Uber Founder Travis Kalanick is Back with a New AI Startup

This is our full interview with Travis Kalanick, recorded live on TBPN. We discuss why he kept City Storage Systems in stealth for nearly eight years before reemerging as Atoms, unpack how his bet on real estate, robotics, autonomous delivery, and industrial infrastructure is designed to bring the economics of prepared food closer to grocery-store prices, and debate what the next era of physical AI could look like from mining and transport to specialized robotics, capital wars, and a future where human labor becomes the critical bottleneck in an increasingly automated world. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to podcast platforms immediately after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com AppLovin - https://axon.ai Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Cognition - https://cognition.ai Console - https://console.com CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io Figma - https://figma.com Fin - https://fin.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Graphite - https://graphite.com Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Kalshi - https://kalshi.com Labelbox - https://labelbox.com Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app MongoDB - https://mongodb.com NYSE - https://nyse.com Okta - https://www.okta.com Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com Public - https://public.com Railway - https://railway.com Ramp - https://ramp.com Restream - https://restream.io Sentry - https://sentry.io Shopify - https://shopify.com Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Vibe - https://vibe.co Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  We have our next guest ready to join us live in the TDP and Ultra Room. We have Travis Kalanick. He is the CEO of Cloud Kitchens. Welcome to the show Travis. Great to meet you. Appreciate you coming on down to our studio, our humble boat. Great to meet you.

• 0:16Jordi Hays?

  We are truly an honor.

• 0:18Speaker 02

  I'm just down the street.

• 0:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. We were actually, we started the show in downtown LA at the Jonathan Club on Figaroa. And so I think we were even closer then.

• 0:29Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  It's still not far. How are things going? How's life?

• 0:35John Coogan?

  Whoa. Can we turn that down? We're getting some feedback.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Wow, that was crazy. Um, man, it's crazy.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's crazy?

• 0:42Speaker 02

  The building doesn't stop.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  Um, I mean, I don't know how much you guys, I mean, I've just, I've been in hiding. So I've been, um, I've been doing, uh, I've been doing this. I run a company called Cities, up until today.

• 0:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  Let's just say. I was running a company called City Storage Systems. Okay. Which was basically about the future of food. A conglomerate operating in about 30 countries. That the whole idea was can you get a meal? That's prepared and delivered to you so efficient that it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  Cause if you do, you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car. So I've been doing that since 2018.

• 1:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  And after just the intensity of Uber from in terms of like being in the public sphere. Dealing with 100 headlines every day, deciding what you do or the actions you take based on what the New York Times is gonna write. I was like, I would like to just-

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  That's a tough way to run a business.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  It is very tough. So, uh, I was just like, I gotta wake up every day and sort of just get to work and build.

• 1:53John Coogan?

  So do you think of-

• 1:53Speaker 02

  So I went under the radar.

• 1:55John Coogan?

  Do you think of this as like stealth mode? Is that the right term?

• 1:57Speaker 02

  We've been in stealth mode for eight years.

• 1:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  And that's like- Till today. Yeah. Employees were not allowed to put the name of the company on their LinkedIn. Wow. We have thousands of employees. Yeah, that's crazy. Okay, so today what happened was is like for my company, and I just got out of an all hands and then came right here, is we went out of stealth. Yep. Now, City Storage Systems is like a hilarious name. It's like the most like, let me choose the most generic. It was like the most. Generic name that no one will ever notice. The business corporation of America. It was on purpose. Yeah. Okay? And it worked. It was like, we had two choices when we, when we launched. Yeah.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  We had what my sort of normal instinct was. Remember, it was only seven, eight months after I left Uber when I started this. Yeah. And it's, let's just say the mission is infrastructure for better food. Yeah. We have hardcore real estate assets. We buy the assets, we do construction, we sell restaurateurs on a delivery only location. I have a software stack. Yeah. That's like ARR, ARR Life. I've got a robotics company. Yeah. I have a marketplace for, for corporate lunch. Like, there's a ton of stuff going on. We use it, we use it. Oh, yeah, that's right. That's right, of course, yeah. It's great. All right. It's great. Okay, so shit, I forgot what I was saying. So, so. It's just a very different business from Uber. Some people would leave that company and be like, I'm gonna start the exact same thing.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  I got the playbook. Well, and this is what, this is what the Uber guys, when I left, were, were like a little bit worried about. This is, we're talking about 2017, 18. Yeah. They're paranoid, so my, my instinct was, okay, I left, it's seven months later, I'm gonna name my company Super. You're like, you leave a company called Uber, you call it Super. Or call it Giga. I'm like, you go from Uber to Super, you're like, no, that, that cannot be a thing. And so I did the opposite. Yeah. Full underground, full stealth, put the toothpaste back in the tube, the genie back in the bottle, and built. Yeah. Literally thousands of employees. And it's like a vacuum of information, full lockdown.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  It's been great building, uh, but today we sort of came out and we renamed the company. We renamed what we do, we call it Adams. Adams. Okay? Beautiful. But we started a new company at the same time. And so, let's just say like, uh, like a physical AI and robotics.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Action and movement through the physical world. Of course, on the food side, we already have all the things I just talked about. But, but think of it as like, um, uh,

• 4:39Speaker 02

  I'm trying to get the mission like I'm so riled up.

• 4:42Jordi Hays?

  It's so fresh.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's so fresh. But, but basically it's, um, yeah, so, so I'll, I'll leave it at that. Let's, we can get rolling here. I'm like super caffeinated on four hours of sleep, so.

• 4:52Jordi Hays?

  I love it, I love it. Uh, what, how much harder? In, in many ways, I think building in stealth for so long made a lot of things easier, right? You're not running your business based on headlines or thinking about what headlines are going to come. What are, what are the ways in which you made it harder? I imagine there's a lot of, there's a lot of, there's a lot of talent out there that wants to go work at the hot company that's in the news constantly. I'm sure you got the benefits of people maybe opting out of that path and saying, "Hey, I just want to come in with you and build, and I don't care about the hype, and I don't want, I don't need every recruiter hitting me up constantly because of whatever's on my LinkedIn." But what were the kind of key challenges and what are, why, why was now the right time to, uh,

• 5:36Jordi Hays?

  to come out and, and start to get loud again?

• 5:40Speaker 02

  So like first, I mean a hundred percent. So imagine every recruiter has to be outbound. Every salesperson has to be outbound. There's no inbound.

• 5:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  That's where it starts. You get good at your craft when that's what you have to do. Like, I believe we have some of the best recruiters in the world because of it. And one of the best recruiting systems. Now, they leverage, okay, you're working with Travis, former, you know, founder of Uber. Like, there's leverage there.

• 6:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  But then you, you have a name like City Storage Systems, and it's like, "So do you guys just have like these, these like boxes sitting in parking lots? Like, what is this?" And that's sort of like, the reason it's different now is because, look, number one, lots of time since the Uber, you know, from having to live that life.

• 6:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  But two is the world is different. Like, in 2016, 2017, the world of, let's call it business press, was just beginning to say, "Business is politics," but people didn't know it. They're like, if...

• 6:45Speaker 02

  New York Times says something, everybody just treated it as the gospel, like it just must be true.

• 6:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  And if they say something bad, it must be true. I believe everything I read on the internet as an example. And so, and by the way, it's, this sounds crazy, but 2017, the media world was actually more negative then than it is today.

• 7:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  And I think partly because of even shows like this.

• 7:09John Coogan?

  No, and it's like-

• 7:10Speaker 02

  It's like, let's bring some optimism to the party.

• 7:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  Can we get excited about what the future looks like and what's being built?

• 7:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  And that's the difference between today and then. And so, when you go 95% of all press is negative, you're like, why engage? When the world is used to business being politics, let's just say, and if I thought of my favorite journal, sorry, my favorite politician and say, what does the internet say that's bad about them? And it's like, an insane amount. What does the internet say that's neg-, or sorry, untrue about them? And it's a ton of stuff. And you go, well, that's how they're going to think about our company too. That's how it's going to play.

• 7:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  We're now, we're desensitized to that stuff. And now, we can get back to optimism and building and not be so worried about, you know, 95% of the media just being negative.

• 7:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 8:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, this is pre, like, whole trend of going direct, right?

• 8:03John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 8:04Jordi Hays?

  Like Lulu, I'm sure you've met it at some point. Basically coached a generation of CEOs on, you know, you just can't, if you, if you want to have any control-

• 8:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:14Jordi Hays?

  -over how people perceive you, you need to, you need to tell-

• 8:18John Coogan?

  You have to counteract with like, a story, not like, a statement. And the, and the boilerplate, like, you know, official statement just doesn't, it doesn't entertain people as well as a full read, a long read.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  And it's also, guys, like, Elon owns Twitter now.

• 8:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  It's X.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Right? Pre-post is like, a massive difference in the mix of sort of ideas that can get out there. And again, you're allowed to be optimistic about things where maybe before-

• 8:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  -everything had to be negative and, and, and sort of-

• 8:49Jordi Hays?

  Yes, you, you talked about the initial idea of naming the next company Super. That would have, in many ways, I'm sure, turned into a- Basically a spite company. A memetic rival. Yeah, where you're just, in this case, like, kind of taking the high road was, I'm just gonna be quiet, I'm gonna do the years and years and years and years of just like chewing glass, building up the infrastructure, getting to scale, getting to thousands of employees, getting to operating globally before you even poke your head up again, which I think is, to any of your former critics, that's, to me, that's taking the high road, basically.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, and what you get when you create a culture around that is you have, you then build a culture of builders. You build a culture of people that want to build and do not need to be famous when they do it.

• 9:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Which basically means emotional intelligence. Now, it's a human nature. I want to be acknowledged for the things that I do.

• 9:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  I'd like the things I build to be seen and I'd like somebody to know that I did it. And so this is when you cut against sort of the core of human nature and we sort of went all the way.

• 9:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  And so we have a very high EQ culture, but like, it is, like, you have to go the extra mile to recruit, the extra mile in sales, etc. Again, the world's different. LFG.

• 10:10John Coogan?

  Are the laws of physics of the different businesses slightly different? I'm just thinking about your career arc with like, Red Swoosh is enterprise communications, you're in a very particular industry. Uber's a consumer company. Now you're working on something that looks, you're probably running like real estate developers. It's like a different industry, different community. Has there been adjustments and what's different, what's the same? Like, what can you just be like a good business operator and power through? And what do you actually have to learn about the new industry?

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Look, I think probably the biggest one is when you go from consumer to, because I have a, I mean, when you go from consumer to B2B.

• 10:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  The number one mega challenge that you must master is called LTV to CAC.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Yes, you can make that argument on consumer, but when you have a sales funnel that starts with, I'm going to talk to customers and I'm going, I have to make LTV to CAC work versus like, my LTV to CAC is the App Store. It's a whole different ballgame. And LTV to CAC with a sales machine, especially if you go small business, this is like life in hard mode. And talk to anybody who's crushed it on SMB. Like those guys are special individuals who've made that happen because life in the SMB B2B world is no joke.

• 11:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, so talk about moats. I feel like Uber's the greatest example of network effects and runaway scale. What do, what did moats look like at Red Swoosh? What were you thinking then? And then, and then what does it look like now?

• 11:54Speaker 02

  So like, nobody knows what Red Swoosh is.

• 11:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, sorry.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  That's all good. So guys, I started a company in 2001. That was, let's call it BitTorrent meets Akamai.

• 12:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  Before BitTorrent existed. Okay, that's crazy. You click on a link and you can pull from other PCs that already have that file or that video stream, but it looks like the internet. That's basically what it was. The first four years, no salary.

• 12:23John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 12:24Jordi Hays?

  Had some famous investors.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  Famous investors, you know, like, Mark Cuban was on the board of Red Swoosh. So before that scour was Ovitz and Ron Burkle. That was the company before that.

• 12:41Jordi Hays?

  I was confusing that too.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, anyways.

• 12:44John Coogan?

  So there's a network effect there. Once you get the CDN up and running.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  That company wasn't meant to be and I willed it into being. And I sold it to Akamai for like, I think it was like 19 million bucks. And probably to this day is still the happiest day of my life. It was crazy. It was crazy. Like I cleared 3 million and I was like, praise the Lord.

• 13:07John Coogan?

  Okay, so then Uber, very obvious, very obvious moats and scale economies. What does this look like with Adams? What does this look like in both? You know, the food delivery, kitchen model, real estate model, but then also where we're going in autonomous robotics.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Look, if you look at where moats are, and really you're looking for network effects in different places, right? So, right now, I have these facilities. There's 30 restaurants in each of them. Picnic is like a perfect example of this, right? You order from your office, looks like Uber Eats or DoorDash, you get 100 options, except all the meals are coming out of my facilities. There's one courier that brings 100 orders at a time, but it's on-demand and it's personalized for you, and we've got enough facilities near here that you can basically get anything. And so, who's gonna, who can play ball? Like, you gotta have the real estate. That's a frickin' moat. You have the network effect now of like, what if I sell every floor on every tower,

• 14:08Speaker 02

  meaning every office floor is on this, and I shelves in all of these floors? That means that one courier can bring 100 orders, and by the way, I'll have five couriers going to a single office with 500 orders, hitting every shelf, and you get notified when it arrives. If you even took one floor, you would be like sad, because your economics are gonna be screwed, because you don't have the efficiency or the operation sort of depth to make it work. So, there's network effects of a building. There's network effects on a facility with kitchens in it. There's, but then there's the moat of like, we own real estate. Okay? So like, if you wanna compete-

• 14:47Jordi Hays?

  You wanna compete with us, go buy 100 million-

• 14:49Speaker 02

  So, very high- Go buy billions of dollars of real estate in every major city in the world, and then we're gonna go head-to-head.

• 14:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk about capital-

• 14:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other, the other, I don't know exactly what bucket this falls in, but just, just the moat of you would have to be absolutely insane to compete with-

• 15:09John Coogan?

  But people were, people were. Like, this is how I remember the Uber versus Lyft battle, was Uber was doing so well, and then all of a sudden, a whole bunch of VCs were like, I want a piece of that, and I didn't get Uber, so I'm funding the-

• 15:21Jordi Hays?

  But I'm saying in the context of cloud kitchens, city storage, like-

• 15:27Jordi Hays?

  Even though people generally figured out what you were up to, right? You did have to share some little things along the way. Or you buy this company or so there's some dude.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  You gotta go to a website and say, what is a delivery only location? What the hell is that?

• 15:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  And so somebody had to know.

• 15:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  But even then, we're like, we're gonna, we're gonna say the cross streets of the facility, not the actual address. Like, these are the little moves you do to be stealth, you know?

• 15:53Jordi Hays?

  In, you know, when I look at the new site and how everything's positioned, a lot of it feels insulated from all the changes and progress that we're seeing in AI. And in many, in many ways, like accelerated because you'll get a lot of the benefits of AI progress and progress in robotics. But you're moving physical atoms around the world in an era where, you know, you can generate any piece of software fairly quickly. This feels like you've been kind of planning for this type of technology progress.

• 16:31Speaker 02

  Sounds great, dude. I love that. I love it. Yeah, dude, it's all in the plan. Look, I think it's always been the plan, a meal that's efficient, you know, so efficient, it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store. A meal that's prepared and delivered to you, that's real. You must do automated production of food. You must do automated delivery of the meal. I call that autonomous burritos, which is why I'm moving into this, making this move on atoms, which is okay, we're still doing the food thing, but then we're adding mining and transport, okay? Mining being like more, you know, we like to say more efficient mines for Earth's industries. Or on transport, it's just wheelbase for robots.

• 17:16Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Okay? Because if you're gonna do specialized robots, not humanoids, but specialized robots, they need to have wheels.

• 17:23Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  Right? I like to say, like, if you saw the Beijing, in Beijing, they had the humanoid Olympics.

• 17:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  And the half marathon, and you're watching a humanoid cruising. I'm like, dude, could you imagine if that thing had wheels? That'd be crazy. So like, humanoids have their place, but there's, there's a lot of room for specialized robots that, that do things in an efficient sort of industrial scale kind of way, which is sort of where we play.

• 17:52John Coogan?

  Uh, I'm, I, I'm, I, I want to go back to Capital Wars, lessons from Capital Wars, when these play out, because we're seeing this.

• 18:00Speaker 02

  The OG, the OG.

• 18:01John Coogan?

  And you, yeah.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  My, my.

• 18:03John Coogan?

  Well, were you the OG? Because, or, or when this Capital War kicked off, were you looking to lessons from the 90s?

• 18:10Speaker 02

  I mean, look, you can always say there was the guy before.

• 18:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  Okay, like, like, you know, Rockefeller was the OG.

• 18:17John Coogan?

  I guess.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  And then before him was like the Medici's, I don't know. But I was, I was the GOAT for a period of time, and now I'm a baby goat.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  And that's okay.

• 18:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Uh, and so then one day, the baby goat will grow up again.

• 18:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  That's fine. It's gonna be fine.

• 18:37John Coogan?

  I, I, I just mean like, um, thi- this idea of like, you have a network effect, it's growing, and then you see a bunch of venture capitalists start throwing money at like, the second place, and there's this debate over catching up, and like, how do you, what moats do you retreat to in that moment? Like, I feel like that's the, that's the lesson from the Uber story that gets missed amid all the random drama, is that there's actually like, a very interesting financial war happening.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:03John Coogan?

  And it played out very well for you, and I'm wondering like, what level of confidence you had, what did you do strategically to set yourself up for success?

• 19:10Speaker 02

  It's a super interesting thing, because of course, all the AI guys are playing that game right now.

• 19:15John Coogan?

  Right.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  Which is, the ability to attract capital. Cap- the Capital Wars becomes a strategic weapon. Capital becomes a strategic weapon.

• 19:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Which means you must be the best at getting capital in order to win.

• 19:28John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  And we realized that early on, in the Uber days, of course, that's happening times 10.

• 19:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  In the sort of, let's call it the digital AI wars.

• 19:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  And, look, the last round of funding that I did at Uber, we were like a 70 million, or, you know, I don't know, it was like a 60, 70 billion dollar pre, uh, let's see that, yeah, when that used to be a thing.

• 19:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  Now, like, oh, that's small stuff.

• 19:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  But we had four rooms, this was our, our, how we'd fundraise, we had four rooms in our New York office. Booked for a week with an hour and a half slot on each. So like for 12 hours in a day, four rooms going in parallel.

• 20:11Jordi Hays?

  Are you bouncing between?

• 20:13Speaker 02

  No, I'm in the $250 million and over club. That's one room and it goes all there's all these other, there's these other rooms to the fourth room is like 25 million dollar checks.

• 20:23Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Okay. There's a guy who works for a guy who works for a guy who works for me who's doing that room.

• 20:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Okay. And then, but we're oversubscribed, so we started putting multiple investors in the same room. We're like, dude, we're just out of slots, dude. Like, let's go.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  And, but what it means is about the system. It's about the system for sort of acquiring that capital at scale and super efficiently. And what it means is that storytelling that we did, anybody in my team could tell that story, let's say on the strategic finance team could tell that story and make it happen. And that was a big part. It was a story that's just like, of course, is like if I'm pitching it, people are like, holy shit, let's go. Then there is making it scalable so that there are 10 different people in a company that can pitch it at any given time.

• 21:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  And that's when you take it all the way. And then there's like even auction dynamics of how you would do it. We would basically, once they said they were interested, we would then give them a piece of paper. It was like digital, but it was like, you need to fill out this table. Which is this valuation, how much money you want to put in? This valuation, how much money? This much money? This, this valuation, how much money? And then we would aggregate the demand.

• 21:44Jordi Hays?

  It's like building an IPO book.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  Yes, but like done way better because you don't, respect to the bankers. But like, I was in charge of pricing.

• 21:54John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  And so, and then you're like, oh, we're trying to clear $5 billion. That takes us to this price. We would tell all these guys, hey, your price isn't big enough because

• 22:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  you don't make it under the curve.

• 22:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  And then they would move their price.

• 22:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  And then that would change the curve and you would do it again.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  Do it again. Makes sense. Were you, were you bringing new investors to private markets at that time? I feel like if I go back to Facebook, I think they IPO'd around 50 billion. You're doing a $70 billion raise. There's a lot of different, it's a completely different shape of investor. What were those conversations like?

• 22:27Speaker 02

  Look, I, like, in some ways, I have to give some credit. This was, it was an era

• 22:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:33Speaker 02

  where this was happening. You had like the fidelities of the world and other guys that are moving in.

• 22:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  I have to give credit to Drew at Dropbox.

• 22:40John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  He was like the first guy in that game.

• 22:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  And, you know, Drew and I'd meet up and we'd, you know, and I'd be like, flex. I'm like, dude.

• 22:55Jordi Hays?

  You're like, this is my, our little safe space.

• 22:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was like Chesky at Airbnb. Like, that was the crew that was doing it in the 2010s.

• 23:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  And sort of pushing the boundaries of what it meant to be, like, people didn't even know what private equity. What is a private, what is private equity?

• 23:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  Now we're just like, yeah, private equity. That's VC. It's the same thing. And, but back then, private equity is like, I do leverage buyouts. And so you're bringing private equity, mutual funds, those guys into the game in a way that didn't exist before. Now it's just old hat.

• 23:26Jordi Hays?

  Have you, have you coached any of the AI founders?

• 23:29John Coogan?

  I was gonna ask the exact same thing. Culturally, like, that crew that you just described, I, we, most of them have been on the show. It feels very different aesthetically than what we're dealing with today.

• 23:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I'm sure Chesky's pumping up Sam.

• 23:43John Coogan?

  I love, I love these guys. I love them all.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  That's so interesting. Look, the, the times when I get hit up.

• 23:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  Are usually when the shit is about to hit the fan.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  Or it's actually hitting the fan. They're like, dude, somebody needs to call Travis immediately. He'll know what to do. So I.

• 24:06John Coogan?

  Travis, they're casting a movie about me.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  My phone's like, what are the crazy, wild, wackiest things going down or like here? Because that's when I usually get the call and I'm so underground.

• 24:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what happens. But like, I should, you know, I should give, you know, I know these guys. I should give them a call and be like, dude, we should.

• 24:26John Coogan?

  Let's cook.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  Let's, let's cook.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  I still think we probably did things better than anybody. That some of those things probably are still better than anybody even today. But obviously the check size much bigger.

• 24:39Jordi Hays?

  Is that approach like systematizing, fundraising, productizing it? Do you apply that across the entire, is that like everything that you do? That is important. You're, you're creating like a ground up kind of solution for it.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, like for instance, I mean, this will, you know, this is just crazy, but like, how about when you do construction?

• 25:02Speaker 02

  You know how effed up construction is? I tell my guys that in the, in the real estate department, I'm like, your entire department is the anti-fraud department.

• 25:14Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah. You know? Guys just are incentivized to just run up the bill.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  So how do you do epic, high quality construction at an insanely efficient price? There's a way. Not gonna tell you.

• 25:26Jordi Hays?

  Not gonna tell you.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  But there's a way.

• 25:28John Coogan?

  Do you have, do you have any like white pills or ideas that potentially AI speeds up the rate of building broadly? Like solving the housing crisis through.

• 25:38Jordi Hays?

  Like permitting.

• 25:39John Coogan?

  Permitting, stuff like that.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  This is so one of the things is that, and I think people are starting to come out of this now. This whole like, the jobs are gone. Like I know still people still say that.

• 25:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  But there is another side to this story. And like, I'll just make this because I'm the Adams guy. I'm like, let's just talk about plumbers. Okay. Let's say the entire world, everything in our world was automated except for plumbers.

• 26:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  Okay. You had machines making buildings. You would basically have like a thousand buildings a day. A thousand buildings being built at a single time in Los Angeles alone.

• 26:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  Just machines doing.

• 26:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  Except plumbers. Okay. How valuable would those plumbers be? Extremely valuable. Okay, those guys, each and every plumber would be like LeBron. Yeah. Okay, why? Why? Because, because, because plumbing is the long pull in the tent to progress. Sure. That you can't get those thousand buildings unless you have a plumber. Sure. And by the way, you've got so much efficiency everywhere else that you need millions of plumbers. Yeah. And then plumbing is like, Yeah. what's up? And so, once you, once you realize that, Yeah. then you're like, until we get super AGI, Yeah. humans are valuable. Mm-hmm.

• 26:59Speaker 02

  And they are going to become more and more valuable because they will be the long pull in the tent to progress. And that progress is going to accelerate and get faster and more, you know, more robust. Except if you're a plumber, you're crushing. And so, until we get to humans are replaced, like, Fully. Fully. Yeah. And by the way, I have, I think we have solutions for that. I think Elon's got that at Neuralink. It's gonna be all good. Okay, and then people are like, oh, God. Mm-hmm. But, but, until we get there, we're gonna, I believe, we're gonna be super fine. That's my white pill. Yeah.

• 27:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, it does, if you have plumbers that are getting paid like LeBron, it obviously increases the, you know, the prize pool of automating. Uh, but again, there's like these kind of windows of,

• 27:47Speaker 02

  But there's gonna be a bunch of things like plumbing. And it's not just plumbing. It's gonna be all over the place. Yeah. And even when it comes to software, so like, for instance, look at like autonomous cars. They, like, like Waymo has people that oversee the rides. Yeah. Okay? And it starts with like, okay, five, five rides for every person. Yeah. Then it goes to 20, then it goes to 100. But like, if we get to this place where autonomous cars are everywhere, okay? And let's just say it's one in a thousand. Mm-hmm. And like, nobody owns cars. There's just ride sharing everywhere. I mean, some people own cars, but it'd be the top of, the top of the pyramid, let's say. Okay, so what do we replace billions of cars with ride sharing?

• 28:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  If it was a thousand to one, you still probably have, I don't know, 20 million jobs?

• 28:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  50 million jobs? I'm just riffing on just the concept of this. You will see this everywhere.

• 28:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  Is that until humans are fully replaced, we become the long pole in the tent to progress. And that progress, by the way, is to serve us.

• 28:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. Robots yet don't yet have bank accounts.

• 28:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  So that plumber gets paid.

• 28:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  Anyways, you get the idea.

• 28:56John Coogan?

  Uh, you mentioned mining?

• 28:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:59John Coogan?

  Have you been to a mine recently? Have you visited a mine? Like, what, what's going on in mining? What, how, I mean, I imagine that mines are fairly automated already, that there's machinery.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  There's thousands of employees at, at a given mine.

• 29:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:13Jordi Hays?

  And it's, and that's work that humans.

• 29:15John Coogan?

  And there's so many resources.

• 29:16Jordi Hays?

  Children, children yearn for the mines of Minecraft.

• 29:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:20Jordi Hays?

  But it's not the best, not the best job.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  Well, like, maybe that's actually how it gets, you know, maybe that's where it goes.

• 29:24John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  It's like an Ender's Game situation.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  The, look, the, it's interesting. You go, a lot of times they're like, oh, um, oh, well, is labor really the issue in my, you know, is that really a thing? But that's, what it really comes down to is productivity.

• 29:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  Right? So if, if a mine is automated, then it can run all hours of the day and night. It doesn't have.

• 29:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  It doesn't have off-hours.

• 29:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  The way machines queue up, doing that really efficiently, like computer science style, I call it digitizing the physical world.

• 30:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  You can make that mine substantially more productive. What is the value of a more productive mine? And by the way, let's say, let's get to the real, sort of, the, the outcome here.

• 30:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:14Speaker 02

  Is, does the world, as we enter this sort of new golden age that's about to come, do we need more minerals? Do we need more materials? Look around us, guys.

• 30:26John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  Like, look around us in this studio or walk outside. Everything you see is grown or mined.

• 30:33John Coogan?

  Yep, yeah.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  Manufactured and moved.

• 30:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:38Speaker 02

  So if you're not in the mining business, like you're like, let's just say that my, like, I shouldn't say that, but like it's, it's a very critical part of the situation. I can't wait till we're putting some machines on SpaceX's rockets to go mine an asteroid or a planet or whatever. In the meantime, lots of mines on planet Earth.

• 31:00John Coogan?

  So what level of abstraction do you want to operate at? Do you want to go and find land and mine it? Because that's sort of on the table. If I look at what you're doing in food, you, you, you own real estate. Or do you want to sell tools to mining companies that already have explored and they understand and they're running up and running?

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, like I'm.

• 31:19John Coogan?

  How do you think?

• 31:20Speaker 02

  I'm not, um, I'm not buying land for mines anytime soon. That's just not anytime soon, but.

• 31:26John Coogan?

  In the next three months.

• 31:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:28John Coogan?

  Not in three times.

• 31:31Speaker 02

  120 days out.

• 31:32John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. We got you.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  I just think it's super fascinating.

• 31:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:38Speaker 02

  Again, it's just like, like I'm an atoms guy. I'm like all about digitization of the physical world. And, you know, I have this framework for it, which is like CPU manipulates bits, storage stores bits, network moves bits from point A to point B. I was a computer engineer at UCLA. I didn't graduate, but it, but I, I loved it.

• 31:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  Um, those are the three core computing resources that you're told about on day one.

• 32:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:04Speaker 02

  But if you're treating atoms like bits, digitizing the physical world, CPU manipulates bits, what manipulates atoms? Manufacturing. Storage stores bits, what stores atoms? Real estate. Network moves bits from point A to point B, what moves atoms? Transport logistics. I didn't know it then, or I didn't think about it that way exactly. But at Uber, we were building network for the physical world, also known as digitized transportation.

• 32:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  City storage systems then makes sense.

• 32:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Storage for the physical world, that's real estate. We're building atoms based computers with a real estate foundation.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  Storage, right? But now leveling up and saying, okay, we have a food computer. What about a mining computer? And what about a wheel-based platform to serve industry generally?

• 32:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. If I look at the last two decades of your career, you're uniquely good at managing very geographically spread out workforces. What is the secret? I can, I could never get behind the remote work thing. Everyone here works in one studio, but

• 33:13Speaker 02

  I'm all about it.

• 33:14John Coogan?

  But you, you've had to do it, basically, because you had to have a presence in New York. You had to have a presence in LA and you can't be in 10 places at once.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  There's a difference.

• 33:23John Coogan?

  How do you do it?

• 33:23Speaker 02

  There's a difference between remote work, where somebody works at home and they're like in boxers and then a

• 33:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  A suit, okay? Versus we have an office in every major city in the world.

• 33:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  And whatever city you're in, you're going to that office every day, five days a week.

• 33:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 33:39Speaker 02

  And sometimes six or seven. And that's it.

• 33:42John Coogan?

  But satellite offices still feel like a headache. How, how did you solve it? Because you can only be in one place.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I guess I just, I cracked the code so thoroughly in Uber times before, I think maybe even before anybody else.

• 33:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  It almost feels like normal.

• 33:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  But like, I basically have figured out sort of the, the management and leadership structures where you, the real, the real thing is about empowerment.

• 34:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  Is you must be able to empower teams, but I, I, I, it's like, I like to say the fewest number of rules while staying out of chaos.

• 34:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  And once you have those systems in place, um, you know, your imagination is only constrained by management capacity.

• 34:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:27Speaker 02

  So, once you figure out the management piece, your imagination can go pretty damn far. And so it's just figuring out the management part of this is the thing.

• 34:37John Coogan?

  Talk about empowering young people. We've had a ton of founders on the show who have the origin story of like, yeah, I was the GM of Miami or so. He's, he sent me to Atlanta and I was me in a hotel room with a bunch of energy drinks. And we had to open up this market, so we had to do a stunt and hire some people. And it just felt like a lot, you know, startup within a startup is a bad phrase. It gets sort of misused, but, um, Why, why were you, you know, you weren't, this wasn't your first company with Uber. Why were you so heavy on leaning on young people, empowering them, pushing them?

• 35:12Speaker 02

  It wasn't on purpose. It was just the right answer.

• 35:16John Coogan?

  Okay, why?

• 35:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, once you have a city team and you're like, okay, I need to find people that can run this. Like, old people aren't the answer. Like, I need fresh, I didn't think of it as like, I gotta get youthful people or not.

• 35:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  I'm just like, I need good talent that can go do X and who has no judgment on what it is we gotta get done.

• 35:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  And it was just like water flows downhill. So, what do you, look, it was a, you know, like, the first driver ops guy that we brought in in San Francisco in 2010, we basically took 200 cards and put names on them. And we said, alphabetize them. Click. And we just would measure how much time it took to alphabetize. We would give them like crazy analytics tests. And then we're like, okay, this is our guy. You know what I mean?

• 36:12John Coogan?

  Free, free AI.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  If you're on the marketing manager, if you're on the marketing manager, but even today, you'd still want that guy.

• 36:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  Even today. So like, you can't use AI. Now alphabetize in the most efficient way. Now, if you're, if you know computer science, sorting is like a big frickin' deal. Sorting efficiently and being able to do that in your brain, not in software, is a thing. That's what ops people do.

• 36:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

• 36:38Speaker 02

  So, I don't know. I don't know how to answer that question other than, problem solving, whether you're young or old, executive or junior, who can solve problems is number one. When you interview, simulate what it's like working together so that day one is really like week two. And you're already pumped because you saw them in action.

• 37:02Jordi Hays?

  How are you with Adams, how are you thinking about recruiting and how are you going to change your approach to building the company? You've been kind of holed up in LA. This is your kind of hideout.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally.

• 37:14Jordi Hays?

  But I imagine, like, do you do you push into back into SF, go back to being the king?

• 37:19Speaker 02

  Well, here, so first, let's just be clear. On December 18th, I moved to Texas.

• 37:24Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  You know, I don't know what's so specific about December 18th, but let's just say it's prior to January.

• 37:31Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  So I'm a primary resident of Texas, but the the action for a lot of this Adams-type technology I'm talking about, of course, like the bay is a real thing. My head of the advanced technology group at Uber is running my robotics division at Adams. It's called Lab 37.

• 37:52John Coogan?

  It's Anthony?

• 37:52Speaker 02

  In Pittsburgh. No, no, that's Eric Myhofer.

• 37:55John Coogan?

  Okay, Eric Myhofer.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  So that's robotics on the food side. Yeah, Anthony Wadowski was running Pronto. I was the I was the largest investor in Pronto and then we just were basically right in the final, like, we're checking off the list, maybe closing today or tomorrow on that deal.

• 38:13Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Let's talk about that deal.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:16Jordi Hays?

  Give us, give us, yeah, give us, like, kind of background on on Pronto and then how it fits into the to the empire.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  Well, look, I I sort of broke out how mining fits.

• 38:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  Right? So we got that. Look, I've been I'm the largest investor in Pronto. And it's super inspiring work, like, like, go to a mine, right? Check out how these things work and let your mind imagine what that might look like when you bring automation to it and how much more productive it is and what that means for industry when all mines are producing more. Where does that go? And in some ways, you could say low-hanging fruit on the autonomy problem, because, yes, there are different problems off-road, but they like, they're way more controlled than what's going on on-road. Okay? But then you get

• 39:11Speaker 02

  into the physical action, like cars on the road, the Waymos on the road, you know, they're moving. But they're not acting on atoms, right? So when you think about excavation and you think about like when you get the material and then you move it, then you're basically crushing the material and then you process it. You think about all of the automation through that stack. It's fantastic.

• 39:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  And it's like,

• 39:39Speaker 02

  it's hard, right? Like I, somebody asked me, like, we have a bunch of roboticists that make some of our food machines. And somebody came like, hey, like, is AI gonna help us design food machines? We're like, dude, let me show you.

• 39:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  Like, this thing has like an insane number of parts. And let me show you just the design of a single part.

• 40:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Like, the, like, the, that, that AI can't even do frickin' math. You know what I mean? It's like, this is not, we're not there yet. Now, could it get there? Yeah. But then you're really an AGI.

• 40:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  If you look at how much harder it is, the physical world, how much harder it is AI in the physical world versus in the digital world, and I'm not demeaning it in any way. I'm just saying it's like, maybe let's call it a different problem set.

• 40:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're, we're just far away from one shotting. There's just way less training data.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. The, it's like one shotting on software. Do you have one shotting on designing a machine or a robot? Phew, we're just not there yet.

• 40:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Not there.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  But that makes it more fun. That's the point is like, do the hard things. If you are in the Adams world, you have decided, I like hard things. I like pain more than anybody else.

• 40:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  This is kind of what you gotta be about.

• 40:49Jordi Hays?

  Chewing glass. I love it. Uh, so I can see how AVs at Adams fit into mining. What other, and just heavy industry broadly, what other kind of categories of, of AVs are, are exciting? How do you see this space evolving?

• 41:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, look, I, anything, I mean, we, the mission is wheelbase for robots.

• 41:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:14Speaker 02

  So then you're just like, okay, what moves?

• 41:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  Right? And then you go, okay, where, you have to find the businesses that make sense, of course. So we're like, okay, mining is a no brainer.

• 41:23Jordi Hays?

  And how do you think about, how do you, how do you think about sizing for wheelbase for robots? That can scale up and down like crazy?

• 41:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, like I tell my team, like, dude, there's like,

• 41:33Speaker 02

  A ton of silver medals here. And there's actually a few other gold medals, just in the category. So, let's just go with delivery robots, like food delivery, which of course is near and dear to my heart.

• 41:46Jordi Hays?

  You make a lot of food.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. Your thirty, your fifteen dollar bowl became thirty bucks.

• 41:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:55Speaker 02

  Okay?

• 41:56Jordi Hays?

  And this is, this is like, I would put it up there as like, one of the number one annoyances of the average American, regardless of where they are in society. It's like, food is just the cost of food delivery. Everybody wants food, fast, cheap, hot, et cetera. And there's all this data that just came out this week that just shows like, it doesn't matter even how much money you're making. You're spending a lot on this category.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  Isn't it interesting, right? Remember I talked about the plumbers?

• 42:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  But like, you could take whole categories, become the long pole in the tent. Food, boring, to a lot of people boring is that. For me, interesting, let's go. And I, look, I did taxis, I did taxis. When they're like, people are looking at me funny.

• 42:48Jordi Hays?

  It was a weird idea.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  Okay, they're looking at me super funny. So, Jason Calcanis, the most famous investor in Uber of all time.

• 42:56Jordi Hays?

  More famous than you in some ways.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Whenever I meet with them, I'm like, dude, I'm so honored to be meeting one of our early investors. But, he, there was like, an angel group that I pitched to. There were like, thirty, forty people in the room. I think it was like, three or four that invested.

• 43:11Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  Okay? The ten grand check became like, a hundred million bucks. It was crazy. But, the boring places are the places.

• 43:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:22Speaker 02

  You know?

• 43:22Jordi Hays?

  Less competitive.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  But also just weird and hard. There's a reason why it's that way.

• 43:28Jordi Hays?

  The graveyard is stacked of tech guys that thought they could crack food. Which is why, which is again, like. Yeah, go back to wet van. You can go, you can go compete in this category, but you have to actually be insane. And you have to have.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:46Jordi Hays?

  And, and you have to attack at all, at all these levels.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  And my, so my head of the robotics division. We're like, yeah, let's do this. Get the band back together, let's go, right? This is Eric Myhoffer. And.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  And he's like, okay, we can make a food robot. I'm like, I got one, there's one requirement. The other, I got one hanging chatter, one string attached. He's like, what? I'm like, you're gonna have to build a restaurant that the robot serves. So my roboticist team in Pittsburgh made a restaurant that is the restaurant that our first robot went into because we had to make sure that we understood how a restaurant worked. We had to make sure that this wasn't just a machine that made food, but a machine that makes food in the ecosystem of machines called a restaurant. And people don't understand, but a restaurant is a manufacturing facility. In fact, if

• 44:44Speaker 02

  you look at like labor statistics, et cetera, restaurants fits under manufacturing for obvious reasons. It just hasn't changed in 50 years.

• 44:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Anyways, back to

• 44:53Speaker 02

  Sorry, I'm all over the

• 44:55Jordi Hays?

  No, I love it. I love it. Firing on all cylinders. But, but so, so again, are, do you want to move people with AVs? Do you, are you, do you care more about commercial?

• 45:06Speaker 02

  Look, the, the industrial thing is sort of like probably our, our main jam, but the bottom line is once you, once you crack, once you crack movement in the physical world, there's lots of people who want access to that.

• 45:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  And in fact, you need partners because you know, you're going to be putting billions, billions of dollars to work to make it happen. So there's going to be lots of partners across different categories that are gonna probably want some of that. And I have no issues with that. We're not like a, you know, this is ours and this thing. It's more like, hey, there, there may be ways to work with us. We're happy to do it. Yeah. We gotta pick our, our spots, but you get the idea.

• 45:47Jordi Hays?

  What about manufacturing broadly? You're doing it in food. Are there other categories that are interesting? Are you happy to be kind of the transport rails?

• 45:57Speaker 02

  Look, I think once you are in physical AI, you should basically understand that manufacturing is part of your tech stack.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  Like it just is. And by the way, energy is part of your tech stack. Land development, real estate is part of your tech stack. That's just what it's gonna be. People don't think about it like that, but it's true. Of course, they're, you know, I've, you know, Tesla just crushes. If you look at this list of things, you're just like, they got it all. So good. But there's just so much to do.

• 46:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  You know what I mean?

• 46:33Jordi Hays?

  And is that, is that?

• 46:34Speaker 02

  We can see all the things, we can see all the things Tesla's doing. That's cool. I'm like,

• 46:39Jordi Hays?

  There's a million other things.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  I can still help you mine.

• 46:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  I could still, I can still get some food to, to some peeps. You know what I mean? So you get the idea.

• 46:46Jordi Hays?

  Is that, is that, is that really, when you're pitching investors around Adams and this new vision? Is it basically like, there's a lot of jobs to do in the world. We're gonna do it with physical AI. And you're basically betting on applying my general ethos to all these categories over time?

• 47:05Speaker 02

  No, you got, you gotta be able to pick your spots. If you are too broad, people are like, dude, what's wrong with you? Now, you know, I think every entrepreneur always gets that, like, you know, I, I joke around like, in the nineties, dude, I'm an old guy. What are you gonna do? In the nineties, it's like, dude, Microsoft's gonna kill you. Like, why do you think? Then in the 2000s, it was like, why isn't Google gonna do this? In the 2010s, it's like, dude, that looks like Uber's thing.

• 47:33Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 47:33Speaker 02

  And the, you know, now it's like, if you're talking about physical AI, it's like, that's Tesla. That is, they are the, they are the incumbent. They are, and not just the incumbent, they're also just doing great, awesome stuff.

• 47:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  But find your spot.

• 47:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:45Speaker 02

  Know yourself, know what you're good at, be self-aware, and find the thing that is your business soulmate, for sure. But also know that you're in an ecosystem and you need to find your spot.

• 47:59Jordi Hays?

  What was your experience like in dot com and the, the financial crisis broadly in 2008?

• 48:05Speaker 02

  Uh, okay. So basically I sold, I sold my peer-to-peer CDN, Akamai meets BitTorrent in 2007 to Akamai.

• 48:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  So I was earning out when that happened and I was, I just started, I think I didn't last very long in that earn-out.

• 48:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 48:23Speaker 02

  Um, so, uh, I was the CXO, I was like an advisor and a CXO.

• 48:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 48:30Speaker 02

  Little-known fact, I was a, I was blogging.

• 48:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  I was like a tech influencer blogger.

• 48:35John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  There is a, a blog still out there called swooshing.

• 48:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  Okay. Crazy, amazing, ridiculous content. Okay?

• 48:44Jordi Hays?

  We're, we're gonna dedicate a whole, an hour to it.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  I was in the click, I was in the click economy, guys. I was in it. Okay. But, um, so I was, I was an advisor and CXO for like five different companies at a time. And so I'd help them on their deals, or I would be their CTO.

• 48:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  Or I would, um, you know, help them sell, or product, or whatever, but I could always just put the phone down and forget.

• 49:07John Coogan?

  So somewhat insulated from like the mortgage crash, like?

• 49:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, my thing was, I was trying to figure out, I was getting a bunch of my friends together and saying, okay, do you have a mortgage with Bank of America? I do too. Let's pool our thing. I'm gonna go to Bank of America and say, I will buy these mortgages off for 40 cents on the dollar.

• 49:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  Cause you're selling them on the market for 10 cents.

• 49:28John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  Could be fun. And then they're like...

• 49:30Jordi Hays?

  Get out of here.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:34John Coogan?

  You're not a hedge fund. It's wild. What about dot com?

• 49:39Speaker 02

  Uh, you're talking about the 90s?

• 49:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, the 90s, like late 90s, like, I mean, you're, at that point, you're like sort of starting your career, right?

• 49:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:46John Coogan?

  But it's an interesting place to start a career in tech. Like, a lot of people watched that and said, ah, that's dangerous.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  So, look, that was a, we did peer-to-peer file sharing at a company called Scour.

• 49:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Okay, so some people did Napster, some went to like, you know, all the ones that came after, BitTorrent, all the way to like, uh, what was the one that, uh, Zenstrom did, uh, Kazaa, or some of these others, right?

• 50:09John Coogan?

  Kazaa, yeah.

• 50:10Speaker 02

  We were the OG file sharing.

• 50:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  Okay?

• 50:15Speaker 02

  Michael Lovitz was on the board, Ron Burkle was on the board, LA. Yeah. Okay, doing a tech, doing tech in LA was like being a finance guy in Fresno. They're like, don't know what the hell is going on. They're like, who are you?

• 50:29Speaker 02

  And you're a little bit sheltered from it in LA. Every time you went to the Silicon Valley, it was like wild and crazy and like every bar was like packed, like after hours, like happy hour thing, like things were bubbling. And the crazy part is not just what happened during the run-up, it was post. I was raising money on this peer-to-peer CDN that I didn't have, I didn't pay myself a salary for for four years. I was raising money in late 2001 for a networking software company. Are you freaking kidding me? And so I remember going to one of these, going to a bar to meet up with a VC.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  And this is like 2002. And it's empty. Like this thing that would be mega-packed just two years earlier. I mean, we're talking Dust Bowl tumbleweeds, empty. And this VC, I wish I remember who it was, because it'd be amazing, was like, "Yeah, Travis, dude, I think, I think it's all done." It's over. And I'm like, I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, "All the software that could be invented has been invented." Wow. "We're done." And he meant it. He meant it. He's like, "It's been real, dude. Let's have a whiskey. Let's go." We're done. That's incredible.

• 51:50Jordi Hays?

  How have you, have you processed the last two years when people are able to raise an amount of money that took you four different rooms in this, you know, entire, you know, process? And they can just raise it literally without a, without a deck often. They can just pull, pull it together.

• 52:08Speaker 02

  Look, it's all good. Like, I don't, I, I just have, because, you know, when you build a company the way I built it, which is like my current one, where you're literally under the radar, it means that you are powered by, you have an internal fulfillment. You're not like caring what others think. You, you get internally fulfilled with building. Yeah. And I don't look at somebody and go, "Oh dude, that's, I had it so much harder uphill, both ways to school, whatever." You know, I don't think like that.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  It's more about the excellence of the process.

• 52:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:46Speaker 02

  So I'm like, well, how do you raise money? And they're like, oh yeah, I just throw a deck to the guy. I'm like, okay, well, that's not a thing.

• 52:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  What is a thing is going all the way until it hurts. If you're doing something and it's easy, it's not valuable. And I'll explain, like, let's just think of like a, like a marathoner.

• 53:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  World-class marathoner. On mile 21. Is that dude smiling? No, he's not smiling. By the way, if he is smiling, you know what's about to happen? He's about to get his ass whooped. Okay?

• 53:18Jordi Hays?

  It's over.

• 53:19Speaker 02

  Because why? Because somebody else who's down for the pain will go harder and further and pass him.

• 53:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:25Speaker 02

  And so if you're getting money easy, I'm like, why didn't you go harder? You could have done it better and more. Now, you don't do things hard just because. Maybe it's like, it just doesn't matter, dude. Like, I gotta go do something else that's hard. But the key is like, if money matters, which I think we would say it does, especially in certain categories, you need to be the best in the world at it.

• 53:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:48Speaker 02

  And it's not enough to say, it was easy. If anybody comes to me and says a strategic thing was easy, I'm like, you messed up. You could have been way better and gone way further. More competitive advantage, more differentiation, get it together.

• 54:04Jordi Hays?

  Give me the update.

• 54:05Speaker 02

  I feel like Tony Robbins right now.

• 54:06Jordi Hays?

  I love it, I love it. No, I think people, I think people need to hear this.

• 54:09John Coogan?

  They do, they do.

• 54:09Jordi Hays?

  And, and yeah, the challenge is like, when, when, if raising money is super easy, and then you actually start building, and you're like, whoa, actually, money doesn't, money makes this possible, but it doesn't make the work easy.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:22John Coogan?

  And it is funny that some of the greatest fundraisers, the critique is always like, oh, well, they are raising too much money. You look at Elon, Sam, all these crazy deals, and people are like, well, like, okay, it's nice that you're good, but like, are you too good? And it's the same thing.

• 54:35Speaker 02

  Look, here's the thing. You know, back in the day, 2010's reference, like, there was a problem with getting Masa money.

• 54:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:43Speaker 02

  There was a problem with that.

• 54:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  Because it was easy money.

• 54:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  And it was too loose.

• 54:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:52Speaker 02

  And so people would get loose with the culture of the investor that they were getting the money from.

• 54:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 54:59Speaker 02

  And so you had to be careful. So if somebody got Masa money, I'd be like, dude, you gotta... You've got to grind. It was maybe a little too easy.

• 55:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:08Speaker 02

  And you still, still to this day. So, so um there's nothing wrong with money as a, as a sort of a competitive advantage or a strategic weapon. It's okay. Like that's part of business. It's necessary, but treat it with respect.

• 55:27John Coogan?

  Last question about Texas. For the Californians that are thinking about making a trip out there, Austin, Dallas, Houston, what do you recommend?

• 55:35Speaker 02

  Well, look, I'm Austin. Now, I own a place in Austin. I've owned it for five years. I'm a avid, I would say, almost professional water skier.

• 55:46John Coogan?

  Nice.

• 55:46Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  Slalom skiing.

• 55:48Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 55:48Speaker 02

  I'll send a video.

• 55:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, send a video.

• 55:50Speaker 02

  It's amazing. It's sick. Don't even get me started.

• 55:55Speaker 02

  Uh, so I've owned a place there for five years. Right on the lake, Lake Austin.

• 56:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:01Speaker 02

  Twenty minutes from the city.

• 56:02John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  Lake life. Hell, yeah. Go for it.

• 56:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 56:05Speaker 02

  I get a little bit FOMO on like these people going to Florida. I'm like, dude.

• 56:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:11Speaker 02

  So much Florida action. Like, come on, homies.

• 56:14Jordi Hays?

  I know. It's, it's been a, it's been a bloodbath for

• 56:18John Coogan?

  It has been.

• 56:18Jordi Hays?

  Every, every single guy's going to Florida.

• 56:20Speaker 02

  But like, yeah, like every weekend this year I've had, uh, this year's in Texas.

• 56:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 56:26Jordi Hays?

  You ever take calls while you're water skiing, like AirPods?

• 56:29Speaker 02

  I, dude, I should.

• 56:30John Coogan?

  Be good.

• 56:31Speaker 02

  I love it. Don't get me excited. Well, I went to Sironic, which does the boats, the autonomous boats.

• 56:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:37Speaker 02

  And I'm like

• 56:37Jordi Hays?

  Build me a water skiing

• 56:38John Coogan?

  Water skiing boat. Ooh, okay.

• 56:40Speaker 02

  I just want to water ski.

• 56:41John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 56:42Speaker 02

  And like

• 56:43John Coogan?

  Water skiing behind a Sironic boat is so funny.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  I'm like, dude, where's my stuff?

• 56:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, that would be good. Pretty viral.

• 56:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, who should, who should come? You're, you're poking your head up. Who should come work for you?

• 56:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:56Jordi Hays?

  Sixty seconds. Who do you want? Not, not any individual, like one individual person, but like

• 57:02Speaker 02

  That's so funny. I have a message for this one guy who didn't take my offer.

• 57:07Speaker 02

  Look, I think the thing is, is like, we're just getting the best. This is so cliche and like, whatever, banal, but um

• 57:17Speaker 02

  Look, we are in the physical AI space, so it's a mix of sort of, let's call it, sensors, compute, the software that sits on top of those things. I mean, it's just gonna be great engineers, and then you go through what I would call the physical AI stack, and you would, you know, but.

• 57:42John Coogan?

  It's a long project, it's someone for who wants a career.

• 57:45Speaker 02

  It's like, infrastructure software, guys, because you've got to have epic AI on the backend, and the way to use that sort of has to be epic. You have to have physical AI model people who are sort of translating foundational models into the physical world, and there's some core research, and some just like, I know all the white papers, and we're just gonna, we're building and going end to end, or some hybrid version of that. You have just normal software, because you've got applications that sit on top, that then, of course, customers see in some fashion or another. Actuation and manipulation on the mechanical and sort of robotic side of things, and mechanical engineers that build machines.

• 58:27John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 58:28Speaker 02

  You know, and then, of course, remember, I've got construction, real estate, like, I could go on. It's lots of cool stuff. Go to the website, there's lots of stuff.

• 58:36John Coogan?

  Go to the website, folks. Adams.co?

• 58:38Speaker 02

  Adams.co, and by the way, Adams.co/vision, I just threw down.

• 58:43John Coogan?

  Okay. I know. Read it.

• 58:46Speaker 02

  Check it out.

• 58:47John Coogan?

  It's amazing. Taking the time to come out with us.

• 58:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:50John Coogan?

  This is awesome.