The Return of Uber’s Ousted Founder | Fortune Daily

0:00He was once seen as the king of the tech bros, and he's the guy who took Uber from a nascent idea into a verb. These days, we're all Ubering all over the place. He was then forced out by his own investors. Travis Kalanick was once the most notorious CEO in Silicon Valley, but after a corporate crisis involving allegations of sexual harassment and a culture of retaliation at Uber, he became a cautionary tale about power, culture, and accountability. But now he's back and he's not apologizing for anything that happened before. Nine years after his ouster, Kalanick is in the spotlight again with his new company, which is called Atoms.

0:50And it's a bet on AI, on robots, and on a future where food can be cooked and delivered without a human even touching it. While comebacks aren't unusual in tech, Kalanick speaks volumes about the current vibe shift that we're seeing in Silicon Valley, because it was once a culture that called him a warning sign. And now it's celebrating him once again as a visionary. So what's going on here? And are there ever any consequences for founders like Kalanick? Well, Fortune Finance and crypto editor Jeff John Roberts joins us to explain what changed, whether it's Travis himself, the tech, or the people funding him.

1:44Jeff, thank you so much for joining us. So I want to talk to you about this really in-depth magazine piece that you have written on Travis Kalanick, who was originally known as the co-founding CEO of Uber. He also has a bit of a bad boy reputation in the tech industry. For the uninitiated viewer, give us a bit of an outline of who Kalanick is. Kalanick stormed onto the scene back in ride sharing, back when this was new. It's hard to believe this is like over a decade old. But Uber and Lyft came onto the scene to dislodge the taxi the taxi agency. And Travis was, as you said, a bad boy. He went and kind of cut every corner.

2:25He was really sharp elbowed. He had a kind of a hyper bro culture, you know, sayings like always be hustling and toe stepping. And he was really abrasive and unapologetically. So it helped him win. Uber is today the biggest or best known ride sharing platform. However, his antics got him pushed out. There's just too many scandals. And his own board forced him out as a company was trying to go public. And this is almost unheard of in Silicon Valley, but his reputation was that bad. He was regarded as that toxic. They pushed him out and someone else took the company public. And the CEO of Uber is the guy who's there today, but it's not Travis.

3:03And there's a couple of things I remember about Travis from that era. Number one, there were various allegations of sexual harassment in the company at the time. and and also there was a video that went viral of him arguing with an uber driver he was sitting in the back seat of the car and i think they were arguing over fares um which went all over the internet um so travis is now back and he is building a company called atoms what do we know about atoms jeff yeah so travis after he was forced out of uber he basically went dark but he's been active the whole time. He started with something called ghost kitchens or cloud kitchens.

3:42And a lot of people don't know this, but if you get DoorDash or order food in a city like Los Angeles or Chicago or New York or a lot of cities, Travis went out and took all his money and bought a bunch of real estate and put it in these kitchens. And what it is, is he buys like a giant warehouse and you might be ordering Chick-fil-A, you might be ordering Starbucks, you know, these various brands, and it's all being made in the same place. So there's sort of like a bunch of kitchens in this warehouse that's what's the start of it because this was his plan all along for uber to expand it to other things and adams is basically his vision for uber's continued and his next step is supposed to be robots are going to make the food and he talks half jokingly about like a little robot's going to bring your burrito it's not going to be like a human-aid robot but it's going to be like something that's going to bring it your way he's also got a mining venture where he's using ai and robotics and he wants to transform the physical world around us with AI and robotics just to upend logistics.

4:38Because in his view, Uber was just the beginning. Uber was supposed to be this massive delivery process and logistics thing to basically transform everything in the world. And that's what he's trying to do with Atoms. So he's transforming the food industry and more really at this point. I want to talk about how he raised money for Atoms. So we're covering Andreessen Horowitz quite a lot on the show this week. We've talked to the CEO of their new academy. That was yesterday's episode. Kalanick's raised $1.7 billion from Andreessen Horowitz. He's also making this big comeback, as we said, and being lauded by young tech leaders.

5:18Tell us a bit about what it says about the industry right now that he is back and he is being celebrated and he seems to be being so successful. What's changed over the past, you know, almost 10 years since he was ousted from Uber. Has he changed or has Silicon Valley changed? The latter. Silicon Valley has changed. And, you know, I mean, just like the country as a whole, political movements swing back and forth. And as I state in my piece, you know, it depends, you know, where you stand. Is Travis like a villain or a hero? You know, in my view, it's neither. People are complicated. They can be both.

5:53But you're certainly right that And Silicon Valley has changed a lot. When he was pushed up, it was sort of, that was right as, you know, you can call it the Me Too movement was beginning to crest. And women, a lot of women had had enough of sexism in Silicon Valley. And Uber, there was some really kind of like hair-raising stories. Travis himself has never been accused of being, you know, sexist or predatory. But the company he built certainly has been accused of. There's a woman named Susan Fowler who wrote a memo, a female engineer of her time at Uber, and talked about a boss who basically had said, like, well, you better sleep with me or I'm going to make your life miserable.

6:28And she wants to complain, and they're like, well, we can move you somewhere else, but this guy's a high performer. So stuff like that. And that was sort of right as Me Too was cresting. And that woman, Susan Fowler, was on the cover of a magazine, I think on Time, along with five other women, including Taylor Swift, who are just pushing back against systemic sexism in these industries. So, you know, so has Silicon Valley changed? Silicon Valley had a reckoning. And, you know, I'd like to think it addressed a lot of these things. But then people say woke went too far the other way. And that sort of began kind of became, in the view of some people, a witch hunt.

7:03and basically the entrepreneurs and founders weren't allowed to cook because they were sort of enmeshed in woke and identity politics all the time. And now the pendulum has swung back, and it's like the message is let Travis cook, let's not get bogged down in this stuff. And I would argue that some lessons were learned perhaps, but in the rehabilitation of Travis, it's a bit odd. Normally, America loves the second act. You come back, you can make a giant mistake, But generally the playbook is you go dark from it. You come in and say wow I was wrong. I shouldn't have done that Give me another chance and Americans love to give you another chance The difference in this one is the message is like Travis did nothing wrong It was the people who pushed him out that are the real villains here because they committed the ultimate sin in Silicon Valley You sort of you know stabbed a founder in the back You shouldn't have done that and Andreessen's using this as a big branding opportunity, too it's no coincidence his comeback has been through this very friendly media series tvpn which is a pro-tech podcast i listen to it sometimes it's not bad but they will never criticize a founder and he's in recent videos i mean it's sort of like this high level of propaganda it's very polished and it's all about like rehabilitating him and it's a good strategy because that's the other thing that's changed in silicon valley the media landscape there's this new ecosystem of very tech-friendly podcasts where you can go on and never be criticized.

8:26So that's kind of all of that. Sorry, that's the long answer, but that summarizes Travis. And he can get a lot of eyeballs without having to engage with traditional media like Fortune, say, who would ask the more pressing questions. You say in your piece that Travis has never overtly apologized for the culture that he is accused of overseeing at Uber. Has he addressed that era in any way? Not really. I mean, it does in passing. It's, you know, listening to Ben Horowitz and Travis Kolnick discuss that era. It's like, ha ha, what a rascals we were. That was a crazy era. And he takes a position that, you know, what's he put it?

9:03I never got chalk in my shoe, a sports metaphor to say he never crossed the line. He just went up right to the line. And he's very proud of that culture he builds of like, he's going to out hustle you. He's sharper. He's more clever. And that's just who he is. And that's what makes him a great entrepreneur. I mean, I would say he is a great entrepreneur. He really has built a generational company. And that's why young people look up to him. It's like, if you can make your company a verb, you've really made it. Yeah, to Uber. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And same generation as Airbnb. Him and Brian Chesky, the CEO of Uber, came up at the same time.

9:36But Chesky basically was able to do it without setting off all these controversies all the time. You mentioned the very friendly press tour that Kalanick is on right now. And one person in your piece pointed out something I'd never thought about, which is that these friendly interviews, they also train AI models on favorable material about the interview subjects. Is that a deliberate strategy in this day and age that you think we're going to see more of? I think so. I mean, you're seeing it from politics. You're seeing people flood the zone with, you know, with kind of propaganda or biased stuff.

10:12in the guise of reporting. And it's certainly happening here too, because if you wanted to go, if you're an AI model and you want to study Travis's return, the only thing out there is going to be laudatory press releases and transcripts from these very friendly videos. That's going to establish a narrative. I mean, you know, I respect the game. It's a clever strategy. You know, Andreessen, you know, who I've talked to on back channels, I've worked with Andreessen for years, they took the position, if the founder's not going to talk to you, we're not going to talk to you. So they, you know, for this instance anyways, but, you know, I've had several people tell me that's what they're doing with this in part.

10:49And, you know, I can get why, you know, it's, it's, it's, I think it's frankly kind of clever. And so Kalanick declined to speak to you. Andreessen declined to speak to you. Susan Fowler, who you also mentioned earlier, the former Uber employee who blew the whistle on what was going on inside the company, declined to speak to you. What does it tell you when you're reporting a story, Jeff, and so many central characters don't want to speak? Well, as part of the new Travis mythology, I think it's like the media is bad, you know, and it's sort of like these are sophisticated, smart people. But, you know, in the world is either, you know, all hit jobs, you know, and we sort of sit around and like stroke our beers and figure out who we're going to attack that day, you know, but again, on our good days, we call it like we see it.

11:31I do think some tech media can be overly critical. And you can't sort of like, you know, lump out someone for stuff that happens 10 years ago over and over. So they're like, we're just not going to address you. In the case of Susan Fowler, you know, it's possible she got a very big settlement that was contingent on her not saying anything. There could be an NDA in play. But also at the time, too, I mean, she and other women were subjected to a ton of invective on social media and elsewhere, which is, you know, I mean, I've been on the sheathing end of that sort of thing, and it's not fun, but I do it full time.

12:02And people like this are just sort of dragged into this. And, And, you know, I think they just kind of want to turn the page in some respect. Which I can understand for sure for those women. We mentioned Atoms and Travis's vision that he's going to do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car. How close to that is reality? What do you think the prospects are for this company? Well, it's incredibly ambitious. And he's got more than just the Andreessen money. He's got a bunch of money from the Saudis. He's got his personal fortune because, you know, say what you will about him. He walks the walk. Once Uber put him out, he sold all of his shares, which netted him more billions.

12:39And so I wouldn't underestimate him. The thing he's trying to do is incredibly ambitious, including these mining ventures where he's going in and using AI to do gold mining. And apparently it's working. It's a hard thing to measure until we see what's the profit and loss. But I think it's ambitious, it's interesting, and it's visionary. you know but once again there's so much hype around it's kind of hard to tell in the same way as uber one reason you got pushed out people did talk to me for the piece including very senior execs at uber they just didn't want to be you know on record and they make the point that you know no it wasn't like all about you know treacherous venture capitalist reality was uber was a financial mess as well as a cultural one and they were trying to go public but they had all these distractions and he just didn't run it very well because he was young and inexperienced i'm not taking position on when or any of this is true i'm sure travis and drees would say no no he was a genius there too you know and they should have let him do it who knows so but again you know they're building a new mythology of this like founder who can do no wrong and people like hero stories and i think too in response to identity politics which can be just kind of exhausting and it's all about criticizing constantly.

13:55People want a story of someone building something cool, a big adventure, you know, something, creating something new, something positive. So people like that story. I'm not taking a position one side or the other, but that's how people see it. And for any young founders watching Jeff, what do you think the main takeaways are, the main lessons that they can learn from the Travis Kalanick trajectory? I mean, I'm not really a pro-clutchy guy, but I would say, I mean, I was there for the first iteration of Travis blowing himself up. And the lesson used to be, be careful. Don't be, you know, don't lean into your inner jerk too much because you will get blown up.

14:32Now, though, you know, I talked a while ago to the founder of Polymarket, who was going through, you know, there are always some controversy. And he's like, I talked to Travis. He's the only one I can trust. He was there too. Tender it all out. Just believe in yourself. Go forward. And, you know, I think, you know, I'm seeing a lot in the values, this idea of founder mode, just believe in who you are. That's what Elon Musk does. But guess what? A lot of you young founders, you're not Elon Musk. You know, that guy makes rockets and, you know, electric cars and stuff like that. And he's got to a point where he can behave that way, you know, whether you should or not, it's a different question.

15:06But I do think it's helpful to, you know, have a little bit of, you know, emotional intelligence and, you know, because it's the right thing to do to treat people decently, but also you create too much controversy, investors are going to get cold feet, you know, even no matter what Andreessen's saying. If you have enough controversy, you get enough scandals. Well, people don't like that stuff. That's going to hurt your valuations, can make your road a lot harder. But the founders would say, I'm going to be me. I'm going to do what I'm going to do what Travis did. I'm going to do what Elon did.

15:36That's just what we're living in right now. Jeff, this is fascinating. Thank you so much for joining us. And Travis Kalanick, if you're listening and you want to come on the show, we'd love to speak to you. Thank you, Ellie. Robinhood just rolled out AI trading agents and investing may never be the same again. We asked Jeff John Roberts to stick around for a minute to explain what's going on. So Jeff, in this story, you wrote something pretty remarkable, which is that trading may never be the same. So what's happened to set the scene for people is that 29 million customers on Robin hood can now tell an agent to go and trade for them why has the company unleashed this well i mean that's where the world is going and robin hood has always been very tech forward and there's stuff like this already robin hood did a thing where you can plug in your agent maybe use claude or whatever use and if you use sort of a plug-in tool called a mcp you could do that but that's you know it's not rocket science but most people don't do that you and me probably are not going to do that in our daily life.

16:41But now you log into Robinhood, right there is going to be, you know, Anthropik and OpenAI and a chatbot. And you can be like, hey, buddy, go buy me, you know, some Tesla shares. Or, you know, hey, agent, go find out a trading strategy to trade the Strait of Hormuz oil crisis. And this is really new. You know, it opens and Robinhood's like, this is the stuff that people on Wall Street, you know, have done for years. But now you can do it too, which is just intriguing. And, you know, the headline might sound a bit much, investing's never going to be the same, but I think it's not because this is just the first arrival and every other company is going to add this next couple of years.

17:23And what's that kind of mean for the markets? I mean, you turn your agent on, you go to sleep and you're like, you know, go trade away. And of course there's guardrails there, but, you know, I just think unintended consequences are going to happen. Yeah, because you raise a scenario in your piece where you say agents could begin to confer with one another, moving into or out of an asset together? How plausible do you think that kind of situation is? I know it's easy to imagine these doom scenarios, but just what we've seen with OpenAI and Hugging Face, these things do escape. But also, what about the herd mentality?

17:57What if the collective wisdom of the agents is like, let's all go buy IBM today, which would be a terrible idea. But you can sort of see, And what if they all sell it once? You'd want to get someone who really knows CAI stuff under the hood. And that might be alarmist. But I do think we've seen enough evidence that these models aren't fully contained. And sure, not every one of 30 million Robinhood customers are going to go do this. But a whole bunch of them are going to come charging in. And I'm really curious what the consequences are going to be. And I guess there's a question as well as to if an agent loses your money, who is responsible for that?

18:34Oh, yeah. The legal liability is really there because Robinhood's like, yo, this ain't on us. This is just you're using, you know, anthropic and open AI. And then there's a legal standard to, you know, with the credit card companies, if I steal your card and go shopping, Visa is going to reimburse you. But if you give me your card and I go and buy a bunch of stuff you don't want, you can't call it Visa and say that guy wasn't supposed to buy that. you know that's you can make that analogy with the agent so we're in a new legal frontier here that's interesting and also how much is it go ahead what are the guardrails that exist so far on Robinhood for these agents I mean there are guardrails you they have its own account you can fund it and you can say hey you know no more than like 200 bucks at a time and also you can get like manual sign-off you know you get a sort of an approval before it does it but not everyone's going to use those guardrails and it's just going to be like YOLO, let's see what you can do.

19:28So we're going to see what happens. But the last point, Ellie, is this stuff is one model's free, but some it's not. Robinhood's going to charge you token fees to use this. So I asked them, what if someone burns all their gains for the year on token maxing? There's another thing that could happen. It's just we're new territory. I think it's super interesting. What did they say? What did they say in response to your question? Oh, they downplayed it. They're like, oh, no, we'll go do that. But, you know, but they also acknowledge that if you tell it to pursue a complex strategy, it's like, you know, okay, go trade oil in the Middle East and factor in this, this, and this.

20:00I mean, that's a big computing thing. But the flip side is too, they're like, if you're a good trader and you know what you're doing, cool. This is very, you know, the democratizing finance in a way that's never been possible before. Because, you know, for now, it's always been like quants at Jane Street who are on the other side with powerful computers. Now you can have this too. You know, whether you should use it is another question, but it's a new frontier and it's really interesting. Yeah, it's a whole new world. Jeff, thanks so much for bringing it to our attention. Speak soon. Thank you, Ellie.

20:33One more thing before we go. Fortune is hosting its inaugural AIQ Summit and AI editor Jeremy Kahn is here from London to tell us what to look out for. Jeremy, hello. Thank you so much for joining us. So you've just flown in from London. That's right. Because today Fortune is hosting its inaugural AIQ Summit just down the road at the New York Stock Exchange. It really couldn't come at a more important or timely time for all the conversations that are happening right now about AI and long-term security. The theme of our event is putting AI to work. Tell us a bit about why that's the theme and what people can expect today.

21:13Yeah, so this is a conference that's really looking at the Fortune 500 companies that are doing the best in terms of how their peers perceive them and how employees reported the companies are doing on surveys. These are the Fortune 500 companies that are doing the best at actually implementing AI in their business, using AI to actually get return on investment, to get growth. And the conference is based on a list that we published very recently, the AIQ75. We published it on Monday. JPMorgan Chase came in at number one. Tell me a bit about the methodology for that list. Yeah, so this is a list, second year we've done the list, just came out this past week, and it is based on survey data.

21:51So we ask the Fortune 500 to sort of rate themselves on how they're doing in terms of AI implementation. We have several questions about how they're using AI agents, how many things that they have actually go from pilot to full production. And we also ask them to rate their peers. And then those surveys are combined in our methodology. And we look at four categories of how the companies are doing, and they're given a score on each of those. And what do you want to hear the executives and the speakers on our stage today talk about? Because I would imagine a month ago, the conversations that we would have been having at this AIQ summit might have felt a bit different to where we are now in the news cycle.

22:30Yeah. So this week, as you know, there's been just tons of news about AI and AI regulation. We had the AI executives meeting with Trump at the White House. They came out with this voluntary framework. Trump also came out with this declaration renaming AI, at least when the government uses the term as superintelligence. So there is going to be some discussion. I would like to hear the executives at the AIQ summit talk a little bit about how they're thinking about the risks of using AI, particularly as they use AI agents in their business. You want those agents to be reliable. You don't want them to go off and do something that you didn't intend them to do, like perhaps attack another company, as we've seen happen with some of these agents that OpenAI was testing.

23:10So I'd like to get their views on that and their views on what's happening in the regulatory front. Anyone you're particularly interested to hear from today? So we've got an executive from HPE. I'd love to hear what they're doing in their business. They're a company that's over 100 years old, and yet now they're trying to kind of become a more AI-native firm. I'm very interested to hear how that works. And Jeremy, where can people find more of your reporting? So the AIQ Summit's going to be live-streamed, but then you can see all of our reporting at at fortune.com as always. And live streamed on fortune.com as well.

23:37Absolutely. Thanks, Jeremy. And we'll put a link to the AIQ live stream in today's show notes. Thanks so much, Ellie. That's it for Fortune Daily. I'm Ellie Austin. Remember to like, subscribe to our YouTube channel and let us know what you thought of today's show. I'll see you next time.

24:04Thank you.