Ben Horowitz and Travis Kalanick on Building Again

**Travis Kalanick** (0:00)
Hey, Travis is back. But I've actually been working for eight years, I just haven't been talking about it. 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.

**Erik Torenberg** (0:40)
You think you were successful because of what you did versus in spite of what you did?

**Travis Kalanick** (0:44)
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.

**Erik Torenberg** (0:53)
The real question is what are you guys going to buy over?

**Sonal Chokshi** (0:57)
After nearly eight years building largely out of public view, Travis Kalanick is finally ready to talk about what comes next.
In this fireside conversation from Adam's Launch Event, Ben Horowitz and I sit down with Travis to discuss why he stayed quiet for so long, how his thinking has evolved since Uber, and why he believes industrial AI will define the next era of technology. Along the way, we revisit the biggest decisions of Uber, founder culture, and what it takes to build transformational companies twice.

**Erik Torenberg** (1:26)
So the reason why people loved our podcast, 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 we're going to open it up for Q&A. I'm scared.

**Travis Kalanick** (1:39)
Erik's good at this and it stresses me out. All right. What do you got, Erik?

**Erik Torenberg** (1:42)
So Travis, why didn't you buy Lyft?
Do you regret it? What would you do if you can go back in time?

**Travis Kalanick** (1:52)
I think this will surprise a lot of people, but Lyft's culture was very different than ours.
Maybe it started with the pink mustache. But I think it's interesting 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. And 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. You want it to work.

**Erik Torenberg** (2:27)
So you wouldn't do anything different?

**Travis Kalanick** (2:29)
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.

**Ben Horowitz** (2:48)
By the way, I agree with that. I think it, I mean, you'd have to do the counterfactual if Travis was still running Uber.

**Erik Torenberg** (2:56)
Because what would that look like? Travis is still running Uber today?

**Ben Horowitz** (3:00)
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. 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.

**Travis Kalanick** (3:28)
Meritocracy and toe stepping.

**Ben Horowitz** (3:29)
Toe stepping. Yeah. Which is kind of like, fuck your feelings. We're here to build. We're going to do it. We're going to push as hard as we can. And yeah, you may get your toe stepped on, but you got to keep going. You got to keep bringing it. And 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.

**Travis Kalanick** (3:57)
Yeah. We've rebranded it the current company at Adams. We call it the best idea wins.