At eighteen, Travis Kalanick was selling knives to strangers. Cutco, the cutlery maker, ran on young door-to-door salespeople, and Kalanick was one. In the same period he started a test-preparation firm called New Way Academy. He had grown up in Northridge, a Los Angeles suburb, and he was already someone who walked up to doors.
He went to UCLA to study computer engineering and business economics, then left in 1998 to join a file-sharing start-up called Scour. Scour went bankrupt in 2000 under a copyright lawsuit. His next company, Red Swoosh, lasted until 2007, when Akamai bought it for about $19 million. Wikipedia notes that accounts differ about who decided to use payroll tax withholding to cover costs during a cash crunch.
Wikipedia notes that accounts differ about who decided to use payroll tax withholding to cover costs during a cash crunch.
Then came Uber, which he co-founded in 2009. In June 2017 he resigned under pressure over workplace culture. What is less often told is that the same month he lost his mother, who died in a boating accident that also badly injured his father. Both facts sit side by side in his Wikipedia entry. He has been wealthy ever since, having sold about 90 percent of his shares, reportedly for $2.5 billion.
What almost nobody saw was where he would put the money. In 2018 he invested about $150 million for control of City Storage Systems, a company founded two years earlier by Diego Berdakin and Sky Dayton to rent out ghost kitchens, buildings equipped for delivery-only restaurants. He became its CEO. In 2019 the Saudi Public Investment Fund added $400 million; in 2021 an $850 million round included Microsoft and put an estimated value near $15 billion.
The low point came in 2023. After about 40 properties in 24 cities and more than 4,000 employees by 2022, the company closed sites and laid people off. A salad chain, Mixt, sued in 2024. A rival, Kitchen United, folded its real estate in late 2023, which says something about the model.
Kalanick's answer was software and robots. The Otter platform reportedly handled 18 percent of U.S. food delivery orders in 2024. In March 2026 the parent was renamed Atoms, with a reported $1.7 billion round led by Andreessen Horowitz, a figure from a search summary that has not been confirmed.
For a founder, the pattern is the thing to see. He began with a knife sample case, and every later company has been a bet that he can sell a hard idea door to door, one more time.