Travis Kalanick

Travis Kalanick, the man who today owns a $66 billion company, was once broke and faced a lawsuit of $250 billion which could have even landed him behind bars. It was his sheer determination and self-belief which gave him the power to rise up and shine on. He is the man behind the immensely successful company Uber. Uber, the taxi hailing app is a household name around the globe and has taken the transport industry by storm.

Travis Kalanick faced a lot of ups and downs in his life but despite the odds, with his skills and talent, he was able to start a worldwide ever-growing firm whose popularity stunned the world.

Kalanick was born on August 6, 1976 in Los Angeles. He lived with his family, father, a Civil Engineer and his mother, a newspaper ad saleswoman, in Northridge, California. He did his graduation from Granada Hills High School Los Angeles, California. He had good interest in programming at a young age and started programming around seventh grade. From his childhood, he had skills necessary for being an entrepreneur which he used to hone by selling small items door to door.

After completing high school, he got admission in University of California, Los Angeles where he decided to pursue computer engineering to get a good job later but for a person, with high enough natural caliber of an entrepreneur like him, it was not supposed to last.

Dropping out of college and first startup failure
In University, he realized his true talent and the opportunities through College were insufficient for him to exercise his capabilities to their potential. In 1998, he made a risky yet bold decision to drop out of college with his friends. Travis Kalanick along with his friends Vince Busam and Michael Todd  founded Scour Inc. and Scour Exchange which was a multimedia search engine and peer-to-peer file exchange service respectively. This was Kalanick’s debut into the corporate world.

The road to success is never easy and straightforward, so it was for Kalanick.  He had to go through a lot of hardships and tough decisions to get to the point where he is today. Emerging in the corporate world with stunning pace it took him no time to get noticed by the big players of the industry.

Scour, the media search engine got very popular as it allowed people search and download videos, movies for free. This rising success of Travis Kalanick and his company was also seen as a threat to business by many other company owners of same niche. Soon Motion Picture Association of America and National Music Publisher Association along with more than 30 companies brought a copyright infringement lawsuit against Scour and sued Scour for a gigantic amount of $250 billion pushing Kalanick and his team to a corner.

With this lawsuit, his company was set to shut down. But, along with it, it could have also landed Kalanick and his team behind bars. But Travis Kalanick with his great presence of mind after considering various possibilities for future decided to save something than nothing and filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and avoided the fine as well as going to jail along with his team. However, as a result he had to shut down the company.

Sun rises but to set Again
This shutdown came as a shock to Kalanick but his persistence didn’t allow him to stop thinking new ideas. In 2001, considering previous incidents carefully along with the Scour’s engineering team he founded a new company called Red Swoosh which was also a peer-to-peer file sharing company that allowed users to exchange large multimedia files.

The idea of Kalanick with this company was to take on all the 33 companies who had sued Scour and turn them into Red Swoosh’s customers which he eventually did.

But things never go the way we want them to be. Soon the bandwidth prices declined and company lost its investments and they had to fire all their employees. But fate had more of it coming against Kalanick.  IRS(Internal Revenue Service) ran a check on Red Swoosh and found that taxes were not being paid to the government completely, hence Kalanick’s company was asked to pay a fine of $110,000 or a jail term. Kalanick somehow managed to get the money as funding from Mark Cuban.

But this incident led to an internal dispute between Kalanick and Todd which eventually resulted in a falling out between the two and Travis took over the company. Thus, there was more pressure of work on him than he could handle, thinking about work all the time, he slowly lost all his friends and was left all alone in the end.

Later in 2007, things got completely out of hand and Travis had to sell the company to an American Corporation, Akamai Technologies, which bought Red Swoosh for $19 million.

“If someone can do it, then I can do it too”

With 2 such huge unsuccessful business startups at the age of 30, his life was in chaos, such circumstances could have broken down any human being but not Travis Kalanick. While trying his best to see through the current situation, he happened to see Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which is the work of a 70-year-old director. It instilled in him a thought process:

“If some old person can do something like that then I can still do much more than I have done yet”.

As a result, the diminished flame of perseverance to achieve the goal in his heart lit again and made him take another step in the corporate world. With his creativity and visionary thinking combined, he came up with a revolutionary idea of combining technology with everyday life.

Masterpiece: The Star-Lit Sky
In 2009, Travis regained the confidence of investors and managed to get a seed funding of $1.25 million and started Uber, which is a mobile application for hiring and ride-sharing vehicles. It works by connecting passengers and drivers of such available vehicles, and created a milestone in the history of both technology and corporate world by merging mobile technology with daily life in a creative yet very handy manner for common people.

Today, Uber is a well-known platform for hiring rides across the globe with just a tap. Just like many other products Uber has become a brand name for hiring rides. Being a convenient and easy to use application for mobile platform Uber was greeted by people with open hands. Since its launch in 2009, it has been able to increase its user base to more than 66 countries with the company’s net valuation to $66 billion, making Kalanick a Star Shining proudly in the Corporate World.

“The Lone Wolf”
Today being acknowledged as one of the world’s most renowned entrepreneurs, Kalanick is often invited to speak at various business events and conferences like LeWeb and Tech Cocktail to share his views on the present business matters being discussed worldwide.

It is Kalanick’s sheer determination and will power to reach greater heights with which he has gone against the tide from time to time to reach his goals. No matter how difficult a situation is, he always makes sure to work his way through it and see it to the end the way he wants.

Chasing his dreams with all he’s got did place him in Forbes’s List Of World Billionaires, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg compared to his achievements in life.

As Kalanick states:

“The entrepreneur community, there’s a certain kind of founder, they call them a ‘lone wolf.’ I probably fit in that category.”

He surely does.