--- title: "The Disgraced Uber Guy Is Back With a Fun New Plan to Kill Restaurants" description: "Travis Kalanick is back with a venture called CloudKitchen, and it's terrible to employees and \"dark kitchen\" operators alike. Shocking!" date: "2022-09-11" modified: "2022-09-11" authors: - name: "Maggie Harrison Dupré" job_title: "Senior Staff Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/mharrison" url: "https://futurism.com/uber-guy-cloudkitchens" categories: - "Future Society" tags: - "ceo" - "restaurants" - "travis kalanick" - "Uber" --- # The Disgraced Uber Guy Is Back With a Fun New Plan to Kill Restaurants ![Travis Kalanick is back with a venture called CloudKitchen, and surprise! It's terrible to employees and "dark kitchen" operators alike.]() *\Image: Getty Images/Futurism\* Hot Girl Summer is officially over. Make way for... Disgraced Executives Fall? Hot on the heels of [Adam Neumann]() and [Martin Shkreli's]() cursed re-entries into startup world, Travis Kalanick — the former CEO of Uber who [resigned from the ride-share app]() amid a firestorm of privacy concerns, allegations of widespread sexual harassment and gender discrimination within the company, and even the [alleged mishandling of information]() related to a rape accusation — is back as well. According to [new reporting]() from the *Financial Times,* the fallen exec's most recent venture, CloudKitchens, is booming. Since a quiet — and lucrative — round of funding back in 2021, the startup has grown like crazy. But as per former CloudKitchens employees, Kalanick's culture apparently hasn't changed a bit. Shocking. CloudKitchens [claims to offer]() a lot of the benefits that previous Kalanick ventures have: freedom, support, growth and mobility, and so on. The company works by building what they ominously call "dark kitchens" or "ghost kitchens" — basically, the company rents vacant warehouse spaces, where it builds kitchen units. Restauranteurs and home chefs can work out of those kitchen cubicles, then hand off their dishes to food delivery apps. It's like taking the dynamic and personality-filled world of restaurants and, well, killing it. Of course, this makes perfect sense for Kalanick's trajectory: disrupting an existing industry by cutting out the middlemen — and whatever worker protections have been established there — in favor of a slick app. The result sounds miserable. According [to a separate report from *Insider*](), the so-called kitchens are pretty much non-functional, and in many cases absolutely disgusting, while the tech itself is said to be glitchy and ineffective. Unsurprisingly, CloudKitchens contracts are reportedly predatory and exploitive, and many operators told *Insider* that they've lost all or most of their savings trying to work out of the defunct, ineffective kitchens. "It's been a heavy toll on our family," former CloudKitchen operator Chudi Orubele told *Insider*. "We have fought and crawled and scraped. We came in there with a dream for our brand, and CloudKitchens tried to destroy it." Regardless, CloudKitchen is currently valued at $15 billion, and has spread across multiple continents. But if you haven't heard of it, that's actually intentional. According to the *Financial Times*, its 4,000 or so employees — which have rapidly grown in numbers since that last round of funding, from which the company raked in a mind-blowing $850 million — are asked to keep CloudKitchen off their LinkedIn profiles, and Kalanick himself has stayed out of the spotlight. Things aren't so great for the CloudKitchen employees either, apparently. One former executive told the *Financial Times* that Kalanick's CloudKitchen is the "most toxic place I've ever seen or experienced," while another employee said that "if \[CloudKitchen wants\] to be a successful company, there needs to be a very big cultural change." That toxic work environment was corroborated by the *Insider* investigation — other former employees said they felt pressured to lie to potential operators to meet their sales goals, and two told *Insider* that they overheard managers call restaurant operators stupid. This sort of work culture isn't that surprising given Kalanick's dismal track record, though. After all, this is the guy who callously [destroyed one industry](), [mistreating employees and drivers]() along the way, and then, after being forced to leave that one, is trying to destroy livelihoods in another. And seeing as how Kalanick's first US investor — which reportedly invested a hefty chunk of that $850 mil last November, according to a *Financial Times* source — is a little company known as Microsoft, other major investors may soon follow suit. Can people change? Sure. But they don't have the incentive to do so if they can just do the same terrible things and still collect millions from investors. If one of the biggest of all dogs says Kalanick's out of the corporate penalty box, then he just might be. **READ MORE:** [*Restaurant owners are fleeing Travis Kalanick's CloudKitchens*]() \[*Insider*\] **More on Kalanick's legacy:** [*If This Leak Is Real, Uber Is in Huge Trouble*]() ## Author At Futurism, I've reported extensively on the rise of AI as a cultural and business force shaping the media industry, and more broadly how those dynamics are changing how we all consume and share information and relate to one another. I'm also fascinated by public health policy and ethics, the role of emerging tech in politics and governance — and the powerful people and forces at those intersections — climate change, and the environment. My investigation on Sports Illustrated's use of AI-generated authors with fictional biographies won a 2024 Mirror Award for "Best Story on Media Coverage of Artificial Intelligence in Journalism and the Media" from Syracuse University's SI Newhouse School, I contributed to Niemen Lab's 2025 Predictions for Journalism series, and I've discussed my work for Futurism during appearances on NPR, CNN, the BBC, the CBC, and more. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania and attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I played Division I field hockey for the Minutewomen as a midfielder. Since then, I've lived in New Orleans, Louisiana and Manhattan, New York. I spend my free time running, reading, perusing archival fashion, and searching for the world’s best negroni. I also have a debonair tuxedo cat, Westley, who's named after "The Princess Bride." ### Author social links [Bluesky]()