July 23, 2015 • Blog, The Power 50, Uncategorized
There is a remote control to life in your pocket, and Garrett Camp is trying to flip the script on how you use it. Again.
First, it was how you browsed the Internet, and some people heard of it. eBay bought that idea for $75 million a few years back. The next one was big – it was how you moved around. Cities are fighting people to stop using it. That idea made him a billionaire. That idea grew 10-fold in 18 months. That idea was Uber, the taxi-industry disruptor valued at $41.2 billion. But that’s not enough.
Garrett Camp wants to flip the script on everything you buy. He doesn’t want to control the transaction of just one store or one product line, he wants it all to go through his service. Camp wants you to have a personal assistant, just like millionaires do. Only that assistant is one of either the app’s employees, retail sales representatives or a brand expert guiding your choice. Too much choice is replaced by a suggestion with an “I’ll buy it” button below. It’s instant satisfaction to “want” before sober second thought has a chance to rationalize “need” while searching for where to buy.
Camp is a Canadian-born entrepreneur that transformed the taxi industry and gave other entrepreneurs a roadmap to turn the Yellow Pages into an on-demand convenience service. Where he got his start was the web-surfing platform, StumbleUpon, which he co-founded in 2002 while he was a graduate student at the University of Calgary, the same city the 36-year-old was born in. In 2007 he sold StumbleUpon to eBay for a cool $75 million, and was looking for his next idea. In the winter of 2008 at Europe’s annual tech conference, LeWeb, he found it on the cold streets of Paris.
According to the self-proclaimed Uber startup story, he and Travis Kalanick were waiting for a cab; a common problem they had at home in San Francisco. “Jamming on ideas, rapping on what’s next is what entrepreneurs do,” Kalanick wrote on Uber’s blog. “Garrett and I would get some good music, good drinks and jam until 5 am. Garrett’s big idea was cracking the horrible taxi problem in San Francisco — getting stranded on the streets of San Francisco is familiar territory for any San Franciscan. Garrett’s m.o. fits the Uber brand. He likes to roll in style, comfort and convenience. His over-the-top idea in Paris started as a limo timeshare service.”
An on-demand car service was only one of the ideas that was talked about at an apartment dubbed the “JamPad” on the outskirts of the French capital city. A recent profile on Uber’s other half, Kalanick, said he had all but moved on from the idea after they both returned to San Francisco.
Camp, however, stuck with it. He convinced Kalanick to run the company, and they launched UberCab (the Cab in the name was later dropped) on May 31st, 2010.
Since then, they have grown into a $41.2 billion wrecking ball. Kalanick continues to lead the charge into new cities, while Camp stays away from the day-to-day operations of Uber, but serves as their chairman.
It’s freed his time up for other pursuits, including founding the tech incubator Expa in 2013, raising its first $50 million from a string of billionaire investors the following year. The list of those willing to bet on whatever Camp does next includes Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson, Google board member Ram Shriram and HP chairwoman Meg Whitman, to name a few.
Out of Expa, Camp launched Reserve, a supercharged version of OpenTable, the restaurant reservation app travel-giant Priceline bought for $2.6-billion in 2014.
That idea had the same look and feel of Uber, but unlike OpenTable, which checks to see if a seat is available at a restaurant the user picks, Reserve takes the time and date the user wants to eat and gives suggestions. Reserve also handles the payment in the app, the same style of transaction Uber users have when leaving a cab without reaching for their wallet.
While Reserve acts as a digital concierge, Operator, Camp’s latest project launched in April, attempts to bring human interaction back into the fold. Camp’s get-me-anything app is selling itself on fixing a problem created by too much choice. It replaces phone calls with a text message describing what a user wants, or even an image of what they want to replace.
“Our goal is to help people find the right product within the right store, and to do it interactively,” Camp said this spring. “It’s like Siri, but with a person on the other end.”
Garrett CampThe Power 50Uber
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