a16zTravis Kalanick: How AI Will Transform the Physical World
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
45 min read · 9,148 words- 0:00 – 0:53
Intro
- TKTravis Kalanick
We're competing for the next industrial revolution. People said, "Are you pissed off about Uber? Does that grind you?" When you fall in love again, you don't think about the ex very much. We had a [censored] massive high-fidelity playbook on how to not get attention for anything we did. A lot of the things that would've happened with Uber over time are things we're doing now. It's basically multiple trillion-dollar industries that are gonna get automated. We talk about digital AI and what it does to the enterprise, but these industries on their own are big.
- ETErik Torenberg
Do you think you were successful because of what you did versus in spite of what you did?
- TKTravis Kalanick
If you don't fight for the best idea, then what idea are you fighting for? You're fighting for the mediocre idea, an idea that's gonna make you less good than if you went for the best idea.
- ETErik Torenberg
The real question-
- TKTravis Kalanick
[laughs]
- ETErik Torenberg
... is when are you guys gonna buy Uber?
- TKTravis Kalanick
Um...
- 0:53 – 9:00
The Bits & Atoms Video: Uber's Vision from 10 Years Ago
- TKTravis Kalanick
Okay. So first of all, I don't even know how I ended up here.
- ETErik Torenberg
Can't do that to us.
- TKTravis Kalanick
How did I end up here? How did I get here? What, what? I have, I have way better friends. No, you're not feeling it? Okay, you're not feeling it. Okay, you're not feeling it. I thought it was really... You know, I have really great friends out there that weren't invited this evening, but they're good friends. Well-
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- TKTravis Kalanick
That's true. Okay. So, uh, I think a lot of folks know that sort of my whole thing, and you hear me talk about it all the time, digitizing the physical world, Bits to Atoms, this kinda thing. Um, you know, some people are like, "Oh, yeah, physical AI. Of course, he's gonna say that. That makes sense." We've been doing this for a long time, okay? This is a continuation of a lot of the awesome things we did back in the Uber day. So I'm gonna show you a video from 10 years ago.
- SPSpeaker
[gentle music] Consider the bit, the building block of the digital world. It was invented just 70 years ago, yet in its short life it has changed the way we communicate, do business, and live almost every aspect of our lives. For Uber, the bit represents our technology. It's complex, precise, and advanced, but when it's expressed, it is effortless and refined. And if you think the bit is a big deal, consider the atom. Born 13.8 billion years ago, the atom is responsible for everything, from the BLT, to moms everywhere, to New York City. And for us, the atom signifies our rapidly improving cities, the goods we move from place to place, and most importantly, the people we serve. Until a few short years ago, atoms and bits existed in entirely different worlds, but then something happened. At Uber, we asked, "What if we brought these two worlds together? What would that look like?" It looks like this. We are able to create safe, low-cost transportation options, like Uber Pool and UberX. We are able to create efficient and more reliable ways of getting people the things they need. We are able to deliver fresh-cooked meals from the most popular, iconic restaurants within minutes. And someday, safe, efficient movement of people and things at a giant scale. Most of us don't think about bits or atoms much, if ever. We think about how to get from here to there, the people in our lives, the millions of tiny dramas that play out across the world each day, the human stuff. Uber ultimately succeeds because we think about the human stuff first. But the way we do it, that's our secret. We leave no bit or atom unturned to create industries that serve people, and not the other way around.
- TKTravis Kalanick
So we, I talk about digitizing the physical world all the time. I've been doing it for 10 fricking years. Uh, I think I'm making a lot of the folks that are at Uber, they're like, "We're tired of it. Please stop talking about bits and atoms. This is crazy. I don't even understand what you're talking about." Look, we know what bits are. Bits, the bits world is a computer, and those of us who were engineers, computer science, et cetera, and some of us who weren't, we know what that is. The three core computing resources, CPU manipulates the bits. Storage stores bits. Network moves bits from point A to point B. But if you're digitizing the physical world, you're treating atoms like bits. And you're like, "Well, I know that CPU manipulates the bits. What manipulates atoms?" That's manufacturing or digitized manufacturing. Storage stores bits. What stores atoms? That's real estate. Network moves bits from point A to point B. What moves atoms? Well, that's transport or logistics. So we didn't exactly think of it... We were close, but we didn't exactly think of it this way at the time, but Uber was network for the physical world. Digitized transportation, but it's not totally digitized. Like, you see the Waymos out there. Okay, now we're getting, we're getting there. Of course, I think people are still driving them from the Philippines or something like this. But, but they're go- it's going digital. But the thing is, and, and this is something that's interesting for entrepreneurs generally, especially in the physical world, digitized manufacturing and digitized real estate still has a long way to go. Huge amount of innovation, uh, left to go And so we have advanced. We've been working really hard. A lot of folks think I'm back, but, like, I'm like, "Dude, I've been working my ass off the whole time. I just haven't been talking about it." Um, what if, what if you're making atoms-based computers, digitized manufacturing, real estate, and network for the physical world? Or, or, sorry, CPU net, uh, storage and network for the physical world. What if you're just the OEM that makes food computers, mining computers, or take your industry and put computer behind it? What if you are doing sort of this, you're making industrial atoms-based computers? That's kinda how we think about what we do. And, you know, we look around us, and you're like the physical world. You're like, you look at OpenAI's doing really well. Anthropic was, was doing pretty well. Um, but look around you. Everything we see, whether it's this room or any room or anywhere you go, everything you see was either grown or mined, manufactured, and moved. Everything. And so we look at what we do as industrial AI, and I sort of have a nice little definition there. Systems of software, sensors, robotics, and AI used to automate operations of entire industrial sectors. Okay, that's what we do. I don't know if anybody else does it. I mean, there are people doing it that they don't, they don't call it this. We're one of the main guys doing this, okay? So we're gonna go through a couple of our, of our atoms-based computers. So the first one's a food computer. Atoms Food, infrastructure for better food. But the real question is, can you make a meal that's prepared and delivered to you so efficient that it approaches the cost of going to the grocery store? You're like, "Okay, well, that's a pretty good question. If you can do it, it's awesome, but what would it take?" Well, it means that your manufacturing has to be automated, so we have robotics that basically do the production of food. Let's call that between six and eight, between six and eight dollars per meal, okay? Um, there's lots of cool things we're gonna do in the future here. Um, you also need to be able to move the food, whether it be inside of a facility that, where it's being made or actually robotic couriers, what I like to call autonomous burritos. You roboticize production. You roboticize the logistics and transportation of, of, of, of food, but you still need a space to do it. This goes back to that sort of atoms-based computer, right? You still need real estate, industrial real estate where that robotic production happens and where the robotic logistics occurs. That's our food computer.
- 9:00 – 14:44
Atoms Mining, Food Computers & Autonomous Machines
- TKTravis Kalanick
Atoms Mining. Uh, we have a really cool mission. Uh, I've gotten super geeked out on mining. I love it. Like, I, I'm loving it more every day. Um, uh, more productive mines to power Earth's industries. What makes superintelligence? Well, it's, it's chips, and it's energy. We know that. Where do the chips come from? Chips come from the ground. Where does the energy come from? And a lot of people are like, "Oh, it comes from the sun." Yeah, it comes from the sun, but how are you capturing it from the sun? From stuff made from the ground, right? So being in the ground at this sort of almost like this primitive of physical AI is like a super interesting place, and when you're automating that thing, it's super interesting. So when we talk about mining, we're talking about, you know, we go to goldmine CEOs, and we're like, "Would you like twenty percent more gold per year?" We haven't heard no. Uh, but they say, "Prove it," and that's kind of the fun part. Um, but it means your OpEx is lower, and it means, by the way, these mines are pretty damn unsafe, and so making these places a way safer is also part of the purpose of what we're doing. And so you go, okay, well, I li- I-- When I talk about mining, I like to p- talk about digitized storage. What is digitized storage in mining? It's called land, right? This is storage for the mining computer. And this is network, right? 'Cause you're moving, you're moving the rocks. This is network. Um, this is me by one of those vehicles. Check that out, okay? I'm standing next to a TCP packet. There's like eight people understood what I just said. But look at that fucking thing. So fully loaded, that's probably like two million pounds, all right? And, uh, this is an autonomous mining machine operating on our stuff. There were probably about three drones that were injured in this, in the, in the filming of this video. But CPU is really interesting in mining too, right? Like, how do you process the material to make it the metal and mineral that we need to, to do all the things that we do to push civilization forward, uh, progress forward? There's lots of really cool things, um, to automate here. You guys ever see these things? These, th-this is called flotation. Uh, you see these when you're flying over. Most people don't know what this is, but this is about distilling, uh, material, uh, down to the actual metal or mineral that you're trying to go for. This is a lithium plant, by the way. Uh, and then, of course, all that stuff has to be orchestrated, so you need software, almost like an operating system, for that computer that's sort of moving things around and making sure it's doing exactly what needs to happen. And then we have transport, which I call wheel base for robots. It's not exactly a computer. It's part of a computer. If you're not doing humanoids, right? Humanoids are like low scale- do low scale tasks in human environments. If you're doing high scale tasks, industrial scale tasks, you are going to make specialized machines that move and act in the physical world. The key part is move. If they're moving, they gotta have wheels. If they have wheels, you gotta, you gotta make the autonomy for those machines, those specialized robotics which are transforming that industry. Um, and if you depend on only one or two companies that exist, you're not going very far. Um, so autonomy's sort of like a critical part or a critical platform that you have to first make for yourself. Um, but there's lots of other industries that you can make it for, right? So we know Phelps is the gold medals guy, but I like to say that transport is full of silver medals, right? A lot of people think about ride-sharing as the gold medal. What about food delivery? What about parcel delivery? What about personal autonomy? What about trucking freight? What about off-road autonomy, like with mining? There's many hundred, multi-hundred billion dollar industries that are gonna be powered by these specialized robotics and that are made for industry, these computers made for industry. And here's sort of like a breakdown of some really interesting, just several of the silver medals that are out there. And I say, look, if you make autonomy and you make it really fast, faster than, than Waymo's making it, let's just say, uh, you... There's a dark horse angle. Like, I don't know if you guys are like Kentucky Derby guys or not, but like there is a dark horse angle here, which is pretty interesting. But the silver medals alone are fricking insane. And so I call what we build progress machines. And what does it, like, what does that mean? It's like, well, I'm like, well, at the company, sort of our culture is about discovering valuable unknown truths. Because if you can dis- if you, if you are good at finding valuable unknown truths, then it means you're going to know a lot of things other people don't know. And if you know a lot of things that other people don't know, it means you can do a lot of things that other people can't do. And the better you are at those valuable unknown truths, the more things you're gonna be able to do that other people can't do, which means you're bringing change faster and faster in, like in a shorter amount of time.
- 14:44 – 22:41
The Final Boss: Resistance to Change & the Second Industrial Revolution
- TKTravis Kalanick
That's called progress. That progress is everything that's powered civilization for since the beginning, including now. But there's a, what I call the final boss. The final boss for progress, like the, the boss you gotta, you, you have to go up against, and every one of the entrepreneurs in this room knows it. It's called resistance to change. It's natural because, like, you know, a lot of times change is bad. Um, and so you have to deliver an overwhelming amount of progress to make your change happen. And so I like to make analogies to... We're almost done, guys. I like to make analogies to the Second Industrial Revolution. There's like, we don't fully... I think a lot of folks here may not be totally schooled on what happened 100 years ago, 150 years ago, but there's a lot of analogies for what happened then to, like, what's happening now. And by the way, we all think, "Oh, founder mode, let's go." Founder mode, guys, 150 years ago, they did founder mode for real. This is a picture, a illustration. You don't see, that guy on the top has a gun. He's about to shoot Henry Frick. Henry Frick was a partner of Carnegie. They revolutionized steel. Like, you talk about everything being mined and all the buildings and things that we see around us, all the infrastructure, et cetera, started with Carnegie and Frick. Um, an anarchist came into his office and shot him twice and stabbed him several times. Uh, he didn't die. While the bullets were getting pulled out, the dude kept working. Founder mode. All right. And by the way, there's other interesting things that happened back then. Super interesting stuff. Okay? It- those of you who know about, like, Westinghouse and Thomas Edison. Edison was all about direct current. Westinghouse was all about alternating current. We kinda know what won. Like, yes, I have a flashlight with direct current, but basically AC won because it could go long distances. Edison was on the wrong side of this equation big time, but he wasn't going down without a fight, so he marketed. He was the ultra OG of FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt. He was the ultra OG. You know what he did? He did public displays of electrocution of animals to show that AC electricity was unsafe. He was the OG. Now, we see this in the current world. Okay? The analogies, they play. I'm just saying, okay? That might go online. This was a homestead protest, okay? Homestead protest. This is a Carnegie-Frick thing. It actually led to him getting shot actually. Uh, and it was about, uh... it was a, a, a strike, sorry, a homestead strike, and it was a, basically a unionization thing, and they weren't willing to go union, and there was obviously a scuffle of, of sorts. Um, and it's I mean, it's one of them... It was the first big, huge union situation for how we think about it today. Probably the archetype for it. And we're starting to see those things, right? So like, of course, go back to 2014, Uber, uh, well, there was a strike across all of Europe, in all the major European cities. They lit cars on fire. They did crazy things to stop that kind of progress. This is the final boss, the resistance to change. And like, you know, they say history doesn't rh- this doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. Okay. [laughs] And not everybody can read it. Okay. So the Uber and Lyft drivers are now protesting at the Waymo office, okay? There's a... What's this? Okay, fair enough. See, that happens. Okay. But we're ma- we're bringing progress forward. There will be resistance. It is going to be a thing, and there are a ton of entrepreneurs, super badass entrepreneurs in this room. Like, we have to be steel-eyed. We have to be hardcore, um, like the guys on the invite that I sent, right? Uh, we've got Ford, we've got Carnegie, we've got J.P. Morgan. Uh, we got all the guys. Westinghouse on the right. Uh, we have to look to... We always think that we did things first, but actually, there were dudes that did it harder, better than us, for sure, always. They walked to school uphill in the snow both ways, I promise. All right? And they had those things, right? They had the stuff, right? And it's like, what you see in the press about what that stuff is, it isn't always what the stuff really is. Look at that, empathy. But how do you lead 20,000 people and get them oriented towards a beautiful mission? And those 20,000 people are great minds, optimistic, good people. How do you do that? You can't do that by being a bad person. But you have to be hardcore. I don't know if you have to be as hardcore as Frick, but you gotta, you gotta bring it. Um, and there's a lotta, there's a lot of things. We got to hold, and we got, like, the entrepreneurs, and we gotta, we gotta do this. And by the way, the folks that support us or the executives that are making magic happen, too, like, you gotta be all these things.
- SPSpeaker
Big into the lead, a sophomore from Columbus-
- TKTravis Kalanick
And so at the company, we have this thing called the champion's, champion's heart.
- SPSpeaker
Dorned had been running sixth.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Maybe hit pause real quick.
- SPSpeaker
Dorned last year scored 23 points for the Golden Gophers in their Big Ten championship.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Is that pausable? It's not.
- SPSpeaker
So they're really relying on getting a lot of points from her this weekend, and-
- TKTravis Kalanick
Oh, they turned down. So we have this thing called champion's heart, which is, um, you know, in life you get knocked down. Like what just happened to her. Uh, but if you put everything you got on the field, and when you get knocked down, you keep getting back up, it's very difficult to fail, right? Uh, you gotta turn the, the volume back up.
- SPSpeaker
May catch the leaders. Wow. Wow. She's got one. This is a gutsy effort by Donovan. Oh. Can she pull it off? She's moving to third. Donovan coming down the stretch on the outside. Donovan coming on strong. Donovan all the way. Donovan. Yo. Yo. She did it. Wow. [laughs]
- TKTravis Kalanick
And this is just a thing we believe at our company, and I think it's a thing that most of the successful entrepreneurs believe in. Um, and so, you know, look, a lot of folks, they say, "Hey, Travis is back," or, you know, I think it might have even been on your invite. [laughs] But, uh, I've actually been working for eight years. I just haven't been talking about it. Um, and so it is good to be back in this way 'cause I was kinda in a cave for a while. Um, and I wanna thank everybody for being here. And, uh, I think, uh, Erik, Ben, and I are gonna have a, a nice conversation. And, uh, again, thank you so much.
- ETErik Torenberg
Thank you, Travis. [clapping]
- BHBen Horowitz
Is it working?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah, we're good. So the reason why people loved our podcast that we did, the first one that we did together, is because we just got right into it, right into the good stuff. So we're gonna do that here, and then we're gonna open it up for-
- TKTravis Kalanick
Oh, man. I'm scared
- ETErik Torenberg
... for Q&A. So-
- TKTravis Kalanick
Erik's good at this, and it stresses me out. All right. What do you
- 22:41 – 28:13
Why Travis Didn't Buy Lyft
- TKTravis Kalanick
got, Erik?
- ETErik Torenberg
So Travis, why didn't you buy Lyft?
- TKTravis Kalanick
[laughs]
- ETErik Torenberg
And do you regret it? What, what would you do if you can go back in time?
- TKTravis Kalanick
Um, I think this will surprise a lot of people, but Lyft's culture was very different than ours.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- TKTravis Kalanick
Uh, maybe it started with the purple, the pink mustache. Um, but I think it's interesting, right, when it comes to entrepreneurs that are in that moment where you could acquire something. By the way, I got a lot of shit for this for a long time. So, so yeah, the, the, uh...
- ETErik Torenberg
The culture didn't align.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Yeah, the, yeah, yeah. The culture didn't mix. And, um, when you meet with somebody and you're gonna acquire them, and there's so much goodness that could come from it. By the way, we're in some crazy war, probably spending a billion dollars a year on it or some insane amount of money. Um, you want it to work.
- ETErik Torenberg
So you wouldn't do anything different?
- TKTravis Kalanick
I wouldn't do anything different. And it's easy to say now, but I got a lot of shit for that for a long time. But it was basically, I would sit across the table from the guys, and I just didn't... It was just clear that we were very culturally different, and you couldn't... It'd get harder and harder to make that happen. So anyways.
- BHBen Horowitz
Yeah. I, I, by the way, I agree with that.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Yeah.
- BHBen Horowitz
I think it... I mean, you, you'd have to do the counterfactual if Travis was still running Uber, uh, because-
- TKTravis Kalanick
What would that look like if Travis was still running Uber today? Well, I think it would've been the original culture. Uh, and, uh, the culture they went to, which was a reaction to, um, the resistance just ended up being, uh, a much more milquetoast culture than the or- the original Uber culture was, uh, a special, um, very pronounced culture. Uh, my favorite thing in that, um, culture doc was meritocracy/toe-stepping or toe-stomping, I can't remember. Toe-stomping. I always thought of it as stomping, but- Meritocracy and toe-stepping. Toe-stepping. Yeah. Which is kind of like, "Fuck your feelings." Y- you know, like, "We're, we're gonna... We're here to build. We're gonna do it. Like, we're gonna push as hard as we can," and like, yeah, you may get your toe stepped on, but, like, you gotta keep going. You gotta keep bringing it. And that, uh, to me, that was the part- Mm ... that, um, got diluted when, when Travis went out, and it was... In, in some ways it was the core part. It, it was a very s- essential element to at least what I saw, you know, kind of from the side in it. Yeah, we've rebranded it, the, the current company at Atoms. We call it, uh, the best idea wins. But, uh, you know, but the toe-stepping is important because you've gotta... There's so many people that are not willing to fight for the best idea 'cause they're gonna upset somebody else, and if you don't fight for the best idea, then what idea are you fighting for? You're fighting for the mediocre idea, the politically expedient idea, an idea that's gonna make you less good than if you went for the best idea. Yeah. And so having everybody oriented towards that is a cultural vibe that helps you win. Yeah. W- when Andy Grove was at Intel, he used to call that constructive confrontation- Yeah ... which is the, which is the only way to get better. You have to get tested. There's a Polymarket on when Travis is gonna come back at Uber or when they're gonna ask Travis to come back at Uber, but the real question is when are you guys gonna buy Uber? I think we still have a lot to earn. It's a fun... It's fun. Um, a, so much of what I'm doing and, you know, people go, "What would you be doing if?" And I can't say all the things that I would be doing at Uber I'm doing now, uh, there's a lot of things I'm not, but it is a continuation of the things. And a lot of the things that would've happened with Uber over time are things we're doing now, and, uh, if those things play out and you take over, like, look, I outlined what industrial AI is and where it's going over time. It's basically multiple hu- like hundred billion or trillion-dollar industries that are gonna get automated. We talk about digital AI and what it does to the enterprise, but these industries on their own are big. Um, and so this is a new industrial age that basically, uh, is sort of coming. I compare it to the second industrial revolution. So if we're correct and we execute well, then it's a thing because you're like, is food gonna get automated? Is production of food gonna get automated, and is the delivery of food gonna get automated? I think we'd all say yes, and if that's the case, then there will be a service that, that prepares and delivers that food at cheaper than going to the grocery store. And if that happens, this occurs, and food will be completely revolutionized. Will mining get automated? And if it does, not just the movement of the materials, but every part of mining, then what is a mining company? It just owns real estate. It will be completely revolutionized, a multi-trillion dollar market, and there's many of these. And, um, well, we gotta, now we gotta deliver, so...
- 28:13 – 36:00
How Travis Has Changed as a Founder
- TKTravis Kalanick
Talk about how you're different as a founder building Atoms than you were building Uber in terms of what have you changed, what have you kept the same? When you reflect back, what do you think you were successful because of what you did versus in spite of what you did? Uh, the... Look, w- uh, some of how I did Uber is very related to what I did before Uber, and what I did before Uber was, um, I failed. [chuckles] I, I mean, I, I got, my, my company barely got acquired. Like, I did the four s- first four years without a salary. I had socks that said, "Blood, sweat, and ramen." You know, it was stuff like that. And, um, when you're that, when you're that on the line and you're on welfare and you've gotta make ends meet and then you go into something like Uber, which is like ultra product market fit times a thousand, but you still think you're poor and you can't, you can't go to the grocery store next week, you get too close to the line. Like, I would go right up against the line. I, some people might have guessed that. But I'd go right up against the line, and the only way you knew that I didn't get chalk on my shoe was you'd get electro- electromagnetic scanning microscope and you would zoom in, reverse angle, and you'd be like, "Okay, he's fine." But if you get big and you roll that way, you get to a place where people y- y- you're bringing a lot of change really fast, and you haven't brought trust along for the ride. Um, so I would say today I'm a few inches off that line. You don't need to do the slow motion replay to know that I did the right thing. I'd stand by every decision I made at Uber. But you don't need to guess anymore. It's, like, super clean. You don't have to be that close. Um- The other thing that's interesting, and I think sometimes, you know, the, the, the new, the-the-the young entrepreneurs that are just coming up right now, they don't totally get it, is that when you get into your third and fourth, I don't know, this may be even my fifth at this point, company, you get fricking really good at doing stuff. And so things that used to take me a day or three days, a lot of stress, anxiety, like, "How am I gonna do this?" Take me, like, 45 minutes. And that's a beautiful thing. There are things you don't get. Like, like I'm like so used to adversity at this point that it's kinda normal, so I don't get as pissed off. But being pissed off makes you good as an entrepreneur. So like I gotta make sure I'm still fired up. Like, come on.
- BHBen Horowitz
You gotta get that, that pissed off energy.
- TKTravis Kalanick
You fucked with me, I'm gonna kick your ass.
- BHBen Horowitz
Yeah.
- TKTravis Kalanick
You know, the... It's easier when you're 25, [laughs] I think. I don't know, I'm just not as... I'm like, "Ah, dude, whatever. It's fine. You be you, dude. It's good." You get too used to adversity, and that's kind of a problem. But, uh, yeah, so I'd say those are some of the fun changes, yeah.
- ETErik Torenberg
What's a, an example of something that used to take a long time but is now just so much easier? Like a...
- TKTravis Kalanick
Look, I wrote a vision note, um, when we rolled out Atoms. It was a few months ago. It was like, like, uh, you know, look, uh, biased obviously, but like it was very, I think, a very well-written vision note. Uh, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, that would've taken me, I don't know, hundreds of hours.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- TKTravis Kalanick
And it just flowed.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Like, okay, I can't say I wasn't thinking about it a lot, but when I was doing the writing, it actually just flowed and just happened. I'm like, "Holy shit, it just happened. Holy cow." Like the one I just did for the, for-
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah
- TKTravis Kalanick
... for this funding, like, okay, I procrastinated, but you know, that's a thing. But like once I did the writing, I'm like, "Oh dude, we got it." It took like 45 minutes. I'm like-
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah
- TKTravis Kalanick
... "This is amazing."
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- TKTravis Kalanick
And it, that's related to presentation, communication-
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah
- TKTravis Kalanick
... strategy, this kinda thing, uh, I'm faster at, which is pretty awesome.
- ETErik Torenberg
Ben, how have you seen Travis evolve since you first got to know him? And, and comment more broadly, we have a lot of repeat entrepreneurs in the room in terms of when, like Travis, you have a, a massive success that also has some mistakes along the way. You know, what, what lessons do you learn for the next time versus, you know, what do you make sure to keep and continue because that's what, that's what got you there?
- BHBen Horowitz
Well, I, I thought that was actually a really good way to characterize it, which was, you know, he thought he was in survival mode when he had 20,000 people working for him, and that, that, that idea, um, is dangerous, uh, when you have such a big organization. It, it c- it's dangerous on two levels. One, it's dangerous 'cause you're not, as he said, bringing enough people along with you. But it's also dangerous in that you've got all these people working for you, um, and their interpretation of that idea could be a lot. You know, you kinda have to [laughs] you have to stay way on this side of the line so the guy, you know, eight levels down doesn't do something stupid. And so that, you know, that's a big change, I would say. But, like, he was always great. Always. I mean, that's why it was so tragic that we didn't invest in Uber. Um, but yeah. And then, and, and, and, and I think, like, when you, you do get... I, I think everything comes easier. It was... What, what's the Prince line? W- people say nothing comes too easy, but when you got it, nothing comes too hard. That's like... That, that's where he got to.
- TKTravis Kalanick
The, I... The one thing I'd add to it, though, and again, I feel like I don't wanna prescribe to some, to folks. Like everybody sh- a lot of folks here already know this, but it's like when it gets easy, it's time to push hard. Y- if, I always used to say, like, uh, if something, if it's getting easy, it's about to get really fucking hard, and you don't want it to be that way. You want to make it hard versus hard make it hard on you, if that makes sense. Uh, yeah. And I've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs over the years where they're like, "Oh man, we're just cranking. We're on easy street right now." And I'm like, "Dude, you are about to get your ass whooped and you don't even know it." Uh, now I know that too because of course I've experienced it myself, so.
- BHBen Horowitz
Yeah.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Yeah.
- BHBen Horowitz
Yeah, that's a, that, that's a very good insight.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Yeah, so it's-
- BHBen Horowitz
I notice that all the time when I talk to entrepreneurs when they start going, "Oh yeah, I just, yeah, it's, it's easy. It's going so well. We don't have competition. You know, I just hired this guy. He had an offer from Anthropic for $5 billion, but he took my $400,000 a year job," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, "Bro, check yourself for wounds 'cause I assure you you're bleeding. You know, like-
- TKTravis Kalanick
Yeah
- BHBen Horowitz
... you're in trouble."
- TKTravis Kalanick
For sure. But, but there's times when it's actually easy. That's a guy pretending, so I call that the fake it till you make it, which he's lying to himself plus others. But there's actual times when it's easy, but it's because you're not continuing to push. So it's one thing when you're just not winning but you're pretending like you are, and there's another thing when you're winning but you're taking it easy and you're about to start losing. Yeah.
- 36:00 – 46:11
From $4M Pre to a16z's Biggest Check Ever
- ETErik Torenberg
Ben, uh, oh, Travis, when you, your first external round at Uber, the venture round, I believe was at 4 million post or, or something like that.
- TKTravis Kalanick
It's 4 million pre. You're talking about at Uber.
- ETErik Torenberg
First round, yeah, at Uber.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Our first round at Uber was 4 million pre.
- ETErik Torenberg
This one, you know, several orders of magnitude, uh, uh, bigger.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Yeah.
- ETErik Torenberg
Um, Ben, I believe this is one of if not our biggest check, biggest check you've ever written.
- BHBen Horowitz
Yeah.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Certainly the biggest check I ever wrote [laughs] Uh, you know, uh, when did you get to conviction that we were 100% do- Like, what, what was your process like? I was at 100 con- A million dollars ... I, when I first started talking to him. Well, as soon as I knew what it was, um, the only question for me was, uh, was it gonna be one thing? Yeah. Uh, because, look, I've known Travis for, for many, many, many years, and, um, he's always been the opposite of the... Like, our conversations were always the real shit. Like, when we... I, I mean, I was on the board of Lyft, uh, and I was talking to him about Uber, and he would tell me, like, all the stuff the Chinese ride-sharing companies were doing to him, breaking into his apps, giving shit away for free, this and that and the other. And he was fired up about that. Like, "Oh, if I can deal with these guys, the rest of the world's gonna be no problem." And there, there are just not that many... There are very few, I'm telling you, I've, I've been in this a while, very few entrepreneurs that come at it like that. So I knew if we could put money in Travis... And he was still... The other thing that I learned was he was still Travis. [laughs] Like, he, he hadn't, like, turned into... He wasn't living his best life. [laughs] He wasn't doing that. Um, so yeah, it was a very... I was at conviction very fast. I think, um, a lot of people don't, some people know this, but not a lot, is that we actually had separate companies going. And so when I went to do the fundraise, I kinda showed up at a16 kind of like the guy with the trench coast- trench coat with a bunch of watches saying, "You want a watch? Which watch would you like? I got lots of stuff. Do, do you want some food stuff? Actually, I got different parts of the food thing. What do you like? I've got some mining stuff. That's pretty cool." And they're like, "We just want the stuff." And we heard that from the first few people that we talked to. And so actually the, the tricky part about this deal w- or, or the, what added trickiness to this deal, uh, that made us sweat a little bit and just made it hard was, like, I had to merge separate entities with different investors and put it together, um, which was pretty interesting 'cause, like, how do you do a ratio when certain things are very early? Um, but, uh, but it's super great 'cause it was like you see some of the things with Elon, and he's starting to put the pieces back together. He did... He's not only phenomenal, of course, on all the five or six or eight things, and of course eight, a16 is in most or all of them. Um, but he was managing five or six or seven different companies, and so I was really trying to put it together under a single roof, which is amazing. He's doing it many, you know, a couple decades later. But, I mean, it's, it makes things better in some ways, yeah. Before we get to Q&A, lastly, Travis, why don't you say a couple words about what it's like to have a lot of the Uber gang back together. Yeah. Uh, sort of, you know, putting the pieces back together. You know- Yeah ... Anthony, whose company you bought. There's a bunch of people in this room- Yeah ... who were alongside with you for the first round. Talk, talk- Look, when I first got going... Look, I was on the board of Uber when I first got going, so I got thousands of inbound from actual Uber employees that are like, "Let's go." And I had to be careful because if you're on the board of a company, you can't hire thousands of their people. [laughs] Bad look. It's not, it's not just a bad look, it's actually illegal. Yeah. So there's that too. And, um, [laughs] and I'm very familiar with the law here. Okay. Um, so you pick your guys, you pick your spots, the whole thing. Um, but you know, there's a few, there's a lot of really special people in this room. I mean, uh, Gautam, who was the CFO over at Uber, has joined Atoms. Uh, that's a recent thing. Ganesh, who was a, a VP or SVP of engineering over at Uber, has just joined Atoms. And there's a lot of young guns at Uber that joined that are now the big guns, right? There's a guy, Brian Atwell, who's one of our engineering leads on the food side and on infrastructure. Uh, Anthony Levandowski, of course. Uh, Erik Meyhofer, who ran Uber's at- uh, advanced technology group, he's running Food Robotics. Like, the list goes on, guys. Uh, oh, Jessica, uh, uh, Jessica Morton, she was head of Uber Eats, uh, Japan. And I went to Japan when we first got going, and I met with Masa 'cause, like, maybe Masa's gonna be in. And, like, I could never get over him just stealing my stuff and then investing in, like, eight other companies that do what I do. And then I met with Jess because that was, like, my number one in Jap- uh, like my number one thing to, or my number one, number two thing to do there. But she's now doing a lot of really cool stuff. Now, we're not just an Uber company. We have more executives that are not Uber than are, but there's a lot of heart from that time and people who were there. And it's like, what do they say? Run it back. Yeah. But there's also run it forward, which is do it new, different. Don't be what you were before. Um, so anyways, we're having fun. Speaking of special people in this room, I wanna open it up to, uh, to some Q&A. Uh, Gary.
- SPSpeaker
Travis, congratulations. Uh, my favorite question to ask for especially a room like this is what... If you could, like, send a message in a bottle to the 18 to 22-year-old version of yourself, what would you say?
- TKTravis Kalanick
Um, look, the 18-year-old version of me, uh, was a super geek, uh, pretending not to be. So I would just be like, "Dude, just be a geek. It's gonna be fine." You know, the pretending to not-
- ETErik Torenberg
Right
- TKTravis Kalanick
... be a geek when you're a geek is just a lot of cognitive spa- you know, load that's not necessary. Um, you know, uh, I'm not sure that things would've gone better [laughs] but that's certainly one of the things I probably would've told myself, yeah. Yeah.
- ETErik Torenberg
What about you, Ben?
- BHBen Horowitz
That's a good... I, I just not to worry about, uh, not to worry about stuff, you know. Like, it is what it is. Do what you gotta do. Um, you know, don't d- don't... Wait, like, consequence is gonna be what the consequence is, you know. You gotta find a way out, and you just gotta keep looking till you find it, and there's nothing else to do, so worrying doesn't help at all.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Hmm. No stress.
- BHBen Horowitz
Yeah.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Don't worry, be happy.
- BHBen Horowitz
Yeah. Yeah, don't worry, be... Well, but you need urgency.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Don't, don't be too happy.
- BHBen Horowitz
Yeah, yeah. [laughs] Don't be too happy.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Come on. You gotta be hard.
- ETErik Torenberg
Don't worry, be happy, Travis Plan.
- BHBen Horowitz
Uh, don't, don't, don't be-
- ETErik Torenberg
Don't be too happy
- BHBen Horowitz
... don't be fat and happy, yeah.
- ETErik Torenberg
Okay. Next question. Owen.
- SPSpeaker
Question for Travis. How are you gonna structure all this? Are you gonna have, like, shared resources across-
- TKTravis Kalanick
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... the divisions? Are you gonna have CEOs? Are you gonna have mini boards? Like, how are you thinking of all of that?
- 46:11 – 50:37
Dirty Fuel, Revenge Businesses & Falling in Love Again
- TKTravis Kalanick
Look, most people don't know this, but before... This is a couple companies before Uber. I did a, uh, a, a peer-to-peer file sharing system, got sued for a quarter of a trillion dollars by 33 of the largest media companies in the world, and I was pissed. I did a revenge business, which was I'm gonna do a peer-to-peer CDN like Akamai, BitTorrent meets Akamai before BitTorrent existed, and my whole thing was turn those guys who sued me into customers. It was like a full spite business, like full spite store, like let's go, okay? Um, but I think in many ways the, y- there is a, there is a dirty, there is a dirty revenge or dirty... It's dirty. It can be successful, but it, it ends up being less than what it should be when it comes from the wrong place, if that makes sense. Uh, part of what drove me earlier was a little bit of, like, a fear of failure. A fear of failure, and that can mean long nights where you get little done, and it just means you have this edge, this weird vibe that people are like, "Dude, something's wrong with that guy," right? And it's just a thing. You're just not gonna go all the way, right? When the Uber thing happened and then moved on to new stuff, which was, like, eight months after I left Uber I was doing the new thing, uh, yeah, I, I, I kinda fell in love again, you know? And so people said, "Are you pissed off about Uber? Are you... This thing, like, are you... Does that grind you or, you know, is it on your mind?" And, uh, yeah, it's just like, when you fall in love again, you don't think about the ex very much. And if you come from that place, you can create in a beautiful undirty way, if that makes sense. Yeah. And it's important and, and it's not... That doesn't... You gotta work on it to get to that place probably over time, but by the time I got there, I was there, yeah.
- ETErik Torenberg
Maybe one last question.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Oh, and by the way, you can't be retard maxing to get to that place, okay? For our boy Mark, Ma- for our boy Mark, I gotta still have a debate on that one. All right.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah. Question. You mentioned, I remember this slide. I'll remember this forever. Killer boss- Um, was the killer boss for Atoms, especially in this-
- TKTravis Kalanick
What is a killer boss? What does that mean?
- ETErik Torenberg
Final boss, sorry.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Final boss.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Oh, final boss.
- ETErik Torenberg
Killer boss is my version for fighting.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Look, um, there's huge opportunities here. It's maybe the final boss is... Uh, uh, like I don't know if the final boss, but, like, I'll just, I'll just riff a little bit on this concept, which is there are a lot of people in this room and not in this room who will gladly vanquish me. And I don't mean that in a bad way, but we're competing for the next industrial revolution. Um, you know, Magic John- This is old school. Magic Johnson and Larry Bird were, like, kinda guys, but, like, they'll kick each other's butt, right? So, uh, this is the wrong analogy for this crew, but y- but you get [chuckles] it's like Patrick Ewing, like, you know, some shit. Okay. But, um, so I think there's, there's that is actually pretty important. Is there, like, an ultra... Like, you have to, you always have to think when you go into a space like this, you go, "Who's the best of the best at industrial AI?" Anybody wanna guess? It's really obvious. His, his name rhymes with Shmelon. Okay? He's the best of the best, and he'll just keep going and keep doing lots more, even if what you do now is not what he does now. So if you wanna go final boss mode, I mean, he... I don't even know who his final boss is. Like, people are like, "Dude, Elon's the GOAT." I'm like, "Dude, I'm a baby goat. It's great." Um, you know, but that, maybe he's the final boss, you know? Uh, but mad respect, of course. Uh, he's, he's obviously the best by a long shot. Um, uh, and so, um, anyways, uh, yeah, I'm not sure exactly how to answer, but that was a little riff on it. Yeah.
- 50:37 – 54:37
Be Uniconic: Eight Years in Stealth & the New Media Landscape
- ETErik Torenberg
Maybe we'll, we'll end on, on this question, which is you, you've never left, but you were in a cave for a while. You know, you were-
- TKTravis Kalanick
Hardcore
- ETErik Torenberg
... you were focusing.
- TKTravis Kalanick
I had a, I had a, a presentation that I gave to my leadership team in, like, 2019. The title was Be Uniconic. Be Uniconic. We did, we had a fucking massive high-fidelity playbook on how to not get attention for anything we did. We had thousands of employees who were not allowed to put our company on LinkedIn. It was weird.
- ETErik Torenberg
So this is your coming out party, so, so to speak.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Yeah.
- ETErik Torenberg
You're back in the flow. Ta-talk about how you've seen Silicon Valley or the tech industry at large change from when you were, you know, right in the, in the center in it to you coming back eight years later. W-w-what, what, what would've, what surprised you or what's, what's most notable about where we are as an industry?
- TKTravis Kalanick
Look, I think probably one of the coolest things, and this is part of why I'm out versus not before, uh, is that the media landscape has completely changed. The media landscape 10 years ago, 90% of what was said was very negative. Business had become politics, and we didn't know it. So think of your favorite politician if you have one. I mean, many of you may not have one, but let's just pretend you did, okay? [chuckles] It's fucking hilarious. But let's just say, okay? Uh, take your favorite politician. Are the... Go type his name in on Google. What are... Do you think you're gonna find anything good? It's gonna be just tsunami waves of negativity is what you're gonna find. Of course, if it leads, if it bleeds, it leads, right? And that's human nature, and there's negativity, and that gets the clicks and the whole thing. Um, but we weren't used to it then, and we thought everything that The New York Times said was real, and we know now that that's not even close to true, and it's, uh, we, we now understand. And so the media landscape is like, yeah, you don't have to talk to those guys. And you can go and talk to a David Senra. You can go and talk to, uh, Joe Rogan or name your guy, and it, it's, you can say what you need to say in a, in an environment that's not like a struggle session in Maoist China, right? So that's a big freaking change, and, and I think it's a, you know, Elon buying Twitter is, like, the beginning of us being able to speak our minds and for disagreeing to not be illegal. That's a big deal. We should all thank Elon for that. [clapping] And it allows, so you go, okay, somebody like myself who basically was just like, "Okay, uh, I wanna build. I want to, uh, I, I wanna not think about what The New York Times is writing when I make decisions about what I build." Um, I had to emulate what it's like being a capitalist in Russia, which is their number one KPI is called shut the fuck up, and that's what I did for eight years. In a weird way, it was like that for different reasons, but it was like that. And so we're now out of that mode or getting out of that mode, and let's go, and I think that's the biggest change for all of us in the last eight years, and God bless and, like, hopefully that continues.
- ETErik Torenberg
I think that's a great note to, to wrap on. Travis is back. Travis never left. Give it up for Travis. [clapping] And thank you. [clapping]
Episode duration: 54:50
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Transcript of episode r8qKNFeBPXE
