Uber: The Success Story of One of the World's Most Famous Startups

Currently, a vast number of new startup ideas are emerging worldwide, with the number of created companies, services, and projects rapidly increasing every day. However, not all ventures succeed, and not all startup founders manage to earn thousands or even millions. Nonetheless, there are lucky individuals who have incredible success and manage to establish themselves in various business sectors. Among them are the founders of the globally renowned service Uber — Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp.

Starting with the fact that before developing Uber, its creators had already launched several successful projects, which earned them high esteem among investors. Travis Kalanick, who grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles, was always considered a born salesman — he could easily persuade anyone to buy even unnecessary or impractical items from him.

Kalanick started earning decent money as a teenager and realized he was capable of achieving more. So, when his friends established a business in 1998 developing media file exchange services, Travis immediately applied his talent, taking charge of marketing and expanding the startup Scour. Subsequently, he independently created the project Red Swoosh, also related to information technology, which was later sold to Akamai for $19 million.

As for Garrett Camp, he launched his first project during his university days. The service was called StumbleUpon and provided optimized web page searching in the vast expanse of the Internet and sharing recommendations of these pages with friends on social networks. In 2007, Camp and a few co-founders sold StumbleUpon for $75 million.

Despite their vast differences, Camp and Kalanick managed to establish a joint business that generates excellent income for its creators, making them among the most successful startup founders worldwide. The idea for developing Uber was born in Paris when friends could not find a taxi in the huge city for almost an hour. At present, the company provides taxi search services in 115 cities around the world, significantly easing the lives of many tourists and city dwellers. While Uber developers do not rush to disclose revenue information, some financial publications report that weekly earnings alone amount to at least $20 million, which is quite a substantial sum.

Initially, Camp and Kalanick invested in business development on their own, but they have now managed to attract a large number of generous investors, including Google Ventures and many other equally strong and promising global corporations. Last year, Uber was valued at around $3 billion, but this year, the company's creators and main visionaries intend to significantly increase their startup's profitability, aiming to multiply it several times over.