Garrett Camp is Canadian. He was born in Calgary in 1798 to an economist father and an artist mother. After uneventful adolescence, he joined the Faculty of Calgary, where he continued his engineering studies. A good student, he did not go out much and devoted most of his time to understanding collaborative information systems and the semantic web or “natural language.”
StumbleUpon: Garett Camp’s first idea
The entrepreneurial spirit has always animated Garett Camp. Ideas are popping up in his head, and he has set up a project to create a smart web. It is a web where all the information is not stored and selected using keywords but understood directly by the computer. The latter can then provide a much more precise answer. It was the subject of his thesis. While working on his thesis, he had the idea to create a new research site: StumbleUpon, which means “met by chance”.
The idea is not entirely new. It was inspired by Amazon recommendations that display products that are likely to interest you based on your research. The purpose of StumbleUpon is to tell the system which sites interest you the most. It would offer an alternative means of indexing, compared to Google. He befriended Jeff Smith and Justin Lafrance to develop his idea.
After graduation, he left for the United States, looking for investors to start his own business. He manages to raise funds and develop the business with his friends. The years after its creation, StumbleUpon leads to register 2 million users. The company was even named in the list of the 50 best websites. Business is so successful that eBay is interested in society.
Garett Camp: the adventure continues with Uber
With his first successful entrepreneurial experience, Garett is looking for new innovative ideas. The fact of remaining simple employee of the box which it created does not like it entirely. It was his meeting with Travis Kalanick in 2007 that gave him this opportunity. While the two men struggled to find a taxi in Paris, the idea came to them to set up an application that will connect the drivers and their customers. Thus was born Uber, a transport network company. Like everything Garett Camp touches, Uber quickly ties up with success.
When it launched in San Francisco in mid-2010, Uber only had a few cars. At the end of the same year, Garrett Camp and his team were able to raise $ 1.25 million to finance the expansion of Uber. The company did not stop developing in the following years. This dazzling success has not gone unnoticed. Forbes ranks Camp’s work among the Top 10 companies of 2012. The next year, Uber took sixth place among the list of fast companies and most innovative companies.
Expa, another work by Garrett Camp
Garrett Camp now wants to help innovators who are taking their first steps in entrepreneurship. He thus set up Expa, a startup studio that allows the founders to develop and launch their concept and product. Investors trust the expertise of Garrett Camp and its flair for finding promising projects. The year following its opening, Expa was able to raise $ 50 million from various investors to finance the design and development of businesses. These investors include Ram Shriram, David Bonderman, SherbaVentures, among others. In 2016, Expa still managed to raise an additional $ 100 million to help the creation of new startups. Never short of ideas, Garrett Camp set up Expa Labs, an incubator program at a reasonably early stage.
Garrett Camp: also an investor
Camp has always wanted to put its experience at the service of young startups. In addition to having set up Expa, he invests in ideas that he considers promising. He has already invested in Prism Skylabs, a video analysis platform founded by Stephen Russel. He also invested in Soundtracking, a music sharing application based on Steve Jang. He also made investments in WillCall; an application used to buy tickets for concerts. He also has shares in PSDept, an application for personal purchases. He also provides advice to new startups to help them in their development.
Not all of Garrett Camp’s achievements have gone unnoticed and has won him numerous awards. In 2007, he was considered the top 35 innovators under the age of 35 at the Emerging Technologies conference of Technology Review organized by MIT. Bloomberg Businessweek also considers him one of the best young entrepreneurs in Tech. At the 2013 Tribeca Disruptive Innovation, he won an award for Uber and StumbleUpon.
Garrett Camp is one of the most enormous fortunes in the world, but he is also a great philanthropist. He joined the Giving pledge and commits to donating half of his fortune to charity while he is still alive.
