Garrett Camp: Uber Co-Founder, Expa and Startup Investing

Brian Nichols is the co-founder of Angel Squad, an angel investing community where aspiring and active angels learn from Hustle Fund’s approach, review curated deal flow, and connect with peers.

Garrett Camp’s name appears across ride-hailing, web discovery, startup investing, and philanthropy. His role changes from one company to the next. For investors, understanding how he builds and backs businesses starts with separating his founding work from Expa’s studio and investment activity.

Who is Garrett Camp?

Garrett Camp is an entrepreneur and investor best known as a co-founder of Uber. He was also the founding CEO of StumbleUpon and is the founder and CEO of Expa, a startup studio that helps create and launch companies. His official biography identifies product and systems design as central to his work.

Camp is Canadian and studied at the University of Calgary, earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in software engineering, according to the National Foundation for American Policy’s founder research.

His career spans three distinct roles: creating products as a founder, helping other founders build companies through a studio, and backing startups through Expa’s investment activity. Those roles explain his connection to a company more precisely than a portfolio list alone.

From StumbleUpon to Uber

StumbleUpon and web discovery

StumbleUpon helped people discover websites based on their interests. Camp served as its founding CEO before the company became part of eBay in May 2007. In 2009, eBay sold StumbleUpon.

The company gave Camp experience with a consumer product, recommendation systems, and the work of running a startup. His later career continued to include consumer-facing businesses alongside software sold to other companies.

Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick at Uber

Camp conceived and designed Uber’s original service. In co-founder Travis Kalanick’s founding account, the idea took shape during conversations in Paris in late 2008. The early concept involved sharing the cost of a driver and using an iPhone app to request a car.

Camp began working on the app in earnest in March 2009. Kalanick became more involved that summer, helping move the prototype toward a business and recruit operating leadership. Uber launched in San Francisco in 2010.

That chronology separates the idea, prototype, and launch. Camp’s contribution began with identifying a transportation problem and designing a service around it. Kalanick helped develop the operating company. Their shared co-founder title covers different early responsibilities.

What Garrett Camp does at Expa

Camp founded Expa in 2013. A startup studio works with founders on creating companies, including developing an idea, designing a product, forming a team, and supplying capital. Expa’s support includes branding, operations, recruiting, and introductions to other investors.

Expa also makes early-stage investments in companies. Its April 2022 third-fund announcement described a $200 million fund for both studio building and backing founders. The announcement explicitly separated companies created through its studio from companies supported through venture investments.

That distinction matters when you read about “Garrett Camp investments.” Expa can help originate a company or invest in an existing founding team. Neither relationship, by itself, establishes that Camp wrote a personal check. Expa’s funding also shouldn’t be confused with Camp’s personal wealth.

A studio can contribute work as well as money. Its involvement may start before there is a finished product or a complete founding team. An angel investor usually has a different time commitment and level of responsibility, even when that investor helps with hiring, customer introductions, or product decisions.

Companies connected to Garrett Camp and Expa

Expa’s public company records include studio-created businesses and venture-backed startups. A personal investment by Camp requires a separate individual attribution.

Companies built with Expa

• Current: Founded by Stuart Sopp, Current is a consumer financial technology company built with Expa’s support. Sopp described that contribution directly: “Our partnership with Expa allowed us to take Current from a concept and infrastructure to a full-fledged challenger bank.” Sopp’s account appears in Expa’s Current profile.
• Aero: The semi-private air-travel business began as an Expa Studio company conceived by Camp. In its September 2022 Aero founder interview, Expa described his work with then-CEO Uma Subramanian on the concept. Aero is a consumer-facing service, so Camp’s company-building work extends beyond business software and infrastructure.

Expa-backed companies and its wider network

Radar, Fabric, and Loop appear in Expa’s company network. They show several ways software can support another business’s operations:

• Radar: Location software for features such as geofencing, which detects entry into or exit from a defined area, plus trip tracking and address lookup.
• Fabric: Headless-commerce software, which separates a retailer’s customer-facing shopping experience from the systems that support commerce behind it.
• Loop: Logistics-payments software that helps businesses move from freight invoices to payment, including reconciling charges and handling payment workflows.

Commons, formerly Joro, is another Expa-backed company. Founder Sanchali Pal built the consumer app around understanding and reducing the climate impact of spending. Expa participated in its $10 million Series A in 2022, as described in its Commons founder interview.

Convoy belongs in the historical record with a clear status distinction. Expa named the digital freight business among its seed-backed companies in 2022. In November 2023, Flexport acquired Convoy’s technology stack, explicitly excluding the company and its liabilities. Flexport later sold the Convoy Platform to DAT Freight & Analytics in July 2025. Flexport’s transaction account documents both events.

A company’s place in a network, a past funding round, and a later sale of its technology each describe something different. None establishes how much an individual investor earned.

Camp’s philanthropy

Camp joined the Giving Pledge in 2017. In his pledge letter, he committed half his assets to charity and described plans to spend time on projects where systems design could help solve social problems.

Camp also founded the Camp Foundation, a nonprofit research organization and charitable foundation. It supports research into infrastructure, sustainability, and conservation projects. This philanthropic work is separate from Expa’s startup building and venture investing.

What angel investors can learn from his career

Camp’s work offers concrete examples of product design, company formation, and operating support. We see three useful lessons for angels, without treating his career as a formula for investment returns.

Start with the customer’s problem

Radar and Loop illustrate the appeal of infrastructure software: a product can address a task another business needs to perform repeatedly. Location tracking can support a delivery experience. Invoice reconciliation can reduce manual work in logistics.

The investment case still depends on the individual business. A useful product may face expensive integrations, long sales cycles, or customers who prefer their existing workflow. Selling to businesses doesn’t automatically produce better economics or a durable advantage.

For a hypothetical logistics-software startup, a specific customer’s reason for paying is more useful than the label “infrastructure.” The founder’s case should connect the problem, the buyer with a budget, the product’s cost to deliver, and the alternatives already available.

Match founder ability with practical support

Expa’s studio model puts product and operating work alongside capital. For an angel, that creates a useful question about your own contribution: which problem can your experience help the founder solve?

Our co-founder Eric Bahn explains, “Pre-seed investing and seed investing is largely an exercise of assessing the potential of the founders.” That is our perspective on early-stage investing, separate from Expa’s approach.

A founder’s ability to learn, recruit, sell, and make decisions matters alongside the product concept. Our approach to evaluating early-stage founders turns those broad qualities into observable behavior. Your own operating experience can help you understand that behavior and offer focused support, without taking on a studio’s full workload.

Record your reasoning before the outcome

A famous co-founder’s involvement is one piece of information. It can’t replace a view on the team, customer demand, competition, and risks of the particular company.

In Democratizing Knowledge, our co-founder Elizabeth Yin wrote, “The more disciplined you are in your thought process/rubric, the more you can improve over time.” In practice, that means keeping a decision record: why a customer should buy, what the team still needs to prove, and what evidence would change your view.

Funding announcements and company valuations cannot tell you whether that reasoning was sound or what an investor ultimately received. Startup investments are speculative, can remain illiquid for years, and can lose all their value. Most bets may fail, even when the founder has an impressive history.

If you want practice evaluating early-stage companies and comparing your reasoning with other investors, apply to Angel Squad. Our community brings together education, curated deal flow, and peer discussion so you can develop your own investment judgment.