Ten years ago, Uber launched in San Francisco. A simple idea became a fast growing company, and Uber now helps hundreds of millions of people around the world move from point A to B. Along this ten year journey, I’ve learned a lot, and realized that I’m most helpful when focused on product strategy & design, and this is where I’d like to focus going forward.

So as we release our proxy statement today, I have decided to shift from a board director to a board observer, and focus on product strategy. I will continue to work with Dara and the product and technology leadership teams to brainstorm new ideas, iterate on plans and designs, and continue to innovate at scale. We have a strong and diverse team in place, and I’m confident everyone will navigate well during these turbulent times.

Thank you to everyone who has helped create Uber over the last decade. You have helped millions of people in times of need. I’m looking forward to helping brainstorm the next big idea…

-Garrett Camp

We are at a turning point in human history. The world is more interconnected than ever… both physically and digitally, and things are evolving and changing faster than ever before. And new platforms that help people in need are now even more critical during our current crisis.

Two years ago when I decided to start spending time on philanthropy as well as work on startups, I didn’t initially have a clear plan of what I wanted to focus on. Camp.org was created to be a research foundation. Having met with many philanthropists and charities, done a lot of reading, and spoken with friends and colleagues who volunteer their time, I realized that there wasn’t just one area or passion to which I kept returning. Instead, there were a wide range of global issues that I felt were very important and needed support.

As we talked to nonprofits, we realized many of these organizations spend a large portion of their time raising money, applying for grants, or building basic online infrastructure, instead of focusing on their core mission. So after several brainstorming sessions with a great team of founders and developers with similar goals, we decided to create a new product that could be helpful to every nonprofit organization.

I’m excited to introduce Every.org, the first nonprofit project that I’m funding and helping design. Every.org is a new platform to connect donors and nonprofits. It allows people to easily support any 501(c)(3) nonprofit with donations, discover nonprofits their friends trust, manage all donations in one place, and create ripple effects by sharing why they support an organization. As a nonprofit which supports nonprofits, our mission is to provide consistent financial support to nonprofits by facilitating monthly donations. So nonprofits can spend less time raising money or maintaining donation websites, and more time tackling humanity’s most pressing problems.

Please join Every.org, and give what you can. Every monthly donation helps, and everyone can now make a difference with just a few clicks. If you run a nonprofit, please get in touch and let us know how we can best support you.

We need to help each other now more than ever, please join me in supporting nonprofit organizations around the world… every donation helps.

-Garrett Camp

every.org/@gc

Last year, we announced a vision for Eco, a new digital currency platform. Eco’s goal was to create a new digital currency that focused on usability and could be used for everyday payments. Today, I’m excited to announce that Eco has joined forces with a like-minded project, Beam.io. We have been working closely with the Beam team for many months, and have now finalized a partnership to work more closely together going forward.

Eco is building an open source, full-stack payment platform with a cryptocurrency designed for payments. We have made great progress over the last 18 months, and now have a working prototype running on a functional testnet in final stages of a comprehensive third-party security audit. We are now ready to start working with beta partners to help test Eco, and assemble a council of experts who will advise on governance and network development.

I’m excited to personally advise Eco as we build a new global payments system. Expa has invested in Eco and will serve as a design and strategy partner to the Eco team, as we progress from beta to public availability early next year.

If you’d like to help us build Eco, please get in touch at Eco.com :)

-@gc

Back in late 2013, I had an idea to create a place that would give entrepreneurs the best environment to build companies. My goal was to combine lessons learned from StumbleUpon and Uber to help other founders. I liked the idea of a space where entrepreneurs could come together, get advice from experts and focus on building their product. We called it Expa, and by March 14, 2014 raised our first $50m. We’ve now been joined by 5 other partners who help founders develop the initial idea, craft the brand and build their prototypes.

In five years, Expa’s community has grown from a just few people to over 300, launched a dozen companies, and supported over 50 entrepreneurs. And many Expa projects have now gained significant traction and investor interest, with over $150M of follow-on capital to date.

A few recent company updates are: Cmd.com, a Linux server security platform, recently raised a $15M Series B. Current.com, a modern debit card application, now has over 250,000 users. Metabase.com, an open source analytics company, just raised $13M. Mos.com launched to help students to automatically apply for college financial aid. And Shift.org, a career transition service, is now targeting 200,000 military veterans per year.

Over the years, we have gone through several iterations on how to best partner with entrepreneurs. We’ve realized that we are most helpful providing hands-on support to early-stage projects that are part of our studio. So as we turn 5, we’ve decided to focus on designing and building, and help a small group of entrepreneurs bring new ideas to life.

If you are an entrepreneur looking to build your next company, or have an idea that you’re looking to develop, Expa could be the place for you. Connect with us :)

Garrett Camp
-Expa founder

Sixteen years ago, we started StumbleUpon to help people discover new webpages. The idea was simple: click a button to find a cool webpage. It was easy and fun. Over the years SU has delivered personalized content to over 40 million users, serving up nearly 60 billion stumbles. StumbleUpon pioneered content discovery on the web, before the concepts of the “like button”, “news feed” or “social media” were mainstream.

Since starting SU the number of people with internet access has grown nearly 10x, and mobile phones and social media have changed our lives. The number of platforms to share or host content has increased significantly, yet we still need better tools to help us filter through the exploding amount of content on the web, and find signal within the noise. And we’ve learned from SU that while simplicity and serendipity is important, so is enabling contextual curation (ie. “cool space photos”) instead of just clicking “I like it”.

Recently Expa has been focused on creating a new discovery platform, which incorporates all of the lessons learned from StumbleUpon to take content discovery to the next level. Mix.com combines social and semantic personalization into one streamlined experience. It also makes it easier for people to organize content into meaningful collections. This will help you find obscure but interesting content that has been recommended by people you know and trust.

After careful consideration, we’ve made the decision to focus fully on building Mix and transition StumbleUpon accounts into Mix.com over the next couple months. We have built Mix to work on every browser and smartphone, to make the transition as smooth as possible. With a few clicks you can register and import your SU favorites, interests and tags — creating Mix Collections that are easily shared with friends. If you have any questions, email support@mix.com for help.

Creating StumbleUpon has been an amazing experience. It was the first project I worked on back in college in 2002. I have personally clicked the stumble button hundreds of thousands of times, and learned a lot in the process. But it’s now time to focus on the future, and create the next discovery platform that will uncover hidden gems we would never think to search for.

Thank you to the 40 million people who have used SU over the years… you’ve gotten us to where we are today and laid the groundwork for Mix’s approach to curation & discovery. We are excited for you to give Mix a try :)

-GC

This was my first time visiting small towns in a developing country, and meeting people who struggle just to find clean water or enough to eat. Most of the population in developing nations live in rural areas, which often lack access to basic services. And solutions or systems that make sense in the US or Europe might be impractical or ineffective in the developing world where simpler infrastructure to provide food, water, or electricity is higher priority.

After turning 39 last month I began thinking about where I should focus my time, across Expa and the companies I’ve started. I’ve now spent 15 years focused mostly on startups, and while I’m still passionate about creating useful products, I also realized I shouldn’t wait to start giving back. Philanthropy isn’t just about donating money, but also sharing your advice or spending time solving important problems.

When I first met Bill Gates earlier this year, I was impressed that he started his foundation while still in his 40s, and is taking a very active and analytical approach to making an impact. My trip to Kenya made me realize that beyond just making charitable donations, I should also begin spending part of my time on projects where hands-on systems design can create more efficient solutions, and help people who need it most.

So I’ve decided to join the Giving Pledge where I will be leaving half of my assets to charity, and gradually deploy them in the most impactful way I can. I’ll start soon by setting up a foundation and spending some time researching where I can be most helpful. My goal is to find a few areas of interest where I can work with others to create systems and products that will make a widespread positive impact.

Thanks to everyone over the last few months who has helped me put things in perspective. If you have suggestions on the best research to read on effective philanthropy, please email info@camp.org.

Garrett Camp
Camp.org

We’re excited to release Expa’s newest project to the public today: Mix.com — the simplest way to discover great content matched to your interests. Mix is now open to everyone on iOS, so be sure to sign up today to reserve your page at mix.com/name.

Our approach with Mix is different from most popular social discovery and news apps as it’s not just focused on real-time news, and posts from your friends. Instead of a timeline-based feed, your recommendations are based on a semantic and social graph… what you like + who you know. Rather than a traditional “newsfeed”, on Mix you simply swipe through a sequence of recommended pages, each of which is matched to your interests and/or endorsed by people you know and trust. This concept builds in part on the legacy of StumbleUpon, which Expa acquired a little more than a year ago. In addition to bringing on a great team from StumbleUpon, we hired additional talent to start applying what we learned to create a more flexible and modern platform for personalized recommendations.

Often the best content for you has the overlap of multiple characteristics: its new, several friends like it, it’s related to your personal interests, and it’s trending among people with similar tastes. Mix will rank content based on all of these characteristics, to help identify the best content for you. While some social signals will be used in Mix, they won’t be the dominant factor in what you see. We will ensure you aren’t just seeing the latest or most popular content, but the stuff that we believe you will actually like the most.

There have been four fundamental stages on the web: First, there was directories with Yahoo. Then there was search with Google. After that came social, with Facebook and Twitter. We are now amidst a fourth phase: Curated discovery. There is so much news, content, and noise in the market today that the ability to have human experts surface the best photos, videos and pages is becoming increasingly important. This is why we created Mix, to help you discover things you’ll like, from people you trust.

We are building Mix for creators, curators, and consumers. While many apps see the majority of their users as primarily content consumers, we’d like Mix to be a place where people contribute high-quality web content they find everyday, and have everyone involved in the curation of our database. We want people to use Mix to actively express themselves, as they add content they want to save or share to their public page at Mix.com/name. One click of the Mix button lets you save and share great content in a personalized way.

We’d love to hear your feedback on Mix, any comments, suggestions or ideas. We are also creating a distributed organization looking to hire great talent from anywhere to help build Mix, including those working fully remotely. If you’d like to join our team, apply here.

Give it a try at Mix.com!

-Garrett Camp
mix.com/gc

All companies have growing pains. And because Uber grew so fast these growing pains are much more serious. Over the years we have neglected parts of our culture as we have focused on growth. We have failed to build some of the systems that every company needs to scale successfully. But what matters now is that we know what needs to be changed. We must update our core values, listen better to employees and riders, and prioritize our drivers. The team at Uber has some of the best problem solvers in the world, and we must now apply our talents to solving these issues through clear actions.

A friend recently asked me, “What went wrong?” and the answer is that we had not listened well enough to those who got us here… our team and especially our drivers. In a highly competitive market it is easy to become obsessed with growth, instead of taking the time to ensure you’re on the right path. Now is that time… to pause for a moment and think about what really matters here: providing 65 million riders transportation when they need it, giving 2 million drivers flexible work options, and creating a company culture we are proud of.

Last week I heard a story that really stuck with me. A college professor made a comment that “Uber has liberated grandmothers worldwide” based off the mobility Uber has brought to her mother. And it made me remember that while many mistakes have been made, Uber has changed millions of people’s lives for the better, bringing mobility to those who need it most. It’s important to remember the positive impact Uber has on the world, and how important our work here is.

Uber has become a global service providing roughly 15 million rides per day across 500 cities, and international markets are growing as fast as ever. People love the product itself, and they see companies like Uber as the future. Which is why we must now hold ourselves to a higher standard going forward. We’ve formed a new executive leadership team, and the board is actively recruiting new directors and talented executives.

I believe that our business can have 10x the impact it has today — once we have additional leadership and training in place, and evolve our culture to be more inclusive and respectful. We should still push hard for what we believe in, and be much more collaborative going forward.

Garrett Camp, co-founder.

When Expa started back in late 2014, the idea was simple: I had several ideas I wanted to work on and, after being a startup CEO for 10 years, didn’t want to focus on a single project again just yet. I also knew that I didn’t want Expa to be a traditional VC since they usually don’t have much contact with the people actually building a product, and mostly play a role as high-level advisors to a company. I’m a system designer at heart, and wanted to be directly involved in the creation of new products: from the initial idea and crafting the brand, to designing the prototype and launching, and eventually scaling users and revenue. So I started Expa to be a “company that creates companies” and help design and launch products that could improve people’s lives. It’s been super exciting to see the idea of Uber gain such traction, and being hands-on with product in the first year or two at Uber has been part of the inspiration for Expa. This is how Expa’s “Studio model” has been structured, which now has 6 partners helping founders build new companies.

By mid-2015, then at 3 full-time partners, we began to ask: “How can we scale Expa beyond a few people helping each other build products?” While it’s great to work on a couple ideas and hopefully see one take off, our studio model requires constant context switching among projects and is really targeted at serial entrepreneurs and executives who want to keep building rather than shifting towards pure investing roles. The studio model is not something I would recommend to the first-time entrepreneur, compared with having extreme focus on “doing one valuable thing well”, and finding product-market-fit first on a single useful service. As we met more first-time founders who were super passionate about their startup ideas, we realized that we needed a second model at Expa: one that’s more systematic, more scalable, and better suited to the first-time founder. We decided in early 2016 to call this model Expa Labs, targeted at founders who would focus on one important idea, while receiving all the resources of the Expa platform, including advice from Partners and support from our core team.

We learned a lot in our first year. By May 2016 we had received hundreds of applications on expa.com/labs. Expa Partners and core team members carefully screened each application to produce a short-list of 18 projects we felt had the greatest potential. We met all 18 teams face to face, and selected six to invest in (3 in SF and 3 in NYC) that the team was excited about. In June 2016 the first Labs companies moved into the Expa offices and started building their prototypes. We helped them along the way, providing detailed operational guidance at every step, and are now seeing several teams gaining traction and investor interest. After gathering feedback from everyone involved in our first session we have decided to alter our model slightly, and prepare for a bigger and better program in 2017.

Expa Labs 2017 brings a couple key changes: 1. We are now offering a $250k seed option for 10%, in addition to $500k for 20% offered last year. While many people who are living in SF or NY need a good amount of cash to leave their jobs and build new products, some founders prefer to take less money up front, with less dilution, with the plan to raise more capital later. So we now have two paths for our Labs founders, depending on which is best for them; either a $250k or $500k seed, with guaranteed introductions to great investors if more capital makes sense. 2. We are now opening up applications to founders anywhere, not just those who live in or are able to move to SF, NYC, or Vancouver. While Expa has great offices in these cities, there are many founders who need to remain in their current location while building their company. There are smart people everywhere, who just need a bit of capital and some guidance, and not everyone can easily move to another location for six months.

So we are excited to now work with teams based anywhere who can periodically visit Expa SF or NY for feedback sessions and hands-on support from our team. Most of the teams we accept will likely be based in North America or Europe for logistical reasons, but we are open to English-speaking teams anywhere who are serious about building something meaningful. We are actively developing custom-built collaboration tools that will help guide and educate founders as we strive to support teams in a scalable way. This platform is offered to our global community of builders, partners and advisors. And if you’re in based in Canada, you’ll also have the option of working from our Vancouver office, where we already have a couple of great companies underway.

Expa is committed to helping great founders everywhere be successful, so if you are interested in exploring an alternative to the traditional “angel round” or “accelerator” approach, please apply to Expa Labs and perhaps we can team up. There are many great product ideas out there and we want to help as many as possible come to life :)

Applications for our 2017 program are open until March 31, 2017 at Expa.com/labs

Garrett Camp
Expa CEO