The a16z Show - Travis Kalanick Is Back | Building the Future of Industrial AI

Episode Date: July 22, 2026

Travis Kalanick, Ben Horowitz, and Erik Torenberg reunite to reflect on Uber's early days, the investment that almost happened, and why Kalanick believes the next great technology opportunity lies beyond software. They discuss the lessons of building Uber, the value of founder-led companies, and why Kalanick spent nearly eight years quietly building Atoms before stepping back into the spotlight. The conversation explores industrial AI, robotics, autonomy, mining, food production, and Kalanick's vision for digitizing the physical world, where software, manufacturing, real estate, and transportation come together to transform entire industries.   Resources: Follow Travis Kalanick on X: https://x.com/travisk Follow Ben Horowitz on X: https://x.com/bhorowitz Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We know what Uber's 2017 was like. Travis Kalernick has stepped down from his role as chief executive. That wouldn't have gone that way if Ben or Mark was on the board. You're in this hell, you're dealing with the lawsuits. You worry about the lawsuit? And you say, hey, let's build again. It's not as much about where you start. It's about why you start.

He's one of the very rare guys who made as much money as he did. And wanted to keep my... Also, remember, I did it stealth. I know some of the techniques I used. Very aggressive, but that name, you can't use that. And I remember David Drummond from Google was on our board, and he's like, you know, Travis, that's not a thing, dude. You've got to change it. The meaningful thing about Adam's food is can you make the preparation and delivery of a quality meal so efficient that it approaches the cost of going to the grocery store?

If it does, you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car. A lot of people have that idea. To build a company, a great company, it's always a great entrepreneur. Today I'm joined by Travis Kalanick and Ben Horowitz for a conversation years in the making. We look back at the investment that almost happened, the lessons Travis took from build an Uber, and why he believes the next great technology revolution won't be in software. But in the physical world. We discussed the origins of atoms, why Travis spent years building in stealth,

The rise of industrial AI, robotics, autonomy, and what it takes to build companies that transform entire industries. Travis, this is the I'm back podcast. This is the Return of the King episode. Return of the Mac. I'm all about. We can return. I don't know what the right thing is, but we ought to come with a walk-on song for sure. Return of the Mac.

Return of the Mac. And it's not just the return of Travis, but it's also a return of this partnership or what could have been, this relationship with Travis and Ben. And so I want to read a quote, Travis, from your launch post. I've known Mark and Ben for a long time. And we got oh so close to partnering up at Uber in 2011. I, Travis, blame Mark. Ben blamed himself. But let's just say it was all on us.

It was on all of us. And in 2017, Uber suffered the consequences of not having Mark on the board. If you know, you know. Travis, tell the story. Okay, so this will be interesting because I think Ben and I have maybe discussed this once or twice. Yeah. It's very painful. And I think that there could.

Mostly for me. I'm not sure if there's a difference of opinion on what happened, but I'll tell you what I thought happened. So I'm in fundraising mode. This is our series B. This is 2011. Uber started 2010, June 2010. I'm raising our series B. Earlier that year, I did Series A with VCO remain nameless.

And I'm hardcore. I went through such tough times as an entrepreneur pre-UBER that once I'm in Uber and things are working, I'm still acting like I'm not going to eat tomorrow. So I would do everything right up to the line, be perfect. And so I have this whole fundraising process that I would do just to perfection. And that means I'd run an auction. So met with A16Z guys, met with lots of folks. And it was what I would call winner takes all auction,

meaning there's one major lead, they're going to set the price, and then everybody else will fall in. So I'd go to the one guy, I'd tell them what the story was, and they're like, oh, we're interested, he's leaning forward. They're like, so how much you raising?

What's the price? And I would do this thing where I would say, this is going to be one of the hottest deals in Silicon Valley this year. We don't know where the price is going to be, where it's going to go to, but it's at least blank. And I call this the uncapped anchor.

Meaning, I'm never in a place where I'm negotiating with somebody where I'm here and they're here and we meet in the middle. I'm always saying it's at least this and it can go up. But I start low. So it'll only go up. So that everybody's pumped leaning forward. He's like, okay, you could see body language. You can read. It's good.

The next guy literally comes to your office an hour later. Same thing happens. He's fired up. I'm showing all the analytics. It's great. okay, so we're interested. What are you thinking about price? Whatever.

I'm like, if the last one was at least 2x our previous round, it just became 3x. I'll say, we don't know, one of the best deals in Silicon, he's coming one of the top deals in Silicon Valley this year, but it will be at least 3x our last round. And he's like, okay, you then go call the guy before and you're like,

hey, just, hey, look, dude, it's went from 2x to 3x, you know, we'll see where it goes. I don't know. They start getting nervous. Anyways, you get all the way to top, and then you go going once, going twice. And it's kind of funny. In this particular case, Uri was almost coming over the top.

So we got to $375, $375 million pre with A16Z. Yuri almost came in at $400, but he was like, no, I can't do it. And so I'm like, okay, going once, going twice, sold. And it's funny because that's a high momentum deal, and that's how you do it. And at the time, you almost should feel a little shy about doing something like that. And it's a little bit crass, let's just say. But that's how I was wired back in the day. Like, just go all the freaking way, all the way.

Score the touchdown, even when you're going to, you know, is a little much. So we're starting to work. You're going to get a term sheet going, the whole thing. And I get an email from Mark. And it was like, hey, Travis, let's go to dinner. And he was like tomorrow night or something like that. Let's go to dinner. And I said, send me the term sheet.

And then, yeah, we can go to dinner. And he responded. he said, let's go to dinner. And I'm like, oh, I didn't like that. So came down south, this neck of the woods, because I was in San Francisco. And this little sushi place, I don't remember the name of it. And he said, look, I know we talked about 375, but went to the partnership. They don't agree or they just didn't think it was the right number.

The best we're going to be able to do is 210. See that? So I'm just telling you how it went down for me. Yeah, wow. And so then I'm like... The story was definitely different on the other side. So, but I want, it would be interesting to hear it. I've got more than the hour we have scheduled here if we want to take time.

But anyways, I had a high momentum deal. It went all the way to the top. I auctioned it. Cleared the market. And the bottom came out from it. And so I had to go back to everybody else and say, 210 is the new number. Like, hey guys, the guy who won backed out, I'm now back at 210. We're starting the auction over.

It was super awkward and weird because people lose credibility in that moment. And I built it back up. And basically it ended up being Menlo Park. This is how Shervin got involved in Uber. And at some point, I told Shervin to stop negotiating against himself because he just kept driving it up without anybody else. I'm like, dude, you won, dude. It's fine. I didn't want the same thing to happen again, you know what I'm saying?

So I'm very clear about the 375 and the 210 and the experience I had, but there may be another side of that story. Yeah, well, okay, let me just tell you what I actually remember and then what I kind of remember. So I remember you came in for the pitch, and I think it was just you, which is, by the way, unusual. So normally people, particularly in those days, very rare that entrepreneur would come in with no touch.

team members on a deal that size. That was a big deal, by the way. That was a high-priced deal. Now it's like a fucking $1.75. Yeah, you'd be like, dude, precede. Pre-sede. Pre-pre. Right?

Yeah, the pitch was super impressive. And then the other thing I recall pretty closely was Travis had definitely read some of my blogs. I felt like, oh, we can win this. This is a deal. And we had the discussion. And it was clear like, no, we want to do the deal. And at the time, I was like, I should really do this one,

but I wasn't the consumer guy. And then I got a lot of board seats. I think it was like 16 board seats. It was something crazy. It was just, I was like, ah. And so I gave it to Mark and John O'Farrell to do. And then all I remember, so I remember something different at this point. But I got it all from them, so I wasn't there.

There was something about the employee option pool or some shit. It was one of these things where it's like, okay, okay, but like I just assumed we were doing the deal, and then the next thing I knew Shervin had the deal, and I was like, geez. And I regret. I can't tell you how long. So that was the beginning of my torture on this thing.

So I was like, fuck, I know we should do that deal. We lost a deal. And then, meanwhile, Scott Weisson did a deal for the other company a space lift. And by the way, that kind of got off to a very, very difficult start

largely because of Uber and, you know, in order to Dave and Catch, I ended up having to go on the board. Like I took over that board seat to kind of help them through that thing. And just so you understand my experience on the lifting,

it happened, I believe a year later, almost to the day, something like this. And the deal on Lyft was 210. Was it really? I had a, I know, I'm just saying this is what the entrepreneur is going to remember, you know what I'm saying?

Holy cow. But anyways, because if a company is in a lot of trouble, that's generally when I get called, given my history with that. Oh, man, I was working so hard on that. And so. I was working hard on that trouble. Oh, my God. It was a lot of trouble. It was a lot of trouble.

But anyway, so I'm living with that. And then, by the way, and then I would see Travis, you know, now and again, like, we had, I had them over to my house, CEO, barbecue, like all kinds of shit, right? like just because, like, I knew who he was. Yeah, we were kind of friends. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like, and it was always like a lot of, like, there was a, there was a respect there because we knew who each other were. But, like, he was winning.

And it was just like, he wasn't going to let me fucking not hear it. And it was just horrible. You know, I had to listen. I was like, God damn it. All the time, like, for a decade. There was also this other thing that would happen. So this is like, 2000, I think this really started 2014, 15, et cetera, is

Emile and I would meet up with Mark and Ben at this super undercover restaurant. Ah, yes, yes. Right next to our office, which was in the same building at the time as Twitter, sorry, same building as Square, right? By the way, Emil also, like, a remarkably amazing motherfucker. And currently the CTO, the department, of war, but super talented.

Yeah, the best. We would do these sessions. We'd have dinner, break some bread, talk shop, and we're like, Emil and I'd always walk out going, damn, it would be so great to have these guys involved. Of course, it didn't because they were at Lyft. And sometimes even we might even talk about, hey, is there a thing that comes together?

But like, I was just so the way I was. Yeah, there was no way to cross a deal with him other than if he gave him the company Yeah And he could just fire everybody and something So as you know But it was like That is it was it was

There was mute There was mutual respect With this Really kind of cool tension at the same time Yeah Yeah That made it That kind of just was the extra texture

On the Uber experience At least for me Yeah it was kind of of like, it felt like, well, you're a basketball guy. It felt like

the old Larry Bird like fuck Magic Johnson. Yeah. We're like, okay, we'll meet each other. We hate you, but like,

oh, wish you were on our team. It sucks. That's good. So it's the one that got away. But fast forward, and now there's a new chance. Well,

what I would say is there's one middle piece to this. Sure. Which is those who are obviously in the tech. industry, like we know what Uber's 2017 was like. That wouldn't have gone that way if Ben or Mark was on the board.

Nope. So when Ben and I talk about this were like, it was our fault. Yeah. We screwed it up. Yeah. I mean, it would have been. By the way, Uber would be, I'll just say considerably larger and more important and more central company today.

There's no question. First of all, I would have won food. No question. Uber was dominating food. Yeah. Dominating food at the time. And it would have also been for sure a leader in Autonomous. DoorDash was 5% market share when I left.

Yeah. And if we lost a tenth of a percent in a week, yeah. We're not going home this weekend. And by the way, Tony, God bless him, had a hell of a time getting his round done at the time. Like right at that period, he was doing a round at DoorDash. And he had to really struggle to get it done.

And congratulations to him for building. You know what he built. And he's done it. Yeah. You got it. You got it. You know what? It's really easy to do the what ifs and the this and the that.

The thing that matters most is tail of the tape. Yeah. And he got some stuff done. He did. He did. No, respect. Amazing. He survived it.

Which is, by the way, in entrepreneurship, surviving is a big part of it. Yeah. Yeah. It's not that easy. Our Tommy program was like second to Waymo but catching up at the time. And you had the network. We had the network too. And we just, we had the ferocity, sort of the fierceness that it takes to catch up.

Yeah. In a certain technology space while building all these other things. that we were doing. I mean, it was a lot. It was good times. It was a lot of fun. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, even though 17 was super tough for me, and maybe you could say even for the company at large, certainly for the company at large, you know, I loved every minute. And honestly, even when you come out of it and you're like, yeah, I got a little weird at the end. It was tough. I still, I still, I still, it was still great. It was fun. Some of that you love and retrospect. Yeah, no, I get you. I trust me. Trust me. You don't have to remind me of that.

I'm just saying like... There's that feeling that's so fucking horrible at the time, you know. Yeah, there was a love affair there. And that's almost the way I would put it. And a lot of people talk about, well, you know, are you mad about this or that? You upset that that happened? And I'm like, when you fall in love again, you don't think about the X very much. Yeah. that's it. So then you can just be like it was a good time. Yeah.

She got a little crazy at the end. That's true. That's true. Like the crazy, crazy X. Yeah. So, there we go. Yeah. And how did you fall in love again?

Or did it take you, how did you handle this interim period between sort of the... Well, yeah, I mean, you had a really interesting situation. I think headlines and the negativity and the headlines for, from that period of time and you could really say the extreme wokeness that was sort of coming in on Uber and trying to constrain it, if that makes sense. There's this interim period, it was like seven, eight months between when I left and when I started,

what's now called Adams. And I had to sort of fight for my life because there are just a number of lawsuits, a number of investigations, all these things where it was just like I continue to stand by every decision I made at Uber

but you know there are a lot of times where you could just make the argument I just got way too close to the line and then yeah I could show that there's no chalk on on the shoe I could show but you would need a electromagnetic scanning microscope to see that there was no chalk on the shoe you reverse angle slow mo and it's

It's just like that's, the problem is the edge of being a, what's the word, a hard scrabble, small startup kid, brought to something that's working and going super big. You don't realize that when you get big, there actually are different rules. Yeah. And they're not just the rules. There's the, there's the vibes of the rules. When the pirate becomes the Navy. We talk about this at the firm a lot. When you're the upstart and you're battling the man,

you can go hard in ways that if you do it when you're the big dog. It's not okay. It's very, you're viewed entirely differently. Yeah, and I hadn't consumed that information. It actually helped me because, you know, when we started the firm, we were the upstart. And I talked just fucking crazy shit about the other VCs and this and that being a, call him bitches. But, like, at some point, like, I could feel it turning.

And I remembered what happened to him, and I was like, and we actually had a whole thing, like, we're not the pirates anymore. Don't say that type of stuff. Like, be chill. We had, yeah, we had this thing where we would, against Lyft, we would recruit the drivers on Lyft to bring them over, to Uber so that it was hard for lift to build supply. And we would aggressively do it,

and we had a program for it internally, which we called shoplifting. Just that, that name, by the way? Like, forget about all the... I know some of the techniques they used, very aggressive, but that name, you can't use that name. That's just not a thing. And I remember, you know, David Drummond from Google

was on our board. And he's like, you know, Travis, that's not a thing, dude. You've got to change it. And then I had, of course, like antitrust training, which, like, at the time again, I'm like this small startup kid. I'm like, antitrust. What the hell is that? Legal people telling me, whatever. They're like, look, I'm like, I can't wait to have that problem.

You know? And they're like, they're like, look, here's the thing. The way you call projects, it has to be appropriate for, like, a, a, a, you know, a, you're like, a 10-year-old basketball team. So it went from shoplift to the national, sorry, the North American Championship Series. We called the

NACS. And we had a whole very heavy-duty initiative called the NACS to like make sure that the North American Championship Series was won by us. That is hilarious. I didn't know about the

North American Championship Series. Yeah. Okay, so you go through this eight-month period. You're in this hell. You're dealing with the lawsuits. You're sort of reflecting back. You're thinking about what's next. And you say, hey, let's build again. So what happened was it's super interesting. So I had a buddy who started a thing right near the end of my Uber tenure. And it was called Cloud Kitchens. And what happened was is he, he's a real estate savant. That's just a thing. And he was looking like real estate, like there's got to be an angle in tech and real estate. How do we do this? And he got a property up.

Actually, maybe you know what? Let me start even before this. We got Uber eats up in 2015. We saw the first dark kitchens. I don't know. It was like late 15, early 16. We saw pictures of commercial kitchens in Melbourne that were not restaurants. that were on Uber Eats.

Oh, wow, wow. So the first dark kitchens were emerging. We're like, this is crazy. That's so interesting. And a buddy of mine, who is this real estate savant, sort of like caught wind of like what's going on? And he had this idea, which was, why don't we have a multi-tenant approach to this?

So 30 kitchens on a single property. And basically lease these kitchens, which are 200 square feet, as delivery-only locations. Anyways, I didn't really, I mean, I sort of knew what was going on, but not really. And then in the fall, like three months after I had left Uber, we meet up. And he's telling me about it. He's like, yeah, you know, we've got a few tenants.

It's kind of working. He's like, I'm going to do like a few more of these. I think I'm going to try to figure out how to do a few more. I'm like, you mean like a few thousand, right? And so then we part. it up, I acquired it. I think they'd sort of, they've done like their, they'd just done their series A. And so I acquired it and then we just went to town, right? And so it's really interesting because sometimes you start a thing. And sometimes you're involved in a thing and then

you come in. Like I think there's an interesting story about like Elon was involved, like obviously involved in Tesla from the beginning was an investor at first but then went all the way in and it's interesting how these ideas come so I like to say that sometimes I you have ideas sometimes ideas come to you yeah but if it's an idea that's meant to be if it's your it's meant to be your soulmate you know it when you see it right and it's and you just yeah and sometimes you just it's like a love affair, you just go for it. Some people have these long lists. That's a very important distinction because there's a real difference between that

and like what's known as the professional CEO, right, where nobody would ever consider nobody smart other than like a few weird political people would ever consider Elon a professional CEO. It's like, oh, that's an idea. That's, I didn't start the company, but it's my company. That's mine. Like it is me. And I know how to do it. And these guys did a great job on starting it, but there's no way they can do it. And that's a different, a very different animal. Yeah. So, you know, you fall in love with something and it's meant to be for you at that time. And you just go for it. And for me it was like, ah, man, complexity is interesting. to me. Things that are naturally not, they're not sexy on the surface is also weirdly interesting.

And then, like, especially if you can see that it's sexy, but people don't understand yet. That's where the sparkle in your eye, you kind of go, ah, you don't see what I see, and I'm pretty sure I'm right. And that's the fun part, yeah. But this was a very common. complex thing because we're buying property, we're doing construction, we are, then have a sales team that's selling to restaurants a delivery only location. So they're expanding the restaurant chain. This isn't like I'm just getting into a vendor flow. I'm actually, we are, we're making a strategic sell, which is you should expand. You should expand your business and you should expand it in a new way, which is two strategic.

moves at the same time. By the way, you like complexity. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Which makes it. Exactly, yeah. So then you're like, you're also, okay, so we've woven technology through this whole real estate thing.

We have a software stack that, of course, we'll sell, will work in this facility, but we'll also sell it to all your brick and mortars everywhere. And shit, let's just get some robot. going at the same time because like labor's your biggest problem if you're a restaurateur if you solve that it's really big i can get into the strategy of why that is the whole thing but but just the brass hacks of the complexity of the project was interesting to me so it was more kind of emergent or iterative than hey i've got this master vision for what it's all going to turn into no i think at that time i like if I don't see how it

it's big and meaningful then the complexity for like complexity's sake is not a thing there has to be you know maybe somebody would say a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow it has to be something meaningful the the meaningful thing about Adam's food or what

folks know as cloud kitchens is can you make the preparation and delivery of a meal, a quality meal, so efficient that it approaches the cost of going to the grocery store. If it does, you do to the kitchen

what Uber did to the car. And you go, okay, that's kind of a big deal. But then you say, what do you need to do to get there? Okay, well, you need to do e-commerce for online food delivery, which means I need warehouses like Amazon style, except they're not just for logistics, It's not just picking, packing, sorting, and then putting in a car.

You also have to have manufacturing there, too. Manufacturing, also known as a restaurant. People don't think of that, but you know the labor statistics, beer labor statistics. Restaurants are manufacturers. Okay. So you have to have manufacturing and logistics infrastructure in the same place. That's real estate. Then you actually have to have automated production.

That's the manufacturing, so robotic food robots, essentially. food robotics, and then you need to have robotic couriers. And you do those three things, and then all of a sudden you are getting super high-quality meals, everything you could ever imagine. We call it the Internet Food Court. And it gets to you at the price of going to the grocery store. So you go, okay, nice, that's a nice story. Then you go, well, in 20 years, will robotics,

I start with a really easy question. In 20 years, will people be cooking food regularly? And there will be a suite of robotics that basically will make higher quality meals. Like, it will be doing a better job than any of us could do. And I think most people, especially those in the robotic space, we like, of course, that's obvious that that's going to happen. And you're like, in 20 years, are we going to have, I call them autonomous burritos, like boxes on wheels that hold food at temperature that come to your house yes everybody will say yes absolutely we see waymo's cruising around all the already we just need a very cheap much cheaper version of

that so 20 years is like the easy one then you go well what about what about 10 what about 7 what about five and so that's when you're bending you're bending reality you're you're bending it towards now So everybody would agree that this is going to happen, and now it's about when and who. And then you say LFG. Now, sometimes you're a little bit early, and I would say on the, we were a bit early on Cloud Kitchens, but you build those bricks, all those things I talked about. We have hundreds of facilities in 30 countries, many hundreds of facilities in 30 countries, restaurants because the online delivery market keeps growing, the restaurants are doing better and better, so success is happening. Yeah.

Right. Well, restaurant world has high churn. Your churn starts coming down because volume's going up. We have applications that guarantee volume into these restaurants so that we can have successful tenants, which means I'm a successful real estate guy from a business model perspective. The robotics start to work. you know, we're getting a manufacturing line for our robots up this in Q4. So like the pieces start to come together. You're like production is now 50% cheaper.

Once we get the couriers, the robotic couriers, you go from $12 a drop for each meal to $0.50 a dollar of distribution costs per meal. And now you're taking, now you're taking, okay, $6 out in labor. you're taking, let's call it, $10 or $11 out on the courier on the real estate because you're going to get higher volume because you're driving the prices down. You probably save a few bucks, let's call it two or three bucks on occupancy per meal. And all of a sudden, you've got like an $8 or $10 meal that's delivered to you, all in. Plus, you don't have to recruit drivers, you know, and get shoplifted. That's true.

So that's right. You can't shoplift a robotic courier. Yeah, yes. So we need to stop using this term. It's so wrong. 100 facilities in 30 countries, thousands of employees in over eight-year period, and you're in stealth. Yeah, dude. Yeah, that's just super hard mode. Yeah.

And the thing is, is like, look, coming out of 17 things were, it was 150 articles a day of negative, you know, negativity. And so I wanted to be able to build without bringing that negativity into the system. And I wanted the team to be able to build without worrying about what the New York Times was writing tomorrow. Yeah, simple as that. And it was the right thing to do. Now, we had to do hard mode is we had to recruit Colt. And it was always from a recruiter who has a stealth thing in LinkedIn and on their signature. Yeah. okay um and you had to go get customers with like stealth in linkedin like and you're thousands of people big this is hard mode yeah and it was interesting we didn't know how long was going to go and you

have to trust that no one's going to leak um you know what happens is here's the cool part about stealth if you go that long and i i don't recommend this for anybody like it's not thing it's a very special case. Yeah, you don't really, I don't, you know, but eventually there's this break in your narrative. Like there was a story arc and it was going, going, going, and then it's discontinuous. It stops. And there's this, whoops, sorry about that, guys. There's this long period of time now where nothing is filling in. And what happens then is the media doesn't want to cover a story because they it's so hard to discuss a thing that has a gap a few years before it so it's too hard to do the story and it's too hard to cover it so you get to this place where it becomes self-fulfilling

where it's easier to be stealth over time because even if somebody tries to leak nobody even knows what to do with it they're just like i don't even understand it by the way we did crazy stuff. So people know it as cloud kitchens in the U.S., but it's Casinos Aquinas in Latin America. And we have different names. That means like magical kitchens, essentially. We have like Kitchen Valley in Korea. We have Flash Kitchen and three other names in China. We have, I mean, food stars in London, like go, it goes, you know, you know, I think it's a kitchen park in Middle East. We were going to go with Yala Kitchens. Like, you know, it's like a bunch of things like this so it was very hard to connect the dots yeah you're extra still yeah anyways and so at some point

an even bigger vision for this company emerges to to digitize the physical world where you're category creating the category the term industrial AI yeah talk about when this bigger vision starts to culminate so look the the vision for digitizing the physical world for me started at Uber okay and treating atoms like bits started at Uber. You were, it was sci-fi at one point, I promise. You would touch glass and a car would come to you. Yeah. And you had satellite view. You're watching this car come to you. That was crazy. Now it's just like whatever, okay? But it was crazy at the time. Everybody's first Uber experience was a magical moment. So we, you know, digitizing in physical world was the thing. And this idea of what I would call an atoms base.

computer was something I sort of was working on in terms of her framework at the end of Uber, which is CPU manipulates bits, storage, stores bits, network moves bits from point A to point B. Okay, well, CPU manipulates bits, what manipulates atoms? That's manufacturing. Storage, stores bits, what stores atoms? That's real estate. Network moves bits from point A to B, what moves atoms well that's transport logistics and those now are your three core computing resources in an atoms based computer and you know what everything you learn in your computer science curriculum everything you learn in engineering it plays in the atoms world same frameworks all the data structures all the algorithms it works exactly the same and i grabbing algorithms oh totally totally in fact we use

We use TCP. We use TCP sawtooth to basically manage how much demand to send to certain kitchens based on capacity and reliability, as an example. But like we look at when I go and I'm messing around, like when I'm pitching this to a tech person wants to understand, that 10,000 square foot facility, I call a 10,000 square foot semiconductor. And it's a 30 core processor.

30 kitchens. They're computing atoms, not bits. The corridors where the food moves, that's a network bus. The processing centers like an L1 cache or something similar. He's taken this analogy very far. The cold storage where you have ice cream and juice, okay? That's pre-computed items that sit on the edge. Those are your Akamai servers.

The courier who comes and picks up the food and goes on the road and brings the meal to you, that's a TCP packet. This shit goes forever. So excellent. Okay, so the vision started at Uber. So the point is that Adams-based computation is a thing. And honestly, it's always been a thing.

And the idea that, oh, okay, Uber was networked for the physical world, digitized transportation. And by the way, almost done. Why almost done? Because it's almost fully software. Yeah. Right? Waymos are cruising. It's almost fully software. But what about, what about CPU for the physical world and storage for the physical world?

Basically, digitized manufacturing and digitized real estate. There's just so much to do there. It's crazy. And so there's a huge amount of innovation there, not just with what Adams is doing, but like there's going to be lots of stuff even beyond what we're doing. It's a portfolio strategy, really, if you're investing. It's very interesting because you kind of got to the conclusion that we've now all learned from AI, which is you can model just about anything with computation. And you basically were ahead of that in modeling this physical world, even metaphorically in computation, and now kind of manifesting that. It's, you know, probably entirely with AI on top of your computation model.

It's funny because the framework started near the end of my Uber time, really when we were getting deep, we were going into deep learning and heavy duty ML. And I was, you know, we would go after some of the best AI. We had an AI lab that was probably one of the best in the world as well.

And I was always pitching that the physical world is more interesting for this stuff than the digital one. And, you know, look, I'm selling my book. Like, that's what we do, right? But it's, you have a way, way many more variables axes of stochastic distribution. Yeah, much more.

Much harder problem. Which then means you're not going to solve it with an algorithm. You're going to solve it by empirically understanding how it works. Yeah. Right. So let's fast forward to how the bigger vision for Adams comes together in terms of the combination of the companies. I keep stopping you. I don't know.

And I don't want to get to the partnership because it also tests together. Yeah, it's all good. So, okay, you've got to have your manufacturing logistics hub. That's the real estate. You've got to have your automated production and you've got to have your autonomous burritos.

The minute about a year ago, I started looking into autonomous burritos. And I went to China and checked out all of the autonomy guys. I was here in the U.S. talking to a lot of the autonomy guys. Word got out. They're like, Travis is looking at autonomy again. People started going.

What's going on? Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, folks like Uber, other partners across different categories were like, we're interested. Like, for one reason or another, because it's like you could even be doing, you could be like, supply chain guy on food, you're also saying, I need to have, for business continuity and just

like peace of mind, I need to have another alternative for how these freight, how these trucks, heavy transport are going to move. And I need an alternative. And I'd love to have a partner as an example, this kind of stuff. And so, okay, so partnered with a couple folks. actually created a new company to do it because funding autonomy through a sort of core food company, it just wasn't going to work at first. And the reason why is because it's like, these are just different profiles. It's a real estate company. This is like heavy duty software, big, big money going after it. It's like a computer company trying to build a network company off of the side. You got to buy a networking company. So we just got, and these,

partners wanted a pure play. And so we created that sort of near the end of last year. But what happened is, it's like, you've got to get, okay, well, now I need to get my team together. I need to get my guys from way back when, 2016, when we're 2017, we're running hardcore at at autonomy. We need to get that going because if you're going to be in the specialized robotics game, you have to have autonomy for yourself. You have to. Your robots are actually. You have to. Your robots are are moving and acting in the physical world, and you cannot depend on only one company that has an existence proof now.

Of course, Tesla is going to get there sometime soon or maybe some amount of time. We don't know exactly. You can't be dependent in that way. And so, okay, get your team together. Eric Meyerhofer, who ran ATG, is already running my food robotics division. That's Uber's Advanced Technology Group,

is working for. us. And then Anthony Lewandowski, who is one of my top leads on autonomy back at Uber, was running Pronto, which was an autonomous mining company. Let's call it off-road autonomy. But in a workflow or category where it's like much more than just like this thing needs to move, it's like how does it move? What is the context for which it's moving? It's like a very specialized thing. I was the biggest investor in Pronto. I'm like, let's go. So acquired Pronto, and now I'm in the mining business.

But it's not like I didn't know about it. I was the biggest investor in it to begin with for a good reason. It's one of the most beautiful and interesting autonomy categories or use cases. And on our mining business, we, you know, our mission statement is more productive minds to power Earth's industries. we can go to a gold mine CEO right now and say, would you like to get 20% more gold per year? We don't get no. Right?

Now he says, prove it. He says prove it, and we're like, let's go. But that's what's happened. So separately, Pronto is working on mining for eight years on their own. Seven, eight years on their own. Go ahead. Also a great target for autonomy because, you know, maybe the worst job for humans there is, is the mining jobs, right?

And we have, so our mining customers, because we're operating in a bunch of mines around the world, our mining customers have existential safety problems. Or let's call safety issues, safety concerns, like where bad things can happen on any given day. And you've got real people that are putting their lives on the line with. when they're at these mines. And so when you automate certain parts of mining, you dramatically improve safety and you, I mean, in a real way.

That's like when you look at the work that's being done and how it's being done, it's a little bit heart-wrenching. When you are exposed to it and you see how mines work, it's not the mind's fault, it's just the nature of the work. And there's a, massive safety upside that goes along with the productivity upside, which is really special. Yeah. So what happened is that Pronto just now is coming past human productivity.

So it's like you do, it's like any enterprise software company. Yeah. You do some cool pilots with big companies. You got stuff. You're like, dude, I've got like, I've got like eight seats at this 10,000 person company. And you're like, okay, maybe. And then all of a sudden, it's better. In the autonomy world, it's about it's better than human productivity.

That means your minds and the quarries. It's like, it's like exactly. Go time. That's when you hit the gas. So we're going to see super exponential, we're seeing it. We're in the middle of it right now, super exponential growth on the mining side, which is super special. These guys ran a very lean startup for a long time.

And now I'm going to their customers who are begging us to move faster and get more out there. We have to manufacture kits. Sorry, we have to do supply chain and manufacture kits. We have to install these kits on these machines that are in the middle of the Amazon

or on the border of Saudi and Iraq or like in these crazy wild places and do it fast. And then do the change management at every one of these minds. So they're like, it's time to go, let's go. And they're pushing us. And so our, you know, how we talk to them

is like, look, we were a lean startup and we're going to muscular. Yeah. And that's how I talk to the team too, because you don't want them to get fat. Yeah. It's like lean muscle, you know. Yes.

But we need some protein shakes, you know, and creatine and things like that. And it's about process, professionalizing a lot of this stuff, but it's in some ways the growth there is almost deterministic, as long as you do the professional things to, like, get all that stuff in mind.

But what it means is that, existing minds are going to be producing more, and they're going to be able to go much further in getting more, and new minds are going to emerge that were not viable before. And what that means for AI, what that means for progress, here and everywhere, super big deal. Yeah. Yeah.

And so to continue, I'll get to the partnership conversation, at what point does this become sort of, Are you thinking from the beginning this is a conglomerate? Or at what point does this become all wrapped up in the atoms? So this, I mean, the fundraise was part of it. So what happened is we started the fundraise. And, you know, Ben remembers this because I gave him a preview at first in Vegas, actually. And I'm like, I was like the guy with a trench coat that's got like 20 watches.

I'm like, which watch do you want? I got all kinds of watches. And he's like, dude, I just want the whole freaking trench coat. dude like i you know the the idea being i don't want to invest in mining or transport or food i want the things that you're doing and let's be partners for all the things you do and so that's that's that was the impetus for um bringing the companies together creation and the funding itself yeah the creation of atoms and the funding itself uh being at what we would call top co level.

Yeah, right. And so now it's just one entity. I mean, there's sub entities there all over the place, but it's one equity structure, which is great for the employees and great for me because managing, I honestly, I don't know how Elon does it or did it slash does it. It's pretty wild. And I'm really glad I don't have that headache, to be honest. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. It's very complex, complicated alignment. But, you know, it's kind of an interesting point because it's very obvious to, you know, when we talked about it here, the way it should work. And I think the narrative of how these things get built is mistold constantly by the industry, by the press, which is, you know, if you hear about how did Facebook come about, how did Google come about, how did Tesla come, oh, they had this idea. And the idea was to do this. But that's not really what happened. A lot of manufacturers had that idea. You know, there's a lot of those ideas out there.

And like, if you look at Tesla, there was a very famous documentary called Who Killed the Electric Car that came out before Tesla. And if you were an entrepreneur watching that, what you would see is big oil, big auto, big government, we're never going to let that happen. They would kill you. But then the reality is, oh, Elon Musk, that motherfucker is hard to kill. Right. So he, by himself, kind of decarbonized America. and auto industry, which is really unbelievable in retrospect. But then it gets told, right, like, if you listen to the politicians now, they're like,

oh, he didn't build Tulsa. He just, like, struck a gold mine and is just pulling the gold out. Like, all those people built it. But why didn't all those people build another Tesla? Like, there's only one, because there's only one non-fungible, very rare person in that equation who could do that. And that's why there's only one space. And that's why meta's meta and friendsters, frenster and all that kind of thing.

That's a good one. I haven't heard that one for a long time. Yeah. That's good. And so to build, you know, to build a company, you know, a great company, it's always a great entrepreneur. And so when we looked at it, we're like, there's a very few entrepreneurs, you know, in the history of the valley that built something like Uper. And that Uber, basically, it survived and is still a very valuable company without him, which almost, you know, like that never happens without the founder.

I mean, it usually turns to crap very fast. And so that was what we, like, yes, the idea is great. The ambition is amazing. It's going to be amazing for the world if he pulls it off. But like, we want to invest in the guy who could pull it off. And that's kind of what drove the whole thing. And there's a fun thing. I realize this at Uber, too, is that I think,

in anyways, maybe Bezos was the guy to sort of really go there, which is the only constraint to your imagination is management capacity. Because, like, look at all the things that Amazon started doing. They were earlier than everybody else starting to do lots of things, right? And so I'm like... By the way, another good one. How many motherfuckers had the idea for an online business? bookstore or online retail or online any of that.

There we go. And how many Amazon's? Yeah. Totally. You know, and by the way, Jeff, like everybody who knows Jeff, everybody who's heard him talk, you're like, oh, he's very special. That's a special CEO right there. And look, and that's our business is to invest in that kind of very, very special

individual, and they're super rare. And so I think in many ways Bezos may have been. I always want to say the OG on something, but then you find out 100 years earlier. Somebody else did that. But of our time, where it's like, how did AWS happen? It literally had nothing to do with a bookstore, really. Nothing.

I mean, there's some fun stories they tell, but it's like this is just a whole new thing. Yeah, by the way, it wasn't like the shit that was running Amazon. Yeah, no, totally. That's my point. Yeah. So, so. So once you get the foothold, the beachhead, whatever, and it's working, you can start going, you know, Uber rides, then it's Uber Eats.

Then it's Uber autonomy. Then it was Uber freight. Then it's like Uber AI labs. Like you can start letting your imagination with constraints start to do really interesting things. And so where you start matters. Yeah. You're right. And it has to be, like, you need knowledge.

Yeah. Right. Like, the thing that Amazon did have on AWS is they had knowledge of what it meant to run these things at scale. Because they were the first to get to, or one of the first, like, five to get to that kind of scale. And so they had that knowledge, totally different business, totally did. But they had the knowledge about what the product should be. Yeah. And because he's a customer of these things, right?

At Uber, he all of a sudden, he knows what the network is. He knows how to do that. And although it's a totally different business, that knowledge is transferable if you can scale and execute and expand management. And sometimes you go to, sometimes those, look, adjacent categories are way easier than whole new off-the-rails categories. Yes.

And there's also, I mean, the amazing thing about AWS is it's one of the few expansions where, like, nobody would think, well, what I want to buy from Amazon is, like, a compute cloud. Like, nobody was thinking that at the time. You know, like there's always, oh, I should sell them more stuff they want to buy from me. But that's a whole other thing.

But, you know, if you're, if you have that level of Jeff's skill, which, like in terms of organizational design, cultural continuity, that guy is. Peak Bezos, hard to beat. Very good. Yeah. So where you start matters. Don't let him living his best life lately.

He gets a lot of bad PR for that. Well, I was, you know, Travis, you could have had a version of living your best life where you're just like, hey, this is what I do, you know, or was it like, I'm going to keep doing it forever? Or was it like, hey, I chased the promised land. I got really far, but I could have got so much further. I'm going to get there next. What was the sort of motivation to just get right back in the, it's just, I love being in the arena, fighting it.

And it's not, you know. By the way, he's one of the very. very rare, rare guys who made as much money as he did and wanted to keep playing. I mean, yeah, and start over basically, not totally, but almost completely, right? So the, yeah, you got to really want it because also remember, I did it stealth. Yeah. So what it means, here's the thing about stealth is that. And starting at the bottom, right?

That's nothing. Doing it by hand, right? Yeah. Like I walked in, I acquired this company. I'm the executive chairman. I acquired Cloud Kitchens, partnered with a buddy mine Diego, right? And there were like six people in the company that I acquired. Okay?

So it's so funny because you've got to think, the last all hands I did had 20,000 people. The next all hands I did in is the only company I was in had six. And I stood in front just like the same and I'm like, let's go, guys, let's do this. charts, you know, like here, what's happening, you know, let's roll, let's do it. And these guys who, like, I just walked in, they're like, what the fuck just happened? They went to work that morning at a six-person startup. And an hour later, the founder of Uber is now the CEO. Yeah, yeah, that is wild. And by the way, like, we've seen it so many times where somebody gets to the penthouse,

and they're like, oh, I want to do a new thing. But they don't want to go all the way down to the ground floor and start at the bottom, fucking putting the building together. Okay, now you're in a fucking shotgun house. They want to jump all the way to the – which never works. You can't start at the top. And the bottom thing also is about there's a humility thing to it.

And there's like there's an anti-fame thing to it. And what I mean by that is imagine, You start from the bottom. You also do it stealth. It means you, plus everybody in your company, gets fulfillment from the work they do every day, not because they're going to get famous. Yeah.

But because they enjoy the people they're working with and what they're doing day in, day out. By the way, if you can pull it off, that's a very significant cultural advantage because as soon as the company feels like it's doing something, for the outside status, it's a dangerous. Yeah.

It's a volatile fucking situation. That's right. You start making decisions based on external validation versus internal correctness. Yeah, you lose true north. Yeah. And that's part of the upside of stealth

and part of what I was doing. Because remember, I wanted to build without worrying about what the New York Times was saying. Yeah. So it starts with internal correctness versus external validation. Yeah. Which...

Once the company starts doing that, it's hard to, like you already see this with the big labs. People keep going, oh, why did the big labs, you know, smack themselves in the face? Well, it's because they need that external validation for their employees because their employees are addicted to it. I want to be a good guy. I want to be a good AI researcher. So go out and tell them that we're going to take all the jobs. It's like, really? You want to say that.

You don't even know if it's true, but you want to be a good guy. to say that, well, why are you doing that? Well, it's that external validation is so important to them. And it's so important not to just to the people running it, but to all the people in the company. And so they almost have to do it. Even though they, if you wanted, if that's what you think, then work on like those problems, work on like, oh, you don't want it to reward hack. Well, why don't you try and solve that as opposed to go running your mouth because you care about the external validation more than the actual thing. And that's the, it's very easy to slip into that.

Like many companies slip into that. And it's, and it's hard. Once it gets out of the bag, it's very hard to put it back. There's a human nature aspect to being proud of what you do, wanting your mom to be proud of what you do and your community at large. Yeah. So there is a human nature piece, which I was malnourishing by being stealth. Yeah.

But it forced a emotional intelligence that's very powerful now that we're moving out of stealth. Yeah. And it will be interesting to see how the coming years go. Yeah, that's going to be a very interesting cultural case study. See what the company is like over time. Yeah. Yeah. So we've talked about what books were to Amazon, you know, food is to Adams in the sense of it.

It's where you start and where you start matters. So why was it important that you started at food in terms of what's general, So here's the thing, right? So what Cloud Kitchens was, was all about the way I saw it. And this was what I brought to the party, but it was like, this is digitized manufacturing and digitized real estate. It was call we, I call it when I can't people know as Cloud Kitchens because that's what we'd sell restaurant customers on. But the name of the company was city storage systems. Ah, okay, storage for the physical world. This is digitized real estate. state. Yeah. This is a food computer with a basis in real estate. Storage. Okay. That needs a network. Yeah. So this was the name of the company from the beginning. Yeah. Or once I came in. Okay. It was purposely boring because I was going stealth. You imagine selling something called city storage systems? Like, people are like, what is that? They'll forget literally 20 minutes after you talk to them. They're like, city, CSS. They're like, I think in HTML, they're like, they're confused.

They don't know what's going on. So for me, the framework was already there. I already thought about this as digitized manufacturing and real estate about an atoms-based computer, about a food computer. And that's why I was excited. The idea captured me because of that. And so it wasn't like, why did you start with food? It was like, I saw something. different than even maybe the the original team that was working on it saw it, but I saw

where it was going and in the way that I just described, and that's what the romance was about. And yes, there are lots of digitized manufacturing problems out there. Yeah, like mining. Like mining, like a whole bunch of other things. But this just captured me at the right time, you know? I was sitting at the bar and somebody came up and we had a great conversation, you know, went to Cabo the next weekend

and then just put a ring on it. Like, let's go. It was serendipity, man. Yeah. It's a real thing. So, and that's okay because the thing is, if you believe that you can,

like, find something, make it work, just grind it out, make it work, will it into working, your imagination can keep going. So for me, it wasn't, it's not as much about where you start. It's about making sure you're passionate about

where you start. And then where you go, you have no idea. And this is very much, I go back to the Bezos style, which is like your imagination will just keep coming up with new cool ideas. And so it's not about where you start. It's about why you start. And how you build a culture that allows you to keep going into new places over time and lets your imagination when it's right flourish. Yeah. That's why it was it's not an idea. It's an idea maze. And the more you learn about the idea and all the things.

And you don't know any, like the thing that is so hard to understand coming from the outside is you know so little when you start. Like when he's, I mean, he didn't even tell me. But he started, he didn't know fucking 1% of the fucking problems he was going to run into with Cloud Kitchens. Yeah, for sure. Because you've got to really get into it. By the way, what tech guy knows anything about real estate? Yeah. Zero.0.

Yeah. So it's all, the whole thing is a learning process. And then it's the best entrepreneurs can take those learnings and then multiply the applications. And that's, you know, it's just a very, very rare thing. Like, look, the fact that Elon has taken SpaceX to Starlink to data centers and space. It's just like nobody would start there.

Or think about this. The first roadster is now optimist. Yeah. Okay? Talk about letting the imagination flourish is a beautiful thing. Yeah, understanding what the core, core principles are and applying them. So with that said, paint us more, Paint us a picture about the future of Adams or more about the, or maybe you say some of the guiding principles that will dictate, you know, which industries you enter next or how you think about where you go for you.

Yeah, look, I tell people I'm very focused right now because it's only food mining and transport. There's so many things I haven't done yet. Like I'm so constrained right now. But it goes back to that thing I was saying before is you've got to find that beachhead. make it flourish build management capacity to solve 98%

of the problems that are going on and then you have the room to go do a new thing and really what it is it's you know I've been accused of using the

marathon analogy too much and I'm going to I'm going to live up to that which is you know at some point you might be doing a business and it just starts

working. I started seeing that on rides at Uber where it was like, I had my leads in different geos, and I'd call them up because we would jam on hard ideas and crank and all this. We didn't have much to talk about. Yeah, because shit was working. It just worked, you know? And they're like, Travis, we got this. I don't know why you're calling me right now. You know? So actually, this brings up one of the things that he did best at Uber, having had to deal with these guys, was, like, if you look at most companies, most of the, really the big tech companies that emerged in the 2000-2000s and tens. The management team were kind of professional middle managers, et cetera. He had so many guys who you would have gone, no, that's a founder. You know, that's a founder over there,

that's a founder over there. That's an actual entrepreneur. And it's amazing that he's not building his own company because he's like working for Travis. But that enabled them like to get to a multitude of ideas, you need like a team like that. And there's just not that many people who can build that kind of. It's just a very hard to attract and maintain that level of capability. Because those guys, unless you're building something absolutely spectacular, you know, they're not going to be in. And even if you are, you're dealing. with you got to be able to manage that.

Well, what happens is the management of it becomes an empowerment puzzle. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. By the way, not unlike here, but I don't know. I was supposed to say. So you've got, you know, I'm running Uber, let's say.

I have, I don't know, five continents going at any given time. You have an engineering team that's multiplexed across, a finance team that's multiplexed across, a product. Like, there's a lot going on. And the only way it works is, okay, you have that entrepreneur there. But they have to, basically empowerment starts with alignment, which is, okay, what's the strategy? Are we aligned on it?

That's the challenge, right? Appowerment plus alignment. So alignment on the front end, accountability on the back end. and we would call this let builders build. And so, but you... There's also, so you've got alignment, but alignment is multidimensional, because it's alignment on, okay, what are the goals,

what are the objectives? Also, what is the culture? Like, what is the behavior you guys are doing over there? Because that's going to affect us over here and us over there and so forth. So, like, we can't dilute the culture because we gave you autonomy. me, we've got to have that.

And that combination is, it's like a very high level of management skill. And that leader has to be good enough to do it. And that leader then has to work with the CFO and the CFO's people, the product, the head of product and the product guys people, engineering and engineering people to make sure that it works. Because if I'm a single point of failure, it ain't scaling on 24 time zones. There's no freaking way. And I think that's the difference between what we did at Uber versus we're seeing how a lot of other companies are expanding internationally that are buying things.

Like I was like, well, I buy. We can just freaking do this. A city's a city, let's go. And then if you buy it, guess what? You brought another culture. Yeah. Okay, and now you've got another reputation. And then that reputation is going to seat back.

And then, okay, now you don't have a culture. Because how are those motherfuckers getting away with that in Korea when we can't get away with that in the U.S., like all those things. And by the way, your product, your technology is a reflection of your culture. So then what happens is you just have the cultures reflected in the technology

and in how even that technology is built, the product decisions that are made, and now you've got to fuse these products and technologies together, which is very hard. Two years later, maybe. Yeah, exactly. That's why I didn't buy Lyft. By the way, that was a very different culture.

Yeah. I can attest. I wrote this. This was the reason I couldn't do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Super interesting.

The, and so you're constrained now by three different industries. What is the, take him off script? No, no. What is the criteria that's going to determine if and when you go into another? Yeah, it's the beachhead thing. And it's the, it's the, it's the, I'll go back to the marathon analogy is that if it's getting easy,

you must make it hard again. But you've got to get it too easy. You've got to start, and it's a vibe. It's like a feeling where basically I'm constantly creating problems. I'm a problem creator.

Problem creator might be like creating a problem might be like, hey, let's do Uber in China. That's creating a real friggin' problem. And by the way, you don't have a full understanding of that problem when you create it. And why is that hard? Because, well, if you create a problem, you have to solve it. So I have this, like framework I call the meta-problem, which is the derivative of your problem creation, D.T,

must be less than the derivative, less than or equal to the derivative of your problem solving DT. And if it's not, you have a real fucking problem. Yeah, well, then... You're underwater. Yeah, then you're underwater. And then you can drown.

And if you have multiples of those, you're really underwater. That's right. So when you create a problem, you're guessing at what your capacity is to solve problems. And you're guessing six months, 12, 18 months. ahead with only a certain understanding of what the nature of the problem is. And when you get it really wrong, you're underwater. And then you must stop all problem creation so that you can get back above water. And then when you go from your neck and then you're like at your waist in terms

of how underwater you are with your problem solving, when you're at your waist, you're like, oh, I could get, I could get to here. You create more problems. You let the problem creation and spick it open. And by the way, when you talk about capacity, a lot of it in this case is he's talking about his personal capacity because he's got to be able, if he's creating a new, large problem, he's got to be able to not pay attention in nearly the level of detail to the other parts of his business.

Those have to be working. Because if he's solving problems over there and created a big new problem, and that one gets in trouble, like then so it's not just like capacity the team it's also personal capacity yeah Matt

it's a little bit of both it's a little bit of both and like I never felt like I never felt like ride share was solved because what happened oh it's time for autonomy yeah okay all right

let's go by the way you were right about that yeah yeah just despite yeah I'm not going to even mention

And so if you would still been running Uber, you know, in this other universe, or some of the vision that you have here with atoms, would that have been, you know, could you've gotten to mining with, like? It's a continuation of the same vision, right? So the digitizing the physical world, the atoms-based computation, that was already set. Yeah. And so if the future of food is about infrastructure, automated production, automated logistics,

that's the future of Uber Eats too. Now, it doesn't mean when you're an OEM and you make a food computer. It doesn't mean you have to make all the parts, right? But the future is the same. And so, so that's my point, is that once you have that framework, why is the framework important?

it's because it tells you what the future is going to be. It's correct. And it also is, it's also compelling. Like, it's interesting once you start seeing things. Like, by the way, I built with my team like 500 cloud kitchens facilities around the world. Like, you could just look at it as like, why are you building kitchens? Which, of course, I sort of would go around all the time and tell people I'm just your local humble kitchens. I'm just your local humble kitchen builder,

you know, just sort of messing around. But like when you're hiring, it's like, why does this matter? Yeah. Oh, that's right. It's a food computer. Yeah. But once, so it's a mix of it's telling you where the future is going. And it's pointing the way towards where the interesting things are.

And it's helping you describe this in a way to really top quality talent who now can see what you see and can get excited about it. Yeah. And there's another kind of interesting thing which we went through when we were understanding the business, which is unlike in a computer where you have storage, and that storage kind of becomes obsolete over time. In the physical storage world in real estate, if you have the computer optimizing the storage, the storage becomes more valuable. So you build the food computer. and the storage is essential to deliver the end service,

particularly before there's OEMs and everybody knows there's a food computer available. But that food computer multiplies the value of the real estate. So it's weird. Imagine a computer that multiplied the value of its storage. I guess it's a little like an AI, like if you've got data, all of a sudden data is become valuable in a way that it wasn't really before.

Well, or you think of it this way. We could go to a data center. That's real estate. right? How much, how many, how many tops are now happening at a data center today versus 20 years ago? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, and how much value is coming out of those tops. Right. So the value of a data center in terms of what it provides society is going up over time, dramatically. A lot. And there's a lot of happy data center owners right now because of it. No doubt. I doubt. My friend Rob Roy. So that's Rob. Yeah. Well, We'll get him on soon. So speaking of, you know, painting this vision to talent and just talking about where

the future is going, talk more about the emerging category that Adams sits within, or you're calling industrial AI. Yeah. So, look, I did a vision letter when we launched Adams that outlined sort of vision for like physical AI where we sit in it. And even went into like what a physical AI stack is. and it's really in some ways it was like it was philosophy about where the technology world in the in in the in the the the tech industry in the physical world where it's going to go but what I didn't do was get to the brass tax and sort of when you look at okay well there's software there's bits that are affecting how atoms,

what happens to atoms, how they're assembled, where they go, what function do they do in the physical world? We basically, we started, I'm all over the place right now,

cut, edit, but we wanted to create, we wanted to create an easy way to understand what it means. And I would, I said, okay, Adam's mission, physical automation to transform industries.

You're like, okay, okay, kind of gets me there. But what does that mean exactly? Well, it means we take entire industries that are ripe for automation and AI, and in doing so that these are physical industries, and in doing so just completely transforms them. In a sense, you've had one idea. like the Uber and Adams Adams is the evolution of Uber in a sense

in that you kind of said okay we're the Cisco of the physical world and then you're like well what about the other parts of the physical world and you built that you extended that vision into the computer and now you're adding the parts but the computer is around an industry

so we make computers for industries. Yeah. Those computers are... Right, that's an important kind of distinction. They're industry-specific computers. But generalized networks in some sense. Yes. So you go, okay, why are we doing transport? Well, because you've got to have wheelbase for robots. Okay, cool. But like actually what it means is every industry is moving things. There's some movement of things eventually. And you must have wheelbase as part of what they do if you want to automate full stack that industry as an example.

But transport itself is an industry too. Yeah. But maybe a horizontal one versus a vertical. Right. Yeah. Peter Thiel a decade ago, you know, famously, you know, sort of talked about how we've had so much progress in bits, but not in atoms and regulation or for whatever reason. It was just easier in bits.

And here we are. And we're finally into it in a real way. Well, and it's like, I think the entrepreneur. that are coming up since the Uber time are not scared of regulation the way the bits... Yeah, well, that was a break for... In a large sense that you made, yeah.

Yeah, and so what it means is... Go on and they've been trying to regulate bits lately. Yeah, totally. But these go together. Yeah. Because it's like once the bits start controlling atoms in the physical world, then the regulators are in the game, big time.

Yeah. And because that's generally how regulation works. It's about our physical world, and that's how it's been for, thousands of years, really, certainly hundreds. And so, yeah, once you get in the physical world, you're like, okay, regulatory is a thing. And you say, okay, when in the past have we seen something like this? And it's like if you start studying the second industrial revolution, there's so many parallels

between what the Carnegie's, the Rockefellers, the Fricks, like you just go through the list. Ford's. The Ford's, what those guys had to deal with in that massive rapid change at that moment. Same, very similar political climate. Yeah. That's right. The new dealers were not that different than the current, you know, the current, in terms of their complete hatred of the industrialists.

Okay, so like there's a guy. Frick, who I think was Carnegie's partner, and this is about steel and how to process steel and do it at scale. I believe this story's accurate. Let's just say mythology, possibly true, but I believe it's true. Anarchist broke into his office while he was working. This is in like early 1900s or late 1800s. An anarchist broke into his office.

office, shot him in the neck. He got it stitched up, went back to work that day. And like, somebody's going to look it up. I believe it's true. Yeah. But somebody should fact check. But you get the vibe of what's going on and how those guys rolled and think about some of the entrepreneurs today that roll that way. Not all of them do. The bits guys don't necessarily roll this way. Elon rolls. But the Adams guys roll this way. Definitely. Right. And so the second industrial revolution, and you look at the characters and what they had to deal with and the adversity they had to go through, by the way, there are also none of these guys is Jesus. So they had their flaws too. But they were amazing. But there's a really, there's a very interesting parallel to what's happening slash about to happen now with like the coming industrial age. If we're selling our own book, we would. we would call it the Adams Age.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there's a book actually that's very interesting on the kind of building of the war machine by the industrialists, which won us World War II,

no question. And the resistance that they got, it's called Freedom's Forge. And, you know, it was a guy Bill Newton, who was like the complete badass who figured out, like, the mass production at Ford

and then got in an argument with Henry Ford and went to Chevy, or went to GM and, like, built Chevy and, like, all that, kind of thing, then went to work for the government for a dollar and to industrialize the nation. And the way he got fought by the press and everybody, like on the most basic thing,

like he's like, well, if we tell him to shut down making cars, and cars, by the way, employ 20% of America at the time. If we tell them to shut down making cars to make tanks and other things, then we're going to have to give them some money. So, like, can we give them cost plus 7%? And which, you know, like, seemed very reasonable, like reading about it, they're going to profit on the war. Like in Eleanor Roosevelt, like everybody was just out to kill this guy.

And, you know, somehow, but that kind of resistance is, like, very similar to what we're saying in data centers today and that kind of thing where I think the governor of New York just banned. data centers in this state. So there's a lot of parallels politically, which actually, I would just call that resistance to change. Yeah. And nature. Very fast change.

That's correct. So I sort of think of it as like the most important truth seeking is the seeking of the seeking of valuable unknown truths. But if you're good at finding valuable unknown truths. You're creating change. Then you know things other people don't know, which means you can do things that other people can't and the better you are at it, the faster the change comes. And the matter that change comes, the more nature will do what it does.

It's called resistance to change. Yes. And so you have to figure out how to bring big time progress to overwhelm resistance to change. And you also have to build trust as best as you can so that you have more advocates versus adversaries. And this is the dynamic. And one of the things I want to say just on the industrial, Very hard to do, by the way. Very hard.

Everybody loves progress. It's changed. They can't stand. Yeah, those two happen to go together. Yeah. So like, but on the industrial AI thing, it was like, my whole vision note was physical AI and like this theoretical thing. It was very academic and theoretical.

And I want to say, I want to get something that was practical brass hacks. Industrial AI is basically this stack of software, sensors, robotic. machinery that automates an industry. And we take it one industry at a time. And it just became much more real and clear about what it is. You go physical AI, you're like, oh, so you're doing a humanoid. I'm like, no, no, we're like the non-humanoid guys. I don't have a problem with them, but that's not what we do. You're like, oh, do you do like some military thing? You're like, no, that's not my thing either. You know, it's like, so this felt very clean about what it is we're about and how we're going after it. By the way, you know, a really interesting point on this

whole thing is one of the things that we completely forgot how to do. We were the best in the world. By far, we taught the world how to do was manufacture. And now we've basically forgotten how to do it as a country other than like Elon. Like if you need somebody who knows how to manufacture, you literally have to get them from Elon. And we're going to have to relearn that. And actually, the beginnings of that are literally data centers. That is a manufacturing problem to large extent, you know, with the cooling and the power. And, you know, you've got to build your own power and all that kind of thing. And there's so much resistance to that from the exact people who were just harping and harping for years about all the manufacturing jobs are going away. Well, they're back.

But we don't want them. And so, like, that's how tough this story is and this kind of narrative is. Thank God there's still enough places that are still welcoming data centers. Yeah. That it's not like the federal system is a wonderful thing because it's like you have this competition of some kind of. States. Yeah. It's really interesting how that works out.

Yeah. Otherwise we'd be Europe. Yeah. Okay. So we were talking offline, you were saying when you started Uber, you, you know, worked with people who would choose to work with you. Yeah. Now you're in a different position.

Yeah. You have, you know, a bit more choice. You've been building in stealth. Sure. Now you're, this is your coming out story. Yeah. Talk to us about, you know, what kind of team you're building here? Yeah, for sure.

How folks can help? Well, look, we just multiply the number of industries we're going out. after by three. So that's a kind of a thing. And each of them is a multi-trillion dollar opportunity. And, you know, look, I had some awesome guys. Like, you know, this is kind of a funny thing to say. But when you make somebody hundreds of millions of dollars, it's hard to hire them again. So, I've never had great success hiring rich people. Yeah. So, you know, but, you know, there's the crew, like Emil Michael's now undersecretary fence, but he was my right hand on doing just epic deal-making and strategic moves.

I need the next Emil Michael, if that makes sense. Like a head of CorpDab, BizDab that can build an inspired team, an inspiring team, as an example. We're in the market for a general counsel, so we're looking for. for somebody who can ride shotgun and make sure that I'm, you know, so I like to go to the line. We should be like a few inches off the line. That's a good thing to do. And then, of course, it's just the, like, I need a CEO of my mining business.

Yeah. Like, I need to build technical leadership across the board from autonomy, heavy duty robotics. And it's really like, we have lots of. folks coming in like all the time but it's like those epic leaders that can inspire their team to just go above and beyond and do really like make magic um so we're all no matter where you are as an entrepreneur the the the talent game is the game and uh again when you multiply the industries by three you're we're back in the flow and because we're stealth for so long we weren't in the flow we're cold calling everybody and i think it's one of the beautiful things about us being back out

there is okay like we can we can now have like a a place for people to understand who we are what we're about and i can start putting teams together that can be out there in a very public way and and and let people know the great work we're doing so and if you're joining now you're you're joining both with the benefit of having, you know, all the lessons you've learned and things you've proven out with Cloud Kitchens. And, of course, Uber before that's almost two decades, but early enough such that there's the upside of, you know, enormous opportunity going forward. Yeah.

And the ability to do something like super meaningful. I mean, save kids from working in the minds, you know, basically making it so that everybody can have great food, like. You know, instead of like eating super healthy food that gives people their time back. Yeah. Yeah. While also saving money. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a hell of a mission. Yeah. So we're having a lot of fun. It's good times. Yeah. It's a great place to wrap.

All right. Travis. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks, guys. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe. Leave us a rating or review.

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