Travis Kalanick is launching a venture fund

Travis Kalanick, the controversial co-founder and one-time chief executive of Uber, is launching a new investment fund called the 10100 Fund.

According to an announcement on his Twitter account, the new fund will focus on “large-scale job creation.”

Investment areas are to include real estate, e-commerce and emerging innovations in China and India.

It’s the systematization of work that Kalanick had been conducting quietly with boards, nonprofits and through investments in young companies.

It’s likely that Kalanick will invest in startups in that magic number between 10 and 100 employees (the magic growth stage for startup companies).

We’ve reached out to Kalanick for comment and will update this once we hear back.

One user on Twitter pointed out that Kalanick might want to rethink the name of the new fund. While the term resonates in startupland — among truckers the term means something entirely different.

Whatever the brand, Kalanick now has a lot of money at his disposal to play around with.

If the reports were accurate, Kalanick was up to sell nearly one-third of his ownership position in the ridesharing giant he built. Given the SoftBank Group valuation of $48 billion for Uber (a huge discount from its last fundraising valuation), that would mean the 29 percent stake that Kalanick was looking to sell would be worth about $1.4 billion.

Kalanick resigned from Uber last June but remains on the company’s board of directors and held a 10 percent stake in the ridesharing company.

As we noted in our initial reporting, Kalanick stands to become a billionaire if the sale goes through, but the deal also is notable because he claimed during the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in October 2016 that he has never sold a single Uber share, even though he was still paying the mortgage on his home.

Kalanick has gone through a rocky year in 2017. Uber was rocked by sexual harassment allegations, lawsuits over intellectual property theft and Justice Department investigations. The Uber co-founder also had to endure personal tragedy, as well.

Still, Kalanick appears to have emerged from the year undeterred. And with his latest venture, the Uber co-founder is going back to one thing that he inarguably knows how to do well… which is build startups.

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