Travis Kalanick, born in Los Angeles, USA in 1977, is well known as the founder and CEO of the taxi-hailing software Uber.
Some public account articles claimed that he could write code at the age of six. This is 80% false because there is no credible information that Kalanick himself has boasted like this.
He did say that when he was a child, he was bullied on campus because his math skills were very high, significantly higher than those of his peers.
I wasn’t beaten, I was probably isolated and laughed at for being a nerd, which is a very American campus culture.
Perhaps because of this, there is a certain withdrawn, unsociable and paranoid side in his character.
The reason why Kalanick did well in mathematics was due to his father's teachings, and the fact that his family used the highest-end computers at the time.
But this does not mean that he comes from a wealthy family.
Kalanick's father is a civil engineer and his mother is a newspaper advertising salesman. They come from a middle-class family living in the suburbs of Los Angeles.
Another piece of evidence about his family background is that Kalanick attended the famous UCLA, also known as the University of California, Los Angeles.
This university is well-known in China because it recruits a large number of international students. It is indeed very good among American public universities.
Focus on public universities.
In the United States, all the truly top schools are private.
Serious old Stars and Stripes - upper-class gentlemen usually don't send their children to this kind of school.
Because they go to college not to get a diploma and find a job, but more importantly to make connections and potential alumni resources in the future.
In the eyes of the old men, it is a waste of life to hang out with a bunch of nerds and international students who "come here to beg for food from other places" and don't know whether they can stay in the United States after graduation.
Kalanick worked very hard when he was at UCLA, planning to pursue two degrees, one in computer science and one in business, but unfortunately he didn't get either.
Because he dropped out of school.
UCLA has a unique geographical location. Kalanick often hung out in the school's Computer Science Association and found a group of like-minded buddies.
They came up with an idea and created the world's first P2P file download resource search engine, called Scour.
In all stories about Kalanick, this project is regarded as his first entrepreneurial venture. In fact, although he is not a marginal role in this team, he cannot be called the primary figure.
Because Kalanick himself was still an intern at Intel when this project started, he was already the seventh member of the team when he joined.
People put the Scour project on Kalanick, of course because after many years he became the most successful one in the entrepreneurial team.
Although Kalanick majored in computer science and was able to program, his role in the team was not to be a siege lion, but to be responsible for financing.
This laid the foundation for his future career.
Kalanick is quite talented in financing. Scour once received US$4 million in financing when it was most promising, but in the end it went bankrupt.
The reasons for its failure are often summed up in a crude way: it was jointly sued by a group of major Hollywood companies for copyright infringement, and the claim amount was an outrageous US$250 billion. In the end, although it settled, it could not escape the outcome of bankruptcy.
The implication of this statement is that a group of young people with ideals were bullied by Hollywood giants.
However, the actual situation is that Scour started out as a music business, but was copied by another website of the same type. Only then did it transform into a video business, stepping on the thunder of Hollywood, and exploded.
Perhaps it violates the truth that "successful people are always right". The media often selectively processes facts independently, as if they are afraid of damaging the "wiseness and martial arts" of successful people.
After failing to start his business and not even getting a degree from UCLA, Kalanick fell into a low point in his life.
After that, the dropout started a second entrepreneurial project, but it wasted for many years. When he was at his lowest point, he was the only one left in the company.
However, Kalanick's talent for finding money was not wasted. He sold the project for US$18.7 million in 2007, pocketing about US$3 million, which was regarded as sweeping away years of decline.
Then his fortune turned around.
By 2009, by this time, he had gotten rid of the previous difficulties in life. While working an idle job and receiving a salary at the large company that acquired him, he was engaged in side business in an honest way.
He was a well-known angel investor on Twitter at the time. Specifically, he paid tens of thousands of dollars to some projects based on his luck.
In addition, he often gives "points and tips" to those low-level entrepreneurs who have failed, which is a bit like a copycat version of the Godfather.
There is also a little story about the origin of Uber.
In 2008, Kalanick and his friends encountered difficulties in hailing a taxi while attending an industry conference in Paris, so he came up with the idea of making a taxi-hailing software, and thus Uber was born.
Unfortunately it's fake.
The truth is that Kalanick’s friend came up with the Uber business model and registered Uber’s earliest domain name several months before the meeting.
This friend shared the idea, and then invited friends in the entrepreneurial circle, including Kalanick, to brainstorm and build a company.
But at this time, the company's shareholders were all participating part-time, and it was considered a round of crowdfunding.
It wasn't until Uber received its first financing that Kalanick felt that the project had good prospects, so he decided to leave his other jobs and join full-time and became Uber's CEO.
For this reason, his friend, Uber's real father, promptly gave up part of his equity so that he could become the largest shareholder.
Since then, Kalanick has appeared as the soul of Uber, but Uber’s plan was not his idea, so how could it work?
Hence the story mentioned above, which can be said to be very routine, and is the standard feature of almost every successful company in Silicon Valley.
No matter how cliché it sounds, at least the existence of this story makes it logical for Kalanick to appear at the very beginning of the Uber legend.
After that, his life was like a rocket with countless boosters attached to it. As Uber became popular in the capital market, his net worth also soared rapidly.
Judging from the current situation, this momentum shows no sign of stopping.
Lin Yi knew that this should be the "sweet period" in Kalanick's life, and he had not yet reached his most glorious peak.
After Kalanick became popular, the media, which had always been oblivious, began to discover some kind of "inevitability of success" in him.
The title they came up with was "The Unluckiest Entrepreneur in History", a vague explanation for his early failures as just bad luck.
Jenny Liu reminded Lin Yi not long ago that entrepreneurs also need their own persona. Kalanick’s persona is like this:
Rebellious, flamboyant, wild and uninhibited, but also perseverant; enjoying, squandering, empty, and then a melancholy older literary young man.
Summary: schizophrenia.
The nonsense mentioned above may just be the self-expression of the stupid media, not the rumors spread by Kalanick himself.
But he may not be unhappy to see his reputation getting louder and louder through rumors and rumors, and even being gradually mythologized by people who don't know what's going on.
The so-called celebrities are people who are covered in layers of disguises, which are either filled with fanciful assumptions or carefully woven lies.
Don't take their stories too seriously.
But Lin Yi knew that what Liu Jianni wanted was to give him such an identity.