Uber Technologies Inc former chief executive officer Travis Kalanick is stepping down from the board, severing his last ties to the company he cofounded a decade ago and helped become one of the world’s most valuable, and controversial, start-ups.
Kalanick, 43, has sold all of his remaining shares in the ride-hailing giant, and plans to focus on his new business and philanthropic endeavors.
“Uber has been a part of my life for the past 10 years,” Kalanick said in a statement on Tuesday. “At the close of the decade, and with the company now public, it seems like the right moment for me to focus on my current business and philanthropic pursuits.”
Along with cofounder Garrett Camp, Kalanick started Uber in 2009, building the company up from an experimental black-car service in San Francisco to a global transportation and logistics company, offering food delivery, freight shipping, helicopter rides and ushering in a new era of work.
However, he was ousted as chief executive officer in June 2017 following months of chaos and controversy. Detractors pointed to his aggressive and sometimes reckless management style as breeding a toxic workplace hostile to women and overseeing morally questionable company programs, including some that intentionally deceived regulators and law enforcement agencies, and spied on riders.
For the past year, Kalanick has been building a new start-up: CloudKitchens. The real-estate company offers fully outfitted kitchens to restaurants that need more space to fulfill orders from take-out food services such as DoorDash Inc and Uber Eats. Along with using his own funds, Kalanick also raised US$400 million from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.
Following Kalanick’s departure as chief executive officer, the board replaced him with Dara Khosrowshahi, a former executive of Expedia Inc, who has worked to rebuild the company’s reputation and promise to investors.
Since its initial public offering (IPO) in May — one of the worst IPOs this year — Uber shares have cratered by more than 30 percent.
With Kalanick fully separated from Uber, Wedbush Securities Inc analysts said it could help the stock, as his continued presence on the board was a “distraction.”
“With ripping the band-aid off and Travis leaving stage left on the board, we believe now it’s about Dara & Co taking Uber in the right direction for 2020 and beyond after a rough road so far,” Wedbush analysts Ygal Arounian and Dan Ives wrote, adding that the massive sell-off of shares following the Nov. 6 lockup expiry has also hurt the stock price.
Kalanick has been steadily unloading his Uber shares in the past few weeks.
He sold the remaining 5.8 million shares before resigning from the board on Monday night, a spokeswoman said, for a grand haul of almost US$3 billion, according to calculations by Bloomberg.
Before the lockup expired, Kalanick held a 6 percent stake in Uber, which made him the firm’s largest individual shareholder.
Softbank Group Corp and Benchmark Capital are the company’s two largest institutional shareholders.
Such a selldown is unusual among prominent tech tycoons. Facebook Inc’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon.com Inc’s Jeff Bezos still own sizeable stakes in their companies. Still, neither of them were ousted by a boardroom coup.
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