Travis Kalanick is back: How Uber’s ousted founder went from pariah to Silicon Valley hero

The Uber cofounder returns with a multibillion robotics and AI venture—and a tech sector more receptive to his hard-charging approach.

In 2017, it looked as if the tech world had seen the last of Travis Kalanick. Following a spate of scandals and allegations ranging from sexism to corporate espionage, Uber’s own investors took the extraordinary step of forcing the CEO out of the firm he cofounded.

Kalanick’s ouster also signaled a bigger cultural shift. As the epilogue of Super Pumped, the definitive account of Uber’s chaotic early days by tech journalist Mike Isaac, put it: “Change had indeed come to the Valley. With the fading of characters like … Kalanick, the backslapping bro culture of Silicon Valley’s aught era is now seen as passé.”

That may have felt true in 2019, when the book was released, but since then much has changed. Now, after nearly a decade of self-imposed exile, Travis Kalanick is back—not contrite, not chastened, and not especially interested in accepting his critics’ moral verdict on his tenure at Uber.

It seems to be working for him. He has a multibillion-dollar industrial robotics venture, the backing of a powerful new set of patrons, and an increasingly receptive audience of young founders who see his downfall as less a reckoning than a cautionary tale about what happens when Silicon Valley lets investors, journalists, and cultural politics constrain its most forceful builders. Nearly a decade after Uber’s board pushed him out, Kalanick is seen by his admirers as a victim of “corporate cancel culture,” a founder who was unjustly removed before he could finish the job.

In a recent series of video appearances, Kalanick doesn’t seem to have changed much. His hair and beard are gray, and there are new lines in his handsome face, but his affect is the same: charismatic and hypercompetitive, with intense dark eyes that can convey both charm and menace.

Since his ouster, Kalanick has acquired legendary status among a new crop of up-and-coming founders. Some go so far as to compare him to another iconoclast who was forced out of his own company. “He’s the Steve Jobs for founders of my generation,” says Kush Bavaria, who has raised $33 million for his AI data startup Ornn. Bavaria added that young entrepreneurs revere Kalanick for notching the rarest of achievements—building a company like Google or Airbnb whose name has become a verb.

Many in Silicon Valley’s VC establishment are offering Kalanick a full-throated welcome back into the sunshine, too. “It takes a rare kind of entrepreneur to change these old-school, heavy parts of our economy,” Ben Horowitz—whose influential venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), is backing Kalanick’s company, Atoms—wrote in a recent blog post. “Travis is that guy.”

Kalanick himself declined to be interviewed for this story. His closest confidants have also closed ranks around him, but it’s easy to surmise his view from a slew of recent podcast interviews: The Valley got woke, and in its rush to exile leaders deemed toxic or “brilliant jerks” in the #MeToo era, it got soft. It ousted visionaries who built paradigm-shifting companies, to the ecosystem’s detriment. And now that Kalanick is back, he’s bringing with him the grinding “founder’s mode” ethos that built Uber.

Strikingly absent from Kalanick’s recounting of his story: any note of regret or apology. “I continue to stand by every decision I made at Uber,” he said in a video released by a16z, blaming his defenestration on “extreme wokeness.”

Bradley Tusk, a prominent political operative and early investor in Uber, concurred. “What is it he should apologize for?” Tusk asks rhetorically. “Why does he need to turn over a new leaf?”

“What is it he should apologize for? Why does he need to turn over a new leaf?”Bradley Tusk, founder of Tusk Ventures

“What is it he should apologize for? Why does he need to turn over a new leaf?”Bradley Tusk, founder of Tusk Ventures

Whether you regard Kalanick’s return with delight or disgust, the basic facts of his downfall are not in dispute: Kalanick and cofounder Garrett Camp launched their startup in 2009 and, by means of aggressive marketing and a win-at-all-costs growth strategy, rapidly built the world’s leading ride-sharing platform.

As Uber grew, however, so did tales of ruthlessness and bad behavior. They included allegations of a misogynistic, boozy corporate culture that failed to hold managers accountable for harassment. Reports also began to trickle out of covert programs with code names like “Greyball” and “Hell” that used underhanded methods to sabotage regulators and competition. The company also faced scrutiny over passenger safety and driver vetting, especially after a rider was raped by an Uber driver in Delhi in 2014 and reports emerged that senior executives had mishandled the victim’s confidential medical records. (Not all these allegations involved Kalanick directly, but critics argued that his scorched-earth leadership style created the conditions and culture for such behavior to happen.)

The company’s reputation took a further hit in early 2017 when one of its former engineers, Susan Fowler, published a detailed memo describing a culture of impunity for high-performing managers, including one who she said sexually harassed her. The memo from Fowler, who declined........

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