Letter #219: Travis Kalanick and Jason Calacanis (2024)
Founder of Uber & Cloud Kitchens and Founder of LAUNCH | All-In Summit Conversation
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Today’s letter is the transcript of a conversation between Travis Kalanick and Jason Calacanis. This was a particularly fun conversation not only because it was Travis’ first interview in nearly a decade, but also because Travis and Jason have known each other for several decades and Jason was reportedly the 3rd or 4th investor in Uber (as a Sequoia scout). His deal memo for Sequoia was just two words: “Cabs suck,” and only written on Roelof Botha’s insistence.
In this conversation, Travis discusses what he’s working on at Cloud Kitchens, shares his operating playbook, dives into all things strategy at Uber from competing with Lyft to launching surge pricing and dealing with bad press, talks about being a wartime CEO and competing in China, reflects on getting ousted as CEO of Uber, and looks toward the future.
Travis Kalanick is the Founder of Cloud Kitchens. Before Cloud Kitchens, he founded Uber, which he grew to a ~$50bn company. Prior to founding Uber, he was the founder of Red Swoosh, a peer-to-peer file sharing company that he sold for $19mn. He started Red Swoosh as a “revenge business” after the previous startup he worked on, Scour, declared bankruptcy after being sued by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), and the NMPA (National Motion Picture Association). He started his career at Scour, which he dropped out of college to work on.
Jason Calacanis is the founder of LAUNCH, an early-stage investment firm, and Inside.com, a media company using AI to curate stories. He is also the creator and host of two podcasts: This Week in Startups and The All-In Podcast, which he co-hosts with Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks, and David Friedberg. Earlier in his career, Jason was a serial entrepreneur, founding or cofounding Mahalo (web directory), Weblogs (blog network), Silicon Alley Reporter (magazine), and Rising Tide Studios (media company). He also served as an SVP at AOL and GM of AOL’s Netscape, as well as an EIA (entrepreneur in action) and investment scout at Sequoia Capital.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did!
[Transcript and any errors are mine.]
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Transcript
Jason Calacanis: All right, everybody. My guy.
Travis Kalanick: I can't believe I get to sit down with one of the most famous investors in Uber.
Jason Calacanis: Hahaha.
Travis Kalanick: So I'm honored to be here.
Jason Calacanis: It starts already. We wanted to have a surprise for you every day. 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--
Travis Kalanick: Just don't let people do the math. It's just like, let's just keep moving.
Jason Calacanis: 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.
Travis Kalanick: Correct.
Jason Calacanis: Correct. But I know this guy'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, whenever you're ready, let's have a conversation. And here we are.
Travis Kalanick: And then you call me every year.
Jason Calacanis: I call you every year--if you're ready?
Travis Kalanick: I'm just a block away from you. At your alma mater, UCLA. Let's go. Come on. I'm like, All right, let's go. It's been a while.
Jason Calacanis: And this year, you said, Okay. 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.
Travis Kalanick: 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 has, I think we all--food is at the center of the human experience, the center of humanity, and just how we live, but 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, at my last gig, we did Uber Eats. It was a starting point. But the difference with food versus rides is that the infrastructure was 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 restauranteur, the entrepreneur who's making it, who does it just because--I mean, it's a labor of love. You gotta 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 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.
Jason Calacanis: 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 restauranteur 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 at Manhattan Beach, we had a wonderful experience of ordering Gwyneth Paltrow's cloud kitchen--these new brands-- great, great new brands popping up. Talk about the economics for that food entrepreneur.
Travis Kalanick: I mean, it's just tough. I think most of us know a restauranteur. Some of us may have even tried to do a restaurant or be a part of it in some fashion. Like I said, it's a labor of love, but like, your big costs are going to be labor--let's call it 30%, but it can range from like 25-40% of your overall revenue. Occupancy, which is the physical space itself--let's call it between 6-12% of revenue. Supply chain is 30%. Marketing--let's call it 10%. I know I'm missing something somewhere, but those are the big stuff. And a successful restaurant is going to have a 10% profit margin and be really pumped about that. And so, yeah, that's just how it works. One thing I want to say, just sort of at the high level--how do you connect the dots on 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. The computers--well, 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 moves atoms? Well, that's transport and 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 building atoms-based computers, and our first computer is really a food computer. So that's kind of how we think about it.
Jason Calacanis: Yeah. Let's take a look at the video of some of the robots that are making food in Cloud Kitchens.
Video Commentary
Travis Kalanick: And that's our lab. We're doing that in-house.
Jason Calacanis: All in house.
Travis Kalanick: All this stuff is in-house.
…
Travis Kalanick: So we call this part, Look, Ma, no hands. So once the dispensers are full of food, nobody touches it. And what comes out on a conveyor belt is bags of food that get delivered. So, lidded, bagged, sealed. You get the general idea.
Travis Kalanick: So now you have a restaurant that can asynchronously produce, for consumers, from what labor is doing. And the labor is primarily on the prep side of things.
Jason Calacanis: So we see there's vessels there. I'm assuming they have ingredients in them. The bowl goes by, stuff gets dropped in, organized, covered, put in a bag, label goes on. The human has no part in that, except for maybe preparing and filling those cylinders.
Travis Kalanick: Let's say you have prep in the morning. This machine can run for hours without anybody there. So this just becomes a more efficient thing. So if you want to do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car, you have to make sure two things happen. One is that you need the logistics, the movement of food needs to go to--the cost of that needs to go to zero. This is autonomous vehicles, things along these lines. And then the production of food must also get roboticized, mechanized, essentially. Those two things happen, and then--we can always cook, but it can be out of choice. And I like to say: I like horses, but I don't ride a horse to work. And so you can get higher quality food to the people at a lower cost and just give people the most precious of commodities back, which is called time--to do all the other things in life that they love.
Jason Calacanis: And you're strategically placing these cloud kitchens in--I get, I would assume--very low cost real estate, but that's at very key locations that make it very efficient to deliver the food, yeah?
Travis Kalanick: Yeah. So on the software side, we we have a software stack that, like I said, hundreds of thousands of restaurants use. We're seeing 18% of all online delivery in the US, as an example--our software is touching. So because we see where all of the delivery is, we know where to put a delivery-only restaurant facility. And so we find distressed real estate or unique situations where it's hard to develop, and we've built a competence in turning that into a 30-kitchen facility that we then lease those kitchens to restauranteurs.
Jason Calacanis: Let's talk about the playbook. This is something you worked on really hard at Uber hiring Josh in New York, Will in LA--we had a podcast, and you said on that podcast years and years ago, Hey, I'm looking for some people to run some cities, to run Uber, and you found this eclectic group of samurais. And you let them go. And man, they cooked.
Travis Kalanick: Yeah.
Jason Calacanis: Talk to me about that management principle and your management principles, Hey, be pumped. And bringing that enthusiasm, that fire, and letting those cities cook, because most people have this top-down--they do things sequentially. You've really--and in those early days--got more and more emboldened and excited about doing things in parallel and letting people make mistakes in those regions and learning they could--I remember Josh started doing Messenger delivery. You let other people deliver kittens for a day, to an office to--it was a funny thing. JD Vance--that's when he uninstalled Uber. No kittens. But cookies--whatever it was--ice cream trucks. Talk about that model of letting 1000 flowers bloom, letting the samurai go crazy.
Travis Kalanick: So look, we had a cultural value at Uber called Let builders build. I'm sure there are other companies that may have said that before us, but we certainly took a hold of that. And look, as it related to our GM model and how to empower GMs to do well, it starts with Who is the person? And I always felt that the magic-making happens when you cross creative instincts with analytical capabilities, or prowess, really. So we would just design tests that sort of simulated what it would be like working together, that tested their creative stuff--their secret sauce and creativity, but would create problems where it was crossed with the necessity to analytically solve problems. And so you put those two things together with a hungry person that maybe just got out their MBA, or let's say equivalent, and they're fired up and ready to go, and you empower them. And then you put very simple controls to make sure that their check-- like waypoints, that in order to go further, they have to pass that test--once they're in the job. And just simple things, like we would have a pricing call in the early days of Uber, where you cannot put it up in the app until you pass the pricing call. The first 30 cities, I was on that pricing call. And the thing about price, when it comes to transportation--it's an amalgamation of all strategy across everything. Across what is your cars look like? What's the supply? What does metro or public transport look like? What is cost of labor in that city? What are their general alternatives for getting around? What are regulations like? Ultimately becomes a service with a price. You pass that, and then you get to run a city. But that means the previous 30 days, or 90 days when they're just doing lots of stuff, I don't have to worry. And then they get to that point, they pass the test. They know what the criteria for passing the test is, so it forces them into the right mode.
Jason Calacanis: Right. Let's talk about strategy. One of the great privileges of getting to be involved in your journey for a little bit, was we would talk sometimes, late at night, weekends, when there were really dicey strategy moments, and I'd ask you what you're thinking, and we would just jam out. And a couple of those conversations, I remember calling you in a panic after having taken a Lyft, a ride share--and we were only Uber Black. And I said, Travis, I just got out of this fucking thing. It's $16. It would have been $60. I'm price insensitive, but man, this is going to change everything. And you're like, JCal--and I said, You don't understand, Travis--JCal--No, this is disrup--and you said, We're launching it next week. We got it. It is disruptive--and you saw the Lincoln Town cars were so brilliant, because there were such high margins, but you saw the disruptiveness of the ride sharing thing--and then surge pricing. We had a big debate about tipping. Let's talk about some of those seminal moments in product design, and competition, because this was not happening in a vacuum. People forget there was Sidecar, there was Lyft, and then there were regulators. This was a war.
Travis Kalanick: Yeah, yeah. So, kind of a funny story. I'm not sure if I ever told you this. You were only six weeks behind Zuck--which is--I first heard about Lyft from Zuck. And he's like, Yo. I think you have a situation on your hands and Zuck would do that with a little--
Jason Calacanis: Fuck with you, kind of--
Travis Kalanick: Yeah, kind of like that.
Jason Calacanis: Yeah, he's a puck, yeah.
Travis Kalanick: And I'm like, Thank you. But the thing was--look, at the beginning, that was--they called their rides donations--it was a donation thing. It was non-commercial because there was no insurance, there was no regulation, there was basically just citizen giving another citizen a ride across town. And we didn't do anything about it for nine months because we were already getting our asses handed to us and we were doing the legal thing. And so I'm like, Dude, we got--I got threatened by the city of San Francisco and the state of California three months after we launched Uber with 90 days in jail for every ride that had occurred. So then this thing is like, It's a donation, I swear! And by the way, if you don't give the donation they suggest, then you get kicked off the system. So we're like, Uh, we're not going to do that. And we saw Lyft eating our market share up from the bottom up because they didn't have insurance or regulation or any of these other things. And then nine months into it, the city of San Francisco--the state of California, because it was a California PUC, said, Ah, you know, it's totally fine. And then we're like, Oh shit. So then we hustled, got our thing going, which, at the time, was called peer to peer ride sharing. And then just got working. And the way we did it was like--the reason we didn't do in the first place is because it was clearly not legit. But then California said Yes. And so I made a pact with myself that was like, I'm never going to let this happen again. And so each and every city we went to, we would wait for Lyft to launch, and then we would basically say to the city: we'd send them a letter saying, There's this really cool thing called ride sharing. This company called Lyft is doing it. We think it's great, but our read of your regs is like, It's probably not allowed.
Jason Calacanis: Because you're thoughtful. You want to be thoughtful.
Travis Kalanick: But if you don't enforce in the next 30 days, we're going to participate as well.
Jason Calacanis: Great. You're just giving them a heads up.
Travis Kalanick: So in almost every city in the US--other than two--we can talk about those two, by the way--but in every city in the US, other than two--Portland and Vegas--we were number two in ride sharing for this reason. And we did this actually internationally. We did it across Europe, we did it everywhere. There were other folks that were out there, and we would talk to the regulatory guy, say, if you're going to enforce, do it, but if you're not, we're going to participate. And that's how we rolled.
Jason Calacanis: Yeah, and that worked. And surge pricing was an interesting one. The brilliance of the Uber marketplace was, in many ways, tackling demand and figuring out a way to get drivers to come out on New Year's Eve, the worst night of their lives, to drive. And you came up with a pretty novel approach, which is, Hey, we'll pay you double, we'll pay you triple. And if you don't want to participate in that as a customer, that's fine. But we think availability is more important than necessarily having standardized pricing. And man, the world got very, very upset at this. And you and I talked about--when you explained it to me, I said, That makes logical sense. And I said, You know what we should do? We should write a blog post. And that blog post is still up, I think. Well, you just explained it to people--
Travis Kalanick: I thought Uber took down all my blog posts.
Jason Calacanis: Probably, yeah. That might be a little...
Travis Kalanick: I think they took it down...
Jason Calacanis: But this blog post, where you just said, Hey, here's how to handle New Year's Eve--leave at this time, go back at this time, but we need to get these people on the road, and they deserve to be compensated.
Travis Kalanick: Yeah, of course. So surge pricing--there's another way to say it now. I called it surge pricing on purpose, because I didn't want anybody to think we were trying to deceive them. So we said surge pricing, like it's clear what's going on. But the other way to say surge pricing is called the lowest cost reliable ride. Because if surge pricing goes up too much, then you have drivers that aren't making any money--and by the way, they'll go to the competition. But if surge pricing is exactly--and by the way, if surge pricing is not enough, you're not going to be able to get a ride because too many people are going to want it, and there won't be enough cars. Surge pricing in the right spot, it draws enough supply in, and fends off enough customers, and the market clears. So it's the lowest cost reliable ride, and that's why we knew it was a winner, even when all of the competition, and the world generally, was hating on this idea. Any time we were doing surge pricing and our competitor wasn't, we knew we were gaining market share because somebody could just come to us to get a ride when in the other system they couldn't.
Jason Calacanis: So you're proving reliability. You're proving--
Travis Kalanick: It's the lowest cost reliable ride.
Jason Calacanis: That's it.
Travis Kalanick: Yeah.
Jason Calacanis: Take me to--
Travis Kalanick: Which, real quick, led to a massive, super interesting logistics crossed with economics problem, where at the peak--I don't know what it is at Uber today, but it was like 100, 150 PhDs working on this problem that we just described.
Jason Calacanis: Inside the company?
Travis Kalanick: Yeah. Which is like, How do you find that lowest cost reliable ride is a very, very difficult problem--in a live logistics system like this.
Jason Calacanis: Let's talk about regulators in relation to people being independent contractors. This is when I realized the press was acting without good faith, data, or logic. And as a former journalist, it was kind of eye opening to me to be on the other side of the table and watching this happen because we knew full well, based on driver data, that they loved their jobs at Uber. Because they had free will, and they could go and do any other job they wanted.
Travis Kalanick: And let's be clear: the average Uber driver, at the end of my tenure, was eight hours a week. This was clearly a side gig.
Jason Calacanis: It was a side hustle. And they wanted the flexibility over everything else.
Travis Kalanick: Work when I want, don't work when I want.
Jason Calacanis: And then these union politicians and everything said No. And the people who own the medallions. And this is a cabal of really bad actors who were saying No, they have to work a shift. And they have to go work for somebody who owns a medallion, who gets 50, 60, 70% of the economics. And they portrayed you as the bad guy in all this. And this was the exact opposite of the truth.
Travis Kalanick: So, yeah, I mean, it was a union problem--which is, it's very difficult to organize people who, in this classic area, which is very union organized, called drivers, it's very difficult to organize them when they choose when they want to work. Their office is their own--it's their own. Like nobody controls it. Like there's just no control--other than the control given to the individual. And so it was very disruptive to the union and their own business model. And so they had to cut it off at the knees. And so that became a mix of a political discourse and a media push crossed with regulatory lobbying and trying to make political apparatuses do what's necessary to constrain it.
Jason Calacanis: And you took the approach: We will fight. There are wartime CEOs. There are peacetime CEOs. They put you in the category, with Elon, of wartime CEOs, who it does not matter how many battles you must battle concurrently, We're going to fight because we're on the right side of history. But this became acute. The number of battles that you had to fight, the number of fronts, increased. Take us to the darkest peak of it, because every time I talked to you, I felt fine about it, but other investors, other people, felt like, Hey, this is too many battles to wage at once. Talk to me about you personally fighting all those battles. My perception of you was, the more battles emerged, the more you realized you were doing the right thing. It filled your bucket, it powered you, it gave energy to you to know we were on the right side.
Travis Kalanick: So, yeah, sort of in jest I would say to folks, I'd be like--I'm not sure how it became so controversial that one citizen giving another citizen a ride across town became such a thing. I'm not sure how that happened, but it did. The darkest moment--I mean, the thing is, you'd keep--it was almost like we were always pushing into that area. So if something became easy, then we'd push elsewhere until that became hard. So it was constant--it was like--I make the analogy to teams that we have in different places then and now--like a world class marathoner. I've never seen a world class marathoner on Mile 19 look like he's just honky dory. And if he was, he's about to lose. So you push right to that edge of what's possible, and if that starts to get easy, you push further. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean you push in exactly that--along that axis. It could be in a totally different area. But as long as the problems you're solving are greater than the problems you're creating, then you're fine. When the problems you're creating start to--when the derivative of problems you're creating is greater than the derivative of the problems you're solving, then you have a real problem. And that's when you have to start pulling back, get back to above water, and then go back into it. But when I talk about creating problems, I think of it like--think of it as like a math professor. A math professor without a really cool, interesting problem to solve is a sad math professor. And that's how we would think about it. We were always pushing to the point where we're sweating, and it's like, Not sure. And there could be late nights, there could be all nighters, it could be that thing. But because we were doing the right thing, because we had great people in the field who believed, then we could push all the way to that edge. And they could be world class marathoners too.
Jason Calacanis: Only two entrepreneurs I know have had the audacity to--not build their products in China; everybody does that, that's pretty easy--but to actually operate a business in China. You and Elon decided, We're going to try to compete--him with selling cars inside of China--pretty crazy. And even crazier, you--
Travis Kalanick: Self-driving cars in China. Wow. Okay, let's go.
Jason Calacanis: Let's go. BYD--you're up against some serious competition, and it's not exactly a fair game, maybe. Or there might be complications to that game. We had a long conversation about China, and I said to you, Wow, we're burning a lot of money there, what do you--what's the strategy here? Let me just hear it from you. And you said, We're going for gold, but--
Travis Kalanick: Yeah. There's a lot of fun there. I mean, look, the thing about doing business in China is it forces you to rethink everything. Everything. Like if you go into China thinking you got it, you're gonna get your ass handed to you. You have to start first principles, bottoms up. Let's see, where could I go with this? Look, we--
Jason Calacanis: Well, tell everybody the strategy, Hey, we're going for gold, but there's silver, and how you looked at the world in that regard.
Travis Kalanick: Yeah, yeah. So I'll get there. So a lot of times when you go and enter China, they're basically--somebody's going, You got to have a partner. If you just go and you do your first exploration trip, they're gonna be like, You got to get a partner, they're like, 50-50, blah, blah, blah, and I'm like, Why? Nobody could tell me why. So then we just went on our own. We just started building something. And we never saw--on the ground, we never saw bias. We were treated fairly on the ground. But, at some point, what I'd say is, the China war went global. And what I mean by that is, the Chinese government, I think it was SAFE--there's some--I think they were called SAFE, it was like the sovereign wealth of China, CIC--there's a few things like that. They started investing hundreds of millions and billions of dollars in all of our competitors--globally--to drain us of money so that it was harder to compete in China. They made Apple--and I'd love to have this discussion with Tim at some point--we had some interesting words for each other at this point--but they made Apple invest a billion dollars in Didi. And Apple doesn't invest anything in anybody. What was he protecting there? There's something going on. So--whole, really amazing story there. Holy cow. Anyways, the Chinese war went global. And so that's when we had to go from going for the gold to making sure we got the silver. And that's when we started negotiating with Didi to basically say we had 20% of the overall entity, of the merged entity. But in order to do that in China, that's when we actually had to push our spend super hard, because they had to be scared. So I think at the peak, right as we were negotiating the term sheet, we pushed--we were burning $75 million a week.
Jason Calacanis: It's a big number.
Travis Kalanick: Yeah, that was that. Yeah. But we knew we had the deal. But we only have the deal if they're scared.
Jason Calacanis: This is a poker hand.
Travis Kalanick: So our market share was skyrocketing as we did this. They're pissed and tripping--and then Emil, who's negotiating the deal, is like, just chain smoking. But that's how you get a deal done in China.
Jason Calacanis: Right. And that turned out to be--[audience claps]--there it is. That's your wartime CEO right there. That deal--we had invested millions in China, billions in China, at that point--
Travis Kalanick: I think we invested--yeah, we probably were around a billion, a billion and a half.
Jason Calacanis: And the Didi stake at the time, when this deal got done, was worth 8, 9, 10-- billion.
Travis Kalanick: Yeah, something like that. So we turned a bill and a half into eight or nine. I can't remember the exact amount, but it was something like that. In like two years.
Jason Calacanis: Yeah. Let's talk about when you got ousted. This was heartbreaking, crushing, brutal. You fought hard to remain in the seat. I got out there and did what I could on the press front to try to defend you and and try to keep you in the seat. But we failed. And it was brutal. And it was particularly hard on you, because you put your soul into this company.
Travis Kalanick: Yeah. Well look, I think there's a little bit more. I mean, if an investor is running a political oppo campaign against you for six months, generating a crisis every week for six months straight, it's going to wear you down. And then my... this one's hard...
Jason Calacanis: Your mom passed. I know. [Audience claps.] I was there with you.
Travis Kalanick: No, no, it's all good. But that's when they went in for the kill. That I just couldn't hang. Bottom line, I just couldn't hang. [Audience claps].
Jason Calacanis: And--yeah. It was it was dark. It was dark.
Travis Kalanick: Yeah. So--but look, a lot of people go, Hey, are you pissed off? And I say, First, I loved every minute. I loved every minute. But when you fall in love again, you don't think about the ex very much.
Jason Calacanis: Right. Cloud kitchen's the ex. You moved on. And you put all that in there--and I just want to say, I am proud of everything you did. And watching you do it, and getting to be there, and witness it--I learned so much from you. The community learned so much from you. And I think we all owe the playbook--I can tell you the impact you had on the next generation, because--I never talk about Uber--I brought it up once or twice--
Travis Kalanick: You never talk about--haha.
Jason Calacanis: I never talk about it. I try to keep it low key--but I brought it up once or twice, and it was good for my deal flow. And I got to see [audience laughs]--I got to see--
Travis Kalanick: I'm so honored to be here.
Jason Calacanis: I'm so honored to be here too! But I got to see that--
Travis Kalanick: Famous Uber investor.
Jason Calacanis: And... I mean this sincerely. The number of entrepreneurs who came to me, who said, I started this company because I watched Travis. I watched what he did. I want to be Travis. You inspired that generation, along with Elon, to say, I want to operate in the real world. I want to build something that has an impact. And I am willing to fight, and have that entrepreneurial spirit--which I'm going to be honest--there's a large amount of entrepreneurs who don't have the fight in them, they don't have the dog in them. You got the dog in you. You got the fight in you. And that's so rare. And that's why you're so successful. It's because you're willing to fight the fight.
Travis Kalanick: Yeah. [Audience claps]. Look, we just saw the Olympics. And I know I made that marathon analogy before, but every one of those gold medalists--they got the dog in them. There's no way--no other way. We're just playing a different sport. And I think that some of the interesting parts about this sport is that it's not just an individual thing. It's a massive team--and there's stakeholders in cities and citizens and all of that. It's just fun. A lot of folks go, Look, you did the Uber thing, why are you doing it again?
Jason Calacanis: I mean, you cashed in a lot of chips. You could be just chilling.
Travis Kalanick: I'm like, Look, Serena keeps getting on the court. She's totally badass. Why's she doing it? Or take your favorite star of anything.
Jason Calacanis: Yeah, LeBron’s in his--what, he's 40 now? And he's looks great out there.
Travis Kalanick: So it's because they have a love of the game. And it's not just Showtime that day. It's everything behind the scenes. It's working with people--especially in this sport. Again, individual stuff is a little different. Like you gotta--I like the magic of working with magical people. Doing it as a crew is where all the good stuff happens.
Jason Calacanis: And they all keep coming back. I've seen a lot of the folks who came for a second tour of duty with you--that speaks volumes. As we end here, Dara has done--I got to know him--try to support the team over there for the legacy. And he's done a decent job, solid job--
Travis Kalanick: Profitable.
Jason Calacanis: What's that?
Travis Kalanick: Let's go. They went from my $75mn a week to profitable.
Jason Calacanis: I like it.
Travis Kalanick: Let's go. Let's go.
Jason Calacanis: Well, I mean, it is great for the legacy. We always knew it was easily to make it profitable. People were saying, Oh, it can never be profitable--and you and I would talk and be like, raise the price of dollar, profitable. Like, it's not difficult.
Travis Kalanick: Just--look. There's an art to that too. It's all good. But yeah, I think--Uber's gotten to a great place. The profitability is there. That's means it's going to be around. Now, we--they've got to figure out the autonomous thing--that's, I think, that's the next big challenge to to go after.
Jason Calacanis: Well, let me just put it out there. He's going to do his tour--and his tour is going to end. Would you consider doing what Steve Jobs did, and coming back and merging Cloud Kitchens with Uber? Would you consider it--if the opportunity was there? Or can you not go home?
Travis Kalanick: So you're saying there's a chance?
Jason Calacanis: Can you go home? I mean, if he--this would be the Return of the King. This would be my dream--if you came back. I know it's not your dream, but it's mine haha. Can you--if Cloud Kitchens became part of Uber, it would be a trillion dollar company with you back in that seat--would you take the seat again if it was offered? Would you consider it? [Audience laughs].
Travis Kalanick: Well I definitely know who my Head of Comms would be.
Jason Calacanis: On that note, Travis Kalanick. My man. I love you. Great guy.
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Wrap-up
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