Travis Kalanick (CEO of CloudKitchens) Biography

Travis Kalanick is an American entrepreneur who has served on the board of directors of the car-ride service provider ‘Uber.’ A ‘UCLA’ dropout, Travis initially co-founded a file-sharing company called ‘Scour.’ The start-up flourished over time. Unfortunately, it was later accused of copyright infringement. The company was sued and faced a lawsuit worth a substantial amount. Kalanick had to eventually declare bankruptcy. He also traded all of the company’s assets. Kalanick, however, managed to get back his investors and established a new start-up called ‘Red Swoosh.’ After he sold ‘Red Swoosh’ to ‘Akamai Technologies,’ Kalanick co-established ‘Uber.’ His tenure at the company was highly controversial. He was accused of being negligent in handling sexual harassment cases at the company and termed an inefficient leader. The company’s unethical HR policies also came under scrutiny. He was eventually forced to resign. ‘Forbes 400’ has included Kalanick on its list of the wealthiest Americans.

Travis Kalanick Biography

Full Name	Travis Kalanick
Nick Name	Travis
Date Of Birth	6 August 1976
Birthplace	Los Angeles, California, United States
Age	46 years
Nationality	American
Gender	Male
Zodiac Sign	Leo
Religion	Christian
Education	University of California, Los Angeles, Granada Hills Charter
Marital Status	Unmarried
Occupation	Businessman
Hobbies	Reading, Learning, Traveling
Father	Donald Edward Kalanick
Mother	Bonnie Horowitz Kalanick
Siblings	Anji Arm, Cory Kalanick
Net Worth and Income	$4 billion

Also Read: Larry Page (Former CEO of Google) Biography

Travis Kalanick Social Life

Travis Kalanick is active on several social media platforms. Travis Kalanick has a LinkedIn profile where he shares updates about her work.

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Also Read:Uber Driver Apk Download For Android

Early Life

• Travis Cordell Kalanick was born on August 6, 1976, in Los Angeles, California, U.S., to Bonnie Renée Horowitz Bloom, a former ‘Los Angeles Daily News’ employee, and Donald Edward Kalanick. Bonnie died in a boating accident on May 26, 2017.
• Kalanick grew up in the Northridge suburb of California. He has two half-sisters and a brother, Cory, who is a firefighter.
• Travis Kalanick was quite young when he developed an interest in computers, and by the time he reached middle school, he had already learned to write computer code.
• Kalanick attended the ‘University of California, Los Angeles’ (UCLA), where he studied computer engineering and business economics. He was a ‘Theta Xi’ fraternity member. He dropped out in 1998 to start his first business venture.

With a tap on your smart phone, you can get a car to pick you up and drop you at your desired destination. Moreover, you don’t need to carry cash, which you can pay online alongside rating the driver as well as getting rated for the type of customer . Uber was the first mobile app that offered this kind of service that was founded by Travis Kalanick, a struggling entrepreneur who had failed multiple times before tasting success. When started, this service had attracted contradictions and restrictions, but it tackled all of them and is now estimated to be of the worth of billions of dollars.

Travis Kalanick Career

• Numerous years before he found this efficient app, he was proficient at looking for a need and then filling the gap aggressively. He established his first business, when he was about to finish his high school with ‘1500 and up’, a SAT training course. Kalanick did earn some money to meet his expenditures with this, but during his college life at UCLA, he was to make a shift to bigger things
• .Travis partnered with his buddies, Vince Busam and Michael Todd, who all dropped from the University of California to work on an amazing project. They developed a peer-to-peer search engine, Scour allowing the download of files from the hard drives of peers. The business was carried out of an apartment in LA for several years of the tense era, when file sharing gangs were being sued by content providers.  Kalanick declared bankruptcy and left the company, but later returned with another startup named RedSwoosh.
• In 1998, Kalanick and his ‘UCLA’ dropout mates Michael Todd and Vince Busam joined Dan Rodrigues (Founder and CEO of ‘Kareo’ software service) to establish the online file-exchange service called ‘Scour Exchange’ and a multimedia search engine named ‘Scour Inc.’
• In September 2000, ‘Scour’ had to be declared bankrupt to close a lawsuit worth $250 billion. The company had been accused of copyright infringement by the ‘Motion Picture Association of America’ (MPAA), the ‘Recording Industry Association of America’ (RIAA), and the ‘National Music Publishers Association (NMPA).’
• By 2001, Travis Kalanick had recovered from the bankruptcy. He then collaborated with Michael Todd to establish his second start-up, again a peer-to-peer file-sharing company, named ‘Red Swoosh.’
• As Kalanick has shared on his archived blog, ‘Swooshing,’ his initial years in ‘Red Swoosh’ were difficult, as he did not receive any salary. He was living with his parents to save rent and owed a debt of $110,000 to the ‘IRS’ in un-suspended income taxes. Almost all of the company’s engineers quit. Following this, Kalanick lived in Trivandrum (India) and Thailand to save money.
• ‘Red Swoosh’ eventually accelerated its business and acquired prominent corporate clients. In 2007, Kalanick sold it to ‘Akamai Technologies’ for approximately $19 million. However, he got involved in tax & securities fraud and perjury, as he failed to pay the shareholders.
• In 2009, Travis Kalanick joined Canadian entrepreneur and investor Garrett Camp to co-found ‘Uber,’ a car-drive share service provider. He, however, gave the credit for the idea to Camp. He created the base model of the concept, and then Kalanick, Oscar Salazar, and Conrad Whelan joined him as advisors.
• In October 2010, Kalanick became the CEO of ‘Uber.’ The company faced severe criticism after the news of Kalanick joining the ‘Strategy and Policy Forum’ of President Donald Trump as an economic advisor, as announced in December 2016, surfaced.
• Due to Trump’s negative image, especially after the announcement of his controversial immigration order, people criticized Kalanick for his political association with Trump. However, Kalanick maintained he would use the position to address issues related to immigration and emerged as a prominent opponent of Trump’s immigration orders. Nevertheless, he was pressurized to withdraw, and he gave in. Kalanick had to withdraw from the forum in February 2017.
• The same month, a former ‘Uber’ employee pointed out the failed HR policies of the company related to sexual harassment and discrimination at the workplace. In response, Kalanick dismissed the SVP of engineering at ‘Uber,’ Amit Singhal, for hiding a sexual harassment charge filed against him during his tenure as the VP at ‘Google Search.’
• Travis Kalanick also introduced former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder to investigate the charges, working with his law firm. Kalanick had the reputation of being an “abrasive leader.”
• Amidst the investigation, a video released in February 2017 showed Kalanick in an ‘UberBLACK’ with two women, having a heated argument with an ‘Uber’ driver.
• The following month, the ‘Uber’ VP of business, Emil Michael, reportedly asked Kalanick’s former girlfriend not to speak about an HR complaint related to sexual harassment, which infuriated her. In response, she revealed to ‘The Information’ that Kalanick and a few other ‘Uber’ managers had visited a Korean escort bar to look for escort service, during a team outing. She also spoke to ‘Businessweek’ about the rape case in India involving ‘Uber.’
• These events amounted to a strong case against the company and Kalanick. According to Holder’s investigation report, submitted in June 2017, a “review and reallocate” order was passed with respect to Kalanick’s responsibilities in the company, and the company’s board had approved it. Kalanick later took an indefinite leave of absence and then resigned as the CEO on June 20. Five significant investors in the company had reportedly demanded the resignation. Kalanick, however, remained on the board of directors.
• In August that year, Kalanick was again involved in a controversy when the venture capital firm ‘Benchmark’ accused him of “fraud, breach of contract, and breach of fiduciary duty.” According to the court’s order, Kalanick was to settle the case arbitrarily. ‘Benchmark’ withdrew the case in January 2018, with the condition that ‘Uber’ would trade a considerable number of shares with ‘Softbank Group Co.,’ to which the company agreed.
• In March 2018, Kalanick ”tweeted” about its new venture fund, ‘10100’ (or “ten-one-hundred”). It aimed at providing employment opportunities by investing in e-commerce and real-estate development in emerging markets.
• In June 2018, the U.K.-based start-up ‘FoodStars’ sold a controlling interest to Kalanick’s real-estate investment company, ‘City Storage Systems.’ With that, he entered the rapidly growing prepared-food delivery sector, commonly known as “dark kitchens.”
• Travis Kalanick stepped down from the board of directors of ‘Uber’ in December 2019. He also traded about 90% of his shares in the company.
• Kalanick currently serves on the advisory board of ‘Neom,’ a planned cross-border futuristic city established in the Tabuk Province of northwestern Saudi Arabia.

Travis Kalanick Net Worth

Travis Kalanick is one of the richest Entrepreneur from United States. According to our analysis, Wikipedia, Forbes & Business Insider, Travis Kalanick‘s net worth $6 Billion.

He studied computer engineering at UCLA, but dropped out in order to help found Scour, a P2P service that filed for bankruptcy in 2000.

He first broke into the Forbes 400 in 2014 when his net worth reached an estimated $6 billion.

Net Worth (2024)	$6 Billion
Net Worth in 2023	$6 Billion
Salary	Under Review
Source of Income	Entrepreneur
House	Living In Own House.

Key Events

• 1976Travis Cordell Kalanick (; born August 6, 1976) is an American businessman best known as the co-founder and former chief executive officer (CEO) of Uber..
• 1976Kalanick was born on August 6, 1976, and grew up in the Northridge neighborhood of Los Angeles..
• 1998In 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..
• 1998In 1998, he dropped out to work at the start-up Scour full-time..
• 2000In September 2000, Scour filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy to protect itself from the lawsuit..
• 2000In 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..
• 2001In 2001, with Michael Todd, Kalanick started Red Swoosh, another peer-to-peer file-sharing company..
• 2001As a result, Red Swoosh ran with minimal month-to-month cash flow, and by August 2001, some employees had gone months without a paycheck..
• 2001In September 2001, Red Swoosh used approximately $110,000 of the company’s payroll tax withholdings to fund day-to-day operations..
• 2002By 2002, Red Swoosh was down to only two employees: Kalanick and former Scour engineer Evan Tsang..
• 2005In early 2005, Todd helped recruit Tsang to Google, resulting in public embarrassment for the already-struggling Red Swoosh and the loss of a potentially lucrative deal with AOL..
• 2006Kalanick was able to hire more programmers, and c. 2006, he moved to Thailand with his software team for two months..
• 2007In 2007, competitor Akamai Technologies acquired Red Swoosh for approximately $19 million..
• 2007Previously 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. .
• 2009In 2009, Kalanick co-founded ridesharing company Uber with Canadian entrepreneur Garrett Camp, co-founder of StumbleUpon..
• 2010In October 2010, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency served UberCab with a cease and desist order, warning that they were in breach of regulations in the city and could face significant fines if they continued to operate as a taxicab company without appropriate permits..
• 2010Kalanick was CEO of Uber from 2010 to 2017..
• 2011In February 2011, Kalanick met with Bill Gurley, an investor from venture capital firm Benchmark, and secured an $11 million investment for 20 percent of Uber (then valued at $50 million) for its Series A round of funding..
• 2011The company embarked on its Series B round in late 2011, raising an additional $32 million..
• 2013In 2013, he obtained a $250 million investment from Google Ventures, with a valuation of $3.5 billion..
• 2014In 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..
• 2014Kalanick dated violinist Gabi Holzwarth from 2014 to late 2016..
• 2014By 2014, Kalanick’s reputation was beginning to suffer as a result of his ruthless attitude towards competitors, regulators, customers, employees, and Uber’s drivers..
• 2014In a 2014 interview with men’s magazine GQ, he joked that the company should be called “Boob-er” for all the female attention it was bringing him; the remark was frequently criticized in the press as an example of his toxic masculinity..
• 2016In December 2016, it was announced that Kalanick would join several other high-profile CEOs as an economic advisor on for the Strategic and Policy Forum of President Donald Trump, organized by Stephen Schwarzman, a businessman with The Blackstone Group..
• 2016In 2016, he negotiated an option to appoint another three board members at his discretion..
• 2016Surveys commissioned by Uber public relations personnel in late 2016 showed that customers appreciated Uber as a service, but had a strongly negative perception of Kalanick..
• 2017At the end of May 2017, Kalanick’s parents were involved in a boating accident that seriously injured his father and resulted in the death of his mother..
• 2017Following the sale, in 2017, Kalanick was ranked 238th on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, with a net worth of $2.6 billion..
• 2017Uber began to negotiate a tender offer with Japanese software conglomerate SoftBank in September 2017..
• 2017On August 10, 2017, Axios reported that Benchmark was suing Kalanick for “fraud, breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty”, in an attempt to remove Kalanick’s residual right to name two further board members..
• 2017On June 20, 2017, Kalanick resigned as CEO after five major investors, including Benchmark Capital, demanded his resignation in a letter..
• 2017On June 13, 2017, it was announced that Kalanick would take an indefinite leave of absence from Uber, although he continued to work without the approval of the company’s board..
• 2017The 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.” 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..
• 2017Shortly after the survey results were first discussed at Uber in February 2017, Eric Newcomer at Bloomberg Businessweek published a video of Kalanick berating an Uber driver at the end of a ride, following a disagreement about falling driver income..
• 2017In March 2017, it was reported that in 2014, Kalanick had been part of a group of Uber executives who visited a karaoke bar in Seoul that featured escorts..
• 2017Much of this behavior became public in early 2017..
• 2017He 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..
• 2017Following the sale, in 2017, Kalanick was ranked 238th on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, with a net worth of $2.6 billion..
• 2018K.-based startup FoodStars in June 2018..
• 2018In January 2018, Benchmark dropped its lawsuit against Kalanick to allow the deal to proceed..
• 2018Since 2018, Kalanick has served on an advisory board for Neom, Saudi Arabia’s plan to build a futuristic “mega city” in the desert..
• 2018In 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..
• 2018On March 7, 2018, Kalanick announced via his Twitter account that he would start a venture fund, 10100 (pronounced ‘ten-one-hundred’), focused on job growth in emerging markets like China and India..
• 2019In 2019, Kalanick purchased a penthouse in New York City for $36.4 million..
• 2019In his 2019 book Super Pumped, Isaac wrote that an unnamed employee made the decision, for which Kalanick was blamed following the employee’s departure from the company..
• 2019Kalanick personally invested $300 million in the startup, and in November 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund completed an agreement with CloudKitchens in January 2019 to invest $400 million in the company..
• 2019On December 24, 2019 Kalanick announced his resignation from the board effective December 31, 2019..
• 2019Kalanick retained his seat on the board of directors until he resigned the seat on December 31, 2019..
• 2020In April 2020, he bought a home in Los Angeles for $43.3 million..
• 2021The company operates a ghost kitchen startup under the name CloudKitchens, which was valued at $15 billion as of 2021. .
• 2022In January 2022, Business Insider reported that the company had raised new funding valued at $15 billion..
• 2022In the Showtime series Super Pumped (2022), Kalanick is portrayed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt..

Travis Kalanick became successful

 Founded Red Swoosh, a peer-to-peer file sharing company, which he later sold for $19 million.This initial success paved the way for the creation of Uber.

Some lesser-known facts about Travis Kalanick

• After resigning from Uber, Travis Kalanick announced that soon in the coming years he is planning to start a venture 10100 (ten-one-hundred).
• Travis Kalanick is also the co-founder of Red Swoosh.
• Travis Kalanick’s birth name is Travis Cordell Kalanick.
• His father worked as a retail advertiser for the Los Angeles Daily News after migrating to America in the 20th century.
• Travis Kalanick co-founded Uber with the Canadian Entrepreneur Garrett Camp, who is also the co-founder of StumbleUpon.

Travis kalanick ex wife

Kalanick dated Gabi Holzwarth, a violist and business development manager, from 2014 to late 2016.

Travis kalanick FAQ