Ex-CEO Travis Kalanick to leave Uber completely

On Tuesday, Uber announced that co-founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick will leave the board of directors by the end of the year — a holiday gift to shareholders weary of the company's continuous market drop.

"Very few entrepreneurs have built something as profound as Travis Kalanick did with Uber," Dara Khosrowshahi, the man tasked with replacing Kalanick as CEO in 2017 and cleaning up Uber's "bro" culture, said in a statement Tuesday, crediting Kalanick's "vision and tenacity."

A spokeswoman said Kalanick, who owned 9% of Uber when it went public earlier this year, had sold his entire stake of over $2.5 billion (€2.25 billion) in shares. The company intends to file the final regulatory form on Thursday, after Christmas, a public holiday in the United States.

Read more: Ride-hailing firm Uber sees rocky start in stock launch

Kalanick's next chapter

Four million drivers worldwide have logged 15 billion trips since Uber's first official ride in San Francisco in 2011. Uber — which, like its primary competitor, Lyft, has lost money on each ride — has seen stock drop continually since it went public in May. Shares floundered and fell almost 11% in its first day of trading as a public company and has dropped by over 30% since, as investors grow increasingly skeptical that such a business model might eventually turn a profit.

Under Kalanick, Uber launched in markets before officials had authorized it to do so and even developed software to thwart regulators. Just this month, the company paid $4.4 million following a federal investigation into workplace misconduct.

In 2017, Kalanick resigned as CEO following employee accounts of a culture that encouraged sexual harassment and bullying. Kalanick gave up voting control later that year, when Uber's board of directors adopted a series of measures to shore up corporate governance, including a one-vote-per-share policy.

A lawsuit in 2017 accused Uber of stealing technology. And a public backlash followed Uber's increasing of fares to New York City's JFK Airport during protests against US President Donald Trump's ban on visitors and immigrants from several countries with majority-Muslim populations, undermining a solidarity strike by taxi drivers.

"Uber has been a part of my life for the past 10 years," the 43-year-old Kalanick said in a statement released 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."

Kalanick has begun working on a startup that would build large industrial kitchens and lease space to restaurants to prepare meals for food delivery without the costs of in-house servers or physical space beyond the cooking area. The company, CloudKitchens, has collected $400 million in investor funding to date, according to the tech monitor Crunchbase.

mkg/cw (Reuters, AP)

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