Travis Kalanick. Everything is for sale

Apparently, he wanted to be a spy in his youth. Unfortunately, due to the nature of his character, he was not a suitable secret agent. He was too conspicuous and attracted attention with his strong personality and domineering disposition.

CV: Travis Cordell Kalanick

Date of Birth: August 6, 1976, Los Angeles

Citizenship: American

Family status: free, no children

Luck: $6 billion

Education: Granada Hills High School, University of California, UCLA (part-time)

An experience: New Way Academy, Scour Fellow (1998-2001), Founder and Head of Red Swoosh (2001-2007), Co-founder and then President of Uber (2009-present)

Interests: classical music, cars

Taxi drivers hate him. That's for sure. So he cannot say that he is generally a beloved and popular person. On the other hand, his life is a classic example of the fulfillment of the American dream and a career in classic Silicon Valley style.

Causing controversy and trouble is, in a way, his specialty. Before his big success with the Uber app, he worked for, among other things, the company that makes the file search engine Scour. He was successful in this business, but due to the fact that users could download movies and music for free, the company was sued by entertainment companies.

Initially 250 billion

Travis Kalanick is a native of California. He was born in Los Angeles to a Czech-Austrian family. He spent all his childhood and youth in Southern California. At eighteen he made his New Way Academy's first business, American SAT Exam Preparation Service. He advertised the "1500+" course he had developed, claiming that his first client improved his scores by as much as 400 points.

He studied computer engineering at the University of California, UCLA. It was then that he met the founders. scour service. He joined the team in 1998. He dropped out of college and devoted himself to building a startup while receiving unemployment benefits. Years later, he posed as one of the co-founders of Scour, although this is not true.

logo - Uber

Skur grew up. Soon, up to thirteen people were working in the apartment of company founders Michael Todd and Dan Rodriguez. The company grew in popularity. Millions of people began to use it, but there were problems with obtaining investments, as well as ... competition, i.e. the famous Napster, which improved the file sharing process and did not load the servers so much. In the end, as mentioned, a coalition of labels sued Scour for nearly $250 billion! The company was unable to cope with this task. She went bankrupt.

After the fall of Skura, Travis founded Red Swoosh servicewhich works similarly and is used for file sharing. Our hero's plan was for the thirty-three organizations that sued Skur to join the group of... clients of his new project. As a result, the companies that sued Kalanick's first employer started paying him money this time. A few years later, in 2007, he sold the service for $23 million to Akamai. It was part of the money received from this transaction that he allocated to the institution in 2009, along with his colleague Garrett Camp. Uber cab app, which made it possible to book low-cost rides that competed with taxis, which then became Uber.

Alternative transportation in Silicon Valley

When testing the service, Kalanick and Camp drove rental cars themselves to see how the app actually works. The first passengers were Kalanick's parents. The company was located in one room of a rented house. The owners did not pay each other any salary, they only divided blocks of shares among themselves. When they made their first big money, they moved into the Westwood high-rise building and the number of employees increased to thirteen.

Travis believed that Silicon Valley was so big that many people might want to use Uber instead of more expensive taxis. He was right, idea stuck. Many have started using the application. There were more and more vehicles available: ordinary cars and large limousines. From the beginning, it was assumed that the client did not pay the driver directly. The amount due is automatically deducted from the credit card of the user of the service. The driver, pre-screened by Uber and checked for criminal records, gets 80% of it. Uber takes the rest.

Initially, the service was not always reliable. For example, the app was able to ship all available cars from San Francisco to one location.

Kalanick, who organized the company and set its direction, becomes president of Uber in December 2010. In April 2012, the company is testing in Chicago the possibility of booking cars and drivers who do not work for it and do not even have a carrier license. Such services are much cheaper than the classic modes of passenger transport used in Chicago. The service is expanding to more cities in the US and later to other countries. Today, Uber can be called one of the fastest growing startups in history. Within a few years, its value reached approximately 50 billion US dollars. Some note that this capitalization is higher than that of General Motors!

Travis and cars

Initially, Uber drivers used Lincoln Town Car, Caddilac Escalade, BMW 7 Series and Mercedes-Benz S550. The company's vehicles were also known as black cars (), named after the color of the Uber vehicles used in New York City. After 2012 it was launched UberX application, expanding the selection also to small and environmentally friendly vehicles such as the Toyota Prius. At the same time, plans were announced to expand the application for drivers who do not have a taxi driver's license. Smaller vehicles and lower tolls have enabled the company to attract less affluent customers, increase repeat customers and significantly increase its influence in this market segment.

In July 2012, the company went public on the London Stock Exchange with a team of about ninety "black car" drivers, mostly Mercedes, BMW and Jaguar. On July 13, in celebration of National Ice Cream Month, Uber launched "Uber Ice Cream," an add-on that allowed an ice cream truck to be called up in seven cities, with charges deducted from the user's account and partially added to the fares when using the services.

At the beginning of 2015, Kalanick announces that thanks to his platform, only in San Francisco there is an opportunity to earn 7 people, in New York 14 thousand, in London 10 thousand. and in Paris, 4. Now the company employs 3 permanent employees plus partner drivers. Around the world, Uber has already employed a million drivers. The service is present in 58 countries and more than 200 cities. It is estimated that up to XNUMX people can regularly use it in Poland. people.

The police are chasing, taxi drivers hate you

The expansion of Kalanicka and Uber sparked violent protests from taxi drivers. In many countries, Uber is seen as unfair competition to traditional taxi companies, destroying the market by lowering the price of services. It is also accused of not being regulated by any regulations. And that such services are unsafe for passengers exposed to driving with random drivers. In Germany and Spain, the service was banned under pressure from taxi companies. Brussels made the same decision. Today this applies to many countries. Uber's war against taxi companies and corporations is taking violent forms in many parts of the world. Violent riots could be seen on the news from France to Mexico. In China, some taxi companies are state-owned, leading to police showing up at Uber offices in Guangzhou, Chengdu and Hong Kong. In Korea, Kalanick is being pursued on an arrest warrant...

Protests in Paris: French taxi drivers destroyed Uber car

Among former associates, our idol does not have a very good reputation at all. The media anonymously suggest that he suffers from an overgrown ego and can be very unpleasant in personal contacts. Also interesting are the memories of several people who worked with him in Red Swoosh. In one of the publications there was a report that during the integration trip of employees to Tulum, Mexico, Kalanick had an argument with a taxi driver who allegedly wanted the whole group to overpay at an inflated fare. As a result, Travis jumped out of a moving taxi. “The guy had a hard time with taxi drivers,” recalls Tom Jacobs, Red Swoosh engineer…

However, no one denies that he was and remains an outstanding salesman. His old friend says he'll sell anything, even used cars, because that's just Travis' personality.

Uber means value

Regardless of the differing opinions of transportation circles, investors are crazy about Uber. Over the course of six years, they backed him with over $4 billion. The California-based company is currently worth over $40-50 billion, making it the second-largest startup in the world (behind only Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi). Kalanick and his partner Garrett Camp made the Forbes list of billionaires last year. The assets of both were then estimated at $5,3 billion.

As an expansive man, Kalanick takes on the biggest challenges. At present, these are ongoing attempts to conquer the Chinese and Indian markets. More ambitious plans are hard to come by, with more than 2,5 billion people living in the two countries together.

Travis wants to move beyond the current Uber model, which frees passenger transportation from the dictates of communications companies, to carsharing and then fleets. autonomous city cars.

“I really believe that Uber brings a huge benefit to society,” he says in an interview. “It's not just about cheaper and more accessible rides or other related services. The point is also that this activity contributes, for example, to reducing the number of drunk drivers. In cities where Uber has been present for some time, the number of accidents caused by them has been significantly reduced. Party goers are more likely to use Uber than their own cars. Fewer cars, fewer traffic jams, fewer busy parking spaces - all this makes the city more friendly to citizens. We also provide the agglomeration with information about phenomena in areas that the city can better manage, such as public transport.”

Despite the company's current size, Travis believes that Uber's "startup culture has survived to this day, five years after it was founded." He is in his prime. He is full of ideas, and it seems that he has just begun to surprise the world.