Uber Technologies, Inc. has announced that co-founder and ex-CEO Travis Kalanick will be resigning from the company’s Board of Directors. He will stay active until December 31.
Last week, Travis Kalanick sold 90%, worth around $383 million, of his shares in Uber, per a public filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). It made up around 12.7 million shares, and he was left with 8.2 million shares. Kalanick had 98 million shares in Uber before November worth around $2.75 billion.
However, according to the Financial Times, he has just sold all of his remaining stocks as well. SEC will reflect the filings after the x-max break.
Current CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who took charge from Travis Kalanick in August 2017, has bid farewell with praising notes. He said, “very few entrepreneurs have built something as profound as Travis Kalanick did with Uber. I’m enormously grateful for Travis’ vision and tenacity while building Uber, and for his expertise as a board member.”
Future endeavors
After quitting Uber, where he spent over ten years, Travis Kalanick wants to focus on his new business and philanthropic endeavors.
Kalanick’s new business is CloudKitchens, a smart kitchens startup for delivery-only restaurants. The CloudKitchens, dubbed as ‘ghost kitchens,’ idea revolves around utilizing cheap proper real estates into a co-working delivery-only restaurant space. The restaurants will be without a counter or sitting area and help people to only sell food online using food delivery platforms like Uber Eats.
CloudKitchens, beside Kalanick’s personal investment, has secured a funding of $400 million in November by Saudi investors. Kalanick himself is also a member of the advisory board to NEOM, a project by Saudi government for a futuristic mega city in the desert.
Travis Kalanick, the controversial Uber founder
Before stepping down as CEO in June 2017, he was facing a few controversies at Uber.
In March 2017, ride-sharing giant Uber was found deceiving authorities so the company can continue its operations in disguise as per a report by the New York Times.
In February 2017, a former employee posted on her blog about sexual harassment and discriminatory envoirment at Uber, which stirred up a lot of controversy at that time. Under the part of the investigation, Kalanick made SVP Amit Singhal resign as he failed to disclose sexual harassment allegations during his time at Google.
READ: Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi termed Jamal Khashoggi murder ‘a mistake’
In the same month, Bloomberg acquired a video where Kalanick was seen losing his mind with an UberBlack driver in a heated debate and exchanged words like ‘bullsh*t.’
In August 2017, Axios reported that venture capital firm Benchmark sued Travis Kalanick for fraud, breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty. Benchmark was an early investor, a large stakeholder and member of the board of directors at Uber, and the first to demand his resignation as CEO.
Featured image: Getty
