Uber went public for the first time and Travis Kalanick, the former CEO was not the one to ring the opening bell -

After a long and arduous journey, Uber has finally managed to become a public company.

Uber started to be a publically open trading company on this Friday morning at the New York Stock Exchange. In this opening ceremony of the company becoming a public company, the former CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick was not the one to bell ring as he was not invited.

It seems that Dara Khosrowshahi, the current CEO of Uber does not want to put his company through its early nasty days when it earned a bad reputation under its former CEO’s rule for being a sexist, cutthroat and a harassment marred corporation.

It seems that Khosrowshahi is now looking to make Uber just more than a ride-hailing service.

He is planning to make Uber into food delivery, bike & scooter sharing and sometime in future a flying taxi service.

While Kalanick was not able to be on the balcony, he still enjoyed the view of the event with his father from the NYSE floor. According to media, Kalanick was greeted with lots of applause. However, media also reported that Kalanick left the building even before the first public trade of Uber went down.

Shares for Uber opened on Friday at a price of $42 which was lower than its IPO price which was $45. While Khosrowshahi holds only 200000 shares of Uber, Kalanick holds more than 117 million shares of Uber.

As for the business front, Kalanick has moved away from Uber to manage his own made investment fund by the name “10100 Fund” but is still connected to Uber in some way.

As for Uber’s smaller rivals such as Lyft, it went public back in March despite it being operational in USA and Canada. Uber is currently available in more than 65 countries worldwide but both Lyft and Uber are currently unprofitable businesses. Lyft lost 1 billion dollars back in 2018 while Uber lost more than 1.8 billion dollars last year.