Travis Kalanick

Travis Cordell Kalanick (b. 6 August 1976 in Los Angeles, California) is a half jewish American entrepreneur and co-founder (2009) and former CEO of Uber, resigning in June 2017 and leaving the board on 31 December 2019. He cofounded two tech startups before Uber: online file-exchange service Scour and file-sharing company RedSwoosh.

Life

Kalanick is the son of the Civil engineer for the city of Los Angeles, CA Donald Edward Kalanick, his father's family is Catholic with Slovak and Austrian roots, and his wife, the advertising saleswoman Bonnie Renée Horowitz, née Bloom. Bonnie's family were Viennese jews who immigrated to the U.S. in the early 20th century. She is therefore three quarters Ashkenazi jewish (her own maternal grandfather was of German and Irish descent). He has two half-sisters, one of whom (Anjanette "Anji") is the mother of actress Allisyn Ashley Snyder, née Arm, and a brother, Cory, who is a firefighter.

In addition to his interest in programming, his sales talent was evident early on. "Even as a teenager he earned extra money by going door to door in Los Angeles to sell kitchen knives," reported the Handelsblatt (20-22 March 2015).

Travis Kalanick's parents were involved in a boat accident on Pine Flat Lake on 26 May 2017. His mother died as a result of the accident at the age of 71 whereas his father was seriously injured.

In 1998, Kalanick gave up his computer science studies, which he had started at the University of California in Los Angeles, to become an entrepreneur. Kalanick's first company, the Internet exchange platform Scour, had to file for bankruptcy in 2000 after a legal dispute with entertainment groups. With his file-sharing company Red Swoosh, which started shortly thereafter, he was targeted by the tax authorities for incorrect bookkeeping before he sold the company to the IT company Akamai Technologies for around US$ 19 million in 2007.

He then achieved great success with the company called Uber, which he founded in San Francisco in 2009 together with his Canadian partner Garrett Camp. According to the founding myth that was cultivated later, the idea for this online agency for driving services came about after he couldn't get a taxi on a winter's night in Paris. Uber began providing its users with private drivers via an application for mobile devices and a web portal. "Private individuals play taxis with their own vehicles for very little money," the Süddeutsche Zeitung (January 21, 2015) explained the model on which Uber earned through commissions.

Supported by the entry of financially strong investors such as u. Google Ventures or Goldman Sachs, Uber, starting from major American cities, achieved a worldwide triumph and rise to become an icon of the so-called "share economy" and a "dread of the taxi industry" (SZ, December 26, 2014). By the end of 2014, Kalanick's company was already present in 250 cities in 50 countries. In 2016, the service was active in more than 70 countries. In Los Angeles alone, Kalanick said at the time, Uber made around 157,000 trips a day (cf. NZZ, June 3, 2016).

But Uber also made negative headlines - e.g. with a data leak in 2014 when attackers were able to access data from over 50,000 Uber drivers. Reports of incorrect billing or rape by Uber drivers also scratched the image. Strange business practices such as the spontaneous price increase for Uber trips in Sydney, Australia, in the wake of a hostage situation there were examples "with which the company made the headlines through carelessness, ignorance and arrogance," as DIE WELT (December 29, 2014) stated . But Kalanick himself was also criticized when he publicly toyed with the idea of snooping on the private lives of unwanted journalists. With his sometimes brash appearances, he fueled the "call of a bully", as the Handelsblatt wrote (June 10-12, 2016): "Wherever Kalanick goes, he is insulted: by taxi drivers, politicians, journalists" (Hbl., 20. -22.3.2015). Above all, however, Kalanick's business model met with fierce resistance in the taxi industry. This storm raged against the new strong competition, not least because they "skilfully and sometimes brazenly undercut national laws", as the Süddeutsche Zeitung (26.12.2014) noted. Kalanick himself did not hold back his opinion of the taxi industry, which was hostile to him, and described it as "dark", "dangerous" and "evil" (cf. FAS, October 19, 2014).

In several states, however, there were not only protests as a result, but also official bans or restrictions on the car service agent, e.g. due to the lack of a corresponding passenger transport permit for the driver. In Germany, too, the expansion of the Uber business came to a standstill for legal reasons. In March 2015, the Frankfurt Regional Court determined that the service was anti-competitive. As early as spring 2015, Uber completely discontinued its private driver service "Uber Pop" nationwide and then limited itself to brokering taxis and a service in a few selected cities (Berlin and Munich) that only uses licensed rental car companies. Uber gave up the price war in China, in which Kalanick had invested a lot of money, in 2016 and sold its China business to the overpowering competitor there, Didi Chuxing.

Uber also turned to new business areas. For example, the ambitions in terms of self-driving cars were pushed forward in order - according to the vision of the future - to eventually replace its drivers with an autonomous system. To this end, numerous experts from the robotics laboratory of the Pittsburgh cooperation partner Carnegie Mellon University were recruited and in the summer of 2016 the start-up Otto, which was working on the technology for self-driving trucks and had been founded just a few months earlier, was taken over for US$ 680 million. Within a very short time, Kalanick's company had a fleet of self-driving cars on the road - first in Arizona and Pittsburgh, and later in San Francisco at the end of 2016. In January 2017, Uber entered into a cooperation agreement with the Daimler Group when it came to autonomous driving. In addition, the development of electric mini-helicopters was targeted (see SPIEGEL, June 17, 2017). However, Uber was confronted with a lawsuit filed in February 2017 by Waymo, the subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet, which specializes in autonomous driving. Ex-Google manager, Otto founder and later Uber employee Anthony Levandowski was accused of stealing intellectual property when he left the Internet company.

Uber had caused great hysteria among investors in previous years. Estimated at US$ 17 billion in mid-2014, in spring 2017 the company was valued at US$ 69 billion. As an unlisted company, Uber is not actually required to disclose its balance sheets, but it nevertheless announced official financial figures for the 2016 financial year for the first time. Accordingly, the company posted a net loss of US$ 2.8 billion on sales of US$ 6.5 billion. And in the first quarter of 2017, Uber continued to write deep red numbers with a loss of US$ 708 million (sales: US$ 3.4 billion).

In addition to the legal dispute with Waymo, Kalanick, who was described as the "enfant terrible" (Hbl., May 2, 2017) and who is both charismatic and rough, caused further negative headlines. It wasn't just his management style that met with criticism. In addition, allegations of sexism, discrimination and bullying, reports from several employees about sexual harassment by colleagues, the partly voluntary, partly forced departure of several high-ranking managers - including Jeff Jones, the company's number two as president, and CFO Gautam Guptka - and one in general "Culture of ruthlessness", as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper wrote (May 14, 2017), the image of the company. A summary of such misconduct and recommendations for improving the leadership quality of managers was also presented by former US Attorney General Eric Holder jr. headed internally commissioned commission of inquiry into corporate culture at Uber.

In November and December 2019, Kalanick - who had owned about 4% of Uber - sold all his shares for more than $2.5 billion (before taxes). He then became CEO of CloudKitchens, a virtual restaurant company that has raised money from the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund.

Family

Kalanick is single and lives in San Francisco. His personal fortune was listed by Forbes in September 2017 as US$5.1 billion. In protest against the US entry ban imposed by Donald J. Trump for people from several Muslim countries, Kalanick resigned his designated mandate on the US President's Advisory Board in February 2017.