Uber Founder Travis Kalanick is Back with a New AI Startup

We have our next guest ready to join us live in the 2D Penultimate Travis Caloneck. He is the CEO of Cloud Kitchens. Welcome to the show Travis. Great to meet you. Appreciate you coming on down to our studio, our humble boat. We are truly an honor. I'm just down the street. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. That's right. Yeah. We were actually we started the show in downtown LA at the Jonathan Club on Figueroa. And so I think we were even closer then. There you go. Yeah. Far. How are things going? How's life? Can we turn that down? We're getting some feedback. That was crazy. Man, that's crazy. Yeah. What's crazy? The building doesn't stop. Okay. I mean, I don't know how much you guys. I mean, I just I've been in hiding. So I've been I've been doing I've been doing this. I run a company called cities up until today. Yeah. Let's just say I was running a company called city storage systems. Okay. Which was basically about the future of food and conglomerate operating in about 30 countries. That the whole idea was 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. Yeah. Because if you do you do to the kitchen, what Uber did to the car? So I've been doing that since 2018. Yeah. And after just the intensity of Uber from in terms of like being in the public sphere, dealing with a hundred headlines every day, deciding what you do or the actions you take based on what the New York Times is going to write. Yeah. I was like, I would like to. That's a tough way to run a business. It is very tough. So I was just like, I got to wake up every day and sort of just get to work and build. So I went under the radar. I do you think of this as like stealth mode? Is that the right? We've been in stealth mode for eight years. Okay. And that's like till today. Yeah. Employees were not allowed to put the name of the company on their LinkedIn. Wow. We have thousands of employees. Yeah. That's crazy. Okay. So today what happened was it's like for my company and I just got out of an all hands and then came right here is we went out of stealth. Yeah. Now city storage systems is like a hilarious name. It's like the most like let me choose the most generic name that no one will ever know. It was on purpose. Yeah. Okay. And it works. It was like we had two choices when we when we launched. Yeah. We had what my sort of normal instinct was. Remember it was only seven eight months after I left Uber when I started this. Yeah. And it's let's just say the mission is infrastructure for better food. Yeah. Okay. We have hardcore real estate assets. We buy the assets. We do construction. We sell restaurant tours on the delivery only location. I have a software stack. Yeah. That's like AR. AR life. I've got a robotics company. Yeah. I have a marketplace for for corporate lunch. Like there's a ton of stuff going on. Oh, yeah. That's right. That's right. Of course. Yeah. That's great. All right. Okay. So shit. I forgot what I was saying. So. So. It's just a very different business from Uber. My people where we go company and be like, I'm going to start the exact same thing. I got the playbook. But this is what this is what the Uber guys when I left were were like a little bit worried about business. We're talking about 2017. Yeah. Yeah. They're paranoid. So my my instinct was, okay, I left it seven months later. I'm going to name my company super. You like it. You call it super. I'm going gig. I'm like, you go from Uber to suit you like now that that cannot be a thing. And so I did the opposite. Yeah. Full underground full stealth put the toothpaste back in the tube, the genie back in the bottle and built. Yeah. Literally thousands of employees. And it's like a vacuum of information full lockdown. It's been great building. But today we sort of came out and we renamed the company. We renamed what we do. We call it Adams. Okay. But we started a new company at the same time. And so let's just say like a physical AI and robotics action and movement through the physical world. Of course, on the food side, we already have all the things I just talked about. But, but think of it as like a. I'm trying to get the mission like we're so that I'm so right. Yeah. So fresh. But but basically it's yeah. So so that I'll leave it at that. Let's get we can get rolling here. I'm like super caffeinated on four hours of sleep. So I love it. I love it. What how much harder in many ways I think building in stealth for so long made a lot of things easier, right? You're not running your business based on headlines. Yeah. We're thinking about what headlines are going to come. What are the what are the ways in which you made it harder? I imagine there's a lot of there's a lot of there's a lot of talent out there that wants to go work at the hot company that's in the news constantly. I'm sure you got the benefits of people maybe still opting out of that path and saying, hey, I just want to come in with you build. And I don't care about the hype and I don't want I don't need every recruiter hitting me up constantly because of whatever's on my LinkedIn. But what were the kind of key challenges and what are why why was now the right time to to come out and start to get loud again? So like first, I mean 100%. So imagine every recruiter has to be outbound. Every salesperson has to be outbound. There's no inbound. Yeah. That's where it starts. You get good at your craft when that's what you have to do. Like I believe we have some of the best recruiters in the world because of it. And one of the best recruiting systems. Now they leverage, okay, you're working with Travis, former founder of Uber, like there's leverage there. But then you have a name like city storage systems and it's like, so do you guys just have like these, these like boxes sitting in parking lots like what is this? And that's sort of like the reason it's different now is because look number one, lots of time since the Uber, you know, from having to live that life. But two is the world is different. Like in 2016, 2017, the world of let's call it business press was just beginning to say business is politics, but people didn't know it. They're like if New York Times says something, everybody just treated it as the gospel, like it just must be true. And if they say something bad, it must be true. I believe everything I read on the internet as an example. And so and by the way, it's this sounds crazy. But 2017, the media world was actually more negative then than it is today. Yeah. And I think partly because it even shows like this. It's like let's bring some optimism to the party. Sure. Yeah. Can we get excited about what the future looks like in what's being built? Yeah. And that's the difference between today and then. And so when you go 95% of all presses negative, you're like, why engage? When the world is used to business being politics, let's just say. And if I thought of my favorite journal, sorry, my favorite politician and say what does the internet say that's bad about them? And it's like an insane amount. What does the internet say that's negative or sorry, untrue about them? And it's a ton of stuff. And you go, well, that's how they're going to think about our company too. That's how it's going to play. Yeah. We're now we're desensitized to that stuff. And now we can get back to optimism and building and not be so worried about, you know, 95% of the media just being negative. Sure. Yeah. I mean, this is pretty like like whole trend of going directly like Lulu. Yeah. I'm sure you've met it at some point. Basically coached the generation of CEOs on, you know, you just can't if you if you want to have any control over how people perceive you, you need to you need to tell. You have to counteract with like a story, not like a statement. And the the boiler plate, like, you know, official statement just doesn't it doesn't entertain people as well as a full read. I mean it's also guys like Elon owns Twitter now. Yeah. X. Yeah. Right. Pre-post is like a massive difference in the mix of sort of ideas that can get out there. And again, you're allowed to be optimistic about things where maybe before everything had to be negative and and and sort of. Yes. You you talked about the initial idea of naming the next company super that would have in many ways I'm sure turned into a basically a spite company. Yeah. In this case, like kind of taking the high road was I'm just going to be quiet. I'm going to do the years and years and years and years of just like chewing glass building up into the structure, getting to scale, getting to thousands of employees, getting to operating globally before you even poke your head up again, which I think is to any of your former critics that's to me that's taken the high road basically. Yeah. And what you get when you create a culture around that is you have you then build a culture of builders. You build a culture of people that want to build and do not need to be famous when they do it. Yeah. Which basically means emotional intelligence. Now, it's a human nature. I want to be acknowledged for the things that I do. I'd like the things I build to be seen and I'd like somebody to know that I did it. And so this is when you cut against sort of the core of human nature and we sort of went all the way. Yeah. And so we have a very [BLANK_AUDIO] IEQ culture, but like it is, like you have to go the extra mile or recruit, the extra mile and sales, et cetera. Again, the world's different, LFG. Are the laws of physics of the different businesses slightly different? I'm just thinking about your career arc with like red swooshes, enterprise communications. You're in a very particular industry. Uber's a consumer company. Now you're working on something that looks, you're probably running like real estate developers. It's like a different industry, different community. Has there been adjustments and what's different, what's the same? What can you just be like a good business operator and power through and what do you actually have to learn about the new industry? Look, I think probably the biggest one is when you go from consumer to, because I have to be, the number one mega challenge that you must master is called LTV to CAC. Yes, you could make that argument on consumer, but when you have a sales funnel that starts with, I'm going to talk to customers and I have to make LTV to CAC work versus like, my LTV to CAC is the app store. It's a whole different ball game. But LTV to CAC with a sales machine, especially if you go small business, this is like life and hard mode. Talk to anybody who's crushed it on SMB. Those guys are special individuals who have made that happen because life in the SMB, B2B world is no joke. Talk about modes. I feel like Uber is the greatest example of network effects and runaway scale. What did modes look like at RedSwish? What were you thinking then? What does it look like now? So like, nobody knows what RedSwish is. That's all good. Guys, I started a company in 2001. That was, let's call it, BitTorrent meets Akamai. Before BitTorrent existed. Okay. Crazy. You click on a link and you can pull from other PCs that already have that file or that video stream, but it looks like the internet. That's basically what it was. The first four years, no salary. Wow. Yeah. Live that month. He had some famous investors. Famous investors. You know, like, Mark Cuban was on the board of RedSwish. So before that scour was Ovid's and Ron Berkel. That was the company before it. No. I was confusing too. Yeah. Anyways. So there's a network effect there once you get the CDN up and running. That company wasn't meant to be and I willed it into being. Okay. And I sold it to Akamai for like, I think it was like 19 million bucks and probably to this day is still the happiest day. I'm like, okay. I guess so. Okay. It was crazy. It was crazy. I got cleared 3 million and I was like, okay. Praise the Lord. Okay. So then you remember very obvious, very obvious modes and scale economies. What does this look like with atoms? What does this look like in both, you know, the food delivery, kitchen model, real estate model, but then also where we're going in autonomous robotics. Look, if you look at where modes are and really you're looking for network effects in different places. Right. So right now I have these facilities. There's 30 restaurants in each of them. The technique is like a perfect example of this. You order from your office, looks like Uber Eats or DoorDash, you get 100 options except all the meals are coming out of my facilities. There's one career that brings 100 orders at a time, but it's on demand and it's personalized for you and we've got enough facilities near here that you can basically get anything. And so who's going to, who can play ball? Like you got to have the real estate. That's a frickin' mode. Yeah. So right now of like what if I sell every floor on every tower, meaning every office floor is on this and I should see that. More efficiency then. In all of these floors, that means that one career can bring 100 orders and by well have five careers going to a single office with 500 orders hitting every shelf and you get notified when it arrives. If you even took one floor, you would be like sad because your economics are going to be screwed. Because you don't have the efficiency or the operation sort of depth to make it work. So there's network effects of a building. There's network effects on a facility with kitchens in it. There's, but then there's the mode of like we own real estate. Yeah. Okay. So like if you want to compete with us, go buy 100 million. So very high billions of dollars of real estate in every major city in the world and then we're going to go head to head. Talk about capital. Yeah. I don't know exactly what bucket this falls in, but just the mode of you would have to be absolutely insane to compete with. But people were. People were. Like this is how I remember the Uber versus lift battle was Uber was so well. And then all of a sudden a whole bunch of VCs were like, I want a piece of that and I didn't get Uber. So I'm funding the. But I'm saying in the context of cloud kitchens, city storage, like even though people generally figured out what you were up to, right? You did have to share some little things along the way where you buy this company or so there to you got to go to a website and say what is an what is a delivery only location? What the hell is that? Yeah. Yeah. And so somebody had to know. Yeah. But even then we're like, we're going to say the cross streets of the facility, not the actual address. Oh, these are the little moves you do to be stealth. So when I look at the new site and how everything's positioned, a lot of it feels insulated from all the changes and progress that we're seeing in AI. And in many ways, like accelerated because you'll get a lot of the benefits of AI progress and progress and robotics. But you're moving physical atoms around the world. And in an era where you can generate any piece of software fairly quickly, this feels like you've been kind of planning for this type of technology progress. Sounds great, dude. I love that. I love it. Yeah, it is. All in the plan. Look, I think it's always been the plan. A meal that's efficient, so efficient, it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store. A meal that's prepared and delivered to you. That's real. You must do automated production of food. You must do automated delivery of the meal. I call that autonomous burritos, which is why I'm moving into this, making this move on atoms, which is, okay, we're still doing the food thing, but then we're adding mining and transport, okay? Mining being like more, you know, we like to say more efficient mines for Earth's industries. For transport, it's just wheelbase for robots, okay? Because if you're going to do specialized robots, not humanoids, but specialized robots, they need to have wheels. Okay. Right, I'd like to say, like if you saw the Beijing, in Beijing, they had the humanoid Olympics. Yeah. And the half marathon in your body and the humanoid. Cruising out like, dude, could you imagine if that thing had wheels? That'd be crazy. So like humanoids have their place, but there's a lot of room for specialized robots that do things in an efficient sort of industrial scale kind of way, which is sort of where we play. I want to go back to capital wars, lessons from capital wars when these play out, because we're seeing this. OGI. Okay. Yeah. My real life. You see OGI, because or when this capital war kicked off, were you looking to lessons from the 90s? I mean, look, you can always say there was the guy before. Yeah. Okay, like, like, you know, Rockefeller was the OGI and then the forehand was like the Medici. I don't know. But I was, I was the goat for a period of time and now I'm a baby goat. And that's okay. And so then one day the baby goat will grow up again. So it's fine. It's going to be fine. I just mean like this idea of like you have a network effect it's growing and then you see a bunch of capitalist started throwing money at like the second place and there's this debate over catching up and like, how do you, what modes do you retreat to in that moment? Like, I feel like that's the, that's the lesson from the Uber story that gets missed amid all the random dramas that there's actually like a very interesting financial war happening. And it played out very well for you and I'm wondering like what level of confidence you had? What did you do strategically to set yourself up for success? It's a super interesting thing because I, of course, all the AI guys are playing that game right now, which is the ability to attract capital. The capital wars becomes a strategic weapon. Capital becomes a strategic weapon, which means you must be the best at getting capital in order to win. And we realized that early on in the Uber days, of course, that's happening times 10 in the sort of, let's call the digital AI wars. And look, the last round of funding that I did at Uber, we were like a 70 million, you know, I know it was like a 60, 70 billion dollar pre. Let's see that. Yeah, when that used to be a thing. And now I'm like, oh, that's small stuff. But we had four rooms. This is our, our, how we'd fundraise. We had four rooms in our New York office. booked for a week with an hour and a half slot on each. So like for 12 hours in a day, four rooms going in parallel. Are you bouncing between them? No, I'm in the $250 million over-club. That's one room. And it goes all these other rooms. The fourth room is like $25 million checks. Okay. There's a guy who works for a guy who works for a guy who works for me who's doing that room. Yeah. Okay. And then, but we're oversubscribed. So we started putting multiple investors in the same room. We're like, dude, we're just out of slots. Yeah, that's understandable. And, but what it means is about the system. It's about the system for sort of acquiring that capital at scale and super efficiently. And what it means is that storytelling that we did, anybody in my team could tell that. Let's say on the strategic finance team, could tell that story and make it happen. And that was a big part. It was a story that's just like, of course, like if I'm pitching it, people like, holy shit, let's go. Then there is making it scalable so that there are 10 different people in a company that can pitch it in any given time. And that's when you take it all the way. And then there's like even auction dynamics of how we would do it. We would basically, once they said they were interested, we would then give them a piece of paper, it was like digital. But it was like, you need to fill out this table, which is this valuation, how much money you want to put in. This valuation, how much money? This much money? And then we would aggregate the demand. It's like an IPO book. Yes, but like done way better because you don't respect to the bankers. But like, I was in charge of pricing. Sure, sure. And so, and then you're like, oh, we're trying to clear $5 billion. That takes us to this price. We would tell all these guys, hey, your price isn't big enough because you don't make it under the curve. And then they would move their price. And then that would change the curve and you would do it again. It would again make sense. Were you, were you bringing new investors to private markets at that time? I feel like if I go back to Facebook, I think the IPO to around 50 billion. You're doing a $70 billion raise. There's a lot of different, it's a completely different shape of investor. What were those conversations like? Look, I, like I, in some ways I have to give some credit. This was, it was an era where this was happening. You had like the fidelities of the world and other guys that are moving in. Yeah. I have to give credit to Drew at Dropbox. Oh. He was like the first guy in that game. Yeah. And you know, Drew and I meet up and we, you know, have like, "Flax, I'm like dude." I love Drew. I love Drew. You're like, is my, our little safe space. Yeah. Chesky at Airbnb. Yeah. That was the crew that was doing it in the 2010s. Yeah. And sort of pushing the boundaries of what it meant to be, like people didn't even know what private equity. Private equity. What is private equity? Yeah. Now we're just like, yeah, private equity. Yeah. And back then, private equity is like, I do leverage buyouts. And so you're bringing private equity, mutual funds, those guys into the game in a way that didn't exist before. Now it's just old hat. Have you, have you coached any of the AI founders? Exactly. Culturally, like that crew that you just described, we've, most of them have been on the show. It feels very different aesthetically than what we're dealing with today. Yeah, but I'm sure Chesky's pumping up Sam. I love these guys. I love them all. That's so interesting. Look, the times when I get hit up are usually when the shit is about to hit the fan. Or it's actually hitting the fan. There like, dude, so many needs to call Travis immediately. He'll know what to do. Travis and the casting, and the casting movie about me. My phone's like, one of the crazy wild wackiest things going down are like here because that's when I usually get the call. I'm so underground. Yeah, that's what happens. But like, I should, you know, I should give, you know, I know these guys. I should give them a convoy like, dude, we should let's let's let's cook. I still think we probably did things better than anybody that some of those things probably are still better than anybody even today. Obviously, the check size much bigger. Is that approach like systematizing fundraising, productizing it? Do you apply that across the entire? Is that like everything that you do that is important? Yeah. You're creating like a ground up kind of solution for it. Yeah, so like, for instance, I mean, this is just crazy. But like, how about when you do construction? You know how effed up construction is? Yeah. I tell my guys that in the real estate department, I'm like, your entire department is the anti-fraud department. Oh, yeah. You know? You guys just are incentivized to just run a bill. So how do you do epic high quality construction at an insanely efficient price? There's a way. Not going to tell you. But there's a way. Do you have any like white pills or ideas that potentially AI speeds up the rate of building broadly, like solving the housing crisis through permitting stuff like that? This is so one of the things is that, and I think people are starting to come out of this now. This whole like, the jobs are gone. Like, I know still people still say that. Yeah. But there's another side to this story. And like, I'll just make this because I'm the Adam's guy. I'm like, let's just talk about plumbers. Okay. Let's say the entire world, everything in our world was automated except for plumbers. Okay. You had machines making buildings. You would basically have like a thousand buildings a day, a thousand buildings being built at a single time in Los Angeles alone. Sure. Just machines doing. Yeah. Except plumbers. Okay. How valuable would those plumbers be? Okay. Those guys would each in every plumber would be like LeBron. Why? Why? Because plumbing is the long pull and the tent to progress. Sure. That you can't get those thousand buildings unless you have a plumber. Sure. And by the way, you got so much efficiency everywhere else that you need millions of plumbers. Yeah. And then plumbing is like, yeah. What's up? And so once you realize that, then you're like, until we get super AGI, humans are valuable. And they are going to become more and more valuable because they will be the long pull and the tent to progress. And that progress is going to accelerate and get faster and more robust except if you're a plumber, you're crushing. And so until we get to humans are replaced, like fully. And by the way, I have solutions for that. I think Elon's got that at Neuralin. It's going to be all good. Okay. And then feel like, oh, God. But until we get there, I believe we're going to be super fine. That's my white pill. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It does. If you have plumbers that are going to be paid like LeBron, it obviously increases the prize pool of automating. But again, there's these kind of windows. But there's going to be a bunch of things like plumbing and it's not just plumbing. It's going to be all over the place. Yeah. And even when it comes to software, so like for instance, look at like Atomas Cars. They like, like, WAMO has people that oversee the rides. Yeah. Okay. And it starts with like, okay, five rides for every person. Yeah. Then it goes to 20. It goes to 100. But like if we get to this place where Atomas Cars are everywhere, okay. And let's just say it's one of a thousand. And like nobody owns cars. It's just ride sharing everywhere. I mean, some people own cars, but it'd be the top of the pyramid, let's say. Okay. So what do we replace billions of cars with ride sharing? Yeah. If it was a thousand to one, you still probably have, I don't know, 20 million jobs. Yeah. 50 million jobs. I'm just riffing on just the concept of this. Yeah. You will see this everywhere. Yeah. Is that until humans are fully replaced, we become the long pull and the tent to progress. And that progress by the way is to serve us. Yeah. Yeah. Robots yet have bank accounts. Yeah. So that plumber gets paid. Yeah. Anyways, you get the idea. You mentioned mining. Yeah. Have you been to a mine recently? Have you visited a mine? Like what's going on in mining? I imagine that mines are fairly automated already. There's a thousand of employees at a given mine. And that's work that he has. And there's so many useful children, children yearn for the minecraft. You do. Minecraft. Yeah. It's not the best job. Well, maybe that's actually how it gets. Yeah, maybe that's where it goes. Oh, yeah. It's mine. Enders games. Yeah. Enders games. Yeah. It's interesting. You go a lot of times they're like, oh, well, is labor really the issue in mine? You know, is that really a thing? But that's what it really comes down to is productivity. Right. So if a mine is automated, then it can run all hours of the day and night. It doesn't have. Yeah. doing that really efficiently. like computer science style, like called digitizing the physical world, you can make that mind substantially more productive. What is the value of a more productive mind? And by the way, let's say, let's get to the real sort of the outcome here, is does the world as we enter this sort of new golden age that's about to come? Do we need more minerals? Do we need more materials? Look around us. Look around us in the studio or walk outside. Everything you see is grown or mined. Manufactured and moved. So if you're not in the mining business, like let's just say that, I shouldn't say that, it's a very critical part of the situation. I can't wait till we're putting some machines on SpaceX's rockets to go mine an asteroid or a planet in the meantime. Lots of mines on planet Earth. So what level of abstraction do you want to operate at? Do you want to go and find land and mine it? Because that's sort of on the table. If I look at what you're doing in food, you own real estate, or do you want to sell tools to mining companies that already have explored and they understand and they're running up and running? Yeah, like how do you think? I'm not buying land for mines anytime soon. But in the next three months. Supply and not in 120 days out. I just think it's super fascinating. Again, it's just like I'm an Adams guy. I'm like all about digitization of the physical world. And I have this framework for it, which is like CPU manipulates bits, storage stores bits, network moves bits from point A to point B. I was a computer engineer at UCLA. I didn't graduate, but I loved it. Those are the three core computing resources that you're told about on day one. But if you're treating atoms like bits, digitizing the physical world, CPU manipulates bits. What manipulates atoms? Manufacturing. Storage stores bits. What stores atoms? Real estate. Network moves bits from point A to point B. What moves atoms? Transport to logistics. I didn't know it then or I didn't think about that way exactly. But at Uber, we were building network for the physical world, also known as digitized transportation. City storage systems then make sense. Storage for the physical world. That's real estate. We're building atoms based computers with a real estate foundation. Storage. But now leveling up and saying, okay, we have a food computer. What about a mining computer and what about a wheel based platform to serve industry generally? Yeah. If I look at the last two decades of your career, you're uniquely good at managing very geographically spread out workforces. What is the secret? I could never get behind the remote work thing. Everyone here works in one studio. It's back. I'm all about it. But you've had to do it basically because you had to have a presence in New York. You had to have a presence in LA and you can't be in the 10 places. It's all good. There's a difference between remote work. Somebody works at home and they're like in boxers and then a suit. Okay. Versus, we have an office in every major city in the world and whatever city you're in, you're going to that office every day, five days a week and sometimes six or seven. And that's it. But satellite offices still feel like a headache. How did you solve it? Because you can only be in one place. Yeah. I just cracked the code so thoroughly and Uber times before, I think, maybe even before anybody else. It almost feels like normal. Yeah. But I basically have figured out the management and leadership structures where the real thing is about empowerment. You must be able to empower teams. I like to say the fewest number of rules while staying out of chaos. And once you have those systems in place, your imagination is only constrained by management capacity. So once you figure out the management piece, your imagination can go pretty damn far. So it's just figuring out the management part of this is the thing. Talk about empowering young people. We've had a ton of founders on the show who have the origin story of like, yeah, I was the GM of Miami or so. He sent me to Atlanta and I was me in a hotel room with a bunch of energy drinks and we had to open up this market so we had to do a stunt and hire some people. And it just felt like, startup within a startup is a bad phrase that gets sort of misused. But why were you, you weren't, this wasn't your first company with Uber. Why were you so heavy on leaning on young people empowering them, pushing them? It wasn't on purpose. It was just the right answer. Okay. Why? Yeah, I mean, once you have a city team and you're like, okay, I need to find people that can run this. Like, old people aren't the answer. Like, I need fresh. I didn't think of it as like, I got to get youthful people or not. I'm just like, I need good talent that can go do X and who has no judgment on what it is we got to get done. And it was just like water flows downhill. So what do you look at? It was a, you know, like the first driver ops guy that we brought in in San Francisco in 2010, we basically took 200 cards and put names on them and we said, alpha betisum. Click. And we just would measure how much time it took to alpha betis. We would give them like crazy analytics tests. And then we're like, okay, this is our guy. You know what I mean? If you're on the marketing manager, if you're on the marketing manager, but even today you'd still want that guy. Yeah. Even today. So like, you can't use AI. Now alpha betisum the most efficient way. Now if you're, if you know computer science, sorting is like a big fricking deal, sorting efficiently and being able to do that in your brain, not in software is a thing. That's what ops people do. Yeah. Yeah. So, I don't know. I don't know how to answer that question other than problem solving whether you're young or old executive or junior. Who can solve problems is number one. When you interview, simulate what it's like working together, so that day one is really like week two. And you're already pumped because you saw them in action. How are you with atoms? How are you thinking about recruiting and how are you going to change your approach to building the company? You've been kind of hold up and out like this is your kind of hideout. Yeah, totally. But I imagine like, do you do you push into back into SF, go back to being the king? Well here. So first, let's just be clear on December 18th, I moved to Texas. Sure. You know, right. I don't know what's so specific about December 18th, but let's just say it's prior to January. Yep. Yeah. So I'm a primary resident of Texas, but the action for a lot of this atoms type technology, I'm talking about, of course, like the Bay is a real thing. My head of the advanced technology group at Uber is running my robotics division at Adams. It's called lap 37 in Pittsburgh. No, no, that's Eric Myhoffer. Okay, Eric Myhoffer. So that's robotics on the food side. Yeah, Anthony Avadowski was running pronto. I was the largest investor in pronto and then we just were basically right in the final like we're checking off the list, maybe closing today or tomorrow on that deal. Amazing. Let's talk about that deal. Yeah. Give us, give us, yeah, give us like, what's the kind of background on on pronto and then how it fits into the to the empire? Well, look, I sort of broke out how mining fits. Yeah. Right. So we got that. Look, I bet I'm the largest investor in pronto. And it's super inspiring work like like go to a mine, right? Check out how these things work and let your mind imagine what that might look like when you bring automation to it and how much more productive it is and what that means for industry when all mines are producing more, where does that go? And in some ways you could say low hanging fruit on the autonomy problem because yes, there are different problems off road, but they like they're way more controlled than what's going on on road. Okay. But then you get into the physical action like cars on the road, the way was on the road, you know, they're moving, but they're not acting on atoms. Right. So when you think about excavation and you think about like when you get the material and then you move it, then you are basically crushing the material and then you process it, you think about all of the automation through that stack. It's fantastic. And it's like, it's hard, right? Like I, as somebody asked me, like we have a bunch of roboticists that make some of our food machines and somebody came like, hey, like is AI going to help us design food machines? We're like, dude, let me show you, like this thing has like an insane number of parts and let me show you just the design of a single part. >> Yeah. >> Like, like, the AI can't even do frick a math, you know what I mean? It's like, we're not there yet. Now, could it get there? Yeah. But then you're really an AGI. If you look at how much harder it is, the physical world, how much harder it is, AI in the physical world versus in the digital world, and I'm not demeaning it anyway, I'm just saying it's like, maybe it's just called a different problem set. >> Yeah, we're just far away from one guy. >> We're just way less training to do that. >> Yeah, it's like one shotting on software, one shotting on designing a machine or a robot, we're just not there yet. >> Yeah. >> But that makes it more fun. That's the point is like, do the hard things. If you are in the atoms world, you have decided I like hard things, I like pain more than anybody else. >> Yeah. >> This is kind of what you got to be about. >> Chewing glass. I love it. So I can see how AVs at atoms fit into mining, what other and just heavy industry broadly, what other kind of categories of AVs are exciting. How do you see this space evolving? >> Yeah, look, anything, I mean, the mission is wheelbase for robots. So then you're just like, okay, what moves? >> Yeah. >> Right, and then you go, okay, where you have to find the businesses that make sense, of course. So we're like, okay, mining is a no brainer. >> And how do you think about sizing for wheelbase for robots that can scale up and down? >> Yeah, I like, I tell my team like, dude, there's like a ton of silver metals here. And there's actually a few other gold metals just in the category. So let's just go with delivery robots, like food delivery, which of course is near and dear to my heart. >> You make a lot of it. >> Your $15 bowl became $30. >> Yeah. Okay? >> And this is like, I would put it up there as like one of the number one annoyances of the average American regardless of where they are in society. >> Oh, sure. Food inflation. >> Food is just the cost of food delivery. Everybody wants food, fast, cheap, hot, et cetera. And there's all this data that just came out this week that just shows like it doesn't matter even how much money you're making. You're spending a lot on this category. >> Isn't it interesting, right? Remember I talked about the plumbers. But like you could take whole categories, become the long pull in the tent. Food. Boring to a lot of people boring is that for me, interesting, let's go. Let's go. Look, I did taxis. When they're like, people looking at me funny. >> It was a weird idea. >> Okay, they're looking at me super funny. So Jason Calcanus, the most famous investor in Uber of all time. >> More famous than you in some way. >> Whenever I meet with them, like, dude, I'm so honored to be meeting one of our real investors. But there was like an angel group that I pitched. They're like 30, 40 people in the room. I think it was like three or four that invested. >> Crazy. >> Okay, the 10 grand check became like a 100 million bucks. It was crazy. But the boring places are the places. You know? >> Less competitive. >> But also just weird and hard. >> Yeah, that's a reason why it's that way. >> The graveyard is stacked of tech guys that thought they could crack food, which is again like- >> Yeah, go back to where you can go. You can go compete in this category, but you have to actually be insane and you have to have- >> Yeah. >> And you have to attack it all at all. >> Yeah, and so my head of the robotics division, we're like, yeah, let's do this. The band back together, let's go. This is Eric Myhofer. And he's like, okay, we can make a food row with them. I got one, there's one requirement. I got one, what Hay and Chad are one string attached. He's like, what, I'm like, you're going to have to build a restaurant that the robot serves. So my robot assist team in Pittsburgh made a restaurant that is the restaurant that our first robot went into. Because we had to make sure that we understood how a restaurant worked. We had to make sure that this wasn't just a machine that made food, but a machine that makes food in the ecosystem of machines called a restaurant. And people don't understand, but a restaurant is a manufacturing facility. In fact, if you look at labor statistics, et cetera, restaurants fits under manufacturing. For obvious reasons. It just hasn't changed in 50 years. >> Yeah, anyways, back to- >> Sorry, I'm all over the place. >> No, I love it. I love it. >> Yeah. >> Firing on all cylinders. So again, do you want to move people with AVs? Do you care more about commercial? >> Look, the industrial thing is sort of like, probably our main jam, but the bottom line is once you crack, once you crack movement in the physical world, there's lots of people who want access to that. And in fact, you need partners because you're going to be putting billions of dollars to work to make it happen. So there's going to be lots of partners across different categories that are going to probably want some of that. And I have no issues with that. We're not like, you know, this is ours and this thing, it's more like, hey, there may be ways to work with us. We're happy to do it. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> We've got to pick our spots, but you've got to be the idea. >> What about manufacturing broadly? You're doing it in food? Are there other categories that are interesting? Are you happy to be kind of the transport rails? Like I think once you are in physical AI, you should basically understand that manufacturing is part of your tech stack. Right. It just is. And by the way, energy is part of your tech stack. Land development, real estate is part of your tech stack. That's just what it's going to be. People don't think about it like that, but it's true. Of course, they're, you know, Tesla just crushes. If you look at this list of things, you're just like, they got it all. So good. But there's just so much to do. >> Yeah. >> You know what I mean? Is that what is it? >> We can see all the things Tesla's doing. It's cool. I'm like, I can still help you mine. I can still get some food to some peeps. So you get the idea. >> Is that really when you're pitching investors around atoms in this new vision? Is it basically like, there's a lot of jobs to do in the world. We're going to do it with physical AI. And you're basically betting on applying my general ethos to all these categories over time. >> Now you got to be able to pick your spots. If you are too broad, pure like dude, what's wrong with you? Now, you know, I think every entrepreneur always gets that. Like, you know, I joke around like in the 90s, I can do it. I'm an old guy. What are you going to do? In the 90s, it's like, dude, Microsoft's going to kill you. Like, why do you think? Then in the 2000s, it was like, why isn't Google going to do this? In the 2010s, it's like, dude, that looks like Uber's thing. And now it's like, if you're talking about physical AI, it's like, that's Tesla. They are the incumbent they are and not just the incumbent, they're also just doing great awesome stuff. But find your spot. Know yourself. Know what you're good at. Be self-aware and find the thing that is your business soulmate for sure. But also know that you're in an ecosystem and you need to find your spot. What was your experience like in.com and the financial crisis broadly in 2008? Okay. So basically, I sold my peer-to-peer CDN, Akamai meets BitTorrent in 2007 to Akamai. So I was earning out when that happened and I just started, I think I didn't last very long in that earn out. So I was the CXO. I was like an advisor and a CXO. Little known fact, I was blogging. I was like a tech influencer blogger. There is a blog still out there called swooshing. Okay. Crazy, amazing, ridiculous content. Okay. I was in the click economy, guys. I was in it. Okay. So I was an advisor in CXO for like five different companies at a time and so I'd help them on their deals or I would be their CTO or I would help them sell or product or whatever, but I could always just put the phone down and forget. So somewhat insulated from the mortgage crash? Yeah. I mean, my thing was I was trying to figure out. I was getting a bunch of my friends together and saying, okay, do you have a mortgage with Bank of America? I do too. Let's pool our thing. I'm going to go to Bank of America and say, I will buy these mortgages off for 40 cents on the dollar. Yeah. Because you're selling them on the market for 10 cents. Interesting. It could be fun and then they're like, they're not out of here. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, we're not ahead of them. That's wild. What about comm? You're talking about the 90s? Yeah, the 90s. Like late 90s, at the point you're starting your career, right? It's an interesting place to start a career in tech. A lot of people watched that and said that. So look, we did peer-to-peer file sharing at a company called Scour. Yeah. Some people with the naps are somewhat to like. You know all the ones that came after BitTorrent all the way to like what was the one that Zendstrom did Kazah or some of these others right we were the OG file sharing. Yeah, okay Michael Ovitz was on the board run Berkel was on the board L.A. Okay doing a tech doing tech in L.A. Was like being a finance guy in Fresno They're like don't know what the hell is going on. They're like who are you? And You're a little bit sheltered from it in L.A. Every time you went to the the Silicon Silicon Valley It was like wild and crazy and like every bar was like packed Like after hours like happy hour thing like things were bubbling and the crazy part is not just what happened During the bit of a run-up. It was post. Yeah I was raising money on this peer-to-peer CDN that I didn't have I didn't pay myself a salary for for four years I was raising money in Late 2001 for a networking software company Are you freaking kidding me and so I remember going to one of these Going to a bar to meet up with a VC and this is like 2002 And it's empty like this thing that would be go mega packed Just two years earlier. I mean we're talking dust bowl tumbleweeds empty and this VC I wish I remember who it was because it'd be amazing. I was like Yeah, Travis dude. I think I think it's all done Like I'm like what do you mean? He's like all the software that could be invented has been invented wow We're done and he met it It's been real dude. Let's have a whiskey. Let's go We're done That's incredible. How have you have you processed the last two years when People are able to raise an amount of money that took you four different rooms in this you know entire You know process and they can just raise it literally without it without a deck often They can just pull pull it together look it's all good like I don't I just have because you know when you build a company The way I built it which is like my current one Where you're literally under the radar. It means that you are powered by you have an internal fulfillment You're not like Carrying what others think you you get internally fulfilled with building yeah, and I don't look at somebody go oh dude That's I had it so much harder uphill both ways to school whatever. Yeah, you know, I don't think like that It's it's it's more about the excellence of the process. Yeah, so I Like well, how do you raise money? And they're like oh, yeah, I just throw a deck to the guy. I'm like okay Well, that's not a thing. Yeah, what is a thing is going all the way until it hurts If you're doing something and it's easy It's not valuable and I'll explain like it. Let's just think of like a like a marathoner. Yeah world-class marathoner On mile 21 Is that dude smiling? No, he's not smiling by the way if he is smiling you know, it's about to happen He's about to get his ass whoop Okay, because why because somebody else who's down for the pain will go harder and further and pass him And so if you're getting money easy, I'm like why didn't you go harder? You could have done it better and more Now you don't do things hard just cause maybe he's like just doesn't matter to like I gotta go do something else That's hard But the key is like if money matters which I think we would say it does especially In certain categories you need to be the best in the world at it And it's not enough to say it was easy if anybody comes to me and says a strategic thing was easy I'm like you messed up You could have been way better and gone way further More competitive advantage more differentiation get it together Give me the idea like Tony Robbins right? I love it. I love it. No, I think people I think people need to hear this They do they do and and yeah The challenge is like when when if raising money is super easy and then you actually start building and you're like Well actually money doesn't money makes this possible, but it doesn't make the work easy Yeah, and it is funny that some of the greatest fundraisers the critique is always like oh well they are raising too much money You look at Elon Sam all these crazy deals and people are like well like okay, well, it's good. I say you're good But like are you too good and it's okay. Here's the thing You know back in the day 2010's reference like There was a problem with getting massive money Yeah, there was a problem with that yeah because It was easy money and It was too loose. Yeah And so people would get loose with the culture of the Investor that they were getting the money from And so you had to be careful so if somebody got massive money. I'd be like dude you got a You got a grind it was it was maybe a little too easy. Yeah And you still still to this day so so There's nothing wrong with money as a as a sort of a competitive advantage or a strategic weapon. It's okay like that's part of business. It's necessary But treat it with respect last question about Texas for the Californians They're thinking about making a trip out there Austin Dallas Houston. What do you recommend? Well look? I'm Austin now I own a place in Austin Vona for five years. I'm a avid I would say almost professional water skier Slalom scheme. Oh, I'll send a video Put it up. Yeah, it's sick. Don't even have a start So I've owned a place there for five years Right on the lake Lake Austin. Yeah 20 minutes from the city. There you go. Lake life. Hell yeah. Go for it I get a little bit FOMO on like these people going to Florida. I'm like dude Floor to action like come on I know it's been it's been a it's been a blood bath for Like just every every griffin house going more like yeah like every weekend this year I've had this year's in Texas. Yeah You ever take calls while your water skiing like air pod dude. I should Be good. I love it. Don't get me excited I like to seronic which does the boats the autonomous. Yeah. Yeah, and I'm like build me a water skiing Boat. Oh, okay. I just want a water ski and like I'm like I'm like Dude pretty viral. Uh who should who should come you're you're poking your head up Who should come work for you? Yeah, 60 seconds. Who do you want? Not not any individual like one individual person I have a message for this one guy who didn't take my offer Um Look, I think the thing is is like We're just getting the best and this is so cliche and like Whatever banal but um You look we are in the physical AI space. So you it's a mix of Sort of let's call it Sensors compute The software that sits on top of those things um I mean it's just it's just gonna be great engineers and then you go through what I would call the physical AI stack and you would You know, but um this is a long project that someone for who it's a career. It's like Infrastructure software guys because you got to have epic AI on the back end and the way to use that Sort of has to be epic. You have to have physical AI model people who are sort of translating foundational models into the physical world and and and There's some core research and some just like I know All the white papers and we're just gonna we're we're building and going end to end or some hybrid version of that um You have just normal software because you've got applications that sit on top that then of course customers see in some fashion or another Actuation and manipulation on a mechanical and sort of robotic Side of things and mechanical engineers that build machines um wow I you know, and then of course remember I've got construction real estate Like I can go on. It's lots of cool stuff. Go to the website. There's lots of stuff And by the way, Adam's dot coast slash vision. I just threw down. Oh, yeah, I know read it Check it out. Well, thank you. It's amazing Do you know this? Yeah, this is awesome. Yeah