⁠[4][13][13][14]

In October 2018, the advisory board list for NEOM, Saudi Arabia’s $500 billion new city project, published by the official Saudi Press Agency, included Kalanick; he did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.⁠[15][15][15]

On December 23, 2019, Kalanick informed Uber of his intention to resign as a director, effective December 31; the company said his resignation was not the result of any disagreement with the company. In his letter to the board he said that he was devoting increasing amounts of time to new ventures and had just sold his remaining Uber shares, so the time was right to leave the board; Uber had grown from a startup operating a few cars in San Francisco into a global phenomenon that changed the way people view transportation.⁠[16][16][16][16]

In March 2025, Kalanick suggested at a conference that CloudKitchens would not be content with renting out kitchen space, raised the idea of “cooking-as-a-service,” and distinguished between “AI for bits,” which processes information, and “atoms AI,” which interacts with the physical world, including autonomous cars and humanoid robots.⁠[17][17]

On March 13, 2026, Kalanick announced the robotics company Atoms Inc., built on the assets of City Storage Systems, as the parent company of his ventures, including the delivery kitchen business CloudKitchens, Otter, the office lunch delivery company Picnic, and the automated bowl-building robotics project Lab37. City Storage Systems operated in 30 countries at the time. Atoms also planned to enter the logistics and mining sectors, centered on Pronto, an autonomous mining truck company in which Kalanick is the biggest investor; he said he was close to acquiring Pronto’s remaining shares. In an essay on the Atoms website, Kalanick wrote that the company aims to make “gainfully employed robots,” specialized robots that bring abundance to their owners and society, and that humanoid robots are not its focus.⁠[14][18][18][14][14][14][14]

On August 16, 2026, David Senra’s podcast released an interview with Kalanick. On the show he described his role at Atoms as “problem solver in chief” and described his way of working as “precision, perfection and obsession.”⁠[5][5][5]

Kalanick is known for a tough, combative style. Investor and mentor Mark Cuban said: “Travis’s biggest strength is that he will run through a wall to accomplish his goals. Travis’s biggest weakness is that he will run through a wall to accomplish his goals.” In March 2017, Uber board member Arianna Huffington said he needed to evolve from a “scrappy entrepreneur” to the “leader of a major global company.”⁠[11][11]