Travis Kalanick on how CloudKitchens stayed stealth for years: "The...

Uploaded: 2026-07-27T19:15:24.000Z
Duration: PT95.782S
Channel: a16z

1:26

Travis Kalanick says when it gets easy, it's time to push hard: "I always used to say, if it's getting easy, it's about to get really hard. You don't want it to be that way." "I've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs over the years where they're like, 'Oh man, we're just cranking. We're on easy street right now.' And I'm like, 'Dude, you are about to get your ass whooped and you don't even know it.'" "I know that too because I've experienced it myself." "There's actual times when it's easy, but it's because you're not continuing to push... When you're winning but you're taking it easy and you're about to start losing." travis kalanick benahorowitz.eth

a16z

175,076 views • 1 month ago

4:27

Travis Kalanick on the Uber Series B that got away: "I'm never in a place where I'm negotiating with somebody where I'm here and they're here, and we meet in the middle. I'm always saying, it's at least this, and it can go up." "It's a little bit crass, let's just say, but that's how I was wired back in the day." "I had a high momentum deal. It went all the way to the top. I auctioned it, cleared the market, and the bottom came out from it." "It was super awkward and weird. You lose credibility in that moment. And I built it back up." travis kalanick benahorowitz.eth Erik Torenberg

a16z

60,940 views • 2 months ago

1:30

Travis Kalanick on the Uber program that had to be renamed: "We would recruit the drivers on Lyft to bring them over to Uber, so that it was hard for Lyft to build supply." "We would aggressively do it, and we had a program for it internally, which we called shoplifting." "Then I had antitrust training. At the time I'm this small startup kid. I'm like, 'Antitrust? What the hell is that? I can't wait to have that problem.'" "They're like, 'Look, the way you call projects, it has to be appropriate for a 10-year-old basketball team.'" "So it went from shoplifting to the North American Championship Series. We called it the NACS." travis kalanick benahorowitz.eth Erik Torenberg

a16z

238,315 views • 2 months ago

1:22

Travis Kalanick and Ben Horowitz on the cultural advantage to building in stealth: "There's a humility thing to it, an anti-fame thing. Everybody in your company gets fulfillment from the work they do every day, not because they're gonna get famous." "You start making decisions based on external validation versus internal correctness. I wanted to build without worrying about what The New York Times was saying." travis kalanick benahorowitz.eth Erik Torenberg

a16z

46,319 views • 2 months ago

3:28

Travis Kalanick on making meal delivery as cheap as groceries: "Can you make the preparation and delivery of a quality meal so efficient that it approaches the cost of going to the grocery store?" "If it does, you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car." "In 20 years, there will be a suite of robotics that will make higher quality meals, they will be doing a better job than any of us could do." "We are going to have autonomous burritos. Boxes on wheels that hold food at temperature that come to your house." "All of the sudden you've got an $8 or $10 meal that's delivered to you all in." travis kalanick benahorowitz.eth Erik Torenberg

a16z

126,454 views • 2 months ago

2:20

Travis Kalanick on launching Atoms & building a team that can take on three industries at once: "It's those epic leaders that can inspire their team to just go above and beyond and make magic." "No matter where you are as an entrepreneur, the talent game is the game." "When you multiply the industries by three, we're back in the flow. And because we were stealth for so long, we weren't in the flow. We were cold calling everybody." "One of the beautiful things about us being back out there is, okay, we can now have a place for people to understand who we are, what we're about, and I can start putting teams together that can be out there in a very public way." travis kalanick Erik Torenberg

a16z

39,792 views • 2 months ago

2:37

Travis Kalanick on the regulatory fight entrepreneurs face today and faced 150 years ago: "Once the bits start controlling atoms in the physical world, the regulators are in the game big time." "When in the past have we seen something like this?" "If you start studying the Second Industrial Revolution, there are so many parallels between the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, the Fricks, the Fords." "What those guys had to deal with in that massive rapid change." "There's a very interesting parallel to what's happening, slash about to happen now." travis kalanick benahorowitz.eth Erik Torenberg

a16z

50,006 views • 2 months ago

2:40

Marc Andreessen says in the future, we may not have programming languages or even user interfaces: "I kind of think that in 10 years, I'm not sure there will even be a salient concept of a programming language in the way that we understand it today." "If you project forward, you have to think forward to a world in which it's just—I'm going to tell the thing what I need, and it's going to do it in whatever way is most optimal." Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 with Latent.Space

a16z

65,741 views • 5 months ago

1:49

Travis Kalanick on what makes an idea worth betting on: "Sometimes you have ideas. Sometimes ideas come to you. But if it's meant to be your soulmate, you know it when you see it." "Complexity is interesting to me. Things that are not sexy on the surface is also weirdly interesting." "Especially if you can see that it's sexy but people don't understand yet." "That's where the sparkle in your eye, you kinda go, 'You don't see what I see, and I'm pretty sure I'm right'. And that's the fun part." travis kalanick benahorowitz.eth Erik Torenberg

a16z

51,423 views • 2 months ago

0:57

Travis Kalanick on starting over after Uber: "I acquired CloudKitchens, partnered with a buddy of mine, Diego. There were six people in the company that I acquired." "You gotta think, the last all-hands I did had 20,000 people. The next all-hands I did had six. And I stood in front just the same, and I'm like, 'Let's go, guys! Let's do this!'" "These guys, they're like, 'What just happened?' They went to work that morning at a six-person startup, and an hour later, the founder of Uber is now the CEO." travis kalanick benahorowitz.eth Erik Torenberg

a16z

71,765 views • 2 months ago

1:57

Travis Kalanick on how one product becomes ten: "The only constraint to your imagination is management capacity." "How did AWS happen? It literally had nothing to do with a bookstore." "Once you get the beachhead and it's working, you can start. Uber Rides, then it's Uber Eats, then it's Uber Autonomy, then it's Uber Freight, then it's Uber AI Labs." "You can start letting your imagination do really interesting things. Where you start matters." travis kalanick benahorowitz.eth Erik Torenberg

a16z

120,946 views • 2 months ago

2:30

Travis Kalanick says new media is why he's back after eight years of silence: "The media landscape 10 years ago, 90% of what was said was very negative. Business had become politics, and we didn't know it... If it bleeds, it leads, right?" "Now the media landscape is like, 'yeah, you don't have to talk to those guys.' You can go and talk to a David Senra. You can go and talk to Joe Rogan or name your guy, and you can say what you need to say." "Elon buying Twitter is the beginning of us being able to speak our minds and for disagreeing to not be illegal. That's a big deal. We should all thank Elon for that." "I want to build. I want to not think about what The New York Times is writing when I make decisions about what I build. I had to emulate what it's like being a capitalist in Russia... and that's what I did for eight years." travis kalanick

a16z

1,093,861 views • 1 month ago

3:27

NBC’s Gabe Gutierrez: “One on Iran and one on Cuba. Is Iran now bigger foreign policy priority for you than China and on Cuba — the Cuban government —” President Trump: “Iran is just a military operation. To me, Iran is something that was essentially largely over in two or three days because the Navy was wiped out almost immediately. The air force came next, the anti-aircraft came next. I mean, we're flying over Iran. We could take out their electric capacity in one hour. We have all the there's nothing they can do right now because everything is knocked out. They have no — again, no radar, no anti-aircraft. They have nothing, and we don't — and it was a decision I made. We discussed it. Pete, Marco, JD all of us, Chris. We discussed it. We can knock out their electricity in a matter of minutes if we wanted to. There's nothing they can do about it. We can knock out their oil in Kharg Island. The only thing we didn't take down was the oil. Because if we knock out, I call them the pipes. Very complex. But if you do that, it will take them forever to rebuild, meaning whoever — and hopefully it's a sane group of people, but whoever it is, it's going to be running that, and we're going to try to get people that are going to run it well. And you know, it's going to be a prosperous, wonderful place. It used to be, you know, if you go back, it used to be a very — the people are great. The people are smart and energetic and it used to be very successful. Now, it's a country run by fear. It's a country where they tell protesters, don't go outside, because if you do, we're going to kill you....Well, Cuba right now is in very bad shape. They're talking to Marco, and we'll be doing something with Cuba very soon. We're really focused on this, but we're dealing with Cuba. Marco, do you want to say a couple of words about it?” Secretary of State Rubio: “Yeah. I mean, Cuba has an economy that doesn't work and a political and governmental system. They can't fix it. It's not dramatic enough. It's not going to fix it, so they've got some big decisions to make over there.” Gutierrez: “But Secretary — Secretary Rubio, do you support and I know this is up to Congress, but do you support easing the Cuban trade embargo if you get more cooperation from Havana?” Rubio: “Well, I'm not going to discuss what we would talk about or not. Suffice it to say that the embargo is tied to political change on the island. The law has been the embargo is codified. And — but the bottom line is their economy doesn't work. It's a nonfunctional economy. It's an economy that has survived. It's for 40 — that revolution — it's not even a revolution, that thing they have — has survived on subsidies from the Soviet Union and now from Venezuela. They don't get subsidies anymore, so they're in a lot of trouble. And the people in charge are — they don't know how to fix it, so they have to get new people in charge. That's what happened.” Trump: “And the relationship we have with Venezuela has been, I think you could almost say, incredible. It's been really good. It's been good for Venezuela and it's been good for us. And I congratulate the Venezuelan baseball team because that was a big — that was a big win. And I guess they play another game tonight in the finals.” Rubio: “Against the U.S.” Trump: “And I said a lot of good things have happened to Venezuela lately. This is the first time they've ever been in the finals, and it was pretty exciting.

Curtis Houck

175,437 views • 6 months ago

0:46

Travis Kalanick says founders should date ideas before committing to them: "I have lots of ideas all the time. I'm an idea factory. But other people have great ideas, too." "I like to say, you go out on a date with the idea. Was it a good date? Did it go well? How did you and the idea get along?" "Who you are is going to be a big part of which idea works for you... Be in touch with who you are, and then when the right idea comes your way, you just know." travis kalanick w/ David Senra

a16z

100,039 views • 1 month ago

1:51

Travis Kalanick showed up to fundraise for several stealth companies at once. Ben Horowitz only needed to check one thing: Ben: "The other thing that I learned was he was still Travis. He hadn't turned into... He wasn't living his best life. He wasn't doing that. I was at conviction very fast." Travis: "We actually had separate companies going. So when I went to do the fundraise, I showed up at a16z like the guy with a trench coat with a bunch of watches saying, 'You want a watch? Which watch would you like? I got lots of stuff. Do you want some food stuff? I've got some mining stuff.'" "They're like, 'We just want the stuff.' And we heard that from the first few people we talked to... I had to merge separate entities with different investors and put it together." "You see some of the things with Elon, and he's starting to put the pieces back together... He was managing five or six or seven different companies. So I was really trying to put it together under a single roof." benahorowitz.eth travis kalanick

a16z

117,091 views • 1 month ago

0:26

.President Donald J. Trump: "It's a Memorandum of Understanding. If it doesn't get done in 60 days, that's alright — we go back to bombing. I don't want to do that because it's so good, but we might have to because we're never going to let them have a nuclear weapon."

Rapid Response 47

102,311 views • 3 months ago

1:30

Anish Acharya: We're going to see a "YouTube moment for software": "If you think about YouTube 20 years ago—we had lots of video and lots of television, and it was high production quality, and it wasn't clear that we needed more and 20 years later, YouTube's a $550 billion enterprise that would be one of the biggest companies in the world if it was independent." "I think the same thing is going to happen for software. People want to make software, and for the first time they can—and they can distribute it and they can consume it." "Sometimes it's going to be important software. Sometimes it's going to be totally trivial. It's going to be software for a bachelor party weekend, software for a joke, software for a prompt. We have this sort of seriousness about software that we had about video and television 20 years ago." "Now it's like—I just took a video on my phone. It's going to be like—I just made an app on my phone. Same energy." Anish Acharya on BILLIONS with Guillaume Moubeche

a16z

103,034 views • 6 months ago

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Travis Kalanick on how CloudKitchens stayed stealth for years: "The media doesn't want to cover a story because it's so hard to discuss a thing that has a gap a few years before it." "It's easier to be stealth over time because even if somebody tries to leak, nobody... show more

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.President Donald J. Trump: "It's a Memorandum of Understanding. If it doesn't get done in 60 days, that's alright — we go back to bombing. I don't want to do that because it's so good, but we might have to because we're never going to let them have a nuclear weapon."