Ben Horowitz and Travis Kalanick on Building Again

Summary

Podcast Summary: The a16z Show

Episode: Ben Horowitz and Travis Kalanick on Building Again

Release Date: August 14, 2026
Host: Andreessen Horowitz
Guests: Travis Kalanick (Founder, Uber and Adams), Ben Horowitz (Andreessen Horowitz Partner)

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Episode Overview

This episode marks Travis Kalanick’s public return after nearly eight years working quietly on his newest venture, Adams. Ben Horowitz and the a16z team engage Travis in a candid, wide-ranging conversation about his time out of the spotlight, how he’s grown as a founder since Uber, and his views on industrial AI as the next wave of technological transformation. They revisit major decisions from Uber’s early days, explore the evolution of founder culture and leadership, and discuss lessons learned from building transformational companies more than once.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Travis’s Return and New Industrial Revolution

• Travis Kalanick’s Quiet Period: Travis explains his time “in the cave,” focused on building rather than public attention.
• Adams and Industrial AI: He introduces Adams, his new company aiming to automate massive, trillion-dollar legacy industries (e.g., food, mining) ([00:00], [04:49]).
  • “We’re competing for the next Industrial Revolution... Multiple trillion dollar industries that are gonna get automated.” — Travis Kalanick [00:10]
  • Draws parallels to the Second Industrial Revolution, predicting radical automation and transformation.

2. Uber, Culture, and Growth

• Lyft, Acquisition, and Cultural Mismatch: Travis reflects on why Uber didn't acquire Lyft, emphasizing deep cultural differences ([01:42], [02:14]).
  • “It was just clear that we were very culturally different, and you couldn't... It got harder and harder to make that happen.” — Travis Kalanick [02:29]
• Uber’s Original Culture: The concept of "meritocracy and toe-stepping" was central—an aggressive, confrontational approach to ensure the best ideas win, even at the expense of ruffling feathers ([03:27], [03:57]).
  • “If you don’t fight for the best idea, then what idea are you fighting for?... That is a cultural vibe that helps you win.” — Travis Kalanick [04:00]
  • Ben and others discuss how this aggressive culture was diluted after Travis left.

3. Lessons Learned & Evolution as a Founder

• From Uber to Adams: Travis candidly shares the ways he’s changed as a leader ([06:47]):
  • Earlier, he operated in a "survival mode," always on the edge (“right up against the line”), sometimes too close.
  • Now, he stands “a few inches off that line,” building more trust with stakeholders, making decisions more deliberately.
  • With more experience, entrepreneurship gets “so much easier”—chores that once took days now take minutes ([09:28]).
  • “When you get into your third and fourth, I don't know, this may be even my fifth... you get fricking really good at doing stuff.” — Travis Kalanick [08:50]
• The Energy of Adversity: Travis and the panel debate the value and risks of being “pissed off” as an entrepreneurial motivator ([09:06], [24:36]):
  • “Being pissed off makes you good as an entrepreneur.” — Travis Kalanick [09:06]
  • However, getting too used to adversity can also lead to complacency.

4. Growth, Fundraising, and Conviction

• Comparing Rounds:
  • Uber’s first round: $4 million pre-money ([14:04])
  • Adams’ recent round: “Several orders of magnitude bigger”—the largest check a16z has written ([14:17])
  • “As soon as I knew what it was, the only question for me was, was there going to be one thing?” — a16z Partner on investing in Adams [14:25]

5. Team Dynamics & Structure

• Reassembling the Gang:
  • Many former Uber execs and key team members have joined Adams, including former Uber CFO, SVP of Engineering, and other executives ([17:36]).
  • “We have more executives that are not Uber than are. But there’s a lot of heart from that time.” — Travis Kalanick [18:46]
• Organizational Design:
  • Travis is structuring Adams with shared resources across business units, but each with autonomy ([21:44]):
  • “The normal GNA, finance, legal, HR—shared. Then, for technology and manufacturing, some things go deep, some shared. I don’t have all the answers yet, but these are business units that run as separate businesses.” — Travis Kalanick [22:00]

6. Reflections & Personal Advice

• Advice for Younger Self:
  • Travis: “Just be a geek. It's going to be fine... Pretending not to be one is just a lot of cognitive load that's not necessary.” [19:58]
  • Ben/A16z: “Don't worry about stuff... Worrying doesn't help at all. You just gotta keep looking till you find a way out.” [20:48]
• On Motivation: Dirty vs. Clean Fuel:
  • Dirty fuel (revenge, fear): “There is a dirty revenge... It can be successful but ends being less than what it should be.” ([24:42])
  • Cleaner motivation (love for building): “When you fall in love again, you don’t think about the ex very much... If you come from that place you can create in a beautiful, undirty way.” — Travis Kalanick [25:38]

7. Industry Evolution and Media Landscape

• Change in Public Narrative:
  • Travis observes that media negativity against tech was far greater a decade ago; today, founders can speak directly via podcasts and new platforms ([29:30]).
  • “The media landscape has completely changed… Elon buying Twitter is the beginning of us being able to speak our minds... That’s a big deal.” — Travis Kalanick [30:35]
  • “We had a massive high fidelity playbook on how to not get attention for anything we did. We had thousands of employees who were not allowed to put our company on LinkedIn. It was weird.” — Travis Kalanick [28:40]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Culture:
  • “Meritocracy and toe stepping... It's 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” — a16z Partner [03:27]
• On Line-Pushing Leadership:
  • “[I] went right up against the line... you’d need an electromagnetic scanning microscope to see I didn’t get chalk on my shoe.” — Travis Kalanick [07:17]
• On Adversity:
  • “If it’s getting easy, it’s about to get really fucking hard. You want to make it hard versus let hard make you.” — Travis Kalanick [12:04]
• On Team:
  • “There’s a lot of heart from that time... There’s run it back. But there’s also run it forward—do it new, different. Don’t be what you were before.” — Travis Kalanick [18:46]
• On Revenge vs. Creation:
  • “Full spite business. Like full spite store. Like, let’s go... But it ends up being less than what it should be when it comes from the wrong place.” — Travis Kalanick [24:36]
• On Modern Media:
  • “You can go and talk to a David Senra, you can go and talk to Joe Rogan... say what you need to say in an environment that’s not like a struggle session in Maoist China.” — Travis Kalanick [30:35]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment | Timestamp | |-------------------------------------------|-------------| | Travis on 8 years out & vision for Adams | 00:00–01:26 | | Uber vs Lyft acquisition & cultures | 01:42–02:47 | | Uber founder culture: meritocracy | 03:27–03:57 | | Toe-stepping, best idea wins | 03:57–04:29 | | Industrial AI as next revolution | 04:49–06:30 | | How Travis has changed as a founder | 06:47–09:22 | | Fast-tracking founder experience | 09:28–10:25 | | On adversity and pushing | 12:04–13:47 | | Early funding at Uber vs Adams | 14:02–14:17 | | Reassembling the Uber gang for Adams | 17:36–19:49 | | Advice to younger self | 19:58–21:19 | | Organizational design at Adams | 21:44–23:32 | | Motivation: Dirty vs clean fuel | 24:36–25:59 | | Managing public narrative, new media era | 29:30–32:21 |

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Conclusion

This episode provides rare insight into Travis Kalanick’s mindset after Uber, his approach to building a new company with a legendary team, and his thoughts on where technology, culture, and media are heading. Listeners hear candid reflections on the risks and costs of founder-driven, aggressive cultures, lessons learned from scaling quickly, and advice for future entrepreneurs on finding better motivations. With Kalanick’s return, all eyes are on how Adams and the next Industrial Revolution will unfold.

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Transcript

[Travis Kalanick]

Hey, 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 gonna get automated. We talk about digital AI and what it does to the enterprise, but these industries on their own are big.

[Ben Horowitz]

You think you were successful because of what you did versus in spite of what you did.

[Travis Kalanick]

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 gonna make you less good than if you went for the best idea.

[Ben Horowitz]

The real question is, what are you guys gonna buy Uber?

[Podcast Host]

After nearly eight years building largely out of public view, Travis Kalanick is finally ready to talk. 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.

[Ben Horowitz]

So the reason why people loved our podcast that we did, the first one that we did together is because we just got right into it, right into the good stuff. So we're going to do that here, and then we're going to open it up for.

[Travis Kalanick]

I'm scared for Q A. Eric's good at this, and it stresses me out. All right, what do you got, Eric?

[Ben Horowitz]

So, Travis, why didn't you buy Lyft? And do you regret it? What would you do if you can go back in time?

[Travis Kalanick]

I think this will surprise a lot of people, but Lyft's culture was very different than ours kept. Maybe it started with the 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.

[Ben Horowitz]

The culture didn't mix.

[Travis Kalanick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the culture didn't mix. And 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.

[Ben Horowitz]

So you wouldn't do anything different.

[Travis Kalanick]

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 it get harder and harder to make that happen?

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

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

[Ben Horowitz]

because what would that look like? Travis was still running Uber today?

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

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. The original Uber culture was a special, very pronounced culture. My favorite thing in that culture doc, was meritocracy, toe stepping or toe stomping, I can't remember. I always thought of it as stomping,

[Travis Kalanick]

but meritocracy and toe stepping.

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

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. And 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. 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.

[Travis Kalanick]

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? You'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.

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

Yeah. When Andy Grove was at intel, he used to call that constructive confrontation.

[Travis Kalanick]

Yeah.

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

Which is the only way to get better. You have to get tested.

[Ben Horowitz]

There's a poly market 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?

[Travis Kalanick]

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, 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. And 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 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 be automated? Is production of food going to get automated and is the delivery of food going to get automated? I 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 gotta deliver.

[Ben Horowitz]

Talk about how you're different as a founder building Adams 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?

[Travis Kalanick]

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, I mean I got, my company barely got acquired. I did the four 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 a thousand, 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. Like, 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. I'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 fricking really good at doing stuff. And so things that used to take me a day or three days, a lot of stress, anxiety, how am I going to do this? Take me 45 minutes. And that's a beautiful thing. There are things you don't get. Like, 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 gotta make sure I'm still fired up.

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

Come on. That's that pissed off energy.

[Travis Kalanick]

You get fucked with me, I'm gonna kick your ass. It's easier when you're 25, I think. I don't know. I'm just not as. I'm like, nah, dude, whatever.

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

It's fine.

[Travis Kalanick]

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.

[Ben Horowitz]

What's an example of something that used to take a long time, but is now just so much easier? Like a look.

[Travis Kalanick]

I wrote a vision note when we rolled out Adams. It was a few months ago. It was like, like, look, biased, obviously, but it was very, I think a very well written vision note. Ten years ago, 15 years ago, that would have taken me, I don't know, hundreds of hours.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Travis Kalanick]

And it just flowed.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Travis Kalanick]

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 the thing. But, like, once I did the right. 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.

[Ben Horowitz]

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. That's what got you there.

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

Well, I. 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. That idea is dangerous when you have such a big organization. It'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 have to say 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. It was with. What's the Prince line. People say nothing comes too easy, but when you got it, nothing comes too hard. That's like, that. That's where he got to the. I.

[Travis Kalanick]

The one thing I 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, 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. 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. Now I know that too, because of course I've experienced it myself.

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

So. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a, that, that's very good insight.

[Travis Kalanick]

Yeah, so it's.

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

I noticed that all the time when I talk to entrepreneurs, when they start going, oh, yeah, I just, yeah, it's a. It's easy. It's going so well. We don't have competition. You know, I just hired this guy, he had an offer from anthropic 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.

[Travis Kalanick]

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. And there's another thing when you're winning, but you're taking it easy and you're about to start losing. Yeah,

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

Many such cases.

[Travis Kalanick]

Yeah, for sure.

[Ben Horowitz]

Last question, then I'll open up to a couple Q and A. So, Ben, Travis, when you. Your first external round at Uber, the Venture round, I believe, was at 4 million poster or something like that.

[Travis Kalanick]

It's 4 million pre you're talking about.

[Ben Horowitz]

First round.

[Travis Kalanick]

Yeah, our first round at Uber was 4 million pre.

[Ben Horowitz]

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.

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

Yeah, certainly. Biggest check I ever written.

[Ben Horowitz]

You know, when did you get to conviction that we were 100% do. Like, what was your process?

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

Like I said 100. When I first started talking to him. Well, as soon as I knew what it was, the only question for me was, was there going to be one thing? Yeah, because like, I known Travis for, 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. Like, oh, if I can deal with these guys, the rest of the world's gonna 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.

[Travis Kalanick]

I think a lot of people don't. Some people know this, but not a lot is that we actually had separate companies going. And so when I went to do the fundraise, I kind of showed up at a 16, kind of like the guy with a trench coast 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 to this deal 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, which was pretty interesting because, like, how do you do a ratio when certain things are very early? But. But 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 did. He's not only phenomenal, of course, on all the five or six or eight things, and of course a 16 is in most or all of them, but 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's. It makes things better in some ways.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah. Before we get to Q and A, lastly, Travis, why don't you say a couple words about what it's like to have a lot of the Uber gang back together. It's, 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. Talk.

[Travis Kalanick]

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.

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

Bad luck.

[Travis Kalanick]

It's not just a bad look. It's actually illegal. So there's that too. And. 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, uh, Gautam, who was the 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 Levandowski, of course. Eric Meihofer, who ran Uber's advanced technology group. He's running Food Robotics. Like, a list goes on, guys. Oh, Jessica. 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 in Japan, like, my number one thing to 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 and 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.

[Ben Horowitz]

Speaking of special people in this room, I want to open it up to some Q and A. Gary Travis.

[Travis Kalanick]

Congratulations. My favorite question to ask for Especially a room like this is if you could send a message in a bottle to the 18 to 22 year old version of yourself what to say. Look, the 18 year old version of me was a super geek pretending not to be. So I would just be like, dude, just be a geek. It's going to be fine. You know, the pretending to not be a geek when you're a geek is just a lot of cognitive space load. That's not necessary. You know, I'm not sure that things would have gone better, but that's certainly one of the things I probably would have told myself.

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

Yeah.

[Travis Kalanick]

Yeah.

[Ben Horowitz]

What about you, Ben?

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

That's a. I just. Not to worry about. Not to worry about stuff, you know, like, it is what it is. Do what you gotta do, you know, don't to. Don't wait. Like consequence is going to be what the consequence is. You know, you got to find a way out and you just got to keep looking till you find it. And there's nothing else to do. So worrying doesn't help at all.

[Travis Kalanick]

No stress.

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

Yeah.

[Travis Kalanick]

Don't worry. Be happy.

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

Yeah, yeah. Don't worry. Be well. But you need urgency.

[Travis Kalanick]

Don't be too happy.

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

Yeah, yeah. Don't be too happy.

[Podcast Host]

Don't worry.

[Ben Horowitz]

Be happy. Travis.

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

Don't.

[Ben Horowitz]

Don't be too happy.

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

Don't be fat and happy. Yeah.

[Ben Horowitz]

Okay, next question.

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

Owen, question for Travis. How are you going to structure all this? 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?

[Travis Kalanick]

Yeah, that's super great. 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 a. It's sort of like this is the management architecture, organizational architecture, geek thing that we got to figure out, okay? The normal gna, finance, legal, hr, shared. Then you're like, okay, infrastructure. On the technology side, shared is 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 transportation. 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. And 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. For the other situations. Yeah, yeah. It's super interesting. 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.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Travis Kalanick]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Next question.

[Travis Kalanick]

Brent. Hi, Travis. One thing that you said earlier was being pissed off makes you a really good entrepreneur. You know, there's. It's interesting, sometimes people say that if you're successful and you're driven by a desire for revenge, it's like a dirty fuel. Like it works, but it's not the best source of fuel that you can possibly have. I'm curious, throughout your career and just like everything that you've built, have you found a cleaner source of fuel or you just. What's your takeaway on that? Look, most people don't know this, but before this is a couple companies. Before Uber, I did a. A peer to peer file sharing system. Got sued for a quarter of a trillion dollars by 33 of the largest media companies in the world. And I was pissed. I did a revenge business which was I'm going to do a peer to peer CDN like Akamai bittorrent meets Akamai. Before bittorrent existed. And my whole thing was turn those guys who sued me into customers. It was like a full spite business. Like full spite store. Like, let's go.

[Ben Horowitz]

Okay.

[Travis Kalanick]

But I think in many ways the. There is a. There is a dirty. There is a dirty revenge or dirty. It's dirty. It can be successful, but it ends up being less than what it should be when it comes from the wrong place. If that makes sense. Part of what drove me earlier was a little bit of like a fear of failure. A fear of failure. And that can mean long nights where you get little done. And it just means you have this edge, this weird vibe that people like, dude, something's wrong with that guy. Right. And it's just a thing. You're just not going to go all the way. Right. When the Uber thing happened and then moved on to New stuff. Which was like eight months after I left Uber, I was doing the new thing. Yeah. I kind of fell in love again, you know, and so people said, are you pissed off about Uber? Are you? This thing, like, are you. Does that grind you or, you know, is it on your mind? And it's just like, when you fall in love again, you don't think about the ex very much. And if you come from that place, you can create in a beautiful, undirty way. If that makes sense.

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

Yeah.

[Travis Kalanick]

It's important. And it's not. That doesn't. You gotta work on it to get to that place. Probably over time. But by the time I got there, I was there.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Travis Kalanick]

Maybe one last question. Oh, and by the way, you can't be retard maxing to get to that place. Okay. For our boy Mark. For our boy Mark. I gotta still have a debate on that one. All right. Yeah.

[Ben Horowitz]

Question you mentioned.

[Travis Kalanick]

I remember this slide. I'll remember it forever. Killer Boss was the killer boss for

[Ben Horowitz]

Adams, especially in this.

[Travis Kalanick]

What is the killer boss? What does that mean?

[Ben Horowitz]

Final boss.

[Travis Kalanick]

Final boss.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Travis Kalanick]

Oh, Final boss. Killer Boss is my version for finance. Look, there's huge opportunities here. It's. Maybe the final boss is like. I don't know if the final boss, but, like, I'll just. I'll just riff a little bit on this concept, which is there are a lot of people in this room and not in this room, who will gladly vanquish me. I don't mean that in a bad way, but we're competing for the next Industrial Revolution. You know, Magic Johnson. This is old school. Magic Johnson, Larry Bird were like, kind of guys, but, like, they'll kick each other's butt, right? So that's the wrong analogy for this crew. But you get. It's like Patrick Ewing, like, you know, some shit. Okay, but so I think there's. There's. That is actually pretty important. Is there like, an Ultra. Like, you have to. You always have to think when you go into a space like this, you go, who's the best of the best at Industrial AI? Anybody want to guess? It's really obvious. His. His name rhymes with shmelon. Okay? He's the best of the best, and he'll just keep going and keep doing lots more, even if what you do now is not what he does now.

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

So may.

[Travis Kalanick]

If you want to go final boss mode. I mean, he. I don't even know who his final boss is. Like, he'll like, dude, Elon's the goat. I'm like, dude, I'm a baby goat. It's great, you know, but that maybe he's the final boss, you know, uh, but mad respect of course. He's, he's obviously the best by a long shot and so anyways, yeah, I'm not sure exactly how to answer, but I was a little riff on it.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, maybe we'll, we'll end on, on this question, which is you, you've never left, but you were in a cave for a while. You know, you were, you were focusing.

[Travis Kalanick]

I had a, I had a, a presentation that I gave to my leadership team in like 2019. The title was Be Uniconic. Be Uniconic. We did, we had a fucking massive high fidelity playbook on how to not get attention for anything we did. We had thousands of employees who were not allowed to put our company on LinkedIn. It was weird.

[Ben Horowitz]

So this is your coming out party, so to speak. Yeah, you're back in the flow. Talk about how you've seen Silicon Valley or the tech industry at large change from when you were, you know, right in the center in it. To be coming back eight years later. What would have, what surprised you or what's. What's most notable about where we are as.

[Travis Kalanick]

Look, I think probably one of the coolest things, and this is part of why I'm out versus not before, is that the media landscape has completely changed the media landscape. Ten years ago, 90% of what was said was very negative. Business had become politics and we didn't know it. So think of your favorite politician if you have one. I mean many of you may not have one, but let's just pretend you did. Okay? It's fucking hilarious. But let's just say, okay, take your favorite politician are the go. Type his name in on Google. What are, do you think you're going to find anything good? It's going to be just tsunami waves of negativity is what you're going to find. Of course, if it leads, if it bleeds, it leads. Right? And that's human nature and there's negativity and that gets the clicks and the whole thing.

[Andreessen Horowitz Partner]

But

[Travis Kalanick]

we weren't used to it then and we thought everything that the New York Times said was real. And we know now that that's not even close to true. And it's, we, we now understand. And so the media landscape is like, yeah, you don't have to talk to those guys and you can go and talk to a David Senra, you can go and talk to Joe Rogan or name your guy and it's you can say what you need to say in a, in an environment that's not like a struggle session in Maoist China, right? So that's a big fricking change. And, and I think it's a. You know, Elon buying Twitter is like the beginning of us being able to speak our minds and for disagreeing to not be illegal. That's a big deal. We should all thank Elon for that. And it allows. So you go, okay. Somebody like myself who basically was just like, okay, I want to build. I want to not think about what the New York Times is writing. When I make decisions about what I build, I had to emulate what it's like being a capitalist. In Russia, which is their number one KPI is called Shut the fuck Up. And that's what I did for eight years. In a weird way, it was like that for different reasons, but it was like that. And so we're now out of that mode or getting out of that mode and let's go. And I think that's the biggest change for all of us in the last eight years. And God bless and like, hopefully that continues.

[Ben Horowitz]

I think it's a great note to wrap on. Travis is back. Travis never left. Give it up for Travis and thank you.

[Podcast Host]

Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to, like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X1 6Z and subscribe to our [e-mail] thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com disclosures.