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 Kalanick 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 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. So I'll bet my entire network that Uber will be here and thriving in 10 years. You're at war prematurely with your customers.

Sorry about that. All right, everybody. My gosh. I can't believe, I can't believe I get to sit down with one of the most famous investors in Uber. So I'm honored, I'm honored to be here. We wanted to have a surprise for you every day. I've been, Travis and I have been friends for 25 years.

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, which was a peer-to-peer network to share files. 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, let's just keep moving.

It was a while ago, 1999. And 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. And I think that's going to win big in the future. And sure enough, we got to go on a great journey together with Uber. And now again, with Cloud Kitchens. 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. It's like, I'm just a block away from you, at your alma mater, UCLA. Let's go. Come on. Yeah. I'm like, all right, let's go. So we said, OK. So here we are.

Let's chop it up. Let's talk about Cloud Kitchens. You have, since 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, so, yeah, I mean, it is kind of funny when you go from being a tech guy to a kitchen guy.

I mean, that's interesting. Look, food is at the center of the human experience, the center of humanity, and just how we live. 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, of course, in my last gig, we did Uber Eats.

It was a starting point. But the difference with food versus rides is that the infrastructure is 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 restaurateur, 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.

But these guys are 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. And so we like to say we serve those who serve others.

We're not the restaurant, we're the guys underneath. And currently I think we have real estate, we have facilities in all the major cities in 30 countries around the world. We also have a software division, so we have hundreds of thousands of restaurants using our software stack. And we have a robotics division that got going with a lot of the original sort of Uber ATG guys, advanced technology group, the autonomy guys.

So we got that crew together and have robots that already are out there, but are going to be out there in a really big way over the coming 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 insight as an entrepreneur. And the insight here is, hey, getting you food quickly, efficiently, and then making it easier for a restaurateur to pop up a restaurant. Tell us the economics of a food brand. When Jade and I and the family were out here on vacation over the summer in Manhattan Beach, we had a wonderful experience of ordering Gwyneth Paltrow's Cloud Kitchen and these new brands, great new brands popping up.

Talk about the economics for that food entrepreneur. - I mean, it's just tough. I think most of us know a restaurateur. Some of us may have even tried to do a restaurateur, be a part of it in some fashion. Like I said, it's a labor of love, but your big costs are gonna be labor, let's call it 30%, but it can range from 25 to 40% of your overall revenue.

Occupancy, which is the physical space itself, let's call it between 6 and 12% of revenue. Supply chain is 30%, marketing, let's call it 10. I know I'm missing something somewhere, but that's the big stuff. And a successful restaurant's gonna have a 10% profit margin and be really pumped about that.

- Wow. - And so, yeah, that's just how it works. One thing I wanna 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 my sweet spot is digitizing the physical world. And 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, a computer's what 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, yeah, what moves atoms? Well, that's transport or 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, let's take a look at the video of some of the robots that are making food in Cloud Kitchens.

And that's our lab. We're doing that in-house. All in-house, yeah. All this stuff is in-house.