Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is officially back as the new chief executive of a real estate startup with 15 employees

Travis Kalanick

Travis Kalanick will soon be CEO of a small real estate startup.
Through his new investment fund, he has acquired a real estate startup called City Storage Systems and installed himself as CEO.
The startup plans on buying distressed real estate and refurbishing those sites for digital businesses. It's small and only has 15 employees.

Travis Kalanick, the former CEO of Uber, is wasting no time moving on to his next chief executive gig.

On Tuesday he announced via a tweet that his investment fund 10100 (pronounced ten-one-hundred) is buying controlling interest in a real estate startup, City Storage Systems (CSS), for $150 million. And that's not all: Kalanick is joining the company as CEO.

Kalanick is best known as the cofounder and former CEO of Uber, a job that he was spectacularly pushed out of last June after Uber became embroiled in a series of scandals. Business Insider recently documented the whole messy inside story of how he was ousted.

Kalanick recently cashed out a portion of his Uber stake in a sale to SoftBank— enough to put $1.4 billion cash into his pocket. He wasted no time in setting up 10100 to oversee both his for-profit investments and his charitable philanthropic gifts.

CSS is 10100's first big investment, Kalanick explained in a tweet.

My new gig... pic.twitter.com/vpD528cdyf
— travis kalanick (@travisk) March 20, 2018

CSS is a real estate company company looking to buy "distressed real estate particularly in the areas of parking, retail and industrial," as Kalanick describes it.

He says there are $10 trillion worth of this kind of real estate available ripe for redevelopment. CSS plans to "repurpose" such sites "for the digital era," he wrote. Kalanick offers the example of two CSS services to explain what he means: CloudKitchens, which provides services, including kitchens, for food-delivery startups; and CloudRetail, which is apparently doing similar things to support online retailers.

By the way, although 10100 sounds like some kind of a insider coding joke — Kalanick is a software engineer — it isn't. The name is a reference to the street address of his childhood home, says someone familiar with the matter. It serves a subtle homage to his mother, who was tragically killed last June in the midst of Kalanick's struggles at Uber.

The name is supposed to represent getting back to his roots as an early-stage startup guy. CSS is Kalanick's fourth startup. Besides Uber, the others all had at most a couple dozen employees. The first one was Scour, a file-sharing company, similar to Napster, which was sued out of business. The second one was Red Swoosh, sold to Akamai for $19 million.

CSS currently employs 15 people, and Kalanick says in his tweet that he's hiring.

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