We're competing for the next industrial revolution. People said, "Are you pissed off about Uber? Does that grind you?" When you fall in love again, you don't think about the X very much. We had a massive high-fidelity playbook on how to not get attention for anything we did. A lot of the things that would have happened with Uber over time are things we're doing now. It's basically multiple trillion dollar industries that are going to get automated. We talk about digital AI and what it does to the enterprise, but these industries on their own are big.
Do you think you were successful because of what you did versus in spite of what you did?
If you don't fight for the best idea, then what idea are you fighting for? You're fighting for the mediocre idea. An idea that's going to make you less good than if you went for the best idea.
The real question is when are you guys going to buy Uber?
Um, okay. So, first of all, I don't even know how I ended up here. How did I end up here? How did I get here? Why? What? I have way better friends. No, you're not feeling it. Okay, you're not feeling it. I thought it was really, you know, I have really great friends out there that weren't invited this evening, but they're good friends. Well, that's true. Okay. So, I think a lot of folks know that sort of my whole thing and you hear me talk about all the time digitizing the physical world, bits to atoms, this kind of thing. Um, you know, some people like, oh yeah, physical AI, of course he's going to say that. That makes sense. We've been doing this for a long time. Okay, this is a continuation of a lot of the awesome things we did back in the Uber day. So, I'm going to show you a video from 10 years ago.
Consider the bit, the building block of the digital world. It was invented just 70 years ago. Yet in its short life, it has changed the way we communicate, do business, and live almost every aspect of our lives. For Uber, the bit represents our technology. It's complex, precise, and advanced. But when it's expressed, it is effortless, and refined. And if you think the bit is a big deal, consider the atom. Born 13.8 billion years ago. The atom is responsible for everything from the BLT to moms everywhere to New York City. And for us, the atom signifies our rapidly improving cities, the goods we move from place to place, and most importantly, the people we serve. Until a few short years ago, atoms and bits existed in entirely different worlds. But then something happened at Uber. We asked, "What if we brought these two worlds together? What would that look like?" It looks like this. We are able to create safe, low-cost transportation options like Uber Pool and Uber X. We are able to create efficient and more reliable ways of getting people the things they need. We are able to deliver fresh-cooked meals from the most popular iconic restaurants within minutes and someday safe efficient movement of people and things at a giant scale. Most of us don't think about bits or atoms much if ever. We think about how to get from here to there, the people in our lives, the millions of tiny dramas that play out across the world each day. The human stuff. Uber ultimately succeeds because we think about the human stuff first. But the way we do it, that's our secret. We leave no bit or atom unturned to create industries that serve people and not the other way around.
So we I talk about digitizing the physical world all the time. I've been doing it for 10 freaking years. I think I'm making a lot of the folks that are at Uber, they're like, "We're tired of it. Please stop talking about bits and atoms is crazy. I don't even understand what you're talking about." Look, we know what bits are. Bits, the bits world is a computer. And those of us who were engineers, computer science, etc., and some of us who weren't, we know what that is. The three core computing resources, CPU manipulates the bits, storage stores bits, network moves bits from point A to point B. But if you're digitizing the physical world, you're treating atoms like bits. And you're like, well, I know that CPU manipulates the bits. What manipulates atoms? That's manufacturing or digitized 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 or logistics. So, we didn't exactly think of it, we were close, but we didn't exactly think of it this way at the time. But Uber was network for the physical world, digitized transportation, but it's not totally digitized like you see the Waymos out there. Okay, now we're getting there. Of course, I think people are still driving them from the Philippines or something like this. But it's going digital. But the thing is and this is something that's interesting for entrepreneurs generally especially in the physical world digitized manufacturing and digitized real estate still has a long way to go. Huge amount of innovation left to go.
And so we have advanced. We've been working really hard. A lot of folks think I'm back but like I'm like dude I've been working my ass off the whole time. I just haven't been talking about it. Um, what if what if you're making atoms-based computers, digitized manufacturing, real estate and network for the physical world or sorry, CPU, storage and network for the physical world. What if you're just the OEM that makes food computers, mining computers or take your industry and put computer behind it? What if you're doing sort of this you're making industrial atoms-based computers? That's kind of how we think about what we do. And you know, we look around us and you're like the physical world, you're like, you look, OpenAI is doing really well. Anthropic was doing pretty well. Um, but look around you. Everything we see, whether it's this room or any room or anywhere you go, everything you see was either grown or mined, manufactured and moved. Everything. And so we look at what we do as industrial AI. And I sort of have a nice little definition there. Systems of software, sensors, robotics, and AI used to automate operations of entire industrial sectors. Okay, that's what we do. I don't know if anybody else does it. I mean, there are people doing it that they don't call it this. We're one of the main guys doing this. Okay, so we're going to go through a couple of our atoms-based computers.
So, the first one's a food computer, Adam's Food, infrastructure for better food. The real question is, can you make a meal that's prepared and delivered to you so efficient that it approaches the cost of going to the grocery store? You're like, okay, well, that's a pretty good question. If you can do it, it's awesome, but what would it take? Well, it means that your manufacturing has to be automated. So, we have robotics that basically do the production of food. Let's call that between six and eight dollars per meal. Okay. Um, there's lots of cool things we're going to do in the future here. Um, you also need to be able to move the food whether it be inside of a facility where it's being made or actually robotic couriers, what I like to call autonomous burritos. You roboticize production. You roboticize the logistics and transportation of food, but you still need a space to do it. This goes back to that sort of atoms-based computer, right? You still need real estate, industrial real estate where that robotic production happens and where the robotic logistics occurs. That's our food computer.
Adam's Mining. Uh, we have a really cool mission. I've gotten super geeked out on mining. I love it. Like I'm loving it more every day. More productive mines to power Earth's industries. What makes super intelligence? Well, it's chips and it's energy. We know that. Where do the chips come from? Chips come from the ground. Where's the energy come from? And a lot of people are like, "Oh, it comes from the sun." Yeah, it comes from the sun. But how are you capturing it from the sun? From stuff made from the ground, right? So being in the ground at this sort of almost like this primitive of physical AI is like a super interesting place. And when you're automating that thing, it's super interesting. So when we talk about mining, we're talking about, you know, we go to gold mine CEOs and we're like, would you like 20% more gold per year? We haven't heard no. Uh, but they say prove it. And that's kind of the fun part. Um, but it means your opex is lower and it means by the way these mines are pretty damn unsafe. And so making these places way safer is also part of the purpose of what we're doing. And so you go okay well when I talk about mining I like to talk about digitized storage. What is digitized storage and mining? It's called land, right? This is storage for the mining computer. And this is network, right? Cuz you're moving the rocks. This is network. This is me by one of those vehicles. Check that out. Okay. I'm standing next to a TCP packet. There's like eight people understood what I just said. But look at that thing. So fully loaded. That's probably like 2 million pounds. All right.
And this is an autonomous mining machine operating on our stuff. There are probably about three drones that were injured in the filming of this video. But CPU is really interesting in mining too, right? Like how do you process the material to make it the metal and mineral that we need to do all the things that we do to push civilization forward, progress forward. There's lots of really cool things to automate here. You guys ever see these things? This is called flotation. You see these when you're flying over? Most people don't know what this is, but this is about distilling material down to the actual metal or mineral that you're trying to go for. This is a lithium plant, by the way. Uh, and then of course all that stuff has to be orchestrated. So you need software almost like an operating system for that computer that's sort of moving things around and making sure it's doing exactly what needs to happen.
And then we have transport, which I call wheelbase for robots. It's not exactly a computer. It's part of a computer. If you're not doing humanoids, right, humanoids are like low scale, do low-scale tasks in human environments. If you're doing high-scale tasks, industrial scale tasks, you are going to make specialized machines that move and act in the physical world. The key part is move. If they're moving, they got to have wheels. If they have wheels, you got to make the autonomy for those machines, those specialized robotics which are transforming that industry. Um, and if you depend on only one or two companies that exist, you're not going very far. Um, so autonomy is sort of like a critical part or critical platform you have to first make for yourself. Um, but there's lots of other industries that you can make it for, right? So, we know Phelps is the gold medals guy, but I like to say that transport is full of silver medals, right? A lot of people think about ride sharing as a gold medal. What about food delivery? What about parcel delivery? What about personal autonomy? What about trucking, freight? What about off-road autonomy? Like with mining? There's many multi-hundred billion dollar industries that are going to be powered by these specialized robotics and that are made for industry. These computers made for industry. And here's sort of like a breakdown of some really interesting just several of the silver medals that are out there. And I say, look, if you make autonomy and you make it really fast, faster than Waymo's making it, let's just say, there's a dark horse angle. Like I don't know if you guys are like Kentucky Derby guys or not, but like there is a dark horse angle here, which is pretty interesting, but the silver medals alone are freaking insane.
And so I call what we build progress machines. And what does that mean? It's like well at the company sort of our culture is about discovering valuable unknown truths because if you are good at finding valuable unknown truths then it means you're going to know a lot of things other people don't know. And if you know a lot of things that other people don't know it means you can do a lot of things that other people can't do. And the better you are at those valuable unknown truths, the more things you're going to be able to do that other people can't do, which means you're bringing change faster and faster, like in a shorter amount of time. That's called progress. That progress is everything that's powered civilization since the beginning, including now. But there's what I call the final boss. The final boss for progress. It's like the boss you have to go up against and every one of the entrepreneurs in this room knows it. It's called resistance to change. It's natural because like you know a lot of times change is bad. Um, and so you have to deliver an overwhelming amount of progress to make your change happen. And so I like to make analogies to the second industrial revolution.
We're almost done guys. There's like we don't fully I think a lot of folks here may not be totally schooled on what happened 100 years ago, 150 years ago, but there's a lot of analogies for what happened then to what's happening now. And by the way, we all think, "Oh, founder mode. Let's go. Founder mode, guys." 150 years ago, they did founder mode for real. This is a picture, an illustration. You don't see that guy on the top has a gun. He's about to shoot Henry Frick. Henry Frick was a partner of Carnegie. They revolutionized steel. Like you talk about everything being mined and all the buildings and things that we see around us, all the infrastructure, etc. Started with Carnegie and Frick. Um, an anarchist came into his office and shot him twice and stabbed him several times. Uh, he didn't die. While the bullets were getting pulled out, the dudes kept working. Founder mode. All right. And by the way, there's other interesting things that happened back then. Super interesting stuff. Okay. If those of you who know about like Westinghouse and Thomas Edison, Edison was all about direct current. Westinghouse was all about alternating current. We kind of know what won. Like, yes, I have a flashlight with direct current, but basically AC won because it could go long distances. Edison was on the wrong side of this equation big time, but he wasn't going down without a fight. So, he was the ultra OG of FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt. He was the ultra OG. You know what he did? He did public displays of electrocution of animals to show that AC electricity was unsafe. He was the OG. Now, we see this in the current world.
Okay, the analogies they play. I'm just saying. Okay, that might go online. This was a Homestead protest. Okay. Homestead protest. This is a Carnegie Frick thing. Actually led to him getting shot actually. And it was a strike, sort of Homestead strike, and it was basically a unionization thing and they weren't willing to go union and there was obviously a scuffle of sorts. And it's I mean it was the first big huge union situation for how we think about it today. Probably the archetype for it. And we're starting to see those things, right? So like of course go back to 2014 Uber, well there was a strike across all of Europe in all the major European cities. They lit cars on fire. They did crazy things to stop that kind of progress. This is the final boss, the resistance to change. And like you know they say history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. Okay. And not everybody can read it. Okay. So the Uber and Lyft drivers are now protesting at the Waymo office. Okay. What's this? Okay, fair enough. See, that happens. Okay. But we're bringing progress forward. There will be resistance. It is going to be a thing.
And there are a ton of entrepreneurs, super badass entrepreneurs in this room. Like we have to be steely. We have to be hardcore. Um, like the guys on the invite that I sent, right? Uh, we've got Ford, we've got Carnegie, we've got JP Morgan. We got all the guys. Westinghouse on the right. Uh, we have to look to We always think that we did things first, but actually there were dudes that did it harder, better than us for sure. Always. They walked to school uphill in the snow both ways. I promise. All right. And they had those things, right? They had the stuff, right? And it's like what you see in the press about what that stuff is isn't always what the stuff really is. Look at that empathy. But how do you lead 20,000 people and get them oriented towards a beautiful mission? And those 20,000 people are great minds, optimistic, good people. How do you do that? You can't do that by being a bad person. But you have to be hardcore. I don't know if you have to be as hardcore as Frick, but you got to bring it. Um, and there's a lot of things we got to hold and we got like the entrepreneurs, we got to do this. And by the way, the folks that support us or the executives that are making magic happen too. Like you got to be all these things.
And so at the company we have this thing called the champion's heart. 23 points for the golden golfers in their championship. So they're really relying on getting a lot this weekend. So, we have this thing called champion's heart, which is um, you know, in life, you get knocked down like what just happened to her. Uh, but if you put everything you got on the field and when you get knocked down, you keep getting back up, it's very difficult to fail, right? Uh, you turn the volume back up.
Wow. Well, she's got fun. This is a gutsy effort by Donavan. Cancel. She's moving it through. Donavan coming down this track to the outside. Donavan coming on strong.
And this is just a thing we believe at our company and I think it's a thing that most of the successful entrepreneurs believe in. Um, and so, you know, look, a lot of folks they say, "Hey, Travis is back." Or, you know, I think it might have even been on your invite, but I've actually been working for eight years. I just haven't been talking about it. Um, and so it is good to be back in this way because I was kind of in a cave for a while. Um, and I want to thank everybody for being here. And I think Eric, Ben, and I are going to have a nice conversation. And again, thank you so much.
So, the reason why people loved our podcast that we did, the first one that we did together, is because we just got right into it. Right into the good stuff. So, we're going to do that here and then we're going to open it up for Q&A.
Eric's good at this and it stresses me out. All right. What do you got, Eric?
So, Travis, why didn't you buy Lyft and do you regret it? What would you do if you could go back in time?
Um, I think this will surprise a lot of people, but Lyft's culture was very different than ours. Uh, maybe it started with the purple, the pink mustache. Um, but I think it's interesting, right, when it comes to entrepreneurs that are in that moment where you could acquire something. By the way, I got a lot of shit for this for a long time. So yeah, the culture didn't mix. Yeah. Yeah. The culture didn't mix. And um, when you meet with somebody and you're going to acquire them and there's so much goodness that could come from it, by the way, we're in some crazy war probably spending a billion dollars a year on it or some insane amount of money. Um, you want it to work.
So, you wouldn't do anything different.
I wouldn't do anything different. And it's easy to say now, but I got a lot of shit for that for a long time. But it was basically I would sit across the table from the guys and I just didn't it was just clear that we were very culturally different and you couldn't it get harder and harder to make that happen.
So I by the way I agree with that. Yeah. I think it I mean you'd have to do the counterfactual if Travis was still running Uber. Uh, because what would that look like? Travis is still running Uber today. Well, I think it would have been the original culture and the culture they went to which was a reaction to the resistance just ended up being a much more milquetoast culture than the original. Uber culture was a special, very pronounced culture. Uh, my favorite thing in that culture doc was meritocracy slash toe stepping or toe stomping. I can't remember. I always thought of it as stomping but meritocracy and toe stepping. Toe stepping. Yeah. Which is kind of like fuck your feelings, you know? Like we're here to build. We're going to do it. Like we're going to push as hard as we can. And like yeah, you may get your toes stepped on, but like you got to keep going. You got to keep bringing it. And that to me that was the part that got diluted when Travis went out and it was in some ways it was the core part. It was a very essential element to at least what I saw kind of from the side in it.
Yeah. We've rebranded it the current company at Adam's. We call it the best idea wins. But you know, but the toe stepping is important because you've got to there's so many people that are not willing to fight for the best idea because they're going to upset somebody else. And if you don't fight for the best idea, then what idea are you fighting for? You're fighting for the mediocre idea, the politically expedient idea, an idea that's going to make you less good than if you went for the best idea.
And so having everybody oriented towards that is a cultural vibe that helps you win.
Yeah. When Andy Grove was at Intel, he used to call that constructive confrontation. Which is the only way to get better. You have to get tested.
There's a Polymarket on when Travis is going to come back at Uber or when they're going to ask Travis to come back at Uber. But the real question is when are you guys going to buy Uber?
I think we still have a lot to earn. It's a fun um so much of what I'm doing and you know people go what would you be doing if and I can't say all the things that I would be doing at Uber I'm doing now. Uh, there's a lot of things I'm not, but it is a continuation of the things and a lot of the things that would have happened with Uber over time are things we're doing now. And if those things play out and you take over like look, I outlined what industrial AI is and where it's going over time, it's basically multiple like hundred billion or trillion dollar industries that are going to get automated. We talk about digital AI and what it does to the enterprise, but these industries on their own are big. Um, and so this is a new industrial age that basically is sort of coming. I compare it to the second industrial revolution. So if we're correct and we execute well, then it's a thing because you're like, is food going to get automated? Is the production of food going to get automated? And is the delivery of food going to get automated? I think we'd all say yes. And if that's the case, then
There will be a service that prepares and delivers that food cheaper than going to the grocery store. And if that happens, food will be completely revolutionized. Will mining get automated? And if it does, not just the movement of the materials, but every part of mining. Then what is a mining company? It just owns real estate. It will be completely revolutionized, a multi-trillion dollar market. And there's many of these. Well, we got to now, we got to deliver.
Talk about how you're different as a founder building at Adams than you were building Uber, in terms of what have you changed? What have you kept the same when you reflect back? What do you think you were successful because of what you did versus in spite of what you did?
Look, some of how I did Uber is very related to what I did before Uber, and what I did before Uber was I failed. I mean, my company barely got acquired. I did the first four years without a salary. I had socks that said blood, sweat, and ramen. You know, it was stuff like that. And when you're that on the line and you're on welfare and you've got to make ends meet, and then you go into something like Uber, which is like ultra product market fit times a thousand, but you still think you're poor and you can't go to the grocery store next week, you get too close to the line. Like, I would go right up against the line. Some people might have guessed that, but I'd go right up against the line. And the only way you knew that I didn't get chalk on my shoe was you'd get an electromagnetic scanning microscope and you would zoom in, reverse angle, and you'd be like, 'Okay, he's fine.' But if you get big and you roll that way, you get to a place where you're bringing a lot of change really fast and you haven't brought trust along for the ride. So I would say today I'm a few inches off that line. You don't need to do the slow motion replay to know that I did the right thing. I'd stand by every decision I made at Uber, but you don't need to guess anymore. It's like super clean. You don't have to be that close. The other thing that's interesting, and I think sometimes the young entrepreneurs that are just coming up right now, they don't totally get it, is that when you get into your third and fourth, I don't know, this may be even my fifth at this point company, you get freaking really good at doing stuff. And so things that used to take me a day or three days, a lot of stress, anxiety, take me like 45 minutes. And that's a beautiful thing. There are things you don't get, like I'm so used to adversity at this point that it's kind of normal. So I don't get as pissed off. But being pissed off makes you good as an entrepreneur. So I got to make sure I'm still fired up. Come on.
That's that pissed off energy.
You [__] with me, I'm going to kick your ass. You know that it's easier when you're 25, I think. I don't know. I'm just not... You get too used to adversity and that's kind of a problem. But yeah, I'd say those are some of the fun changes.
What's an example of something that used to take a long time, but is now just so much easier?
Look, I wrote a vision note. When we rolled out Adams, it was a few months ago. You know, look, I'm biased obviously, but it was, I think, a very well-written vision note. 10 years ago, 15 years ago, that would have taken me, I don't know, hundreds of hours. And it just flowed. Like, okay, I can't say I wasn't thinking about it a lot, but when I was doing the writing, it actually just flowed and just happened. I'm like, holy [__], it just happened. Holy cow. Like, the one I just did for this funding, like, okay, I procrastinated, but you know, that's a thing. But once I did the writing, I'm like, 'Oh, dude, we got it.' It took like 45 minutes. I'm like, 'This is amazing.' And that's related to presentation, communication, strategy, this kind of thing. Unsure at which, which is pretty awesome.
Ben, how have you seen Travis evolve since you first got to know him, and comment more broadly? We have a lot of repeat entrepreneurs in the room in terms of when like Travis you have a massive success that also has some mistakes along the way. You know, what lessons do you learn from the next time versus what do you make sure to keep and continue because that's what got you there?
Well, I thought that was actually a really good way to characterize it, which was, you know, he thought he was in survival mode when he had 20,000 people working for him. And that idea is dangerous. When you have such a big organization, it's dangerous on two levels. One, it's dangerous because you're not, as he said, bringing enough people along with you, but it's also dangerous in that you've got all these people working for you. And their interpretation of that idea could be a lot. You know, you kind of have to stay way on this side of the line so the guy, you know, eight levels down doesn't do something stupid. And so that, you know, that's a big change, I would say. But like he was always great. Always. I mean that's why it was so tragic that we didn't invest in Uber. But yeah, and I think look when you do get, I think everything comes easier. It was what's the prince line? People say nothing comes too easy but when you got it nothing comes too hard. That's where he got to.
The one thing I add to it though, and again I feel like I don't want to prescribe to folks, like a lot of folks here already know this, but it's like when it gets easy it's time to push hard. I always used to say like if something, if it's getting easy, it's about to get really [__] hard and you don't want it to be that way. You want to make it hard versus hard make it hard on you, if that makes sense. And I've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs over the years where they're like, 'Oh man, we're just cranking. We're on easy street right now.' And I'm like, 'Dude, you are about to get your ass whooped and you don't even know it.' Now I know that too because of course I've experienced it myself. So yeah.
Yeah. And that's a very good insight.
I notice that all the time when I talk to entrepreneurs when they start going, 'Oh yeah, it's easy. It's going so well. We don't have competition. You know, I just hired this guy. He had an offer from Anthropic for $5 billion, but he took my $400,000 a year job. Blah blah blah blah blah.' I'm like, 'Bro, check yourself for wounds because I assure you you're bleeding.' You know, like you're in trouble.
For sure. But there's times when it's actually easy. That's a guy pretending. So I call that the fake it till you make it, which he's lying to himself plus others. But there's actual times when it's easy, but it's because you're not continuing to push. So it's one thing when you're just not winning, but you're pretending like you are. And there's another thing when you're winning but you're taking it easy and you're about to start losing.
Last question then I'll open up to a couple Q&A. So Ben, oh Travis, when your first external round at Uber, the venture round I believe was at 4 million post or something like that?
It's 4 million pre. You're talking about first round. Yeah.
Our first round at Uber was 4 million pre. This one is, you know, several orders of magnitude bigger.
Ben, I believe this is one of, if not our biggest check, biggest check you've ever written.
