Travis Kalanick is back: How Uber’s ousted founder went from pariah to Silicon Valley hero

In 2017, it looked as if the tech world had seen the last of Travis Kalanick. Following a spate of scandals and allegations ranging from sexism to corporate espionage, Uber's own investors took the extraordinary step of forcing the CEO out of the firm he cofounded .

Kalanick's ouster also signaled a bigger cultural shift. As the epilogue of Super Pumped , the definitive account of Uber's chaotic early days by tech journalist Mike Isaac, put it: "Change had indeed come to the Valley. With the fading of characters like … Kalanick, the backslapping bro culture of Silicon Valley's aught era is now seen as passé."

That may have felt true in 2019, when the book was released, but since then much has changed. Now, after nearly a decade of self-imposed exile, Travis Kalanick is back—not contrite, not chastened, and not especially interested in accepting his critics' moral verdict on his tenure at Uber.

It seems to be working for him. He has a multibillion-dollar industrial robotics venture , the backing of a powerful new set of patrons, and an increasingly receptive audience of young founders who see his downfall as less a reckoning than a cautionary tale about what happens when Silicon Valley lets investors, journalists, and cultural politics constrain its most forceful builders. Nearly a decade after Uber's board pushed him out, Kalanick is seen by his admirers as a victim of "corporate cancel culture," a founder who was unjustly removed before he could finish the job.

In a recent series of video appearances, Kalanick doesn't seem to have changed much. His hair and beard are gray, and there are new lines in his handsome face, but his affect is the same: charismatic and hypercompetitive, with intense dark eyes that can convey both charm and menace.

Since his ouster, Kalanick has acquired legendary status among a new crop of up-and-coming founders. Some go so far as to compare him to another iconoclast who was forced out of his own company. "He's the Steve Jobs for founders of my generation," says Kush Bavaria, who has raised $33 million for his AI data startup Ornn. Bavaria added that young entrepreneurs revere Kalanick for notching the rarest of achievements—building a company like Google or Airbnb whose name has become a verb.

Many in Silicon Valley's VC establishment are offering Kalanick a full-throated welcome back into the sunshine, too. "It takes a rare kind of entrepreneur to change these old-school, heavy parts of our economy," Ben Horowitz—whose influential venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), is backing Kalanick's company, Atoms—wrote in a recent blog post. "Travis is that guy."