FULL INTERVIEW: Uber Founder Travis Kalanick is Back with a New AI Startup

We have our next guest ready to join us live in the TVPlam. We have Travis Kalan. He is the CEO of Cloud Kitchens. Welcome to the show, Travis. Great to meet you. Appreciate you coming on down to our studio, our humble boat. Great to meet you. We are truly an honor. I'm just down the street. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. Um, we we were actually we started the show in downtown LA at the Jonathan Club on uh Figuroa and so I think we were even closer then. Um, still not far. Uh, how are things

going? Uh, how's life? Who? Can we turn that down? We're getting some feedback. That was crazy. Um, man, that's crazy. Yeah. What's crazy? The building doesn't stop. Um, I mean, I don't know how much you guys I mean, I've just I've been in hiding. So, I've been um I've been doing uh I've been doing this. We I I run a company called City Up until today. Yeah. Let's just say I was running a company called City Storage Systems, okay? Which was basically about the future of food, a conglomerate operating in about 30 countries. That the

whole idea was, can you get a meal? Uh that's prepared and delivered to you so efficient that it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store. Yep. Because if you do, you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car. So I've been doing that since 2018. Yeah. And after just the intensity of Uber from in terms of like being in the public sphere, dealing with a hundred headlines every day, deciding what you do or the actions you take based on what the New York Times is going to write. Yep. I

was like, I would like to That's a tough way to run a business. It is very tough. So, uh, I was just like, I got to wake up every day and sort of just get to work and build. So, did you So, I went under the radar. Did you think of this as like stealth mode? Is that the right term? We've been in stealth mode for eight years. Okay. And that's like till today. Yeah. Employees were not allowed to put the name of the company on their LinkedIn. We have thousands of employees. Yeah. That's crazy.

Okay. So today what happened was is like for my company and I just got out of all hands and then came right here is we went out of stealth. Y now city storage systems is like a hilarious name. It's like the most like let me choose the most generic generic name that no one will ever know. Business corporation of America. It was on purpose. Okay. And it worked. It was like we had two choices when we when we launched. Um we had what my sort of normal instinct was. Remember it was only seven eight months

after I left Uber when I started this. Yeah. Yeah. And it's let's just say the mission is infrastructure for better food. Okay. We have hardcore real estate assets. We buy the assets. We do construction. We sell restaurant tours on a delivery only location. I have a software stack that's like ARR AR life. I've got a robotics company. I have a marketplace for for corporate lunch. Like there's a ton of stuff going on. Oh yeah, that's right. That's right. Of course. Yeah, it's great. Okay. So, [ __ ] I forgot what I was saying. So So

it's just a very different business from Uber. Some people would leave that company and be like, I'm going to start the exact same thing. I got the playbook. This is what this is what the Uber guys when I left were were like a little bit worried about this is we're talking about 2017 18. They're paranoid. So my My instinct was okay. I left it's seven months later. I'm going to name my company Super. He like you leave a company called Uber, you call it Super. I'm like call it Gigas. I'm like you go from Uber

to super. You're like no that that cannot be a thing. And so I did the opposite. Full underground, full stealth. Put the toothpaste back in the tube, the genie back in the bottle and build. Yeah. Literally thousands of employees and it's like a vacuum of information, full lockdown. It's been great building. Uh but today we sort of came out and we renamed the company. We renamed what we do. We call it Adams. Adams. Okay. Beautiful. But we started a new company at the same time. And so let's just say like uh like physical AI and

robotics, action and movement through the physical world. Of course, on the food side, we already have all the things I just talked about. Um but but think of it as like um uh uh I'm trying to get the mission like we're so I'm so riled up. Yeah, it's so fresh. Uh but but basically it's um yeah. So so the I I'll leave it at that. Let's get we can get rolling here. I'm like super caffeinated on four hours of sleep. So I love it. I love it. Uh what how much harder in in many ways

I think building in stealth for so long made a lot of things easier, right? You're not running your business based on headlines or thinking about what headlines are going to come. What are what are the ways in which it made it harder? I imagine there's a lot of there's a lot of there's a lot of talent out there that wants to go work at the hot company that's in the news constantly. I'm sure you got the benefits of people maybe opting out of that path and saying, "Hey, I just want to come in with you

and build and I don't care about the hype and I don't want I don't need every recruiter hitting me up constantly because of whatever's on my LinkedIn." But what were the kind of key challenges and what are why why was now the right time to uh to come out and and start to get loud again? So like first I mean 100%. So imagine every recruiter has to be outbound. Every salesperson has to be outbound. There's no inbound. Yeah. That's where it starts. You get good at your craft when that's what you have to do. Like

I believe we have some of the best recruiters in the world because of it and one of the best recruiting systems. Now they leverage. Okay, you're working with Travis, former, you know, founder of Uber. Like there's leverage there. Yeah. But then you you have a name like City Storage Systems and it's like, So do you guys just have like these these like boxes sitting in parking lots? Like what is this? And that's sort of like the reason it's different now is because look, number one, lots of time since the Uber situ, you know, from having

to live that life. Yeah. Um but two is the world is different. Like in 2016 2017 the world of let's call it business press was just beginning to say business is politics but people didn't know it. They're like if New York Times says something everybody just treated it as the gospel like it just must be true. Yeah. Ver and and if they say something bad it must be true. I believe everything I read on the internet as an example. And so, and by the way, it's this sounds crazy, but 2017, the media world was actually

more negative then than it is today. And I think partly because of even shows like this, right? It's like, let's bring some optimism to the party. Can we get excited about what the future looks like and what's being built? And that's the difference between today and then. And so, when you go 95% of all press is negative. You're like, why engage? When the world is used to business being politics, let's just say, and if I thought of my favorite journal, sorry, My favorite politician and say, what does the internet say that's bad about them? And

it's like an insane amount. What does the internet say that's ne or sorry, untrue about them? And it's a ton of stuff. And you go, well, that's how they're going to think about our company, too. That's how it's going to play. We're now we're desensitized to that stuff. And now we can get back to optimism and building and not be so worried about, you know, 95% of the media just being negative. Sure. Yeah. I mean, this was pre like go like whole trend of going direct, right? Like Lulu, I'm sure you met it at some

point. uh basically coach a generation of CEOs on you know you just can't if you if you want to have any control yeah over how people perceive you uh you need to you need to tell you have to counteract with like a story not like a statement and the the the boilerplate like you know official statement just doesn't it doesn't entertain people as well as a full read a long read and it's also guys like Elon owns Twitter now X right pre-post post is like a massive difference in the mix of sort of ideas that

can get out there. And again, you're allowed to be optimistic about things where maybe before everything had to be negative and and and sort of Yes. You you talked about the initial idea of naming the next company Super. That would have in many ways, I'm sure, Turned into a basically a spite company. Yeah. where you're just uh in this case like kind of taking the high road was I'm just going to be quiet. I'm going to do the years and years and years and years of just like chewing glass, building up this infrastructure, getting to

scale, getting to thousands of employees, getting to operating globally before you even poke your head up again, which I think is uh to any of your former critics, that's to me that's taking the high road basically. Yeah. And what you get when you create a a culture around that is you have you then build a culture of builders. You build a culture of people that want to build and do not need to be famous when they do it. Yeah. Which basically means emotional intelligence. Now there it's a human nature. I want to be acknowledged for

the things that I do. Yeah. I'd like the things I build to be seen and I I'd like somebody to know that I did it. And so this is when you cut against sort of the core of human nature. And we sort of went all the way. Yeah. And so we have a very high EQ culture, but like it is like you have to go the extra mile to recruit, the extra mile in sales, etc. Again, the world's Different. LFG are the laws of physics of of the different businesses slightly different. I'm just thinking about

your career arc with like Red Swoosh is enterprise communications. You're in a very particular industry. Uber is a consumer company. Now you're working on something that looks you probably run into like real estate developers. It's like a different industry, different community. Has there been adjustments and what's different? What's the same? Like what can you just be like a good business operator and power through and what do you actually have to learn about the new industry? Look, I think probably the biggest one is when you go from consumer to because I have a I mean when

you go from consumer to B2B Yeah. the number one mega challenge that you must master is called LTV to CAC. Yes. You could make that argument on consumer. But when you have a salesunnel that starts with I'm going to talk to customers and I'm going I have to make LTV to CAC work versus like my LTV to CAC is the app store. It's a whole different ballgame. and um LTV to CAC with a sales machine, especially if you go small business. Y this is like life in hard mode. Y um and talk to anybody who's

who's crushed it on SMB. Yeah. Like those guys are special individuals who've made that happen because life in the SMB B2B world is no joke. Yeah. So talk about Moes. Uh, I feel like Uber's the greatest example of network effects and and runaway scale. Uh, what do what did Moes look like at Red Swoosh? What were you thinking then? And then and then what does it look like now? So like nobody knows what Red Swoosh is. That's all good. So guys, I started a company in 2001 that was let's call it uh Bit Torrent meets

Okami. Yeah. Sold before Bit Torrent existed. Yeah. Okay. That's crazy. You click on a link and you can pull from other PCs that already have that file or that video stream, but it looks like the internet. That's basically what it was. Uh the first four years, no salary. Wow. Yeah. Had some had some famous investors, famous investors, you know, like um Mark Cuban was on the board of Red Swoosh. Um so before that, Scour was Oitz and and Ron Burkel. That was the company before that. Oh. Oh, I bet. I was confusing too. Yeah. Anyways,

uh so there's a network effect there once you get the CDN up and running. That company wasn't meant to be and I willed it into being and I sold it to Okami for like I think it was like 19 million bucks and probably to this day is still the happiest day of my life. Okay. It was crazy. It was cra like I cleared 3 million and I was likeing praise the Lord. Okay. So then Uber very obvious uh very obvious modes and and and scale economies like what does this look like with Adams? What does

this look like in both you know the food delivery kitchen model, real estate model, but then also where we're going in uh in autonomous robotics. Look, I if you look at where Moes are and really you're looking for network effects in different places, right? So right now I have these facilities. There's 30 restaurants in each of them. Picnic is like a perfect example of this, right? Uh you order from your office, looks like Uber Eats or Door Dash. You get a 100 options except all the meals are coming out of my facilities. There's one courier

that brings a hundred orders at a time, but it's on demand and it's personalized for you. And we've got enough facilities near here that you can basically get anything. And so who's going to who can play ball? Yeah. Like you got to have the real estate. That's a freaking mode. You have the network effect now of like what if I sell every floor on every tower meaning every office floor is on this and I in all of these floors that means that one courier can bring a 100red or by the way I'll have five couriers

going to a single office with 500 ores hitting every shelf and you get notified when it Arrives how if you even took one floor you would be like sad because your economics are going to be screwed because you don't have the efficiency or the operation sort of uh depth to make it work. Yeah. So there's network effects of a building. There's network effects on a on a facility with kitchens in it. There's um but then there's the moat of like we own real estate. Yeah. Okay. So like if you want you want to compete with

us, go buy a hundred million billions of dollars of real estate in every major city in the world and then we're going to go headtohead. Yeah. Talk about capital. Yeah. the other the other uh the I I don't know exactly what what bucket this falls in, but just just the moat of you would have to be absolutely insane to compete. But people were people were like this is how I remember the Uber versus Lyft battle was Uber was doing so well and then and then all of a sudden a whole bunch of VCs were like

I want a piece of that and I didn't get Uber so I'm funding the but I'm saying in the context of of cloud kitchens and city storage like even though people generally figured out what you were up to, right? you did have to share some little things along the way or you buy this company or or there you got to you got to go to a website and say what are what what is an what is a delivery only location what the hell is that and so somebody had to know but even then we're like

we're going to We're going to say the cross streets of the facility not the actual address like these are the little moves you do to be stealth you know in in you know when I look at the the new site and and how everything's positioned uh a lot of it feels insulated from all the changes and progress that we're seeing in AI and in many in many ways like accelerated because you get you'll get a lot of the b you know the benefits of of AI progress and progress in robotics uh but you're moving physical

atoms around the world and in an era where you know you can generate any piece of software fairly quickly uh this this feels like you've been kind of planning for this type of technology progress for sounds great, dude. I love that. I love it. Yeah, dude. This big all in the plan. Let's go, dude. Look, I think it's always been the plan. A meal that's efficient, you know, so efficient, it starts to approach the cost of going to the the grocery store. A meal that's prepared and delivered to you. That's real. You must do automated

production of food. You must do automated delivery of the meal. I call that autonomous burritos, which is why I'm moving into this making this move on atoms, which is okay. We're still doing the food thing, but then we're adding mining and transport. Okay. Uh mining being like more, you know, we like to say more efficient mines for Earth's industries or uh on transport, it's just robot wheelbase for robots. Okay. Okay. Because if you're going to do specialized robots, not humanoids, but specialized robots, they need to have wheels. Okay? Right? I like to say like if

you saw the Beijing in Beijing, they had the humanoid Olympics or whatever and the half marathon and you're watching a humanoid cruising. I'm like, dude, could you imagine if that thing had wheels? That'd be crazy. So like humanoids have their place, but there's there's a lot of room for specialized robots that that do things in an efficient sort of industrial scale kind of way, which is sort of where we play. Uh I'm I I'm I want to go back to capital wars, lessons from capital wars, when these play out because we're seeing this AIG and

you Yeah. my Were you the OG because or or when this Capital War kicked off, were you looking to lessons from the '90s? I mean, look, you can always say there was the guy before. Okay. Like, like, you know, Rockefeller was the OG and then before him was it like the Medici? I don't know. But I was I was the goat for a period of time and now I'm a baby goat. Yeah. And and that's okay. Uh, and so then one day the baby goat will grow up again. That's fine. It's going to be fine.

I I I I just mean like um th this idea of like you have a network effect, it's growing and then you see a bunch of venture capitalists started throwing money at like the second place and there's this debate over catching up and like how do you what moes do you retreat to in that moment? Like I feel like that's the that that's the lesson from the Uber story that gets missed amid all the random drama is that there's actually like a very interesting financial war happening and it played out very well for you and

I'm wondering like what level of confidence you had. What did you do strategically to set yourself up for success? It's a super interesting thing because of course all the AI guys are playing that game right now which is the ability to attract capital. Cap the capital wars becomes a strategic weapon. Capital becomes a strategic weapon, which means you must be the best at getting capital in order to win. And we realized that early on in the Uber days, of course, that's happening times 10 y in the sort of let's call it the digital AI wars.

And look, the last round of funding that I did at Uber, we were like a 70 million, you know, I don't know, it was like a 6070 billion pre. Uh, let's see that. Yeah, when that used to be a thing. Now like, oh, that's small stuff. Um, but we had four rooms. This was our our how we'd fundraised. We had four rooms in our New York office. Okay. Booked for a week. Mhm. With an hour and a half slot on each. Yeah. So like for 12 hours in a day. Four rooms going in parallel. I

was in You're Are you bouncing between it? No, I'm in the $250 million and over club. Okay. That's one room. And it goes all there's all these other there's these other rooms to the fourth room is like $25 million checks. Okay. Okay. There's a guy who works for a guy who works for a guy who works for me who's doing that room. Yeah. Okay. And then but we're oversubscribed. So we started putting multiple investors in the same room. We're like dude we're just out of slots, dude. Like let's go. Um and but what it means

is it's about the system. It's about the system for uh sort of acquiring that capital at scale and superefficiently. And what it means is that storytelling that we did, anybody in my team could tell that story. Let's say on the strategic finance team could tell that story and make it happen. Y and that was a big part. It was the story that's just like of course is like if I'm pitching it people like holy [ __ ] let's go. Yeah. Then there is making it scalable so that there are 10 different people in a company

that can pitch it at any given time. Yeah. And that's when you take it all the way. And then there's like even auction dynamics of how you would do it. We would basically once they said they were interested, we would then give them a piece of paper. It was like digital, but it was like you need to fill out this table which is this valuation, how much money you want to put in, this valuation, how much money, this much money, this this valuation, how much money. And then we would aggregate the demand IPO book. Yes.

But like done way better because you don't respect of the bankers. But like Yeah. I was in charge of pricing. Sure. Sure. And so and then you're like, "Oh, we're trying to clear $5 billion that takes us to this price." We would tell all these guys, "Hey, your price isn't big enough because y don't make it under the curve." Yep. And then they would move their price. Yep. And then that would change the curve and you would do it again. Do it again. Makes sense. Were you uh were you bringing new investors to private markets

at that time? I feel like if I go back to Facebook, I think they IPOed around 50 billion. You're doing a $70 billion raise. There's a lot of different It's a completely different shape of investor. What were those conversations like? Look, I like I in some ways I have to give some credit. The be this was it it was an era where this was happening. You Had like the Fidelities of the world and other guys that are moving in. Yeah. I have to give credit to Drew at Dropbox. Oh, he was like the first guy

in that game. Yeah. And you know, Drew and I meet up and we, you know, and I'm like, flex. I'm like, dude, you're like, this is my our little safe space. Like Chesky at Airbnb. That was the crew that was doing it in the 2010s and sort of pushing the boundaries of what it meant to be like people didn't even know what private equity private what is a private what is private equity. Yeah. Now we're just like yeah private equity that's VC it's the same thing and but back then private equity is like I do

leverage buyouts and so you're bringing private equity mutual funds those guys into the game in a way that didn't exist before. Now it's just old hat. Have you uh have you coached any of the AI founders? I was going to ask the exact same thing. Culturally, like that crew that you just described, I we most of them have been on the show. It feels very different aesthetically than what we're dealing with today. Um yeah, but I'm sure Chesky's pumping up Sam. I love I love these guys. I love them all. That's so interesting. Look, the

the times when I get hit up Yeah. are usually when the [ __ ] is about to hit the fan or or it's actually hitting the fan. They're like, "Dude, somebody needs to call Travis immediately. He'll know what to do." So I you So my casting casting a movie about me. My phone's like one of the crazy wild wackiest things going down or like here because that's when I usually get the call and I'm so underground. Yeah. Yeah. That's what happens. But like I should, you know, I should give a, you know, I know these

guys. I should give them a call and be like, "Dude, we should let's let's cook." I still think we probably did things better than anybody that some of those things probably are still better than anybody even today, but obviously the check size much bigger. Is that approach like systematizing, fund, fundraising, productizing it? Do you apply that across the entire is that like everything that you do that is important? You're you're creating like a groundup kind of solution for it. Where else where else? Well, like for instance, I mean this will you know this is just

crazy, but like how about when you do construction? Mhm. Do you know how effed up construction is? I tell my guys that uh in the con in the real estate department, I'm like, "Your entire department is the anti-fraud department." Oh yeah, those guys just are incentivized to just run up bill. So, how do you do epic highquality construction at an insanely efficient price? There's a way. Mhm. Not going to tell you. Not going to tell you, but there's a way. Do you have Do you have any uh like white pills or ideas that potentially AI

speeds up the rate of building broadly like solving the housing crisis through permitting stuff like that? This is so one of the things is that and I think people are starting to come out of this now this whole like the jobs are gone like I know still people still say that but there is another side to this story and like I'll just make this because I'm the atoms guy I'm like let's just talk about plumbers okay let's say the entire world everything in our world was automated except for plumbers okay okay you had machines making

buildings you would basically have like a thousand buildings a day. Yeah. A thousand buildings being built at a single time in Los Angeles alone. Sure. Just machines doing Yeah. Except plumbers. Okay. How valuable would those plumbers be? Extremely valuable. Okay. Those guys each and every plumber would be like LeBron. Okay. Why? Why? Because because because plumbing is the long pole in the tent to progress. Sure. That you can't get those thousand buildings unless you have a plumber. Sure. And by the way, you got so much efficiency everywhere else that you need millions of plumbers. Yeah.

And then plumbing is like, yeah, what's up? And so once you once you realize that, then you're like, until we get super AGI, yeah, humans are valuable. And they are going to become more and more valuable because they will be the long pole in the tent to progress. And that progress is going to accelerate and get faster and more, you know, more robust. Except if you're a plumber, you're crushing. And so until we get to humans are replaced like fully fully. Yeah. And by the way, I have I think we have solutions for that. I

think Elon's got that at Neuralink. It's going to be all good. Okay. Then people like, "Oh god." But but until we get there, we're going to I believe we're going to be super fine. That's my white pill. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it does. If you have plumbers that are getting paid like LeBron, it obviously increases the, you know, the prize pool of automating. Uh but again, there's like these kind of windows of but there's going to be a bunch of things like plumbing and it's not just plumbing. It's going to be all over the place. And

even when it comes to software, so like for instance, look at like autonomous cars, they like like Whimo has people that oversee the rides. Yeah. Okay. And it starts with like okay, five five rides for every person, then it goes to 20, then it goes to 100. But like if we get to this place where autonomous cars are everywhere, okay, and let's just say it's one in a thousand. Mhm. And like nobody owns cars. There's just ride sharing everywhere. I mean, some people will own cars, but it' be the top of the top of the

pyramid, let's say. Okay. So, what do we replace? Billions of cars with ride sharing. Yeah. If it was a thousand to one, you still probably have, I don't know, 20 million jobs. Yep. 50 million jobs. I'm just riffing on just the concept of this. You will see this everywhere is that until humans are fully replaced, we become the long pole in the tent to progress. And that progress, by the way, is to serve us. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Robots yet don't yet have bank accounts. So that plumber gets paid. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, you get the

idea. Uh you mentioned mining. Yeah. Have you been to a mine recently? Have you visited a mine? Like what what's going on in mining? How I mean I imagine that mines are fairly automated already? Like there's machinery. There's thousands of employees. Okay. At a given mine. Um, and and that's work that he There's so many resources. Children children yearn for the minds of Minecraft, but it's not the best not the best, but like maybe that's actually how it gets, you know, maybe that's where it goes. Enders game situation. The look the it's interesting. You go

a lot of times they're like, "Oh, um, oh well, is labor really the issue in my, you know, is that really a thing?" But the what it really comes down to is productivity. Okay. Right. So if if a mine is automated, then it can run all hours of the day and night. It doesn't have Yeah. It doesn't have off hours. Yeah. Uh the way machines queue up doing that really efficiently like computer science style. I call it digitizing the physical world. Yeah. You can make that mind substantially more productive. What is the value of a

more productive mind? And by the way, let's say let's get to the real sort of the the outcome here. Yeah. Is does the world as we enter this sort of new golden age that's about to come. Do we need more minerals? Do we need more materials? Look around us, guys. I like look around us in this studio or walk outside. Everything you see is grown or mined. Yep. Yeah. Manufactured and moved. Yeah. So if you're not in the mining business like you're like let's just say the m like I shouldn't say that but like it

it's it's a very critical part of the situation. I can't wait till we're putting some machines on uh SpaceX's rockets to go mine an asteroid or a planet or whatever. In the meantime lots of mines on planet Earth abstraction do you want to operate at? Do you want to go and find land and mine it because that's sort of on the table if I look at what you're doing in food. You you you own real estate. Or do you want to sell tools to mining companies that already have explored and they understand and they're running

up and Running? Yeah. Like how do you think I'm not um I'm not buying land for mines anytime. That's just not anytime soon. But in the next three months, not 120 days out. I just think it's super fascinating. Again, it's just like like I'm an atoms guy. I'm like all about digitization of the physical world. And you know, I have this framework for it which is like CPU manipulates bits, storage stores bits, network moves bits from point A to point B. I was a computer engineer at UCLA. I didn't graduate, but it but I I

loved it. Yeah. Um, those are the three core computing resources that you're told about on day one. Yeah. But if you're treating atoms like bits, digitizing the physical world, CPU manipulates bits. What manipulates atoms? Manufacturing. Storage stores bits. What stores atoms? Real estate. Network moves bits from point A to point B. What moves atoms? Transport. Logistics. I didn't know it then or I didn't think about that way exactly. But at Uber, we were building network for the physical world, also known as digitized transportation. Y city storage systems then make sense. Yeah. Storage for the physical

world. That's real estate. We're building atomsbased computers with a real estate foundation. Storage. Yeah. Right. But now leveling up and saying, okay, we have a food computer. What about a mining computer? And what about a wheelbased platform to serve industry generally? Yeah, if I look at the last two decades of your career, you're uniquely good at managing very uh geographically spread out workforces. What is the secret? I I I can I could never get behind the remote work thing. Everyone here works in one studio, but respect. I'm all about it. But you you've had to

do it basically because you had to have a presence in New York. You had to have a presence in LA and you can't be in 10 places at work. It's all good. There's a difference. There's a difference between remote work where somebody works at home and they're like in boxers and then a a suit, okay? Versus we have an office in every major city in the world and whatever city you're in, you're going to that office every day, five days a week and sometimes six or seven and that's it. But satellite offices still feel like

a headache. How how did you solve it? Because you can only be in one place. Yeah. I guess I just I cracked the code so thoroughly in Uber times before I think maybe even before anybody else. It almost feels like normal. Yeah. But like I basically have figured out sort of the the management and leadership structures where you the real the real thing is about empowerment. Okay. is you must be able to empower teams. But I I I I it's like uh I like to say the fewest number of rules while staying out of chaos.

Sure. And once you have those systems in place, um you know, your imagination is only constrained by management capacity. Yeah. So once you figure out the management piece, your imagination can go pretty damn far. And so it's just figuring out the management part of this is the thing. Talk about empowering young people. We've had a ton of founders on the show who have the origin story of like, yeah, I was the GM of Miami or so or he sent me to Atlanta and I was me in a hotel room with a bunch of energy drinks

and we had to open up this market. So, we had to do a stunt and hire some people and it just felt like a lot, you know, startup within a startup is a bad phrase that gets sort of misused. But, um, why why were you, you know, you weren't, This wasn't your first company with Uber. Why were you so heavy on leaning on young people, empowering them, pushing them? It wasn't on purpose. It was just the right answer. Okay. Why? Um, yeah. I mean, once you have a city team and you're like, "Okay, I need

to find people that can run this." Like, old people aren't the answer. Like, I need fresh. I didn't think of it as like, I got to get youthful people or not. I'm just like, I need good talent that can go do X and who has no judgment on what it is we got to get done. Yeah. And it it was just like water flows downhill. So, um what do you look it was a you know like the the first driver ops guy that we brought in in San Francisco in 2010. We basically took 200 cards

and put names on them and we said alphabetize them. Click. And we just would measure how much time it took to alphabetize. We would give them like crazy analytics tests and then we're like, "Okay, this is our guy." You know what I mean? Free AI. If you're on the marketing manager, if you're on the marketing manager, but you even today, you'd still want that guy. Yeah. Even today. So like, you can't use AI now. Alphabetize in the most efficient way. Now, if you're if you know computer science, sorting is like a big freaking deal. sorting

efficiently and being able to do that in your brain, not in Software, is a thing. That's what ops people do. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. So, um I don't know. I don't know how to answer that question other than uh problem solving, whether you're young or old, executive or junior, who can solve problems is number one. When you interview, simulate what it's like working together so that day one is really like week two. and you're already pumped because you saw them in action. Yeah. How are you with Adams? How are you thinking about recruiting and

how are you going to change uh your approach to building the company? You've been kind of holed up in LA. This is your kind of hideout. Yeah, totally. But I imagine like do you do you push into back into SF? Go back to being the king. Well, here. So, first let's just be clear. On December 18th, I moved to Texas. Sure. you know, I don't know what's so specific about December 18th, but who knows? Let's just say it's prior to January. Yeah. Um, so I'm a primary resident of Texas, but the the action for a

lot of this Adams type technology I'm talking about, of course, like the bay is a real thing. My head of the advanced technology group at Uber is running my robotics division at Adams. It's called Lab 37, Anthony in Pittsburgh. No, no, that's uh Eric Mhoffer. Okay. Eric Mhoffer. Uh so that's robotics on the food side. Um yeah, Anthony Evanowski uh was running Pronto. I was the I was the largest investor in Pronto and then we just were basically right in the final like we're checking off the list maybe closing today or tomorrow on that deal.

So amazing. Let's talk about that deal. Yeah. Give us give us Yeah. give us like kind of background on on Pronto and then how it fits into the to the empire. Well, look, I I I sort of broke out how mining fits. Yeah. Right. So, we got that. Look, I've been I'm the largest investor in Pronto. Um and it's super inspiring work like like go to a mine, right? Check out how these things work and let your mind imagine what that might look like when you bring automation to it and how much more productive it

is and what that means for industry when all minds are producing more. Where does that go? Um, and in some ways you could say lowhanging fruit on the autonomy problem because yes, there are different problems off-road, but they ain't like they're way more controlled than what's going on onro. Okay, but then you get into the physical action like cars on the road, the Whimos on the road, uh, you know, they're moving but they're not acting on atoms, right? So when you think about excavation and you think about crush like when you get the material and

then you move it then you are basically crushing the material and then you process it you think about all of the automation through that stack it's fantastic and it's like it's hard right like I somebody asked me like we have a bunch of roboticists that make some of our food machines and somebody came like hey like is AI going to help us design food machines were like, "Dude, let me show you." Yeah. Like this thing has like an insane number of parts and let me show you just the design of a single part. Yeah. Like

like the that that AI can't even do freaking math. You know what I mean? It's like this is not we're not there yet. Now, could it get there? Yeah. But then you're really an AGI. If you look at how much harder it is the physical world, how much harder it is AI in the physical world versus in the digital world, and I'm not demeaning it in any way. I'm just saying it's like a maybe let's just call it a different problem set. Yeah. You're we're just far away from one. There's just way less training data.

Yeah. The it's like one-shotting on software, Dude. Oneotting on designing a machine or a robot. We're just not there yet. Yeah. Not there yet. But that makes it more fun. That's the point is like do the hard things. If you are in the Adams world, you have decided, I like hard things. I like pain more than anybody else. Yeah, this is kind of what you got to be about. Chewing glass. I love it. Uh, so I can see how AVs at Adams fit into mining. What other and just heavy industry broadly? What other kind of

categories of of AVs are are exciting? How do you see the space evolving? Yeah. Look, I anything I mean we the mission is wheelbase for robots. Yeah. So then you're just like, okay, what moves? Yeah. Right. And you go, okay, where you have to find the businesses that make sense. Of course. So we're like, okay, mining is a no-brainer. How do you how do you think about sizing for a wheelbase for robots that can scale up and down like crazy? I like I tell my team like, "Dude, there's like a ton of silver medals here

and there's actually a few other gold medals just in the category." Um, so let's just go with delivery robots like food delivery, Which of course is near and dear to my heart. Um, you make a lot your 20 Yeah. Your 30 Your $15 bowl became 30 bucks. Yeah. Okay. Two. And this is this is like I would put it up there as like one of the number one annoyances of the average American regardless of where they are in society. Food is just the cost of food delivery. Everybody wants food fast, cheap, hot, etc. Yeah. And

there's all this data that just came out this week that just shows like it doesn't matter even how much money you're making, you're spending a lot on this category. Isn't it interesting? Right. Remember I talked about the plumbers. Yeah. But like you could take whole categories become the long pole in the tent. Food. Boring to a lot of people. Boring is that for me [ __ ] interesting. Let's go. Let's go. But I look I did taxis. I did taxis. Yeah. When they're like people are looking at me funny. It was a weird idea. Okay.

They're looking at me super funny. So Jason Calcanis, the most famous investor in Uber of all time, More famous than you in some whenever I meet with him, I'm like, "Dude, I'm so honored to be meeting one of our early investors." But he there was like a angel group that I pitched to. There were like 30 40 people in the room. I think it was like three or four that invested. It's crazy. Okay. The 10 grand check became like a hundred million bucks. It was crazy. Wow. But um the boring places are the places. Yeah,

you know, less competitive, but also just weird and hard. There's a reason why it's that way. The graveyard uh is stacked of tech guys that thought they could crack food, which is why which is again like Yeah. Go back to and you can go you can go compete in this category, but you have to actually be insane and you have to have Yeah. and and then you have to attack at all at all these and my so my head of the robotics division Yeah. We're like, "Yeah, let's do this. Get the band back together. Let's

go." Right. This is Eric Myhoffer. Yeah. And um and he's like, "Okay, we can make a food row." I'm like, "I got one there's one Requirement. I got one what hanging chat or one string attached." He's like, "What?" I'm like, you're going to have to build a restaurant that the robot serves. So, my roboticist team in Pittsburgh made a restaurant that is the restaurant that our first robot went into. Because we had to make sure that we understood how a restaurant worked. We had to make sure that this wasn't just a machine that made food,

but a machine that makes food in the ecosystem of machines called a restaurant. Yeah. And uh people don't understand but a restaurant is a manufacturing facility. In fact, if you look at like the labor statistics, etc. Restaurants fits under manufacturing for obvious reasons. It just hasn't changed in 50 years. Yeah. Anyways, back to Sorry, I'm all over the place. No, I love it. I love it. Firing on all cylinders. Uh but but so so again, uh are do you want to move people with AVs? Do you are you do you care more about commercial? Look,

the the industrial thing is sort of like probably our our main jam, but the bottom line is once you once you crack once you crack movement in the physical World, there's lots of people who want access to that. Yeah. And in fact, you need partners because, you know, you're going to be putting billions billions of dollars to work to make it happen. Yeah. So, there's going to be lots of partners across different categories that are going to probably want some of that. And I have no issues with that. We're not like a, you know, this

is ours and this thing. It's more like, hey, there there may be ways to work with others. We're happy to do it. Yeah. We got to pick our our spots, but you get the idea. What about manufacturing broadly? You're doing it in food. Are there other categories that are interesting or are you happy to be kind of the transport rails? Look, I think once you are in physical AI, you should basically understand that manufacturing is part of your tech stack. Like it just is. And by the way, energy is part of your tech stack. Land

development, real estate is part of your tech stack. That's just what it's going to be. People don't think about it like that, but it's true. Of course, there, you know, I've I, you know, Tesla just crushes. If you look at this list of things, you're just like, "Yeah, they got it all." So good. Um, but there's just so much to do. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I mean? We can see all the things We can see all the things Tesla's doing. That's cool. I'm like, "There's a million. I can still help you mine. I I

could still I can still get some food to to some peeps." You know what I mean? So, you get the idea. Is that is that is that really when you're pitching investors around atoms in this new vision? Is it basically like there's a lot of jobs to do in the world, we're going to do it with physical AI and you're basically betting on applying my general ethos to all these categories over time. No, you gota you got to be able to pick your spots. If you are too broad, people are like, "Dude, what's wrong with

you?" Now, you know, I think every entrepreneur always gets that like, you know, I I I joke around like in the 90s, dude, I'm an old guy. What are you going to do? In the 90s, it's like, dude, Microsoft's going to kill you. Like, why do you think? Then in the 2000s, it was like, why isn't Google going to do this? In the 2010s, it's like, dude, that looks like Uber's thing. Y in the, you know, now it's like, if you're talking about physical AI, it's like, that's Tesla. That they are the They are the

incumbent. They are and not just the incumbent, they're also just doing great awesome stuff. But find your spot. Yeah. Know yourself. Know what you're good at. Be self-aware and find the thing that is your business soulmate for sure. But also know that you're in an ecosystem and you need to find your spot. What was your experience like in dot and the the financial crisis broadly in 2008? Uh okay. So basically I sold I sold my peer-to-peer CDN. Yeah. Okami meets Bit Torrent in 2007 to Okami. Okay. So I was earning out when that happened. And

I was I just started I think I didn't last very long in that earnout. Sure. Um so uh I was the CXO. I was like an adviser and a CXO. Okay. Little known fact, I was a I was blogging. Okay. I was like a tech influencer blogger. There is a a blog still out there called Swooshing. Yeah. Okay. Crazy amazing ridiculous content. Okay. We're going to dedicate I was in the click I was in the click economy, guys. I was in it. Okay. But um so I was I was a adviser and CXO for like

five different companies at a time. And so I'd help them on their deals or I would be their CTO. Yeah. or I would um you know help them sell or product or whatever, but I could always just put the phone down and forget. So somewhat insulated from like the mortgage crash like Yeah. I mean my thing was I was trying to figure out I was getting a bunch of my friends together and saying okay do you have a mortgage with Bank of America? I do too. Let's pull our thing. I'm going to go to Bank

of America and say I will buy these mortgages off for 40 cents on the dollar because you're selling them on the market for 10 cents. Interesting. Could be fun. And then they're like, "Get out of here." Yeah. Crazy. You're not a hedge fun. It's wild. What about uh you're talking about the 90s? Yeah, the 90s. Like late 90s. Like I mean, you're still at that point you're like sort of starting your career, right? But it it's an interesting place to start a career in tech. Like a lot of people watched that and said, "H that

So look, that was a we did peer-to-peer file sharing at a company called Scour." Yeah. Okay. So, some people did Napster, some went to like, you know, all the ones that came after Bit Torrent all the way to like uh what was the one that uh Zenstrom did? Uh Kazah or some of these others, right? We were the OG file sharing. Yeah. Okay. Um Michael Oitz was on the board, Ron Burkel was on the board. LA Okay. Doing a tech doing tech in LA was like being a finance guy in Fresno. They're like don't know

what the hell is going on. and they're like, "Who are you?" Um, and um, you're a little bit sheltered from it in LA. Every time you went to the the Silicon Silicon Valley, it was like wild and crazy and like every bar was like packed like after hours like happy hour thing. Like things were bubbling. And the crazy part is not just what happened during the the runup. It was post. Yeah. I was raising money on this peer-to-p peer CDN that I didn't have I didn't pay myself a salary for for four years. I was

raising money in two in late 2001 for a networking software company. Yeah. Are you freaking kidding me? And so I remember going to one of these um going to a bar to meet up with a VC and this is like 2002 and it's empty like this thing that would be mega packed just two years earlier. I mean, we're talking dust bowl tumble weeds empty. And this VC, I wish I remember who it was because it'd be amazing. Uh, was like, "Yeah, Travis, dude, I think I think it's all done. It's over. It's over." And I

told you it's over. And I'm like I'm like, "What do you mean?" He's like, "All the software that could be invented has been invented." Wow. We're done. And he meant it. He's like, "It's been real, dude. Let's have a whiskey. Let's go. We're done." That's incredible. How have you how have you processed the last two years when uh people are able to raise an amount of money that took you four different rooms in this, you know, entire, you know, process and they can just raise it literally without a without a deck often. Uh they can

just pull pull it together. Look, it's all good. Like I don't I I just have because you know when you build a company the way I built it which is like my current one where you're literally under the radar it means that you are powered by you have an internal fulfillment. You're not like caring what others think. You you get internally fulfilled with building. Yeah. And um I don't look at somebody and go oh dude that's I had it so much harder uphill both ways to school whatever. Yeah. you know, I don't think like that.

It's it's it's more about the excellence of the process. Yeah. So, I'm like, "Well, how do you raise money?" And they're like, "Oh, yeah. Just throw a deck to the guy." I'm like, "Okay, well, that's not a thing." Yeah. What is a thing is going all the way until it hurts. If you're doing something and it's easy, it's not valuable. And I I'll explain. Like, let's just think of like a like a marathoner. Yeah. world class marathoner on mile 21. Is that dude smiling? No, he's not smiling. By the way, if he is smiling, you

know what's about to happen? He's about to get his ass whooped. Okay, it's over. Because why? Because somebody else who's down for the pain will go harder and further and pass him. Yeah. And so if you're getting money easy, I'm like, why didn't you go harder? You could have done it better and more. Mhm. Now, you don't do things hard just cuz maybe he's like, "It just doesn't matter, dude. Like, I got to go do something else that's hard." But the key is like if money matters, which I think we would say it does, especially

in certain categories, you need to be the best in the world at it. And it's not enough to say it was easy. If anybody comes to me and says a strategic thing was easy, I'm like, you messed up. You could have been way better and gone way further. More competitive advantage, more differentiation. Get it together. Give me the update. Feel like Tony Robbins right now. I love it. I love it. No, I think people I think people need to hear this. They do. They do. And and yeah, the challenge is like when when if raising

money is super easy and then you actually start building and you're like, whoa, actually money doesn't money makes this possible, but it doesn't make the work easy. Yeah. And it is funny that some of the greatest fundraisers they the critique is always like oh well they are raising too much money. You look at Elon Sam all these crazy deals and people are like well like okay it's nice that you're good but like are you too good? And look here's the thing. Uh you know back in the day 2010's reference like there was a problem with

getting Masa money. Yeah. There was a problem with that. Yeah. Because it was easy money. Sure. And it was too loose. Yeah. And so people would get loose with the culture of the investor that they were getting the money from. Sure. And so you had to be careful. So if somebody got Masa money, I'd be like, "Dude, you got to you got to grind. It was it was maybe a little too easy." Yeah. And you still to this day. So So um there's nothing wrong with money as a as a sort of a competitive advantage

or a strategic weapon. It's okay. Like, that's part of Business. It's necessary. But treat it with respect. Last question about Texas. For the Californians that are thinking about making a trip out there, Austin, Dallas, Houston. What do you recommend? Well, look, I'm Austin now. I own a place in Austin. I've owned it for five years. I'm a avid, I would say, almost professional water skier. Nice. Slalom ski. I'll send a video. Put it up video. That's amazing. It's sick. Don't even get me started. Um uh so I've owned a place there for 5 years right

on the lake. Lake Austin, 20 minutes from the city. There you go. Lake life. Hell yeah. Go for it. Okay. I get a little bit FOMO on like these people going to Florida. I'm like, dude, why so much Florida action? Like come on, homies. Like I know it's it's been a it's been a bloodbath for like it's just every every single guy is going to Florida. But like yeah like every weekend this year I've had this year in Texas. Yep. Uh give or take calls while you're water skiing like AirPods. I dude I should be

good. I love it. Don't get me excited. Well I went to Seronic which does the boats the autonomous boats and I'm like build me a water skiing water skiing boat. Ooh, okay. I just want to water ski and like you're skiing behind a boat is so funny. Autonomous water ski pretty viral. Uh, who should who should come? You're you're poking your head up. Who should come work for you? Yeah. 60 seconds. Who do you want? Not not any individual like one individual person, but it's funny. I have a message for this one guy who didn't

take my offer. Um, look, I think the thing is is like we're just getting the best in this is so cliche and like whatever benal, but um look, we are in the physical AI space. So, it's a mix of uh sort of let's call it sensors, compute, the software that sits on top of those things. Um uh I mean it's just it's just going to be great engineers and then you go through what I would call the physical AI stack and you would you know but um it's a long project. It's someone for who wants

a career. It's like infrastructure software guys because you got to have epic AI on the back end and the way to use that sort of has to be epic. you have to have physical AI model people who are sort of translating foundational models into the physical world and and and there's some core research and some just like I know all the white papers and we're just going to we're we're building and going end to end or some hybrid version of that. Um you have just normal software because you've got applications that sit on top that

then of course customers see in some fashion or another. uh actuation and manipulation on the mechanical and sort of robotic uh side of things and mechanical engineers that build machines. Um wow, you know, and then of course remember I've got construction real estate. Like I could go on. It's lots of cool stuff. Go to the website. There's lots of stuff. Go to the website, folks. Go to the website. Adams.co. And by the way, adams.co/vision. I just threw down. Okay. Read it. Amazing. Check it out. Well, thank you for taking the time to come out with

us.