Ben Horowitz and Travis Kalanick on Building Again

Travis Kalanick spent roughly eight years building new ventures after leaving Uber without speaking publicly about them, describing his silence strategy as emulating a capitalist in Russia whose primary KPI is to shut up. Around 2019 he ran a deliberately low-profile operation in which thousands of employees were prohibited from listing the company on LinkedIn. Approximately eight months after leaving Uber he was already working on new ventures, and after falling in love with the new work he stopped thinking about Uber and was able to build without the motivations of spite or fear.

His new company is called Atoms, which he describes as the vehicle for many things he would have done at Uber over time. Before the fundraise closed he merged several separate early-stage entities with different investors under a single roof, requiring him to determine valuation ratios across companies at very different stages. He chose not to have multiple boards across his business divisions, and individual unit leaders such as the head of mining have high autonomy to run their divisions as separate businesses. Shared resources across divisions include finance, legal, HR, and technology infrastructure, with manufacturing likely shared across mining and transport but not food given how different food manufacturing is.

Several senior Uber alumni have joined Atoms. Godham, former CFO at Uber, has joined, as has Ganesh, former VP or SVP of Engineering. Eric Meyhofer, who ran Uber's Advanced Technology Group, is now running food robotics at Atoms, and Jessica Morton, former head of Uber Eats Japan, is also on the team. Kalanick noted that CloudKitchens has more executives who did not come from Uber than those who did, and his time on Uber's board had constrained his ability to hire from Uber's employee base for legal and ethical reasons.

Andreessen Horowitz's investment in Atoms is the largest check the firm has ever written. Ben Horowitz said conviction came quickly once he confirmed Kalanick was still the same driven person and had not shifted into living his best life. Horowitz acknowledged that failing to invest in Uber was tragic for the firm. During early fundraising Kalanick met with Masayoshi Son but was put off by Son investing in competing companies after seeing his plans. Investors pushed to consolidate Kalanick's separate companies into one before the Andreessen Horowitz deal closed.

Kalanick's thesis for Atoms centers on industrial AI, which he compares to the second industrial revolution. He believes industrial AI will automate multiple industries each worth hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars. Specific predictions include food production and delivery becoming cheaper than going to the grocery store, and mining becoming fully automated such that a mining company will ultimately just own real estate. He identifies Elon Musk as the best of the best in industrial AI and describes himself by comparison as a baby goat.

On the decision not to acquire Lyft during the competitive war, Kalanick said the cultures were too different and cited the pink mustache as an early signal. He does not regret the decision despite taking significant criticism for it, and noted Uber was spending approximately one billion dollars a year during that competitive period. Kalanick stands by every decision he made at Uber. Horowitz noted that the culture which replaced Kalanick was a reaction to resistance and ended up more milquetoast than the original, with the core element lost being what Uber called meritocracy toast stepping, the principle of prioritizing the best idea over feelings. At Atoms that concept has been rebranded as the best idea wins.

Kalanick reflected that revenge and fear of failure are dirty fuels that can produce success but result in outcomes less than what they should be. He noted that being too accustomed to adversity is a problem because the anger that drives entrepreneurial performance diminishes with experience. He said that at Uber he operated very close to the line in terms of risk tolerance but today operates a few inches off that line. A practical sign of accumulated experience is that writing a vision note for the Atoms rollout that would have taken hundreds of hours fifteen years ago now took about 45 minutes. He described the shift away from legacy media gatekeeping as the biggest change for builders over the last eight years, credited Elon Musk buying Twitter as the beginning of people being able to speak their minds, and expressed hope that the trend toward freer speech and direct communication continues.