Ex-head of Uber Kalanik headed a startup for real estate

What's happened

The former head of Uber Travis Kalanik almost a year after dismissal from his own company found a new lesson - for $ 150 million he will buy a startup City Storage Systems (CSS) and will become his CEO. The company is engaged in reselling problem real estate, it was founded by one of the early Uber investors Diego Berdaki.

What does ubereats have to do with it?

• CSS specializes that it reproduces parking and abandoned shopping centers (which, thanks to Amazon, there are more and more in the USA) for rooms for online retailers and the delivery services of finished food (its two units are called Cloudkitchens and Cloudretal).
• “In real estate - assets of $ 10 trillion, which must be rebuilt under the digital era,” Kalanik commented on the purchase. The ex-head of Uber also said that so far 15 people are working in the startup, and invited those who wanted to work.
• The new Kalanik business is associated with one of his favorite Uber services - the delivery of food by a taxi Ubereats. The Kalanik shifter at the CEO Uber post, Dara Khosrovshani congratulated the businessman on the purchase and added that Cloudkitchen collaborates with Ubereats.

https://twitter.com/dkhos/status/97629924733417816

• In CSS, Kalanik will invest through his investment fund 10100, which he spoke about the creation of in early March. The purpose of the fund is declared “creating a large number of jobs”, real estate investments, electronic trade and “innovation in China and India”, as well as charitable projects.

Uber after Kalanik

Travis Kalanik left Uber in June - the shareholders asked about this, referring to the need to update the company. They could be understood: Uber, under the guidance of an eccentric Kalanik, fell into all major scandals that he could and had big problems with the authorities in many countries. Six months after Kalanika departed, the Japanese SoftBank became the largest shareholder of Uber, and during the Uber transaction, Uber's rating decreased from $ 70 billion (2016) to $ 48 billion. Kalanik sold a third of his 10% Uber for $ 1.4 billion. Its fortune is now estimated at $ 4.8 billion.

How Uber lost customers after scandals

• You can list the controversial and sometimes illegal actions of the Uber from the time of Kalanik for a long time - Khosrovshani so often has to apologize for his predecessor that Bloomberg called him Chief ApoLgy Officer.
• The last scandal was revealed last fall: it turned out that in 2016, hackers stole 57 million Uber users. The company did not tell anyone, and the hackers paid $ 100 thousand for the promise to delete information. Facebook has a similar problem now.
• Prior to this, Uber has been submitted to Waymo unmanned vehicles for several years (Alphabet belongs) - Waymo accused her former employee Anthony Lewandovsky, who went to work in Uber, of theft of secret documents. As a result, the lawsuit in February was settled in a non -judicial basis - Uber allegedly as a result paid only $ 245 million instead of $ 1.86 billion compensation required by Waymo.
• Despite the problems with the authorities, Uber was not at all shy about mocking officials of different countries who accused the company of tax evasion. In 2015-2016, the Ripley technology used the company's local offices, which allows you to remotely change passwords, turn it off and completely deprive extraneous data access on any device in any company’s office in the world. It helped during police raids. Another similar program is Greyball , which identified police and officials and showed them a fake version of the application.
• With the help of another program called Hell Uber, she also followed competitors, first of all, the main rival of Lyft.
• Personally, Kalanik also regularly reminded of himself: after publishing a scandalous video of his dispute with the usual Uber driver about the price policy of the company, Kalanik was forced to publicly ask for forgiveness, and then meet with a driver for personal apologies. As a result, Kalanik again began to argue and offered the man part of the company's shares. Uber lawyers could not allow this, and Kalanik paid the driver $ 200 thousand from his own pocket.

What am I to me?

If Kalanik succeeds with a new project, it will prove it - there are also market niches that can be mastered by providing. Perhaps you should carefully look around.

Artem Gubenko