Travis Kalanick | All-In Summit 2024

the reason that he was kicked out is because of this toxic culture some big news that took place on Christmas Eve if you missed it Travis kenck planning to leave the board at Uber and when he showed me what he was working on I immediately said hey can I invest a popular 70 billion doll ride sharing company is searching for a new CEO to take the wheel so you want to talk about structure being completely screwy competition is good I'll bet my entire network that Uber will be here and thriving in 10 years you're you're at War prematurely with your customers sorry about [Music] that all right [Applause] everybody my guy um uh I can't believe I can't believe I

get to sit down with one of the most famous investors in Uber I'm honored I'm honored to be here um we we wanted to have a surprise for you every day uh I've been you know Travis and I have been friends for 25 years um the first time I interviewed Travis was 1999 I was doing a little magazine out here digital Coast reporter you were doing a little company called scour um which was a peer-to-peer Network to share files um and you were 22 years old I was 28 I think if we put those two numbers together just don't let people do the math you know it's just like just keep moving was a while ago 1999 um and um I just

remember the enthusiasm drive and fire that you had at that time and it always struck me I said to myself I don't know if he's going to win on this one I'm pretty sure he's going to get his ass handed to him in fact correct correct um but I know this guy's going to win big in the future and and sure enough uh we got to go on a great journey together with Uber and now again with Cloud kitchens and I every year when we're hanging out I say since you left Uber I say you know whenever you're ready let's have a conversation and here we are and then you call me every year I call you every year if you're ready just and I'm just a

block away from you you're Alma moer UCLA let's go come on I'm like all right let's let's go and this year you said okay so here we are um let's chop it up let's talk about Cloud kitchens you have since uh you left Uber been working extremely hard and quietly on cloud kitchens what is the vision what is cloud kitchens for people who don't know well uh so yeah I mean it it is kind of funny when you go from being a tech guy to a kitchen guy I mean that's interesting um look food has I think we all know like food is it's at the center of the Human Experience the center of humanity and just just how we live but it's got a lot of

problems Health cost convenience like all that stuff and it could be a hell of a lot better and so um of course in my last at my last gig we did Uber Eats it was a starting point but the difference with food versus rides is that the infrastructure was already there you had a bunch of cars that were 98% unutilized and so you just had to light it up but to do food right you needed to build the infrastructure and so the mission for our company is infrastructure for better food and the idea is like can you get the preparation and delivery of food so high quality and most importantly so cost efficient that it starts to approach the cost of you going to the

grocery store if that happens you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car and so the quiet part is like we go and buy real estate we do construction we then go talk to the center point of what matters in food which is the restaurant tour the entrepreneur who's making it who does it just because I mean it's a labor of love you got to have a deep passion for food and a deep passion for people because otherwise you couldn't survive in that world uh but these guys are like like true blue entrepreneurs and they are our customer and you do it from their perspective and you help them get their vision for what they're doing out there and do it super super efficiently um and

so we like to say we serve those who serve others we're not the restaurant we're the guys underneath and uh currently I think we have real estate we we have facilities in all the major cities in 30 countries around the world um we also have a software division so we have hundreds of thousands of restaurants using our software stack um and we have a robotics division um that you know got going with a lot of the original sort of uber atg guys Advanced Technology Group the the autonomy guys so we got that crew together and um have really you know robots that are going to that already are out there but are going to

be out there in a really big way over the coming you know quarters and years so the premise of uber was hey press a button we move you or anything from point A to point B what a profound simple but profound um insight as an entrepreneur and the Insight here is hey getting you food uh quickly efficiently and then making it easier for a restaurant tour to pop up a restaurant tell us the economics of a food brand um when Jade and I and the family were out here here on vacation over the summer at Manhattan Beach we had a wonderful experience of ordering gwenneth Pal's Cloud kitchen and these new brands great um yeah great great new brands popping up um talk about the

economics for that food entrepreneur I mean It's just tough I think most of us know a restaurant tour some of us may have even tried to do a restaurant or be a part of it in some fashion I like I said it's a labor of love but like your big costs are going to be labor let's call it between you know let's call it 30% but it can range from like 25 to 40% of your overall Revenue occupancy which is the the physical space itself uh let's call it between six and 12% of Revenue uh supply chain is 30% uh marketing let's call it 10 um I know I'm missing something somewhere but those are the that's the big stuff and a successful restaurant's going to have a

10 % profit margin and be really pumped about that wow um and so yeah that's just how it works um you know one thing I wanted to say just sort of the high level to like sort of how do you connect the dots on like sort of where Innovation is going is that um you know my sweet spot is digitizing the physical world and you know you could take that to mean a lot of different things but it's basically treating atoms like bits and so we know the bits world is a computer okay computers well CPU manipulates the bits storage stores the bits Network moves bits from point A to point B but if you're treating atoms like bits you go CPU manipulates the

bits what manipulates atoms that's manufacturing storage stores bits what stores atoms that's Real Estate Network moves bits from point A to point B what uh yeah what moves atoms well that's transport of logistics and so these are the three sort of core Computing resources in a atoms based computer and you can say my last gig was so much about the network for the physical world but there's just a huge amount of innovation left in compute and storage for the physical world also known as digitized manufacturing and digitized real estate and so our company is really sort of building atoms based computers and sort

of our first computer is really a food computer so that's kind of how we think about it yeah um let's take a look at the video of um some of the robots uh that are making food in Cloud kitchens [Music] and that's our lab we're doing that in house all in house yeah all this stuff is in house [Music] [Applause] [Music] so we call this part like look ma no hands right so once the dispensers are full of food nobody touches it and what comes out on a conveyor belt is bags of food that get delivered amazing right so you know LED bag sealed you get the general idea so

now you have a a restaurant that can asynchronously produce for consumers from what labor is doing and the labor is primarily on the on the prep side of things so we see there's kind of vessels there um I'm assuming they have ingredients in them the bowl goes by stuff gets dropped in organized covered put in a bag label goes on the human has no part in that except for maybe preparing and and filling prep let's say you have prep in the morning this machine can run for hours without anybody there um and so you know there's interesting you know so so it just becomes a more efficient thing so the if you want to do to the kitchen what Uber

did to the car you have to make sure two things happen one is that you need the logistics the movement of food needs to go to the cost of that needs to go to zero this is a autonomous vehicles things along these lines and then the production of food must also get uh sort of roboticized mechanized essentially those two things happen and then we can always cook but it can be out of choice and um you know I like to say I like a I I like horses but I don't ride a horse to work and so um you can get higher quality food to the people at a lower cost and just give people the most precious of commodities back which is called time to do all the

things all the other things in life that they love and you're strategically placing these Cloud kitchens um in I get I would assume very lowcost real estate but that's at very key uh locations that make it very efficient to uh deliver the food yeah yeah so on the software side we we have a software stack that like I said hundreds of of thousands of restaurants use we're seeing 18% of all online delivery in the US as an example our software is touching so because we see where all of the delivery is we know where to put a delivery only restaurant facility um and so we find distressed real estate or sort of unique situations where it's hard to develop and we've

built a competence in sort of turning that into a 30 kitchen facility that we then lease those kitchens to restaurant tours let's talk about the Playbook this is something you worked on really hard at Uber hiring Josh in New York will in La we had a podcast and you were set on that podcast years and years ago hey I'm looking for some people to run some cities to run Uber and you found this eclectic group of Samurai and you let them go um and man they cooked yeah talk to me about that management principle and your management principles hey be pumped you know and and bringing that enthusiasm that fire and letting those cities cook because most people have

this top down they do things sequentially you've really and and in those early days got more and more emboldened and excited about doing things in parallel and letting people make mistakes in those regions and learning they could I remember Josh started doing messenger delivery you let other people deliver kittens for a day to an office to that was a funny thing yeah JD Vance that's when he uninstalled Uber um no kittens um but cookies whatever it was ice cream trucks yeah talk about that model of letting you know a th flowers bloom letting these Samurai go crazy so look we had a a cultural value at Uber called let Builders build and I'm sure it was there

are other companies that I think may have said that before us uh but we we certainly took a hold of that and look as it related to our GM model and and how to empower GMS to do well it starts with who is the person and we I always felt that the the magic making happens when you cross uh sort of uh creative instincts with analytical capabilities or prowess really so we would just design tests that sort of simulated what it would be like working together that tested their creative stuff their secret their secret sauce and creativity but would create problems where it was crossed with the necessity to analytically solve problems

got it and so you put those two things together with a hungry person that maybe just got out their MBA or let's say equivalent and they're fired up and ready to go and you Empower them and then you put very simple controls to make sure that they're check that like like like waypoints that in order to go further they have to pass that test once they're in the job and just simple things like we would have a pricing call in the early days of uber where you cannot put it up in the app until you pass the pricing call the first 30 cities I was on that pricing call and the thing about price when it comes to Transportation it's a amalgamation of all strategy

across everything across what does your cars look like what's the supply the supply uh what does uh what does Metro or public uh public transport look like what is cost of Labor in that City uh what are their General alternatives for getting around what are regulations like ultimately becomes a service with a price you pass that and then you run you get to run a city but that means the previous 30 days or 90 days when they're just doing lots of stuff I don't have to worry and then they get to that point they pass the test they know what the criteria for passing the test is so it forces them into the right mode right let's talk about strategy you know one of the great

privileges of of getting to be involved you know in your journey for a little bit was we would talk sometimes late at night weekends uh when there were really dicey strategy moments and I'd ask you what you're thinking and we would just jam out and a couple of those conversations I remember calling you in a panic after having taken a lift a ride chair and we were only Uber black yeah and I said trais I just got out of this [ __ ] thing it's $16 it would have been 60 I'm pricing sensitive but man this is going to change everything and you're like jakow and I said don't you don't understand J no this is disrup and you said we're launching it next week we

got it you know it is disruptive and you saw you know the the Lincoln Town Cars were so brilliant you know because there were such high margins but you saw the disruptiveness of of the rering thing and then surge pricing we had a big debate about tipping let's talk about some of those seminal moments in product design yeah and competition because this was not happening in a vacuum people forget there was sidecar there was lift yeah and then there were Regulators this was a war yeah so I mean kind of a funny story I'm not sure if I've ever told you this you were you were only six weeks behind Zuck right which is I first heard about Lyft from Zuck H and he's

like yo yo I think you have a situation on your hands and like Su would sort of do that like with like a little [ __ ] with you kind of sit yeah kind of like that yeah he's he's a puck yeah and I'm like thank you and um but the thing was was look it was at the beginning that was like they called their rides donation it was a donation thing it was non-commercial because there was no insurance there was no regulation there was basically just citizen giving another citizen a ride across town and we didn't do anything about it for 9 months because we were already getting our asses hand handed to us and we were doing the legal thing and

so I'm like dude like we're we got like I got threatened by the city of San Francisco and the state of California 3 months after we launched Uber with 90 days in jail for every ride that had occurred yeah so then this thing is like it's a donation I swear and by the way if you don't give the donation they suggest then you get kicked off the system yeah right so we're like H we're not going to do that and we saw Lyft eating our market share up from the bottom up because they didn't have insurance or regulation or any of these other things and then nine months into it uh the city of San Francisco the state of California because it's was a California pu said ah you know it's

totally fine and then we're like oh [ __ ] so then we hustled got our thing going which is called would at the time was called peer-to-peer ride sharing right um and then just got working and um um the way we did it was like the reason we didn't do it in the first place is because it was clearly not like legit and but then California said yes and so I made a PCT with myself that was like I'm never going to let this happen again and so each and every city we went to we would send we would wait for Lift to launch and then we would basically say to the city we'd send them a letter saying there's this really cool thing called ride sharing this company called lft is

doing it um we think it's great but our read of your regs is like it's probably not allowed because you're thoughtful you want to be thoughtful but if you don't enforce in the next 30 days we're going to participate as well great so almost every city in the US other than two we can talk about those two by the way but in all every city in the US other than two Portland Vegas we were number two in R sharing um be for this reason um and we did this actually internationally we did it across Europe we did it everywhere there were other folks that were out there and we would talk to the regulatory guys say if

you're going to enforce do it but if you're not we're going to participate yeah and that work that's kind of how we rolled and surch pricing was an interesting one you know um the Brilliance of the of the Uber Marketplace was in many ways tackling demand and figuring out a way to get uh drivers to come out on New Year's Eve the worst night of their lives to drive and you came up with a pretty novel approach which is hey we'll pay you double we'll pay you triple yeah and if you don't want to participate in that as a customer that's fine but we think availability is more important uh than necessarily having standardized

pricing and man the world got very very upset at this and you and I talked about when you explained it to me I said that makes logical sense and I said you know what we should do we should write a blog post and that blog post is still up I think where you just explained it to people I thought Uber took down all my blog posts they probably yeah that might be a little but this blog post where you just said hey here's how to handle New Year's Eve leave at this time go back at this time but we need to get these people on the road and they deserve to be compensated so surge pricing there's another way to say it now I called it surge pricing on purpose

because I didn't want any body to think we were trying to deceive them right so we said surge pricing like it's clear what's going on um but the other way to say surge pricing is called the lowest cost reliable ride because if surge pricing goes up too much then you have drivers that aren't making any money um and by the way they'll go to the competition but if surge pricing is exactly at and by the way if surge pricing is not enough you're not not going to be able to get a ride because too many people are going to want it and there won't be enough cars sech price in the right spot it draws enough Supply in and fends off enough customers and

the market clears so it's the lowest cost reliable ride and that's why we knew it was a winner even when all of the competition and the world generally was like hating on this idea anytime we were doing surge pricing and our competitor wasn't we knew we were gaining market share because somebody could just come to us and get a ride when in the other system they couldn't so you're proving reliability you're proving it's the lowest cost reliable ride that's it yeah um take me to you know real quick led to a massive super interesting Logistics cross with economics problem where at the peak I mean and I don't know what it is at Uber today but it was like I don't

know like 150 phds working on this problem that we just described huh inside the company yeah which is like how do you find that lowest cost reliable ride is a very very difficult problem in a live Logistics system like this let's talk about Regulators in relation to people being independent contractors this is when I realized the Press was acting without good faith data or logic and as a former journalist you know it was kind of eye openening to me to be on the other side of the table and watching this happened because we knew full well based on driver data that they loved their jobs at Uber because they had Free Will and they could go and do any other

job they wanted and let's be clear the average Uber driver during my you know let's say at the end of my tenure was eight hours a week so they clearly like it clearly a side gig yeah side hustle and they wanted the flexibility over everything else work when I want don't work when I want and then these Union politicians and everything said no and the people who own the medallions and this is a cobal of really bad actors who were saying no they have to work a shift and they have to go work for somebody who owns a medallion who gets 50 60 70% of the economics and they portrayed us or you as the bad guy in all this and this was the exact opposite

of the truth so um yeah I mean it was a union problem which is it's very difficult to organize people who in this classic area which is very Union organized called drivers it's very difficult to organize them when they choose when they want to work their office is their own it's their own like nobody controls it like there there's just no control and so other than the control given to the individual and so it was very disruptive to the union and their own business model and so they had to cut it off at the knees and so that became a mix of a sort of political discourse and like a media push crossed with sort of of

regulatory uh lobbying and like like trying to make political apparatuses do what's necessary to constrain it and you took the approach we will fight there are wartime CEOs there are peacetime CEOs I put you in the category with Elon of wartime CEOs who it does not matter how many battles you must battle concurrently we're going to fight because it's we're on the right side yeah of History yeah uh but this became acute the number of battles yeah that you had to fight the number of fronts increase take us to the darkest peak of it because every time I talked to you I felt fine about it but other investors other people felt like hey this is too many battles to wage at

once talk to me about you personally fighting all those battles I my perception of you was the more battles emerged Yeah the more you realized you were doing the right thing it filled your bucket it powered you it gave energy to you to know we were on the right side so yeah I you know sort of in justest I would I would say to folks I'd be like so you know I'm not sure how it became so controversial that one citizen giving another citizen aide across town became such a thing I I'm not sure how that happened but it did uh the darkest moment I me the thing is is like you'd keep it was almost like we were always

pushing into that area so like if something became easy then we'd push elsewhere until that became hard so it was constant is like I make the analogy to like a to teams that we have in different places then and now like a a world class marathoner I've never seen a worldclass marathoner a mile 19 look like he's just honky Dory yeah right and if he was he's about to lose so you push right to that edge of what's possible and if that starts to get easy you push further now it doesn't necessar mean you push in exactly that along that axis it could be in a totally different area but um as long as the

problems you're solving are greater than the problems you're creating then you're fine when the problems you're creating are starts to when the derivative of problems you're creating is greater than the derivative of the problems you're solving then you have a real problem right and that's when you have to start pulling back get back to above water and then go back into it but when I talk about creating problems I think of it like think of it as like a math professor a math profess professor without a really cool interesting problem to solve is a sad math professor and that's how we would think about it right these we always pushing

to the point where we're sweating yeah and it's like not sure and there could be late nights there could be all nighters it could be that thing but because we were doing the right thing because we had great people in the field who believed then we could push all the way to that edge uh only they could be world class marathoners too only two entrepreneurs I know have had the audacity to not build their products in China everybody does that that's pretty easy but to actually operate a business in China yeah you and Elon uh decided we're going to try to compete him with selling cars inside of China pretty crazy uh and even crazier

self- driving cars in China wow yeah okay let's go let's go byd like you're up against some serious competition and it's not exactly um a fair game maybe or there might be complications to that game um we had a long conversation about China and I said to you wow we're burning a lot of money there what do you what's the strategy here let me just hear it from you and uh you said we're we're going for gold yeah but I mean there's a lot of fun there I mean look the thing about doing business in China is it forces you to rethink everything everything like if you go into China thinking you got it you're going to get your ass handed to you you have to start

first principles Bottoms Up um let's see where could I go with this um look we tell me tell everybody the strategy hey we're going for gold but they're silver and and you how you looked at the world in that regard yeah yeah so I'll get there is that we so a lot of times when you go in ENT China they're basically somebody's going you got to have a partner if you just go and you do your first exploration trip they' be like you got to get a partner they're like 50/50 blah blah blah and I'm like why nobody could tell me why so then we just went on our own and started building something and we never saw on the ground we never saw bias we were treated fairly

on the ground um but at some point what I'd say is the China war went Global and what what I mean by that is the Chinese government I think it was safe there was a there's some there's some I think it were called safe like a it was like The Sovereign wealth of China cic there's like a few things like that they started investing hundreds of millions and billions of dollars in all of our competitors globally to drain us of money so that it was harder to compete in China they made apple and I'd love to have a discussion with Tim at some point we had

some interesting words for each other at this point but they made Apple uh invest a billion dollars in Dee and apple doesn't invest anything in anybody no that's not their like what was he protecting there there's something going on so whole really amazing story there holy cow anyways uh the Chinese War went Global and so that's when we had to go from going for the goal to making sure we got the silver and that's when we started negotiating with de to basically say we had 20% of the of the overall entity of the merged entity uh but in order to do that in China that's when we actually had to

push our spend super hard because they had to be scared so I think at the peak uh right be right as we were negotiating the term sheet we pushed we were burning I think it was $75 million a week it's a big number yeah that was that yeah and but it but we knew we had the deal but we only have the deal if they're scared right this is a poker so our market share was skyrocketing as we did this they're pissed and tripping and then ail who's negot the deal is like just chain smoking yeah but that's how you get a deal done in China right uh and that turned out to

be there it is um that's that's your wartime CEO right there um that deal we had invested millions in ch billions in China at that point and I think we I think we invested yeah we probably were around a billion billion and a half and the DD St at the time when deal got done was we at 891 yeah something like that so we turned a bill and a half into eight or nine I can't remember the exact math but it's something like that uh let's talk about in like two years yeah let's talk about when you got atin U this was heartbreaking crushing brutal um you fought hard to remain in the seat I got out there and did what I could on the Press front to try to defend you and and try to keep

you in the seat but we failed yeah uh and it was brutal and it was particularly hard on you because you put your soul into this company yeah well look I think there's a little bit more I mean uh you know like if an investor is running a political Oppo campaign against you for six months sort of generating a crisis every week for six months straight it's going to wear you down and then you know my this one's hard your mom passed I know I was there with you no no it's all good with you but that's that's when they went in for the kill uh that I just couldn't hang yeah bottom line I just couldn't hang

[Applause] yeah and yeah it was um it was dark it was dark yeah so but look I a lot of people go hey are you pissed off or this thing and I say um first I loved it every minute I loved every minute but when you fall in love again you don't think about the ex very much right Cloud kitchen the X you moved on and you put all that in there in in the I I just want to say like I am proud of everything you did and and watching you do it and getting to be there and witness it I learned so much from you the community learned so much from you and I think we all owe like the Playbook I I can tell you the impact you had on the Next Generation

because you know I never talk about Uber I brought it up once or twice never talk I never talk about it I try to keep it lowkey but I brought it up once or twice and it was good for my deal flow and I got to see I got to see I got I'm so honored to be here I'm so honored to be here too uh but I got to see that famous Uber investor and I mean this sincerely the number of entrepreneurs who came to me who said I started this company because I watch Travis I watched what he did I want to be Travis you inspired that generation along with Elon to say I want to operate in the real world I want to build something that has an impact and I

am willing to fight and have that entrepreneurial Spirit which I'm going to be honest there's a large amount of entrepreneurs who don't have the fight in they don't have the dog in them you got the dog in you you got the fight in you you know and and that's so rare and that's why you're so successful it's because you're willing to fight the fight yeah um you know look we just saw the Olympics and I know I made that marathoner analogy before but like every one of those gold medalists they got the dog in them there's no way no other way um we're just playing a different sport and I think the you know some of the interesting parts about this sport is

that it's it's not just an individual thing it's a it's a massive team and there's stakeholders in cities and citizens and and all that um it's just fun you know like a lot of folks go look you did the Uber thing why are you doing it again I mean you catched in a lot of chips you could be just chilling I'm like look Serena keeps getting on the court she's totally badass why is she doing it right you know or take your favorite star of anything yeah LeBron's in his 40 what he's 40 now and he he's looks great out there so it's because they have a love of the game and it's not just Showtime that day yeah it's everything

behind the scenes it's working with people especially in this sport like again individual stuff is a little different like you got to I like the magic of working with magical people doing it as a crew is where all the good stuff happens and they and you know they all keep coming back you know I've seen a lot of the the the folks who who came for a second Tour of Duty with you that speaks volumes as we end here um Dar has done I got to know him yeah um try to support the team over there for the Legacy um and he's he's he's done a decent job solid job profitable what's that let's go they went from my 75 million a week to profitable I like it

well I mean it is great the Legacy we always knew it was easily to make it profitable people were saying oh it could never be profitable and you and I would talk and be like we were raise the price of dollar profitable like it's not difficult just do you know look there's there's an art to that too it's all good yeah um but yeah like like I think Uber's gotten to a great place the profitability is there that's means it's going to be around now we they've got to figure out the autonomous thing that's I think that's the next big challenge to uh to go after well let me just put it

out there he's he's going to do his tour and uh his stour is going to end would you consider doing what Steve Job did and coming back and merging Cloud kitchens with Uber would you consider it if if if the opportunity was there or can can you not go you're saying there's a chance can you go home I mean if he this would be the Return of the King this would be my dream if you came back I know it's not your dream but it's mine could you if Cloud kitchens became part of uber it would be it would be a trillion dollar company with you back in that seat would you take the seat again if if it was offered would you consider it well I definitely know who my head of

comms would be on that note Travis Kalen my man I love you great job