Travis Kalanick Is Back | Building the Future of Industrial AI

Travis Kalanick, Ben Horowitz, and Erik Torenberg reunite to reflect on Uber's early days, the investment that almost happened, and why Kalanick believes the next great technology opportunity lies beyond software. They discuss the lessons of building Uber, the value of founder-led companies, and why Kalanick spent nearly eight years quietly building Atoms before stepping back into the spotlight. The conversation explores industrial AI, robotics, autonomy, mining, food production, and Kalanick's vision for digitizing the physical world, where software, manufacturing, real estate, and transportation come together to transform entire industries.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We know what Uber's 2017 was like.

• 0:03Ben Horowitz?

  Travis Kalanick has stepped down from his role as chief executive.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  That wouldn't have gone that way if Ben or Mark was on the board. You're in this hell, you're dealing with the lawsuits.

• 0:14Ben Horowitz?

  Are you worried about the lawsuit?

• 0:16Speaker 00

  And you say, hey, let's build again. It's not as much about where you start, it's about why you start.

• 0:22Ben Horowitz?

  He's one of the very rare guys who made as much money as he did and wanted to keep money.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  Also, remember, I did it stealth.

• 0:30Ben Horowitz?

  I know some of the techniques I used, very aggressive, but that name, you can't use that name.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  And I remember David Drummond from Google was on our board and he's like, you know, Travis, that's not a thing, dude. You've got to change it. The meaningful thing about Adam's food is can you make the preparation and delivery of a quality meal so efficient that it approaches the cost of going to the grocery store? If it does, you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car.

• 0:59Ben Horowitz?

  A lot of us had that idea. To build a company, a great company, it's always a great entrepreneur.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  Today, I'm joined by Travis Kalanick and Ben Horowitz for a conversation years in the making. We look back at the investment that almost happened, the lessons Travis took from building Uber, and why he believes the next great technology revolution won't be in software, but in the physical world. We discuss the origins of Adams, why Travis spent years building in stealth, the rise of industrial AI, robotics, autonomy, and what it takes to build companies that transform entire industries.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  Travis, this is the I'm Back podcast, this is the Return of the King episode.

• 1:43Ben Horowitz?

  Return of the Mac.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  That's what I'm all about. We can return. I don't know what the right thing is, but we got to come up with a walk-on song for sure.

• 1:50Ben Horowitz?

  Return of the Mac.

• 1:52Speaker 00

  And it's not just the return of Travis, but it's also a return of this partnership, or what could have been this relationship with Travis and Ben. So I want to read a quote, Travis, from your launch post. "I've known Mark and Ben for a long time, and we got oh-so-close to partnering up at Uber in 2011. I, Travis, blame Mark, Ben blamed himself, but let's just say it was all on us, it was on all of us, and in 2017, Uber suffered the consequences of not having Mark on the board. If you know, you know." Travis, tell the story. Okay, so this will be interesting because I think Ben and I have maybe discussed this once or twice.

• 2:24Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, it's very painful.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  And I think that there could-

• 2:27Ben Horowitz?

  It's mostly for me.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  I'm not sure if there's a difference of opinion on what happened, but I'll tell you what I thought happened. So I'm in fundraising mode. This is our Series B. This is 2011. Uber started 2010, June 2010. I'm raising our Series B. Earlier that year, I did Series A with VCL remain nameless. And I'm hardcore. It's usually, I went through such tough times as an entrepreneur pre-Uber, that once I'm in Uber and things are working, I'm still acting like I'm not going to eat tomorrow. So I would do everything right up to the line, be perfect. And so I have this whole fundraising process that I would do just

• 3:12Speaker 00

  to perfection, and that means I'd run an auction. So met with A16Z guys, met with lots of folks, and it was what I would call a winner-takes-all auction, meaning there's one major lead, they're going to set the price, and then everybody else will fall in. So I'd go to the one guy, I'd tell him what the story was, and they're like, oh, we're interested, he's leaning forward. They're like, so how much are you raising? What's the price? And I would do this thing where I would say, this is going to be one of the hottest deals in Silicon Valley this year. We don't know where the price is going to be, where it's going to go to, but it's at least blank. And I call this the uncapped

• 3:55Speaker 00

  anchor, meaning I'm never in a place where I'm negotiating with somebody, where I'm here and they're here and we meet in the middle. I'm always saying it's at least this, and it can go up. But I start low.

• 4:08Ben Horowitz?

  So it'll only go up.

• 4:09Speaker 00

  So that everybody's pumped, leaning forward. He's like, okay. You could see body language, you can read, it's good. The next guy literally comes to your office an hour later, same thing happens, he's fired up, I'm showing all the analytics, it's great. Okay, so we're interested, what are you thinking about price, whatever? I'm like, if the last one was at least 2X our previous round, it just became 3X. I'll say, we don't know, one of the best deals in Silicon, it's going to be one of the top deals in Silicon Valley this year, but it will be at least 3X our last round. And he's like, okay. You then go call the guy before and you're like, hey, just hey, look, dude, this went from 2X to 3X, you know, we'll see where it goes, I don't know. They start getting nervous.

• 4:54Speaker 00

  Anyways, you get all the way to top, and then you go going once, going twice. And it's kind of funny, in this particular case, Yuri was almost coming over the top. So we got to 375, 375 million pre with A16Z. Yuri almost came in at 400, but he was like, no, I can't do it. And so I'm like, okay, going once, going twice, sold. And it's funny because that's a high momentum deal, and that's how you do it. And at the time, you almost should feel a little shy about doing something like that, and it's a little bit crass, let's just say, but that's how I was wired back in the day. Like, just go all the frickin' way, all the way, score the touchdown, even when you're gonna, you know, it's a little much. So we're starting to work, you're going to get a term sheet going,

• 5:38Speaker 00

  the whole thing, and I get an email from Mark, and it was like, hey Travis, let's go to dinner. And he was like, tomorrow night or something like that, let's go to dinner. And I said, send me the term sheet, and then, yeah, we can go to dinner. And he responded, he said, let's go to dinner. And I'm like, oh, I didn't like that. So came down south, this neck of the woods, because I was in San Francisco, and this little sushi place, I don't remember the name of it, and he said, look, I know we talked about 375, but went to the partnership, they don't agree, or they just didn't think it was the right number, the best we're going to be able to do is 210. See that? So that, I'm just telling you how it went down for me.

• 6:24Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, well, well-

• 6:25Speaker 00

  And so then I'm like-

• 6:27Ben Horowitz?

  The story was definitely different on the other side.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  So, but I want, it'd be interesting to hear it. I've got more than the hour we have scheduled here, if we want to take time. But anyways, I had a high momentum deal, it went all the way to the top, I auctioned it, cleared the market, and the bottom came out from it. And so I had to go back to everybody else and say, 210 is the new number. Like, hey, guys, the guy who won backed out, I'm now back at 210, we're starting the auction over. It was super awkward and weird, because people used to lose credibility in that moment, and I built it back up. And basically, it ended up being Menlo Park, this is how Sherwin got involved in Uber. And at some point, I told Sherwin to stop negotiating against

• 7:14Speaker 00

  himself, because he just kept driving it up without anybody else. I'm like, dude, you won, dude, it's fine. I didn't want the same thing to happen again, you know what I'm saying? So I'm very clear about the 375 and the 210, and the experience I had, but there may be another side to that story.

• 7:32Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, well, okay, let me just tell you what I actually remember, and then what I kind of remember. So I remember you came in for the pitch, and I think it was just you, which is, by the way, unusual. So normally, people, particularly in those days, very rare that entrepreneur would come in with no team members on a deal that size. That was a big deal, by the way, that wasn't, that was a high-priced deal. Now, it's like a fucking 375.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, you'd be like, dude, precede, pre-seed, pre-pre, right?

• 8:05Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, the pitch was super impressive. And then the other thing I recall pretty closely was Travis had definitely read some of my blogs. I felt like, oh, we can win this, this is a deal. And we had the discussion, and it was clear, like, no, we want to do the deal. And at the time, I was like, I should really do this one, but I wasn't the consumer guy. And then I had a lot of board seats and a lot going on.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  I think it was like 16 board seats, it was something crazy.

• 8:32Ben Horowitz?

  It was just, I was like, ah. And so I gave it to Mark and John O'Farrell to do. And then, all I remember, so I remember something different at this point, but I got it all from them, so I wasn't there. There was something about the employee option pool or some shit. It was one of these things where it's like, okay, okay, but like, I just assumed we were doing the deal. And then the next thing, I knew Sherwin had the deal. And I was like, jeez. And I regret, I can't tell you how long. So that was the beginning of my torture on this thing. So I was like, fuck, I know we should do that deal, we lost the deal. And then meanwhile, Scott Weisand did a deal for the other company

• 9:17Ben Horowitz?

  in the space, Lyft. And by the way, that kind of got off to a very, very difficult start, largely because of Uber. And, you know, in order to dive in catch, I ended up having to go on the board. Like, I took over that board seat to kind of help them through that.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  And just so you understand my experience on the Lyft thing, it happened, I believe, a year later, almost to the day, something like this. And the deal on Lyft was 210.

• 9:45Ben Horowitz?

  Was it really?

• 9:47Speaker 00

  I know, I'm just saying, this is what the entrepreneur is going to remember, dude, you know what I'm saying?

• 9:51Ben Horowitz?

  But anyways, because if a company is in a lot of trouble, that's generally when I get called, given my history with that.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  Oh, man, I was working so hard on that.

• 9:59Ben Horowitz?

  And so-

• 10:01Speaker 00

  I was working hard on that trouble.

• 10:03Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, my God, it was a lot of trouble. It was a lot of trouble. But anyway, so I'm living with that. And then, by the way, and then I would see Travis, you know, now and again, like, we had, I had him over to my house, CEO barbecue, like, all kinds of shit, right? Like, just because, like, I knew who he was.

• 10:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, we were kind of friends.

• 10:19Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah. And it was always like, a lot of, like, there was a, there was a respect there, because we knew who each other were. But like, he was winning, and it was just like, he wasn't going to let me fucking not hear it. And it was just horrible, you know, I had to listen. I was like, god damn it. All the time, like, for a decade.

• 10:42Speaker 00

  There was also this other thing that would happen. So this is like, 2000, I think this really started 2014, 15, et cetera, is Emile and I would meet up with Mark and Ben at this super undercover restaurant.

• 10:59Ben Horowitz?

  Ah, yes.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  Right next to our office, which was in the same building at the time as Twitter, or sorry, same building as Square, right?

• 11:07Ben Horowitz?

  By the way, Emile also, like-

• 11:10Ben Horowitz?

  A remarkably amazing motherfucker. And currently the CTO of the Department of War, but super talented.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, the best. We would do these sessions, we'd have dinner, break some bread, talk shop. And we're like, and then I'd always walk out going, damn. It would be so great to have these guys involved. Of course, I didn't because they were at Lyft. And sometimes even, we might even talk about, hey, is there a thing that comes together? But like, I was just so the way I was.

• 11:44Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, there was no way to cross a deal with him, other than if he gave them the company.

• 11:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:48Ben Horowitz?

  And he could just fire everybody instantly.

• 11:51Speaker 00

  So it was, you know, but it was like, that is, it was, it was, there was mutual respect with this really kind of cool tension at the same time.

• 12:05Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 12:07Speaker 00

  That made it, that kind of just was the extra texture on the Uber experience, at least for me.

• 12:13Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, it was kind of like, it felt like, well, you're a basketball guy. It always felt like the old Larry Bird, like fuck Magic Johnson. Where like, okay, we'll meet each other. We hate you, but like, uh, wish you were on our team. It sucks.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  So it's the one that got away. But fast forward, and now there's a, there's a new chance. Well, what I would say is, there's one middle piece to this. Sure. Which is those who are obviously in the tech industry, like we know what Uber's 2017 was like. Yeah. That wouldn't have gone that way if Ben or Mark was on the board.

• 12:59Ben Horowitz?

  Nope.

• 13:00Speaker 00

  So, so when Ben and I talked about this, we're like, it was our fault.

• 13:04Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  We screwed it up.

• 13:07Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. I mean, it would have been, by the way, Uber would be, I'll just say considerably larger and more important and more central company today. There's no question. I mean, first of all, it would have won food. No question. Uber was dominating food. Dominating food at the time. And it would have also been for sure a leader in autonomous.

• 13:36Speaker 00

  DoorDash was 5% market share when I left.

• 13:40Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  And if we lost a 10th of a percent in a week.

• 13:45Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  We're not going home this weekend.

• 13:48Ben Horowitz?

  And by the way, Tony, God bless him, had a hell of a time getting his round done at the time. Like, right at that period, he was doing a round at DoorDash. And he had to really struggle to get it done. And, you know, congratulations to him for building, you know, what he built.

• 14:06Speaker 00

  And he's done it. You got it, you got it. You know what? It's really easy to do the what ifs and the this and the that. The thing that matters most is tale of the tape.

• 14:15Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  And he got some stuff done.

• 14:18Ben Horowitz?

  He did, he did, he did.

• 14:19Speaker 00

  You know, respect.

• 14:20Ben Horowitz?

  Amazing. He survived it. Which is, by the way, you know, in entrepreneurship, surviving is a big part of it.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:29Ben Horowitz?

  It's not that easy.

• 14:30Speaker 00

  Our Tommy program was like second to Waymo, but catching up at the time.

• 14:35Ben Horowitz?

  And you had the network.

• 14:36Speaker 00

  We had the network too. And we just, we had the ferocity, sort of the fierceness that it takes to catch up.

• 14:43Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 14:44Speaker 00

  In a certain technology space, while building all these other things that we were doing. I mean, it was a lot, it was, it was good times. It was a lot of fun.

• 14:52Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 14:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, even though 17 was super tough for me. And maybe that you could say even for the company at large, certainly for the company at large. You know, I loved every minute. And honestly, even when you come out of it, and you're like, yeah, it got a little weird at the end. It was tough. I still, I still, I still, it was still great. It was fun.

• 15:18Ben Horowitz?

  Some of that you love in retrospect.

• 15:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I get you. I trust me, trust me. You don't have to remind me of that. I'm just saying like.

• 15:24Ben Horowitz?

  There's that feeling that's so fucking horrible at the time, you know?

• 15:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was, there was a love affair there. And that's almost the way I would put it. And a lot of people talk about, well, you know, are you mad about this or that? You upset that that happened? And I'm like, when you, when you fall in love again, you don't think about the ex very much.

• 15:48Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  That's it. So then you can just be like, it was a good time.

• 15:52Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  She got a little crazy at the end.

• 15:54Ben Horowitz?

  That's true. That's true. Like, yeah, the crazy, crazy ex.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, there we go.

• 16:01Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  And how did you fall in love again? Or did it take you, how did you handle this interim period between sort of the? Well, yeah, I mean, you had a really interesting situation, I think, headlines. And the negativity in the headlines from that period of time. And you could really say the extreme wokeness that was sort of coming in on Uber and trying to constrain it, if that makes sense. There's this interim period, it was like seven, eight months between when I left and when I started what's now called Adams. And I had to sort of fight for my life.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  Because there are just a number of lawsuits, a number of investigations, all these things where it was just like, I continue to stand by every decision I made at Uber. But, you know, there are a lot of times where you could just make the argument, I just got way too close to the line. And then, yeah, I could show that there's no chalk on the shoe. I could show, but you would need a electromagnetic scanning microscope to see that there was no chalk on the shoe. You reverse angle, slow mo, and it's just like, that's, the problem is, is the edge of being a, what's the word?

• 17:27Speaker 00

  A hard scrabble, small startup kid, brought to something that's working and going super big.

• 17:36Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  You don't realize that when you get big, there actually are different rules.

• 17:41Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 17:41Speaker 00

  And they're not just the rules. There's the, there's the vibes of the rules.

• 17:47Ben Horowitz?

  When the pirate becomes the Navy, we talk about this at the firm a lot. When you're the upstart and you're battling the man, you can go hard in ways that if you do it when you're the big, the big dog.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  It's not okay.

• 18:02Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, very, you're viewed entirely differently.

• 18:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I didn't, I hadn't consumed that information.

• 18:09Ben Horowitz?

  It actually helped me because, you know, when we started the firm, we were the upstart. And I talked this fucking crazy shit about the other VCs and this and that, and being a, call them bitches. But like, at some point, like, I could feel it turning. And I remembered what happened to him and I was like, and we actually had a whole thing, like, we're not the pirates anymore. Don't say that type of stuff. Like, be chill.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  We had, yeah, we had this thing where we would, against Lyft, we would, we would recruit the drivers on Lyft to bring them over to Uber so that it was hard for Lyft to build supply. And we would aggressively do it, and we had a program for it internally, which we called shoplifting. Okay?

• 18:59Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, just that, that name, by the way, like, forget about all the, I know some of the techniques they used, very aggressive. But that name, you can't use that name.

• 19:10Speaker 00

  That's just not a thing. And I remember, you know, David Drummond from Google was on our board. And he's like, you know, Travis, that's not a thing, dude. You've got to change it. And then I had, of course, like antitrust training, which like, at the time, again, I'm like this small startup kid. I'm like, antitrust, what the hell is that? Legal people telling me, whatever. They're like, look, I'm like, I can't wait to have that problem, you know? And they're like, they're like, look, here's the thing. The way you call projects, it has to be appropriate for like a 10-year-old basketball team.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  So it went from shoplift to the national, sorry, the North American Championship Series. We call it the NACS.

• 20:01Speaker 00

  And we had a whole very heavy duty initiative called the NACS to like make sure that the North American Championship Series was won by us.

• 20:12Ben Horowitz?

  That is hilarious. I didn't know about the North American Championship Series.

• 20:19Erik Torenberg?

  Okay, so you go through this eight month period, you're in this hell, you're dealing with the lawsuits, you're sort of reflecting back, you're thinking about what's next, and you say, hey, let's build again?

• 20:30Speaker 00

  So what happened was, it's super interesting.

• 20:34Speaker 00

  So I had a buddy who started a thing right near the end of my Uber tenure.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  And it was called Cloud Kitchens. And what happened was is he, he's a real estate savant. That's his thing. And he was looking like, real estate, like, there's gotta be an angle in tech and real estate. How do we do this? And he got a property up, actually, maybe, you know what, let me start even before this. We got Uber Eats up in 2015. We saw the first dark kitchens. I don't know, it was like late 15, early 16. We saw pictures of commercial kitchens in Melbourne that were not restaurants, that were on Uber Eats.

• 21:20Speaker 00

  So the first dark kitchens were emerging. We're like, this is crazy. That's so interesting. And a buddy of mine, who is this real estate savant, sort of like caught wind of like, what's going on? And he had this idea, which was, why don't we have a multi-tenant approach to this? So 30 kitchens on a single property. And basically lease these kitchens, which are 200 square feet, as delivery-only locations. Anyways, I didn't really, I mean, I sort of knew what was going on, but not really. And then in the fall, like, three months after I had left Uber, we meet up. And he's telling me about it. He's like, yeah, you know, we've got a few tenants. It's kind of working.

• 22:05Speaker 00

  He's like, I'm gonna do like a few more of these. I think I'm gonna try to figure out how to do a few more. I'm like, you mean like a few thousand, right?

• 22:15Speaker 00

  And so then we partnered up. I acquired it. I think they'd sort of, they've done like their, they'd just done their Series A. And so I acquired it, and then we just went to town, right? And so it's really interesting, because sometimes you start a thing. And sometimes you're involved in a thing, and then you come in. Like, I think there's an interesting story about, like, Elon was involved, like, obviously involved in Tesla from the beginning. Was an investor at first, but then went all the way in. And it's interesting how these ideas come. So I like to say that sometimes you have ideas. Sometimes ideas come to you.

• 23:00Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 23:00Speaker 00

  But if it's an idea that's meant to be, if it's meant to be your soulmate, you know it when you see it.

• 23:08Ben Horowitz?

  Right.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  And you just, and sometimes you just, it's like a love affair, you just go for it. Some people have these long lists.

• 23:16Ben Horowitz?

  That's a very important distinction, because there's a real difference between that and like, what's known as the professional CEO, right? Where nobody would ever consider, nobody smart other than like a few like weird political people would ever consider Elon a professional CEO. It's like, oh, that's an idea. That's, I didn't start the company, but it's mine. That's mine. Like, it is me. And I know how to do it. And these guys did a great job on starting it, but there's no way they can do it. And that's a different, a very different animal.

• 23:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, you know, you fall in love with something, and it's meant to be for you at that time. And you just go for it. And for me, it was like, ah, man.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  Complexity is interesting to me. Things that are naturally not, they're not sexy on the surface is also weirdly interesting.

• 24:28Speaker 00

  And then, like, especially if you can see that it's sexy, but people don't understand yet. That's where the sparkle in your eye, you kind of go, ah, you don't see what I see, and I'm pretty sure I'm right. And that's the fun part, yeah. But this was a very complex thing, because we're buying property, we're doing construction.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  We are, then have a sales team that's selling to restaurants a delivery-only location. So they're expanding the restaurant chain. This isn't like I'm just getting into a vendor flow. I'm actually, we're making a strategic sell, which is, you should expand. You should expand your business, and you should expand it in a new way, which is two strategic moves at the same time. And...

• 25:18Ben Horowitz?

  By the way, you like complexity.

• 25:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:22Ben Horowitz?

  Which makes it...

• 25:23Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah. So then you're like, you're also, okay, so we've woven technology through this whole real estate thing. We have a software stack that, of course, will sell, will work in this facility, but will also sell it to all your brick and mortars everywhere. And shit, let's just get some robotics going at the same time, because like, labor's your biggest problem if you're a restaurateur. If you solve that, it's really big. I can get into the strategy of why that is the whole thing, but just the brass tacks of the complexity of the project was interesting to me.

• 26:03Erik Torenberg?

  So it was more kind of emergent or iterative than, hey, I've got this master vision for what it's all gonna turn into?

• 26:11Speaker 00

  No, I think at that time, I, like, if I don't see how it's big and meaningful, then the complexity, for like, complexity's sake's not a thing. There has to be, you know, maybe somebody would say a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It has to be something meaningful. The meaningful thing about Adam's Food, or what folks know as Cloud Kitchens, is can you make the preparation and delivery of a meal, a quality meal, so efficient that it approaches the cost of going to the grocery store?

• 26:52Speaker 00

  If it does, you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car. And you go, okay, that's kind of a big deal. But then you say, what do you need to do to get there? Okay, well, you need to do e-commerce for online food delivery. Which means I need warehouses, like Amazon style. Except they're not just for logistics. It's not just picking, packing, sorting, and then putting in a car. You also have to have manufacturing there too. Manufacturing, also known as a restaurant. People don't think of that, but you're the labor statistics, but your labor statistics, restaurants are manufacturers, okay? So you have to have manufacturing and logistics infrastructure in the same place. That's real estate.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  Then you actually have to have automated production. That's the manufacturing, so robotic food robots, essentially. Food robotics. And then you need to have robotic couriers.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  And you do those three things, and then all of a sudden, you are getting super high-quality meals. Everything you could ever imagine. We call it the internet food court.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  And it gets to you at the price of going to the grocery store.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  So you go, okay, nice, that's a nice story. Then you go, well, in 20 years, will robotics, I start with a really easy question. In 20 years, will people be cooking food regularly?

• 28:20Speaker 00

  And there will be a suite of robotics that basically will make higher-quality meals.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Like, this is, it'll be doing a better job than any of us could do. And I think most people, especially those in the robotics space, would be like, of course. That's obvious that that's gonna happen. And you're like, in 20 years, are we gonna have, I call them autonomous burritos? Like, boxes on wheels that hold food at temperature that come to your house? Yes. Everybody will say, yes, absolutely. We see Waymos cruising around already. We just need a very, a much cheaper version of that. So 20 years is like the easy one. Then you go, well, what about, what about 10? What about seven? What about five? And so that's when you're bending, you're bending reality. You're bending it towards now.

• 29:11Speaker 00

  So everybody would agree that this is going to happen, and now it's about when and who.

• 29:19Speaker 00

  And then you say LFG. Now, sometimes you're a little bit early. And I would say on the. We were a bit early on cloud kitchens, but but you build those bricks. All those things I talked about. We have hundreds of facilities in 30 countries, many hundreds of facilities in 30 countries. Restaurants, because the online delivery market keeps growing, the restaurants are doing better and better. So success is happening.

• 29:48Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 29:48Speaker 00

  Right? Well, restaurant world has high churn. Your churn starts coming down because volume's going up. We have applications that guarantee volume into these restaurants so that we can have successful tenants, which means I'm a successful real estate guy from a business model perspective. The robotics start to work. You know, we're getting a manufacturing line for our robots up this in Q4. So like the pieces start to come together. You're like, production is now 50% cheaper. Once we get the couriers, the robotic couriers, you go from $12 a drop for each meal to 50 cents. A dollar of distribution cost per meal.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  And now you're taking, now you're taking, okay, $6 out in labor. You're taking, let's call it $10 or $11 out on the courier. On the real estate, because you're going to get higher value, volume, because you're driving the prices down. You probably save a few bucks, let's call it two or three bucks on occupancy per meal. And all of a sudden, you've got like a $8 or $10 meal that's delivered to you, all in.

• 30:59Ben Horowitz?

  Plus, you don't have to recruit drivers, you know, and get shoplifted.

• 31:05Speaker 00

  That's true. So that's right. You can't shoplift a robotic courier.

• 31:10Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yes.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  So.

• 31:12Erik Torenberg?

  We should, we need to stop using this term.

• 31:14Speaker 00

  So you're.

• 31:14Erik Torenberg?

  So wrong.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 31:15Erik Torenberg?

  Hundred facilities in 30 countries, thousands of employees, you know, over eight year period, and you're in stealth.

• 31:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, dude. Yeah, that's just super hard mode.

• 31:26Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  And the thing is, is like, look, coming out of 17, things were, it was 150 articles a day of negative negativity. And so I wanted to be able to build without bringing that negativity into the system. And I wanted the team to be able to build without worrying about what the New York Times was writing tomorrow.

• 31:48Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  Simple as that. And it was the right thing to do. Now, we had to do hard mode is we had to recruit cold.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  And it was always from a recruiter who has a stealth thing in LinkedIn and on their signature.

• 32:02Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 32:02Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 32:05Speaker 00

  And you had to go get customers with like stealth in LinkedIn, like, and you're thousands of people big. This is hard mode.

• 32:15Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  And it was interesting. We didn't know how long it was going to go.

• 32:19Erik Torenberg?

  And you have to trust that no one's going to leak.

• 32:22Speaker 00

  You know what happens is here's the cool part about stealth if you go that long. And I don't recommend this for anybody.

• 32:29Ben Horowitz?

  It's not. It's very special.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, you don't really, I don't, you know, but. Eventually. There's this break in your narrative, like there was a story arc and it was going, going, going. And then it's discontinuous. It stops. And there's this, whoops. Sorry about that, guys. There's this long period of time now where nothing is filling in. And what happens then is the media doesn't want to cover a story. Because they, it's so hard to discuss a thing that has a gap a few years before it. So it's too hard to do the story and it's too hard to cover it.

• 33:13Speaker 00

  So you get to this place where it becomes self fulfilling, where it's easier to be stealth over time. Because even if somebody tries to leak, nobody even knows what to do with it.

• 33:24Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  They're just like, I don't even understand it. By the way, we did crazy stuff. So people know it as cloud kitchens in the US, but it's casinos, sequentas in Latin America. And we have different names. That means like magical kitchens, essentially. We have like Kitchen Valley in Korea. We have Flash Kitchen and three other names in China. We have, I mean, Food Stars in London, like go, it goes, you know. You know, I think it's Kitchen Park in Middle East. We were going to go with Yala kitchens, like, you know, it's like a bunch of things like this. So it was very hard to connect the dots.

• 33:58Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. You're extra still.

• 34:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. Anyways.

• 34:03Ben Horowitz?

  That'd work.

• 34:03Erik Torenberg?

  And so at some point, an even bigger vision for this company emerges to digitize the physical world. We're category creating, you're creating a category, the term industrial AI.

• 34:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:14Erik Torenberg?

  Talk about when this bigger vision starts to culminate.

• 34:16Speaker 00

  So, look, the, the vision for digitizing the physical world for me started at Uber. Okay. And treating atoms like bits started at Uber. You were, it was sci fi at one point, I promise. You would touch glass and a car would come to you.

• 34:35Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  And you had satellite view, you're watching this car come to you. That was crazy. Now it's just like, whatever. Okay. But it was crazy at the time. Everybody's first Uber experience was a magical moment. So we, you know, digitizing the physical world was the thing. And this idea of what I would call an atoms based computer was something I sort of was working on in terms of her framework at the end of Uber, which is CPU manipulates bits, storage stores bits. Network moves bits from point A to point B. Okay, well, CPU manipulates bits, what manipulates atoms? That's manufacturing. Storage stores bits, what stores atoms? That's real estate. Network moves bits from point A to point B, what moves atoms?

• 35:20Speaker 00

  Well, that's transporter logistics. And those now are your three core computing resources in an atoms based computer. And you know what? Everything you learn in your computer science curriculum, everything you learn in engineering, it plays in the atoms world. Same frameworks, all the data structures, all the algorithms, it works exactly the same.

• 35:42Ben Horowitz?

  Routing algorithms.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  Oh, totally. Totally. In fact, we use, we use TCP.

• 35:48Ben Horowitz?

  OSPF.

• 35:49Speaker 00

  We use TCP Sawtooth to basically manage how much demand to send to certain kitchens based on capacity and reliability, as an example. But like, we look at, when I go and I'm messing around, like, when I'm pitching this to a tech person who wants to understand. That 10,000 square foot facility, I call a 10,000 square foot semiconductor. And it's a 30 core processor, 30 kitchens. They're computing atoms, not bits. The corridors where the food moves, that's a network bus. The processing center is like an L1 cache or something similar. The.

• 36:27Ben Horowitz?

  Taking this analogy very far.

• 36:29Speaker 00

  The cold, cold storage where you have ice cream and juice. Okay. That's pre computed items that sit on the edge, those are your Akamai servers. The courier who comes and picks up the food and goes on the road and brings the meal to you, that's a TCP packet. This shit goes forever.

• 36:48Ben Horowitz?

  Excellent.

• 36:50Erik Torenberg?

  Okay, so the vision started at Uber.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  So the point is, is that atoms based computation is a thing. And honestly, it's always been a thing. And the idea that, oh, okay, Uber was network for the physical world. Digitized transportation. And by the way, almost done. Why almost done? Because it's almost fully software. Right? Waymos are cruising. It's almost fully software. But what about, what about CPU for the physical world and storage for the physical world? Basically, digitized manufacturing and digitized real estate. There's just so much to do there, it's crazy.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  And so there's a huge amount of innovation there, not just with what Adams is doing, but like, there's going to be lots of stuff, even beyond what we were doing. It's a portfolio strategy, really, if you're investing.

• 37:45Ben Horowitz?

  It's very interesting because you kind of got to the conclusion that we've now all learned from AI, which is you can model just about anything with computation. And you basically were ahead of that in modeling this physical world, even metaphorically with computation. And now kind of manifesting that.

• 38:06Speaker 00

  It's.

• 38:06Ben Horowitz?

  You know, probably entirely with AI on top of your computation.

• 38:10Speaker 00

  It's funny because the framework started near the end of my Uber time, really when we were getting deep, we were going into deep learning and heavy duty ML. And I was, you know, we would go after some of the best AI. We had an AI lab that was probably one of the best in the world as well. And I was always pitching that the physical world is more interesting for this stuff than the digital one. And, you know, look, I'm selling my book, like, that's what we do. Right? But it's, you have a way, way many more variables, axes of stochastic distribution.

• 38:48Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 38:48Speaker 00

  Which then means.

• 38:49Ben Horowitz?

  Much harder problem.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  Which then means you're not going to solve it with an algorithm. You're going to solve it by empirically understanding how it works.

• 38:59Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. Right.

• 39:03Erik Torenberg?

  So let's fast forward to how the bigger vision for Adams comes together in terms of the combination of the companies.

• 39:10Speaker 00

  I keep stopping you.

• 39:12Erik Torenberg?

  I know. And I want to get to the partnership because it also ties together.

• 39:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's all good. So, okay. You've got to have your manufacturing logistics hub. That's the real estate. You've got to have your automated production and you've got to have your autonomous burritos. The minute, about a year ago, I started looking into autonomous burritos and I went to China and checked out all of the autonomy guys. I was here in the US talking to a lot of the autonomy guys. Word got out. They're like, Travis is looking at autonomy again. People started going, what's going on?

• 39:51Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 39:52Speaker 00

  And, you know, folks like, you know, folks like Uber, other partners across different categories were like, we're interested. Like, for one reason or another, because it's like, you could even be, you could be like, supply chain guy on food, you're also saying, I need to have, for business continuity and just like, peace of mind, I need to have another alternative for how these freight, how these trucks, heavy transport are going to move. And I need an alternative and I'd love to have a partner. As an example, this kind of stuff.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  And so, okay, so partnered with a couple of folks, actually created a new company to do it because funding autonomy through a sort of core food company, it just wasn't going to work at first. And the reason why is because it's like, these are just different profiles. It's a real estate company. This is like, heavy duty software, big, big money going after it.

• 40:59Ben Horowitz?

  It's like a computer company trying to build a network company off of the side. You gotta, you gotta buy a networking company.

• 41:08Speaker 00

  So, so we just got, and these partners wanted a pure play. And so we created that sort of near the end of last year. But what happened is, is like, you've got to get, okay, well, now I need to get my team together. I need to get my guys from way back when, 2016, when we were, 2017, when we were, we were running hardcore at autonomy. We need to get that going because if you're going to be in the specialized robotics game, you have to have autonomy for yourself. You have to. Your robots are moving and acting in the physical world and you cannot depend of, on only one company that has an existence proof now. Of course Tesla's going to get there, you know, sometime soon, or maybe some amount

• 41:51Speaker 00

  of time, we don't know exactly. You gotta, you, you can't be dependent in that way. And so, okay, get your team together. Eric Myhoffer, who ran ATG, is already running my food robotics division. That's Uber's advanced technology group, is working for us. And then Anthony Levandowski, who is one of my top leads on autonomy back at Uber, was running Pronto, which was an autonomous mining company. Let's call it off-road autonomy. But in a workflow or category where it's like, much more than just like, this thing needs to move. It's like, how does it move? What is the context for which it's moving?

• 42:36Speaker 00

  It's like a very specialized thing. I was the biggest investor in Pronto. I'm like, let's go. So acquired Pronto and now I'm in the mining business. But it's not like I didn't know about it. I was the biggest investor in it to begin with, for a good reason. It's one of the most beautiful and interesting autonomy categories or use cases. And on our mining business, we, you know, we have, our mission statement is, more productive mines to power Earth's industries. We can go to a gold, a gold mine CEO right now and say, would you like to get 20% more gold per year? We don't get no. Right? Now, he says, prove it. He says, prove it.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  And we're like, let's go. But that's what's happened is, so separately, Pronto was working on mining for eight years on their own, seven, eight years on their own. Go ahead.

• 43:32Ben Horowitz?

  Also, a great, a great target for autonomy because, you know, maybe the worst job for humans there is, is the mining jobs, right?

• 43:41Speaker 00

  And we have, so our mining customers, because we're operating in a bunch of mines around the world, our mining customers have existential safety problems. Or let's call it safety issues, safety concerns.

• 43:57Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 43:58Speaker 00

  Like where bad things can happen on any given day. And you've got real people that are putting their lives on the line when they're on, when they're at these mines. And so when you automate certain parts of mining, you dramatically improve safety. And you, I mean, in a real way. That's like, when you look at the work that's being done and how it's being done, it's a little bit heart wrenching when you are exposed to it and you see our mines work. It's, it's not the mines' fault, it's just the nature of the work. And there's a massive safety upside that goes along with the productivity upside, which is really special.

• 44:42Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 44:43Speaker 00

  So, so what happened is, is that Pronto just now is coming past human productivity. So it's like you do, it's like any enterprise software company. You do some cool pilots with big companies, you got stuff, and you're like, dude, I got like, I've got like, eight seats at this 10,000 person company. And you're like, okay, maybe. And then all of a sudden, it's better. And in the autonomy world, it's about, it's better than human productivity? That means your mines and the quarries and it's like, it's like, exactly.

• 45:15Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 45:16Speaker 00

  Go time. That's when you hit the gas. So we're going to see super exponential, we're seeing it, we're in the middle of it right now, super exponential growth on the mining side, which is super special. These guys ran a very lean startup for a long time. And now I'm going to their customers who are begging us to move faster and get more out there. We have to manufacture kits, sorry, we have to do supply chain and manufacture kits. We have to install these kits on these machines that are in the middle of the Amazon, or on the border of Saudi and Iraq, or like, in these crazy wild places, and do it fast. And then do the change management at every one of these mines. So they're like, it's time to go, let's go.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  And they're pushing us and so our, you know, how we talk to them is like, look, we were a lean startup and we're going to muscular.

• 46:06Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 46:07Speaker 00

  And that's how I talk to the team too, because you don't want it to get fat.

• 46:10Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 46:11Speaker 00

  It's like lean muscle, you know?

• 46:13Ben Horowitz?

  Yes.

• 46:14Speaker 00

  But we need some protein shakes, you know, and creatine and things like that. And it's about process, professionalizing a lot of this stuff, but it's, in some ways, the growth there is almost deterministic. As long as you do the professional things to like, get all that stuff in mind. But what it means is that existing mines are going to be producing more and they're going to be able to go much further in getting more and new mines are going to emerge that couldn't, that were not viable before. And what that means for AI, what that means for progress here and everywhere, super big deal.

• 46:55Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 46:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:57Erik Torenberg?

  And so, to continue, I'll get to the partnership conversation. At what point does this become sort of, or are you thinking from the beginning, this is a conglomerate? Or at what point does this become all wrapped up in the, in the Adams?

• 47:10Speaker 00

  So this, I mean, the, the fundraise was part of it. So what happened is, is we started the fundraise and, you know, Ben remembers this because I gave him a preview at first at, in Vegas, actually. And I'm like, I was like the guy with a trench coat that's got like, 20 watches. I'm like, which watch do you want? I got a, I got all kinds of watches. And he's like, dude, I just want the whole frigging trench coat, dude. Like, you know, the, the idea being, I don't want to invest in mining or transport or food. I want the things that you're doing. And let's be partners for all the things you do. And so, that's, that was the impetus for bringing the companies together.

• 47:55Ben Horowitz?

  Creation of.

• 47:56Speaker 00

  And the funding itself, yeah, the creation of Adams and the funding itself, being at what we would call top co-level.

• 48:04Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  Right? And so now it's just one entity. I mean, there's sub-entities there all over the place, but, but it's one equity structure, which is great for the employees and great for me. Because managing, I honestly, I don't know how Elon does it, or did it, slash does it. It's pretty wild. And I'm really glad I don't have that headache, to be honest. Yeah.

• 48:30Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, it's very complex.

• 48:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:32Ben Horowitz?

  Complicated alignment. But, you know, it's a kind of an interesting point because it's very obvious to, you know, when we talked about it here.

• 48:44Ben Horowitz?

  The way it should work. And I, and I think the, the narrative of how these things get built is um, mistold constantly by the industry, by the press, which is, you know, if you hear about, how did Facebook come about? How did Google come about? How did, you know, Tesla come? Oh, they had this idea. And the idea was to do this. But that's not really what happened. A lot of motherfuckers had that idea. You know, there's a lot of those ideas out there. And like, if you look at Tesla, there was a very famous documentary called Who Killed the Electric Car? That came out before Tesla. And if you're an entrepreneur watching that, what you would see is, big oil, big auto, big government, we're never

• 49:29Ben Horowitz?

  gonna let that happen. They would kill you. But then, the reality is, oh, Elon Musk, that motherfucker's hard to kill. Right? Like, so he, by himself, kind of decarbonized American auto industry, which is, you know, really unbelievable in retrospect. But then it gets told, right? Like, if you listen to the politicians now, they're like, oh, he didn't build Tesla. He just like struck a gold mine and is just pulling the gold out. Like, all those people built it. But why didn't all those people build another Tesla? Like, there's only one. Because there's only one non-fungible, very rare person in that equation, who could do that. And same, and that's why there's only one SpaceX.

• 50:14Ben Horowitz?

  And that's why, you know, that's why Meta's Meta, and Friendster's Friendster, and all that kind of thing.

• 50:20Speaker 00

  That's a good one. I haven't heard that one for a long time. It's good.

• 50:23Ben Horowitz?

  And so to build, you know, to build a company, you know, a great company, it's always a great entrepreneur. And so when we looked at it, we're like, there's a very few entrepreneurs, you know, in the history of the valley that built something like Uber. And that Uber, basically, it survived, and is still a very valuable company without them. Which almost, you know, like, that never happens without the founder. I mean, it's usually turns to crap very fast. And so, that was what we, like, yes, the idea is great. The ambition is amazing. It's gonna be amazing for the world if he pulls it off. But like, we want to invest in the guy who could pull it off. And that's kind of what

• 51:08Ben Horowitz?

  drove, drove the whole thing.

• 51:10Speaker 00

  And there's a fun thing. I realized this at Uber, too, is that, I think, in many ways, maybe, maybe Bezos was the guy to sort of really go there, which is, the only constraint to your imagination is management capacity. Because like, look at all the things that Amazon started doing. They were earlier than everybody else starting to do lots of things. Right? And so I'm like-

• 51:38Ben Horowitz?

  By the way, another good one. How many motherfuckers had the idea for an online bookstore, online retailer, online any of that?

• 51:44Speaker 00

  There we go.

• 51:45Ben Horowitz?

  And how many Amazons?

• 51:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally.

• 51:47Ben Horowitz?

  You know, and, and by the way, Jeff, like, everybody who knows Jeff, everybody's heard him talk, you're like, oh, he's very special. That's a special CEO right there. And, and that, and look, and that's our business is to invest in that kind of very, very special individual. And they're super rare.

• 52:06Speaker 00

  And so, I think in many ways, Bezos may have been, I always want to say the OG on something, but then you find out 100 years earlier, somebody else did that. But of our time, where it's like, how did AWS happen? It literally had nothing to do with a bookstore, really.

• 52:27Ben Horowitz?

  Nothing.

• 52:28Speaker 00

  I mean, there's some, there's some fun stories they tell, but it's like, this is just a whole new thing.

• 52:32Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, by, yeah, by the way, it wasn't like, the shit that was running Amazon.

• 52:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, totally. That's my point. Yeah. So, so, once you get the foothold, the beachhead, whatever, and it's working, you can start going, you Uber rides, then it's Uber eats. Then it's Uber autonomy. Then it was Uber freight. Then it's like Uber AI labs. Like, you can start letting your imagination with constraints, start to do really interesting things. And so, where you start matters.

• 53:08Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. You're right. And it has to be, like, you need knowledge.

• 53:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:14Ben Horowitz?

  Right. Like, the thing that Amazon did have on AWS is they had knowledge of what it meant to run these things at scale. Because they were the first to get there, or one of the first, like, five to get to that kind of scale. And so they had that knowledge. Totally different business, totally, but they had the knowledge about what the product should be. And because he's a customer of these things, right? At Uber, he all of a sudden, he knows what the network is. He knows how to do that. And although it's a totally different business, that knowledge is transferable if you know, if you can scale and execute and expand management.

• 53:48Speaker 00

  And sometimes you go to, sometimes those, look, adjacent categories are way easier than whole new, off the rails categories. Yes.

• 53:58Ben Horowitz?

  And, and there's also, I mean, the amazing thing about AWS is, it's one of the few expansions where, like, nobody would think, well, what I want to buy from Amazon is like a compute cloud. Like, nobody was thinking that at the time.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, no.

• 54:12Ben Horowitz?

  You know, like, there's always, oh, I should sell them more stuff they want to buy from me. But that's a, that's a whole nother, that's a whole nother thing. But, you know, if you're, if you have that level of Jeff skill, which, like, in terms of organizational design, cultural continuity, that guy is-

• 54:33Speaker 00

  Peak Bezos. Hard to beat.

• 54:35Ben Horowitz?

  Very good.

• 54:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. Where you start matters.

• 54:38Ben Horowitz?

  Don't let him living his best life later. He gets a lot of bad PR for that money.

• 54:44Speaker 00

  Well, I was, what, you, Travis, you could have had a version of living your best life, where you're just like, hey, this is what I do, you know? Or, or was it like, I'm gonna keep doing it forever? Or was it like, hey, I chased the promised land, I got really far, but I could have got so much further, I'm gonna get there next. What was the sort of motivation to just get right back in the- It's just, I love being in the arena, fighting it. And it's not, you know-

• 55:07Ben Horowitz?

  By the way, he's one of the very rare, rare guys who made as much money as he did, and wanted to keep playing. I mean-

• 55:16Speaker 00

  And start over, basically. Not totally, but almost completely, right? So, the, yeah, you gotta really want, because also remember, I did it stealth. So what it means, here's the thing about stealth, is that-

• 55:31Ben Horowitz?

  Stealth, and starting at the bottom, right? Like, doing it by hand, right? Like, not, not-

• 55:35Speaker 00

  Like, I walked in, I acquired this company-

• 55:37Ben Horowitz?

  I'm the executive chairman.

• 55:38Speaker 00

  I acquired, I acquired Cloud Kitchens, partnered with a buddy of mine, Diego, right? And there were like, six people in the company that I acquired. Okay? So, it's so funny, because you gotta think, the last all hands I did, had 20,000 people. The next all hands I did, and this is the only company I was in, had six. And I stood in front, just like the same, and I'm like, let's fucking go, guys, let's do this. Charts, you know, like, here, what's happening? You know, let's roll, let's do it. And these guys who, like, I just walked in, they're like, what the fuck just happened? They went to work that morning

• 56:20Speaker 00

  at a six-person startup, and an hour later, the founder of Uber is now the CEO.

• 56:27Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, that is wild. And that, by the way, like, we, we've seen it so many times where somebody gets to the penthouse, and they're like, oh, I want to do a new thing. But they don't want to go all the way down to the ground floor, and start at the bottom, fucking putting the building together. Okay, now you're in a fucking shotgun house. They want to jump all the way to the, which never works. You can't start at the top.

• 56:52Speaker 00

  And, yeah, well, and the bottom thing also is about, there's a humility thing to it. And there's like, there's an, an anti-fame thing to it. And what I mean by that is, imagine, you start from the bottom, you also do it stealth. It means you, plus everybody in your company, gets fulfillment from the work they do every day, not because they're gonna get famous, but because they enjoy the people they're working with and what they're doing day in, day out.

• 57:20Ben Horowitz?

  By the way, if you can pull it off, that's a very significant cultural advantage, because-

• 57:29Ben Horowitz?

  As soon as the company feels like it's doing something for the outside status, it's a dangerous.

• 57:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:37Ben Horowitz?

  It's a volatile fucking situation.

• 57:39Speaker 00

  That's right. You start making decisions based on external validation versus internal correctness.

• 57:46Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, you lose true north.

• 57:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. And that's part of the upside of stealth and part of what I was doing. Because remember, I wanted to build without worrying about what the New York Times was saying.

• 57:55Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 57:55Speaker 00

  So it starts with internal correctness versus external validation.

• 58:00Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. Which, once, once a company starts doing that, it's hard to, like, you, you already see this with the big labs. People keep going, oh, why did the big labs, you know, smack themselves in the face? Well, it's because they need that external validation for their employees because their employees are addicted to it. I want to be a good guy. I want to be a good AI researcher. So go ahead and tell them that we're going to take all the jobs. It's like, really? You want to say that? You don't even know if it's true. But you want to say that, well, why are you doing that? Well, it's that external validation is, is so important to them. And it's so important not just to, not just to the people running it, but to all the people in the company. And so they almost have to do it.

• 58:44Ben Horowitz?

  Even though they, if you wanted, if that's what you think, then work on like those problems. Work on like, oh, you don't want it to reward hack. Well, why don't you try and solve that as opposed to go running your mouth? Because you care about the external validation more than the actual thing. And that's the, it's, it's very easy to slip into that. Like many companies slip into that.

• 59:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:10Ben Horowitz?

  And it's, and it's hard to, once it gets out of the bag, it's very hard to.

• 59:13Speaker 00

  There's a human nature aspect to being proud of what you do, wanting your mom to be proud of what you do and your community at large.

• 59:22Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 59:22Speaker 00

  So there is a human nature piece, which I was malnourishing by being stealth.

• 59:29Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 59:29Speaker 00

  But it forced a emotional intelligence that's very powerful now that we're moving out of stealth.

• 59:37Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 59:37Speaker 00

  And it's, it will be interesting to see how the coming years go.

• 59:40Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, I'm, that's a, going to be a very interesting cultural case study. See what the company is like over time.

• 59:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:48Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 59:49Erik Torenberg?

  So we've talked about, you know, what books were to Amazon, you know, food is to Adams in a sense of it. It's where you start and where you start matters. So why was it important that you started at food in terms of what's generalizable? What's like, yeah, same.

• 1:00:00Speaker 00

  So here's the thing, right? So what Cloud Kitchens was, was all about the way I saw it. And this was what I brought to the party, but it was like, this is digitized manufacturing and digitized real estate. It was called, I called it when I came, people know as Cloud Kitchens because that's what we'd sell restaurant customers on. But the name of the company was City Storage Systems. Ah, okay, storage for the physical world. This is digitized real estate.

• 1:00:29Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  This is a food computer with a basis in real estate, storage. Okay?

• 1:00:38Ben Horowitz?

  That needs a network.

• 1:00:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. So this was the name of the company from the beginning.

• 1:00:43Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  Or once I came in, okay? It was purposely boring because I was going stealth. You imagine selling something called City Storage Systems? Like, people are like, what is that? They'll forget literally 20 minutes after you talk to them, they're like, city, CSS. They're like thinking HTML. They're like, they're confused. They don't know what's going on. So, um, so for me, it, the framework was already there. I already thought about this as digitized manufacturing and real estate, about an Adams-based computer, about a food computer. And that's why I was excited. The idea captured me because of that. And so it wasn't like, why'd you start with food?

• 1:01:27Speaker 00

  It was like, I saw something different than even maybe the, the, the original team that was working on it saw it. But I saw where it was going and in the way that I just described. And that's what the romance was about. And yes, there are lots of digitized manufacturing problems out there.

• 1:01:50Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, like mining.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  Like mining, like a whole bunch of other things. But this is, this captured me at the right time, you know? I was sitting at the bar and somebody came up and we had a great conversation, you know? Went to Cabo the next weekend and then just put a ring on it. Like, let's go.

• 1:02:06Ben Horowitz?

  It was serendipity, man.

• 1:02:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:08Ben Horowitz?

  It's a real thing.

• 1:02:09Speaker 00

  So, and that's okay. Because the thing is, if you believe that you could, like, find something, make it work, just grind it out, make it work, will it into working? Your imagination can keep going. So for me, it wasn't, it's not as much about where you start. It's about making sure you're passionate about where you start. And then where you go, you have no idea. And this is very much, I go back to the Bezos style, which is like your imagination will just keep coming up with new cool ideas. And so it's not about where you start.

• 1:02:49Speaker 00

  It's about why you start and how you build a culture that allows you to keep going into new places over time and lets your imagination, when it's right, flourish.

• 1:03:00Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. That's why it was, it's, it's not an idea. It's an idea maze. And the more you learn about the idea and all the things and you, you don't know any, like, the thing that is so hard to understand coming from the outside is you know so little when you start. Like when he's, I mean, he didn't even tell me, he started, he, he didn't know fucking 1% of the fucking problems he was going to run into with Cloud Kitchens.

• 1:03:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:03:24Ben Horowitz?

  Because you've got to really get into it.

• 1:03:26Speaker 00

  By the way, what tech guy knows anything about real estate?

• 1:03:28Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:29Speaker 00

  0.0.

• 1:03:30Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. So you, it's all, the whole thing is a learning process. And then it's, the best entrepreneurs can take those learnings and then apply, multiply the applications. And that's, you know, it's just a very, very rare thing. Like, like, like the fact that Elon has taken SpaceX to Starlink to data centers in space. It's just like, nobody would start there.

• 1:04:01Speaker 00

  Or think about this.

• 1:04:02Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:03Speaker 00

  The, the first roadster.

• 1:04:06Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:07Speaker 00

  Is now Optimus.

• 1:04:10Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:10Speaker 00

  Okay? Talk about.

• 1:04:12Ben Horowitz?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:04:13Speaker 00

  Letting the imagination flourish is a beautiful thing.

• 1:04:16Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, understanding what the core, core principles are.

• 1:04:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19Ben Horowitz?

  And applying them.

• 1:04:22Erik Torenberg?

  So with that said, paint us more, paint us a picture about the future of Adams or more around the, or maybe you say some of the guiding principles that will dictate, you know, which industries you enter next or how you think about where you go from there.

• 1:04:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, look, I tell people I'm very focused right now because it's, it's only food, mining and transport. There's so many things I haven't done yet. Like, like I'm so constrained right now. But it goes back to that thing I was saying before is you've got to find that beachhead, make it flourish, build management capacity to solve 98% of the problems that are going on. And then you have the room to go do a new thing. And really what it is, it's, you know, I, I've been accused of using the marathon analogy too much.

• 1:05:14Speaker 00

  And I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to live up to that, which is, you know, at some point, you might be doing a business and it just starts working. I, I started seeing that on rides at Uber where it was like, I had my leads in different geos and I'd call them up because we would jam on hard ideas and crank and all this. We didn't have much to talk about.

• 1:05:37Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, because shit was working.

• 1:05:38Speaker 00

  It just worked, you know? And they're like, Travis, we got this. I don't know why you're calling me right now, you know?

• 1:05:44Ben Horowitz?

  So actually, this brings up one of the things that he did best at Uber, having had to deal with these guys, was like, if you look at most companies, most of the, really the big tech companies that, that emerged in the 2000s, 2000s and 10s, the management team.

• 1:06:06Ben Horowitz?

  Were kinda professional middle managers, et cetera. He had so many guys who you would have gone, no, that's a founder. You know, that's a founder over there. That's a founder over there. That's a, that's an actual entrepreneur. And it's amazing that he's not building his own company because he's like working for Travis. But that enabled them, like, to get to a multitude of ideas. You need like a team like that. And there's just not that many people who can build that kind of, it's just a, it's a very hard to attract and maintain that level of capability. Cause those guys, unless you're building something absolutely spectacular, you know, they're not gonna be.

• 1:06:48Ben Horowitz?

  And even if you are, you're dealing with, you gotta be able to manage that.

• 1:06:54Speaker 00

  Well, what, what happens is the management of it becomes an empowerment puzzle.

• 1:07:00Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. So.

• 1:07:02Ben Horowitz?

  Yes.

• 1:07:02Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:07:03Ben Horowitz?

  By the way, not unlike here.

• 1:07:04Speaker 00

  I know, I was about to say. So you've got, you've got, I've got, you know, yeah, I'm running Uber, let's say. I have, I don't know, five continents going at any given time. You have an engineering team that's multiplexed across, a finance team that's multiplexed across. A product, like, there's a lot going on. And the only way it works is, okay, you have that entrepreneur there, but they have to. Basically empowerment starts with alignment, which is, okay, what's the strategy? Do, are we aligned on it?

• 1:07:41Ben Horowitz?

  That's the challenge, right? Empowerment plus alignment.

• 1:07:43Speaker 00

  So alignment on the front end, accountability on the back end.

• 1:07:49Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:49Speaker 00

  And we would call this let builders build. And so, but.

• 1:07:53Ben Horowitz?

  By the way, and there's also, so you've got alignment, but alignment is multi-dimensional. Cause it's alignment on, okay, what are the goals? What are the objectives? Also, what is the culture? Like, what is the behavior?

• 1:08:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:08Ben Horowitz?

  You guys are doing over there? Cause that's gonna affect us over here and us over there and so forth. So like, we can't dilute the culture because we gave you autonomy. We've got to have that. And that, that, that combination is, it's like a very high level of management skill.

• 1:08:25Speaker 00

  And that leader has to be good enough to do it.

• 1:08:28Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:28Speaker 00

  And that leader then has to work with the CFO and the CFO's people, the product, the head of product and the product guys, people, engineering and engineering people, to make sure that it works. Because if I'm a single point of failure, it ain't scaling on 24 time zones. There's no frickin' way. And I think that's the difference between what we did at Uber versus we're seeing how a lot of other companies are expanding internationally, that are buying things. Like, I was like, well, I buy, we can just frickin' do this. A city's a city, let's go.

• 1:09:01Ben Horowitz?

  And then if you buy it, guess what? You bought another culture.

• 1:09:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:06Ben Horowitz?

  Okay, and now you got another reputation. And then that reputation's gonna seat back. And then, okay, now you don't have a culture.

• 1:09:12Speaker 00

  And by the.

• 1:09:13Ben Horowitz?

  Because how are those motherfuckers getting away with that in Korea? When we can't get away with that in the US? Like, all those things.

• 1:09:20Speaker 00

  And by the way, your product, your technology is a reflection of your culture. So then what happens is you just have, the culture is reflected in the technology and in how even that technology's built, the product decisions that are made. And now you gotta fuse these products and technologies together, which is very hard. Two years later, maybe.

• 1:09:40Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:09:42Speaker 00

  That's why I didn't buy Lyft.

• 1:09:46Ben Horowitz?

  By the way, that was a very, that was a very different culture.

• 1:09:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:50Ben Horowitz?

  I can attest.

• 1:09:51Speaker 00

  I, this, this was the reason I couldn't do it.

• 1:09:53Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, super interesting. The, and so you're constrained now by, by three different industries. What is the, you take him off script. No, no. What is the criteria that's gonna determine if and when you go into another? Yeah, it's the beachhead thing. And it's the, it's the, I'll go back to the marathon analogy is that if it's getting easy, you must make it hard again.

• 1:10:22Ben Horowitz?

  But you gotta get it too easy.

• 1:10:23Speaker 00

  You gotta, you've gotta start, it's a, and it's a vibe. It's like a, it's like a, it's like a feeling where you, basically, I'm constantly creating problems. I'm a problem creator. A problem creator might be like, like creating a problem might be like, hey, let's do Uber in China. Okay, that's creating a real frickin' problem. And by the way, you don't have a full understanding of that problem when you create it. And why is that hard? Because, well, if you create a problem, you have to solve it. So I have this like framework I call the meta problem, which is the derivative of your problem

• 1:11:05Speaker 00

  creation, DT, must be less than the derivative, less than or equal to the derivative of your problem solving DT. And if it's not, you have a real fucking problem.

• 1:11:20Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, well, then, then, then.

• 1:11:21Speaker 00

  You're underwater.

• 1:11:22Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, then you're underwater. And then you can, you can drown. And if you have, yeah, if you have multiples of those, you're really underwater.

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  That's right. So when you make, when you create a problem, you're guessing at what your capacity is to solve problems. And you're guessing six months, 12, 18 months ahead, with only a certain understanding of what the nature of the problem is. And when you get it really wrong, you're underwater. And then you must stop all problem creation so that you can get back above water. And then when you go from your neck and then you're like at your waist in terms of how underwater you are with your problem solving, when you're at your waist, you're like, oh, I could get, I could get to here. You create more problems. You let the problem creation spigot open.

• 1:12:06Ben Horowitz?

  And by the way, when you talk about capacity, a lot of it in this case is he's talking about his personal capacity, because he's got to be able, if he's creating a new, large problem, he's got to be able to not pay attention in nearly the level of detail to the other parts of his business. Those have to be working. Cause if he's solving problems over there and created a big new problem, and that one gets in trouble. Like then, so it's not just like capacity of the team, it's also personal capacity.

• 1:12:39Speaker 00

  It's a little bit of both. It's a little bit of both.

• 1:12:41Ben Horowitz?

  And so it's a real.

• 1:12:42Speaker 00

  I never felt like, I never felt like rideshare was solved because what happened? Oh, it's time for autonomy.

• 1:12:50Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:50Speaker 00

  Okay, all right, let's go.

• 1:12:53Ben Horowitz?

  By the way, you were right about that.

• 1:12:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:55Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. Just despite.

• 1:12:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:00Ben Horowitz?

  I'm not gonna even mention names.

• 1:13:02Speaker 00

  And so if you, if you had still been running Uber, you know, in this other universe, are some of the vision that you have here with Adams, would that have been, you know, could you have gotten to mining with Uber? It's a continuation of the same vision.

• 1:13:16Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:16Speaker 00

  Right? So the digitizing the physical world, the atoms-based computation, that was already set.

• 1:13:21Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:22Speaker 00

  And so if the future of food is about infrastructure, automated production, automated logistics, that's the future of Uber Eats too. Now, it doesn't mean when you're an OEM and you make a food computer, it doesn't mean you have to make all the parts. Right?

• 1:13:48Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:49Speaker 00

  And so, but, but it, but the future's the same.

• 1:13:53Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:54Speaker 00

  And so, so that's my point, is that, is that, once you have that framework, why is the framework important? It's because it tells you what the future's gonna be.

• 1:14:04Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:05Speaker 00

  It's correct. And it also, it's also compelling. Like, it's interesting, once you start seeing things. Like, by the way, I built with my team, like, 500 cloud kitchens facilities around the world. Like, you could just look at it as like, why are you building kitchens? Which of course I would, I sort of would go around all the time and tell people, I'm just your local humble, I'm just your local humble kitchen builder, you know, just sort of messing around. But like, when you're hiring, it's like, why does this matter?

• 1:14:39Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:39Speaker 00

  Oh, that's right, it's a food computer.

• 1:14:42Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:43Speaker 00

  But once, so it's a mix of it's telling you where the future is going. And it's pointing the way towards where the interesting things are. And it's helping you describe this in a way to really top quality talent. Who now can see what you see and can get excited about it.

• 1:15:01Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, and there are, there's another kind of interesting thing which we went through when we were understanding the business, which is unlike in a computer where you have storage and that storage kind of becomes obsolete over time. In the physical storage world in real estate, if you have the computer optimizing the storage, the storage becomes more valuable. So you build the food computer and the storage is essential to deliver the end service. You know, particularly before there's OEMs and everybody knows there's a food computer available, but that food computer multiplies the value of the real estate. So it's weird imagining a computer that multiplied the value of its storage.

• 1:15:46Ben Horowitz?

  I guess it's a little like in AI, like if you've got data, all of a sudden data is become valuable.

• 1:15:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:52Ben Horowitz?

  In a way that it wasn't really before.

• 1:15:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, or you think of it this way, we could go to a data center. That's real estate, right? How much, how many, how many tops are now happening at a data center today versus 20 years ago?

• 1:16:07Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:16:08Speaker 00

  So, and how much value is coming out of those tops, right? So the value of a data center in terms of what it provides society is going up over time dramatically.

• 1:16:18Ben Horowitz?

  A lot.

• 1:16:19Speaker 00

  And there's a lot of happy data center owners right now because of it.

• 1:16:24Ben Horowitz?

  No doubt, no doubt. My friend Rob Roy. So that's Rob.

• 1:16:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, we'll get him on soon. Speaking of, you know, painting this vision to talent and just talking about where the future is going, talk more about the emerging category that Adams sits within, or you're calling industrial AI.

• 1:16:41Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:42Speaker 00

  So, look, I did a vision letter when we launched Adams that outlined sort of vision for like physical AI, where we sit in it. And even went into like what a physical AI stack is. And it's really in some ways, it was like, it was philosophy about where the technology world in the, in the, the tech industry in the physical world, where it's gonna go. But what I didn't do was get to the brass tacks.

• 1:17:21Speaker 00

  And sort of when you look at, okay, well, there's software, there's bits that are affecting how Adams, what happens to Adams, like how they're assembled, where they go, what function do they do in the physical world? We basically, we started, I'm all over the place right now. Cut, edit. But we wanted to create, we wanted to create an easy way to understand what it means. And I would, I said, okay, Adams mission, physical automation to transform industries. You're like, okay, okay, kind of gets me there.

• 1:18:06Speaker 00

  But what does that mean exactly? Well, it means we take entire industries and that are ripe for automation and AI. And in doing so, that these are physical industries and in doing so, just completely transforms them.

• 1:18:24Ben Horowitz?

  In a sense, you've had one idea, like Uber and Adams. Adams is the evolution of Uber in a sense, in that you kind of said, okay, we're the Cisco of the physical world. And then you're like, well, what about the other parts of the physical world? And you built that, that you extended that vision into the computer and now you're adding the parts.

• 1:18:51Speaker 00

  But the computers around an industry.

• 1:18:53Ben Horowitz?

  Yes.

• 1:18:54Speaker 00

  So we make computers for industries. Yeah. Those computers are.

• 1:19:00Ben Horowitz?

  Right, that's, that's an important kind of distinction. They're industry specific computers, but generalized networks in some sense.

• 1:19:07Speaker 00

  Yes. So you go, okay, why are we doing transport? Well, because you've got to have wheelbase for robots. Okay, cool. But like, actually what it means is every industry is moving things. There's some movement of things eventually. And you must have wheelbase as part of what they do if you want to automate full stack that industry is an example. But transport itself is an industry too. But maybe a horizontal one versus a vertical.

• 1:19:36Ben Horowitz?

  Right.

• 1:19:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. Peter Thiel, a decade ago, famously, you know, sort of talked about how we've had so much progress in bits, but not in Adams and because of regulation or for whatever reason, it was just easier in bits. And yeah, here we are. And we're finally.

• 1:19:52Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:52Speaker 00

  Getting to it in real way. Well, and it's like, I think the entrepreneurs that are coming up since the Uber time are not scared of regulation, the way the bits.

• 1:20:03Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, well, that was a break for, in a large sense that you made, yeah.

• 1:20:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so what it means is.

• 1:20:08Ben Horowitz?

  And then they've been trying to regulate bits lately.

• 1:20:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. But these go together. Because it's like, once the bits start controlling Adams in the physical world, then the regulators are in the game, big time. And because that's generally how regulation works. It's about our physical world and that's how it's been for thousands of years, really, certainly hundreds. And so, yeah, once you, once you get in the physical world, you're like, okay, regulatory is a thing. And you say, okay, when in the past have we seen something like this? And it's like, if you start studying the second industrial revolution, there's so many parallels between what the Carnegie's, the, the Rockefellers, the Fricks, like you

• 1:20:54Speaker 00

  just go through the list.

• 1:20:56Ben Horowitz?

  Ford's.

• 1:20:57Speaker 00

  The Ford's, what those guys had to deal with in that massive, rapid change at that moment.

• 1:21:04Ben Horowitz?

  Same, very similar political climate.

• 1:21:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:07Ben Horowitz?

  Very similar.

• 1:21:08Speaker 00

  The, the.

• 1:21:09Ben Horowitz?

  The new dealers were not that different than the, you know, the, the current, in terms of their complete hatred of the industrialists.

• 1:21:24Speaker 00

  Okay, so like, there's a guy, Frick, who I think was Carnegie's partner. And this is about steel and how to process steel and do it at scale. I believe this story is accurate. Let's just say mythology possibly true, but I believe it's true. He, an anarchist broke into his office while he was working. This is in like, there are eight, like early 1900s or late 1800s. An anarchist broke into his office, shot him in the neck. He got it stitched up, went back to work that day. And like, somebody's gonna look it up. I believe it's true.

• 1:22:07Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:09Speaker 00

  But somebody should, should fact check. But you get the vibe of what's going on and how those guys rolled. And think about some of the entrepreneurs today that roll that way. Not all of them do. The bits guys don't necessarily roll this way.

• 1:22:22Ben Horowitz?

  Elon rolls.

• 1:22:23Speaker 00

  But the Adams guys roll this way.

• 1:22:25Ben Horowitz?

  Definitely.

• 1:22:26Speaker 00

  Right? And so the second industrial revolution, and you look at the characters and what they had to deal with and the adversity they had to go through. By the way, there are also, none of these guys is Jesus. So they had their, they had their flaws too. But there's a really.

• 1:22:44Ben Horowitz?

  And they built the country, yeah.

• 1:22:45Speaker 00

  There's a very interesting parallel to what's happening slash about to happen now with like the coming industrial age. For selling our own book, we would call it the Adams age.

• 1:22:57Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. Yeah, there's a book, actually, that's very interesting on the kind of building of the war machine by the industrialists, which won us World War II, no question. And the resistance that they got, it's called Freedom's Forge. And, you know, it was, it's like Bill Newton, who was like the complete badass who figured out like the mass production at Ford and then got in an argument with Henry Ford and went to Chevy, or went to GM and like, built Chevy and like, all that kind of thing. Then went to work for the government for a dollar and to industrialize the nation. And the way he got fought by the press and everybody like, like on the most basic thing,

• 1:23:37Ben Horowitz?

  like he's like, well, if we tell them to shut down making cars, and cars, by the way, employed 20% of America at the time. If we tell them to shut down making cars to make tanks and, and other things, then we're gonna have to give them some money. So like, can we give them cost plus 7%? And which, you know, like seemed very reasonable, like reading about it. They're gonna profit on the war, da, da, da, da, da. Like in Eleanor Roosevelt, like everybody was just out to kill this guy. And, you know, somehow, but that, that kind of resistance is like very similar to what we're seeing in data centers today and that kind of thing where I think the governor of

• 1:24:21Ben Horowitz?

  New York just banned data centers in the state.

• 1:24:23Speaker 00

  There's a lot of parallels politically, which actually I would just call that resistance to change.

• 1:24:30Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:30Speaker 00

  And nature.

• 1:24:31Ben Horowitz?

  Very fast change.

• 1:24:32Speaker 00

  That's correct. So I, you know, I like, you know, I sort of think of it as like, the most important truth seeking is the seeking of valuable unknown truths. But if you're good at finding valuable unknown truths.

• 1:24:46Ben Horowitz?

  You're creating change.

• 1:24:47Speaker 00

  Then you know things other people don't know, which means you can do things that other people can't do. And the better you are at it, the faster the change comes.

• 1:24:55Ben Horowitz?

  And the madder they are.

• 1:24:56Speaker 00

  And the faster the change comes, the more nature will do what it does. It's called resistance to change.

• 1:25:02Ben Horowitz?

  Yes.

• 1:25:03Speaker 00

  And so you have to figure out how to bring big time progress to overwhelm resistance to change. And you also have to build trust as best as you can so that you have more advocates versus adversaries. And this is the dynamic. And one of the things I want to say, just on the industrial, the industrial.

• 1:25:23Ben Horowitz?

  Very hard to do.

• 1:25:24Speaker 00

  Very hard.

• 1:25:25Ben Horowitz?

  Everybody loves progress. It's change they can't stand.

• 1:25:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, those two happen to go together.

• 1:25:32Ben Horowitz?

  So.

• 1:25:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. So like, but on the industrial AI thing, it was like, my whole vision note was physical AI and like this theoretical thing. It was very academic and theoretical. And I want to say, I want to get something that was practical brass tacks. Industrial AI is basically this stack of software, sensors, robotics, machinery that automates an industry and we take it one industry at a time and it just became much more real and clear about what it is. You go physical AI, you're like, oh, so you're doing a humanoid. I'm like, no, no, we're like the non humanoid guys. I don't have a problem with them, but that's not what we do. You're like, oh, do you do like some military thing? You're like, no, that's not my thing either. You know, it's like, so

• 1:26:13Speaker 00

  this felt very clean about what it is we're about and how we're going after it.

• 1:26:18Ben Horowitz?

  By the way, you know, a really interesting point on this whole thing is one of the things that we completely forgot how to do. We were the best in the world by far. We taught the world how to do is manufacture. And now we've basically forgotten how to do it as a country other than like Elon. Like if you need somebody who knows how to manufacture, you literally have to get them from Elon.

• 1:26:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:26:37Ben Horowitz?

  And we're going to have to relearn that. And actually, the beginnings of that are are literally data centers. That is a manufacturing problem to a large extent, you know, with the cooling and the power and you've got to build your own power and all that kind of thing. And there's so much resistance to that from the exact people who were just harping and harping for years about all the manufacturing jobs are going away.

• 1:26:58Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:26:59Ben Horowitz?

  Well, they're back, but we don't want them. And so like, that's how, that's how tough this, this story is and this kind of narrative.

• 1:27:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27:09Ben Horowitz?

  Is.

• 1:27:10Speaker 00

  Thank God, there's still enough places that are still welcoming data centers.

• 1:27:14Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:15Speaker 00

  That it's not like, the federal system is a wonderful thing because it's like you have this competition of some kind.

• 1:27:20Ben Horowitz?

  Thank God for states.

• 1:27:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's really interesting how that works out.

• 1:27:23Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. Otherwise, we'd be Europe.

• 1:27:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. Okay. So we were talking offline, you were saying when you started Uber, you worked with people who would choose to work with you.

• 1:27:34Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:34Speaker 00

  Now you're in a different position.

• 1:27:36Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:36Speaker 00

  You have a bit more choice. You've been building in stealth.

• 1:27:39Ben Horowitz?

  Sure.

• 1:27:40Speaker 00

  Now you're, this is your coming out story.

• 1:27:42Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:43Speaker 00

  Talk to us about, you know, what kind of team you're building here, how folks can help.

• 1:27:47Ben Horowitz?

  Well, look, we just multiplied the number of industries we're going after by three. So that's a kind of a thing. And each of them is a multi trillion dollar.

• 1:27:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27:56Ben Horowitz?

  Opportunity. And, you know, look, I had, I had some awesome guys, like, you know, this is kind of a funny thing to say, but when you make somebody hundreds of millions of dollars, it's hard to hire them again. So. I've never had great success hiring rich people.

• 1:28:14Speaker 00

  So there you go. So, you know, but, but, you know, there's the crew, like Emil Michael's now under Secretary of Defense, but he was my right hand on doing just epic deal making and strategic moves.

• 1:28:29Speaker 00

  I need the next Emil Michael, if that makes sense. Like a head of corp dev, biz dev that can build an inspired team, an inspiring team, as an example.

• 1:28:45Speaker 00

  We're, we're, we're in the market for a general counsel. So we're looking for somebody who can ride shotgun and, and, and make sure that I'm, you know, so I like to go to the line. We should be like a few inches off the line.

• 1:29:00Ben Horowitz?

  That's a good thing to do.

• 1:29:03Speaker 00

  And then of course, it's just the, like, I need, I need a CEO of my mining business.

• 1:29:08Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:08Speaker 00

  Like, I, I need to be, build technical leadership across the board from autonomy, heavy duty robotics. And it's really like, we have lots of folks coming in like, all the time, but it's like those epic leaders that can inspire their team to just go above and beyond and do really like make magic. So we're all, no matter where you are as an entrepreneur, the, the talent game is the game. And again, when you multiply the industries by three, you're, we're back in the flow. And because we were stealth for so long, we weren't in the flow. We were cold calling everybody. And I think it's

• 1:29:53Speaker 00

  one of the beautiful things about us being back out there is, okay, like we can, we can now have like a, a place for people to understand who we are, what we're about. And I can start putting teams together that can be out there in a very public way and, and let people know the great work we're doing. So.

• 1:30:15Ben Horowitz?

  And if you're joining now, you're joining both with the benefit of having, you know, all the lessons you've learned and things you've proven out with cloud kitchens. And of course Uber before that's almost two decades, but early enough such that there's the upside of, you know, enormous opportunity going forward.

• 1:30:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:30:31Ben Horowitz?

  And, and, and the ability to do something like super meaningful. I mean.

• 1:30:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:30:36Ben Horowitz?

  Save kids from working in the mines, you know, basically making it so that everybody can have great food, like, you know, instead of like eating.

• 1:30:49Speaker 00

  Super healthy food.

• 1:30:50Ben Horowitz?

  Poisoned stuff.

• 1:30:51Speaker 00

  That gives people their time back.

• 1:30:53Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:55Speaker 00

  While also saving money. Yeah.

• 1:30:57Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, saving money. Yeah. It's a, it's a hell of a mission.

• 1:31:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. So we're, we're having a lot of fun. It's good times. Yeah. It's a great place to wrap. Travis, thank you.

• 1:31:07Ben Horowitz?

  Awesome. Thanks, guys.

• 1:31:11Speaker 03

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked 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 X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.

• 1:31:36Speaker 03

  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 this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.