Excellence Is the Capacity To Take Pain | Travis Kalanick, Founder of Uber

I want to start with Atoms.

Yeah?

You have this great line on the website that I actually love. It's this awesome sentence. It says, "Physical world autonomy requires AI for the physical world. This kind of intelligence requires computation we haven't invented, at an efficiency we can't yet fathom, with deep learning models to understand and act in the physical world that don't yet exist."

Tell us what you're building.

Let's start with the mission. It's easier that way. "Physical automation to transform industries." So you start there. You can sort of go, it's almost Socratic, like, what does that mean? And sort of in the terms that people use today, it's physical AI and robotics to transform industry.

And you go, okay, well, uh, so what is it, a humanoid? And no, it's not. It's not. It's— I wouldn't call myself anti-humanoid. It's just what we're doing is not that. It's specialized robotics that— it's not like we make robotics and anybody can have some.

It's more like robotics and AI that go after an industry, one industry at a time. And in the industries we think it makes massive moves. Big moves. And once we get our sea legs, we go to the next.

And the next. If you're doing it really well, I like to say that the only constraint on our imagination is management capacity.

What does that mean?

We're solving problems every day. If I have to solve lots of small problems because I don't have a lot of management capacity under me, we're not going to do very much. I'm going to be constrained in what portion of my imagination can become possible.

Like, real. But if you have lots of management capacity, lots of problem-solving capacity, then those constraints unwind.

So how do you broaden and expand the management capacity you have?

Okay, so why don't we step back and talk a little bit about— like, I have a lot of frameworks for this kind of stuff. One of them I call the Meta Problem. Imagine if you have this equation, which is the derivative of problem-solving dt, must always be greater than or equal to the derivative of problem-creation dt.

And if that's ever not true, you have a real problem. I call that the Meta Problem. So what's happening is, is that if you are creating problems faster than you can solve them, then you're kind of effed. But when you create problems, like in an Uber context would be like, "Let's go to China."

That's creating a problem,right? Now, the way I think about problems, I don't think about them in a negative way. I think about problems the way like a math professor would think about a problem. Is a math professor without interesting problems to solve is a sad math professor.

Yeah. So it's like a good thing. So you want to create interesting things to solve. You want to create problems to solve. You have to predict well the nature of the problem and your ability and capacity to solve it.

You create a problem today, you may not understand the nature of the problem-solving you're going to have to do. You have to predict it. And those problems start coming ashore in like six months and like a real heavy way, and maybe even longer.

And so you have to be good at predicting what it's the nature of that problem and saying, okay, well, what is my management capacity to solve it? If that equation gets out of balance, then you have to stop problem creation while you get the solving going so that you're not drowning anymore.

Right?

Can you give us an example of what happened in China then?

I mean, China was like, amazing, but very difficult. And in some ways impossible to predict. "Let's go to China. Sounds like fun." It was a— it was a super awesome adventure because what happened was, is I was like, "Sounds cool."

And I got— it was 2000, probably 2013 or early '13. Uber started in 2010. So it was still early crew. And I got a crew of folks, like super OG guys, and we stayed in an apartment in China for a week or two.

A week and a half, two weeks, something like that. And met with everybody we could. It's actually when I first met Wanqing at Meituan, actually. And he told me I was crazy. Don't do it. It's the worst idea ever.

What was your response when people tell you, "You're crazy. It's not going to work"?

Like, that's the best thing ever. Okay, so, I mean, we're— there's many threads here. We're already poking through a bunch of them.

We're going to go everywhere, man.

Okay, so, in engineering we call this BFS, Breadth-First-Search, so I'm not able to go deep. We're like, we're painting the breadth of the tree before we're going deep. So we have a cultural value for that at Uber, and I've pulled it into our new value system, into my value system at my current company.

But it's called Super Pumped, which is about infectious enthusiasm about the hard things.

The harder it is, the more

weird, gnarly, whatever words, whatever superlative you want to put in front of it, the more awesome it would be to solve it.

Mm-hmm.

The more excited I get. And the problems that are more awesome to solve are the ones that people think are impossible to solve. Sometimes people think something is impossible. They perceive it that way, but it's very possible, but it's actually easy.

And there's other ones that people think are impossible that are super difficult, but possible.

That's how you think about Atoms now,right? When I hear you speak about it and when I read about it, you're like, "This is going to be super difficult, but it is possible."

So Atoms is the name of my company. We just named it this. It came from a

crazy obscure name that was done on purpose. We basically wentultra stealth. But the real question is, is coming out of Uber, what was the next thing and why? And it is Atoms. We just started calling it that now.

I was yearning or had a penchant for an affinity for something that's super

hard, super complicated.

Have you always been like that? Or was the experience, like, was the experience of Uber that crystallized how important that was? When did this desire—

It's always— it's always been this way, which is, and I think it's funny how you got there because it's like that feeling when somebody tells you something that is impossible and you're like, "Is thatright?" And that— and I'm like, "Watch this."

I've always had that. Like when I was a kid, I'd always have a sparkle in my eye to do something somebody was like, "Shit." That kind of thing.

Did you know when you started it, like how— there's no way you could have known, like, how difficult it was. Or did you like, "This is a hairy problem. I'm going to— there's— I'm going to be fighting it."

No, there was a complexity. There's a complexity to it that was part of the attraction.

Okay. And you saw that from the— from the first spot?

Yeah, from the very early days. I knew it was complicated. I didn't understand exactly how it was complicated.

I'm very curious. What you said was very interesting. You're creating all these problems. Some of the problems you're creating are not coming ashore, I think is the word you used.

It takes time to see what the nature of the problem is that you created.

So can you give an example of, like, a problem you're creating when you start in China, how long it takes to come ashore and what happens when it does?

Okay, so what you learn when you go and do what we did in China is you learn that when you go and take your business and go to China, you have to start over. So many people think that you can take your business and take it somewhere, which, by the way, Uber kind of like trademarked that, if there's such a thing.

Like, we made that a thing where, like, cities, countries didn't matter. We created a system that was inevitable. But China was different because of how that country works. Everything's different. And that means you have to start from scratch.

Right? It's like something as simple as, like, the phones, or let's say maps, GPS. There's a different GPS system in China than there is here. What does that mean? Well, it's like different. So if I want to understand how cars are moving through space, I have to change my GPS system so I can do that.

So I understand. And that's like one of, like, a hundred things that are different in China, which means you have to start over. And so, yeah, you're starting a new business when you take it to China, and you have to— you have to be in a very receptive, like, "I am going to learn how to do things differently in this very different place," and be excited and interested in how different it is.

Whereas most entrepreneurs, let's say Western entrepreneurs that go to China, that almost none succeed.

Have any succeeded?

At the time, like Apple.

Okay.

I'd say the two that you would come up with in our area, in our neck of the woods, there are others, but like in our neck of the woods, you're like, "Okay, Elon definitely did." Right? And Apple definitely did.

Tim Apple and Elon,right? Right? Those are the two guys.

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So you start getting in this war with Didi. Was there anybody else besides— was there multiple competitors?

We eventually rolled out. So Uber Black was one thing, much smaller than like a Didi thing. There was another company called Quidi. And we were just in this corner, sort of doing a niche thing, which is a super high-end thing in China, which is like, so niche,right?

An S-Class in China at that time is like, very, it's thin. I mean, we were growing. It was fun, but it was thin. But I think it was 2014. I believe it was '14. Yeah, I believe it was '14.

Must have been. Where we basically said, "Okay, we're going to do ride-sharing in China." Nobody had done that. Didi was taxis. And if anybody who's used a taxi app with taxis, the problem is you're a second-class citizen, meaning taxis want people to wave them down.

They don't want to take rides from an app where they have to give a percentage of the revenue to some middleman. That's not a thing. So it sort of will fill in the gaps, but it's not their main jam.

But we went to full ride-share, which is like peer-to-peer ride-sharing where anybody driving a car could offer a ride to a citizen in the city.

Which before you did not exist at all in China.

Certainly not coordinated by an app.

Yeah.

This is now a ride-sharing, what was at the time called peer-to-peer ride-sharing. Think of, some people would think of Lyft or UberX, this kind of thing in the US context. But what we called it was the people's Uber.

And so in the app, you'd open it up and it was red cars. But we became Chinese. We had a massive awesome brand there because we cared and we were passionate about the user, the customer in ways that these other companies just weren't.

But what was interesting about what was going on with Didi was that while we were inventing, innovating, they were copying. And these guys were so good at copying, it was kind of, it was almost an art form. To be able to copy as quickly and fiercely as they did was like warrior mentality in its ownright.

But it was like, I like to say, like the place to be is like a braveheart, which is like the warrior poet. These guys were just pure warriors. There was no poetry. They weren't creating the new thing. They were copying.

They were copying. But almost to a level of poetry in their ability to copy and the speed at which they were able to do it. Right? But while they were getting ready copying, it was a very wild sort of half technology, half regulatory arbitrage, very bold.

It took them a while to copy, and while that happened, it went vertical.

Uber did.

Yeah, Uber did. And I'd say, like, so vertical it almost leaned to the left. Like it almost started bending. The curve almost bent to the left. Okay? And

that was what it was. The opportunity was massive where we basically, at some point, probably our top 10 cities were all Chinese cities.

That's wild.

In rides. Not in revenue. Because the rides, instead of like, in my day, 13 bucks, 15 bucks, whatever, they were, these were like three bucks, two bucks type stuff. Right? I remember we were doing this fundraise in China.

We had to raise money in China because we, I mean, it was a huge, I mean, it was just pulling a huge amount of money.

You mean you were burning a ton of money?

We were burning a lot of money.

Okay.

But also we needed a partner. When we first went to China, everybody told us that we needed a partner. And they'll just tell you that. And we're like, "What is a partner?" They're like, "Well, that person or that entity has like 50% of your company in China."

I go, "Why? Is this a law?" They're like, "No, but if you don't do it, you're totally screwed." And I just never got it. Nobody could tell me why and why I had to. I just said, "I'm going to just try it.

Screw it." Which is like, again, Apple, Tesla, these guys said, "Screw it," and they just did it.

Yeah.

Right? And we eventually did get a partner, but instead of giving up 50%, we gave up, I think it was 7%. And it was to Baidu. But it was because we were getting massive regulatory heat. And as long as we had a partner by our side, we could be Chinese.

Yeah.

Right? And like, this is like when you start meeting with ministers in China, you know, like at the top, at the highest level, you have to be vouched for by somebody in China or things start to get weird.

And that's what the 7% is for.

That's what the 7% was for.

Got it.

Baidu needed, we needed a partner inside China that was trusted, essentially. But like I remember, you know,right around the time that we got that partner, you know, we, of course, were doing this, and there was a strike, a pan-European strike for all taxis in all European cities.

And at some point, I think they were like, I think this is '15, I believe, 2015, July, I think.

You know, there were vehicles being lit on fire in Paris, you know? But it was like every major city in, they just tried to shut the shit down. And.

What are they protesting?

Progress.

So I'm going and meeting with the transportation minister in China, and he throws down three newspapers, Western newspapers, that

top of the fold, old-school newspapers,right? Remember those?

Pictures of this chaos across all these cities. And he's like, "This is a problem. This is not going to, you know, this is not something we're okay with." And I said,

"Why?" And, you know, there's obvious, I knew what I, you know, I knew what he was going to say. And I said, "But this is all Western democracies." And I'm like, "In Western democracy,

as we know, it's a popularity contest." And what that means is that

the politician succeeds by being popular. He doesn't succeed when progress comes. And the only way to get progress in a democracy is for that, for that politician who seeks to be popular when he's under threat.

When there is a threat of disruption or instability is the only time you'll get progress in Western democracy. And I'm like, "But so what? We're here in China and it's totally different." He goes, "What do you mean?" And I'm like, "Well, the only time I get, I'm able to get progress in China is when

stability is in harmony with progress." So, or let's say progress, those two must be harmonized. You will only get progress when it is in harmony with stability. And I said it in that way, those three words. And

that was very Chinese, you know? And totally different. It's like, I'm like, if there was ever any hint of instability that we were to bring to China, we would be shut down immediately. But as long as we create a foundation of stability, progress is super welcome.

Progress must be in harmony with stability. And totally different.

So when did they take the viewpoint, if they took the viewpoint that Uber is injecting instability into their city or area?

They never did. But they, at some point, felt like we were, we may win. And instead of really seeing super problems at the, we didn't, for the most part, we were treated fairly at the cities, for the most part, not completely, but for the most part.

But what happened was the, what I would say at the time is that the China war went global. So we were spending, let's say, tens of millions of dollars a month fighting Didi in all these cities. And the fight was like, I needed to subsidize rides to gain market share.

When I gain market share, there's network effect, because if I'm bigger, then my system is more efficient. And if I'm more efficient than them, they have to subsidize more than I do to compete with me. So how do I subsidize where, when, how to get that efficiency edge, that network effect efficiency edge, so that I subsidize less than them?

This is why, you know, like Lyft is smaller than Uber, because we were better at this part of the thing. And people don't really know that's what it takes. It's, but like, how do you get efficiency edge? Efficiency edge starts when somebody even downloads the app and signs up.

If it's easier to sign up on one versus the other, you have an efficiency edge. If it's easier to call a vehicle and like get it to you without problems, you have an efficiency edge. Because you'll have less support.

You'll have less, like people are getting their higher completion rates. Like if the cars are moving to where the demand is, because the driver app has good sort of ways to point drivers to theright place, that means you have shorter pickup time.

Efficiency edge. Efficiency edge means you get bigger faster. You get bigger faster means you have a bigger network of drivers, which means wherever you are in the city, you are going to get a faster pickup. And it will be cheaper because, well, if there's less dead time for the driver to pick you up, then if he's generally trying to optimize for a dollars per hour,

then the whole thing just starts working better. That's the network effect. So you're like, okay, how do I get bigger? Well, I'll make the rides really cheap. That's one way of doing it. And if your rides are cheaper than them, then all of a sudden your network gets bigger.

Your network gives you efficiency, which then means you can get to a lower price point without subsidies, but the competitor still has to subsidize.

You'd make money, profit at a place where they would make a loss. And the Robert Behrens all understood this.

Yes.

Like you could go Carnegie.

Absolutely.

All of them did.

100%.

Yeah. When you're talking, I'm like, shit, this is Rocafort.

Totally. So I read, I think it was a Chernal biography.

A Titan?

Yes.

Okay. There's actually a better one I'm going to send you.

Yeah.

And what it is, is this book from 1970 by David Freeman Hawk. It's called Rockefeller, the Founding Father, John Dee, the Founding Father of Rockefeller's. Titan is 800 pages and you got a lot about his like family history.

This is like 250 pages of how he built Standard Oil and it's this shit.

Yeah.

It is exactly what you're describing. I want to interrupt you one second before you go back to China.

Yeah.

My question to you now is like, I spend thousands of dollars a month on Uber and I only use Uber at black SUV. It's insane. In a mature market in the United States, in these big cities that I'm using Uber, what would, how would the network effects of Uber be reversed?

Okay. So there's a couple of things. First is a small player competing against Uber has certain advantages. Let's say a small player said, I'm going to have cheaper rides than the big player. Okay? The small player, let's say, is one-tenth the size, let's just say.

Their subsidies on an absolute basis are somewhere around one-tenth as much. So if I am the small guy and I go and subsidize rides, I'm going to gain market share unless the big guy is spending 10 times as much as me.

Now the efficiency edge can make it, instead of 10X, can make it 7X. Okay? But you ultimately, a well-funded competitor, you have to let them grow to some degree so that they have to feel the weight of the size of what they are.

So when they're subsidizing, it becomes a problem.

And it hurts them more.

I like to talk about situations where if we had a competitor, we weren't exactly sure what was going on. Because what happens is you have to guess when you're subsidizing, you have to guess, do I have an efficiency edge on them or not?

You try to make yourself as efficient as possible, but you don't know if you are more efficient than them or not. So you need signal to determine whether you're better. One of the ways you could totally do it is let the competitor get to 50%.

So it's 50-50. You have the same network size. Then you would start to see, okay, is my price lower than theirs while maintaining a 50% market share? Or is my price higher than theirs while maintaining a 50% market share?

If I can maintain 50% market share while having a higher price, then my system is more efficient than them. Then I could start dialing because I know they'll lose. Because why? Because at some point, efficiency outstrips subsidy. What I mean by that is when you're subsidizing, you go through huge growth and at some point you get so big that you can't really subsidize a lot.

Like if you're doing 10 billion rides a year, you can't subsidize two bucks a ride.

Because you run out of money.

There's $20 billion a year. Nobody's going to fund that.

Okay.

Right? And so as you get bigger and bigger, the amount of subsidy you can actually put to it is smaller and smaller. And at some point, the amount of subsidy you can put to it realistically is smaller than your efficiency gain by just being better.

And so then you, efficiency outstrips subsidy. Anybody who's a small player in a market has a natural advantage if they're well-funded, is that you can gain market share very quickly and you can force the big guy to burn money.

But why wouldn't the big guy be able to drown the smaller competitor faster?

Well, there are, there are ways to reverse it.

Yeah.

So for instance, the other way where there's asymmetric going the other way is recruiting drivers.

So for instance, I could give subsidies to drivers if I'm the big guy. I can give subsidies to drivers that are like,

they're like

a thousand dollars if you join Uber and you're, you know, you do a hundred trips in that first week. I could suck up that supply. The only way they're going to be able to keep those drivers is they're going to have to subsidize across all of their drivers, even though I just took a small number of them.

So I'm going to suck up all of their drivers unless they defend their driver base. There's like a lot of little things like this. And I'm almost like remembering, because it's been 10 years since I did any of this, but like I'm trying to remember all the ways where it's asymmetric one way versus the other way.

And I'm, yeah.

I think you hit on, it's this paying attention to every single little detail. So like when you were speaking about even the signup flow and like how fast the ride comes and how easy it is to put in your credit card information and everything else, what I'm sitting here thinking is not necessarily about you and Uber in China.

I'm thinking about Rockefeller walking by and saying, "Hey, you guys are putting 50 drops of solder on these barrels and you're doing that because you think it's 50, so it doesn't leak. Try 48." They try 48. This is in fucking Titan.

They try 48, it leaks. What about 49? 49 doesn't leak. And he says the first year that only saved us $2,500 a year.

Yeah.

Because that one drop, but we were tiny. Now it's hundreds of thousands of dollars. And he did that with a thousand different things. So by the time he got to his scale, you're not competing at all. It's impossible.

And so that's super important. Now, I read Titan after Uber.

Okay? And I'm reading him going, holy shit, this dude was way more hardcore. But the reason why is because I got an anti, like there, we had antitrust attorneys at Uber and they're like very, making it very clear.

Like there's certain things you can do, certain things you can't. They're like training me and educating me on antitrust law. Now at first, when you hear that and you're just a startup kid, like literally just get, you're like, antitrust law, that's like, what are you, I can't wait to have that problem, you know?

But it ends up being obviously very important. But Rockefeller didn't have that.

No.

He.

The laws were passed because of him.

Of course. But it's like he's the super, like people use OG, they use it the wrong way. It means original gangster. He's the OG. OG.

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I think the other thing about monopolies too is there's, there are different ways, there are different things because sometimes the monopoly emerges because the company is so competitive. Sometimes the monopoly emerges because the company is anti-competitive and they're different.

That's interesting. Say more about this.

Yeah. Well, where I ended up at Uber was

basically sort of the motto was more like the one who serves the customer best gets all the customers.

Very Bezos.

That's where we ended up. So you can be highly competitive. And look, we had never at Uber, we never got a regulation passed that would hurt a competitor. We never would do that. That's just not how we rolled.

We never donated to a campaign, ever, to try to get something passed.

You wanted to win because you built the best service.

That'sright.

I'm reading this biographyright now. It was published in 1975. It's on the founder of Honda who's competing in Japan. He founds Honda in 1948. Japan's in ruins.

Yeah.

And the technology in Japan's really low at the time. And so all these, all of his, the people that are building motorcycles and cars, they're like, let's get together and petition the government to not allow imports. And he's like, and he was the only one that voted against it.

He goes, no, no, no. He goes, the way to win is to build the superior technology.

Yeah.

Because he said, we have the best product. That product will go, it won't just be profitable in Japan.

Yeah.

It'll spread throughout the entire world.

Yeah.

Very much like what you're saying here. It's like, no, I don't want protectionism. I want to win because I built the best product.

Well.

And customers are choosing it.

And also remember what we were overcoming to do what we do was a system that was perfectly anti-competitive.

Can you explain what time?

A government condoned monopoly or a government condoned cartel called the taxi.

People don't understand this. Can you explain the environment in which you started Uber?

Let's start with what is a taxi.

Okay. What is a taxi? We'll do New York because it's the best, it's the best way to tell it. In the early 1900s, there were people that were picking up other citizens that needed a ride across town and charging them for it.

And

eventually the city decided, hey, look, we want to have this to be licensed and controlled in some way. Or like certainly rules of the road, just rules of the road. So you'd get a license, but anybody could get a license.

You'd get that license for free and they would make sure like you weren't like a felon and like different things like this, which you'd go, that sounds great, good idea. But anybody could get a license and get it for free.

A taxi license in New York. And eventually that number got to, I don't know, somewhere around 13,000. And

then those 13,000 people who had licenses, this is now like, let's call it the 1920s, the 1930s, decided that they would lobby the city to give no more licenses out. And the city, they did some deals, who knows, you know, that era in New York, you know, how that went down, but no more licenses.

And of course, that was great for the people who had them because as the city was growing, there's more and more demand to get across town, but there are a fixed number of licenses. People who could do it were allowed to do it.

Then the taxi guys go to city council and they lobby again. And the next version of the lobbying is, we want to be able to sell the license to somebody else. So now I have this thing. Now it's known as an, now I can, it's sort of artificial scarcity and I can sell it to somebody else who wants to get a cash flow that's an artificially high cash flow because nobody's allowed to compete essentially.

And then they went to city council one more time and they said, we want to be able to lease out this license to an individual on a daily or weekly basis. And that is the modern taxi system today.

When Uber rolled into New York,

the driver was getting a 12-hour shift seven days a week, but there are two 12-hour shifts. Each of those drivers was paying $40,000 a year to rent a car for halftime.

Insane.

Which means the guy who had the license, whose grandpa got it for free.

Okay.

Allright. The guy who has a license, whose grandpa got it for free, is getting $80,000 a year renting a car to a taxi driver. And that taxi driver who's paying $40,000 a year for 12 hours a day, he's renting a car for $40,000 a year.

For that privilege, he gets to be impoverished. That is the taxi system. And they are over a hundred years. So

it's like Stockholm syndrome or regulatory capture is so freaking tight that

the regulators, the difference between the regulator and the taxi company is almost indistinguishable.

And it had to be jarring for you to walk into a system where you just described, you're just describing corruption.

Yeah.

It is not.

Legalized corruption.

Legalized corruption.

So, so remember it is, so what is the taxi system? It is a government condoned cartel that outlaws competition.

But it had to be jarring for you because then you come in with a better product at a better, at a cheaper price that customers love. I've never taken a, since I had Uber, you've had, you caught me in 2010.

Yeah.

And whenever you opened up in New York.

Yeah.

You've kept me since then. I've never opened up another app.

Yeah.

Like 16, 17 years, however long it's been.

Yeah.

It's like, I'm choosing to do that. And then the governments are like, no, no, this legalized corruption is good. You, Travis and Uber, get the hell out of here.

So what happens is

being anti-competitive is illegal in the United States unless you get a government official or regulator to do it for you. Then it's legal.

Pretty interesting.

We were talking before we started recording about capitalism and you had some interesting thoughts and ways to describe it. I would also say like, you know, this, this shows a love letter to capitalism. It's very pro-entrepreneurship. I'm the son of a Cuban immigrant.

I grew up meeting people that came over here in Rafs. From the time I was nine years old, I knew.

Right.

I'm obviously born into a very special place. If these people risked their lives to get here.

Yeah.

And the wealth that this country has created. What I think also has to be called out is this crony capitalism where it's like, you don't, I like the Hondas of the world. Where it's like, no, no, I want to win because I'm the best.

Yeah.

Not because I gave you a bunch of money and you shut down my competitors.

Right.

That shit should be called out.

So it's super interesting because you go, okay, well in this case, Uber

was, was the symbol of hyper-capitalism in many ways. Like it was like embracing all of the

values and

principles of capitalism. But it started with the most important, which is an individual has aright to choose between different

suppliers of a good or service. It's like a pro-competition thing. The consumer has aright to choose between different offerings. The other side of that is an individual can start a business to provide that service or offering. So you go, okay, so capitalism at its foundation is somebody can start a legal business, like a, you know, any, make a product or a service and offer it to people.

And the people have theright to choose which one they use. That's capitalism. So the question is, what's anti-capitalism? Anti-capitalism is the constraint on people being able to start a business or have a vocation that they choose and/or individuals not having theright to choose which service or product that they buy.

At the core, that's what it is. Now people get confused. Sometimes they think something is capitalism that is not. It's pretty obvious, you know, anybody watching any part of this conversation on taxis, it's super clear that taxis are definitely not capitalism.

But it's why they are not very good and it's why they are more expensive than they need to be. And if people are taking Ubers today in New York and wondering why it's so expensive and why it's getting more unreliable, it's because after I left Uber, they started passing a bunch of laws that are turning Uber into the taxi system.

I didn't know this.

Yeah. They've, they have a limit on the number of drivers that can be on Uber. They've turned it into a medallion system that cannot be traded. And as people retire out of driving, the number of Ubers, I believe, I may have this wrong, but it's something, it's either fixed or shrinkingright now.

And that is why the prices are going up and the service is going down. But Uber's thought of as a capitalist thing, but actually the government is constraining it. This is a, and why? Because of the taxi owners who want their medallion prices to go back up.

This is madness. Have you ever read Atlas Shrugged?

Of course. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people are like, what's happening now feels like the scenario, you know, the scenes from that book.

I haven't, it was like, recommended to me a million times.

Yeah.

There's a bunch of people, guests that have been on the show that have talked to me about it in private. And finally I was like, allright, the 12th fucking person that recommended, I finally read it. And I'm like, and then I went and looked up, I was like, wait, this was written from like 1946 and 1956, I think the 10-year period she was writing.

I was like, this sounds, the, the, the.

Yeah.

People in this book.

Yeah.

Is exactly, it's the same kind of person today.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I agree with that.

The whole of the book is like, we have these prime movers and then we have these people that are just trying to restrain their competitive and their, I love what you said, like what are they protesting? Progress.

Yeah.

Well, what happens when the people building the progress then go on strike? That's a very fascinating like theme throughout the book.

Yeah. I mean, we get to some pretty interesting places with this kind of thing.

In your career, did you only run into this government corruption in Uber? Have you run into any, I know you started City Storage Systems, Cloud Kitchens was in City Storage Systems.

Yeah.

Now you renamed it Atoms. Have you run into, because your, your, your whole thing, what I love about you is just like.

Yeah.

All physical world. I think you said it's a, you consider it a calling.

Yeah.

To digitize.

The physical world.

I love that you use the word calling though. I think that's really important. Have you run into other forms of?

It's everywhere, but taxis is by far the most intense. Literally competition. We talk about anti-competitive things and antitrust law and Rockefeller and things like this. No, no, no. Taxis, competition is illegal.

But why do they still have power?

They've captured the regulators through lobbying, through donations, through legalized corruption. And it's not like the only industry where this exists. You know, there are obviously many other industries, but in terms of what I've seen, competition is outlawed.

How does the China Didi Uber story end? Did they, the government put the hand on the scale and favored Didi over Uber?

So they ultimately did. What happened was, is the China war went global. And what happened is the sovereign wealth, their sovereign wealth funds in China started pouring billions of dollars into my competitors, Uber's competitors in different regions so that they would subsidize in those regions and drain my resources.

Wait, before you go there, take me your mindset when you realize the game that they're playing.

Yeah. I mean, you're like, damn, that's real.

What are you like, not sleeping? Are you like.

Well, I mean, the entire Uber thing was like a lack of sleep, you know, so it wasn't like this was a new lack of sleep thing. It was just, I mean, it was a new thing, but lack of sleep generally was a thing just because I had a global business that was really intense and, and very game theory oriented in the ways that I'm describing, which means it was always on and crazy weird things happening in cars at night.

So like, the first time I got woken up in the middle of the night because there was a drive-by shooting from an Uber, you know what I mean? Like that's not good. The thing is, is that what happens in a city happens in an Uber.

And you're exposed to all the vagaries of human behavior.

Yeah. The roads, the roads are the cardiovascular system for the city. There's nothing that happens in a city that the road doesn't touch. You know, people are people. They do things they shouldn't do. What we're, our goal was to make Uber the safest place in a city.

And I think we accomplished that. We got pretty close to that. And I know they take it pretty seriously today.

But go back to the stress, like you wanted the stress,right?

It was fun.

Okay. So Herb Kelleher, do you know who that is?

Southwest.

Southwest Airlines.

Yes.

Most successful airline in history.

For sure.

40 straight years was, was profitable.

Yeah.

And you know, he, he, he has what, he was a gangster,right?

Hmm.

He would drink a fifth of bourbon every day.

Oh, okay.

Smoke cigarettes on the plane. And he was a, he unfiltered guy.

Yeah.

I would love if he was still alive. He'd be like one of my top.

Yeah.

You know, guests I'd want to talk to. And I loved, he was giving, he was doing an interview one time.

Yeah.

They're like, you undergo a lot of stress. How do you handle it? And he goes, I don't handle it. I like it.

Yeah.

I get that same vibe from you.

The lifestyle of an entrepreneur, I believe at its core, there's a couple other things, but this is one, one prism, one, one, one part of it, one pillar of it is I can take more pain than the other guy and I'll prove it.

Once you take on that lifestyle, I mean, it's a real thing. It's not just that I choose to take it on. It is the nature of the thing that I am doing. Then you are taking on a life of adversity and overcoming all the time.

And once you are seeing adversity all the time and overcoming it, it just becomes normal. The downside of it is you can get used to adversity. It just becomes very normal.

Why is that a downside?

Because you almost start accepting it. You don't, like something bad happens, you don't even get mad. You're like, oh, that's interesting.

But wouldn't it be beneficial to be like unruffled like that where.

There, there are benefits.

Yeah.

But you need to make sure you don't get so used to it that it doesn't even bother you. You can get so zen you're unbothered. Now you still act, but there's something special about the extra fierceness of being bothered, being upset about something that is wrong.

Yeah. Wrong things. When, what is adversity? What is adversity?

Usually adversity is like some bad shit went down that shouldn't have

and it was done to you. It's adversity. You know what I mean? Like for a farmer, it's like a drought, you know? It's like terrible.

So, or it could be a lot of things. It could be somebody stole his crops, could be, could be pests, could be, you know, it could be anything. So.

Are you just getting numb to it? Is that what you're saying? Like, was there parts of.

I'm just saying once you fully embody the lifestyle of

adversity and overcoming it, you have to be careful of the

ease at which you walk through it, because there is an extra power in being bothered by something that is wrong. You can get too used to wrong things happening.

Have you reached to that point in your career before?

Well, no, I, I, I would say today there are very few things that actually stress me out.

Are you worried about that?

Of course. So I remember the things that are important

and that's where I channel fierceness through. What isright and what is wrong?

You're almost telling me you've been inoculated.

My, my point is.

From pain.

Yeah. It's something like, there's a zen that can happen when a warrior has fought for a long time. You can get used to it.

Yeah, but you still, for at least on the outside, you still have this like crazy, I told you the most intense person.

Yeah.

I've ever met. And I've met almost all the top founders in the world.

But imagine fierceness with calm on the inside.

That's what you want or that's what you're wanting?

That's what I got.

Yeah.

That's where I'm at. Yeah.

You weren't calm on the inside when you were building Uber. That's what you're saying?

I'm just saying as one entrepreneur's longer and longer and does it properly.

I've never heard it used as a verb.

You get, you get to that place. You just get to that place.

As one entrepreneur's for longer and longer. I'm using that line, man.

You just get to that place.

Well, I love what you said though about like the pain, because you know, there's a bunch of maxims from the history of entrepreneurship that I love. Like, I think something that we, we both like support is like trying to, to win based on, you know, providing the best service.

So like one of my favorite maxims comes from Henry Ford, where he says, money comes naturally as a result of service. If you go read his autobiography, you see how he organized Ford Motor Company. It's just like, we're going to provide the maximum amount of service and I'm not, the money will take care of itself.

If I'm just delighting the customer.

Yeah.

The bank account will be fine.

Yeah, yeah.

But my favorite maxim from all of history of entrepreneurship.

Yeah.

Is excellence is the capacity to take pain.

Hmm.

Which is exactly what you said.

Oh, this is a hundred, oh, I love that one.

Yeah.

That is a hundred percent true. So once you say entrepreneurship is the lifestyle of entrepreneuring,

the lifestyle of entrepreneuring is the, this sort of pride and I can take more pain than the other guy. You go, why? Well, the best example is like world-class marathoner on mile 21. You ever seen, you ever seen a marathon?

You ever seen a marathoner on mile 21? Probably on TV. Is that dude smiling?

Mm-mm.

Fuck no. Of course not. Why? Because if he were smiling, if he were just not feeling pain, there's somebody else who will. What is the difference between feeling pain and not feeling pain? Is that extra push? That extra push means he loses if he's not getting into that pain.

And that's what excellence is. Excellence is about pushing into the extent, the, the, the, the, what is a human capable of, the, the, the full potential. Because if you don't, somebody else does.

Yeah.

And then that becomes the standard of excellence. And all of human progress is through that push towards excellence that is a push through pain. If it is not painful, you're clearly not pushing hard enough.

And I love that you've tied this to if you're doing something that's easy, you're doing something that's not valuable.

If you're doing something that's easy, it may be valuable, but you're about to get your ass whooped.

Or

it may not be valuable. It just depends. So, you know, easy could be sitting on the beach for six months. Now it could be valuable to you. Respect. And that's all good. Everybody has that choice. That's all good.

But you're not, you're, you're, you're not bringing human progress. And then you go, well, that's interesting. So if somebody sits on the beach for six months, they're not bringing, there's no part, they're not participating in human progress. I'm like, well, how could they?

You're like, well, what if they start thinking deeply about

life and about philosophy and about society and they had really amazing thoughts? I'm like, well, did they write them down? I'm like, okay, he wrote them down. So now he's on the beach writing it down.

Mm-hmm.

And I'm like, okay, but there's lots of people doing that. He's gotta be better than those other guys if he wants to be about progress. So now he's really fucking writing them down and he's honing those words to such a degree that it's beautiful and perfect before somebody else has that thought and does it themselves.

And now he's in pain.

How long did you take from when you left Uber, which obviously had to be fucking devastating, heartbreaking.

Yeah.

To jumping into the next thing? Did you sit on the beach for a little bit? Like, what did you actually do?

No, so it was like seven months, six, seven months, something like this. And most of it was

fending off lawfare.

So wait, the lawfare was it criminal? Were they trying to like.

It was civil and criminal.

Okay.

For sure. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So you're fighting off that for.

Yeah. It's like. Corporate cancel culture, lawfare, like all the things on the corporate side of all of those things. Remember I said, remember earlier we, we talked about

business became politics.

We were talking about this off camera.

Yes.

Can you talk about this now?

Yeah. So there was a, you know, in the 2010s, there was something that happened in the media and it was that business became politics. If you just think about your favorite politician and just go on the internet today,

do you think you're gonna see a lot of happy-go-lucky stuff about your favorite politician? Like, of course not. We know that because politicians basically, there's the nature of what it is they do. There's a lot of mudslinging and a lot of stuff and a vast majority of it is just untrue.

Though I'd say with some of our politicians today, maybe a lot of it is true, but, but you know, it's just a dog-eat-dog mudslinging thing and the headlines are often not true, which I think we know that in politics.

What we didn't know in the 2010s is that, or that was just starting to happen was that business was becoming politics, that the headlines you were starting to read about business were just narratives and often fabrications with substantial material perversion of truth.

And you were exhibit A for this.

For sure. I, I would, I would say so.

Yeah. No, I would say so too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, you know, like talk to anybody who knows me, they would basically say the difference between, especially if you talk about 10 years ago, the difference between the public persona and the actual person couldn't be more different.

Well, I can, I can speak to this.

Yeah.

And I know.

Yeah.

When I, we before we started recording and I've been chasing you for a while.

Yeah.

That was a dinner and then I saw you at Michael Dell's house.

Yeah.

And everything else, which was funny by the way, when you walked up to us and I was like, do you remember me? And you go, you go, you're like, yeah. And I go, it's time to do the fucking show.

And you go, it's time to do the fucking show. I love that. But what I would say is just like in terms of founders that actually know their shit.

Yeah.

Your reputation is perfect.

Hmm.

Sterling. It's like if you're a killer entrepreneur.

Hmm.

You say great things about Travis.

Yeah.

It's the only shit I've ever heard comes from like investors. This is why again.

I don't necessarily believe it comes from investors, but.

I'm saying what I hear.

No, it's interesting because where I, you know, yeah, a lot of times it's from the, the gallery. Now sometimes investors are in that category, but when I go and do pitches and fundraise and I don't feel like.

You're Travis Kalanick. Come on, bro.

I'm just saying.

Fucking Travis. Come on.

No, I don't know.

Of course. Like you, you're basically unlimited. So this is one, I was texting Daniel Ek about that I was gonna see you and he wanted, he's like, you gotta get him talking about fundraising, which we'll get to in a minute.

Yeah.

But I think we have to hit on something really important because what I loved about our dinner is you just straight interrupted me, which I loved 'cause you should've. And, but I was trying to tell you, I was like, man, listen, there's just something weird that all the content and the podcasts that entrepreneurs and founders are consuming are created by VCs.

And you like, and then I went to say another thing and you cut me off. You put like your hand in my face, which is hilarious. You're like, real founders don't listen to VCs. We need to talk about this.

Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Because.

Sure.

If your friends are founders, you hear atrocious horror stories and bad behavior by investors all the time that they will not sit talk about publicly.

Hmm.

Right? You went through one of the worst of the worst.

Yeah.

Like going back is like, is it just when you're doing Uber, is it just you raised money from the wrong people? What did you, how do you look at it now and how could you, what, what would you tell like a young founder now that has to raise a ton of money?

I always, I gotta do the, I gotta first shoot the arrow, which is you definitely shouldn't raise from benchmark capital. Gotta get that out there. And then, okay, let's get into the real stuff.

Look, I think it's really interesting to start with what, where, where did it get weird? I mean, basically at the peak, so 2017 was a, was my problem year,right? I mean, it was always hard, but this is when it got dialed up and Benchmark was running a war room.

They were an, an unspoken activist investor that was creating a once-a-week crisis.

But without.

Against you.

Yeah, against me. Without speaking of it. Again, there's some things I don't know, but the best I can see is that they wanted liquidity and they felt like I wouldn't give it.

We were already preparing for an IPO, but I didn't tell 'em that.

Why didn't you tell 'em that?

Because we wanted to sort of make sure we'd done theright thinking, got prepared so we could just say, we're gonna do it and here's how we're gonna do it. And Bill Gurley's a bit of a catastrophist. It's always the end of the world.

And so that forces you to do really weird things if you think the world is always going to end, including try to take me out. So instead of dealing with that catastrophism, let's just go do the damn thing.

Because I give you lots of examples. Like, I think on the, we had a, we had a fundraise in 2014, mid 2014, where the last round we did was in August 13, was three and a half billion dollars.

That's when we brought Google and

Google and TPG in. And then mid 2014, so nine months later, that was three and a half billion. Nine months later we did a round. Gurley was like convinced it was the end of the world and we gotta raise and just take your first term sheet, just fucking take it.

And you have a whole philosophy on this, which is like if you want a round to go well and to go fast, you have to have a process. If you just go take the first term sheet, getting the round done will actually take longer because there's no alternatives.

You don't have alternatives. And then it gets weird. And then the VC will just keep pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, getting more, more, more, more, more. And it gets weird to a point where it actually becomes highly likely that the deal just blows up.

So I like to say I never get attached to a price. I get attached to a process. That process is about excellence and fundraising.

Anyways, can you explain that process though?

We'll get there.

Okay.

Okay.

Don't let me forget.

I won't.

BFS.

Okay. You're gonna have to sit here for 10 hours to cover everything.

Oh God.

But he was convinced, like, hey, just take the first deal, like just do a $6 billion. It was like, I think you could get a $6 billion round valuation doneright now. It's nine months after the three and a half.

Just go take the first term sheet, make it happen. Now, if you're a founder hearing that and you're just like,

you're like, dude, I hear you. But even if the world is about to end, the best thing you can do is have alternatives and the deal will actually get done faster.

So we got to a place where like I just wouldn't talk to him and not if he reached out to me, I would reach, I would talk to him, but like I just wouldn't try to engage because it was always that.

So Emile Michael would handle this part. He would handle a lot of the, the investor relations, especially as it relates to.

Shout out to Emile Michael. That dude is loyal as hell to you.

Well, he's just an awesome guy. Not because of loyalty, but because he's just an awesome guy. But of course that too. And he would do it in a genuine, authentic way, like try to handle the, the objections or whatever.

Anyways, two months later we got a round done at a 17 and a half billion pre.

Whoa.

So that's my point. So when you want to do thingsright, you gotta do thingsright. And VCs don't, not all, but many, most, they're just, they're worried about other things. So we were already planning IPO stuff. They didn't know it, but they also never expressed the desire to, like, hey dude, you gotta IPO.

It's never brought up. So it was like this weird

catastrophism mixed with if you think the world's about to end and you've got this thing that's worth a ton of money, you could get to a weird place, especially when you're in a VC, you don't have any control.

You're not like running anything. So now you're like your entire holy shit big your outcomes in life are due to this guy. And you think the world's about to end and he doesn't. You're like, you could get into a place where you're running a war room to destroy him.

And that's, that's kind of what happened.

What's the alternative scenario if you raised just from somebody that wouldn't have done that? Like, I'm just gonna make this up, but like how founders fund says they no matter what, they'll never remove a founder.

Yeah.

They'll not do like a warfare, a war room against them.

Well, I think there's two parts. So first I'd say the most, the, the, the actually a super high bar for a VC is do no harm. There's a lot of reasons why that's hard for a VC.

Elaborate, please. This is important, man.

Yeah.

No one talks about this shit.

Everybody wants to make a mark on the world. Everybody wants to make a mark on the world. And you might believe one thing or another, you wanna make a mark on the world. And the, the way I think about it is an operator who's running a company is a, if they're good, is a grandmaster of chess.

Mm-hmm.

The VC, and by the way, that grandmaster of chess, this operator entrepreneur is playing this chess match somewhere between 60 and 80 hours a week

and is like really knows this thing and it's like knows many moves ahead and just sees things other people don't see and they're in it as well.

And the VC is a chess enthusiast

and they check in on the chess match once every three months

and they're like trying to make a mark on the world. They have an opinion. They're trying to make a mark. Hey, why don't you do this or that? And you're like,

you know,

don't go to Jordan and tell him how to dunk and definitely don't go to him and tell him how to dribble.

But it's hard because everybody has an opinion and you believe whatever you believe, you really believe it. But like if you're not in the thing all in all the way every day, 12 to 16 hours a day on this game, it ain't a thing.

But that's a hard thing for most people to take who aren't running shit.

Why do you think it's hard for them to take?

Because VCs are glamorized and they have a seat at the table in some fashion and there are certain powers. You can make a mark. And so it's sort of like the way to think about it is you're on the Serengeti

and

like if an antelope limps in the Serengeti, the lion will take it down even if it's not hungry. Can't even fucking help it.

It's just what is, what he does. And that's kind of the nature of most VCs. This, the, the nature of it is they will, if the, if you are on the Serengeti and limping, you will, you will be eaten.

It's just the nature of it. And the, the lion doesn't even know why sometimes. It's just like, this is what I do.

Yeah. So when you're talking to other founders, younger founders, you're saying priority number one is just find an investor that does no harm.

That would be a high bar.

So achievable. What percentage of the time then you would guess?

10%.

Oh, okay.

And then the 1% is helpful, but it's hard. How the fuck are they supposed to be helpful? There's different times to be helpful though. Helpful is hard times is when you actually need real help,right?

Helpful is

there, you know, maybe it's personnel, like you need epic people, but it's still like hard, hard for them to participate because they're just not in it that deep.

So can you explain, explain excellence in the fundraising process and how you think about it, the system you developed for this?

Yeah. And it, it could be changing over time, but I, like I certainly have my approach. It's interesting because I've just, I'm just finishing a fundraiseright now and it's, it's interesting to see the world change. But I think part of what we're seeingright now is we're in a, we're in a super cycle or like a super high, we're in a hype, I don't wanna call it hype, but like in a, a very bullish cycleright now, which means different things happen than if it's sort of average.

When it's average, it's super important to tell a beautiful story that's woven, like that, that, that's, that's like a story that numbers are woven through. It's a, it's a, it's a beautiful, entertaining, interesting story with analytical numbers woven through it.

And you basically get to what I would call QED, which is you've dissected the chess match to such a degree that it's very clear what it takes to win and that you have the winning formula. And you get to the end of the thing and you're like, it's just proven.

It's not even like a question anymore. It's QED. That's in normal times. And I think in super cycles or whatever we wanna call, you know, kind of what's going onright now, that rigor's not as important. And if you go too far on that rigor, it could be too much.

Explain that.

You hear stories of entrepreneurs that just sit down around a table and then

have an idea and they get money. That's the opposite of QED. But

if you have a two-hour long presentation that goes QED in a super cycle, you probably should shorten that to 45 minutes.

Why?

I don't know how to put it. It just looks like too much. Like why are you going so far, dude? What, what's.

You'll talk yourself out of the deal.

Something wrong.

Yeah. You'll talk yourself out of the deal.

Why are you so detailed? It's this weird dynamic. It's very funny. Like it's cool, bro. You know, maybe it's also because you're, you're projecting many years out. So, so the more super cycle you're in, the more forward you are, the more into the future you are.

And that future can't really be presented as tightly with numbers.

Yeah. So what are you talking two hours for? You don't know.

So then it's about the theory of the case. That's probably the way to think about it is that a mix of super cycle plus the speed at which technology is moving and the sort of true exponential inflection that can occur, you're talking three to five years out.

There's almost no set of numbers today that can QED the five-year thing at this crazy hundred X situation that's probably gonna occur.

Mm-hmm.

So then you have to talk about the theory of it in many ways. And so maybe that's why it's a little bit different today.

What's the common in your approach in a normal cycle?

Yeah.

And the super cycle you just got here.

Normal cycle is two hours QED.

What is something that you'll use in both, whether it's normal or super?

Well, I still do some version of I, my style is QED.

And then the multiple bids thing is mandatory.

Is mandatory.

Correct?

Yeah. So well, I would call it, so it's QED is the storytelling and then there's sort of like an auction process

that you hone if, when you're doing itright now, this has to be measured against how many resources you have to do QED and how much deal resources you have to manage a full auction.

Explain that part to me.

Like if I have five rooms going at the same time, I have to have the, that's a thing that you, five rooms simultaneous for an entire week.

Where'd you even get that idea?

It was just the expression of theright thing. It, it's, it's sort of like if you keep incrementing on something and keep making it better and better, you will end up there.

What was the quality of the business when you were running this like five room process?

That's peak Uber.

Peak. So it's like there, it's like you can put money into this or nothing. Nothing's even close. So if you don't get this.

No, there are other things, but it was peak Uber. But the point was I did it QED. So I showed at the atomic level how the whole system works

with, with a very analytical view, but also sort of a bit of performance art 'cause you're storytelling.

Okay. Explain what's happening in these five rooms then.

Five rooms, 12 hours, one week.

Who's in the rooms? You don't have to say the people, but like.

No, it's okay. So I'm in the $250 million check or over room. Then there's like a $100 million room and a $50 million room and a $25 million room. And there'll be a guy in the $25 million room who's like,

who works for a guy who works for a guy who works for me.

Right. And what are you guys saying in, in all these rooms?

We're telling the story.

Mm-hmm.

That story is the core.

Mm-hmm.

And now you have it being performed in four rooms at a time.

And there's a deadline. The price is going up.

Well, no, it's not prices going up. So that's the miss, that's the misunderstanding.

Okay.

Theright way to do it is to start with a low price.

Explain that.

So a lot of entrepreneurs, they go and they say, they really have a, remember I said attached to a process, not a price. So a lot of entrepreneurs will get attached to the price and not the process. And you have to be careful.

It's very easy to get sucked into that where you're like, you get some signal that it should be a price and you get attached to it and then that becomes your price, but you haven't cleared the market. So you have to be very careful about that.

So you get attached to the price. And so then when I throw a price out, you're on the other side of the table and you like, you come in under it and now we negotiate,right? It's a very bad place to be from my perspective.

Where you really wanna be is you wanna start at a low price and say, look, I don't know where the price is gonna go, but I know it's at least here. And if it's low,

the VC's like, okay. Now, once they give you that read, once they lean forward like that, you're like, okay, we're good. You have a bidder.

And then you go to the next guy. It depends on how the nature of the round. If you're doing a winner takes all round, then you would just go to the next guy and you would then say, whatever that guy said, X plus five, whatever.

Mm-hmm.

X plus Y here. Just say X plus five. And that guy does the same thing. And then you go to the next guy and then it's X plus five plus five. And the next guy, X plus five plus five plus five.

And all the while while that's happening is a winner takes all deal.

Mm-hmm.

You go back to the original guy and you're like, dude, it's going up. It's going up. And you're telling people it's going up. That's a winner takes all approach. And then you sort of do a going once, going twice.

Like when you start to peak out where it's like people are getting a little, it's starting to get a little high altitude, sweaty. Then you're like, okay, going once, going twice, sold. And then you close it down and winner takes all and they take the deal.

Yeah.

But most deals that are big deals today are not working that way. When you're doing multiple rooms at a time and something like this, it's more like,

how much would you put in at this price? And how much would you put in, let's call it, I'm just making this up, a billion. And how much would you put in at nine? And how much would you put in at 10?

How much would you put in at 12? How much would you put in 14? Fill the sheet out. You decide how much you'd put in at any, any price that we end up at. And you do that across everybody.

And it.

Is that what you're doing now?

Hold on. Slow down. Slow down. Then you aggregate how much demand I have at every price. So as the price gets higher, the demand goes down. You now have your demand curve and you're like, okay, I wanna raise a billion.

So, but at the really low price, I have 3 billion of demand. At the higher price, eventually I have a billion dollars worth of demand. And I go, okay, that's the price that I could close atright now. Then you go and tell all the people that that got cut out because they didn't get high enough of a price.

There's less demand at this price, which means there's certain people that didn't bid here. You go tell 'em they're out and you're like, but you could fill out another sheet if you wanna make some moves. So they fill out the sheet, you do the demand curve again, everything moves a little bit to theright and there's other guys that now get pushed out and you do it one more time and then you clean it and you're done.

So what are you doing now?

I'm about to close a deal.

Do you wanna say how you did it though?

You don't say numbers, but like.

No, I just.

I can't do that. No.

Okay.

I can't do that.

Okay. Fair enough.

No, it's fair.

Come back on in a few months and you can break it.

Yeah. I'll be like, yeah, a couple years ago, here's how this one went. You gotta put time in between 'cause it's like you just did a deal. You know what I mean? But I, I would say I did a, a, a slightly different, slightly different this time around.

I'm very curious how you protect yourself from what happened with Benchmark and Uber from ever happening to you again. So how are you selecting? Is that just obviously the price?

Look.

You're not taking the highest bidder. Like how are you picking your partners?

Yeah. You have to also be careful. Like,

there can be, you gotta be really careful not to get into victim mentality. And what I mean by that is what was my part in that, in that dynamic?

I was thinking while you were speaking, I was like, what if we could ask them what would they want you to do that you weren't doing? Maybe say, hey, we're about to fucking IPO.

Yeah.

That's probably what it would've saved me.

But also like I didn't kiss the ring. I think Girlie wanted to feel like Homey Town with me and just never was.

Homey Town to me is different than kissing the ring though.

But it, it, it's similar.

Okay.

Okay. Let's put it in that category. We don't have to fucking go there. So, so that's, there's that, that's one thing I could have done differently for sure. Would've changed everything. There are people inside of the company who became his partner to do the coup.

Those individuals shouldn't have been there. Okay.

Did you suspect them at all before?

Yes.

Wow.

There was definitely something wrong is what I would say. Okay. Let's put it that way. Every decision I made at Uber, defend to this day.

Like I wasn't a hundred percent correct, but always good intentions and always come from theright place. Generally just did theright thing. Yeah. One of my lawyers put it this way. He's like, you know, did you, if you're like he, he sort of made a sporting or like a, like a sports analogy, which is like, do you have chalk on your shoe?

Would be like kind of going out of bounds or doing something you shouldn't have done. And I'm like, never had chalk on my shoe. But in order to know, you would need an electromagnetic scanning microscope to see with reverse angle of slow-mo replay to verify that there's no chalk on the shoe.

So the problem was that I ran too close to the line in too many situations that it, it create, when you are big and important, the scrutiny and the expectation is that you don't run that close to the line, even if it's correct.

And that is a thing I definitely did not understand.

And it comes from what I did before Uber, which was I was doing a really hard startup, first four years, no salary, ran outta money several times, like super grind, like lose all friends, like everything's, it was just the hardest kind of, I, I like to say the non-luckiest entrepreneur journey of all time.

You can't call it unlucky. I eventually sold, but like you definitely would never call it lucky. That's for damn sure. But basically it was so hard that I had to be sort of

epically precise and hardcore just to pay the bills and go to the grocery store next week. And that precision and intensity made Uber what it was. But I was running a $70 billion company the way somebody who thought he was gonna starve next week would run it.

That is fascinating.

Like super intense precision, perfection, obsession because he's not sure that he's gonna be able to pay the grocery bill next week.

Did you understand you were, that was your approach at the time you had that approach or you had to leave and look back and figure it out?

It's a little, probably a little bit of both. Yeah. But I take pride in that. At the time it was like a pride in going all the way, but like not maybe understanding every, understanding it the way I understand it today.

I wonder how much of that is a benefit. Like you're, you're super, you're one of the most aggressive founders in history. You're wiser, more experienced now.

Yeah.

More access to resources, better network.

Yeah.

I wonder if this version of you could compete with that version or that aggressiveness is just what the, the, you, you created the entire category.

Yeah. No, I understand. It would be super fun if there was a universe where I could compete with my younger self. That would be fucking awesome. I would love that so much. I would kick his ass.

You, okay.

Now there'd be certain things he's doing because he's younger and there's a, there's a certain thing to that. Remember I talked about the, the, the passion forright and wrong,right? As an example, there's something to that. But also what I noticed today is most of the things that would take me X amount of time 10 years ago, I can do an X divided by three today.

And not because I got clawed over there.

Right.

Like that's a whole separate thing. I'm just saying like, like, I don't know, you read my Atoms vision note.

Yeah.

Okay. That would've taken me, I don't even know if I could have written that back in the day. Like not that good. I can just flow and get it done. Like the core of that was written in an hour and a half.

Mm-hmm.

You know, that kind of thing.

What is it that accel it caused you to accelerate now though?

There's different things. So like, a lot of early founders have a fear of failure. But what that does is it creates blockage around progress and that ma making progress. 'Cause you're, you're just, you're bogged down. The psyche around fear of failure fucks with your ability to, to get there.

Well, the fear of failure could either stand in your way or could push you from behind,right?

It can push you from behind, but ultimately you will never be truly world-class if you have a fear of failure.

But how many entrepreneurs have you met where they said like the fear of failure is greater than the love of success?

I understand that. I'm just saying that

it will get you places, but it won't get you all the way.

Okay. In that version of Travis where you're running a $70 billion company.

Well, no, I would say I was transitioning out of fear of failure.

Towards the end in 2017?

Just, just, just, just, just say like we don't have to put a specific date. It's just a spectrum. It's a, and just I'm transitioning out of it. 'Cause remember where I came from? It's just before. So I'm transitioning out of fear of failure.

How old were you when you started Uber?

33.

33. And you had a couple million bucks,right?

Yeah. I, that I put all into all my friends' startups.

Okay.

I had nothing.

Yeah. So.

It's kind of funny.

Yeah.

It's kind of funny.

Did that work out?

So I was the first investor in Expensify.

There's like a healthcare IT company that still hasn't gone public. It's really funny.

Okay. So not a lot of resources, still young. 33, still young. So you, it makes sense why you felt the way you felt.

Yeah. But it, it's, it's just about the background. It's just about what the previous experience was, not about my age per se.

Mm-hmm.

It was just about what experience I had just come out of.

So I love where the conversation has gone because what I'm hearing from you is like there's just this theme that runs through you as a person and then your approach to company building throughout these companies. So we barely touched on what you're doing now.

Yeah.

Like let's get into Atoms.

Yeah.

And you said you wanted to start with the mission where it says physical automation to transform industry and move the world.

AI and robotics to totally transform

industries, but one industry at a time and specialized robotics to do so. So for instance, if you want to make a thousand pancakes an hour, you wouldn't have a humanoid do it. If you wanted to

get a car to move down the street, you wouldn't have a humanoid drive it. I think humanoids have their place, which is, let's call it low-scale tasks in human design, environments designed for humans. So example, you're in a house.

Clothes need to be folded, but it's not like you're folding clothes all day long. It's one of the things, but there's no way you'd buy a robot for tens of thousands of dollars to just fold clothes because it's just not big enough of a problem.

So now you need a machine that can do many different types of things in the home. So it needs to fold clothes, it needs to take out the trash, probably needs to wash dishes. There's like a bunch of things, but that's a very generalized thing.

It has to be able to do a lot of different things and it's in a very human environment. The best form factor is a humanoid for this thing. But I'll bring up the thousand pancakes an hour. Imagine a humanoid making pancakes while it would make it like a human.

It would be like,

okay. And by the way, if you were just making pancakes at a home once a week on a Sunday, because you need a machine that can do many different things, including make pancakes, it's all good. But if you needed to do a thousand an hour, you'd probably need like, I don't know, a hundred humanoids in a row doing this,right?

Versus a very simple iron apparatus where the batter gets pushed into it, it's hot already and it's pushing out like maybe even like a hundred pancakes every few minutes.

Mm-hmm.

You know what I mean? So specialized robotics, specialized machines that are specialized for the task at hand is sort of how I look at what we do. And so industrial scale where there's real change to an industry by automating the whole thing.

And so you go, okay, well I've got a lot going on in food already. The idea is can you get a meal that's prepared and delivered to you so efficient that it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store?

Pretty awesome if you could. And it's gotta be a high-quality meal, of course. But like the, the, the question mark there, can you requires you to have what I would call industrial real estate for food e-commerce. What do I mean?

Food e-commerce. We know what e-commerce is. It's got Amazon warehouses everywhere or like major hubs, like big distribution centers, DCs. But food e-commerce is a little different. You, it is a warehouse type. You need to do logistics from it, but you also need to do manufacturing.

Like there's no manufacturing that's happening at an Amazon warehouse because everything's manufactured somewhere. It gets delivered to this big warehouse and then it goes from there. But with food, it has a 30-minute half life. So the manufacturing, the logistics has to happen at the same place and it always has to be 15 minutes from where you are.

So now you have a very different situation where you have real estate in urban and suburban environments. It's always 15 minutes from anybody. So you have an urban logistics fabric, production and logistics fabric across a city, which is I have the real estate, then I have robots, robotic food production, 'cause then I'm taking the labor cost out and then I have robotic logistics.

Becauseright now your $15 bowl that then gets delivered to you somehow became 30 bucks.

Mm-hmm.

It's of course expensive to produce, but every time there's a drop by a courier, that's another 12 bucks.

Mm-hmm.

Industrial real estate, robotic production, robotic couriers. And then.

Was there a specific reason you, you started with food though?

It just caught me. I mean, like that is like, I don't have a list. Well, first of all, of course I did Uber Eats, so like very familiar with this part of things.

Mm-hmm.

But nowhere close to the atoms that are necessary to do what I just described.

Mm-hmm.

You know, I, I like to say like I have lots of ideas all the time. I mean, I, I'm an idea factory.

Mm-hmm.

But other people have great ideas too. But like an idea comes to you or comes to you, if that makes sense. And I'd like to say, you know, you go out on a date with the idea, like was it a good date?

Did it, did it go well? Like how did you and the idea get along? And it's very much related to like who are you is going to be a big part of which idea works for you.

You call this finding your sport.

Yeah. Finding your sport or your business soulmate.

Mm-hmm.

Be in touch with who you are. And then when theright idea comes your way, you just know. You just know.

I thought I, I understood how you thought.

Yeah.

And now, you know, we've been talking for several hours. I'm, I think I'm getting a little closer there. But then I read what you wrote.

Yeah.

Where you're just like, well, look around, dude. Everything that you see in a city and a civilization has either been grown, mined, or manufactured.

Yeah.

And so I'm like, oh, he like is, you're in the details like you were describing the Uber signup flow earlier.

Yeah.

But you zoomed all the way out.

Yeah.

So it's like I'm gonna start with the material constituents of everything that exists in the world.

So when you look around you, everything around you is grown or mined, manufactured, and moved. And that's how we look at the world. And then you go, well, when you think about physical AI, the automation of movement and action in the physical world, you look at the, what I call the physical AI tech stack.

Real estate's part of that for the reasons I've, I've described as it relates to food. If you didn't have the industrial scale, what I call high infrastructure, heavy-duty energy, heavy-duty mechanical systems, 'cause you're extracting air and then tempering it and pushing it back in.

Real estate is a big part. What is a mining company? It's actually real estate. So the ability to take land and turn it into pro productive pro progress, essentially is a underappreciated and not understood thing. And it is most definitely a big part of the, what I would call the physical AI tech stack.

You go like look at, you know, you can look at Tesla and all the things Elon's doing. Like it's obvious that real estate is his jam or certainly his team's jam. He doesn't talk about it as much, but it's a big part of what happens.

He's got a fricking city. He's starting a fricking city,right? You know, the head of HRs is basically the mayor of a city that he's building. You know what I mean? So it's a really important thing. But also when you, you know, you can go further than that, which is everything we're seeing in technology, you know, a lot of times we talk about superintelligence is sort of the function of I need to have energy and I need to have minerals at the very base.

Lots of energy. We talk about data centers now in gigawatts or megawatts, you know? So I need to have energy and I need to have the minerals. And then I have those two things and I can get superintelligence eventually.

Working those things hard. But where does the energy come from? You're like, oh, it comes from the sun. Okay. But how do you capture it? Goes back to minerals. Like land is the whole damn thing. So there's a really interesting perspective about how land plays a role in the future of physical automation, physical AI, and just

autonomy in the physical world is, is very dependent upon it. And that's why mining is so interesting.

You're not owning the mines, correct?

No.

You're just making them more productive with gainfully employed robots.

Correct. Yeah. What we call gainfully employed robots.

Which is hilarious by the way.

Yes. But it's like becauseright now, you know, you know, look, I do think of course humanoids are gonna be gainfully employed. They're not there yet, but they'll get there. Butright now they're, the demos are dancing and martial arts.

You know, I talk about the Beijing, there's a, a, a, a humanoid Olympics in Beijing and they're, they're doing a marathon. You're like, okay, they're not quite there. They're, they're gonna get there. But I kept thinking like, man, imagine if you put wheels on 'em,right?

And this gets back to humanoids being good at certain things and not others and sort of having a purpose-built machine for the task is important.

So wait, you said two very interesting things. Your life's work is digitizing the physical world. And then you're saying for Atoms, you're gonna attack one industry at a time.

Mm-hmm.

Physical world far outstrips the digital world. Therefore you almost stumbled into or picked, you didn't stumble into.

Yeah.

You picked an infinite game. So there's no limit to what you, this company can expand into.

Look, I, I have a little bit of an issue of infinite, but like it's a very, it goes very far. Like the dream, like okay, look, the mission for mining is more productive mines to power Earth's industries. 'Cause we can go to a gold mineright now, go to a gold mine CEO and ask whether he wants 20% more gold per year.

Why? Because when you automate it, that's the output and you make it cheaper to go to other places and even get more gold out of that mine that you wouldn't even get before. So it's getting more per year.

It's getting more than you otherwise would in the totality of that mine. Plus being able to go and do more mines than you otherwise would because the opex is so much lower.

But if you're increasing the raw materials, then you're also increasing overall industry in the world.

Yeah.

Period. And then you could then go and automate and enhance those industries as well,right?

The point is, is that if you get really good at minerals and materials and land, you get good at automating making land productive and powering progress with land, it's sort of the lever that moves the world.

Exactly.

So if you automate the thing that is the lever that moves the world, it's like theultra lever. And it's just kind of fun. It's just actually cool. If you see a picture of a, you know,

a machine that loaded is over 2 million pounds and it's the size of a building and it's autonomously moving around, it's pretty cool. The dream in like this is like, it's really Elon willing really. But like one day he's gonna be sending, he's gonna be sending missions to asteroids to mine them.

Yeah. Maybe we can help out in some way. That'd be a lot of fun.

You have mining, you have food.

Transport. And the thing we call it, the mission there is wheelbase for robots. So if you have specialized machines that, that, that act and move in the physical world, that's what we do for a living, you have to have wheelbase.

You have to automate how they move. You know, some people think about ride sharing when they think about this, but there's just a lot of, there's a lot of things you're not thinking about. You know, like I was talking to one of the large food suppliers in the US.

They supply all the food to the, to the restaurants. They're spending $3 billion a year on the labor that moves the pallets on forklifts.

It's like, this is just like a little drop in the bucket of all the things that are moving,right? But what about freight? What about parcel delivery? What about

food delivery? So like we talked about that on the food side. Once I knew I had to get into autonomy to complete the food story, this is when the Atoms thing sort of came together beyond just food.

One of the things that I was talking to Daniel Ek about you, that he finds most fascinating about you is your propensity to build a ton of separate companies inside of one company. You did this obviously at Uber.

Yeah.

You're doing it again at Atoms.

Yeah.

Is that just your natural? Is that what you meant? Like your business soulmate? Just like, I don't wanna work on just one product or one business. Like you want a conglomerate? Like how do you think about this?

I mean, this goes back to, no, you don't, that's not how it works. It's, but it is, remember, the only constraint to our imagination is management capacity. So then the question is twofold. Do you have an imagination and is it any good?

But if you do have an imagination and it's good, you're gonna have interesting ideas that should happen. There's many ideas that maybe either shouldn't or somebody else should do, but there's gonna be many ideas that you should do.

So what does an actual organization inside of Atoms looks like with all, look like with all these different businesses?

Yeah.

Like does every business have a CEO? They report directly to you? Like how, how did you actually structure this?

You have a business unit line leader, and then you might even have sub-business unit leaders as well. You really try to empower and the, you know, empower them to do their thing. That is, you know, I sort of look at that as alignment upfront, accountability on the back end.

So what are we trying to accomplish? How are we gonna try to accomplish it? What do we view as risky and what's sort of a no-brainer? And how do we do accountability as we go and then sort of approach it with like a management style, which I call problem solver in chief, which is I spend my time on the most impactful problems that are not already being solved.

That's how you dedicate your time.

Yeah.

Is that the directive that you give to everybody?

Yeah.

That's, that's, okay.

Yes. So I've got a certain number of hours per day, but that's a tiny fraction of the problems that need to be solved.

Yeah. That's what I'm trying to figure out. Like how do you?

So that flows down. Now everybody's got their, their, their, their remit, let's say. So they solve problems in this area. So it's flowing down, but they are the problem solver in chief deputized for their area all the way down to the bottom.

Do you still put an emphasis? I've heard you speak about this in the past, an emphasis of hiring and empowering young people. Is this business different than like when you were launching new cities in Uber, for example, where you gave a lot of responsibility to, you know, aggressive young people?

Well, look, again, so it, it, there's really interesting ways to do it. I, I, I sort of have this, this concept I call the line in sort of the, maybe the framework is finding the line. So there's a line on one side is order, lots of structure, sorry, structure.

Like as you, as you pull away further, further back into order, you have lots of rules, lots of structure, lots of process, and eventually lots of bureaucracy. And if you go too far back from that line, you're going slow and people are bummed.

And if you go to the other side of the line, which is chaos,

lack of rules, lack of process, lack of structure. And as you go deeper and deeper and deeper into chaos, you also get to a place where you're going slow and people are bummed. So that line between order and chaos is innovation at speed and at scale.

And the job of every leader is to find that line. And it's not in two dimensions. It's like in 80 dimensions. Okay? And the best leaders are able to find that. And you know, the probably the most approachable way to describe this is the fewest number of rules while staying out of chaos is the, is the approachable way to describe this.

But you go to back to like launch at Uber, you could think of it as like, okay, there's a bunch of 23-year-olds launching cities. What happened was at the beginning, the first 20, 30 cities, I was deeply involved in whether that city was gonna get launched.

But what happened was

somebody'd go out, hey, go launch a city, make something outta nothing, and there'd be some kind of playbook there. But a lot of it was undefined, but nothing would actually launch until they got to a pricing call. 'Cause pricing in the transportation space is the sum of all strategy.

And so the pricing call then goes, well, what's the regulatory? What's the car type that you're gonna use because of that regulatory? What is the average wage in the city? Because that's on the driver's side and that's part of the cost.

Of course, you basically go through every aspect of the city that relates to transportation. How long does it take to get around? Like where are people going? You ultimately get to a price, but it means you have to understand everything and how you get to that price matters.

So in the first 20 cities, I was on a pricing call in some of those cities, man, it would be like eight pricing calls. It could be like eight hours, 10 hours of pricing calls before we launched London as an example.

But I never solved the same problem twice. Once we solved it, then it became part of the playbook. And eventually we get to city 20 and that pricing call takes five minutes. I stopped going to them. Didn't matter anymore.

But the key that I was trying to get to is you have a 23-year-old who then can go and launch a city. Even at the beginning when I was still involved in that pricing call, they wouldn't see me till the pricing call, but they knew I was gonna be at that pricing call.

The one rule was you can't launch until I say yes at that pricing call. So they would come ready to play at that pricing call. And they knew that if they didn't, I'd be like, no. And then they suck.

And so they would put everything they in into making that successful, which means all the other things that they're doing before are gonna be organized towards doing itright because they wanna win. And so now I've got one rule, which is that pricing call.

The fewest number of rules while staying outta chaos. That if you didn't have that one rule, you now have 23-year-olds running around doing crazy shit.

That's awesome. It made me think of another line that I love that you put on the Atoms website where you said that chaos was the law of nature and order was the dream of man.

Hmm.

My interpretation of that line now, having spoken to you about this, it's like I feel that you are imposing order on the chaos of the physical world. That's what your company's trying to do.

I almost think of it as negantropic, which means, and it's kind of a, you could get into a very interesting sort of, very,

I don't wanna say you, very energetic debate with certain people about negative entropy. But civilization is an attempt to locally slow down entropy and maybe even go negative. It's building structure against

the nature towards chaos. That's what civilization is. And so Atoms is essentially the structure to defend

civilization and move it forward into progress.

There's another line when you, when you speak, there's a lot of things that you say that remind me of Rockefeller. And when in the early days of the oil refining industry, he used that word that he thought it was a chaotic industry.

It was, he said at the very beginning.

Yeah.

This is when the oil industry, the entire.

Yeah.

It's solely concentrated in Pennsylvania, for God's sake.

Yeah.

And he goes, I'm going to impose order on this chaos. That's the line he used.

Progress is sort of the organization and structuring of the world towards human happiness and liberty and transcendence in some fashion. That's how I view what we're doing at maybe the very highest level.

I think that's an awesome place to close, Travis. It really means a lot to me.

Yeah.

Taking the time.

Yeah.

Really appreciate it, man. Thanks.

Great.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs searching for ideas that you can use in your work.

Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through founders.