In 2001, Travis Kalanick moved back into his parents' house. His second company, Red Swoosh, had almost no cash. He reportedly went without a salary for more than three years, and some of his employees had gone months without pay.
The young man in that house was a Los Angeles kid from Northridge. His mother worked in retail advertising at the Daily News and his father was a civil engineer for the city. As a teenager he sold Cutco knives door to door. At eighteen he started a test-prep company, New Way Academy, with a classmate's father. He went to UCLA for computer engineering and business economics and left in 1998 for a file-sharing start-up, Scour.
His mother worked in retail advertising at the Daily News and his father was a civil engineer for the city.
Scour was sued in 2000 for copyright infringement, with the entertainment industry seeking $250 billion, and filed for Chapter 11 that September. An investor, Michael Ovitz, had already sued the company and taken majority control; the experience soured Kalanick on how investors treated founders.
What almost nobody remembers about Red Swoosh is how close it came to the edge. In September 2001 the company used about $110,000 in payroll tax withholdings to fund daily operations. Advisers reportedly warned it could be tax fraud, and accounts differ on who made the call. A second funding round gave it enough to repay the IRS, and no one was prosecuted. By 2002 only Kalanick and one engineer remained. In 2005 Mark Cuban invested $1.8 million, and in 2007 Akamai bought the company for about $19 million. After taxes, Kalanick made around $2 million.
Then Uber, which he co-founded in 2009. He resigned under pressure in June 2017. At the end of May that year his mother had died in a boating accident that badly injured his father. He sold about 90 percent of his shares, reportedly for $2.5 billion.
What he did next surprised few who knew him. In 2018 he paid about $150 million for control of City Storage Systems, a company Diego Berdakin and Sky Dayton had started in 2016 to rent out ghost kitchens, buildings equipped for delivery-only restaurants. The Saudi Public Investment Fund added $400 million in 2019, and an $850 million round in 2021 that included Microsoft put its value near $15 billion.
2023 was the low point: closures and layoffs after growing to about 40 sites in 24 cities and more than 4,000 employees. A salad chain, Mixt, sued in 2024. Kalanick pivoted to software and robots; in March 2026 the parent was renamed Atoms, with a reported $1.7 billion round that has not been confirmed.
A founder can take one thing from the house in 2001. The man who later ran billion-dollar companies once covered payroll with money that was not his, and lived with his parents to keep the lights on. He has been making bets under pressure ever since.