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Travis Kalanick on the physical world as an atoms-based computer: "The vision for digitizing the physical world for me started at Uber. Treating atoms like bits started at Uber. It was sci-fi at one point. You would touch glass and a car would come to you." "CPU manipulates bits.... show more

a16z

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43,584 views • 1 month ago •via X (Twitter)

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Travis Kalanick is back. After 8 years of building in stealth, he joins Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg to tell the story of his latest company, Atoms, and its vision to digitize the physical world one industry at a time: 01:32 The a16z & Uber backstory 15:36 Different companies, different rules 21:13 CloudKitchens origins 27:13 An $8 meal delivery 31:58 Building in private 34:59 Computing atoms, not bits 42:54 Autonomous mining 49:02 Ideas are cheap, founders are rare 56:21 From 20,000 employees to 6 1:00:32 Why food came first 1:10:40 Entering a new industry 1:20:21 Parallels to the Industrial Revolution 1:28:26 Who Travis is hiring travis kalanick benahorowitz.eth Erik Torenberg

Travis Kalanick is back. After 8 years of building in stealth, he joins Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg to tell the story of his latest company, Atoms, and its vision to digitize the physical world one industry at a time: 01:32 The a16z & Uber backstory 15:36 Different companies, different rules 21:13 CloudKitchens origins 27:13 An $8 meal delivery 31:58 Building in private 34:59 Computing atoms, not bits 42:54 Autonomous mining 49:02 Ideas are cheap, founders are rare 56:21 From 20,000 employees to 6 1:00:32 Why food came first 1:10:40 Entering a new industry 1:20:21 Parallels to the Industrial Revolution 1:28:26 Who Travis is hiring travis kalanick benahorowitz.eth Erik Torenberg

a16z

564,338 views • 1 month ago

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

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 • 1 month ago

Peter Thiel: Elon is super impressive and unique because he's innovating in the world of atoms. “I think Elon's super impressive because he's done something outside of the IT space. We're in a world that's dominated by IT, by innovation in the world of bits, much less in the world of atoms. And I think that is what makes Elon uniquely charismatic because we do have a sense that it would be good if we were doing a little bit more in atoms and not everything in the world of bits.” This Week in Startups/YouTube, March 16, 2015

Peter Thiel: Elon is super impressive and unique because he's innovating in the world of atoms. “I think Elon's super impressive because he's done something outside of the IT space. We're in a world that's dominated by IT, by innovation in the world of bits, much less in the world of atoms. And I think that is what makes Elon uniquely charismatic because we do have a sense that it would be good if we were doing a little bit more in atoms and not everything in the world of bits.” This Week in Startups/YouTube, March 16, 2015

ELON CLIPS

118,853 views • 11 months ago

Travis Kalanick: "A lot of folks think I'm back. I've been working my ass off the whole time. I just haven't been talking about it." Eight years, thousands of employees, multiple industries, none of it on LinkedIn, and now the biggest check Ben Horowitz has ever written. travis kalanick joins benahorowitz.eth and Erik Torenberg for a fireside chat to discuss Atoms: an industrial AI company that sees manufacturing, real estate, and logistics as the CPU, storage, and network of the physical world: 00:00 Intro 01:30 The Uber video from 10 years ago 04:26 Bits, atoms, and the three computing primitives 07:37 Can a delivered meal cost less than the grocery store? 10:16 Standing next to a TCP packet 11:59 Ride-sharing was the gold medal. Transport is full of silver 13:59 Resistance to change is the final boss 22:22 Why he didn't buy Lyft 24:09 Best idea wins 28:13 Blood, sweat, and ramen 32:32 When it gets easy, push harder 36:18 Showing up to the fundraise like a guy selling watches 45:46 Dirty fuel vs. falling in love again 48:31 Be uniconic

Travis Kalanick: "A lot of folks think I'm back. I've been working my ass off the whole time. I just haven't been talking about it." Eight years, thousands of employees, multiple industries, none of it on LinkedIn, and now the biggest check Ben Horowitz has ever written. travis kalanick joins benahorowitz.eth and Erik Torenberg for a fireside chat to discuss Atoms: an industrial AI company that sees manufacturing, real estate, and logistics as the CPU, storage, and network of the physical world: 00:00 Intro 01:30 The Uber video from 10 years ago 04:26 Bits, atoms, and the three computing primitives 07:37 Can a delivered meal cost less than the grocery store? 10:16 Standing next to a TCP packet 11:59 Ride-sharing was the gold medal. Transport is full of silver 13:59 Resistance to change is the final boss 22:22 Why he didn't buy Lyft 24:09 Best idea wins 28:13 Blood, sweat, and ramen 32:32 When it gets easy, push harder 36:18 Showing up to the fundraise like a guy selling watches 45:46 Dirty fuel vs. falling in love again 48:31 Be uniconic

a16z

1,106,843 views • 17 days ago

Uber's original culture had a value Ben Horowitz still quotes, "meritocracy and toe-stepping." Travis Kalanick kept it at Atoms, under a new name: Ben: "We're here to build. We're gonna do it. We're gonna push as hard as we can, and yeah, you may get your toe stepped on, but you gotta keep going... In some ways it was the core part." Travis: "At Atoms we call it 'The Best Idea Wins.' But the toe-stepping is important, because there's so many people that are not willing to fight for the best idea 'cause they're gonna upset somebody else." "If you don't fight for the best idea, then what idea are you fighting for? You're fighting for the mediocre idea, the politically expedient idea, an idea that's gonna make you less good than if you went for the best idea." "Having everybody oriented towards that is a cultural vibe that helps you win." travis kalanick benahorowitz.eth

Uber's original culture had a value Ben Horowitz still quotes, "meritocracy and toe-stepping." Travis Kalanick kept it at Atoms, under a new name: Ben: "We're here to build. We're gonna do it. We're gonna push as hard as we can, and yeah, you may get your toe stepped on, but you gotta keep going... In some ways it was the core part." Travis: "At Atoms we call it 'The Best Idea Wins.' But the toe-stepping is important, because there's so many people that are not willing to fight for the best idea 'cause they're gonna upset somebody else." "If you don't fight for the best idea, then what idea are you fighting for? You're fighting for the mediocre idea, the politically expedient idea, an idea that's gonna make you less good than if you went for the best idea." "Having everybody oriented towards that is a cultural vibe that helps you win." travis kalanick benahorowitz.eth

a16z

57,271 views • 17 days ago

back in 2017 i was interning as an equities analyst at a fund in nyc, which had a 9am morning call every weekday. the purpose of this call was to discuss quarterly earnings or current events or whether we should be buying nvidia (at the time, on a tear because of the '17 crypto boom), but one morning in june the call opened with a bunch of people freaking out because some guy named "travis" had resigned. after a couple of rounds of "travis is gone" "did they fire him" "bloomberg says he resigned," i was especially confused because the firm had a portfolio manager named travis, and i looked over at his desk and he was still sitting there, not being escorted out by security or anything. who was travis? it was only after things had calmed down that i realized the people on this call were talking about *travis kalanick* of uber, a figure who loomed so large in the minds of wall street investors that even *two years before* uber ipo-ed, the news of his departure was treated like a six sigma event. everyone wanted to know: if travis was gone, what would happen to his company? even in his uber days, travis was the bits and atoms guy (watch the video clipped in the first ~2 minutes of the below podcast for proof of that). and in order to be a bits and atoms guy - as in, the kind of guy who's so discontent with the slow, staid, schlerotic state of things that he has to painstakingly reorchestrate the physical world with computers, perhaps pissing off some powerful interests along the way - some people might call you difficult. some people will not understand your vision. some people will try to get you fired. but if you're a bits and atoms guy, you never stop being one. you might retreat into near-obscurity, or spend years wandering in the wilderness, biding your time in exile. but you will not stop building. and one day you will return triumphant like a modern-day charles de gaulle, even better than ever, and ready to prove wrong everyone who didn't understand the first time around. being in a room with travis leaves you pretty pumped up. you can see why he's such a rallying leader, and why (by my count) at least six top uber execs have chosen to follow him to his new company, atoms. it isn't simply that the job isn't finished (although that's a big part of it, as travis attests). it's also because it's clear that there are very few leaders like travis out there: people who have such a holistic worldview that they can get people who would otherwise be founders themselves to join the ride and help build an extremely specific vision for the future. here are some things that stood out to me from this event: -travis is a branding/comms mastermind. he deploys memorable phrases like “food computer,” “wheelbase for robots,” “atoms as bits” and describes his vision for cheap meal delivery as "autonomous burritos." you can see why people get excited for his vision for the future. there's extraordinary complexity in what atoms is trying to do, but travis makes each step along the way feel manageable because he can distill these ideas into extremely concrete images. -atoms is building full-stack autonomation for three different divisions: food, mining, and transportation. food supplies the real estate, software, robotics, and logistics laboratory; mining supplies a commercially deployed autonomy business; and transport is intended to become the reusable movement platform connecting multiple physical industries. travis argues humanoids make sense for diverse, low-volume work in spaces designed for people. but at industrial scale (which atoms is doing), purpose-built machines should win on throughput, space, cost, and reliability. -the best way to get over your last company may be the same as the best way to get over your ex: fall in love again. travis says anger and fear of failure can carry a founder through years of pain, but they also produce long nights where very little gets done and sharp elbows felt by everyone around you. atoms is what happened when he learned to build toward a future rather than against an enemy. -doing hard things is a reminder you can do more hard things. in the q&a ben remembers travis describing attacks by chinese ride-sharing companies as proof that, if he could survive china, the rest of the world would be manageable. travis still deliberately creates problems when things become easy. but the rate of problem creation cannot exceed the organization’s rate of problem-solving. such a fun talk and q+a with travis kalanick benahorowitz.eth Erik Torenberg ! check it out.

back in 2017 i was interning as an equities analyst at a fund in nyc, which had a 9am morning call every weekday. the purpose of this call was to discuss quarterly earnings or current events or whether we should be buying nvidia (at the time, on a tear because of the '17 crypto boom), but one morning in june the call opened with a bunch of people freaking out because some guy named "travis" had resigned. after a couple of rounds of "travis is gone" "did they fire him" "bloomberg says he resigned," i was especially confused because the firm had a portfolio manager named travis, and i looked over at his desk and he was still sitting there, not being escorted out by security or anything. who was travis? it was only after things had calmed down that i realized the people on this call were talking about travis kalanick of uber, a figure who loomed so large in the minds of wall street investors that even two years before uber ipo-ed, the news of his departure was treated like a six sigma event. everyone wanted to know: if travis was gone, what would happen to his company? even in his uber days, travis was the bits and atoms guy (watch the video clipped in the first ~2 minutes of the below podcast for proof of that). and in order to be a bits and atoms guy - as in, the kind of guy who's so discontent with the slow, staid, schlerotic state of things that he has to painstakingly reorchestrate the physical world with computers, perhaps pissing off some powerful interests along the way - some people might call you difficult. some people will not understand your vision. some people will try to get you fired. but if you're a bits and atoms guy, you never stop being one. you might retreat into near-obscurity, or spend years wandering in the wilderness, biding your time in exile. but you will not stop building. and one day you will return triumphant like a modern-day charles de gaulle, even better than ever, and ready to prove wrong everyone who didn't understand the first time around. being in a room with travis leaves you pretty pumped up. you can see why he's such a rallying leader, and why (by my count) at least six top uber execs have chosen to follow him to his new company, atoms. it isn't simply that the job isn't finished (although that's a big part of it, as travis attests). it's also because it's clear that there are very few leaders like travis out there: people who have such a holistic worldview that they can get people who would otherwise be founders themselves to join the ride and help build an extremely specific vision for the future. here are some things that stood out to me from this event: -travis is a branding/comms mastermind. he deploys memorable phrases like “food computer,” “wheelbase for robots,” “atoms as bits” and describes his vision for cheap meal delivery as "autonomous burritos." you can see why people get excited for his vision for the future. there's extraordinary complexity in what atoms is trying to do, but travis makes each step along the way feel manageable because he can distill these ideas into extremely concrete images. -atoms is building full-stack autonomation for three different divisions: food, mining, and transportation. food supplies the real estate, software, robotics, and logistics laboratory; mining supplies a commercially deployed autonomy business; and transport is intended to become the reusable movement platform connecting multiple physical industries. travis argues humanoids make sense for diverse, low-volume work in spaces designed for people. but at industrial scale (which atoms is doing), purpose-built machines should win on throughput, space, cost, and reliability. -the best way to get over your last company may be the same as the best way to get over your ex: fall in love again. travis says anger and fear of failure can carry a founder through years of pain, but they also produce long nights where very little gets done and sharp elbows felt by everyone around you. atoms is what happened when he learned to build toward a future rather than against an enemy. -doing hard things is a reminder you can do more hard things. in the q&a ben remembers travis describing attacks by chinese ride-sharing companies as proof that, if he could survive china, the rest of the world would be manageable. travis still deliberately creates problems when things become easy. but the rate of problem creation cannot exceed the organization’s rate of problem-solving. such a fun talk and q+a with travis kalanick benahorowitz.eth Erik Torenberg ! check it out.

Elena

108,953 views • 17 days ago

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

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 • 1 month ago

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

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 • 1 month ago

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

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 • 1 month ago

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

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

120,753 views • 1 month ago

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

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 • 1 month ago

I am a physicist and I'm profoundly opposed to any idea of non-physical explanations that contradict physics. So that's a no-no and really doesn't make sense. However, there are ways in which both emergent properties such as minds and life and so on have an effect. And as you said, also abstractions. Now the fact that the theory of good explanations led to the idea that abstractions are real things was slightly surprising to me. I wasn't expecting the link, at least wasn't expecting it to be so strong as it is. But the thing is, if you think about how to explain events, physical events like a footprint on the moon, how do you explain how that happened? Well, it happened because of human ideas, of science. And human ideas, you could say in this reductionist sense that as you rightly say is the prevailing mode of explanation and the prevailing idea is to look down on other modes of explanation, that those ideas are nothing more than configurations of atoms. So some physicists, some rocket scientists put their brain into certain configurations of atoms and those atoms then acted on other atoms which then ended up making a footprint on the moon. Now what that misses is the explanation of why certain configurations of atoms put footprints on the moon while others, the overwhelming majority of configurations that human brains, even human brains have been put into in history, do not have that effect. And it's because there's a certain type of information. And this information can't in my view be reduced to statements about atoms because if you think about what that information does, it is in brains but the same information then gets transferred into, let's say, sound waves in air and then it gets transferred into ink on paper and then it gets transferred into magnetic domains inside a computer which then control a machine that instantiates those ideas in bits of steel and silicon and so on and so on. There's an immense chain of instantiations of the same information. And it's only special kinds of information that have this property that they are preserved and instantiated in successive physical modes. So what is being transmitted, what is having the causal effect is not the atoms but the fact that the atoms instantiate certain kinds of information and not other kinds. So therefore it is the information that is having the causal effect. If a particular instantiation of that information were damaged, then processes would come along to fix it, whether or not they could fix the physical instantiation. For example, if the computer goes wrong, then we don't use the corrupted information. We go back and rescue the information from a different computer and we throw away the atoms that at one point instantiated it. So the information causes itself to remain in existence. Now I think there's no way out of that mode of explanation. And if explanation is going to be the fundamental thing about our criterion, for example, about what is or isn't real, then we have to say that information and this particular kind which we call knowledge is real and really does cause things. David Deutsch

I am a physicist and I'm profoundly opposed to any idea of non-physical explanations that contradict physics. So that's a no-no and really doesn't make sense. However, there are ways in which both emergent properties such as minds and life and so on have an effect. And as you said, also abstractions. Now the fact that the theory of good explanations led to the idea that abstractions are real things was slightly surprising to me. I wasn't expecting the link, at least wasn't expecting it to be so strong as it is. But the thing is, if you think about how to explain events, physical events like a footprint on the moon, how do you explain how that happened? Well, it happened because of human ideas, of science. And human ideas, you could say in this reductionist sense that as you rightly say is the prevailing mode of explanation and the prevailing idea is to look down on other modes of explanation, that those ideas are nothing more than configurations of atoms. So some physicists, some rocket scientists put their brain into certain configurations of atoms and those atoms then acted on other atoms which then ended up making a footprint on the moon. Now what that misses is the explanation of why certain configurations of atoms put footprints on the moon while others, the overwhelming majority of configurations that human brains, even human brains have been put into in history, do not have that effect. And it's because there's a certain type of information. And this information can't in my view be reduced to statements about atoms because if you think about what that information does, it is in brains but the same information then gets transferred into, let's say, sound waves in air and then it gets transferred into ink on paper and then it gets transferred into magnetic domains inside a computer which then control a machine that instantiates those ideas in bits of steel and silicon and so on and so on. There's an immense chain of instantiations of the same information. And it's only special kinds of information that have this property that they are preserved and instantiated in successive physical modes. So what is being transmitted, what is having the causal effect is not the atoms but the fact that the atoms instantiate certain kinds of information and not other kinds. So therefore it is the information that is having the causal effect. If a particular instantiation of that information were damaged, then processes would come along to fix it, whether or not they could fix the physical instantiation. For example, if the computer goes wrong, then we don't use the corrupted information. We go back and rescue the information from a different computer and we throw away the atoms that at one point instantiated it. So the information causes itself to remain in existence. Now I think there's no way out of that mode of explanation. And if explanation is going to be the fundamental thing about our criterion, for example, about what is or isn't real, then we have to say that information and this particular kind which we call knowledge is real and really does cause things. David Deutsch

Deutsch Explains

45,735 views • 2 years ago

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

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 • 1 month ago

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

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

126,198 views • 1 month ago

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

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 • 1 month ago

Richard Feynman on the one idea that explains almost everything around you: 1. heat isn't a substance. it's motion. when something feels hot, its atoms are jiggling fast. when it's cold, they're jiggling slow. that's all temperature is... speed. 2. when a warm cup heats your hand, nothing actually flows into you. the fast atoms just bump the slow ones and speed them up. heat "spreading" is only jiggling passed along by touch. 3. atoms never lose energy. a bouncing ball slows and stops... but the motion doesn't disappear. it leaked into the floor. the ball goes still, the floor gets a little warmer. the motion is still there. just scrambled. 4. hammer a piece of metal long enough and it gets hot. you added no heat. you just jiggled it harder. pounding is heating. 5. a drop of water pulls into a ball because the atoms want partners on every side. the ones at the surface only have them below. so they keep clawing inward, trying to get in. that's what rounds the drop. 6. that same drop is slowly vanishing. atoms at the surface keep breaking free into the air, one by one, until none are left. you're watching them leave. 7. ice, water, and steam are the same atoms at different speeds. slow, and they lock in place like oranges in a crate... ice. faster, and they roll over each other... water. faster still, and they fly apart... steam. 8. pump up a bike tire and the pump gets hot. squeezing the air speeds the atoms up. let the air expand and it cools, because the atoms hit a piston that gives way and lose speed. heat and cold are hiding in a bicycle pump.

Richard Feynman on the one idea that explains almost everything around you: 1. heat isn't a substance. it's motion. when something feels hot, its atoms are jiggling fast. when it's cold, they're jiggling slow. that's all temperature is... speed. 2. when a warm cup heats your hand, nothing actually flows into you. the fast atoms just bump the slow ones and speed them up. heat "spreading" is only jiggling passed along by touch. 3. atoms never lose energy. a bouncing ball slows and stops... but the motion doesn't disappear. it leaked into the floor. the ball goes still, the floor gets a little warmer. the motion is still there. just scrambled. 4. hammer a piece of metal long enough and it gets hot. you added no heat. you just jiggled it harder. pounding is heating. 5. a drop of water pulls into a ball because the atoms want partners on every side. the ones at the surface only have them below. so they keep clawing inward, trying to get in. that's what rounds the drop. 6. that same drop is slowly vanishing. atoms at the surface keep breaking free into the air, one by one, until none are left. you're watching them leave. 7. ice, water, and steam are the same atoms at different speeds. slow, and they lock in place like oranges in a crate... ice. faster, and they roll over each other... water. faster still, and they fly apart... steam. 8. pump up a bike tire and the pump gets hot. squeezing the air speeds the atoms up. let the air expand and it cools, because the atoms hit a piston that gives way and lose speed. heat and cold are hiding in a bicycle pump.

Naruto

112,570 views • 2 months ago

We asked Erik Palitsch (CEO of Freeform) about his frustrations regarding manufacturing technology's impact on national security. "China is investing in the 3D printing space. They don't have our technology. We are developing this in the U.S. for the U.S." "We don't have software margins that some VCs want, we are combining bits and atoms. You want your 5000x company, you get it at a company like this."

We asked Erik Palitsch (CEO of Freeform) about his frustrations regarding manufacturing technology's impact on national security. "China is investing in the 3D printing space. They don't have our technology. We are developing this in the U.S. for the U.S." "We don't have software margins that some VCs want, we are combining bits and atoms. You want your 5000x company, you get it at a company like this."

TBPN

17,140 views • 1 year ago

Travis Kalanick says entrepreneurs need pissed-off energy: "When you get into your 3rd and 4th, this may be even my 5th at this point, company, you get fricking really good at doing stuff." "Things that used to take me a day or 3 days, a lot of stress, anxiety, like how am I gonna do this, take me like 45 minutes." "I'm so used to adversity at this point that it's kind of normal, so I don't get as pissed off. But being pissed off makes you good as an entrepreneur, so I gotta make sure I'm still fired up." "You get too used to adversity, and that's kind of a problem." travis kalanick benahorowitz.eth

Travis Kalanick says entrepreneurs need pissed-off energy: "When you get into your 3rd and 4th, this may be even my 5th at this point, company, you get fricking really good at doing stuff." "Things that used to take me a day or 3 days, a lot of stress, anxiety, like how am I gonna do this, take me like 45 minutes." "I'm so used to adversity at this point that it's kind of normal, so I don't get as pissed off. But being pissed off makes you good as an entrepreneur, so I gotta make sure I'm still fired up." "You get too used to adversity, and that's kind of a problem." travis kalanick benahorowitz.eth

a16z

322,357 views • 17 days ago

Travis Kalanick's rule for pacing a company's ambition: "I'm constantly creating problems. 'Hey, let's do Uber in China.' And you don't have a full understanding of that problem when you create it. If you create a problem, you have to solve it." "I have this framework I call the meta problem. The derivative of your problem creation must be less than or equal to the derivative of your problem solving." "If it's not, you have a real problem. You're underwater." "You're guessing at what your capacity is to solve problems, and you're guessing six months, 12, 18 months ahead. When you get it really wrong, you must stop all problem creation so that you can get back above water." travis kalanick benahorowitz.eth Erik Torenberg

Travis Kalanick's rule for pacing a company's ambition: "I'm constantly creating problems. 'Hey, let's do Uber in China.' And you don't have a full understanding of that problem when you create it. If you create a problem, you have to solve it." "I have this framework I call the meta problem. The derivative of your problem creation must be less than or equal to the derivative of your problem solving." "If it's not, you have a real problem. You're underwater." "You're guessing at what your capacity is to solve problems, and you're guessing six months, 12, 18 months ahead. When you get it really wrong, you must stop all problem creation so that you can get back above water." travis kalanick benahorowitz.eth Erik Torenberg

a16z

213,254 views • 1 month ago

Elon Musk just measured your existence by how many times your atoms have been inside a dying star. Musk: “How many times have your atoms been at the center of a star? I think it’s like on average three or four times.” Every atom in your body has already survived the core of a star. Multiple times. Crushed under pressures that would flatten planets. Superheated to millions of degrees. Blown apart in explosions so violent they forged new elements. Then gravity pulled those scattered pieces back together. New stars formed. And the cycle repeated. For 13.8 billion years, your atoms have been fuel for the most violent process in the universe. And they are not done. Musk: “In terms of existence as measured by the number of times your atoms will be at the center of a star, we seem to be roughly halfway.” Halfway. Your atoms have been through the furnace three or four times. They will go through three or four more. But right now, in this impossibly thin sliver between cycles, those atoms are doing something they have never done before. They are conscious. For billions of years before you, they burned through stellar cores with no awareness. No memory. No sense of what they were or where they had been. After you, they will return to that state. Unconscious matter drifting through space until the next star claims them. This is the only moment in their entire journey where they can look back at the stars that made them and understand. Musk: “If you want to look at the big picture… that’s the really big picture.” The big picture is not that we are small. Everyone already knows that. The big picture is that we are temporary witnesses to a process that does not need witnesses. Stars do not need observers to burn. Atoms do not need anyone to understand where they have been. The universe ran for billions of years with no one in it. It will run for billions more after the last conscious thing disappears. But right now, matter is examining itself. That has never happened before in 13.8 billion years. You are not a person who happens to contain ancient atoms. You are ancient atoms that briefly figured out how to think. The universe did not design consciousness. It designed stars. Consciousness was the accident. And the accident is half over.

Elon Musk just measured your existence by how many times your atoms have been inside a dying star. Musk: “How many times have your atoms been at the center of a star? I think it’s like on average three or four times.” Every atom in your body has already survived the core of a star. Multiple times. Crushed under pressures that would flatten planets. Superheated to millions of degrees. Blown apart in explosions so violent they forged new elements. Then gravity pulled those scattered pieces back together. New stars formed. And the cycle repeated. For 13.8 billion years, your atoms have been fuel for the most violent process in the universe. And they are not done. Musk: “In terms of existence as measured by the number of times your atoms will be at the center of a star, we seem to be roughly halfway.” Halfway. Your atoms have been through the furnace three or four times. They will go through three or four more. But right now, in this impossibly thin sliver between cycles, those atoms are doing something they have never done before. They are conscious. For billions of years before you, they burned through stellar cores with no awareness. No memory. No sense of what they were or where they had been. After you, they will return to that state. Unconscious matter drifting through space until the next star claims them. This is the only moment in their entire journey where they can look back at the stars that made them and understand. Musk: “If you want to look at the big picture… that’s the really big picture.” The big picture is not that we are small. Everyone already knows that. The big picture is that we are temporary witnesses to a process that does not need witnesses. Stars do not need observers to burn. Atoms do not need anyone to understand where they have been. The universe ran for billions of years with no one in it. It will run for billions more after the last conscious thing disappears. But right now, matter is examining itself. That has never happened before in 13.8 billion years. You are not a person who happens to contain ancient atoms. You are ancient atoms that briefly figured out how to think. The universe did not design consciousness. It designed stars. Consciousness was the accident. And the accident is half over.

Dustin

2,413,374 views • 3 months ago