Travis Kalanick: How AI Will Transform the Physical World

Ben Horowitz, Travis Kalanick, and Erik Torenberg take the stage at Atoms' launch event for a candid fireside conversation about entrepreneurship, company building, and why Kalanick believes the next industrial revolution will be powered by AI. They revisit pivotal moments from Uber's history, including the decision not to acquire Lyft, lessons from scaling one of the world's fastest-growing companies, and how Kalanick has evolved as a founder. The conversation also explores Atoms' vision for industrial AI, why software is moving into the physical world, what it takes to build enduring company cultures, and why Kalanick believes the biggest opportunities of the next decade lie in transforming industries like food production, mining, and manufacturing. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 00:53 - The Bits & Atoms Video: Uber's Vision from 10 Years Ago 09:00 - Atoms Mining, Food Computers & Autonomous Machines 14:44 - The Final Boss: Resistance to Change & the Second Industrial Revolution 22:41 - Why Travis Didn't Buy Lyft 28:13 - How Travis Has Changed as a Founder 36:00 - From $4M Pre to a16z's Biggest Check Ever 46:11 - Dirty Fuel, Revenge Businesses & Falling in Love Again 50:37 - Be Uniconic: Eight Years in Stealth & the New Media Landscape Resources: Follow Travis Kalanick on X: https://x.com/travisk Follow Ben Horowitz on X: https://x.com/bhorowitz Stay Updated: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends! Find a16z on X: https://twitter.com/a16z Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z Listen to the a16z Show on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYX Listen to the a16z Show on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711 Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenberg Please note that 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. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see http://a16z.com/disclosures.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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

• 0:40Erik Torenberg?

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

• 0:44Speaker 00

  If you don't fight for the best idea, then what idea are you fighting for? You're fighting for the mediocre idea, an idea that's going to make you less good than if you went for the best idea.

• 0:53Erik Torenberg?

  The real question is, when are you guys going to buy Uber? After nearly eight years building largely out of public view, Travis Kalanick is finally ready to talk about what comes next. In this fireside conversation from Atoms launch event, Ben Horowitz and I sit down with Travis to discuss why he stayed quiet for so long, how his thinking has evolved since Uber, and why he believes industrial AI will define the next era of technology. Along the way, we revisit the biggest decisions of Uber, founder culture, and what it takes to build transformational companies twice.

• 1:26Erik Torenberg?

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

• 1:39Speaker 00

  Eric's good at this and it stresses me out. All right, what do you got, Eric?

• 1:42Erik Torenberg?

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

• 1:52Speaker 00

  I think this will surprise a lot of people, but Lyft's culture was very different than ours.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  Maybe it started with the pink mustache. But I think it's interesting, right? When it comes to entrepreneurs that are in that moment where you could acquire something. By the way, I got a lot of shit for this for a long time. So yeah, the

• 2:13Erik Torenberg?

  The culture didn't

• 2:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, the culture didn't mix. And when you meet with somebody and you're going to acquire them and there's so much goodness that could come from it. By the way, we're in some crazy war, probably spending a billion dollars a year on it or some insane amount of money. You want it to work.

• 2:27Erik Torenberg?

  So you wouldn't do anything different?

• 2:29Speaker 00

  I wouldn't do anything different. And it's easy to say now, but I got a lot of shit for that for a long time. But it was basically, I would sit across the table from the guys and I just didn't. It was just clear that we were very culturally different and you couldn't. It get harder and harder to make that happen.

• 2:47Ben Horowitz?

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

• 2:57Erik Torenberg?

  What would that look like? Travis was still running Uber today?

• 3:00Ben Horowitz?

  Well, I think it would have been the original culture. And the culture they went to, which was a reaction to the resistance, just ended up being a much more milquetoast culture than the The original Uber culture was a special, very pronounced culture. My favorite thing in that culture doc was meritocracy slash toe stepping. Or toe stomping, I can't remember. I always thought of it as stomping.

• 3:28Speaker 00

  Meritocracy and toe stepping.

• 3:29Ben Horowitz?

  Toe stepping.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:31Ben Horowitz?

  Which is kind of like fuck your feelings. We're here to build, we're going to do it, we're going to push as hard as we can. And yeah, you may get your toes stepped on, but you gotta keep going. You gotta keep bringing it. And to me, that was the part that got diluted when Travis went out. And it was, in some ways, it was the core part. It was a very essential element to, at least what I saw kind of from the side in it.

• 3:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, we've rebranded it, the current company at Adams. We call it the best idea wins. But the toe stepping is important because there's so many people that are not willing to fight for the best idea because they're going to upset somebody else. And if you don't fight for the best idea, then what idea are you fighting for? You're fighting for the mediocre idea, the politically expedient idea, an idea that's going to make you less good than if you went for the best idea. And so having everybody oriented towards that is a cultural vibe that helps you win.

• 4:30Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, when Andy Grove was at Intel, he used to call that constructive confrontation.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:34Ben Horowitz?

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

• 4:38Erik Torenberg?

  There's a poly market on when Travis is going to come back at Uber or when they were going to ask Travis to come back at Uber. But the real question is, when are you guys going to buy Uber?

• 4:49Speaker 00

  I think we still have a lot to earn. It's a fun, it's fun. So much of what I'm doing and people go, what would you be doing if? And I can't say all the things that I would be doing at Uber I'm doing now. There's a lot of things I'm not, but it is a continuation of the things. And a lot of the things that would have happened with Uber over time are things we're doing now. And if those things play out and you take over, look, I outlined what industrial AI is and where it's going over time. It's basically multiple, like 100 billion or trillion dollar industries that are going to get automated.

• 5:32Speaker 00

  We talk about digital AI and what it does to the enterprise. But these industries on their own are big. And so this is a new industrial age that basically is sort of coming. I compare it to the second industrial revolution. So if we're correct and we execute well, then it's a thing. Because you're like, is food going to be automated? Is the production of food going to get automated? And is the delivery of food going to get automated? I think we'd all say yes. And if that's the case, then there will be a service that prepares and delivers that food at cheaper than going to the grocery store. And if that happens, this occurs and food will be completely revolutionized. Will mining get automated?

• 6:14Speaker 00

  And if it does, not just the movement of the materials, but every part of mining, then what is a mining company? It just owns real estate. It will be completely revolutionized, a multi-trillion dollar market. And there's many of these. And now we got to deliver.

• 6:30Erik Torenberg?

  Talk about how you're different as a founder, building Adams than you were building Uber in terms of, what have you changed? What have you kept the same? When you reflect back, what do you think you were successful because of what you did versus in spite of what you did?

• 6:47Speaker 00

  The, look, some of how I did Uber is very related to what I did before Uber. And what I did before Uber was I failed. I mean, I got, my company barely got acquired. I did the first four years without a salary. I had socks that said blood, sweat and rum. It was stuff like that. And when you're that on the line and you're on welfare and you've got to make ends meet, and then you go into something like Uber, which is like ultra product market fit times 1,000, but you still think you're poor and you can't go to the grocery store next week. You get too close to the line. Like I would go right up against the line.

• 7:31Speaker 00

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

• 8:15Speaker 00

  You don't have to be that close. The other thing is interesting, and I think sometimes the young entrepreneurs that are just coming up right now, they don't totally get it, is that when you get into your third and fourth, I don't know, this may be even my fifth at this point, company, you get fricking really good at doing stuff. And so things that used to take me a day or three days, a lot of stress, anxiety, I don't want to do this, take me 45 minutes. And that's a beautiful thing. There are things you don't get, like I'm like so used to adversity at this point that it's kind of normal, so I don't get as pissed off.

• 8:59Speaker 00

  But being pissed off makes you good as an entrepreneur. So like, I gotta make sure I'm still fired up.

• 9:05Ben Horowitz?

  That's that pissed off energy.

• 9:06Speaker 00

  You fucked with me, I'm going to kick your ass. It's easier when you're 25, I think. I don't know, I'm just not, I'm like, dude, whatever, it's fine. You be you, dude, it's good. You get too used to adversity and that's kind of a problem. But yeah, so I'd say those are some of the fun changes, yeah.

• 9:22Erik Torenberg?

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

• 9:28Speaker 00

  Look, I wrote a vision note when we rolled out Adams, it was a few months ago. It was like, look, I have bias obviously, but it was very, I think a very well-written vision note. 10 years ago, 15 years ago, that would have taken me

• 9:46Speaker 00

  I don't know, hundreds of hours. Yeah. And it just flowed. Yeah. Like, okay, I can't say I wasn't thinking about it a lot. But when I was doing the writing, it actually just flowed and just happened. I'm like, holy shit. It just happened. Holy cow. Like, the one I just did for the, for, for this funding. Like, okay, I procrastinated, but, you know, that's a thing. But like, once I did the writing, I'm like, oh dude, we got it. It took like 45 minutes. I'm like, this is amazing. Yeah. And it, that's related to presentation, communication, strategy, this kind of thing. Uh, I'm faster at, which is pretty awesome.

• 10:25Erik Torenberg?

  Ben, how have you seen Travis evolve since you first got to know him? And comment more broadly, we have a lot of repeat entrepreneurs in the room in terms of when, like Travis, you have a massive success that also has some mistakes along the way. You know, what, what lessons do you learn for the next time versus, you know, what do you make sure to keep and continue? Because that's what, that's what got you there.

• 10:45Ben Horowitz?

  Well, I, I thought that was actually a really good way to characterize it, which was, you know, he thought he was in survival mode when he had 20,000 people working for him and that, that, that idea is dangerous when you have such a big organization.

• 11:07Ben Horowitz?

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

• 11:46Ben Horowitz?

  But yeah, and then, and, and I think like, when you, you do get, I, I think everything comes easier. It was, what's the Prince line? People say nothing comes too easy, but when you got it, nothing comes too hard. That's like, that's where he got to.

• 12:04Speaker 00

  The, the one thing I add to it though, and again, I feel like I don't want to prescribe to some, to folks, like everybody, a lot of folks here already know this, but it's like,

• 12:16Speaker 00

  when it gets easy, it's time to push hard. If, I always used to say like, uh, if something, if it's getting easy, it's about to get really fucking hard and you don't want it to be that way. You want to make it hard versus harden, make it hard on you, if that makes sense. And I, yeah. And I've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs over the years where they're like, oh man, we're just cranking, we're on easy street right now. And I'm like, dude, you are about to get your ass whooped and you don't even know it. Now I know that too, because of course I've experienced it myself. So, yeah.

• 12:54Ben Horowitz?

  And that's a, that's a very good insight.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's.

• 12:57Ben Horowitz?

  I notice that all the time when I talk to entrepreneurs, when they start going, oh yeah, I just, yeah, it's, it's easy, it's going so well, we're going to have competition. You know, I just hired this guy, he had an offer from Anthropic for $5 billion, but he took my $400,000 a year job, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, bro, check yourself for wounds because I assure you, you're bleeding, you know, like you're in trouble.

• 13:21Speaker 00

  For sure. But, but there's times when it's actually easy. That's a guy pretending, so I call that the fake it till you make it, which he's lying to himself plus others. But there's actual times when it's easy, but it's because you're not continuing to push. So it's one thing when you're just not winning, but you're pretending like you are. And there's another thing when you're winning, but you're taking it easy and you're about to start losing. Yeah.

• 13:47Ben Horowitz?

  Many such cases.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure.

• 13:49Erik Torenberg?

  Last question, then I'll open it up to a couple of Q and A. So Ben, Travis, when you, your first external round at Uber, the venture round, I believe was at four million post or, or something like that.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  It's four million pre, you're talking about Uber.

• 14:04Erik Torenberg?

  First round, yeah.

• 14:04Speaker 00

  Our first round at Uber was four million pre.

• 14:07Erik Torenberg?

  This one, you know, several orders of magnitude, uh, uh, bigger.

• 14:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:11Erik Torenberg?

  Ben, I believe this is one of, if not our biggest check, biggest check you've ever written.

• 14:17Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. Certainly biggest check I ever.

• 14:20Erik Torenberg?

  You know, when did you get to conviction that we were a hundred percent, like, what was your process like?

• 14:26Ben Horowitz?

  I was not a hundred percent. When I first started talking to him, well, as soon as I knew what it was, um, the only question for me was, uh, was it going to be one thing?

• 14:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:39Ben Horowitz?

  Because like, I've known Travis for, for many, many, many years and, um, he's always been the opposite of the, like, our conversations were always the real shit. Like when we, I, I mean, I was on the board of Lyft, uh, and I was talking to him about Uber and he would tell me like all the stuff that Chinese ride sharing companies were doing to him, breaking into his apps, giving shit away for free, this and that and the other. And he was fired up about that, like, oh, if I can deal with these guys, the rest of the world's going to be no problem. And there, there are just not that many, there are very few, I'm telling you, I've been in this a while, very few entrepreneurs that come at it like that.

• 15:22Ben Horowitz?

  So I knew if we could put money in Travis and he was still, the other thing that I learned was he was still Travis. Like he hadn't like turned into, he wasn't living his best life. He wasn't doing that.

• 15:36Ben Horowitz?

  So yeah, it was a very, I was that conviction very fast.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  I think, um, a lot of people don't, some people know this, but not a lot, is that we actually had separate companies going. And so when I went to do the fundraise, I kind of showed up at A16, kind of like the guy with a trench coat, trench coat with a bunch of watches, saying, you want a watch? Which watch would you like? I got lots of stuff, dude, you want some food stuff? Actually, I got different parts of the food thing. What do you like? I've got some mining stuff, that's pretty cool. And they're like, we just want the stuff. And we heard that from the first few people that we talked to. And so actually the, the tricky part about this deal, or the, what added trickiness to this deal, uh, that made us sweat a little bit and just made it hard was like, I had

• 16:24Speaker 00

  to merge separate entities with different investors and put it together. Which was pretty interesting because like, how do you do a ratio when certain things are very early?

• 16:37Speaker 00

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

• 17:00Speaker 00

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

• 17:18Erik Torenberg?

  Before we get to Q and A, lastly Travis, why don't you say a couple of words about what it's like to have a lot of the Uber gang back together. Uh, it's where, you know, putting the pieces back together, you know, Anthony, this company you bought, it was a bunch of people in this room who were alongside with you for the first round.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  Look, when I first got going, look, I was on the board of Uber when I first got going. So I got thousands of inbound from actual Uber employees that are like, let's go. And I had to be careful because if you're on the board of a company, you can't hire thousands of their people.

• 17:56Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, like.

• 17:56Speaker 00

  Not, it's not just a bad look, it's actually illegal. So there's that too. And, um, and I'm very familiar with the law here. Okay. So you pick your guys, you pick your spots, the whole thing. But you know, there's a few, there's a lot of really special people in this room. I mean, uh, Gotham, who was the CFO over at Uber, has joined Adams, uh, that's a recent thing. Ganesh, who was a VP or SVP of Engineering over at Uber, has just joined Adams. And there's a lot of young guns at Uber that joined that are now the big guns. Right? There's a guy, Brian Atwell, who's one of our engineering leads on the food side and on infrastructure.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  Anthony Levandowski, of course. Eric Myhoffer, who ran Uber's advanced technology group, he's running food robotics. Like a list goes on, guys. Oh, Jessica, uh, Jessica Morton, she was head of Uber Eats, uh, Japan. And I went to Japan when we first got going and I met with Masa, because like, maybe Masa's going to be in and like, I could never get over him just stealing my stuff and then investing in like eight other companies that do what I do. And then I met with Jess because that was like my number one in, like my number one thing to, my number one, number two thing to do there. But she's now doing a lot of really cool stuff. Now, we're not just an Uber company.

• 19:27Speaker 00

  We have more executives that are not Uber than are, but there's a lot of heart from that time and people who were there.

• 19:37Speaker 00

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

• 19:49Erik Torenberg?

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

• 19:56Erik Torenberg?

  Gary.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  Travis, congratulations. My favorite question to ask for especially a room like this is, well, if you could like send a message in a bottle to the 18 to 22 year old version of yourself, what to say?

• 20:13Speaker 00

  Um, look, the 18 year old version of me uh was a super geek uh pretending not to be.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  So I would just be like, dude, just be a geek. It's gonna be fine.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  You know, the pretending to not be a geek when you're a geek is just a lot of cognitive spe- you know, load that's not necessary. Um, you know, uh, I'm not sure that things would have gone better, but that's certainly one of the things I probably would have told myself. Yeah.

• 20:46Erik Torenberg?

  What about you, Ben?

• 20:48Ben Horowitz?

  That's a, I, I, just not to worry about uh, not to worry about stuff, you know, like it is what it is. Do what you gotta do. Um, you know, don't, don't, like, consequence is gonna be what the consequence is. You know, you gotta find a way out.

• 21:09Ben Horowitz?

  And you just gotta keep looking till you find it. And there's nothing else to do. So worrying doesn't help at all.

• 21:17Speaker 00

  No stress.

• 21:18Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 21:18Speaker 00

  Don't worry, be happy.

• 21:19Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, don't worry. Well, but you need urgency.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  Don't be too happy.

• 21:24Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, don't be too happy.

• 21:25Erik Torenberg?

  Don't worry, be happy, Travis.

• 21:27Ben Horowitz?

  Don't, don't, don't be, don't be fat and happy. Yeah.

• 21:30Erik Torenberg?

  Okay, next question.

• 21:33Speaker 04

  Owen. Question for Travis. How are you gonna structure all this? Are you gonna have like shared resources across the divisions? Are you gonna have CEOs? Are you gonna have many boards? Like, how are you thinking of all of that?

• 21:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's super great. Um, so one of the things I'm happy about is that I don't have multiple boards, cuz that's a thing I was just like, oh my God, I definitely don't want that. Um, but shared resources is just a, it's sort of like, this is the management architecture, organizational architecture geek saying that we gotta figure out. Um, okay, the normal G and A, finance, legal, HR, shared. Then you're like, okay, infrastructure on the technology side, shared. Is manufacturing shared? Sometimes you want manufacturing to go deep. Okay, we're just gonna do this kind of manufacturing, but it just so happens that a lot of the manufacturing that we're doing on mining is similar to uh, the manufacturing

• 22:27Speaker 00

  that we're doing on transport. But it's very different than the manufacturing we're doing on food. So, do you have a guru of manufacturing? You probably do. Because it's a thing, it's a specialized thing. And when you do it at scale, you can get way better talent and just all the other things work better. So my guess is manufacturing is also one of those things. And then you're like, which parts of software get locked in? Mostly, but not complete. And I don't have all the answers on that one. But like, these are business units that run as separate businesses. Like, the guy who runs, you know, mining is just like, all in

• 23:07Speaker 00

  on that and has lots of control and empowerment to make mining successful. Um, and, and same for the other, for the other situations. Yeah. Yeah, it's super interesting. Yeah, but I mean, that's the thing, right? Is like, I had to make it a bit painful. Otherwise, I'm just not, I'm just like, I will, I, it's just inevitable. I just do that. Yeah. Yeah.

• 23:34Erik Torenberg?

  Next question.

• 23:38Erik Torenberg?

  Brett.

• 23:40Speaker 05

  Hi Travis. Um, one thing that you said earlier was uh, being pissed off makes you a really good entrepreneur. Um, you know, there's, it's interesting. Sometimes people say that if you're successful and you're driven by a desire for revenge, it's like a dirty fuel. Like, it works, but it's not the best source of fuel that you can possibly have. I'm curious throughout your career and just like, everything that you've built, have you found a cleaner source of fuel? Or you just, you know, what's your takeaway on that?

• 24:04Speaker 00

  Look, most people don't know this, but before, this is a couple of companies before Uber, I did a uh, a peer-to-peer file sharing system, got sued for a quarter of a trillion dollars by 33 of the largest media companies in the world, and I was pissed. I did a revenge business, which was, I'm gonna do a peer-to-peer CDN, like Akamai, BitTorrent meets Akamai before BitTorrent existed. And my whole thing was turn those guys who sued me into customers. It was like a full spite business, like full spite store. Like, let's go. Okay? Um.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  But I think in many ways, the, there is a, there is a dirty, there is a dirty revenge or dirty, it's dirty, it can be successful, but it ends up being less than what it should be, when it comes from the wrong place, if that makes sense. Uh, part of what drove me earlier was a little bit of like a fear of failure. A fear of failure. And that can mean long nights where you get little done. And it just means you have this edge, this weird vibe that people are like, dude, something's wrong with that guy. Right? And it's just a thing. You're just not gonna go all the way. Right? When the Uber thing happened and

• 25:23Speaker 00

  then moved on to new stuff, which was like, eight months after I left Uber, I was doing the new thing. Uh, yeah, I, I kinda fell in love again, you know? And so, people said, are you pissed off about Uber? Are you, this thing, like, are you, does that grind you? Or, you know, is it on your mind? And I, it's just like, when you fall in love again, you don't think about the X very much. And if you come from that place, you can create in a beautiful, undirty way, if that makes sense. Yeah. It's important and, and it's not, that doesn't, you gotta work on it to get to that place probably over time, but by the time I got there, I was there. Yeah.

• 26:09Erik Torenberg?

  Maybe one last question.

• 26:12Speaker 00

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

• 26:23Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, question, you mentioned, I remember this slide, I'll remember it forever. Killer boss, um, was the killer boss for Adams, especially in this.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  What is the killer boss? What does that mean?

• 26:36Erik Torenberg?

  Final boss, sorry.

• 26:37Speaker 00

  Final boss?

• 26:37Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 26:37Speaker 00

  Oh, final boss.

• 26:40Erik Torenberg?

  Killer boss is my version for fighting.

• 26:42Speaker 00

  Look, um, there's huge opportunities here. It's maybe the final bosses, like, I don't know what the final boss, but like, I'll just, I'll just riff a little bit on this concept, which is, there are a lot of people in this room and not in this room who will gladly vanquish me. And I mean, not in a bad way, but we're competing for the next industrial revolution.

• 27:14Speaker 00

  Um, you know, Magic Johnson, this is old school. Magic Johnson, Larry Bird were like, kinda guys, but like, they'll kick each other's butt, right? So, uh, that's the wrong analogy for this crew, but, but you get, it's like Patrick Ewing, like, you know, some shit. Okay, but um, so I think there's, there's, that is actually pretty important. Is there like an ultra, like, you have to, you always have to think when you go into a space like this, you go, who's the best of the best at industrial AI? Anybody wanna guess? It's really obvious.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  His, his name rhymes with Schmee lon. Okay? He's the best of the best. And he'll just keep going and keep doing lots more, even if what you do now is not what he does now. So maybe if you wanna go final boss mode, I mean, he, I don't even know who his final boss is. Like, people are like, dude, Elon's the goat. I'm like, dude, I'm a baby goat. It's great.

• 28:13Speaker 00

  Um, you know, but that, maybe he's the final boss, you know? Uh, but mad respect, of course. Uh, he's, he's obviously the best by a long shot. Um, uh, and so, um, anyways, yeah, I'm not sure exactly how to answer, but I was a little riff on it. Yeah.

• 28:31Erik Torenberg?

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

• 28:40Speaker 00

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

• 29:11Erik Torenberg?

  Okay, so this is your coming out party, so to speak.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:14Erik Torenberg?

  You're back in the flow. Talk about how you've seen Silicon Valley or the tech industry at large change from when you were, you know, right in, in the center in it to be coming back eight years later. What would have, what surprised you or what's, what's most notable about where we are as an agency?

• 29:30Speaker 00

  Look, I think probably one of the coolest things, and this is part of why I'm out versus not before, uh, is that the media landscape has completely changed. The media landscape 10 years ago, 90% of what was said was very negative. Business had become politics and we didn't know it. So, think of your favorite politician, if you have one. I mean, many of you may not have one, but let's just pretend you did. Okay? It's fucking hilarious.

• 30:05Speaker 00

  But let's just, okay? Uh, take your favorite politician. Are the, go type his name in on Google. What are, do you think you're gonna find anything good? It's gonna be just tsunami waves of negativity is what you're gonna find. Of course, if it leads, if it bleeds, it leads. Right? And that's human nature and there's negativity and that gets the clicks and the whole thing. Um, but we weren't used to it then and we thought everything that the New York Times said was real. And we know now that that's not even close to true. And it's, we, we now understand. And so the media landscape is like, yeah, you

• 30:47Speaker 00

  don't have to talk to those guys. And you can go and talk to a David Senra, you can go and talk to uh, Joe Rogan or name your guy and it's, you can say what you need to say in a, in an environment that's not like a struggle session in Maoist China. Right? So, that's a big frickin' change. And, and I think it's a, you know, Elon buying Twitter is like the beginning of us being able to speak our minds and for disagreeing to not be illegal. That's a big deal. We should all thank Elon for that.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  And it allows, so you go, okay, somebody like myself, who basically was just like, okay, I want to build, I want to, I want to not think about what the New York Times is writing when I make decisions about what I build. I had to emulate what it's like being a capitalist in Russia, which is their number one KPI is called shut the fuck up. And that's what I did for eight years. In a weird way, it was like that, for different reasons, but it was like that. And so we're now out of that mode, or getting out of that mode, and let's go. And I think that's the biggest change for all of us in the last eight years.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  And God bless, and hopefully that continues.

• 32:21Erik Torenberg?

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

• 32:30Speaker 06

  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 a 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. 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.

• 33:14Speaker 06

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