David Senra: I want to start with Atoms.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: 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.

Travis Kalanick: 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, so what is it, a humanoid?" And no, it's not.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

David Senra: What does that mean?

Travis Kalanick: 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.

David Senra: So, how do you broaden and expand the management capacity you have?

Travis Kalanick: 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 had this equation, which is: The derivative of problem-solving DT must always be greater than or equal to the derivative of problem creation DT.

Travis Kalanick: And if that's ever not true, you have a real problem. I call that the meta problem. So, what's happening 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?

Travis Kalanick: 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?

Travis Kalanick: 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 in a real heavy way, and maybe even longer.

Travis Kalanick: And so, you have to be good at predicting what the nature of that problem is, 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?

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

Travis Kalanick: I mean, China was amazing but very difficult, and, in some ways, impossible to predict. "Let's go to China. Sounds like fun." It was a super awesome adventure, because what happened was I was like, "Sounds cool." And I got... It was probably 2013 or early '13. Uber started in 2010, so it was still an early crew.

Travis Kalanick: And I got a crew of folks, like super OG guys, and we stayed in an apartment in China for a week, or a week and a half, two weeks, something like that, and met with everybody we could. It's actually when I first met Wang Xing at Meituan, actually.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: And he told me I was crazy. "Don't do it. It's the worst idea ever."

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

Travis Kalanick: Like, that's the best thing ever. Okay? So, I mean, there are many threads here. We're already poking through a bunch of them.

David Senra: We're going to go everywhere, man. Let's go.

Travis Kalanick: Okay, so in engineering, we call this BFS, breadth-first search, so I'm not able to go deep. 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.

Travis Kalanick: 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, the more excited I get.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: 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 are other ones that people think are impossible, that are super difficult, but possible.

David Senra: 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."

Travis Kalanick: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: 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 went ultra-stealth. But the real question is, coming out of Uber: What was the next thing, and why? And it is Atoms.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

David Senra: Have you always been like that? Or was it the experience of Uber that crystallized how important that was? When did this desire...

Travis Kalanick: 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 that right?" And I'm like, "Watch this." I've always had that. Even when I was a kid. I'd always have a sparkle in my eye to do something that somebody was like, "Shit." That kind of thing.

David Senra: Did you know when you started it, like how... There's no way you could've known how difficult it was, right? Did you like, "This is a hairy problem. I'm going to be fighting with every single regulator"?

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

David Senra: Okay. And you saw that from the first spot?

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

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

David Senra: I'm very curious, what you said was very interesting.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: You're creating all these problems. Some of the problems you're creating are not coming ashore, I think is the word you used for another...

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

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

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

Travis Kalanick: 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 trademarked that, if there's such a thing. Like, we made that a thing where cities, countries didn't matter.

Travis Kalanick: We created a system that was inevitable, but China was different. Because of how that country works. Everything is different, and that means you have to start from scratch, right? It's like as something as simple as the phones, or let's say maps, GPS.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: There's a different GPS system in China than there is here. What does that mean? Well, it's 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.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: So, I understand. And that's like one of 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 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.

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

David Senra: Have any succeeded?

Travis Kalanick: At the top, like Apple.

David Senra: Okay.

Travis Kalanick: I'd say the two that you would come up with in our area, in our neck of the woods, there are others, but 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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David Senra: So, you start getting into this war with DiDi. Was there anybody else besides? Were there multiple competitors?

Travis Kalanick: We eventually rolled out. So, Uber Black was one thing, much smaller than like a DiDi thing. There was another company called Kuaidi.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: 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 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 ridesharing in China." Nobody had done that.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: So, it sort of will fill in the gaps, but it's not their main jam. But we went to full rideshare, which is like peer-to-peer ridesharing, where anybody driving a car could offer a ride to a citizen in the city.

David Senra: Which, before you, did not exist at all in China?

Travis Kalanick: Certainly not coordinated by an app.

David Senra: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: This is now a ridesharing... What is, at the time, called peer-to-peer ridesharing. 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.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

Travis Kalanick: And these guys were so good at copying, it was kind of almost an art form. To be able to copy as quickly and fiercely as they did was like a warrior mentality in its own right. But I like to say the place to be is like "Braveheart," which is like the warrior poet. These guys were just pure warriors.

David Senra: Mm.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

David Senra: Mm.

Travis Kalanick: Right? But while they were getting ready copying it, 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.

David Senra: Uber did?

Travis Kalanick: 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 would basically, at some point, probably our top 10 cities were all Chinese cities.

David Senra: That's wild.

Travis Kalanick: In rides.

David Senra: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: 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?

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah, 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.

David Senra: You mean you were burning a ton of money?

Travis Kalanick: We were burning a lot of money.

David Senra: Okay.

Travis Kalanick: 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 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."

Travis Kalanick: 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.

David Senra: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Right? Now, 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.

David Senra: Yeah.

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

David Senra: And that's what the 7% is for.

Travis Kalanick: That's what the 7% was for.

David Senra: Got it.

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

Travis Kalanick: And at some point, I think there were like, I think this is '15, I believe, 2015, July, I think... There were vehicles being lit on fire in Paris, you know? But it was like every major city, they just tried to shut the shit down.

David Senra: What are they protesting?

Travis Kalanick: Progress.

Travis Kalanick: 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? Okay. Pictures of this chaos across all these cities, and he's like, "This is a problem. This is not something we're okay with."

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

Travis Kalanick: And the only way to get progress in a democracy is for that politician who seeks to be popular when he's under threat. When there is a threat of disruption or instability, it's 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."

Travis Kalanick: He goes, "What do you mean?" And I'm like, "Well, the only time I'm able to get progress in China is when stability is in harmony with progress." Or let's say progress, those two must be harmonized. You will only get progress when it is in harmony with stability.

David Senra: Mm.

Travis Kalanick: And I said it in that way, those three words, and that was very Chinese.

David Senra: Mm.

Travis Kalanick: You know? And totally different. 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."

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

Travis Kalanick: They never did.

David Senra: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: But, they, at some point, felt like we may win. And instead of really seeing super problems at the... 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, what I'd 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.

David Senra: Mm.

Travis Kalanick: When I gain market share, there's a 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, and how to get that efficiency edge, that network effect, efficiency edge, so that I subsidize less than them?

Travis Kalanick: This is why Lyft is smaller than Uber, because we were better at this part of this thing, and people don't really know that's what it takes. But how do you get an 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.

Travis Kalanick: If it's easier to call a vehicle and 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. If the cars are moving to where the demand is, because the driver app has good sort of ways to point drivers to the right place, that means you have shorter pickup times. Efficiency edge.

Travis Kalanick: 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 than if he's generally trying to optimize for dollars per hour, then the whole thing just starts working better. That's the network effect.

Travis Kalanick: 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 theirs, 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 that the competitor still has to subsidize.

David Senra: You'd make money, a profit at a place where they would make a loss and... The robber barons all understood this...

Travis Kalanick: Yes. This is like, you can go...

David Senra: Rockefeller, Carnegie, all of them did.

Travis Kalanick: Absolutely.

Travis Kalanick: 100%.

David Senra: Yeah. When you're talking, I'm like, "Shit, this is Rockefeller."

Travis Kalanick: Totally. So, I read, I think it was a Chernow biography.

David Senra: Of "Titan?"

Travis Kalanick: Yes.

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

Travis Kalanick: Yeah?

David Senra: And what it is, is this book from 1970, by David Freeman Hawke, it's called "John D.: Founding Father of the Rockefellers."

Travis Kalanick: Mm.

David Senra: "Titan" is 800 pages, and you get a lot about his family history. This is like 250 pages of how he built Standard Oil, and it's this shit.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

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

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: My question to you now is, I spend thousands of dollars a month on Uber. And I only use Uber Black SUV.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: It's insane. In a mature market in the United States, in these big cities that I'm using Uber, how would the network effects of Uber be reversed?

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Okay, so there are 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?

David Senra: Mm.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: Okay? But ultimately, as 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.

David Senra: And it hurts them more.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

David Senra: Because you'll run out of money.

Travis Kalanick: There's 20 billion dollars a year.

David Senra: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Nobody's going to fund that.

David Senra: Okay.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: And so, then, 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.

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

Travis Kalanick: Well, there are ways to reverse it.

David Senra: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: 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 1,000 dollars if you join Uber, and you do 100 trips in that first week.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: 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 remembering because it's been 10 years since I did any of this, but I'm trying to remember all the ways where it's asymmetric one way versus the other way, and I'm... Yeah.

David Senra: I think you hit on... It's this paying attention to every single little detail.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: So, when you were speaking about even the signup flow and how fast the ride comes, and how easy it is to put in your credit card information, and everything else.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: I'm sitting here thinking it's 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."

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: "Try 48." They try 48. This is in f****in' "Titan."

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: They try 48. It leaks.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: What about 49?

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: 49 doesn't leak.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: And he says, "The first year, that only saved us 2,500 dollars a year, because of that one drop, but we were tiny."

Travis Kalanick: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yep.

David Senra: "Now it's hundreds of thousands of dollars."

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: 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.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: 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... We had antitrust attorneys at Uber, and they're making it very clear that there are certain things you can do and certain things you can't. They're training me and educating me on antitrust law.

David Senra: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Now, at first, when you hear that, and you're just a startup kid, literally, you're just like, "Antitrust law? That's like... I can't wait to have that problem." You know? But it ends up being, obviously, very important. But Rockefeller didn't have that.

David Senra: No.

David Senra: The laws were passed because of him.

Travis Kalanick: 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"

David Senra: I found one of my all-time favorite quotes when I was reading the book "Zero to One." The quote says, "The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places. And they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas." That is exactly what AppLovin has done with their advertising platform. AppLovin connects you with over a billion potential new customers inside mobile games. AppLovin allows you to capture undivided attention.

David Senra: AppLovin ads are full-screen video ads that are watched for an average of 35 seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water, and you can launch on AppLovin in minutes. You set the goal, and AppLovin achieves it. There's no complex setup, no expertise needed, and AppLovin scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers.

David Senra: Other businesses have seen immediate results, have scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day, and increased their revenue by millions. So you want to get started quickly, before all of your competitors are on AppLovin, and you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com.

Travis Kalanick: I think the other thing about monopolies, too, is there are different ways, they're 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.

David Senra: That's interesting. Say more about this.

Travis Kalanick: 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."

David Senra: Very Bezos.

Travis Kalanick: That's where we ended up. So, you can be highly competitive. And look, 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.

David Senra: You wanted to win because you built the best service.

Travis Kalanick: That's right.

David Senra: I'm reading this biography right now. It was published in 1975. It's on the founder of Honda, who's competing in Japan. He founded Honda in 1948. Japan is in ruins.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: And the technology in Japan is really low at the time, and so all these people who are building motorcycles and cars, they're like, "Let's get together and petition the government to not allow imports."

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: And he was the only one who voted against it. He goes, "No, no." He goes, "The way to win is to build the superior technology."

Travis Kalanick: Oh, yeah.

David Senra: "Because if we have the best product, that product will go... It won't just be profitable in Japan; it'll spread throughout the entire world."

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: Very much like, what you're saying here, is like, "No, I don't want protectionism."

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: "I want to win because I built the best product. The customers are choosing me."

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

David Senra: Can you explain what type...

Travis Kalanick: A government-condoned monopoly, or a government-condoned cartel called the taxi.

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

Travis Kalanick: Let's start with what is a taxi? Okay, what is a taxi? We'll do New York because it's the best way to tell it. In the early 1900s, there were people who were picking up other citizens who needed a ride across town and charging them for it.

Travis Kalanick: And eventually, the city decided, "Hey, look, we want to have this to be licensed and controlled in some way, or 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 you weren't a felon and different things like this, to 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.

Travis Kalanick: 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, 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.

Travis Kalanick: But no more licenses. And of course, that was great for the people who had them, because as the city was growing, there was 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 the city council, and they lobby again.

Travis Kalanick: 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 a medallion. Now, 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.

Travis Kalanick: And then they went to the 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 were two 12-hour shifts. Each of those drivers was paying 40,000 dollars a year to rent a car for half time.

David Senra: Insane.

Travis Kalanick: Which means, the guy who had the license, whose grandpa got it for free, okay? All right? The guy who has the license, whose grandpa got it for free, is getting 80,000 dollars a year renting a car to a taxi driver, and that taxi driver, who's paying 40,000 dollars a year for 12 hours a day, he's renting a car for 40,000 dollars a year. For that privilege, he gets to be impoverished.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

David Senra: And it had to be jarring for you to walk into a system where you're just describing corruption.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: That does not serve...

Travis Kalanick: Legalized corruption.

David Senra: Legalized corruption.

Travis Kalanick: So remember, it is... So, what is a taxi system? It is a government-condoned cartel that outlaws competition.

David Senra: But it had to be jarring for you because then, you come in with a better product at a cheaper price that customers love. I've never taken a... Since I had Uber.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: You caught me in 2010, or whenever you opened up in New York.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

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

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

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

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: It's just like I'm choosing to do that.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: And then the governments are like, "No, no, this legalized corruption is good. You, Travis, and Uber, get the hell out of here."

Travis Kalanick: 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.

David Senra: We were talking, before we started recording, about capitalism.

Travis Kalanick: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And you had some interesting thoughts and ways to describe it. I would also say, like, this show's a love letter to capitalism. It's very pro-entrepreneurship. I'm the son of a Cuban immigrant. I grew up meeting people who came over here on rafts. From the time I was nine years old, I knew it was...

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Right.

David Senra: I'm obviously born into a very special place if these people risked their lives to get here.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: 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...

Travis Kalanick: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: I like the Hondas of the world, where it's like, no, I want to win because I'm the best, not because I gave you a bunch of money and you shut down my competitors.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Right.

David Senra: That shit should be called out.

Travis Kalanick: So, it's super interesting because you go, okay, well, in this case, Uber was the symbol of hyper-capitalism in many ways. It was like embracing all of the values and principles of capitalism. But it started with the most important, which is that an individual has a right to choose between different suppliers of a good or service.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: It's like a pro-competition thing. The consumer has a right to choose between different offerings. The other side of that is that an individual can start a business to provide that service or offering.

Travis Kalanick: So you go, okay, so capitalism, at its foundation, is that somebody can start a legal business, like, make a product or a service, and offer it to people, and the people have the right to choose which one they use. That's capitalism. So the question is, what's anti-capitalism?

Travis Kalanick: 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 the right 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 when it is not. It's pretty obvious, anybody watching any part of this conversation on taxis, it's super clear that taxis are definitely not capitalism.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: 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 a taxi system.

David Senra: I didn't know this.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah. 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 either fixed or shrinking right 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 it. And why? Because of the taxi owners, who want their medallion prices to go back up.

David Senra: This is madness. Have you ever read "Atlas Shrugged?"

Travis Kalanick: Of course, yeah. I mean, a lot of people are like, "What's happening now feels like the scenes from that book, for sure."

David Senra: It was recommended to me a million times.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: 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, all right, the 12th f****** person that recommended it, I finally read it, and then I went and looked it up.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: I was like, wait, this was written from, like, 1946 to 1956, I think, the 10-year period she was writing. I was like, this sounds that the people in this book...

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: It's exactly the same kind of person today.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I agree with that. I think there's a lot of...

David Senra: Yeah, because the whole book is like, we have these prime movers, and then we have these people who are just trying to restrain. They're competitive, and they're... I love what you said. Like, what are they protesting?

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: Progress.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: But what happens when the people building the progress then go on strike? That's a very fascinating theme throughout the book.

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

David Senra: In your career, did you only run into this government corruption at Uber? Have you run into any... I know you started City Storage Systems.

Travis Kalanick: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: CloudKitchens was in City Storage Systems.

Travis Kalanick: Right.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: Now, you renamed it ATOMS. Have you run into... Because your whole thing, what I love about you, is just, like, the physical world.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: I think you said you consider it a calling to digitize...

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: The physical world.

David Senra: I love that you use the word calling, though. I think that's really important.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: Have you run into other forms of...

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

David Senra: But why do they still have power?

Travis Kalanick: 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.

David Senra: How does the China DiDi-Uber story end? Did the government put its hand on the scale and favor DiDi over Uber?

Travis Kalanick: So, they ultimately did. What happened was that 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 those regions and drain my resources.

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

Travis Kalanick: Yeah, I mean, you're like, "Damn." "That's real." You're like...

David Senra: But are you not sleeping? Are you like...

Travis Kalanick: 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. 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 very game-theory-oriented in the ways that I'm describing, which means it was always on, and crazy, weird things happen in cars at night.

Travis Kalanick: So, the first time I got woken up in the middle of the night was because there was a drive-by shooting from an Uber. You know what I mean?

David Senra: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Like, that's not good.

David Senra: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: The thing is that what happens in a city happens in an Uber. And so...

David Senra: So, you're exposed to all the vagaries of human behavior.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah. The roads are the cardiovascular system for the city. There's nothing that happens in a city that roads don't touch. You know, people are people. They do things they shouldn't do. 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.

David Senra: But go back to the stress. Like, you wanted the stress, right?

Travis Kalanick: It was fun.

David Senra: Okay. So, Herb Kelleher, do you know who that is? Founder of Southwest Airlines.

Travis Kalanick: That's Southwest.

Travis Kalanick: Yes.

David Senra: The most successful airline in history. Forty straight years was profitable.

Travis Kalanick: For sure.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: And he was a gangster, right?

Travis Kalanick: Mm.

David Senra: Would drink a fifth of bourbon every day. Smoke cigarettes on the planes.

Travis Kalanick: Okay.

Travis Kalanick: Yikes.

David Senra: And he was an unfiltered guy.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: I would love if he was still alive, he'd be one of my top guests I'd want to talk to, and I love...

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: He was doing an interview one time.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: 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."

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: I get that same vibe from you.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: The lifestyle of an entrepreneur, I believe, at its core... There are a couple of other things, but this is one prism, 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, yeah, 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.

Travis Kalanick: Then you are taking on a life of adversity and overcoming it all the time. And once you are seeing adversity all the time and overcoming it, it just becomes normal. The downside of it is that you can get used to adversity. It just becomes very normal.

David Senra: Why is that a downside?

Travis Kalanick: Because you almost start accepting it. Like, something bad happens, and you don't even get mad. And you're like, "Oh, that's interesting."

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

Travis Kalanick: There are benefits.

David Senra: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: 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 that 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.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah? Wrong things... What is adversity? What is adversity? Usually, adversity is when 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.

David Senra: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: You know? It's like, terrible.

David Senra: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Or it could be a lot of things. Could be that somebody stole his crops, could be pests, could be... It could be anything. So...

David Senra: Are you just getting numb to it? Is that what you're saying? Like, was there a part to...

Travis Kalanick: I'm just saying, once you fully embody the lifestyle of adversity and overcoming it, you have to be careful of the ease with 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.

David Senra: Have you reached to that point in your career before?

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

David Senra: Are you worried about that?

Travis Kalanick: Of course. So, I remember the things that are important, and that's where I channel fierceness through, what is right and what is wrong.

David Senra: You're almost telling me you've been inoculated from pain.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: My point is...

Travis Kalanick: 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.

David Senra: Yeah. But at least on the outside, you still have this crazy...

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: I told you, you're the most intense person I've ever met, and I've met almost all the top founders in the world.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: But imagine fierceness with calm on the inside.

David Senra: That's what you want or that's what you're wanting?

Travis Kalanick: That's what I got.

David Senra: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: That's where I'm at. Yeah.

David Senra: You weren't calm on the inside when you were building Uber, that's what you're saying?

Travis Kalanick: I'm just saying as one entrepreneurs longer and longer, and does it properly, you get to that place.

David Senra: I've never heard it used as a verb.

Travis Kalanick: You just get to that place.

David Senra: "As one entrepreneurs for longer and longer..." I'm using that line, man.

Travis Kalanick: You just get to that place.

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

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: He'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, the bank account will be fine.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah, yeah.

David Senra: But my favorite maxim from all of history of entrepreneurship is that "Excellence is the capacity to take pain."

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Mm.

David Senra: Which is exactly what you said.

Travis Kalanick: Oh, this is 100... Oh, I love that one.

David Senra: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: That is 100% true. So, once you say entrepreneurship is the lifestyle of entrepreneuring. The lifestyle of entrepreneuring is this sort of pride, and I can take more pain than the other guy. You go, "Why?" Well, the best example is a world-class marathoner on mile 21.

Travis Kalanick: Have you ever seen a marathon? Have you ever seen a marathoner on mile 21? Probably on TV. Is that dude smiling?

David Senra: Mm-mm.

Travis Kalanick: F*** 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? It's 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 to the extent of what is a human capable of the full potential, because if you don't, somebody else does.

David Senra: Yeah.

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

David Senra: 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.

Travis Kalanick: If you're doing something that's easy, it may be valuable, but you're about to get your a** whooped. Or it may not be valuable. It just depends. So, 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 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...

Travis Kalanick: 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 have 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 them down."

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: And I'm like, "Okay, but there are lots of people doing that. He's got to be better than those other guys if he wants to be about progress, so now he's really f****** 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."

David Senra: How long did you take from when you left Uber, which obviously had to be f****** devastating, heartbreaking, to jumping into the next thing?

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: Did you sit on the beach for a little bit? Like, what did you actually do?

Travis Kalanick: No, so it was six, seven months, something like this, and most of it was fending off lawfare.

David Senra: So wait, the lawfare, was it criminal, or were they trying to...

Travis Kalanick: It was civil and criminal.

David Senra: Okay.

Travis Kalanick: For sure, yeah.

David Senra: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: So, you're fighting off that for what...

Travis Kalanick: Yeah, it's like a corporate cancel culture, lawfare, like, all the things. On the corporate side of all of those things, remember I said, remember earlier we talked about how business became politics.

David Senra: We were talking about this off camera. Can you talk about this now?

Travis Kalanick: Yeah. So there was a...

David Senra: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: You know, in the 2010s, there was something which 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 going to see a lot of happy-go-lucky stuff about your favorite politician? Like, of course not.

Travis Kalanick: We know that, because politicians, basically, just by 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 it's just a dog-eat-dog mudslinging thing, and the headlines are often not true, which I think we know in politics.

Travis Kalanick: What we didn't know in the 2010s, 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.

David Senra: And you were Exhibit A for this.

Travis Kalanick: For sure. I would say so.

David Senra: Yeah. No, I would say so, too.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

David Senra: Well, I can speak to this.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: And I know that before we started recording, and I've been chasing you for a while.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: That was a dinner, and I saw you at Michael Dell's house, and everything else, which was funny, by the way, when you walked up to us, and I was like, "Do you remember me?"

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: And you're like, "Yeah." And I go, "It's time to do the f****** show." And you go, "It's time to do the f****** show." I love that. But what I would say is, just like in terms of founders that actually know their shit, your reputation is perfect.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Mm.

David Senra: Sterling. And it's like, if you're a killer entrepreneur, you say great things about Travis.

Travis Kalanick: Mm.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: It's the only shit I've ever heard that comes from investors. This is why, again...

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

David Senra: I'm saying what I hear.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah, it's interesting because where I...

David Senra: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah, a lot of times it's from the gallery. Now, sometimes investors are in that category, but when I go and do pitches and fundraising, I don't feel like...

David Senra: You're Travis Kalanick. Come on, bro.

Travis Kalanick: I'm just saying.

David Senra: You are f****** Trav...

Travis Kalanick: I don't know.

David Senra: Of course, you're basically unlimited.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: I was texting Daniel Ek that I was going to see you, and he wanted... He's like, "You've got to get him talking about fundraising," which we'll get to in a minute.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

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

Travis Kalanick: Mm.

David Senra: And then I went to say another thing, and you cut me off. You put your hand in my face. Which is hilarious. You're like, "Real founders don't listen to VCs."

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: We need to talk about this.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah, yeah, okay.

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

Travis Kalanick: Sure.

Travis Kalanick: Mm.

David Senra: Right? You went through one of the worst of the worst.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: Going back, when you were doing Uber, is it just you raised money from the wrong people? How do you look at it now? And what would you tell a young founder now who has to raise a ton of money?

Travis Kalanick: I got to first shoot the arrow, which you definitely shouldn't raise from Benchmark Capital. Got to get that out there. And then, okay, let's get into the real stuff. Look, I think it's really interesting to start with, where did it get weird? I mean, basically, at the peak... So, 2017 was my problem year, right? I mean, it was always hard, but this is when it got dialed up.

Travis Kalanick: And Benchmark was running a war room. They were an unspoken activist investor who was creating a once-a-week crisis. But without...

David Senra: Against you?

Travis Kalanick: Yeah, against me. Without speaking of it. Again, there are 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 them that.

David Senra: Why didn't you tell them that?

Travis Kalanick: Because we wanted to sort of make sure we'd done the right thinking, got prepared so we could just say, "We're going to do it, and here's how we're going to 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 trying to take me out.

Travis Kalanick: So, instead of dealing with that catastrophism, let's just go do the damn thing. I give you lots of examples, like, I think on the... 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 TPG in.

Travis Kalanick: And then mid-2014, so nine months later... That was three and a half billion. Nine months later, we did a round. Gurley was convinced it was the end of the world, and we got a raise and just took your first term sheet, just f****** 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.

Travis Kalanick: If you just go take the first term sheet, getting the round done will actually take longer, because there are no alternatives. You don't have alternatives, and then it gets weird, and then the VC will just keep pushing, pushing, pushing, getting more and more and 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 in fundraising. Anyways...

David Senra: Can you explain that process though?

Travis Kalanick: We'll get there.

David Senra: Okay.

Travis Kalanick: Okay.

David Senra: Don't let me forget.

Travis Kalanick: I won't. BFS. Okay? We're going to have to sit here for 10 hours to cover everything.

David Senra: That's fine, bro.

Travis Kalanick: But he was convinced, like, "Hey, just take the first deal. Like, just do a six-billion-dollar..." It was like, "I think you could get a six-billion-dollar round valuation done right now. It's nine months after the three-and-a-half. Just go take the first term sheet and make it happen."

Travis Kalanick: Now, if you're a founder hearing that and 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."

Travis Kalanick: 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 talk to him, but I just wouldn't try to engage because it was always like that. So, Emil Michael would handle this part. He would handle a lot of the investor relations, especially as it relates to...

David Senra: Shout out Emil Michael. That dude is loyal as hell to you.

Travis Kalanick: Well, he's just an awesome guy. Not because of loyalty, but because he's just an awesome guy.

David Senra: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: But of course, that too, and he would do it in a genuine, authentic way, like trying to handle the objections or whatever. Anyways, two months later, we got a round done at 17 and a half billion pre.

David Senra: Woah!

Travis Kalanick: So, that's my point. So, when you want to do things right, you've got to do things right, 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 got an IPO." It was never brought up.

Travis Kalanick: 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 running anything. So now, 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.

Travis Kalanick: You're like, you could get into a place where you're running a war room to destroy him, and that's kind of what happened.

David Senra: What's the alternative scenario if you raised just from somebody who wouldn't have done that? Like, I'm just going to make this up, but, like, how Founders Fund says they... No matter what, they'll never remove a founder. They'll not do a war room against them.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

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

David Senra: Elaborate, please. This is important, man.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: No one talks about this shit.

Travis Kalanick: 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 want to make a mark on the world. And the way I think about it is that an operator who's running a company is a... If they're good, they're a grandmaster of "Chess."

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: 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 really knows this thing, and knows many moves ahead, and just sees things other people don't see, and they're in it as well.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

Travis Kalanick: "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 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.

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

Travis Kalanick: Because VCs are glamorized, and they have a seat at the table in some fashion, and they have 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 if an antelope limbs in the Serengeti, the lion will take it down even if it's not hungry. Can't even f****** help it.

Travis Kalanick: It's just what he does. And that's kind of the nature of most VCs. The nature of it is that they will... If you are on the Serengeti and limping, you will be eaten. It's just the nature of it, and the lion doesn't even know why sometimes. They're just like, "This is what I do." Yeah.

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

Travis Kalanick: That would be a high bar.

David Senra: So, achievable, what percentage of the time, then, would you guess?

Travis Kalanick: 10%.

David Senra: Oh, man!

Travis Kalanick: And then, the 1% is helpful. But it's hard. How the f*** are they supposed to be helpful? There are different times to be helpful, though. Helpful is in hard times, when you actually need real help, right?

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

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

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

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

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

Travis Kalanick: 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."

Travis Kalanick: That's in normal times, and I think in super cycles, or whatever we want to call it, you know, kind of what's going on right now, that rigor's not as important. And if you go too far on that rigor, it could be too much.

David Senra: Explain that.

Travis Kalanick: You hear stories of entrepreneurs who 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 it to 45 minutes.

David Senra: Why?

Travis Kalanick: I don't know how to put it. It just looks like too much.

David Senra: Mm.

Travis Kalanick: Like, why are you going so far, dude?

David Senra: You'll talk yourself out of the deal?

Travis Kalanick: Is something wrong?

David Senra: Yeah, you'll talk yourself out of the deal.

Travis Kalanick: 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 projecting many years out, so the more super cycles you're in, the further forward you are, the more into the future you are, and that future can't really be presented as tightly with numbers.

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

Travis Kalanick: So then, it's about the theory of the case. That's probably the way to think about it, is that a mix of the 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 100X situation that's probably going to occur.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

David Senra: What's the common, in your approach in a normal cycle, and the super cycle as you just described here?

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Normal cycle is two hours QED.

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

Travis Kalanick: Well, I still do some version of... Yeah, my style is QED.

David Senra: And then the multiple bids thing is mandatory, correct?

Travis Kalanick: Yeah, so, well, I would call it... So, QED is the storytelling, and then there's sort of like an auction process that you hone when you're doing it right now. This has to be measured against how many resources you have to do QED and how many deal resources you have to manage a full auction.

David Senra: Explain that part to me.

Travis Kalanick: Like, if I have five rooms going at the same time, I have to have... That's a thing that you... Five rooms simultaneously for an entire week.

David Senra: Where'd you even get that idea?

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

David Senra: What was the quality of the business when you were running this five-room process?

Travis Kalanick: That's peak Uber.

David Senra: Peak.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: So, it's like you can put money to this or nothing's even close.

David Senra: So, if you don't get this, you...

Travis Kalanick: There are other things.

Travis Kalanick: No, there are other things, but it was peak Uber, but the point was I did it, Q.E.D.

David Senra: Yeah, but...

Travis Kalanick: So, I showed at the atomic level how the whole system works with a very analytical view, but also sort of a bit of performance art because you're storytelling.

David Senra: Okay, explain what's happening in these five rooms then.

Travis Kalanick: Five rooms, twelve hours, one week.

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

Travis Kalanick: No, it's okay. So, I'm in the 250 million dollar checker-over room.

Travis Kalanick: Then there's a 100 million dollar room, and a 50 million dollar room, and a 25 million dollar room, and there'll be a guy in the 25 million dollar room who's like...

Travis Kalanick: Who works for a guy, who works for a guy, who works for me, right?

David Senra: And what are you guys saying in all these rooms?

Travis Kalanick: We're telling the story.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: That story is the core and now you have it being performed in four rooms at a time.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And there's a deadline, the price is going up.

Travis Kalanick: Well, no, it's not prices going up, so that's the misunderstanding.

David Senra: Okay.

Travis Kalanick: The right way to do it is to start with a low price.

David Senra: Explain that.

Travis Kalanick: So, a lot of entrepreneurs, they go and they say, they really have a... Remember, I said attached to a process, not a price.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

Travis Kalanick: 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 come in under it, and now we negotiate, right?

Travis Kalanick: It's a very bad place to be from my perspective.

Travis Kalanick: Where you really want to be is you want to start at a low price and say, "Look, I don't know where the price is going to go, but I know it's at least here."

Travis Kalanick: And if it's low, the VC's like, "Okay."

Travis Kalanick: Now, once they give you that read, once they lean forward like that, you're like, "Okay, we're good."

Travis Kalanick: You have a bidder.

Travis Kalanick: And then you go to the next guy.

Travis Kalanick: It depends on 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 X plus Y here.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: 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 that's happening, it's a winner-takes-all deal.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

Travis Kalanick: And then you sort of do it 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.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

David Senra: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: But most deals that are big deals today are not working that way.

Travis Kalanick: When you're doing multiple rooms at a time in 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, 8 billion? And how much would you put in at 9? And how much would you put in at 10? How much would you put in at 12? How much would you put in at 14? Fill the sheet out."

Travis Kalanick: You decide how much you'd put in at any price that we end up at, and you do that across everybody.

David Senra: Is that what you're doing now?

Travis Kalanick: Hold on.

David Senra: Okay.

Travis Kalanick: Slow down. Slow down.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

Travis Kalanick: And you're like, "Okay, I want to raise a billion."

Travis Kalanick: So, but at the really low price, I have 3 billion of demand.

Travis Kalanick: 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 at right now."

Travis Kalanick: Then you go and tell all the people 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.

Travis Kalanick: You go tell them they're out, and you're like, "But you could fill out another sheet if you want to make some moves."

Travis Kalanick: So, they fill out the sheet.

Travis Kalanick: You do the demand curve again. Everything moves a little bit to the right, 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.

David Senra: So, what are you doing now?

Travis Kalanick: I'm about to close a deal.

David Senra: Do you want to say how you did it though? You don't have to say numbers, but like...

Travis Kalanick: No, I can't do that, no.

David Senra: I'm just...

David Senra: Okay.

Travis Kalanick: I can't do that.

David Senra: Okay, fair enough.

Travis Kalanick: It's fair, right?

David Senra: Come back on in a few months, and we can break it.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah, yeah. It'll be like, yeah, a couple years, I'll go, "Here's how this one went."

Travis Kalanick: You have to put time in between because it's like you just did a deal, you know what I mean?

Travis Kalanick: But I would say I did it slightly different this time around.

David Senra: I'm very curious how you protect yourself from what happened with Benchmark and Uber from ever happening to you again.

David Senra: So, how are you selecting... It's not just obviously the price.

Travis Kalanick: Look, you know...

David Senra: You're not taking the highest bidder. How are you picking your partners?

Travis Kalanick: Yeah, you have to also be careful. There can be...

Travis Kalanick: You got to be really careful not to get into victim mentality, and what I mean by that is, what was my part in that dynamic, right?

David Senra: I was thinking while you were speaking, I was like, if we could ask them what would they want you to do that you weren't doing? Maybe say, "Hey, we're about to f*** an IPO."

Travis Kalanick: Right. For sure, that probably would've saved me.

David Senra: Might be wrong on that one.

Travis Kalanick: But also, I didn't kiss the ring. I think Gurley wanted to feel like homie town with me, and just never was.

David Senra: Homie town to me is different than kissing a ring, though.

Travis Kalanick: But it's similar.

David Senra: Okay.

Travis Kalanick: Okay, let's put it in that category. We don't have to f****** go there.

Travis Kalanick: There's that. That's one thing I could've done differently, for sure. Would've changed everything.

Travis Kalanick: There are people inside of the company who became his partner to do the coup.

Travis Kalanick: Those individuals shouldn't have been there, okay?

David Senra: Did you suspect them at all before?

Travis Kalanick: Yes.

David Senra: Wow.

Travis Kalanick: There was definitely something wrong, is what I would say.

Travis Kalanick: Okay, let's put it that way.

Travis Kalanick: Every decision I made at Uber, defend to this day.

Travis Kalanick: I wasn't 100% correct, but always good intentions, and always coming from the right place.

Travis Kalanick: Generally, just did the right thing, yeah?

Travis Kalanick: One of my lawyers put it this way, he's like, "Did you... If you're..." He sort of made a sporting or like a sports analogy, which is like, "Do you have chalk on your shoe?"

Travis Kalanick: Would be kind of going out of bounds or doing something you shouldn't have done. And I'm like, "Never had chalk on my shoe."

Travis Kalanick: 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.

Travis Kalanick: So, the problem was is I ran too close to the line in too many situations. 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.

Travis Kalanick: And it comes from what I did before Uber, which was I was doing a really hard startup. First four years, no salary, ran out of money several times.

Travis Kalanick: Super grind, lose all friends, everything's... It was just the hardest kind of... I like to say, the non-luckiest entrepreneur journey of all time.

Travis Kalanick: You can't call it unlucky. I eventually sold, but 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.

Travis Kalanick: And that precision and intensity made Uber what it was, but I was running a 70 billion dollar company the way somebody who thought he was going to starve next week would run it.

David Senra: That is fascinating.

Travis Kalanick: Super intense precision, perfection, obsession, because he's not sure that he's going to be able to pay the grocery bill next week.

David Senra: Did you understand that was your approach at the time you had that approach? Or you had to leave and look back and figure it out?

Travis Kalanick: It's probably a little bit of both, yeah.

Travis Kalanick: But I take pride in that.

Travis Kalanick: At the time, it was like a pride in going all the way, but not maybe understanding it the way I understand it today.

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

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: More access to resources, better network.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

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

Travis Kalanick: Mm.

Travis Kalanick: 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 f****** awesome.

Travis Kalanick: I would love that so much. I would kick his ass.

David Senra: Okay.

Travis Kalanick: Now, there'd be certain things he's doing because he's younger, and there's a certain thing to that.

Travis Kalanick: Remember I talked about the passion for right and wrong, right? As an example.

Travis Kalanick: There's something to that. But also what I notice today is most of the things that would take me X amount of time 10 years ago, I can do in X divided by three today.

Travis Kalanick: And not because I got Claude over there, right? That's a whole separate thing. I'm just saying... I don't know. You read my Atoms Vision Note

David Senra: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Okay? That would've taken me...

Travis Kalanick: I don't even know if I could have written that back in the day.

Travis Kalanick: Not that good.

Travis Kalanick: I can just flow and get it done.

Travis Kalanick: The core of that was written in an hour and a half.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: You know, that kind of thing.

David Senra: What is it that caused you to accelerate now, though?

Travis Kalanick: There's different things. So, a lot of early founders have a fear of failure.

Travis Kalanick: But what that does is it creates blockage around progress and making progress because you're just bogged down.

Travis Kalanick: The psyche around fear of failure f**** with your ability to get there.

David Senra: Well, the fear of failure could either stand in your way or it could push you from behind, right? Where like...

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

David Senra: But how many entrepreneurs have you met where they said, "The fear of failure is greater than the love of success"?

Travis Kalanick: I understand that. I'm just saying that it will get you places, but it won't get you all the way.

David Senra: Okay, in that version of Travis where you're running a 70 billion dollar company...

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

David Senra: Towards the end in 2017?

Travis Kalanick: Let's just say we don't have to put a specific date. It's just a spectrum. And just I'm transitioning out of it, because remember where I came from.

David Senra: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: It's just before. So, I'm transitioning out of fear of failure.

David Senra: How old were you when you started Uber?

Travis Kalanick: 33.

David Senra: 33, and you had a couple million bucks, right?

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

David Senra: Okay.

Travis Kalanick: I had nothing.

David Senra: Yeah, so...

Travis Kalanick: It's kind of funny.

David Senra: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: It's kind of funny.

David Senra: Did that work out?

Travis Kalanick: So, I was the first investor in Expensify.

Travis Kalanick: There's a healthcare IT company that still hasn't gone public.

Travis Kalanick: It's really funny.

David Senra: Okay, so not a lot of resources, still young. 33 is still young.

David Senra: So, it makes sense why you felt the way you felt.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

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

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: It was just about what experience I'd just come out of.

David Senra: So, I love where the conversation has gone because what I'm hearing from you is there's just this theme that runs through you as a person and then your approach to company building throughout these companies.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: So, we barely touched on what you're doing now.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah. Yeah.

David Senra: Let's get into Atoms.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: And you said you wanted to start with the mission, where it says, "Physical automation to transform industry and move the world."

Travis Kalanick: 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.

Travis Kalanick: If you wanted to get a car to move down the street, you wouldn't have a humanoid drive it.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: I think humanoids have their place, which is, let's call it, low-scale tasks in environments designed for humans. So, example, you're in a house.

Travis Kalanick: Clothes need to be folded.

Travis Kalanick: But it's not like you're folding clothes all day long.

Travis Kalanick: It's one of the things.

Travis Kalanick: 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 a bunch of things.

Travis Kalanick: But that's a very generalized thing.

Travis Kalanick: It has to be able to do a lot of different things, and it's in a very human environment.

Travis Kalanick: The best form factor is a humanoid for this thing.

Travis Kalanick: But I'll bring up the thousand pancakes an hour. Imagine a humanoid making pancakes. Well, it would make it like a human. It would be like, "Okay." And by the way, if you were just making pancakes at 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.

Travis Kalanick: But if you needed to do a thousand an hour, you'd probably need, 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 a hundred pancakes every few minutes.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: You know what I mean? So, specialized robotics, 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.

Travis Kalanick: 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?

Travis Kalanick: Pretty awesome if you could. And it's got to be a high-quality meal, of course.

Travis Kalanick: But the question mark there, "can you," requires you to have what I would call industrial real estate for food e-commerce.

Travis Kalanick: What do I mean, food e-commerce? We know what e-commerce is. It's got Amazon warehouses everywhere, or major hubs, like big distribution centers, DCs.

Travis Kalanick: But food e-commerce is a little different. It is a warehouse type. You need to do logistics from it, but you also need to do manufacturing.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

Travis Kalanick: So, the manufacturing, the logistics has to happen at the same place, and it always has to be 15 minutes from where you are.

Travis Kalanick: So, now you have a very different situation where you have real estate in urban and suburban environments that's always 15 minutes from anybody.

Travis Kalanick: So, you have an urban production and logistics fabric across a city, which is I have the real estate, then I have robots, robotic food production, because then I'm taking the labor cost out, and then I have robotic logistics.

Travis Kalanick: Because right now, your 15-dollar bowl that then gets delivered to you somehow became 30 bucks.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

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

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: Industrial real estate, robotic production, robotic couriers.

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

Travis Kalanick: It just caught me.

Travis Kalanick: I mean, that is, I don't have a list.

Travis Kalanick: Well, first of all, of course, I did Uber Eats, so, very familiar with this part of things.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

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

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: I like to say I have lots of ideas all the time.

Travis Kalanick: I mean, I'm an idea factory.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: But other people have great ideas too, but an idea comes to you or comes to you, if that makes sense. And I like to say, you go out on a date with the idea, right? Was it a good date?

Travis Kalanick: Did it go well? How did you and the idea get along?

Travis Kalanick: And it's very much related to who are you is going to be a big part of which idea works for you.

David Senra: You call this finding your sport.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah, finding your sport or your business soulmate.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Travis Kalanick: Be in touch with who you are, and then when the right idea comes your way, you just know.

Travis Kalanick: You just know.

David Senra: I thought I understood how you thought.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: And now, we've been talking for several hours. I think I'm getting a little closer there, but then I read what you wrote, where you're just like, "Well, look around, dude.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: Everything that you see in a city and a civilization has either been grown, mined, or manufactured."

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: And so, I'm like, "Oh, he is..." You're into details like you were describing the Uber sign-up flow earlier.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: But you zoomed all the way out.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: So, it's like I'm going to start with the material constituents of everything that exists in the world.

Travis Kalanick: 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 what I call the physical AI tech stack.

Travis Kalanick: Real estate's part of that for the reasons 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 because you're extracting air and then tempering it and pushing it back in.

Travis Kalanick: Real estate is a big part. What is a mining company? It's actually real estate.

Travis Kalanick: So, the ability to take land and turn it into productive progress, essentially, is an underappreciated and not understood thing, and it is most definitely a big part of what I would call the physical AI tech stack. You can go 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.

Travis Kalanick: 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?

Travis Kalanick: The head of HR 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 you can go further than that, which is everything we're seeing in technology, 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.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

Travis Kalanick: But where does the energy come from? You're like, "Oh, it comes from the sun."

Travis Kalanick: Okay, but how do you capture it?

Travis Kalanick: Goes back to minerals.

Travis Kalanick: Land is the whole damn thing.

Travis Kalanick: So, there is 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 very dependent upon it, and that's why mining is so interesting.

David Senra: You're not owning the mines, correct? You're just making them more productive with gainfully employed robots?

Travis Kalanick: Correct.

David Senra: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: What we call gainfully employed robots.

David Senra: Which is hilarious, by the way.

Travis Kalanick: Yes. But it's like because right now, look, I do think, of course, humanoids are going to be gainfully employed. They're not there yet, but they'll get there.

Travis Kalanick: But right now the demos are dancing and martial arts.

Travis Kalanick: I talk about the Beijing... There's a humanoid Olympics in Beijing, and they're doing a marathon. You're like, "Okay, they're not quite there. They're going to get there."

Travis Kalanick: But I kept thinking like, man, imagine if you put wheels on them, right?

Travis Kalanick: 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.

David Senra: 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 going to attack one industry at a time.

Travis Kalanick: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: Physical world far outstrips the digital world, therefore, you almost stumbled into, or picked... You didn't stumble into it, you picked an infinite game.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: So, there's no limit to what this company can expand into.

Travis Kalanick: Look, I have a little bit of an issue of infinite, but it goes very far. Like, the dream...

Travis Kalanick: Okay, look, the mission for mining is more productive mines to power Earth's industries.

Travis Kalanick: Because we can go to a gold mine right now, go to a gold mine CEO, and ask whether he wants 20% more gold per year.

Travis Kalanick: Why? Because when you automate it, that's the output.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

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

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: And then you could then go and automate and enhance those industries as well, right?

Travis Kalanick: The point 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.

David Senra: Exactly.

Travis Kalanick: So, if you automate the thing that is the lever that moves the world, it's like the ultra-lever.

Travis Kalanick: And it's just kind of fun. It's just actually cool. If you see a picture of a machine that loaded is over two million pounds, and it's the size of a building, and it's autonomously moving around, pretty cool.

Travis Kalanick: The dream, and this is like it's really Elon willing, really, but one day he's going to be sending missions to asteroids to mine them.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah, maybe we can help out in some way.

Travis Kalanick: That'd be a lot of fun.

David Senra: You have mining, you have food.

Travis Kalanick: Transport. And the thing... We call it... The mission there is wheel-base for robots. So, if you have specialized machines 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.

Travis Kalanick: Some people think about ride-sharing when they think about this, but there's just a lot of things you're not thinking about.

Travis Kalanick: I was talking to one of the large food suppliers in the US.

Travis Kalanick: They supply all the food to the restaurants.

Travis Kalanick: They're spending three billion dollars a year on the labor that moves the pallets on forklifts.

Travis Kalanick: This is just like a little drop in the bucket of all the things that are moving, right?

Travis Kalanick: But what about freight?

Travis Kalanick: What about parcel delivery? What about food delivery?

Travis Kalanick: So, we talked about that on the food side.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

David Senra: 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.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: You're doing it again at Atoms.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: Is that just your natural... Is that what you meant, like your business soulmate? That you're just like, "I don't want to work on just one product or one business." You want a conglomerate. How do you think about this?

Travis Kalanick: I mean, this goes back to, no, you don't... That's not how it works. But it is... Remember, the only constraint to our imagination is management capacity.

Travis Kalanick: So, then the question is twofold, do you have an imagination, and is it any good?

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

David Senra: So, what does the actual organization inside of Atoms look like with all these different businesses?

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: Does every business have a CEO? They report directly to you? How did you actually structure this?

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

Travis Kalanick: So, what are we trying to accomplish? How are we going to try to accomplish it? What do we view as risky, and what's sort of no-brainer? And how do we do accountability as we go?

Travis Kalanick: And then sort of approach it with 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.

David Senra: That's how you dedicate your time.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: Is that the directive that you give to everybody that's...

Travis Kalanick: Yes.

David Senra: Okay.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

David Senra: Yeah, that's what I'm trying to figure out, like how do you...

Travis Kalanick: So, that flows down.

Travis Kalanick: Now everybody's got 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.

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

Travis Kalanick: Well, okay, again, so there's really interesting ways to do it. I sort of have this concept I call the line, in sort of maybe the framers of finding the line. So, there's a line.

Travis Kalanick: On one side is order, lots of structure...

Travis Kalanick: Sorry, structure. As you pull away 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.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

Travis Kalanick: And it's not in two dimensions. It's like in 80 dimensions, okay? And the best leaders are able to find that.

Travis Kalanick: And probably the most approachable way to describe this is the fewest number of rules while staying out of chaos is the approachable way to describe this.

Travis Kalanick: But you go back to launch at Uber.

Travis Kalanick: You could think of it as, okay, there's a bunch of 23-year-olds launching cities.

Travis Kalanick: What happened was at the beginning, the first 20, 30 cities, I was deeply involved in whether that city was going to get launched, but what happened was somebody would go out, "Hey, go launch a city. Make something out of 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, because pricing in the transportation space is the sum of all strategy.

Travis Kalanick: And so the pricing call then goes, "Well, what's the regulatory? What's the car type that you're going to use because of that regulatory? What is the average wage in the city?"

Travis Kalanick: 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? 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.

Travis Kalanick: 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, ten hours of pricing calls before we launched London, as an example, but I never solved the same problem twice.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

Travis Kalanick: Even at the beginning when I was still involved in that pricing call, they wouldn't see me until the pricing call, but they knew I was going to be at that pricing call. The one rule was you can't launch until I say yes at that pricing call.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

Travis Kalanick: And so, they would put everything into making that successful, which means all the other things that they're doing before are going to be organized towards doing it right, because they want to win.

Travis Kalanick: And so now I've got one rule, which is that pricing call.

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

David Senra: 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."

Travis Kalanick: Mm-hmm.

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

Travis Kalanick: I almost think of it as negentropic, which means... And it's kind of a... You could get into a very interesting sort of I don't want to say... A very energetic debate with certain people about negative entropy. But civilization is an attempt to locally slow down entropy and maybe even go negative.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

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

Travis Kalanick: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: It was. He's at the very beginning.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: This is when the oil industry, the entire...

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

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

Travis Kalanick: Yeah, yeah.

David Senra: And he goes, "I'm going to impose order on this chaos."

Travis Kalanick: Mm.

David Senra: That's the line he used.

Travis Kalanick: 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.

David Senra: I think that's an awesome place to close, Travis.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

David Senra: It really means a lot to me you taking the time.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah. Appreciate it.

David Senra: Really appreciate it, man. Thanks.

Travis Kalanick: Yeah. Great.

David Senra: 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 have obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work.

David Senra: Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.