A lot of stuff at that time was very negative. And we basically said, 'Look, let's just get to work. Let's not worry about what the New York Times writes tomorrow when we decide what we're going to do today. Let's just build.' And so we went full stealth. At some point we had, I don't know, 4,000 employees and nobody could put the name of the company on LinkedIn.
Hello and welcome to Spears coverage from FII Priority Rome. I'm Edwin Smith and I'm delighted to say that I'm joined now by Travis Kalanick, former CEO of Uber and now CEO of Atom. He's here to tell us a little bit about his business and what he's been working on since he left Uber. Travis, welcome.
Please give us a little bit of the sort of topline summary of what the company that you're heading now is.
Yeah. Look, our mission is physical automation to transform industry. And that's a sort of a very pithy way of saying robotics and AI oriented towards specific industries to really change them, really transform them. Right now we're doing food, mining, and transport and have our hands full.
And why was this the path that you chose having left Uber? Why did you direct your energy here?
Look, so we've been working on the food category for eight years and the idea is can you get a meal that's prepared and delivered to you so efficient it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store. If you can do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car, you turn this thing that everybody used to do for themselves into a thing that is a cost and convenience that now a service can do for you. At Uber, we created Uber Eats. But the infrastructure underneath wasn't efficient. For rides, all you needed to do was get a rider app and a driver app. The roads were built. The cars were already there and they were highly unutilized. In food, the restaurants are highly utilized. There's a little extra space, a little extra capacity, but in many ways, restaurants are not the infrastructure for e-commerce. You need industrial e-commerce, you need robotic production of food, and you need robotic couriers. If you can do those three things, the cost of that meal that's prepared and delivered starts to get down. So we've been working on that for a while. Once I got into robotic couriers, I like to call them autonomous burritos. Then I was like, okay, I'm back in autonomy. We did it back at Uber, getting back into autonomy now, and I had to get my team back together. One of those guys that I ran, that was a lead on our autonomy project at Uber back in the mid 2010s, was a guy named Anthony Levandowski. Okay.
He was doing an autonomous mining startup?
Sure. I was the largest investor in it. And I basically acquired his company.
What was the name of that business?
It was called Pronto.
Okay. And that's now part of your overarching group. So we're doing autonomous mining in a bunch of different countries around the world. It's super fascinating and a really interesting space. I think a place that people are going to know a lot more about over time. Our mission there is more productive minds to power Earth's industries. When you automate a mine, that mine becomes more productive.
So if it's a gold mine, it means they're getting 20% more gold per year. The same if it's lithium or phosphates or aggregates.
Clear opportunity in rare earths and that sort of thing. Is that where you're specifically targeting it or are you agnostic as to the metal or the mineral you're looking for?
Well, I mean we're more agnostic. There are some differences with the minerals, but the core high intensity labor is in the haulage, in the moving of the material.
You start there and you sort of work your way out from there.
Sure. Sure. And you're obviously here talking about the company today which is fantastic. I think there was a sort of event in San Francisco fairly recently where you were speaking about it, but until this point it's been sort of under the radar. Was it deliberately kept quiet and if so what was the reason for that?
Yeah, I mean look, you have to understand when I left Uber in 2017, what was happening was the business was becoming politics, but nobody really knew it. It was like if anybody took their favorite politician and went online to see what people are saying, it's a lot of very terrible things and we're used to that. But what happened is there was a transition where that was now being coined a business, and us as business people, innovators, were like we didn't know, it didn't make sense, and we didn't yet realize that a lot of what we see in the mainstream media is just not true. So a lot of stuff at that time was very negative. And we basically said, 'Look, let's just get to work. Let's not worry about what the New York Times writes tomorrow when we decide what we're going to do today. Let's just build.' And so we went full stealth. At some point we had, I don't know, 4,000 employees and nobody could put the name of the company on LinkedIn. So it was just stealth.
