How Much Is an Idea Worth? In Uber’s Case, $3.7 Billion
Garrett Camp envisioned cities full of private cars for hire with an app. Travis Kalanick took it from there, and they both became wealthy beyond imagination.
How much is a great idea worth? In the case of Uber Technologies Inc., the answer is $3.7 billion. That’s the value of the stake held by Garrett Camp, the inventor of Uber, ahead of the company’s first day of stock trading on Friday. It’s an unfathomable sum, even for Camp, who was already an internet millionaire.
With that haul, Camp could buy his hometown hockey team, the Calgary Flames, and probably still afford the seven other teams in its division. He could gift a brand-new Toyota Camry to nearly a fifth of the population of his adopted city, San Francisco. Instead, he says he’ll spend a chunk of the money on the thing he loves most: creating startups.