He Sold His Company for $75M. Then Bet It All on Uber

Описание: In 2007, Garrett Camp was a 26-year-old Canadian who had just sold his first company, StumbleUpon, to eBay for $75 million. He had enough money to never work again, buy anything he wanted, and disappear into a comfortable life. Instead, he spent his nights obsessing over a problem that seemed trivial to everyone around him — why was it so hard to get a reliable car in a major city? The answer, his peers told him, was that nobody wanted to solve it.
The decision moment arrived when Garrett was stranded during a Paris snowstorm in 2008, unable to find a cab for over an hour despite being willing to pay any price. That single night crystallized what $75 million in the bank could not buy: a reliable ride on demand. Rather than commission a study or hire consultants, he pulled out a notebook and started sketching an app that would let anyone summon a private black car with one tap — the concept that would become Uber.
The immediate outcome was that Garrett spent $250,000 of his own money building the first working prototype, coding through nights and weekends with co-founder Travis Kalanick. Every investor they approached called it a luxury toy with no mass market. The conventional wisdom was that people would never trust a stranger's car over a licensed taxi, and that the liability exposure alone would kill the company before it launched.
Garrett had quietly bought back StumbleUpon from eBay for a fraction of its original price just before launching Uber — meaning the company that first made him rich became the financial engine that funded his $5 billion gamble. This move let him maintain equity in two ventures simultaneously while keeping Uber's early funding structure clean and free of early investor pressure that had constrained StumbleUpon's growth.
Today, Garrett Camp's stake in Uber is worth approximately $5.2 billion, making him one of the highest-returning founders in Silicon Valley history from a single pivot decision made during a snowstorm. The irony is that the investors who called Uber "a toy for the rich" watched it become the most-used transportation app on earth, operating in 70+ countries with over 130 million active users. His $250,000 bet returned more than 20,000x.
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📚 FACT-CHECKED STORY
Verified from: Forbes profile on Garrett Camp, Uber S-1 IPO filing (2019), TechCrunch StumbleUpon acquisition coverage, Bloomberg Uber founder equity reporting
Every dollar amount and date comes from documented sources.
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