From selling knives door-to-door in his teen years, Travis Kalanick has made an incredible empire for himself by being a serial entrepreneur and has a net worth of $5.6 billion. So how did a regular California kid create one of the largest growing and most prestigious businesses of the century? It certainly wasn’t immediate.
This all started when he first started selling Cutco at the age of 17. This job laid the foundation for Kalanick’s communication skills and work ethic. This job is what made it possible for him to fund and ultimately achieve his goal of owning his own business. Perhaps at that time in his life, however, even he did not know many times he would achieve that goal. Kalanick also received some natural business acumen from his mother, a retail adviser.
Kalanick started an SAT preparation course when he was just 18, which combined his brains and his service abilities. He put the name of “New Way Academy” on his course.
Attending UCLA in for computer science, Kalanick would eventually drop out in 1998 with hopes of success for Scour, a peer-to-peer search engine that he started with his classmates. What many people don’t know is how Kalanick had to live on unemployment checks while working full time for Scour, and eventually filed for bankruptcy after being sued by several companies for $250 billion dollars.
Next up on the the list of serial ventures is RedSwoosh, which at the time was on the fence of success and failure. Due to many clashes with the co-founder, legal issues, and employee complaints, RedSwoosh almost failed. However, the team was able to re cooperate, and successfully sold to Akamai for $23 million dollars.
Kalanick’s most famous development, however, was Uber, in which Kalanick did not create solely but is now the CEO of. Uber allows individuals to use Uber drivers, which are different than taxi drivers, for transport. Things are looking fantastic for Kalanick, as Uber’s most recent valuation would make him a multibillionaire.
