Limitless Podcast - The Rise and Fall of Travis Kalanick... And His Return With Atoms

Episode Date: March 19, 2026

Travis Kalanick, former Uber CEO, is coming back. Now as he launches his new venture, Atoms, aimed at automating the movement of physical goods. We discuss his tumultuous past, including his ousting from Uber and subsequent success with Cloud Kitchens, alongside his ambitious vision for Atoms that leverages AI and robotics to revolutionize multiple industries.------🌌 LIMITLESS HQ ⬇️NEWSLETTER:    https://limitlessft.substack.com/FOLLOW ON X:   https://x.com/LimitlessFTSPOTIFY:             https://open.spotify.com/show/5oV29YUL8AzzwXkxEXlRMQAPPLE:                 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/limitless-podcast/id1813210890RSS FEED:           https://limitlessft.substack.com/------POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET 🔮https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast------TIMESTAMPS0:00 The Return of Travis Kalanick1:11 The Rise and Fall of Uber8:12 The Silent Comeback9:43 The Birth of Cloud Kitchens11:23 Unveiling Atoms20:41 The Future of Kalanick and Uber22:46 Conclusion------RESOURCESJosh: https://x.com/JoshKaleEjaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213------Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Just last week, one of the most controversial founders in tech history broke eight years of silence. His name is Travis Kalanick, and he is the person who built Uber into a $70 billion company. He got forced out in probably the most traumatic oustings since Steve Jobs and then totally vanished. He was gone for eight years when he was secretly building this company in stealth that was just unveiled this week called Adams. He's already acquired a self-driving startup founded by the engineer who went to prison for stealing Google's autonomous vehicle secrets, and Uber, the company that kicked him out, is reportedly funding this whole thing. So there's a lot of crazy chaos, interesting parts to this story. One of the most interesting is the fact that thousands of employees were forbidden to put their

company name that they were working in on LinkedIn. There's a $15 billion valuation already reached in the dark. They've raised $1.1 billion from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund. But no one actually knows what this company does until last week. This is a crazy story about one of the most notable founders in Silicon Valley. I think it's important to take a step back and really understand who this character is at the core of this new company that's really important to the future. Travis is one of those few founders where his backstory is actually equally as exciting as the story that we're breaking on this episode today about his new company. This guy's lived and died by the sword multiple times and then was resurrected.

He actually founded two startups before Uber that surged dramatically and then failed. I think the first company was called Scour. It was like a peer-to-peer network where you can have kind of file-sharing systems. So think of like Napster, but for like any kind of file system, kind of like a lime wire-esque, I guess. And he quickly got sued by a bunch of regulators for a quarter of a trillion dollars. Now back then, in 1998, that is a heck of a lot of money. Today, that's a heck of a lot of money. Today, that's a, I don't know, with all the AI CAPEX stuff, maybe it's not.

Maybe I've been, my mind's been warped. but that is a lot of money for four 22-year-olds to be sued with. So he had no choice but to file for bankruptcy. But he came back with a vengeance with his second company called Red Swoosh, which was pretty much a similar type of company, but aimed at a more professional market. Same thing kind of happened with them. They got sued, but they managed to get through it.

And then Google poached all of his engineers. It was just him, a one-man company. And so he was about to file for bankruptcy before, get this, Mark Cuban makes an entrance, gets into an argument with Travis Kalanek online. He's so impressed by Travis's response that he gives him $1.8 million. Travis moves to Thailand and he lives there for a year and a half, cuts down costs and runs this company, ends up selling it and makes $2 million and moves to SF. Which is pretty good for someone in their early 20s.

And this was the start of a pretty unbelievable story. I mean, in between this time and 2009, when he started Uber, he was also working. There's a few funny stories that I like about Travis, one of which that I'd like to tell briefly is the one with the wee tennis story, just to kind of understand who this guy is. A famous investor named Chris Saka. And Chris Saka back in the day, I mean, still is, but one of the most legendary investors in the world, he was a seed round investor in Uber. And he was hosting Travis for the weekend.

And Travis was woke up in the morning and was playing wee tennis with his dad. Just for fun. His dad liked playing wee tennis. That's when we was very popular. He was kind of kicking his dad's ass. He was getting a few points, but he was doing pretty well. And he was playing with his opposite hand, and he wasn't really paying attention. And then he switches over to his dominant hand and he starts playing seriously.

His dad doesn't score a point. He moves over to the scoreboard. And it turns out that Travis is number two in the world at Wii tennis. And it's a testament to the type of founder that this person is that we're going to uncover throughout this episode is just hyper fixated on winning and success and being the absolute best at what he does. And this reflected itself in Uber, which is where I think a lot of people can pick up this story where they're familiar with.

In 2009, he founded Uber, which went to go on to become the biggest ride-sharing application in the world. And not only that, but created an entire sector of technology today that is ride-sharing. This simply did not exist prior to Uber's existence. And he kind of found or came across the idea for Uber as an accident. After he sold his company Red Swoosh for and made $2 million, he moved to SF. And he kind of started like the original incubator, which was just his apartment. And he had founders like come through all the time. and one such guy he went to Paris with to go to a conference,

and they couldn't hail a black cap. So he ended up kind of like creating this idea around an app that can call a black car for you, not necessarily a cab driver. And that's what ended up becoming Uber. But where he kind of like really doubled down on with the company, and as the story goes, was on like the regulatory arbitrage. So he just kept on hounding state regulators to allow them to legalize Uber because it was completely legal to start off with.

And that's really how Uber became a massive boat. It's just a crazy, crazy story, but then it ended up in him being ousted. Yeah, so there's a few steps just before the ousting, one of which is an important character in the story, which is Google. Google Ventures invested a quarter of a billion dollars in 2013 into Uber at a three and a half billion dollar valuation, which at the time was a pretty big deal. Briefly afterwards, around 2015, this is when Google was creating their self-driving project. Travis was aware of this because of their connection, and this self-driving project eventually became Waymo. And Waymo was viewed as an existential

threat. If cars can drive themselves, Uber doesn't need drivers, but neither does anyone else. So whoever owns the autonomy owes this the future of transportation. So this was an existential crisis they were having. Travis goes ahead and he creates Uber's self-driving division in 2015. This is where he recruits Anthony Lewandowski, who we mentioned earlier, away from Google's self-driving program. Levendowski was a founding member of what became Waymo, and with him, what he didn't know at the time was many documents that were actually stolen from Google and Waymo, and eventually wound up putting him in jail. So this created a lot of chaos.

This was, I guess, the beginning of the chaos that really started around February of 2017, where there was a blog post published that was detailing some not-so-favorable activities in the workplace. There was a Waymo lawsuit where Waymo sued Uber alleging that Levantowski downloaded 14,000 proprietary files, which turned out was loosely true. And these were secret files about trade secrets from Waymo's autonomy. his vehicle history. And then there is a series of videos that come out, one of which was dash cam footage from Travis inside of an Uber driver,

being not so nice to the Uber driver. And there's just this really unfortunate cascading series of events that eventually unfolds, like you mentioned, EJAS, he got kicked out of Uber. Yeah, so this headline says Uber CEO, Travis Kalanick, resigns following months of chaos, the events that you just referenced. But I don't think resigns is the right word here. In June of 2017, whilst Travis was interviewing someone to become a deputy head at Uber, two partners from benchmark capital,

which were early and big investors in Uber, turned up at his hotel room, walked in, and hands him a draft resignation letter for him to sign. And they cite reasons of, we can't deal with the drama that you're creating, the fraud that is all over the media, we need you to step down or it's going to ruin the success of the business. Now, they keep pounding him,

and about a month later, they sue Kalanik for fraud, and it ends up becoming this whole thing which forces him to resign. And the most brutal part about this is it comes right after his mother died in a boating accident. It was pretty messed up.

He almost lost his dad in that same accident, too. It was a really traumatic time for him, and he attended this board meeting two days after her funeral. And it's a six-hour board meeting. It's this horrific series of events, and you can't help but think that, like Bill Gurley and the benchmark team,

we're really just leveraging this, really nasty opportunity to impose their will on the company. And then the day after Travis resigns, Bill Gurley, he quit the Uber board. So it was this really kind of messy thing. It destroyed Travis. At this point, this was the absolute love of his life. He had spent his life as a founder, finally found some unbelievable levels of success, and then at the darkest moment of his life, got kicked out of the most important thing in his life. So it's this really difficult, tough time. And Travis kind of goes dark for about nine months time where no one really hears from him. And nine months later, he comes back very quietly in stealth and begins to work on this company called Cloud Kitchens,

or also known as city storage systems, this weird unknown stealth company that was backed by the $2.5 billion that he had actually sold when he left Uber. He sold all of his stock. He cashed out, and now he has this treasure trove of money that he could use to build the next thing. The idea is that he takes this controlling share of this company named city storage systems for $150 million. He becomes CEO. They own Cloud Kitchens. And Cloud Kitchens is a company that buys real estate. They builds commercial ghost kitchens and then rents them to restaurant for delivery-only operations. So chances are if you live in a major city and you've taken delivery from Chick-fil-A, Taco Bell, a lot of these larger brands, they have come out of a cloud kitchen.

And the idea of a cloud kitchen is to automate the food delivery process. So if you've ever used Uber Eats, you're familiar with Travis's engagement with food delivery, where Uber is the food delivery version of Uber. You take food from one place, you move to another. Cloud Kitchens is the automated version of that. You basically try your hardest to remove the people, the cost of labor from that loop, and you decrease the cost of these goods to get as close to the pure cost as possible by automating everything. So these cloud kitchens are totally automated. They have a lot of robots. They have a lot of automation. You order a bowl. The robot builds this bowl and it ships it off to you and it's a really effective, really efficient way of

delivering food. And this was the first step in this redemption arc. But again, this was all silent. He's building in stealth mode. Yeah, I mean, it's a recurring theme with Travis, his entire goal with Uber and with this company, Cloud Kitchens, is he's trying to automate moving of atoms of things, which suggests what his new company is called. He didn't tell anyone about this. I think his original investment was acquisition of a control. stake in city storage systems was about 150 mil, didn't make any headlines, no one knew what the hell it was. And the concept itself, Cloud Kitchens, isn't something that you can kind of like visit publicly. Josh, actually, you told me a story where you tried to visit their site in Brooklyn,

right? Yeah, I'm obsessed with Travis, like, disgustingly. So I think he's one of the best entrepreneurs of our time, by far. And I suspect a lot more people will realize this over the coming years as he builds this new company, which we're almost getting to. We're almost there at the new company. But part of this fascination is wanting to get close to him and just wanting to see what that was like. So I was curious what it would look like to work at a company that Travis runs. There is no way to actually apply to these places. They're outbound only because they're totally in stealth. So stop at one of the kitchens to check it out. And of course, it's a ghost kitchen. I mean, there's no one there. There's no markings. There's no branding out, right? I mean, there are people,

but it is a very inconspicuous building. There's not much going on. It's fascinating because as an outsider looking in, there's really no signs that anything special is happening here. Meanwhile, they've deployed over 2,000 kitchen locations across America, and they're accounting for, I believe, 18% of all U.S. food delivery. And this was in 2024. So I'm assuming that number is going higher and higher and higher.

And they've quietly built this really impressive empire as it relates purely to food. This is just one pillar of the new company. So let's get into the actual story about the company Atoms. So collectively, since he left Uber, Travis has been in stealth for about eight years now. And he's employed thousands and thousands of employees, presumably to work on this Cloud Kitchen thing, but no one really knows what he's doing. They can't officially list their title or the company that they work for on their LinkedIn. So it's complete stealth mode for eight years. Now, think about anyone else that can potentially hold that.

Like, he's getting everyone to sign NDAs. Like, no one can really keep something hidden that large for that long, but Travis did end up doing it until Friday of last week, where he announced his new company called Atoms. And the vision is kind of simple, or rather follows on from his founding of Uber and Cloud Kitchens. He wants to do what he did with Uber. He wants to do what he did with food

to every single part of physical delivery that exists in the world today. And he's going to focus on three specific verticals. He's going to focus on the mining. industry. He's going to focus on the food industry. That's with Cloud Kitchens, what he's re-branded it to food atoms. And he's going to do it with automotive transport. And the company follows a framework of three specific steps to figure out which industry and how to approach this. One, he wants to understand the current state of the physical world. So he's looking at food delivery. He's looking at the mining industry. He's looking at automotive transport delivery. And he's like,

okay, this is how it functions right now. These are where the problems are going to be. And so this is what it might potentially turn into. So that brings us a step two where he predicts what the future state of the physical world will look like. And then finally, step three, control the future state of that physical world. So creating a new app or a new product like Uber to transform transportation of humans or creating cloud kitchens to transform cooking of food and transportation and delivery of that food. And so how he plans to enable this is the coolest part for me, which is AI-powered robots, but not the humanoid type robots that you and I have spoken about on the show many times, Josh, but rather robots that are specifically designed to perform these acts, right?

Yeah, if you've ever been to L.A. and you've seen these like four wheeled robots kind of riding around the sidewalk delivering food, that's kind of the vibe. It's wheel platforms. And I think the way you can think about Adams and the reason why it's named Adams is similar to the progress that we've seen in Bits. So I think one of the things that we talk about a lot is we've had so much progress in the world of bits over the past few decades, meaning that all the software has gotten much better, all of the chips have gotten much better. Everything in our digital world has improved, while the external physical world has not really gone a long way. The goal of this company, the intention of this company, is to do what we just did for computers to the real physical world

using the same framework. So if you think of this world of bits infrastructure, we have the chips, which is the intelligence. We have the storage, which is how you store the intelligence, Then we have the network, which is how you transfer that intelligence across the world. What they're doing with atoms is the same three-level stack. You have the CPU. You have the intelligence, which is these cloud kitchens, which is these automation systems that are actually deployed in the physical world. You have the storage, which is the real estate.

One of the huge parts of this company is real estate. They're owning a lot of buildings. They're building a lot of kitchens. They own a lot of places to distribute this compute. And then the network is this autonomous part of the business. It's kind of what he envisioned. for Uber, where you have truly fully autonomous movement of these goods and services using these robots. So he explicitly said they're not building human rights. They're not in the business of disrupting

Tesla with full self-driving or their humanoid robots. They're building supplemental things for their world of atoms, for delivering groceries, delivering food, delivering objects, and being the full stack and revolutionizing the world in the way that we did with bits, but with atoms. And it's a really grand plan. And he's rolled it out in a few places so far. I mean, they have the mining, they have the cloud kitchens, and then they have Otter, which is the third part of the business. So there's a lot going on here, but it's around that one core thesis that atoms are the thing that really matters as we move forward from this like, I guess, artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence age. One thing that stood out for me is his approach

to the design of robots. I was fixated on why he was so anti-humanoid. It kind of makes sense, right? The world is designed for humans. So you would create human shapes. that's what Tesla is doing. That's what a bunch of robotic startups in the UK and China are doing. So why wouldn't he do the same? And he used, I watched his interview on TVPN and there's a story where he goes, I watched the robot Olympics in China last year or a few months ago. And he was like, I was so impressed by all these robots dancing and running and winning these races. But what I couldn't help think was this robot would be so much faster if it just had four wheels. And it just, and it just like raced that way. And it made sense that this was his.

entire approach from first principles to moving atoms from one place to the next, whether it's food, whether it's mining and moving machinery from spot A to spot B, or whether that's doing the same for automotive transports, be it trucks, cars, delivering, whatever, right? What was interesting was I was curious, like, why did he do mining specifically? And looking into it, it just seems like an incredibly, like, human dependent, bulky machinery operated industry that is ripe for, like, consumption by AI robotics. And I don't think many startups are like focused on this. The same could potentially be said for food as well. The way he framed it was cloud kitchens was R&D for food automation or transport automation disguised as a cookout, as a kitchen that would just like make food for you,

right? So he's been doing R&D for eight years and now he's expanding to these three very prominent sectors that no one else has really been focused on. I don't think even Tesla is like focused on like stuff like mining and stuff like that. So it's really ripe for like consumption. And I think that Travis is the perfect guy to do this because of what he pulled off at Uber. It's important to really understand these three pillars because Travis is not someone who reasons by analogy. He has really, he thinks very deeply about what meaningfully matters and what will actually impact the world going forward. And mining is such a huge one because when you think about AI, the world that we spend so much time thinking about, the common constraint outside of energy is just these materials, like we don't

have enough memory. We don't have enough raw materials. We don't have enough for batteries and to create enough storage for this energy. And mining is such a huge part of that. And mining is this incredibly laborious process with a lot of labor rules and laws. And it's not a very glamorous thing. But if you automate a lot of this mining process like he intends to, well, then suddenly a lot more areas open up for mining. There's a lot more efficiency to be had. It's just a huge part of how they plan to win. And you mentioned Tesla. I mean, he explicitly addressed Tesla, I think, on the All-in podcast earlier this week about how impressive Tesla is and how much respect they have for it and how he's kind of in a way basing his ideas off of the Tesla stack because

he believes that Tesla is very much the Google of this era, meaning if you were to create a startup in the early 2000s, the first question you get is why isn't Google going to kill you? Tesla is basically that for physical AI. They own the whole manufacturing stack. They own full production from sand in to vehicle out and even intelligence out through full self-driving. And Travis argued that not enough people are taking this seriously and not enough people are trying to be complimentary to that. You don't have to fight this force. You could actually just be a contributor to the success and win as a result. Yeah, if I were to like zoom out and distill what he's trying to do with this company, what Claude Code did to automating software engineering, what Chatchipt did to replacing a bunch of high schoolers able to write like PhD level essays, science, automating mathematics. He's doing for the physical. world. So if you think of mining as a technological stack, he is doing the sensors, he is doing the compute on top of that. He's operating the machinery, which is powered by the AI models that set on top of this. So if you could automate all of that, then you can think about automated

factories that set on top of that. And then the produce that comes on top of that also being automated. And so if you could scale that, not necessarily at the speed of software, but automated by AI, that's something pretty cool that we haven't seen in the world today because we're constrained by humans, by our biological brains, by making errors, by needing to sleep and a bunch of other things like that. The other thing that, like, fascinates me about this is Travis is very much building like a vertically integrated play here, right? Like, if I think about it, he's doing the sensors, he's got the compute, he's got the AI models, and then he's like manipulating these atoms by physically delivering them using robots, which then accelerates manufacturing,

he's owning the real estate, there's a bunch of energy production around that. He's involved in all parts of that. That reminds me of a bunch of other companies. that we've spoken about on the show. Like, Nvidia's doing that from Silicon all the way to AI agents that they announced with Nemo Kloor this week. Tesla is doing, or rather, SpaceX. SpaceX and Tesla, they're all the same company.

They're going to merge anyway. It's doing that from everything from energy production to space transportation to harnessing the energy from the sun itself to training AI and distributing it on social media on X. Travis is doing the same with physical AI automation. And I think that it's a very ambitious task, but if he's able to pull that off,

this is going to be a world-changing company. and Travis is one of the few founders with the track record to be able to pull that off. You mentioned Tesla rolling in SpaceX and Tesla into the same company. I have a question about whether Uber will be doing the same because there's reports that Adams is receiving major backing from Uber. Travis's reportedly told people that he wants to be more aggressive in rolling out self-driving technology than Waymo. So it makes sense that the company that he built, he might actually be able to have the chance to play a meaningful role in. And to that, I want to refer to polymarket because there's a polymarket for whether or not Uber will ask Travis

to come back to the company. And I have to ask the question because when you think about Steve Jobs in the past, Steve, I think he got kicked out of Apple in 1988. And it was only in 1997, I believe it was. The years could be slightly off, but 1997 when the company that he built was purchased by Apple. Next, he came back to Apple. Apple was struggling at the time and he rebuilt them into the Apple that we know and love today after a huge hiatus. Now, Traffs has only been away for eight years now, so he's doing, he's kind of speed running the Steve Jobs arc. And there is a world in which he might come back to Uber. Now, Polymerka says this is improbable at 14%. It's not looking very likely. In fact, it was a 40% chance earlier in the month, I guess prior to the announcement of this new company.

It seems like whatever they saw with this new company announcement, it dropped from 46% to 14. So perhaps it's not going to happen. Although, man, how cool would that be? The king is back. Yeah. No, someone knows something. I mean, that decline is like super steep and like almost instantaneous. It's like dumped 20% in like an hour or so.

That's crazy. Yeah, pretty brutal. Well, thank you to Polymarket for sponsoring that segment of the pod. And I think that leaves us with a comeback arc, not complete. There's still a lot of work left to be done. But this at least sets the stage for what's next, which is this new foundational company built on doing what we just did to bits to the world of Adams and naming it after that. Buy one of the best entrepreneurs to do it.

And that's the end of the episode. Thank you so much for listening. A bit of a different flavor of the episode today. We were passionate about telling the story of Travis because it makes sense to explain why he's going after this big company versus just explaining the company itself. Let us know if you enjoyed this format of an episode. Also, a ton of new subscribers we officially hit as we're recording this episode, 40,000 subscribers, which is crazy because nine months ago,

we had, what was it, 10,000, Josh, maybe even less than that. Pretty crazy growth from then, and we welcome all of you. A bunch of you have also subscribed to our newsletters. If you haven't, please do we drop articles in pieces, highlights of the week twice a week. And wherever you listen to us, Spotify, Apple Music, or even on YouTube, if you're watching us, please give us a thumbs up and give us a subscribe. It helps us out massively. And we'll see you on the next one.