Travis Kalanick

Travis Kalanick, (born August 6, 1976, Los Angeles, California, U.S.), American entrepreneur who was cofounding CEO (2009–17) of the ride-hailing app company Uber, which provided transportation by enabling users to page freelance drivers of privately owned vehicles via smartphones.

Kalanick's parents are Bonnie Renée Horowitz Kalanick (née Bloom) and Donald Edward Kalanick. Bonnie, whose family were Viennese Jews who immigrated to the U.S. in the early 20th century, worked in retail advertising for the Los Angeles Daily News.

Donald, from a Slovak-Austrian Catholic family whose grandparents immigrated to the United States from the Austrian city of Graz, was a civil engineer for the city of Los Angeles. Kalanick has two half-sisters, one of whom is the mother of actress Allisyn Ashley Arm, and a brother who is a firefighter.

Kalanick grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles. He was interested in computers from a young age and had learned to write computer code by the time he was in middle school. He studied computer engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), but he dropped out in 1998 to help launch the start-up company Scour, Inc., with several of his UCLA classmates.