What is Garrett Camp's Net Worth?
Garrett Camp is a Canadian businessman and entrepreneur who has a net worth of $2.5 billion. Garrett Camp earned his first small fortune as the co-founder of the web-discovery tool StumbleUpon. He became a multi-billionaire thanks to his work at the mobility-as-a-service provider Uber. Among his other ventures, Camp founded the startup studio Expa and serves as the chairman of Mix, the successor of StumbleUpon.
At Uber's peak private valuation, Garret's net worth topped as much as $6 billion. On the day Uber went public in May 2019, his paper net worth ended the trading day at $3.4 billion.
Early Life and Education
Garrett Camp was born on October 4, 1978 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada to an artist mother and an economist father. As a young adult, he went to the University of Calgary, from which he earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 2001. He went on to attend the school as a graduate student, studying evolutionary algorithms and information retrieval, among other areas. Camp obtained his master's degree in software engineering.
StumbleUpon
While he was still in graduate school at the University of Calgary in late 2001, Camp co-founded the web-discovery tool StumbleUpon with Geoff Smith, Justin LaFrance, and Eric Boyd. Credited as the first web-discovery platform and personalized recommendation engine, the service used collaborative filtering to create virtual communities of Web users. In 2006, StumbleUpon relocated to San Francisco, California after receiving funding from Silicon Valley angel investors such as Brad O'Neill, Tim Ferriss, Mitch Kapor, and Ram Shriram. The following year, the platform was purchased by eBay for $75 million; Camp and other investors eventually bought it back in 2009.
After buying the company back, Camp worked to expand StumbleUpon's offerings to include mobile phone app discovery and social networking. As CEO, he grew the company to more than 100 employees and over 25 million registered users before resigning in 2012. Camp acquired StumbleUpon again in 2015 when it was languishing in financial debt. The platform was ultimately shut down in mid-2018, with all user accounts being transitioned to Mix.com, a new web-discovery tool built in part through Camp's startup venture Expa.
Uber
During his tenure as CEO of StumbleUpon in early 2009, Camp co-founded the mobility-as-a-service provider Ubercab with fellow businessman Travis Kalanick. The company was founded with the aim of offering affordable direct transportation services to riders. Soon, Ubercab was rebranded as Uber. The company launched its services in San Francisco in mid-2010 with just a few cars. By the end of that year, it raised over $1 million in venture capital. Uber went on to expand substantially over the subsequent years, both across the United States and overseas. In 2012, the company launched its services UberX, Uber SUV, and UberTAXI. The most significant change to Uber came in early 2013 when CEO Travis Kalanick announced a ride-sharing service that would let people from the public become drivers through the Uber application.
(Photo by Rob Kim/Getty Images)
Expa
Building on his decade-long experience with startups, Camp founded the startup studio Expa in 2013. Through the studio, he helps create and launch new companies by providing starting capital, technical advice, and workspaces to fledgling startups. In early 2014, Expa raised $50 million to fund the development and design of such startups. A couple of years later, the company raised $100 million. Expa is responsible for developing and launching such online companies as Mix, Haus, and Cmd.
Eco
In his other endeavors, Camp created a cryptocurrency called Eco. Unlike other forms of cryptocurrency, which create a heavy strain on the environment, Camp intends Eco to be highly energy efficient in its token generation and transaction verification processes.
Philanthropy
Beyond his corporate ventures, Camp has been involved in some philanthropic activities. He is among the many wealthy people to join the Giving Pledge, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett's campaign for extremely affluent individuals to give away the majority of their fortunes to charitable causes during their lifetimes. Additionally, Camp created his own Camp Foundation, a non-profit research organization that works to support research in the fields of sustainability, environmental conservation, and infrastructure.
Controversy
Camp is not without his fair share of controversy, much of it stemming from Uber's widely documented mistreatment of its labor force. The pushback became even stronger in 2019 when Camp paid $72.5 million for an 11,000-square-foot mansion in the Trousdale Estates neighborhood of Beverly Hills. This purchase was widely decried by both activists and Uber employees, who spoke out in protest while demanding better working conditions for drivers of the company.
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