Ben Horowitz and Travis Kalanick on Building Again

0:00Hey, Travis is back, but I've actually been working for eight years. I just haven't been talking about it. We're competing for the next industrial revolution. People said, are you pissed off about Uber? Does that grind you? When you fall in love again, you don't think about the X very much. We had a massive, high-fidelity playbook on how to not get attention for anything we did. A lot of the things that would have happened with Uber over time are things we're doing now. It's basically multiple trillion-dollar industries that are going to get automated. We talk about digital AI and what it does to the enterprise.

0:37But these industries on their own are big. You think you were successful because of what you did versus in spite of what you did? If you don't fight for the best idea, then what idea are you fighting for? You're fighting for the mediocre idea, an idea that's going to make you less good than if you went for the best idea.

0:53Erik Torenberg:The real question is, what are you guys going to buy Uber? After nearly eight years building largely out of public view, Travis Kalanick is finally ready to talk about what comes next. In this fireside conversation from Adam's launch event, Ben Horowitz and I sit down with Travis to discuss why he stayed quiet for so long, how his thinking has evolved since Uber, and why he believes industrial AI will define the next era of technology. Along the way, we revisit the biggest decisions of Uber, founder culture, and what it takes to build transformational companies twice. So the reason why people loved our podcast, the first one that we did together, is because we just got right into it, right into the good stuff.

1:35Erik Torenberg:So we're going to do that here, and then we're going to open it up for Q &A. Eric's good at this and it stresses me out. All right, what do you got, Eric? So Travis, why didn't you buy Lyft? And do you regret it? What would you do if you can go back in time? I think this will surprise a lot of people, but Lyft's culture was very different than ours. Maybe it started with a pink mustache. But I think it's interesting, right, when it comes to entrepreneurs that are in that moment where you could acquire something. By the way, I got a lot of shit for this for a long time. So yeah, the - The culture didn't - Yeah, yeah, yeah, the culture didn't mix.

2:16And when you meet with somebody and you're going to acquire them and there's so much goodness that could come from it. By the way, we're in some crazy war, probably spending a billion dollars a year on it or some insane amount of money. You want it to work. So you wouldn't do anything different? I wouldn't do anything different. And it's easy to say now, but I got a lot of shit for that for a long time. But it was basically I would sit across the table from the guys and I just didn't. It was just clear that we were very culturally different and you couldn't get harder and harder to make that happen.

2:47By the way, I agree with that. I think it, I mean, you'd have to do the counterfactual if Travis was still running Uber because.

2:57Erik Torenberg:What would that look like? Travis was still running Uber today. Well, I think it would have been the original culture. And the culture they went to, which was a reaction to the resistance, just ended up being a much more milquetoast culture than the original Uber culture was a special, very pronounced culture. My favorite thing in that culture doc was meritocracy slash toe-stepping or toe-stomping. I can't remember. I always thought of it as stomping. Meritocracy and toe-stepping. Toe-stepping. Yeah. Which is kind of like, fuck your feelings. We're here to build. We're going to do it. We're going to push as hard as we can.

3:37And yeah, you may get your toe stepped on, but you got to keep going. You got to keep bringing it. And to me, that was the part that got diluted when Travis went out. And it was, in some ways, it was the core part. It was a very essential element to at least what I saw kind of from the side in it. Yeah, we've rebranded it, the current company at Adams. We call it the best idea wins. But the toe stepping is important because there's so many people that are not willing to fight for the best idea because they're going to upset somebody else. And if you don't fight for the best idea, then what idea are you fighting for?

4:13You're fighting for the mediocre idea, the politically expedient idea, an idea that's going to make you less good than if you went for the best idea. And so having everybody oriented towards that is a cultural vibe that helps you win. Yeah, when Andy Grove was at Intel, he used to call that constructive confrontation.

4:34Erik Torenberg:Yeah. Which is the only way to get better. You have to get tested. There's a polymarket on when Travis is going to come back at Uber, or when they're going to ask Travis to come back at Uber. But the real question is, when are you guys going to buy Uber? I think we still have a lot to earn. It's a fun, it's fun. So much of what I'm doing, and people go, well, what would you be doing if? And I can't say all the things that I would be doing at Uber I'm doing now. There's a lot of things I'm not, but it is a continuation of the things. And a lot of the things that would have happened with Uber over time are things we're doing now.

5:18And if those things play out and you take over, look, I outlined what industrial AI is and where it's going over time. it's basically multiple like 100 billion or trillion dollar industries that are going to get automated we talk about digital ai and what it does to the enterprise but these industries on their own are big and so this is a new industrial age that basically is sort of coming i compare it to the second industrial revolution so if we're correct and we execute well then it's a thing because you're like, is food going to get automated? Is production of food going to get automated? And is the delivery of food going to get automated?

6:00I think we'd all say yes. And if that's the case, then there will be a service that prepares and delivers that food at cheaper than going to the grocery store. And if that happens, this occurs, and food will be completely revolutionized. Will mining get automated? And if it does, not just the movement of the materials, but every part of mining, then what is a mining company? It just owns real estate. It will be completely revolutionized, a multi-trillion dollar market, and there's many of these. And now we got to deliver. Talk about how you're different as a founder

6:33Erik Torenberg:building Atoms than you were building Uber in terms of what have you changed? What have you kept the same? When you reflect back, what do you think you were successful because of what you did versus in spite of what you did? The, look, some of how I did Uber is very related to what I did before Uber. And what I did before Uber was I failed. I mean, I got my company barely got acquired. I did the first four years without a salary. I had socks that said blood, sweat, and ramen. It was stuff like that. And when you're that on the line and you're on welfare and you've got to make ends meet, and then you go into something like Uber, which is like ultra product market fit times 1 ,000, but you still think you're poor and you can't go to the grocery store next week, you get too close to the line.

7:29Like, I would go right up against the line. Some people might have guessed that. But I'd go right up against the line, and the only way you knew that I didn't get chalk on my shoe was you'd get an electromagnetic scanning microscope and you would zoom in, reverse angle, and you'd be like, okay, he's fine. But if you get big and you roll that way, you get to a place where people, you're bringing a lot of change really fast and you haven't brought trust along for the ride. So I would say today I'm a few inches off that line. You don't need to do the slow motion replay to know that I did the right thing.

8:07I'd stand by every decision I made at Uber. But you don't need to guess anymore. It's like super clean. You don't have to be that close. the other thing that's interesting and I think sometimes the young entrepreneurs that are just coming up right now they don't totally get it is that when you get into your third and fourth I don't know this may be even my fifth at this point company you get freaking really good at doing stuff and so things that used to take me a day or three days a lot of stress anxiety I don't want to do this take me 45 minutes. And that's a beautiful thing. There are things you don't get.

8:52Like, I'm like so used to adversity at this point that it's kind of normal, so I don't get as pissed off. But being pissed off makes you good as an entrepreneur. So like, I got to make sure I'm still fired up. That's that pissed off energy. You fucked with me, I'm going to kick your ass. It's easier when you're 25, I think. I don't know. I'm just not as, I'm like, whatever, it's fine. you be you dude it's good you get too used to adversity and that's kind of a problem but yeah so i'd say those are some of the fun changes yeah what's that an example of something

9:23Erik Torenberg:that used to take a long time but is now just so much easier like a look i wrote a vision note when we rolled out adams's a few months ago it was like like a look a bias obviously but it was very i think very well written vision note 10 years ago 15 years ago that would have taken me I don't know, hundreds of hours. Yeah. And it just flowed. Yeah. Like, okay, I can't say I wasn't thinking about it a lot, but when I was doing the writing, it actually just flowed and just happened. I'm like, holy shit. It just happened. Holy cow. Like the one I just did for this funding, like, okay, I procrastinated, but you know, that's a thing.

10:09But like, once I did the writing, I'm like, oh dude, we got it. It took like 45 minutes. I'm like, this is amazing. And that's related to presentation, communication, strategy, this kind of thing I'm faster at, which is pretty awesome.

10:25Erik Torenberg:Ben, how have you seen Travis evolve since you first got to know him? And comment more broadly, we have a lot of repeat entrepreneurs in the room in terms of when, like Travis, you have a massive success that also has some mistakes along the way. You know, what lessons do you learn for the next time versus, you know, what do you make sure to keep and continue? because that's what got you there. Well, I thought that was actually a really good way to characterize it, which was, you know, he thought he was in survival mode when he had 20 ,000 people working for him. And that idea is dangerous when you have such a big organization.

11:07It's dangerous on two levels. One, it's dangerous because you're not, as he said, bringing enough people along with you, but it's also dangerous in that you've got all these people working for you. And their interpretation of that idea could be a lot. You know, you kind of have to, you have to stay way on this side of the line so the guy, you know, eight levels down doesn't do something stupid. And so that, you know, that's a big change, I would say. But, like, he was always great. always. I mean, that's why it was so tragic that we didn't invest in Uber. But yeah, and I think like when you do get, I think everything comes easier.

11:54It was what's the Prince line? People say nothing comes too easy, but when you got it, nothing comes too hard. That's like, that's where he got to the one thing to add to it though and again i feel like i don't want to prescribe to some to folks like everybody a lot of folks here already know this but it's like when it gets easy it's time to push hard if i always used to say like uh if something if it's getting easy it's about to get really fucking hard and you don't want it to be that way you want to make it hard versus hard make it hard on you if that makes sense yeah yeah and i've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs over the years where they're like oh man we're just cranking we're on easy street right now and i'm like dude you are about to get your ass whooped and you don't even know it uh now i know that too because of course i've experienced it myself so yeah yeah and that's a that's a very good insight yeah so i notice that all the time when i talk to entrepreneurs when they start going, oh, yeah, I just, yeah, it's easy.

13:02It's going so well. We don't have competition. You know, I just hired this guy. He had an offer from Anthropoc for$5 billion, but he took my$400 ,000 a year job, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, bro, check yourself for wounds because I assure you, you're bleeding. You know, like you're in trouble. For sure. But there's times when it's actually easy. That's a guy pretending. So I call that the fake it till you make it, which he's lying to himself plus others. But there's actual times when it's easy, but it's because you're not continuing to push. So it's one thing when you're just not winning, but you're pretending like you are.

13:39And there's another thing when you're winning, but you're taking it easy and you're about to start losing. Yeah. Many such cases.

13:48Erik Torenberg:Yeah, for sure. Last question, then I'll open up to a couple of Q &A. So Ben, Travis, Travis, when your first external round at Uber, the venture round, I believe was at 4 million post or something like that. It's 4 million pre. You're talking about at Uber. First round, yeah. Our first round at Uber was 4 million pre. This one, you know, several orders of magnitude bigger. Ben, I believe this is one of, if not our biggest check, biggest check you've ever written. Yeah. Certainly the biggest check I ever written. You know, when did you get to conviction that we were 100 % doing it? Like, what was your process like?

14:26I was at$100. When I first started talking to him, well, as soon as I knew what it was, the only question for me was, was it going to be one thing? Yeah. Because, like, I've known Travis for many, many, many years, and he's always been the opposite of the, like, our conversations were always the real shit. Like, when we, I mean, I was on the board of Lyft, and I was talking to him about Uber, and he would tell me, like, all the stuff that Chinese ride-sharing companies were doing to him, breaking into his apps, giving shit away for free, this and that and the other. And he was fired up about that.

15:08Like, oh, if I can deal with these guys, the rest of the world is going to be no problem. And there are just not that many. There are very few, I'm telling you, I've been in this a while, very few entrepreneurs that come at it like that. So I knew if we could put money in Travis, and he was still, the other thing that I learned was he was still Travis. Like he hadn't like turned into, he wasn't living his best life. He wasn't doing that. So, yeah, it was a very, I was that conviction very fast. I think a lot of people don't, some people know this, but not a lot, is that we actually had separate companies going.

15:47And so when I went to do the fundraise, I kind of showed up at A16, kind of like the guy with a trench coat with a bunch of watches, saying, you want a watch? Which watch would you like? I got lots of stuff. Did you want some food stuff? Actually, I got different parts of the food thing. What do you like? I've got some mining stuff. That's pretty cool. And they're like, we just want the stuff. and we heard that from the first few people that we talked to and so actually the the tricky part about this deal or the what added trickiness this deal uh that made us sweat a little bit and just made it hard was like i had to merge separate entities with different investors and put it together um which was pretty interesting because like how do you do a ratio when certain things are very early.

16:37But it's super great because it was like, you see some of the things with Elon, and he's starting to put the pieces back together. He's not only phenomenal, of course, on all the five or six or eight things, and of course, A16 is in most or all of them.

17:00But he was managing five or six or seven different companies. And so I was really trying to put it together under a single roof, which is amazing. He's doing it many, you know, a couple decades later. But I mean, it makes things better in some ways, yeah.

17:18Erik Torenberg:Before we get to Q &A, Blastley Travis, why don't you say a couple words about what it's like to have a lot of the Uber gang back together, you know, putting the pieces back together. you know, Anthony, this company you bought, there's a bunch of people in this room who were alongside with you for the first round. When I first got going, look, I was on the board of Uber when I first got going. So I got thousands of inbound from actual Uber employees that are like, let's go. And I had to be careful because if you're on the board of a company, you can't hire thousands of their people. Bad luck. It's not just a bad luck.

17:58It's actually illegal. So there's that too. And I'm very familiar with the law here. Okay. So you pick your guys, you pick your spots, the whole thing. But, you know, there's a few, there's a lot of really special people in this room. I mean, Gautam, who was a CFO over at Uber, has joined Adams. That's a recent thing. Ganesh, who was a VP or SVP of engineering over at Uber, has just joined Adams. And there's a lot of young guns at Uber that joined that are now the big guns, right? There's a guy, Brian Atwell, who's one of our engineering leads on the food side and on infrastructure. Anthony Lewandowski, of course.

18:44Eric Meioffer, who ran Uber's advanced technology group. He's running food robotics. Like a list goes on, guys. Oh, Jessica Morton. she was head of Uber Eats Japan. And I went to Japan when we first got going and I met with Masa because like maybe Masa is going to be in and like I could never get over him just stealing my stuff and then investing in like eight other companies that do what I do. And then I met with Jess because that was like my number one thing or my number one, number two thing to do there. But she's now doing a lot of really cool stuff. Now, we're not just an Uber company. We have more executives that are not Uber than are, but there's a lot of heart from that time and people who are there.

19:36And it's like, what do they say? Run it back. But there's also run it forward, which is do it new, different. Don't be what you were before. So anyways, we're having fun.

19:49Erik Torenberg:Speaking of special people in this room, I want to open it up to some Q &A. Uh, Gary. Travis, congratulations. Uh, my favorite question to ask for especially a room like this is what, if you could like send a message in a bottle to the 18 to 22 year old version of yourself, what to say?

20:13Um, look, the 18 year old version of me, uh, was a super geek, uh, pretending not to be. so I would just be like dude just be a geek it's gonna be fine you know the pretending to not be a geek when you're a geek is just a lot of cognitive space you know load that's not necessary um you know uh I'm not sure that things would have gone better but that's certainly one of the things I probably would have told myself yeah yeah what about you, Ben? That's a good, I, just not to worry about, not to worry about stuff, you know, like it is what it is, do what you got to do. You know, don't, don't, like consequence is going to be what the consequence is.

21:06You know, you got to find a way out and you just got to keep looking until you find it and there's nothing else to do. So worrying doesn't help at all. no stress. Don't worry, be happy. Yeah, don't worry. Well, but you need urgency. Don't be too happy. Yeah, yeah, don't be too happy. Don't worry, be happy, Travis. Don't be fat and happy, yeah. Okay, next question. Owen. Question for Travis. How are you going to structure all this?

21:38Erik Torenberg:Are you going to have like shared resources across the divisions? Are you going to have CEOs? Are you going to have many boards? Like how are you thinking of all of that? Yeah, that's super great. Right. So one of the things I'm happy about is that I don't have multiple boards because that's a thing I was just like, oh, my God, I definitely don't want that. But shared resources is just it's sort of like this is the management architecture, organizational architecture geek thing that we got to figure out. OK, the normal GNA, finance, legal, HR, shared. Then you're like, OK, infrastructure on the technology side, shared.

22:14is manufacturing share. Sometimes you want manufacturing to go deep. Okay, we're just going to do this kind of manufacturing, but it just so happens that a lot of the manufacturing that we're doing on mining is similar to the manufacturing that we're doing on transport, but it's very different than the manufacturing we're doing on food. So do you have a guru of manufacturing? You probably do because it's a thing. It's a specialized thing. and when you do it at scale, you can get way better talent and just all the other things work better. So my guess is manufacturing is also one of those things.

22:50And then you're like, which parts of software get locked in? Mostly, but not complete. And I don't have all the answers on that one. But like these are business units that run as separate businesses. Like the guy who runs, you know, mining is just like all in on that and has lots of control and empowerment to make mining successful. And same for the other situations. Yeah. Yeah, it's super interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, that's the thing, right? Is like I had to make it a bit painful. Otherwise, I'm just not, I'm just like, I will make, it's just inevitable. I just do that. Yeah. Yeah.

23:34Next question.