Daily Management Review

Travis Kalanick says last goodbye to Uber


12/25/2019


Uber founder Travis Kalanick will leave the board of directors on December 31. He will focus on his new business and charity.



Dan Taylor
Dan Taylor
Founder and former CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick, will officially leave the company's board of directors on December 31. It is reported by The Wall Street Journal, citing a statement from Uber.

The entrepreneur himself, whose words are quoted in the statement, believes that the end of the decade in which the company he created became public is suitable for him to focus on his new business and charity.

Uber CEO Kalanick left the post in 2017. This happened after five key investors demanded his immediate resignation due to a series of scandals. For a long time, Kalanick refused to reduce his stake in Uber, but last year he sold almost a third of his share with an estimated value of $ 1.4 billion to a consortium of investors led by Japanese SoftBank. Kalanick also sold shares for a smaller amount within the IPO.

Six months after Uber became a public company, Kalanik began to actively sell his shares. In mid-November, he completed a deal worth about $ 547 million, parting with 20% of his stake. Last weekend, it became known that the volume of shares sold by Kalanik exceeded 90%. Thus, in seven weeks he sold more than $ 2.5 billion worth of shares. The Financial Times wrote that by the end of the year, Kalanick could sell his entire stake in Uber.

Last month, WSJ learned that Kalanick had raised $ 400 million in funding from the Saudi Sovereign Fund to develop its new project, CloudKitchens startup. The company turns the purchased premises into kitchens, which it rents out to restaurants preparing food exclusively for its delivery. Later, WSJ and Business Insider reporters found one of the “ghost kitchens” in San Francisco.

source: wsj.com