When I first met Garrett Camp in March 2007 on a reporting assignment, it was at the San Francisco-based offices of StumbleUpon, a web-discovery tool that had registered more than 2 million users and drawn attention to Camp, the startup’s twenty-something-year-old founder. Seed funded with $1.5 million by storied angel Ram Shriram among others, StumbleUpon would go on to be acquired several months later by eBay for $75 million.
Then Camp’s career really took off.
Within two years, Camp had bought back StumbleUpon with a syndicate of investors (he later folded the outfit into a newer discovery app called Mix). Around that same time, in 2009, Camp began tinkering in earnest with his idea for an on-demand car service — one that famously became Uber and which made Camp, who still owned 4% of it when Uber went public in 2019, a multibillionaire.
Nearly all the while, Camp, a Calgary native who now lives primarily in Los Angeles, has churned out fr …
