Garrett Camp

Garrett Camp was born on October 4, 1978 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. His mother was an artist and his father was an economist. The couple decided to change their careers and teamed up to become a design/build team who built houses. Young Garrett inherited his parents’ entrepreneurial spirit.

He went to a small elementary school that had only 150 students. His high school was bigger, with around 1, 700 students.

After completing his schooling he enrolled in the University of Calgary for a degree in electrical engineering in 1996. After his junior year he moved to Montreal for an internship at Nortel Networks where he worked on speech recognition technology. During his stay in Montreal, he also took courses at Concordia University.

He returned to Calgary in 2000 to finish the degree. He then started working on his Masters in Software Engineering and researched collaborative systems, evolutionary algorithms and information retrieval.

While at the university he decided that he wanted to open his own business. He teamed with three of his friends—Geoff Smith, Justin LaFrance and Eric Boyd—to discuss potential business ideas. The friends discussed five or six ideas before eventually deciding on creating a discovery engine.

StumbleUpon was launched in 2002 while Camp was still at the university. The discovery engine was designed to help people find sites that are more targeted to their interests than they would be with a regular search engine.

The company became successful within a couple of years and its growing popularity attracted the attention of Silicon Valley angel investors. StumbleUpon was relocated to San Francisco in 2006 upon receiving its first round of funding from Silicon Valley angels.

The founders sold StumbleUpon to eBay for $75 million in 2007. However, they bought it back within a couple of years in 2009. StumbleUpon is now an independent, investor-backed startup once again.

In 2009 Camp launched another one of his innovative businesses. The idea for a cab service had been incubating in his mind from the past one year and he collaborated with Travis Kalanick to found Uber (initially UberCab) in early 2009. Uber is an on-demand car service available via a mobile application.

In 2002 he was a part of the team that founded StumbleUpon, a web-discovery platform. It was a huge success and had acquired over 25 million registered users within ten years of its formation. StumbleUpon has been listed in TIME's 50 Best Websites.

Garrett Camp co-founded Uber, a transportation network company which allows customers to submit a trip request through the Uber mobile app on their smartphones. The company’s services are today available in 300 cities across 58 countries. Uber was estimated to be worth $50 billion in mid-2015.