Travis Kalanick, who is the founder and former CEO of Uber which was once touted as the world’s most valued startup, is leaving the company’s board of director. The company has announced that Kalanick will officially resign from the board as of December 31 to “focus on his new business and philanthropic endeavors.”
In 2017, after a shareholder revolt, Travis Kalanick was forced to resign as CEO of Uber and was eventually replaced by Dara Khosrowshahi. However, he had retained his seat at the board of directors in the company.
Commenting on the departure of Travis Kalanick, Uver CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said: “Very few entrepreneurs have built something as profound as Travis Kalanick did with Uber. I’m enormously grateful for Travis’s vision and tenacity while building Uber, and for his expertise as a board member. Everyone at Uber wishes him all the best.”
This development of his resignation from the company’s board comes at the time when he is already selling his Uber shares in bulk. Last week, he sold around $383 million in shares and reduced his stake in the company to less than 10 percent.
However, a new report from Financial Times claims that he now has sold all his remaining stock and the SEC filings reflecting the same on web will likely go live after the Christmas holiday. The selling of shares comes after Uber’s restriction on the sale of stock for private investors and employees expired six months after the company’s IPO.
Since last one year, Travis Kalanick has been working on a new startup — CloudKitchens. The company will reportedly offer fully outfitted kitchens to restaurants that need more space to fulfill orders from take-out food services like DoorDash and UberEats.
For CloudKitchens, Kalanick has used $300 million from his own funds and has also raised $400 million from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Travis is also serving on advisory board for Neom, Saudi Arabia’s plan to build a futuristic “mega city” in the desert.
