Travis Kalanick
Co-founder of Uber; referenced in Cyan Banister's story of her early investment in the company.
- How Apollo, Citadel, Blackstone, & Bridgewater Built Their Brands
- 20VC_ Uber President on Budgeting AI at Uber_ How AI Helps and Hurts Uber _ Why Autonomy Is Existential _ How to Beat DoorDash to #1 in Food _ The Untold Stories of Travis Kalanick, Dara Khosrowshahi
- Reddit and Other Big Pubs Consider Blocking Google
“If you loved Uber and it really made your life better, you really didn't care what was going on with Travis Kalnick at the moment.”
Source→“He's a problem solver. Like, he will define what he is and what he looks for in others as creative problem solving. The ability for him to walk into any meeting on any topic, ask a few pointed questions, float a few ideas, and in 15 minutes sort of change the minds.”
Source→“In building Uber, Travis basically ignored the regulators and built the service anyway. Built a fan base of customers that he could use against the regulators that were trying to shut him down.”
Source→“Atoms raised $1.7 billion by consolidating subsidiary companies (Pronto, food robotics, autonomous transport) into a single cap table.”
Source→“An eight-year-old Los Angeles startup founded and led by Travis Kalanick... Raised a $1.7 billion round led by Andreessen Horowitz.”
Source→“We had a bunch of other subsidiaries doing cool stuff. And I said, which one do you guys want to do? Do you want to invest in mining? Do you want to invest in food? And they're just like, we want to invest in you... So then what we did is we put the companies together and then sold the equity in a singular entity.”
Source→“Federal preemption is good when you are pro-regulatory capture. When you want to squeeze others out, you should get federal regulatory bigness going for you... I think we got to be careful of some of these closed-weight things that are creating situations where they need to be regulated. And they want it. I'd be very — I'd keep an eye on that.”
Source→“You never go to a customer and say, give me a percentage of your stuff. You go to a customer and say, here's the price of our stuff. And if it does really well for you, we think we should get a little more scratch... Don't be crass about it.”
Source→“They're either humanoids, which we're not. I'm not anti-humanoid. I'm just non-humanoid. Specialized industrial robots. That's high-scale, industrial-scale tasks, which means you would not have a humanoid ever do that.”
Source→“"I don't like everything about Travis Kalanick, but I have seen and heard so many stories about his level of ambition for the mission. And that's really inspiring to me."”
Source→“Waymo and San Francisco are resulting in... Waymo is everywhere within six months. It's been a long, steady progress for Waymo.”
Source→“We're going to bring both to North America and I understand South America from a friend of mine who's got an automated mining system, Adams, Travis. We're going to be able to just create a large number of jobs here.”
Source→“Referenced in the timestamp 'Meeting Travis Kalanick'”
“Casa — an AI platform for residential handymen — raised $20M Series A; backed by Forerunner Ventures and Travis Kalanick.”
AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.