Travis Kalanick on Building Atoms After Uber

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 X very much. We had a massive high-fidelity playbook on how not to get attention for anything we did.

1. How Travis Has Changed as a Founder

A lot of the things that would have happened with Uber over time are things we're doing now. It's basically multiple trillion-dollar industries that are going to get automated. We talk about digital AI and what it does to the enterprise, but these industries on their own are big.

Do you think you were successful because of what you did versus in spite of what you did?

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 going to make you less good than if you went for the best idea.

The real question is: when are you guys going to buy Uber?

2. The Bits & Atoms Video: Uber's Vision from 10 Years Ago

Okay. So, first of all, I don't even know how I ended up here.

You can't do that to us.

How did I end up here? How did I get here? Why? What? I have way better friends.

No, 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 who weren't invited this evening, but they're good friends.

Well, that's true.

Okay. So, I think a lot of folks know that my whole thing—and you hear me talk about it all the time—is digitizing the physical world, bits to atoms, this kind of thing. Some people are like, “Oh, yeah, physical AI. Of course he's going to say that. That makes sense.” We've been doing this for a long time.

This is a continuation of a lot of the awesome things we did back in the Uber days. I'm going to show you a video from 10 years ago.

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.

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 2 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: the 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, and 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.

I talk about digitizing the physical world all the time. I've been doing it for 10 freaking years. I think a lot of the folks who are at Uber are like, “We're tired of it. Please stop talking about bits and atoms. It's crazy. I don't even understand what you're talking about.”

Look, we know what bits are. The bits world is a computer. Those of us who were engineers or studied computer science, and some of us who weren't, know what that is. The 3 core computing resources: the CPU manipulates the bits, storage stores bits, and the network moves bits from point A to point B.

But if you're digitizing the physical world, you're treating atoms like bits. You're like, “Well, I know that the CPU manipulates the bits. What manipulates atoms?” That's manufacturing, or digitized manufacturing. Storage stores bits. What stores atoms? That's real estate. The network moves bits from point A to point B. What moves atoms? Well, that's transport or logistics.

We didn't exactly think of it this way at the time. We were close, but we didn't exactly think of it this way. Uber was the network for the physical world: digitized transportation. But it's not totally digitized, like you see with Waymo out there. Okay, now we're getting there. Of course, I think people are still driving them from the Philippines or something like this, but it's going digital.

The thing is—and this is something that's interesting for entrepreneurs generally, especially in the physical world—digitized manufacturing and digitized real estate still have a long way to go. There's a huge amount of innovation left to go.

We've advanced. We've been working really hard. A lot of folks think I'm back, but I'm like, “Dude, I've been working my ass off the whole time. I just haven't been talking about it.”

What if you're making atom-based computers: digitized manufacturing, real estate, and a network for the physical world? Or, sorry, the CPU, storage, and network for the physical world. What if you're just the OEM that makes food computers, mining computers, or—you take your industry and put a computer behind it? What if you're doing this? You're making industrial, atom-based computers.

That's kind of how we think about what we do. We look around us and you're like, “The physical world…” You look at OpenAI, which is doing really well. Anthropic was doing pretty well. 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.

We look at what we do as industrial AI. I have a nice little definition there: systems of software, sensors, robotics, and AI used to automate the 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, but they don't call it this. We're one of the main groups doing this.

We're going to go through a couple of our atom-based computers. The first one is Adam's food: infrastructure for better food.

The real question is: can you make a meal that's prepared and delivered to you so efficiently 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?”

It means that your manufacturing has to be automated. We have robotics that basically do the production of food. Let's call that between $6 and $8 per meal. There's a lot of cool stuff we're going to do in the future here.

You also need to be able to move the food, whether it's inside a facility where it's being made or through actual robotic couriers—what I like to call autonomous burritos. You roboticize the production. You roboticize the logistics and transportation of food, but you still need a space to do it.

This goes back to that atom-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.

3. Atoms Mining, Food Computers & Autonomous Machines

Adam's mining. We have a really cool mission: more productive mines to power Earth's industries. What makes superintelligence? Well, it's chips and energy. We know that.

Where do the chips come from? Chips come from the ground. Where does the energy come from? 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?

Being in the ground, at this almost primitive level of physical AI, is a super interesting place. When you're automating it, it's super interesting.

When we talk about mining, we go to gold-mine CEOs and we're like, “Would you like 20% more gold per year?” We haven't heard no. But they say, “Prove it.” And that's kind of the fun part.

It means your OpEx is lower, and it means, by the way, these mines are pretty damn unsafe. Making these places much safer is also part of the purpose of what we're doing.

When I talk about mining, I like to 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 the network, because you're moving the rocks. This is network.

This is me by one of those vehicles. Check that out. I'm standing next to a TCP packet. There are about 8 people who understood what I just said. But look at that fucking thing. Fully loaded, that's probably about 2 million pounds.

This is an autonomous mining machine operating on our stuff. There were probably about 3 drones that were injured during the filming of this video.

But the CPU is really interesting in mining, too, right? How do you process the material to make it the metal and mineral that we need to do all the things that we do to push civilization forward—to push progress forward? There are lots of really cool things to automate here.

Have you ever seen these things? This is called flotation. You see these when you're flying over them. Most people don't know what this is, but this is about distilling material down to the actual metal or mineral that you're trying to extract.

This is a lithium plant, by the way. And then, of course, all that stuff has to be orchestrated.

So you need software almost like an operating system for that computer, moving things around and making sure it’s doing exactly what needs to happen.

And then we have transport, which I call the wheelbase for robots. It’s not exactly a computer; it’s part of a computer. If you’re not doing humanoids, right, humanoids are low-scale and do low-scale tasks in human environments. If you’re doing high-scale, industrial-scale tasks, you’re going to make specialized machines that move and act in the physical world. The key part is move. If they’re moving, they’ve got to have wheels. If they have wheels, you’ve got to make the autonomy for those machines—those specialized robotics that are transforming that industry.

If you depend on only 1 or 2 companies that exist, you’re not going very far. Autonomy is a critical part, or critical platform, that you have to first make for yourself. But there are lots of other industries that you can make it for, right? We know Phelps is the gold-medal guy, but I like to say that transport is full of silver medals. A lot of people think about ride-sharing as a gold medal. What about food delivery? What about parcel delivery? What about personal autonomy? What about trucking and freight? What about off-road autonomy, like with mining?

There are many hundred-billion-dollar industries that are going to be powered by these specialized robotics that are made for industry—these computers made for industry. Here’s a breakdown of several of the really interesting silver medals that are out there. I say, look, if you make autonomy and you make it really fast—faster than Waymo’s making it, let’s just say—there’s a dark-horse angle. I don’t know if you guys are Kentucky Derby guys or not, but there is a dark-horse angle here, which is pretty interesting. The silver medals alone are freaking insane.

I call what we build progress machines. What does that mean? At the company, our culture is about discovering valuable unknown truths. If you’re good at finding valuable unknown truths, then it means you’re going to know a lot of things other people don’t know. If you know a lot of things other people don’t know, it means you can do a lot of things other people can’t do.

4. The Final Boss: Resistance to Change & the Second Industrial Revolution

The better you are at finding those valuable unknown truths, the more things you’re going to be able to do that other people can’t do. That means you’re bringing change faster and faster, in a shorter amount of time. That’s called progress. Progress is everything that’s powered civilization since the beginning, including now.

But there’s what I call the final boss—the final boss for progress. It’s the boss 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 a lot of times change is bad. You have to deliver an overwhelming amount of progress to make your change happen.

I like to make analogies to the Second Industrial Revolution. We don’t fully—I think a lot of folks here may not be totally schooled on what happened 100 or 150 years ago—but there are a lot of analogies between what happened then and what’s happening now. By the way, we all think, “Founder mode. Let’s go. Founder mode, guys.” 150 years ago, they did founder mode for real.

This is a picture, an illustration. You see that guy at the top has a gun? He’s about to shoot Henry Frick. Henry Frick was a partner of Carnegie. They revolutionized steel. When you talk about everything being mined, all the buildings and things that we see around us, all the infrastructure, it started with Carnegie and Frick.

An anarchist came into his office, shot him twice, and stabbed him several times. He didn’t die. While the bullets were being pulled out, the dude kept working. Founder mode.

And by the way, there are other interesting things that happened back then—super interesting stuff. For those of you who know about Westinghouse and Thomas Edison, Edison was all about direct current. Westinghouse was all about alternating current. We kind of know what won. 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. He was the ultra-OG of FUD—fear, uncertainty, and doubt. You know what he did? He held public displays of electrocution of animals to show that AC electricity was unsafe. He was the OG.

We see this in the current world. The analogies apply. I’m just saying. Okay, that might go online.

This was a Homestead protest.

This is a Carnegie-Frick thing. It actually led to him getting shot. It was about the Homestead strike, sort of a unionization thing, and they weren’t willing to go union. There was obviously a scuffle of sorts. I mean, it was one of the first big, huge union situations as we think about it today—probably the archetype for it.

We’re starting to see those things, right? Go back to 2014: Uber—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: resistance to change.

They say history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Not everybody can read it. The Uber and Lyft drivers are now protesting at the Waymo office.

Okay, fair enough. That happens. But 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. We have to be steely. We have to be hardcore. Like the guys on the invite that I sent, right? We’ve got Ford, we’ve got Carnegie, we’ve got J.P. Morgan. We’ve got all the guys. Westinghouse is on the right.

We always think that we did things first, but actually there were dudes who did it harder and better than us, for sure. Always. They walked to school uphill in the snow both ways. I promise. They had those things, right? They had the stuff. What you see in the press about what that stuff is isn’t always what the stuff really is. Look at that empathy.

How do you lead 20,000 people and get them oriented toward a beautiful mission? 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’ve got to bring it.

There are a lot of things we’ve got to hold, and we’ve got to do this. And by the way, the folks who support us—the executives who are making magic happen—have to do it too. You’ve got to be all these things.

And so, at the company, we have this thing called Champion’s Heart.

23 points for the Golden Gophers in their championship, so they’re really relying on getting a lot this weekend.

So, we have this thing called Champion’s Heart, which is, in life, you get knocked down—like what just happened to her—but if you put everything you’ve got on the field, and when you get knocked down, you keep getting back up, it’s very difficult to fail. Right?

May catch the leaders.

Wow.

Well, she’s got heart. This is a gutsy effort by Donovan. She’s moving it through. Donovan coming down the track to the outside. Donovan coming on strong.

And this is just a thing we believe at our company, and I think it’s a thing that most successful entrepreneurs believe in.

A lot of folks say, “Hey, Travis is back.” I think it might have even been on your invite, but I’ve actually been working for 8 years. I just haven’t been talking about it.

It is good to be back in this way because I was in a cave for a while. I want to thank everybody for being here. I think Erik, Ben, and I are going to have a nice conversation. Again, thank you so much.

The reason people loved the 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 going to do that here, and then we’re going to open it up for—

I’m scared for Q&A.

5. Why Travis Didn't Buy Lyft

Erik’s good at this, and it stresses me out. All right. What do you got, Erik?

So, Travis, why didn’t you buy Lyft, and do you regret it? What would you do if you could go back in time?

I think this will surprise a lot of people, but Lyft’s culture was very different than ours.

Maybe it started with the purple—the pink mustache. 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.

The culture didn't mix.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The culture didn't mix. And when you meet with somebody and you're going to 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. You want it to work.

So, you wouldn’t do anything different?

I wouldn’t do anything different. It’s easy to say now, but I got a lot of shit for that for a long time. But basically, I would sit across the table from the guys, and it was just clear that we were very culturally different. It got harder and harder to make that happen.

So, by the way, I agree with that.

Yeah.

I think you’d have to do the counterfactual if Travis was still running Uber.

What would that look like? Travis is still running Uber today.

Well, I think it would have been the original culture. The culture they went to, which was a reaction to the resistance, just ended up being a much more milquetoast culture than the original Uber culture was. The original Uber culture was a special, very pronounced culture.

My favorite thing in that culture document was “meritocracy slash toe stepping.” I can’t remember. I always thought of it as stomping, but—

Meritocracy and toe stepping.

Toe stepping.

Yeah.

Which is kind of like, “Fuck your feelings,” you know? We’re here to build. We’re going to do it. We’re going to push as hard as we can. You may get your toes stepped on, but you’ve got to keep going. You’ve got to keep bringing it.

That, to me, was the part that got diluted when Travis went out, and in some ways it was the core part. It was a very essential element to at least what I saw from the side.

Yeah. At Adams, the current company, we’ve rebranded it. We call it “the best idea wins.” But the toe stepping is important because there are so many people who aren’t willing to fight for the best idea because they’re going to upset somebody else. 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 going to make you less good than if you went for the best idea.

Yeah. Yeah.

And so having everybody oriented toward that is a cultural vibe that helps you win.

Yeah. When Andy Grove was at Intel, he used to call that constructive confrontation.

Yeah.

Which is the only way to get better. You have to get tested.

There’s a Polymarket on when Travis is going to come back to Uber, or when they’re going to ask Travis to come back to Uber. But the real question is, when are you guys going to buy Uber?

I think we still have a lot to earn. It’s fun. So much of what I’m doing now—and people go, “What would you be doing if…”—I can’t say that I’m doing all the things I would be doing at Uber now. There are a lot of things I’m not doing, but it is a continuation of the things I was doing, and a lot of the things that would have happened with Uber over time are things we’re doing now.

If those things play out and you take over—look, I outlined what industrial AI is and where it’s going over time. It’s basically multiple 100-billion-dollar or trillion-dollar industries that are going to get automated. We talk about digital AI and what it does to the enterprise, but these industries on their own are big.

This is a new industrial age that is basically coming. I compare it to the Second Industrial Revolution. If we’re correct and we execute well, then it’s a thing. Is food going to get automated? Is the production of food going to get automated, and is the delivery of food going to get automated? I think we’d all say yes.

If that’s the case, then there will be a service that prepares and delivers that food cheaper than going to the grocery store. If that happens, food will be completely revolutionized. Will mining get automated? 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 multitrillion-dollar market. There are many of these, and now we’ve got to deliver.

Talk about how you’re different as a founder building at Adams than you were building Uber. 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?

Look, some of how I did Uber is very related to what I did before Uber, and what I did before Uber was fail. My company barely got acquired. I did the first 4 years without a salary. I had socks that said “blood, sweat, and ramen.” It was stuff like that.

When you’re that much on the line, and you’re on welfare and you’ve got to make ends meet, and then you go into something like Uber, which is ultra-product-market fit times 1,000, but you still think you’re poor and you can’t go to the grocery store next week, you get too close to the line. I would go right up against the line. Some people might have guessed that, but I’d go right up against the line.

The only way you knew that I didn’t get chalk on my shoe was to get an electromagnetic scanning microscope, zoom in, reverse-angle, and be like, “Okay, he’s fine.” But if you get big and you roll that way, you get to a place where you’re bringing a lot of change really fast and you haven’t brought trust along for the ride.

I’d 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 super clean. You don’t have to be that close.

The other thing that’s interesting—and I think sometimes the young entrepreneurs who are just coming up right now don’t totally get it—is that when you get into your 3rd and 4th—I don’t know, this may even be my 5th at this point—company, you get freaking really good at doing stuff. Things that used to take me a day or 3 days, with a lot of stress and anxiety—“I am going to do this”—take me 45 minutes. That’s a beautiful thing.

There are things you don’t get. I’m so used to adversity at this point that it’s kind of normal, so I don’t get as pissed off. But being pissed off makes you good as an entrepreneur. I’ve got to make sure I’m still fired up. Like, come on.

That’s that pissed-off energy.

You fuck with me, I’m going to kick your ass.

You know, it’s easier when you’re 25, I think. I don’t know. I’m just not—It’s like, 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, yeah, I’d say those are some of the fun changes.

What’s an example of something that used to take a long time but is now so much easier?

Look, I wrote a vision note when we rolled out Adams a few months ago. I’m biased, obviously, but I think it was a very well-written vision note. Ten years ago, 15 years ago, that would have taken me hundreds of hours.

Yeah.

And it just flowed.

Yeah.

I can’t say I wasn’t thinking about it a lot, but when I was doing the writing, it actually just flowed and happened. I’m like, “Holy fuck, it just happened. Holy cow.” The one I just did for this funding—I procrastinated, but that’s a thing. Once I did the writing, I’m like, “Oh, dude, we got it.” It took 45 minutes. I’m like, “This is amazing.”

And that’s related to presentation, communication, strategy, this kind of thing, which is pretty awesome.

6. From $4M Pre to a16z's Biggest Check Ever

Ben, how have you seen Travis evolve since you first got to know him? And, more broadly—we have a lot of repeat entrepreneurs in the room—when, like Travis, you have a massive success that also has some mistakes along the way, what lessons do you learn the next time versus what do you make sure to keep and continue because that’s what got you there?

Well, I thought that was actually a really good way to characterize it. He thought he was in survival mode when he had 20,000 people working for him, and that idea is dangerous.

When you have such a big organization, it’s dangerous on 2 levels. 1, it’s dangerous because 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, and their interpretation of that idea could be a lot. You kind of have to stay way on this side of the line so the guy 8 levels down doesn’t do something stupid. So that’s a big change, I would say.

But he was always great. Always. I mean, that’s why it was so tragic that we didn’t invest in Uber. But, yeah, I think when you do get—everything comes easier. What’s the Prince line? People say, “Nothing comes too easy,” but when you’ve got it, nothing comes too hard. That’s where he got to.

The one thing I’d add to it, though—and again, I feel like I don’t want to prescribe this to everybody; a lot of folks here already know this—is that when it gets easy, it’s time to push hard.

I always used to say, “If something’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 making it hard on you, if that makes sense.

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.” Now I know that, too, because of course I’ve experienced it myself.

So, yeah.

Yeah.

And that's a very good insight.

Yeah.

I notice that all the time when I talk to entrepreneurs. They start going, “Oh, yeah, it’s easy. It’s going so well. We don’t have competition. 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. I’m like, “Bro, check yourself for wounds, because I assure you you’re bleeding.” You’re in trouble.

For sure. But there are times when it’s actually easy. That’s a guy pretending, so I call that “fake it till you make it.” He’s lying to himself and others. But there are actual times when it’s easy because you’re not continuing to push. It’s one thing when you’re just not winning but pretending like you are. It’s another thing when you’re winning but taking it easy and you’re about to start losing.

Yeah. Many such cases.

Yeah, for sure. Last question, then I’ll open it up to a couple of questions and answers. So, Travis, when you had your first external round at Uber—the venture round, I believe, was at $4 million post or something like that—

It was $4 million pre. You’re talking about the first round?

Yeah. Our first round at Uber was $4 million pre. This one is several orders of magnitude bigger. Ben, I believe this is one of, if not the biggest check you’ve ever written.

Yeah. Certainly the biggest check I’ve ever written.

When did you become convinced that we were 100% in? What was your process like?

I wasn’t at 100%. When I first started talking to him, as soon as I knew what it was, the only question for me was whether it was going to be one thing.

Yeah.

Because look, I’ve known Travis for many, many years, and he’s always been the opposite of that. Our conversations were always the real shit. When I was on the board of Lyft and talking to him about Uber, he would tell me all the stuff that Chinese ridesharing companies were doing to him—breaking into his apps, giving shit away for free, this, that, and the other. He was fired up about it: “If I can deal with these guys, the rest of the world is going to be no problem.” There are very few entrepreneurs—I’m telling you, I’ve been in this a while—who come at it like that. So I knew that if we could put money in Travis, he was still Travis.

Yeah.

The other thing I learned was that he was still Travis. He hadn’t turned into somebody else. He wasn’t living his best life. He wasn’t doing that. So, yeah, I reached that conviction very fast.

I think a lot of people don’t know this, but we actually had separate companies going. When I went to do the fundraising, I showed up at a16z like the guy in a trench coat with a bunch of watches saying, “You want a watch? Which watch would you like? I’ve got lots of stuff. Did you want some food stuff? Actually, I’ve got different parts of the food thing. What do you like? I’ve got some mining stuff that’s pretty cool.” They were like, “We just want the whole thing,” and we heard that from the first few people we talked to.

The tricky part about this deal—the thing that added some trickiness and made us sweat a little bit—was that I had to merge separate entities with different investors and put them together. That was pretty interesting because how do you do a ratio when certain things are very early? But it’s super great because you see some of the things with Elon. He’s not only phenomenal, of course, on all the 5 or 6 or 8 things, and of course a16z is in most or all of them, but he was managing 5, 6, or 7 different companies. So I was really trying to put it together under a single roof, which is amazing. He’s doing it many—a couple of decades later, but it makes things better in some ways.

Yeah. Before we get to Q&A, lastly, Travis, why don’t you say a couple of words about what it’s like to have a lot of the Uber gang back together?

We’re putting the pieces back together. Anthony, this company you bought—there are a bunch of people in this room who were alongside you for the first round.

Look, when I first got going, I was on the board of Uber. So I got thousands of inbound messages from actual Uber employees who were like, “Let’s go.” I had to be careful, because if you’re on the board of a company, you can’t hire thousands of its people.

Bad luck.

It’s not just a bad look. It’s actually illegal.

There’s that, too.

And I’m very familiar with the law here, okay? So you pick your guys, you pick your spots, the whole thing.

There are a lot of really special people in this room. Gautam, who was the CFO at Uber, has joined Atman. Ganesha, who was a VP or SVP of engineering at Uber, has just joined Adams. And there are a lot of young guns at Uber who joined and are now the big guns. There’s a guy, Brian Atwell, who’s one of our engineering leads on the food side and on infrastructure. Anthony Levandowski, of course. Eric Meyhofer, who ran Uber’s Advanced Technology Group, is running Food Robotics. The list goes on, guys.

Jessica Morton was head of Uber Eats Japan. I went to Japan when we first got going and met with Masa because maybe Masa was going to be in. I could never get over him just stealing my stuff and then investing in 8 other companies that do what I do. Then I met with Jess because that was my number-one and number-two thing to do there. She’s doing a lot of really cool stuff now.

We’re not just an Uber company. We have more executives who aren’t from Uber than are. But there’s a lot of heart from that time and from the people who were there. What do they say? Run it back.

Yeah.

But there’s also “run it forward,” which is: do it new and different. Don’t be what you were before. So, anyways, we’re having fun.

Speaking of special people in this room, I want to open it up to some Q&A.

Gary Travis, congratulations. My favorite question to ask, especially for a room like this, is: if you could send a message in a bottle to the 18- to 22-year-old version of yourself, what would it say?

Look, the 18-year-old version of me was a super geek pretending not to be. So I would just be like, “Dude, just be a geek. It’s going to be fine.” Pretending not to be a geek when you’re a geek is just a lot of cognitive load that’s not necessary. I’m not sure that things would have gone better, but that’s certainly one of the things I probably would have told myself.

Yeah. What about you, Ben?

I’d just say not to worry about stuff. It is what it is. Do what you’ve got to do. Don’t worry about the consequences. The consequence is going to be what the consequence is. You’ve got to find a way out, and you just have to keep looking until you find it. There’s nothing else to do. Worrying doesn’t help at all.

No stress.

Yeah.

Don’t worry, be happy.

Yeah. Yeah. Don’t worry, be—

Well, but you need urgency. Don’t be too happy.

Yeah. Yeah. Don’t be too happy.

Don’t worry, be happy. Travis, don’t be too happy. Don’t be fat and happy. Yeah. Okay, next question. Owen.

Question for Travis: how are you going to structure all this? Are you going to have shared resources across the divisions? Are you going to have CEOs? Are you going to have many boards? How are you thinking of all of that?

Yeah, that’s super great. One of the things I’m happy about is that I don’t have multiple boards, because that’s a thing where I was just like, “Oh my God, I definitely don’t want that.”

Shared resources are sort of the management-architecture, organizational-architecture geek thing that we have to figure out. The normal G&A—finance, legal, and HR—are shared. Then you’re like, okay, is infrastructure on the technology side shared? Is manufacturing shared? Sometimes you want manufacturing to go deep: okay, we’re just going to do this kind of manufacturing.

But it just so happens that a lot of the manufacturing we’re doing in mining is similar to the manufacturing we’re doing in transport, but it’s very different from the manufacturing we’re doing in food. So do you have a guru of manufacturing? You probably do, because it’s a thing. It’s a specialized thing. When you do it at scale, you can get way better talent, and all the other things work better. So my guess is manufacturing is also one of those things.

Then you’re like, which parts of software get locked in? Mostly, but not completely. I don’t have all the answers on that one, but these are business units that run as separate businesses. The guy who runs mining is all in on that and has lots of control and empowerment to make mining successful. And the same goes for the other situations.

Yeah, yeah. It’s super interesting.

But I mean, that’s the thing, right? I had to make it a bit painful. Otherwise, I’m just like—I will make it. It’s just inevitable. I just do that.

Yeah. Next question. Brent.

Hi, Travis.

7. Dirty Fuel, Revenge Businesses & Falling in Love Again

One thing that you said earlier was that being pissed off makes you a really good entrepreneur. Sometimes people say that if you're successful and driven by a desire for revenge, it's a dirty fuel. It works, but it's not the best source of fuel that you can possibly have. I'm curious: throughout your career and everything that you've built, have you found a cleaner source of fuel, or do you just—what's your takeaway on that?

Look, most people don't know this, but a couple of companies before Uber, I did a peer-to-peer file-sharing system. I 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 going to do a peer-to-peer CDN—Akamai meets BitTorrent, before BitTorrent existed.” My whole thing was, “Turn those guys who sued me into customers.” It was a full-spite business, like a full-spite store. Like, let's go.

But I think, in many ways, dirty revenge—it can be successful, but it ends up being less than what it should be when it comes from the wrong place, if that makes sense. Part of what drove me earlier was a little bit of a fear of failure. That can mean long nights where you get little done. It just means you have this edge, this weird vibe that people are like, “Dude, something's wrong with that guy,” right? It's just a thing. You're just not going to go all the way, right?

When the Uber thing happened and I moved on to new stuff, which was about 8 months after I left Uber, I was doing the new thing. I kind of fell in love again, you know? People said, “Are you pissed off about Uber? Is this thing grinding you? Is it on your mind?” When you fall in love again, you don't think about the ex very much.

If you come from that place, you can create in a beautiful, unironic way, if that makes sense. It's important. It's not that you don't have to work on it to get to that place, probably over time. But by the time I got there, I was there. Maybe one last question. Oh, and by the way, you can't be [censored]-maxing to get to that place. Okay, for our boy Mark—for our boy Mark. I've got to still have a debate on that one. All right.

Yeah. Question. You mentioned—I remember this slide. I'll remember it forever: “Killer boss.” What was the killer boss for Adams, especially in this—

What is the killer boss? What does that mean?

Final boss. Sorry.

Final boss.

Yeah.

Oh, final boss. Killer boss is my version. Fair fight. Look, there are huge opportunities here. Maybe the final boss is—I don't know if it's the final boss, but I'll just riff a little bit on this concept. There are a lot of people in this room and not in this room who will gladly vanquish me. I don't mean that in a bad way, but we're competing for the next Industrial Revolution.

Magic Johnson and Larry Bird were kind of guys, but they'll kick each other's butt, right? That's the wrong analogy for this crew, but you get it. It's like Patrick Ewing, you know, some shit. I think that's actually pretty important. When you go into a space like this, you always have to think, “Who's the best of the best at industrial AI?” Anybody want to guess? It's really obvious. His name rhymes with “on.”

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 want to go final-boss mode, I mean, I don't even know who his final boss is. People are like, “Dude, Elon's the GOAT.” I'm like, “Dude, I'm a baby goat. It's great.”

Maybe he's the final boss, you know. But mad respect, of course. He's obviously the best by a long shot. So, anyways, I'm not sure exactly how to answer, but that was a little riff on it.

8. Be Uniconic: Eight Years in Stealth & the New Media Landscape

Maybe we'll end on this question. You've never left, but you were in a cave for a while. You were focusing—

I had a presentation that I gave to my leadership team in 2019. The title was “Be Uniconic.” Be uniconic. We had a massive, high-fidelity playbook on how not to get attention for anything we did. We had thousands of employees who were not allowed to put our company on LinkedIn.

It was weird. So this is your coming-out party, so to speak. You're back in the flow. Talk about how you've seen Silicon Valley, or the tech industry at large, change from when you were right in the center of it to coming back 8 years later. What surprised you, or what's most notable about where we are?

Look, I think probably one of the coolest things—and this is part of why I'm out versus not before—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.

Think of your favorite politician, if you have one. Many of you may not have one, but let's just pretend you did, okay? It's fucking hilarious. Let's just say, take your favorite politician. Go type his name into Google. What do you think you're going to find? Anything good? It's going to be tsunami waves of negativity. That's what you're going to find.

Of course, if it bleeds, it leads, right? That's human nature, and there's negativity, and that gets the clicks and the whole thing. But we weren't used to it then. We thought everything that The New York Times said was real, and we know now that that's not even close to true. We now understand that.

The media landscape is like, yeah, you don't have to talk to those guys. You can go and talk to David Senra. You can go and talk to Joe Rogan, or name your guy. You can say what you need to say in an environment that's not like a struggle session in Maoist China, right? So that's a big freaking change.

I think it's a big change for all of us. Elon buying Twitter is like the beginning of us being able to speak our minds and for disagreeing not to be illegal. That's a big deal. We should all thank Elon for that.

It allows somebody like myself, who basically was just like, “Okay, I want to build. I want to not think about what The New York Times is writing when I make decisions about what I build.” I had to emulate what it's like being a capitalist in Russia, where their number-one KPI is called “shut the fuck up.” And that's what I did for 8 years.

In a weird way, it was like that for different reasons, but it was like that. So we're now out of that mode, or getting out of that mode, and let's go. I think that's the biggest change for all of us in the last 8 years. God bless, and hopefully that continues.

I think it's a great note to wrap on. Travis is back. Travis never left. Give it up for Travis. Thank you.