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Travis Kalanick is the co-founder and CEO of Uber, a transportation network company based in San Francisco, California. He’s also known for having founded Scour, the world’s first p2p search engine, and Red Swoosh, a peer-to-peer content delivery company, which he sold to Akamai technologies in 2007.
He belongs to the dropout generation by having attended the University of California, Los Angeles, for a brief period before founding Scour, with his classmates. The company, a peer-to-peer file-exchange service, was founded in 1998 and filed for bankruptcy in 2000 in order to avoid a lawsuit from the RIAA and NMPA for copyright infringement.
A year later, after shutting down the company, Travis Kalanick, with his engineering team, founded Red Swoosh, a peer to peer networking client that downloads and sideloads video multicasts from websites that support the Red Swoosh Technology. After six years, he sold the company, with his co-founder Michael Todd, for $19 million to Akamai Technologies.
While attending LeWeb Paris, Travis had probably the best eureka moment that he has ever experienced. The inability to take a taxi made him reflect on the power of technology if applied to this market; that’s why in 2009 with Garreth Camp, he started Uber, a transportation network company that connects private cars through the use of an app.
The company is currently worth $17 billion and is part of the Ivy League of tech companies, those who have raised billions before even thinking of an IPO. Travis is also an angel investors with a portfolio that includes Livefyre, Kareo, StyleSeat, Honestly.com, Flowtown, Formspring and ClowdFlower.
Travis Kalanick is the next billion dollar guy in the tech ecosystem and Uber might probably be worth five times more than what is worth today in five years. By having experienced more failures than successes on his skin, he resembles the classic figure of an entrepreneur, that has never given up, and who has reached success later in his life. Being an entrepreneur is a lifestyle and stories such as Facebook are once in a lifetime opportunities that occur every hundred years; that’s why people like Travis, who are now the “cool” guys, should be admired.
