Uber Founder Travis Kalanick is Back with a New AI Startup

**John Coogan** (0:00)
We have our next guest ready to join us live in the TBPN Ultraman. We have Travis Kalanick. He is the CEO of Cloud Kitchens. Welcome to the show, Travis. Great to meet you. Appreciate you coming on down to our studio, our humble abode. Great to meet you.

**Jordi Hays** (0:16)
We are truly an honor.

**Travis Kalanick** (0:18)
I'm just down the street.

**John Coogan** (0:19)
Yeah.

**Jordi Hays** (0:19)
Yeah.

**John Coogan** (0:19)
That's right. That's right. Yeah. We were actually, we started the show in downtown LA at the Jonathan Club on Figueroa. And so I think we were even closer then. There you go. How are things going? How's life?
Can we turn that down? We're getting some feedback.

**Travis Kalanick** (0:37)
That was crazy. Man, it's crazy. Yeah.

**John Coogan** (0:42)
What's crazy?

**Travis Kalanick** (0:42)
The building doesn't stop. Okay. I mean, I don't know how much you guys, I mean, I've just, I've been in hiding. So I've been, I've been doing, I've been doing this. I run a company called City, up until today.

**Jordi Hays** (0:58)
Yeah.

**Travis Kalanick** (0:58)
Let's just say, I was running a company called City Storage Systems. Okay. Which was basically about the future of food, a conglomerate operating in about 30 countries. That the whole 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?

**Jordi Hays** (1:18)
Yep.

**Travis Kalanick** (1:19)
Because if you do, you do the kitchen what Uber did to the car. So I've been doing that since 2018

**Jordi Hays** (1:25)
Yeah.

**Travis Kalanick** (1:26)
And after just the intensity of Uber from in terms of being in the public sphere, dealing with a 100 headlines every day, deciding what you do or the actions you take based on what The New York Times is going to write, I was like, I would like to just-

**Jordi Hays** (1:44)
That's a tough way to run a business.

**Travis Kalanick** (1:45)
It is very tough. So I was just like, I got to wake up every day and just get to work and build. So I went under the radar.

**John Coogan** (1:55)
Did you think of this as like stealth mode? Is that the right term?

**Travis Kalanick** (1:57)
We've been in stealth mode for eight years. And that's like, till today, employees were not allowed to put the name of the company on their LinkedIn. We have thousands of employees. That's crazy. So today what happened was, it's like for my company, and I just got out of an all hands and then came right here, is we went out of stealth. Now, City Storage Systems is like a hilarious name.

**Jordi Hays** (2:22)
It's like the most, let me choose the most generic. It's like the most generic name that no one will ever notice.

**John Coogan** (2:27)
The Business Corporation of America.

**Travis Kalanick** (2:29)
It was on purpose.

**Jordi Hays** (2:30)
Yeah.

**Travis Kalanick** (2:30)
Okay.

**Jordi Hays** (2:31)
And it works.

**Travis Kalanick** (2:32)
It works. Like we had two choices when we launched. We had what my sort of normal instinct was. Remember, it was only seven, eight months after I left Uber, when I started this.

**Jordi Hays** (2:46)
Yeah.

**Travis Kalanick** (2:46)
And let's just say the mission is infrastructure for better food. We have hardcore real estate assets. We buy the assets. We do construction. We sell restauranteurs on a delivery only location. I have a software stack that's like ARR, ARR life. I've got a robotics company. I have a marketplace for corporate lunch. Like there's a ton of stuff going on.

**Jordi Hays** (3:08)
We use it.

**Travis Kalanick** (3:09)
Oh yeah, that's right. That's right. Of course.

**John Coogan** (3:10)
It's great.

**Jordi Hays** (3:11)
All right.

**Travis Kalanick** (3:12)
Okay. So, shit, I forgot what I was saying.

**John Coogan** (3:16)
So, it's just a very different business from Uber. Some people would leave that company and be like, I'm going to start the exact same thing. I got the playbook.

**Travis Kalanick** (3:23)
But this is what the Uber guys, when I left, were like a little bit worried about. This is, we're talking about 2017, 18 Yeah. They're paranoid. So my instinct was, okay, I left. It's seven months later. I'm going to name my company, Super. You leave a company called Uber, you call it Super.

**Jordi Hays** (3:41)
Or you call it Giga.

**Travis Kalanick** (3:42)
I'm like, you go from Uber to Super? You're like, no, that cannot be a thing. And so I did the opposite.

**Jordi Hays** (3:48)