back to indexIn conversation with Travis Kalanick | All-In Summit 2024
Chapters
0:0 Jason intros Travis Kalanick
2:27 What Travis is working on at Cloud Kitchens
12:32 Travis's operating playbook
16:16 Strategy at Uber: Competing with Lyft, surge pricing, dealing with bad press
26:12 Being a "War time CEO" and competing in China
34:9 Travis reflects on getting ousted as CEO of Uber and his future
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The reason that he was kicked out is because of this toxic culture. 00:00:04.440 |
Some big news that took place on Christmas Eve, if you missed it, Travis Kalanick planning 00:00:12.260 |
And when he showed me what he was working on, I immediately said, hey, can I invest? 00:00:14.720 |
A popular $70 billion ride-sharing company is searching for a new CEO to take the wheel. 00:00:20.640 |
So you want to talk about structure being completely screwy? 00:00:25.000 |
So I'll bet my entire network that Uber will be here and thriving in 10 years. 00:00:29.680 |
You're at war prematurely with your customers. 00:00:39.720 |
I can't believe, I can't believe I get to sit down with one of the most famous investors 00:01:05.280 |
We wanted to have a surprise for you every day. 00:01:07.560 |
I've been, Travis and I have been friends for 25 years. 00:01:11.640 |
The first time I interviewed Travis was 1999. 00:01:15.400 |
I was doing a little magazine out here, Digital Coast Reporter. 00:01:18.000 |
You were doing a little company called Scour, which was a peer-to-peer network to share 00:01:28.080 |
I think if we put those two numbers together- 00:01:29.900 |
Just don't let people do the math, you know, it's just like, let's just keep moving. 00:01:36.960 |
And I just remember the enthusiasm, drive, and fire that you had at that time. 00:01:44.800 |
And it always struck me, I said to myself, I don't know if he's going to win on this 00:01:49.920 |
I'm pretty sure he's going to get his ass handed to him, in fact. 00:01:55.200 |
And I think that's going to win big in the future. 00:01:57.840 |
And sure enough, we got to go on a great journey together with Uber. 00:02:04.040 |
Every year when we're hanging out, I say, since you left Uber, I say, you know, whenever 00:02:15.360 |
It's like, I'm just a block away from you, at your alma mater, UCLA. 00:02:29.980 |
You have, since you left Uber, been working extremely hard and quietly on Cloud Kitchens. 00:02:39.840 |
What is Cloud Kitchens for people who don't know? 00:02:42.080 |
Well, so, yeah, I mean, it is kind of funny when you go from being a tech guy to a kitchen 00:02:52.040 |
Look, food is at the center of the human experience, the center of humanity, and just how we live. 00:03:02.140 |
It's got a lot of problems, health, cost, convenience, like all that stuff. 00:03:13.880 |
And so, of course, in my last gig, we did Uber Eats. 00:03:22.280 |
But the difference with food versus rides is that the infrastructure is already there. 00:03:26.960 |
You had a bunch of cars that were 98% unutilized. 00:03:32.760 |
But to do food right, you needed to build the infrastructure. 00:03:37.280 |
And so the mission for our company is infrastructure for better food. 00:03:40.920 |
And the idea is like, can you get the preparation and delivery of food so high quality and most 00:03:50.320 |
importantly so cost efficient that it starts to approach the cost of you going to the grocery 00:03:56.400 |
If that happens, you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car. 00:04:00.880 |
And so the quiet part is like, we go and buy real estate. 00:04:09.240 |
We then go talk to the center point of what matters in food, which is the restaurateur, 00:04:16.440 |
the entrepreneur who's making it, who does it just because, I mean, it's a labor of love. 00:04:22.800 |
You got to have a deep passion for food and a deep passion for people because otherwise 00:04:29.080 |
But these guys are like true blue entrepreneurs and they are our customer. 00:04:33.320 |
And you do it from their perspective and you help them get their vision for what they're 00:04:39.400 |
doing out there and do it super, super efficiently. 00:04:44.040 |
And so we like to say we serve those who serve others. 00:04:47.360 |
We're not the restaurant, we're the guys underneath. 00:04:50.880 |
And currently I think we have real estate, we have facilities in all the major cities 00:04:59.920 |
We also have a software division, so we have hundreds of thousands of restaurants using 00:05:05.720 |
And we have a robotics division that got going with a lot of the original sort of Uber ATG 00:05:12.680 |
guys, advanced technology group, the autonomy guys. 00:05:15.880 |
So we got that crew together and have robots that already are out there, but are going 00:05:25.600 |
to be out there in a really big way over the coming quarters and years. 00:05:31.280 |
- So the premise of Uber was, hey, press a button, we move you or anything from point 00:05:37.400 |
A to point B. What a profound, simple, but profound insight as an entrepreneur. 00:05:43.600 |
And the insight here is, hey, getting you food quickly, efficiently, and then making 00:05:51.240 |
it easier for a restaurateur to pop up a restaurant. 00:05:58.200 |
When Jade and I and the family were out here on vacation over the summer in Manhattan Beach, 00:06:01.760 |
we had a wonderful experience of ordering Gwyneth Paltrow's Cloud Kitchen and these 00:06:12.080 |
Talk about the economics for that food entrepreneur. 00:06:20.240 |
Some of us may have even tried to do a restaurateur, be a part of it in some fashion. 00:06:24.760 |
Like I said, it's a labor of love, but your big costs are gonna be labor, let's call it 00:06:30.280 |
30%, but it can range from 25 to 40% of your overall revenue. 00:06:37.800 |
Occupancy, which is the physical space itself, let's call it between 6 and 12% of revenue. 00:06:47.640 |
Supply chain is 30%, marketing, let's call it 10. 00:06:52.360 |
I know I'm missing something somewhere, but that's the big stuff. 00:06:57.240 |
And a successful restaurant's gonna have a 10% profit margin and be really pumped about 00:07:06.840 |
One thing I wanna say, just sort of the high level to like sort of how do you connect the 00:07:10.760 |
dots on like sort of where innovation is going is that my sweet spot is digitizing the physical 00:07:18.620 |
And you could take that to mean a lot of different things, but it's basically treating atoms 00:07:26.880 |
And so we know the bits world is a computer, a computer's what CPU manipulates the bits, 00:07:32.840 |
storage stores the bits, network moves bits from point A to point B. 00:07:36.600 |
But if you're treating atoms like bits, you go, CPU manipulates the bits, what manipulates 00:07:52.220 |
Network moves bits from point A to point B. What, yeah, what moves atoms? 00:08:01.680 |
And so these are the three sort of core computing resources in a atoms-based computer. 00:08:09.760 |
And you can say my last gig was so much about the network for the physical world, but there's 00:08:16.040 |
just a huge amount of innovation left in compute and storage for the physical world, also known 00:08:22.640 |
as digitized manufacturing and digitized real estate. 00:08:27.640 |
And so our company is really sort of building atoms-based computers and sort of our first 00:08:38.920 |
Yeah, let's take a look at the video of some of the robots that are making food in