Editor's Note:Travis Kalanick left Uber on June 21, 2017. That's how he turned it into a multi-billion dollar company.
"What if we could just push a button and a car would come? »
—Washingtonian, January 2012
Travis Kalanick didn't want to be CEO of Uber.
When the company officially launched in May 2010, he was reluctant to jump into the heat of battle. Not because he was scared. But because he was wary of commitment.
He had gone through two grueling startups in nine years. And, as he admits, the idea of the business – as first presented to him by his friend Garrett Camp – wasn't all that enticing to Kalanick.
I don't want to run a limo business Kalanick thought.
© SIMONE PEROLAR / LUZ / REDUX
He agreed to invest in the idea, though. And, with Camp's blessing, Kalanick found someone else to oversee day-to-day operations. And so Ryan Graves, a former database administrator at General Electric Healthcare, became Uber's first CEO. And Kalanick worked alongside him for 15-20 hours a week, quietly shaping the company's business strategy as Camp's co-founder and "chief incubator".
"We both thought the business was going to be pretty low tech, mostly operational,” Kalanick wrote in a blog post. "We didn't know much;)"
It's hard to say exactly what happened to alter Kalanick's thinking, but within seven months of launch he decided to take command .
With Graves at his side as senior vice president, Kalanick boldly pushed the company's car service forward – despite stiff opposition from the taxi industry and government regulators – in more than 500 cities around the world, funding the expansion with a multi-billion dollar war chest provided by a host of powerful investors including Benchmark Capital, Jeff Bezos and Google Ventures.
Today, Uber is valued at nearly $70 billion.
Related: The Uber episode
The company didn't share many details about those early days. Kalanick tends to be wary of the press, turning down most interview requests, but he speaks regularly at tech conferences and trade school forums, and many of those interviews are archived on the web. If you listen carefully, patterns emerge, statements and anecdotes that reveal his thoughts.
His fierce determination has been documented in countless stories. The one he mentions time and time again involves a $250 billion lawsuit that crushed the company he gave up on to build. He was 23 at the time, working with a group of friends from the University of California, Los Angeles in a cramped off-campus apartment to create an Internet search engine called Scour that allowed users to exchange music , movies and music videos.
That was before Napster. In fact, Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning was an early fan.
The technology was promising enough to attract a $4 million investment from Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz and the supermarket mogul Ron Burkle. Before the deal closed, Ovitz himself sued Kalanick and his friends to stop them from pitching the idea to other investors. Ovitz and Burkle eventually got 51% of the company.
In the end, it didn't matter. Scour's search engine has proven so popular among music and movie lovers that it has drawn the ire of the entertainment industry. A slew of litigants, 33 in all – including the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Music Publishers Association – filed suit in a US District Court in New York, seeking $150,000 for each reported incident of copyright infringement. .
Team Scour had to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
For most people, a hardball experience like this would scare them away from the business world forever. But Kalanick returned a month later with a new company called Red Swoosh, built around an idea that would eventually succeed, but only after years of toil and turmoil.
And so, when at last he did agreed to take the reins at Uber, he was a skilled field general. On the day the board approved his nomination as CEO, the company, then known as UberCab, received a cease-and-desist letter from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, accusing him of to run an unlicensed taxi service. Kalanick's response? He cut off the Uber name and kept rolling the wheels.
“Go against the grain, be resilient, even if everyone thinks you're crazy. »
—Startup India, January 2016
From the start, he saw himself as an underdog, the classic underdog. Born in Los Angeles on August 6, 1976, Kalanick grew up in the working class neighborhood of Northridge. His father was a civil engineer for the city. Her mother worked in the Los Angeles Daily News ad sales department. . Their son was a straight-A student. The kind of kid who learned to code in the mid-80s on a Commodore 64.
Kalanick likes to pepper his speech with references to the spirit of the champion, the importance of leaving every ounce of effort on the field, but he couldn't experience that glory firsthand. At Granada Hills High, the quarterback role was reserved for John Elway, who had attended in the late 70s.
Kalanick ran cross-country instead. He also anchored the 4 x 400 meter relay team and competed in the long jump. One summer, he sold Cutco knives for $20,000.
At age 18, he started an SAT prep service with a classmate's dad. They called it New Way Academy. A year earlier, Kalanick had scored 1580 on the test, answering all but two questions in the verbal section. So he decided to coach the most gifted students, those who most resembled him in ambition.
He could have gone to Stanford University – like Elway and so many other future titans of technology – but he opted for UCLA, where he joined a club called the Computer Science Undergraduate Association. It was there that he met Michael Todd, who with classmate Vince Busam was working on a peer-to-peer search engine that would soon attract millions of users and cause Kalanick to drop out of school in the middle of his senior year. year.
Although a computer engineer by training, Kalanick managed the marketing and business development of the young company. He spent long hours working on phones in a futile effort to drum up support after the $250 billion lawsuit wiped out Scour's prospects. When the venture ultimately failed, he slept 14 hours a night to recover from the strain.
In an out-of-court settlement, Scour's team agreed to pay $1 million in damages and to shut down technology. The whole company was spun off and sold within 20 minutes.
For Kalanick, the sting of this defeat would linger for years.
“Go after the hard stuff. Because that's where you'll create lasting value, lasting value, magic that can be maintained. »
—MIT, Dec. 2015
Kalanick loves problem solving. Creative problem solving. “Everything I do in business goes back to that fundamental problem-solving rigor that I was exposed to in the engineering program [at UCLA],” he told a US news site. campus in 2015.
He enjoys analyzing data collected by Uber's mobile app and considers himself Rain Man-like in his powers, but – despite his left-brain strength – he also has a philosophical side . In the 18 months since selling Red Swoosh, he bought a three-bedroom house in San Francisco for $1 million and opened the doors to a fluid discussion of ideas. He nicknamed it the Jam-Pad.
Visitors arrived at all hours of the day and night to play video games, drink beer, eat meals prepared by Kalanick's chef and throw concepts. It was not uncommon to find a young CEO like Box's Aaron Levie sacked in the spare room in the morning.
Sometimes Kalanick can be outspoken with his opinions. He once dismissed an idea touted by Jordan Kretchmer, CEO of Livefyre (now part of Adobe), as "small in size". But when Kretchmer came up with the idea for Livefyre's social media software, Kalanick was generous with his support. He not only introduced Kretchmer to dozens of investors, he backed him with his own money.
Kalanick brings the same curiosity and vigor to Uber, where he calls himself "Chief Solver ". Thanks to his fertile imagination, the company has become much more than a limousine service. It is now a tech giant capable of tackling huge logistics issues like FedEx or Amazon. It doesn't own cars or employ drivers, but it can provide fast commutes to passengers in 540 cities around the world, regardless of weather, time of day, or the myriad ordinances that govern that transit. The CEO has come under heavy criticism for using aggressive tactics to advance Uber's cause, but he places those tactics in the context of the company's mission. It's not about being insensitive or impatient, he explained during an appearance on the Charlie Rose to show. "It's more about really interesting problems in the world and how you lean into them and solve things that maybe people thought they couldn't even solve. "
"I like trouble," he added, "where you can fight for something that matters. »
Related: Think Slow and Other Tips for Better Problem Solving
“Your hardest times are when you learn to be your best. »
—CBS This Morning, August 2012
When Scour imploded, Kalanick didn't pull out to tend to his injuries for long. He went back to work. A month after the company closed, he launched Red Swoosh with fellow Scour member Michael Todd.
Kalanick calls it a “revenge business.” The idea was to take the networking software that powered Scour's search engine and turn it into a useful tool for the entertainment titans who crushed it. As he gleefully explained at Silicon Valley's FailCon in 2011, he wanted "guys who chased [him]" to have to pay him.
The Red Swoosh concept was, as Kalanick admits , ahead of its time. On paper, this could save a company like YouTube hundreds of millions of dollars in bandwidth costs by pulling requested videos from nearby users instead of YouTube's own servers. But industry leader Akamai had seen its share price plummet from $328 to $3 after the stock market crash of 2000, which failed to inspire visions of wealth among venture capitalists.
For a long time, Kalanick insists, he just couldn't catch a break. Mark Cuban backed him up with $1 million, then asked for the refund. Microsoft showed interest in buying the company, then offered Kalanick with an offer of $1.2 million.
To make ends meet, Kalanick had to move with his parents to the bedroom he had occupied when he was a child. He worked four years without pay. At one point, the company owed $110,000 in unpaid withholding taxes to the IRS — a development that drove a huge wedge between Kalanick and Todd. The two men do not agree on who was responsible for the error. Todd left the company and then went to work for Google.
“When you're in a tough spot as an entrepreneur, you often have to do things you don't want to do, things you would like to do. don't have to do,” Kalanick lamented at the Code Conference in Palos Verde, Calif. , in 2014.
But, to his credit, Kalanick didn't give up on the Red Swoosh idea, even when it seemed dead. He convinced his engineers to work without pay for months. He found a family willing to invest $300,000. He moved the operation to a beach in Thailand for a few months to regroup and recharge.
“I did really well negotiating from a position of weakness,” he told the crowd from FailCon.
“Fear is the disease. Hustle is the antidote. »
—Startup Mixology Conference, October 2010
He weathered a steady stream of disappointments for years before finally convincing Akamai to buy Red Swoosh in a $23 million deal.
Kalanick's confidence is now legendary. People marvel at his ability to fend off threats from lawyers, government officials, union leaders, you name it. He is regularly described in the press as gritty and pugnacious.
What makes him so unfazed?
He seems to have a deep and abiding faith in his ability to solve problems. The bigger they are, the more it comes alive. It clearly has something to do with his engineering background. But it's also tied to his belief in the champion mindset.
In a fireside chat in India with Ronnie Screwvala, founder of subcontinent media conglomerate UTV, he explained like this:“When you step onto the court, put everything you have, put every ounce of energy you have on the court… and when you get knocked down – because if you're an entrepreneur, you will be inevitably – when you see hard times and you get knocked down, come back. If you keep putting everything in it and keep getting back up when you get knocked down, it's almost impossible to fail. »
Related: 3 Emotions All Entrepreneurs Feel (And How To Keep Them Under Control) This is, of course, the kind of overused talk you'd expect to find in bad sports movies. But Kalanick believes in his underlying truth. And he lets her guide his life to the extreme.
"He doesn't sleep. He doesn't lose his focus. He'll even forget to eat,” Uber investor Chris Sacca wrote in a 2015 blog post. In the story, Sacca described how Kalanick established himself for a No. Nintendo's Wii console. Kalanick apparently humiliated Sacca's dad, a respectable athlete, in a game one afternoon while wielding the controller in his weak hand.
When the stakes are high, the CEO doesn't just unbox his holster and heading towards the Clint Eastwood style; he works every angle imaginable to ensure he has the upper hand.
To surround himself with the right team, he spends 30-50 hours interviewing candidates for leadership positions. He ripped people off from General Electric, Target, Google and President Obama's campaign staff. It gives them a lot of autonomy but keeps them at a high level. It's not uncommon to find Uber employees in meetings at 9 p.m. and 3 a.m. chat sessions
He is a master at using phones. A colleague described him waiting in line for hours while soaking in a hot tub during a bachelorette party in Las Vegas. An old girlfriend claims he was on the phone so long during a deal that he got carpet burns on his feet.
This might explain why Kalanick has taken the art of fundraising to a whole new level. He raised $1.25 million in Uber's first round of funding in 2010, then $48 million more in 2011. And $258 million in 2013, $2.6 billion in 2014, $3.7 billion in 2015 and $4.8 billion in 2016. The latter figure includes a check for $3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund.
It rarely stops moving . During meetings, he will walk around the conference table. And on average, he walks 40 miles on the walking track inside Uber's headquarters. That's how he likes to think.
Over the years, this relentless movement has taken its toll. He admits to being on the verge of a mental breakdown when the Red Swoosh deal was finally done. He was so exhausted that it took a year to travel and recharge.
In a heartfelt conversation filmed at the dining room table of his childhood home, Kalanick once asked his father, Don, words of wisdom as he was about to enter the second half of his life. Don previously spoke about Travis' toughness as a child. "Don't work too long or too hard," Don said. " Take some time for yourself. »
“You can either do what they say or fight for what you believe. »
—Vanity Fair, November 2014
Despite all the talk about his pugnacity, Kalanick speaks (in public, at least) in a calm, measured tone, patiently asking questions and thoughtfully explaining his vision. He seems keen to share what he's learned.
Over the years, he's embraced the fairly simple business concept presented by Garrett Camp – a black car service for the cheeky young princes of Silicon Valley – and l 'has transformed into a populist movement capable of disrupting the way people move around the planet.
In 2010, the company was on a mission to transport a privileged few. “Ballers,” Kalanick called them. Today, it's about reshaping cities, creating jobs with flexible hours and reducing carbon emissions. When people have access to reliable and safe rides, Kalanick says, they don't need to own cars. They don't need to smother the streets with traffic, the communities with parking lots, the atmosphere with the exhaust fumes of idle gas drinkers.
DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
The problem is that people in the taxi industry and the government agencies that often control and protect these operations do not share Kalanick's utopian vision. They aren't interested in making way for a new service that doesn't own cars, doesn't provide health care for its drivers, and doesn't adhere to the complex and costly regulations that govern transfers to airports, hotels and malls. of congress. When you pay $1 million for the privilege of owning a taxi license, you're not inclined to compete with a part-time driver who enters the field with nothing but a cell phone and a mobile app.
In a 2013 white paper outlining Uber's "principled approach" to expansion, Kalanick accused the taxi industry of operating an inefficient system against the public interest, promising to provide a safe alternative with $1 million in liability coverage for any accident, and drivers who have undergone background checks beyond "what any existing local regulatory body already has in place". br />These days, the CEO is deftly using Twitter and Facebook to make his point, rallying Uber's loyal customer base to pressure politicians to see things his way. At times, he will openly engage with governors, mayors, and other elected officials.
His arsenal for shaping public opinion also includes TV ads, celebrity endorsements, robocalls, and petitions launched from the Uber app. In San Antonio, the company suspended operations for more than six months to protest a city council action requiring auto service drivers to submit to digital background checks. In Washington, DC, he asked users to help him stop a city transit law that would have quintupled fees, unleashing 50,000 emails and 37,000 tweets.
That's not to say that efforts like these are infallible. As of last summer, Uber was fighting more than 70 federal lawsuits (in addition to at least 60 that had already been resolved), according to the San Jose Mercury News . But Kalanick's sizable war chest more than covered legal costs. It has also held off competing services such as Lyft and Sidecar (which was acquired by GM in December 2015).
And so, as regulators and taxi industry officials resisted advances in 'Uber, confiscating cars, issuing cease-and-desist letters and raising doubts about the safety of the company's services, Kalanick could afford to increase the fire. He has taken to referring to the opposition as “Big Taxi” and the “taxi cartel”. At the Code Conference in 2014, he sat onstage in a red chair, legs crossed, hands in his lap, and said, “We need to reveal the truth about darkness, danger and evil on the taxi side. »
“We are running a political campaign and the candidate is Uber. »
—Vanity Fair, November 2014
In 2014, Uber had developed a “playbook” to govern its rapid expansion. For a stretch that year, the company launched service in a new city almost daily. Each advance started with a team of three people:one to recruit drivers, one to manage marketing efforts and one to monitor the competition and negotiate with local authorities on behalf of the company. Teams have learned to be creative with outreach. Sometimes they used the Uber app to deliver Valentine's Day ice cream cones, roses and kittens (for 15 minutes of cuddles). In Calgary, where authorities resisted the service, Uber offered free rides in exchange for a $5 donation to a local charity.
But Kalanick's aggressive outlook may have led to fakes not his lieutenants:Uber employees have been accused of ordering and canceling thousands of Lyft rides to pull rival cars off the road; sending mercenaries armed with credit cards and company-issued cellphones onto city streets in an attempt to recruit drivers to Lyft; threatening to invest a million dollars in opposition research that could be used to smear critics; and using the company's mapping technology – known in the office as “God View” – to covertly track the movements of celebrities, politicians and ex-girlfriends.
Drivers Uber also protested the company's moves. As entrepreneurs, they would have to pay for gas, repairs, and car insurance out of their own pockets. They are largely discouraged from accepting advice. And they must concede at least 20% of their revenue to headquarters.
Even Uber customers – a long-time source of praise – have begun to express disappointment with the company's bullish mentality, offending the high price used to keep vehicles running at all hours of the day and night. When fares skyrocketed on New Year's Eve, people took to social media to voice their disapproval. When fares rose in times of crisis – a hostage crisis in Sydney, Australia, and a bombing in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood – they screamed outrage.
The bad press weighed on Kalanick, forcing him to rethink his approach. It was not enough to simply fight the transport industry, he decided. He had to convince people that Uber was a force for good.
He started by hiring a political strategist. Not just any strategist, but David Plouffe, the man who orchestrated Barack Obama's run for the White House in 2008. In the months that followed, Uber began rolling out programs to turn military veterans into drivers and others to enlist drivers in the nation's Amber Alert efforts. . He also tapped Princeton University economist Alan Krueger for a study on Uber's impact on job creation. In a masterstroke, Plouffe appeared on MSNBC Morning Joe two days after Obama's 2015 State of the Union address to discuss the results.
MARLENE AWAAD / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
Kalanick reluctantly learned to accept that he was not is no longer the scrappy underdog. As much as he identifies as David, the world at large can't help but see him as a global Goliath. The one that employs more than 160 lobbyists. When he comes out stumbling now, he's arming himself with cold hard facts instead of the language of rebellion.
A year ago, he took the stage in Vancouver to present a TED Talk. He ditched the ballerina flat he often wears for a pair of jeans and a gray V-neck sweater. In a humble tone reminiscent of Al Gore, he laid out his case for a world with fewer cars, bringing back each point of his slideshow with a clever photo or surprising number.
"With technology in our pockets today" today, and a little smart regulation," he said, "we can turn every car into a carshare, and we can get our cities back. »
“Once you can deliver cars in five minutes, you can deliver a lot in five minutes. »
—Dreamforce Conference, September 2015
In his interviews with budding entrepreneurs, Kalanick likes to say that the playground of innovators lies in the gap between perception and reality. And these days, he aims to upend the conventional wisdom that owning an automobile is a worthy pursuit.
The reality, he argues, is that your car sits idle 96% of the time, often in the one of the vast sectors of urban real estate devoted solely to the accommodation of parked vehicles. "We've even built skyscrapers for cars," he told the TED audience. “This is the world we live in today. »
In the future Kalanick envisions, Uber will use its logistics savvy to transport more than just people. With UberEATS, it already delivers meals. With UberRUSH, that adds groceries and other products to the mix. The company has even experimented with providing helicopter service to wealthy Manhattanites bound for summer retreats in the Hamptons.
In pursuit of ever greater efficiency, Kalanick has invested heavily in technology self-driving cars, much to the dismay of its independent drivers. In 2015, he launched an Advanced Technology Center at a Pittsburgh chocolate factory, luring 40 researchers from nearby Carnegie Mellon University's famed Robotics Center with huge pay raises and bonuses.
The Last year, it acquired self-driving truck startup Otto for $680 million and artificial intelligence company Geometric Intelligence for an undisclosed sum. Between these two purchases, David Drummond, senior vice president of corporate development at Google's parent company, Alphabet, resigned from Uber's board, citing growing conflicts between the two companies.
In mid-December, Uber unveiled its self-driving cars in San Francisco, where the company had launched six years earlier. He started picking up passengers in a sensor-laden Volvo SUV. La voiture avait un conducteur et un ingénieur d’essais assis à l’avant juste pour être en sécurité. Mais lorsque l’un des 16 véhicules d’Uber a été enregistré sur bande vidéo avec un feu rouge, le California Department of Motor Vehicles a ordonné à la société d’interrompre les tests parce qu’elle n’avait pas demandé le permis d’essai requis.
À la manière de Kalanick, Uber a refusé de céder. Les roues continuaient de rouler. Mais une semaine plus tard, l’État a révoqué l’immatriculation des voitures et Uber a concédé, les chargeant dans un camion et les transportant en Arizona. Quelques mois plus tôt, Kalanick avait fait une concession encore plus importante en Chine – un prix qu’il convoitait autrefois pour ses nombreuses grandes agglomérations. Après des années de duel rival Didi Chuxing pour la suprématie, il a accepté de fermer boutique en échange d’un investissement en actions de 1 milliard de dollars et d’une participation de 17,7% dans son adversaire. Jusque-là, Uber avait perdu 200 millions de dollars par mois dans la guerre du gazon.
Est-ce à dire que le PDG a perdu son sang-froid? Ce serait une première. A-t-il une autre pièce en tête? Seul le temps nous le dira et Kalanick a toujours été en avance.
En relation: J’ai conduit Uber pour voir comment des étrangers peuvent avoir un impact sur ma vie
This article originally appeared in the March 2017 issue of SUCCESS magazine.
