Reactions from ranked influencers
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Travis Kalanick: "I left Uber at 20,000 people, and eight months later I was running a company of six. It felt just as real as the big show." The full interview with @travisk and @bhorowitz on Atoms, the future of robotics, why every problem is an engineering problem, and more. 2:19 Ben Horowitz: "There was nobody in Uber that didn't feel Travis. To have that kind of presence at that scale is something not a lot of founders can do" 4:07 "An entrepreneur should basically be saying the best VC does no harm, and all cash is green. That is your full aspiration with 98% of investors" 4:53 "Most VCs were operators once upon a time. When they cross over, they don't say it in their heads, they don't admit it, but they've begun the process of degrading" 6:41 "I left Uber at 20,000 people, and eight months later I was running a company of six. It felt just as real, just as everything, as the big show" 9:33 "Robots to make it, robotic couriers to move it to your house, so efficient it approaches the cost of going to the grocery store" 10:17 "When robots are doing it, you get exactly to the gram what you asked for. I can imagine people doing blood work and then getting a meal plan" 19:44 "I'm not anti-humanoid, I'm non-humanoid. The minute you have a machine doing a high-scale task, we're no longer in humanoid land, we're in specialized robotics land" 20:26 "There was a moment nine months ago where humanoids were the mega rage. When your hairdresser says he's getting into the humanoid business, we know something's wrong" 23:27 Ben Horowitz: "The AI models are so good now that I worry about ideas that are not ambitious enough. In the old days you'd say, that's going to be too hard to build" 24:56 "The second Industrial Revolution, the complex environments those industrialists were in, it feels like in some ways we're rhyming with that" 26:49 "You read historical biographies of the folks who built the railroads, the steel mills, and you're like, oh, they saw all the things. I'm replaying their playbook, and I thought it was new" 32:13 "Sometimes the things that sound the coolest are the easiest. The hardest thing we do on food is actually put a bowl in a paper bag" 33:57 "In a tech product they'd call it the happy path. They say, does this ever happen? Dude, it never happens. And then it happens a lot" 39:01 "I tell my engineers every problem is an engineering problem. I don't care if it's HR or finance or sales. It always involves two things, logic and people" @eriktorenberg @theojaffee @schisofrenia
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." @travisk @bhorowitz @eriktorenberg
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." @travisk @bhorowitz @eriktorenberg