There's a lot to wrap your mind around with Chicago Ideas Week -- kicking off Monday! -- and we're helping with series of speaker profiles designed to highlight the benefit to you.
In this profile: Travis Kalanick
Accolades: As an entrepreneur, his companies have been featured in everything from the L.A. Times and Forbes to the Wall Street Journal and Wired. Oh, and some blog called Inc. Well, associated with some scrappy network called NBC.
Why you should care: Just because we recently profiled Kalanick's Uber, an on-demand car service that just debuted in Chicago, doesn't mean we full expect you to take our word alone for venturing away from your computer to hear him speak. Really, Kalanick's track record speaks for itself: He founded Scour, the world's first peer-to-peer search engine and before Uber he founded Red Swoosh, a peer-to-peer content delivery network. IGN, a giant, long-running site of channels about video games, films, music, and other media, is among those who have utilized Red Swoosh -- and IGN is a division of News Corporation. If our salute to him doesn't mean anything to you, surely Rupert Murdoch's vote of confidence is worth at least something.
More to the point, Kalanick can be counted as an entrepreneur not just at the forefront of technology and its capability to change people's lives via new businesses, but he's something of a revolutionary. Seeing him this week also offers a rare chance to see an entrepreneur speak about his business, Uber, while it's still in its early days of finding its legs. Uber's been around in other cities prior, sure, but it still has that new-car smell around these parts. Whatever he has to say about that, and the future, should be pretty interesting.
When you can see him: October 12, Thorne Auditorium, 4:30 p.m. - 6:30 p.m.
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Check out the full list of speakers and register for passes on the Chicago Ideas Week website at ChicagoIdeas.com.
