Travis Kalanick

Travis Cordell Kalanick (; born August 6, 1976) is an American businessman best known as the co-founder and former chief executive officer (CEO) of Uber. Previously 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. He is currently CEO of Atoms, which owns CloudKitchens, operator of ghost kitchens.

Kalanick was CEO of Uber from 2010 to 2017. He resigned from Uber in 2017 after growing pressure from allegations that he ignored reports of sexual harassment at the company. Kalanick retained his seat on the board of directors until he gave it up on December 31, 2019. Before he resigned, Kalanick sold approximately 90% of his shares in Uber for $2.5 billion.

Kalanick is ranked 374th on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, with a net worth of $3.6 billion.

In 2018, Kalanick started the 10100 Fund to invest in e-commerce, innovation and real estate in emerging markets such as China and India. That same year, Kalanick announced an investment of nearly $150 million in real estate redevelopment company City Storage Systems (renamed to Atoms); he also announced that he would be its CEO.

Kalanick was born on August 6, 1976, and grew up in the Northridge neighborhood of Los Angeles. Kalanick's parents are Bonnie Renée Horowitz Kalanick (née Bloom) and Donald Edward Kalanick. Bonnie, whose family were Viennese Jews who immigrated to the U.S. in the early 20th century, worked in retail advertising for the Los Angeles Daily News. Donald, from a Slovak–Austrian Catholic family whose grandparents immigrated to the United States from the Austrian city of Graz, was a civil engineer for the city of Los Angeles. Kalanick has two half-sisters, one of whom is the mother of actress Allisyn Ashley Arm, and a brother who is a firefighter.

In middle and high school, Kalanick was known to be competitive and driven to win. As a teenager, Kalanick sold knives door-to-door for direct sales company Cutco. At 18, he started a test preparation company called "New Way Academy" with the father of a classmate. After graduating from Granada Hills Charter High School, Kalanick studied computer engineering and business economics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). While studying at UCLA, Kalanick was a member of Theta Xi fraternity. In 1998, he dropped out to work at the start-up Scour full-time.

In 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. Kalanick handled sales and marketing for Scour. He has referred to himself as a co-founder of the company, but the other co-founders have disputed this.

After months of growth, Scour needed cash and sought funding from venture capital investors Ronald Burkle and Michael Ovitz. Negotiations were contentious and Ovitz eventually sued Scour for breach of contract. Scour was forced to accept unfavorable terms for the investment, and Ovitz acquired majority control over the company. The situation soured Kalanick's view of investor-founder relations.

In 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. In September 2000, Scour filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy to protect itself from the lawsuit.

In 2001, with Michael Todd, Kalanick started Red Swoosh, another peer-to-peer file-sharing company. Kalanick called it his "revenge business" against the MPAA and RIAA for the lawsuit that killed Scour. Kalanick's business model was that media companies would pay Red Swoosh to provide legitimate copies of media files to customers and the company developed technology to make the transfer of such large files more efficient. Kalanick had difficulty securing funding as the company was launched right after the dot-com bubble burst. As a result, Red Swoosh ran with minimal month-to-month cash flow, and by August 2001, some employees had gone months without a paycheck.

In September 2001, Red Swoosh used approximately $110,000 of the company's payroll tax withholdings to fund day-to-day operations. There are differing accounts of what led to the decision and the fallout that ensued. In 2014, Business Insider reported Kalanick had publicly accused co-founder Michael Todd of making the decision without his knowledge, while Todd stated it was a decision they made together. The article noted "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. In 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. According to this version, it was only after the fact that he was advised it could be tax fraud. In the end, a second round of funding provided enough cash to repay the Internal Revenue Service, and no one was ever prosecuted.

In 2009, Kalanick co-founded ridesharing company Uber with Canadian entrepreneur Garrett Camp, co-founder of StumbleUpon. Camp, a frequent guest at Kalanick's home, had become frustrated with taxi services in San Francisco, and had found hiring drivers with upscale black car services inconvenient and expensive. Eventually he developed the concept of a smartphone app that could hail luxury vehicles directly from the user's smartphone. He discussed the concept with Kalanick, who agreed to act as a "mega advisor" to the company, originally called UberCab. As neither Camp nor Kalanick wanted to run the company directly, Ryan Graves was brought on as chief executive officer (CEO) at launch. He held the position for ten months before being removed in favor of Kalanick. Camp and Graves each signed over a large portion of their shares to Kalanick when he took the CEO position, giving him a significant degree of control over the company.

In 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. Kalanick directed the company to ignore the order and continue operating, but changed the company's name from UberCab to Uber to prevent it from being accused of falsely advertising itself as a taxi company. Kalanick believed that in addition to efficiency, Uber offered elegance because all drivers had fancy black cars. He did not feel regular cars would be attractive. When Wingz, Inc. launched in 2011 with the first ridesharing website in the world using regular drivers, he felt Wingz was illegal and contacted authorities to stop regular drivers from giving rides.

In February 2011, Kalanick met with Bill Gurley, an investor from venture capital firm Benchmark, and secured an $11 million investment for 20% of Uber (then valued at $50 million) for its Series A round of funding. The company embarked on its Series B round in late 2011, raising an additional $32 million. Kalanick's experiences with investors at Scour and Red Swoosh had made him wary of investors who might interfere with his control of Uber, so he ensured the terms for these and future investments strongly favored himself and Uber. He strictly limited the amount of financial information investors could access, and the shares for new investors had a tenth of the voting power of the shares held by Kalanick, Camp, and Graves. In April 2013, after Wingz, Lyft, and Sidecar obtained licenses to legally operate as rideshare companies, Uber announced it was going to adopt this model and add regular drivers with personal vehicles to the UberX platform instead of only commercially-licensed vehicles, subject to a background check, insurance, registration, and vehicle standards. By December 2013, the service operated in 65 cities. That same year, Kalanick obtained a $250 million investment from Google Ventures, with a valuation of $3.5 billion. Kalanick also made a point of undermining potential investments into competitor Lyft, poaching them for Uber.

By 2014, Kalanick's reputation was beginning to suffer as a result of his ruthless attitude towards competitors, regulators, customers, employees, and Uber's drivers. By this time, Gurley, once a supporter of Kalanick's, had become frustrated with his reckless corporate spending and overriding of the chief financial officer and chief legal officer. Corporate culture at Uber under Kalanick was grueling. Employees were expected to work nights and weekends regularly without additional compensation, and conference calls were often scheduled at all times of the night. Kalanick favored employees who were willing to do anything to advance in the company, even if it resulted in chronic infighting. He authorized the use of industrial espionage tactics against competitors and regulators, including the Greyball blacklisting program, and encouraged the development and use of rider-surveillance programs. Throughout his tenure as CEO, Kalanick had tight control over the company's board of directors, once telling Tim Cook from Apple that he had intentionally structured the board and hand-picked its members to allow him to "do what I want". In 2016, he negotiated an option to appoint another three board members at his discretion.

Journalists and the public alike criticized Kalanick regularly for setting Uber up with a "bro culture" awash in toxic masculinity, bullying, and misogyny, which in turn influenced attitudes in Silicon Valley generally. In a 2014 interview with men's magazine GQ, he joked 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. Executives were known to expense strip club visits to corporate accounts, a practice jokingly referred to as "Tits on Travis". Surveys commissioned by Uber public relations personnel in late 2016 showed customers appreciated Uber as a service, but had a strongly negative perception of Kalanick. Shortly 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. Kalanick apologized for the incident to company employees in an email that was later posted to the company blog, stating that he felt he needed to "grow up". Later that year, Reuters reported Kalanick had developed "a reputation as an abrasive leader".

On 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.

Shortly after the announcement of his venture fund, Kalanick announced his fund had invested $150 million in City Storage Systems (CSS), a company focused on the redevelopment of distressed real estate assets; he also announced he would serve as its CEO. CSS subsidiary CloudKitchens, a ghost kitchen managing company, took a controlling interest in U.K.-based startup FoodStars in June 2018. Kalanick personally invested $300 million in the startup, and in November 2019, Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund completed an agreement with CloudKitchens in January 2019 to invest $400 million in the company. In January 2022, the company had raised new funding valued at $15 billion.

On March 13, 2026, Kalanick announced a new company, Atoms, which absorbed CloudKitchens, with a focus on robotics.

Since 2018, Kalanick has been on an advisory board for Neom, Saudi Arabia's plan to build a futuristic "mega city" in the desert. As of 2026, plans for Neom have been substantially scaled back, with only a handful of structures built and multiple construction contracts terminated.

Kalanick owns a townhouse in the upper hills of San Francisco's Castro District, which was nicknamed "the Jam Pad" and had its own Twitter account. In 2019, Kalanick purchased a penthouse in 565 Broome Street, New York City for $36.4 million. In April 2020, he bought a home in Los Angeles for $43.3 million.

Kalanick dated Gabi Holzwarth, a violist and business development manager, from 2014 to late 2016. In 2017, Holzwarth told HuffPost she was "glad to be out of Uber's orbit", which she described as a deeply misogynistic environment and an "unhealthy world of impossible standards" that was damaging to her psyche, as she had dealt with eating disorders for years. Holzwarth did, however, praise Kalanick for helping her recover from her eating disorders.