Uber founder Travis Kalanick's new investment fund to focus on India

Travis Kalanick, co-founder and former CEO of Uber, has launched a new venture fund called 10100 (ten-one-hundred) through which he will focus on promoting large scale employment by investing in tech in India and China. Kalanick announced the move through a Twitter post earlier today saying that the fund will be home to his “passions, investments, ideas and big bets”. He added that 10100 will oversee his investments in both for-profit as well as non-profit sectors. “The overarching theme will be able large-scale job creation, with investments in real estate, e-commerce and emerging innovations in China and India. Our non-profit efforts will initially focus on education and the future of cities” Kalanick wrote in the post on Twitter. Global newspaper reports have said that Kalanick sold equity worth $1.4 billion in Uber, amounting to 29 per cent of his shareholding in the company, during the recent secondary sale to Softbank and its associates.

He was known to own 10 per cent of the equity in Uber which received a $48 billion valuation in the secondary sale. Kalanick is considered one of the brightest minds in the global technology space with the scale and size of Uber being testament to this. However, several people have pointed out his shortcomings as a leader which ultimately led to his removal as the CEO of Uber by its investors last year. While his ouster from Uber is considered to have been in the works for a while owing to the number of scandals the company had found itself in, Kalanick’s fate as CEO was finally sealed when investors found out that he had turned a blind eye to Eric Alexander, erstwhile president of Uber’s Asia-Pacific business, illegally obtaining medical records of a 26-year old woman who was raped by an Uber driver in Delhi. As the CEO of Uber, Kalanick had visited India just once in December 2016, during which he interacted with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and a host of top ministers such as Arun Jaitley, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Nitin Gadkari and Nirmala Sitharaman. He had also interacted with cricketing superstar Sachin Tendulkar and Bollywood star Salman Khan.