Travis Kalanick & Michael Dell Live from Austin, Texas

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
I don't know if some of you knew I was an angel investor in some companies. On the count of three, what's my favorite angel investment of all time? One, two, three. Thank you. Give it up, Travis Kalanick.
Appreciate you. All right, wow. On a big news day, Travis is here on a very big news day. You spent, wow, I guess like seven years just in the lab building. Last year, every year I ask you, hey, you want to come to the All-In Summit? You want to, is that not? It's like, I'm going to just chill, I'm building. Next year, hey, you know, it's just toys available to you.

**Travis Kalanick** (0:45)
I'm like, no, you don't understand, I'm stealth.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:47)
I'm stealth, nobody knows where I am, nobody knows what I'm doing. The employees are not allowed to put the name of the company on their LinkedIn.

**Travis Kalanick** (0:54)
Thousands of employees that weren't allowed to put the company name on LinkedIn.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:59)
I mean, incredible. And I'm like, okay.

**Travis Kalanick** (1:02)
Their parents thought they worked for the CIA.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:03)
Yeah, and then he's like, and by the way, Jay Cal, you can invest, you can announce it, and you have to sign an entity, you can't mention you're an investor. It's like, okay, no problem. I'm just happy to be on the cap table.

**Travis Kalanick** (1:13)
Is he like kind of like secret saying what he wasn't supposed to say right there?

**David Friedberg** (1:18)
I was going to say. No, now he's all about boy, that just happened.

**Travis Kalanick** (1:21)
No, you're out now, f*** it, let's go.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:23)
You're out, it's out, you came out of stealth today.

**Travis Kalanick** (1:27)
It's so funny.

**David Friedberg** (1:28)
It's so great.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:29)
You came out of stealth, well, you talked a little bit, you came to All-In Summit last year.

**David Friedberg** (1:32)
Is that true? Is that fair? You say you're coming out of stealth today? Is that right?

**Travis Kalanick** (1:35)
Well, look, let's just start with what that meant for our employees, because again, imagine if you're at a multi-thousand-person company and every single employee has stealth on their LinkedIn, including salespeople, including recruiters. They were living life on hard mode.

**David Friedberg** (2:00)
It's fun too, right?

**Travis Kalanick** (2:02)
It was like, what is this? Why is this massive density of stealth startup people in Los Angeles? What is happening over there?

**Jason Calacanis** (2:13)
Yeah.

**Travis Kalanick** (2:14)
Yeah.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:14)
Also, technically, the name of the company in different countries was very generic names of companies.

**Travis Kalanick** (2:23)
I mean, everything was designed to be stealth.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:25)
Right.

**Travis Kalanick** (2:26)
So we operate in 30 countries. In the US, the kitchens product is known as Cloud Kitchens. In Korea, it's Kitchen Valley. In the Middle East, it's Namah. In Latin America, parts of Latin America, it's Casinas Acueltas. I mean, you get the idea.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:51)
You can't even remember all the names or all the code words.

**Travis Kalanick** (2:53)
You have to think about it.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:54)
You have to think it through.

**Travis Kalanick** (2:56)
We have four in China. Yeah. It's like all over the place. Yeah.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:59)
But things have gone really well and you've been a little acquisitive. So tell us about the branding today that you're announcing and then maybe some of the acquisitions and evolution of the company. You're not just renting kitchen space.

**Travis Kalanick** (3:13)
Those who, I mean, know how I thought about things in the Uber day, a lot of this stuff's not surprising. I would often talk about digitizing the physical world. I think I even did it all at Summit. The quick version of this, I'll try to do it quickly, but it's like we know the bits world, the computer world, the one that Michael Dell essentially invented for us. CPU, storage, network, these are three core computing resources when you go to computer science class your first day. Three core computer resources. CPU manipulates the bits, storage stores the bits, network moves bits from point A to point B. But if you're digitizing the physical world, you're treating atoms like bits.
You're building an atoms-based computer. I'll explain what I mean to say. I know there's a little out there. CPU manipulates bits, what manipulates atoms? Manufacturing. Storage stores bits, what stores atoms? Real estate. Network moves bits from point A to point B, what moves atoms? That's transportation or logistics. You have these three core computing resources in an atoms-based computer. The name of my company was very obtuse and purposely designed to be as boring as hell, was called city storage systems. So that's digitized real estate in an atoms-based computer, our first computer being a food computer. What does that mean? Manufacturing, real estate and logistics for food. So you start to get there and the idea that the mission was infrastructure for better food, the idea was can you get a meal that's prepared and delivered to you, so efficient that it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store. If you can do that, you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car. But in the Uber day, the roads were there, the cars are unused. You just had to put an app in the app store. Wasn't that easy, but that easy. In this world, you can't do this on a restaurant. Restaurant doesn't have, when I left Uber, 13 percent of all San Francisco miles were Uber miles.