How a tweet turned Uber's first hire into a billionaire

REUTERS/Beck Diefenbach

Uber head of global operations Ryan Graves (R) eats with fourth grader Frederick Dozier during a nutrition class in San Francisco.

His car-hailing company, most recently valued at $41 billion, was less than a year old at the time.

A guy named Ryan Graves saw Kalanick's tweet and responded.

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"heres a tip. email me :)," Graves said on Twitter. He included his email address too.

Back then, Graves was a normal guy whose work experience included a database administrator position at General Electric and a stint in business development at Foursquare that he acquired by working for them for free after the company initially turned him down.

Five years later, as Forbes' Ellen Huet pointed out, this tweet would make a billionaire out of Graves. 

Kalanick presumably followed up with Graves, who became Uber's first hire. Graves was briefly Uber's CEO before Kalanick replaced him in late 2010. Graves stayed on as Uber's head of global operations, where he remains today.

"Ryan Graves' first day was March 1st and he hit the ground running," Kalanick said in a blog post detailing Uber's origins. "From the day he got going, we spent about 15-20 hours a week working together going over product, driver on-boarding, pricing model, the whole nine. He learned the startup game fast and worked his ass off to build the Uber team and make the San Francisco launch and subsequent growth a huge success." 

Kalanick, Graves, and Uber cofounder Garrett Camp all made Forbes' list of the world's billionaires for the first time this year. Cofounders Kalanick and Camp have a larger stake in the company than Graves does, which explains their larger net worths ($5.3 billion and $5.3 billion, respectively, as opposed to Graves' $1.4 billion).

Uber expanded its Series E round of funding from $1.2 billion to $2.8 billion last month, bringing the total amount of funding raised by Uber to an astounding $5.9 billion.