Entrepreneurial Hero: Garrett Camp

Garrett Camp has been an entrepreneur since college. While in graduate school, he co-founded StumbleUpon, a web-discovery platform that allows people an easy way to find cool websites, videos and images from across the Internet. After growing the company to over 100 employees and 25 million register users, Garrett sold it to Ebay for $75 million. Later, he bought it back with the intent to step down as CEO and become the Chairman so he could focus on new business venture, Uber.

After recognizing the horrendous taxi problem in San Francisco, Camp had the genius idea of creating a ride-share service that would allow people to find a ride home via mobile app and be picked up within a matter of minutes by drivers with space in their personal vehicles. Initially, he pitched the idea as a “time share for limousines.” Although it didn’t end up being quite that, it has become an extremely successful company, allowing users to roll in style, comfort and, most importantly, convenience. Uber has completely changed the travel dynamic, nearly putting taxi cab drivers out of business.

What began in 2009 as a luxury car service is now valued at $3.76 billion and operates in 35 cities worldwide. That said, not every idea Camp has tried to implement has been successful. Last year, he pushed “BlackJet,” which was positioned as “Uber for Private Jets.” This idea did not take off (pun intended), but like any good entrepreneur, his failures didn’t stop him from moving onto the next idea.

Currently, Garrett is busy forming Expa, a start-up studio that works with entrepreneurs to develop and launch new products. With 10 years of start-up experience, Garrett has identified many techniques that create successful companies and now wants to use his expertise to help other entrepreneurs increase their chance of success. Entrepreneurs helping other entrepreneurs – does it get any better than that?

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