Limitless: An AI Podcast

Ejaaz:
Just last week, one of the most controversial founders in tech history broke eight years of silence.

Ejaaz:
His name is Travis Kalanick, and he is the person who built Uber into a $70 billion company.

Ejaaz:
He got forced out in probably the most traumatic ousting since Steve Jobs,

Ejaaz:
and then totally vanished.

Ejaaz:
He was gone for eight years when he was secretly building this company in stealth

Ejaaz:
that was just unveiled this week called Atoms.

Ejaaz:
He's already acquired a self-driving startup founded by the engineer who went

Ejaaz:
to prison for stealing Google's autonomous vehicle secrets. And Uber,

Ejaaz:
the company that kicked him out, is reportedly funding this whole thing.

Ejaaz:
So there's a lot of crazy chaos, interesting parts to this story.

Ejaaz:
One of the most interesting is the fact that thousands of employees were forbidden

Ejaaz:
to put their company name that they were working in on LinkedIn.

Ejaaz:
There's a $15 billion valuation already reached in the dark.

Ejaaz:
They've raised $1.1 billion from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund.

Ejaaz:
But no one actually knows what this company does until last week.

Ejaaz:
This is a crazy story about one of the most notable founders in Silicon Valley.

Ejaaz:
I think it's important to take a step back and really understand who this character

Ejaaz:
is at the core of this new company that's really important to the future.

Josh:
Travis is one of those few founders where his backstory is actually...

Josh:
Equally as exciting as the story that we're breaking on this episode today about his new company.

Josh:
This guy's lived and died by the sword multiple times and then was resurrected.

Josh:
He actually founded two startups before Uber that surged dramatically and then failed.

Josh:
I think the first company was called Scour. It was like a peer-to-peer network

Josh:
where you can have kind of file sharing systems.

Josh:
So think of like Napster, but for like any kind of file system,

Josh:
kind of like LimeWire-esque, I guess.

Josh:
And he quickly got sued by a bunch of regulators for a quarter of a trillion dollars.

Josh:
Now, back then in 1998, that is a heck of a lot of money. $215 billion.

Ejaaz:
Today, that's a heck of a lot of money.

Josh:
Today, that's, I don't know, with all the AI CapEx stuff, maybe it's not.

Josh:
Maybe my mind's been warped. But that is a lot of money for four 22-year-olds to be sued with.

Josh:
So he had no choice but to file for bankruptcy.

Josh:
But he came back with the vengeance with his second company called Red Swoosh,

Josh:
which was pretty much a similar type of company, but aimed at a more professional market.

Josh:
Same thing kind of happened with them. They got sued, but they managed to get through it.

Josh:
And then Google poached all of his engineers. It was just him, a one-man company.

Josh:
And so he was about to fall for bankruptcy before, get this,

Josh:
Mark Cuban makes an entrance, gets into an argument with Travis Kalanick online.

Josh:
He's so impressed by Travis's response that he gives him $1.8 million.

Josh:
Travis moves to Thailand and he lives there for a year and a half,

Josh:
cuts down costs and runs this company, ends up selling it and makes $2 million and moves to SF.

Ejaaz:
Which is pretty good for someone in their early 20s. And this was the start

Ejaaz:
of a pretty unbelievable story.

Ejaaz:
I mean, in between this time and 2009, when he started Uber, he was also working.

Ejaaz:
There's a few funny stories that I like about Travis, one of which that I'd

Ejaaz:
like to tell briefly is the one with the Wii Tennis story, just to kind of understand

Ejaaz:
who this guy is. A famous investor named Chris Saka.

Ejaaz:
And Chris Saka back in the day,

Ejaaz:
I mean, still is, but one of the most legendary investors in the world.

Ejaaz:
He was a seed round investor in Uber and he was hosting Travis for the weekend.

Ejaaz:
And Travis was woke up in the morning and was playing Wii Tennis with his dad.

Ejaaz:
Just for fun. His dad liked playing Wii Tennis.

Ejaaz:
That's when Wii was very popular. He was kind of kicking his dad's ass.

Ejaaz:
He was getting a few points, but he was doing pretty well and he was playing

Ejaaz:
with his opposite hand and he wasn't really paying attention.

Ejaaz:
And then he switches over to his dominant hand and he starts playing seriously.

Ejaaz:
His dad doesn't score a point.

Ejaaz:
He moves over to the scoreboard and it turns out that Travis is number two in the world at Wii Tennis.

Ejaaz:
And it's a testament to the type of founder that this person is,

Ejaaz:
that we're going to uncover throughout this episode, is just hyper fixated on

Ejaaz:
winning and success and being the absolute best at what he does.

Ejaaz:
And this reflected itself in Uber, which is where I think a lot of people can

Ejaaz:
pick up the story where they're familiar with.

Ejaaz:
In 2009, he founded Uber, which went to go on to become the biggest ride sharing

Ejaaz:
application in the world.

Ejaaz:
And not only that, but created an entire sector of technology today that is ride sharing.

Ejaaz:
This simply did not exist prior to Uber's existence.

Josh:
And he kind of found or came across the idea for Uber as an accident after he

Josh:
sold his company read swoosh for and made two million dollars he moved to sf

Josh:
And he kind of started like the original incubator, which was just his apartment.

Josh:
And he had founders like come through all the time. And one such guy he went

Josh:
to Paris with to go to a conference and they couldn't hail a black cap.

Josh:
So he ended up kind of like creating this idea around an app that can call a

Josh:
black car for you, not necessarily a cab driver. And that's what ended up becoming Uber.

Josh:
But where he kind of like really doubled down on with the company and as the

Josh:
story goes was on like the regulatory arbitrage. So he just kept on hounding

Josh:
state regulators to allow them to legalize Uber because it was completely legal to start off with.

Josh:
And that's really how Uber became a massive boat. It's just a crazy,

Josh:
crazy story. But then...

Josh:
It ended up in him being ousted.

Ejaaz:
Yeah, so there's a few steps just before the ousting, one of which is an important

Ejaaz:
character in the store, which is Google.

Ejaaz:
Google Ventures invested a quarter of a billion dollars in 2013 into Uber at

Ejaaz:
a three and a half billion dollar valuation, which at the time was a pretty big deal.

Ejaaz:
Briefly afterwards, around 2015, this is when Google was creating their self-driving project.

Ejaaz:
Travis was aware of this because of their connection, and this self-driving

Ejaaz:
project eventually is what became Waymo.

Ejaaz:
And Waymo was viewed as an existential threat. If cars can drive themselves.

Ejaaz:
Uber doesn't need drivers, but neither does anyone else.

Ejaaz:
So whoever owns the autonomy owes us the future of transportation.

Ejaaz:
So this was an existential crisis they were having.

Ejaaz:
Travis goes ahead and he creates Uber's self-driving division in 2015.

Ejaaz:
This is where he recruits Anthony Lewandowski, who we mentioned earlier,

Ejaaz:
away from Google's self-driving program. Lewandowski was a founding member of what became Waymo.

Ejaaz:
And with him, what he didn't know at the time was many documents that were actually

Ejaaz:
stolen from Google and Waymo and eventually wound up putting him in jail.

Ejaaz:
So this created a lot of chaos.

Ejaaz:
This was, I guess, the beginning of the chaos that really started around February

Ejaaz:
of 2017, where there was a blog post published that was detailing some not so

Ejaaz:
favorable activities in the workplace.

Ejaaz:
There was a Waymo lawsuit where Waymo sued Uber, alleging that Lewandowski downloaded

Ejaaz:
14,000 proprietary files, which turned out was loosely true.

Ejaaz:
And these were There's secret files about trade secrets from Waymo's autonomous vehicle history.

Ejaaz:
And then there is a series of videos that come out, one of which was dash cam

Ejaaz:
footage from Travis inside of an Uber driver being not so nice to the Uber driver.

Ejaaz:
And there's just this really unfortunate cascading series of events that eventually

Ejaaz:
unfolds, like you mentioned, Ejaz.

Ejaaz:
He got kicked out of Uber.

Josh:
Yeah, so this headline says Uber CEO Travis Kalanick resigns following months

Josh:
of chaos, the events that you just referenced.

Josh:
But I don't think resigns is the right word here. In June of 2017,

Josh:
whilst Travis was interviewing someone to become a deputy head at Uber,

Josh:
two partners from Benchmark Capital, which were early and big investors in Uber,

Josh:
turned up at his hotel room, walked in, and hands him a draft resignation letter for him to sign.

Josh:
And they cite reasons of, we can't deal with the drama that you're creating,

Josh:
the fraud that is all over the media.

Josh:
We need you to step down or it's going to ruin the success of the business.

Josh:
Now, they keep hounding him. And about a month later, they sue Kalanick for

Josh:
fraud. And it ends up becoming this whole thing which forces him to resign.

Josh:
And the most brutal part about this is it comes right after his mother died in a boating accident.

Ejaaz:
It's pretty messed up. He almost lost his dad in that same accident,

Ejaaz:
too. It was a really traumatic time for him.

Ejaaz:
And he attended this board meeting two days after her funeral

Ejaaz:
and it's a six-hour board meeting it's this like horrific series

Ejaaz:
of events and you can't help but think that like bill

Ejaaz:
girley and the benchmark team were really just leveraging this really nasty

Ejaaz:
opportunity to impose their will on the company and then the day after uh travis

Ejaaz:
resigns bill girley he quit the uber board um so it was this really kind of

Ejaaz:
messy thing it destroyed travis this at this point this was the absolute love of his life.

Ejaaz:
He had spent his life as a founder, finally found some unbelievable levels of

Ejaaz:
success, and then at the darkest moment of his life got kicked out of the most

Ejaaz:
important thing in his life.

Ejaaz:
So it's this really difficult, tough time.

Ejaaz:
And Travis kind of goes dark for about nine months time where no one really hears from him.

Ejaaz:
And nine months later, he comes back very quietly in stealth and begins to work

Ejaaz:
on this company called Cloud Kitchens, or also known as City Storage Systems,

Ejaaz:
this weird unknown stealth company that was backed.

Ejaaz:
By the $2.5 billion that he had actually sold when he left Uber.

Ejaaz:
He sold all of his stock, he cashed out, and now he has this treasure trove

Ejaaz:
of money that he could use to build the next thing.

Ejaaz:
The idea is that he takes this controlling share of this company named City

Ejaaz:
Storage Systems for $150 million.

Ejaaz:
He becomes CEO. They own Cloud Kitchens, and Cloud Kitchens is a company that buys real estate.

Ejaaz:
They build commercial ghost kitchens and then rents them to restaurant for delivery-only operations.

Ejaaz:
So chances are, if you live in a major city and you've taken delivery from Chick-fil-A,

Ejaaz:
Taco Bell, a lot of these larger brands, they have come out of a cloud kitchen.

Ejaaz:
And the idea of a cloud kitchen is to automate the food delivery process.

Ejaaz:
So if you've ever used Uber Eats, you're familiar with Travis's engagement with

Ejaaz:
food delivery where Uber Eats is the food delivery version of Uber.

Ejaaz:
You take food from one place, you move it to another.

Ejaaz:
Cloud Kitchens is the automated version of that. You basically try your hardest

Ejaaz:
to remove the people, the cost of labor from that loop, and you decrease the

Ejaaz:
cost of these goods to get as close to the pure cost as possible by automating everything.

Ejaaz:
So these cloud kitchens are totally automated. They have a lot of robots.

Ejaaz:
They have a lot of automation.

Ejaaz:
You order a bowl, the robot builds its bowl, and it ships it off to you.

Ejaaz:
And it's a really effective, really efficient way of delivering food.

Ejaaz:
And this was the first step in this redemption arc. But again,

Ejaaz:
this was all silent. He's building in stealth mode.

Josh:
Yeah, I mean, it's a recurring theme. With Travis, his entire goal with Uber

Josh:
and with this company, Cloud Kitchens, is he's trying to automate moving of

Josh:
atoms of things, which suggests what his new company is called.

Josh:
He didn't tell anyone about this. I think his original investment was acquisition

Josh:
of a controlling stake in city storage systems was about 150 mil,

Josh:
didn't make any headlines. No one knew what the hell it was.

Josh:
And the concept itself, Cloud Kitchens, isn't something that you can kind of like visit publicly.

Josh:
Josh, actually, you told me a story where you tried to visit their site in Brooklyn, right?

Ejaaz:
Yeah, I'm obsessed with Travis, like disgustingly so. I think he's one of the

Ejaaz:
best entrepreneurs of our time by far.

Ejaaz:
And I suspect a lot more people will realize this over the coming years as he

Ejaaz:
builds this new company, which we're almost getting to.

Ejaaz:
We're almost there at the new company. But part of this fascination is wanting

Ejaaz:
to get close to him and just wanting to see what that was like.

Ejaaz:
So I was curious what it would look like to work at a company that Travis runs.

Ejaaz:
There is no way to actually apply to these places. They're outbound only because

Ejaaz:
they're totally in stealth.

Ejaaz:
So I'll stop by one of the kitchens to check it out. And of course,

Ejaaz:
it's a ghost kitchen. I mean, there's really, there's no one there. There's no markings.

Josh:
There's no branding.

Ejaaz:
Just a bunch of robots hanging out, right? I mean, there are people,

Ejaaz:
but it is a very inconspicuous building.

Ejaaz:
There's not much going on. It's fascinating because as an outsider looking in,

Ejaaz:
there's really no signs that anything special is happening here.

Ejaaz:
Meanwhile, they've deployed over 2,000 kitchen locations across America,

Ejaaz:
and they're accounting for, I believe, 18% of all U.S. food delivery.

Ejaaz:
And this was in 2024. So I'm assuming that number is going higher and higher and higher.

Ejaaz:
And they've quietly built this like really impressive empire as it relates purely

Ejaaz:
to food. This is just one pillar of the new company.

Josh:
So let's get into the actual story about the company Atoms.

Josh:
So collectively, since he left Uber, Travis has been in stealth for about eight years now.

Josh:
And he's employed thousands and thousands of employees, presumably to work on

Josh:
this cloud kitchen thing, but no one really knows what he's doing.

Josh:
They can't officially list their title or the company that they work for on

Josh:
their LinkedIn. So it's complete stealth mode for eight years.

Josh:
Now think about anyone else that can potentially hold that. Like he's getting everyone to sign NDAs.

Josh:
Like no one can really keep something hidden that large for that long,

Josh:
but Travis did end up doing it.

Josh:
Until Friday of last week where he announced his new company called Atoms.

Josh:
And the vision is kind of simple or rather follows on from his founding of Uber and Cloud Kitchens.

Josh:
He wants to do what he did with Uber. He wants to do what he did with food to

Josh:
every single part of physical delivery that exists in the world today.

Josh:
And he's gonna focus on three specific verticals. He's gonna focus on the mining industry.

Josh:
He's gonna focus on the food industry. That's with Cloud Kitchens,

Josh:
what he's rebranded it to Food Atoms. and he's going to do it with automotive transport.

Josh:
And the company follows a framework of three specific steps to figure out which

Josh:
industry and how to approach this.

Josh:
One, he wants to understand the current state of the physical world.

Josh:
So he's looking at food delivery, he's looking at the mining industry,

Josh:
he's looking at automotive transport delivery, and he's like,

Josh:
okay, this is how it functions right now.

Josh:
These are where the problems are going to be. And so this is what it might potentially turn into.

Josh:
So that brings us to step two, where he predicts what the future state of the

Josh:
physical world will look like.

Josh:
And then finally, step three, control the future state of that physical world.

Josh:
So creating a new app or a new product like Uber to transform transportation

Josh:
of humans or creating cloud kitchens to transform cooking of food and transportation

Josh:
and delivery of that food.

Josh:
And so how he plans to enable this is the coolest part for me,

Josh:
which is AI-powered robots, but not the humanoid type robots that you and I

Josh:
have spoken about on the show many times, Josh.

Josh:
Rather robots that are specifically designed to perform these acts, right?

Ejaaz:
Yeah. If you've ever been to LA and you've seen these like four wheeled robots

Ejaaz:
kind of riding around the sidewalk delivering food, that's kind of the vibe. It's wheel platforms.

Ejaaz:
And I think the way you could think about Atoms and the reason why it's named

Ejaaz:
Atoms is similar to the progress that we've seen in bits.

Ejaaz:
So I think one of the things that we talk about a lot is we've had so much progress

Ejaaz:
in the world of bits over the past few decades, meaning that all the software

Ejaaz:
has gotten much better. All of the chips have gotten much better.

Ejaaz:
Everything in our digital world has improved, while the external physical world

Ejaaz:
has not really gone a long way.

Ejaaz:
The goal of this company, the intention of this company, is to do what we just

Ejaaz:
did for computers to the real physical world using the same framework.

Ejaaz:
So if you think of this world of bits infrastructure, we have the chips,

Ejaaz:
which is the intelligence. We have the storage, which is how you store the intelligence.

Ejaaz:
Then we have the network, which is how you transfer that intelligence across the world.

Ejaaz:
What they're doing with atoms is the same three-level stack

Ejaaz:
you have the cpu you have the intelligence which

Ejaaz:
is these cloud kitchens which is these automation systems that are actually

Ejaaz:
deployed in the physical world you have the storage which is the real estate

Ejaaz:
one of the huge parts of this company is real estate they're owning a lot of

Ejaaz:
buildings they're building a lot of kitchens they own a lot of places to distribute

Ejaaz:
this compute and then the network is this autonomous part of the business it's.

Ejaaz:
Kind of what he envisioned for uber where you have truly fully autonomous

Ejaaz:
movement of these goods and services using these

Ejaaz:
robots so he explicitly said they're not building humanoids they're

Ejaaz:
not in the business of disrupting tesla with full self-driving or

Ejaaz:
their humanoid robots they're building supplemental things for their

Ejaaz:
world of atoms for delivering groceries

Ejaaz:
delivering food delivering objects and being

Ejaaz:
the full stack and revolutionizing the world in the way that

Ejaaz:
we did with bits but with atoms and it's a really grand plan

Ejaaz:
and he's rolled it out in a few places so far i mean

Ejaaz:
they have the mining they have the cloud kitchens and then they have otter which

Ejaaz:
is the third part of the business so there's a lot going on here but it's around

Ejaaz:
that one core thesis that atoms are the thing that really matters as we move

Ejaaz:
forward from this like i guess artificial intelligence artificial general intelligence age one.

Josh:
Thing that stood out for me is his approach to the design of robots i Like I

Josh:
was fixated on why he was so anti-humanoid.

Josh:
It kind of makes sense, right? The world is designed for humans.

Josh:
So you would create human-shaped robots. That's what Tesla is doing.

Josh:
That's what a bunch of robotic startups in the UK and China are doing.

Josh:
So why wouldn't he do the same?

Josh:
And he used, I watched his interview on TVPN and there's a story where he goes,

Josh:
I watched the Robot Olympics in China last year or a few months ago.

Josh:
And he was like, I was so impressed by all these robots dancing and running

Josh:
and winning these races. But what I couldn't help think was,

Josh:
This robot would be so much faster if it just had four wheels.

Josh:
And it just raced that way.

Josh:
And it made sense that this was his entire approach from first principles to

Josh:
moving atoms from one place to the next, whether it's food,

Josh:
whether it's mining and moving machinery from spot A to spot B,

Josh:
or whether that's doing the same for automotive transports, be it trucks,

Josh:
cars, delivering, whatever, right?

Josh:
What was interesting was I was curious, like, why did he do mining specifically.

Josh:
And looking into it, it just seems like an incredibly human-dependent,

Josh:
bulky machinery-operated industry that is ripe for consumption by AI robotics.

Josh:
And I don't think many startups are focused on this. The same could potentially be said for food as well.

Josh:
The way he framed it was cloud kitchens was R&D for food automation or transport

Josh:
automation, disguised as a cookout, as a kitchen that would just make food for you.

Josh:
So he's been doing R&D for eight years.

Josh:
And now he's expanding to these three very prominent sectors that no one else

Josh:
has really been focused on.

Josh:
I don't think even Tesla is like focused on like stuff like mining and stuff

Josh:
like that. So it's really ripe for like consumption.

Josh:
And I think that Travis is the perfect guy to do this because of what he pulled off at Uber.

Ejaaz:
It's important to really understand these three pillars because Travis is not

Ejaaz:
someone who reasons by analogy.

Ejaaz:
He has really, he thinks very deeply about what meaningfully matters and what

Ejaaz:
will actually impact the world going forward.

Ejaaz:
And mining is such a huge one because when you think about AI,

Ejaaz:
the world that we spend so much time I'm thinking about the common constraint

Ejaaz:
outside of energy is just these materials. Like we don't have enough memory.

Ejaaz:
We don't have enough raw materials.

Ejaaz:
We don't have enough for batteries and to create enough storage for this energy.

Ejaaz:
And mining is such a huge part of that.

Ejaaz:
And mining is this incredibly laborious process with a lot of labor rules and

Ejaaz:
laws. And it's not a very glamorous thing.

Ejaaz:
But if you automate a lot of this mining process like he intends to,

Ejaaz:
well, then suddenly a lot more areas open up for mining.

Ejaaz:
There's a lot more efficiency to be had. it's just a huge part of

Ejaaz:
how they plan to win. And you mentioned Tesla. I mean, he explicitly addressed Tesla,

Ejaaz:
I think, on the All In podcast earlier this week about how impressive Tesla

Ejaaz:
is and how much respect they have for it and how he's kind of in a way basing

Ejaaz:
his ideas off of the Tesla stack because he believes that Tesla is very much the Google of this era.

Ejaaz:
Meaning if you were to create a startup in the early 2000s, the first question

Ejaaz:
you get is, why isn't Google going to kill you?

Ejaaz:
Tesla is basically that for physical AI. They own the whole manufacturing stack.

Ejaaz:
They own full production from sand in to vehicle out and even intelligence out

Ejaaz:
through full self-driving.

Ejaaz:
And Travis argued that not enough people are taking this seriously and not enough

Ejaaz:
people are trying to be complementary to that.

Ejaaz:
You don't have to fight this force. You could actually just be a contributor

Ejaaz:
to the success and win as a result.

Josh:
Yeah, if I were to like zoom out and distill what he's trying to do with this

Josh:
company, what Claude Code did to automating software engineering,

Josh:
what ChatGPT did to replacing a bunch of high schoolers is able to write like

Josh:
PhD level essays, science,

Josh:
automating mathematics, he's doing for the physical world.

Josh:
So if you think of like mining as a technological stack, he is doing the sensors,

Josh:
he is doing the compute on top of that, he's operating the machinery,

Josh:
which is powered by the AI models that sit on top of this.

Josh:
So if you could automate all of that, then you can think about automated factories

Josh:
that sit on top of that. And then the produce that comes on top of that also being automated.

Josh:
And so if you could scale that, not necessarily at the speed of software,

Josh:
automated by AI, that's something pretty cool that we haven't seen in the world

Josh:
today because we're constrained by humans, by our biological brains,

Josh:
by making errors, by needing to sleep and a bunch of other things like that.

Josh:
The other thing that like fascinates me about this is Travis is very much building

Josh:
like a vertically integrated play here, right?

Josh:
Like if I think about it, he's doing the sensors, he's got the compute,

Josh:
he's got the AI models, and then he's like manipulating these atoms by physically

Josh:
delivering them using robots, which then accelerates manufacturing.

Josh:
He's owning the real estate. There's a bunch of energy production around that.

Josh:
He's involved in all parts of that.

Josh:
That reminds me of a bunch of other companies that we've spoken about on the

Josh:
show, like NVIDIA is doing that from Silicon all the way to AI agents that they

Josh:
announced with NemoClaw this week.

Josh:
Tesla is doing, or rather SpaceX, SpaceX and Tesla, they're all the same company.

Josh:
They're going to merge anyway, is doing that from everything from energy production

Josh:
to space transportation, to harnessing the energy from the sun itself,

Josh:
to training AI and distributing it on social media on X.

Josh:
Travis is doing the same with physical AI automation. And I think that it's a very ambitious task.

Josh:
But if he's able to pull that off, this is going to be a world changing company.

Josh:
And Travis is one of the few founders with the track record to be able to pull that off.

Ejaaz:
You mentioned Tesla rolling in SpaceX and Tesla into the same company.

Ejaaz:
I have a question about whether Uber will be doing the same because there's

Ejaaz:
reports that Adams is receiving major backing from Uber.

Ejaaz:
Travis has reportedly told people that he wants to be more aggressive in rolling

Ejaaz:
out self-driving technology than Waymo. So it makes sense that the company that he built,

Ejaaz:
he might actually be able to have the chance to play a meaningful role in.

Ejaaz:
And to that, I want to refer to Polymarket, because there's a Polymarket for

Ejaaz:
whether or not Uber will ask Travis to come back to the company.

Ejaaz:
And I have to ask the question, because when you think about Steve Jobs in the

Ejaaz:
past, Steve, I think he got kicked out of Apple in 1988.

Ejaaz:
And it was only in 1997, I believe it was.

Ejaaz:
The years could be slightly off, but 1997, when the company that he built was

Ejaaz:
purchased, by Apple next.

Ejaaz:
He came back to Apple. Apple was struggling at the time, and he rebuilt them

Ejaaz:
into the Apple that we know and love today after a huge hiatus.

Ejaaz:
Now, Travis has only been away for eight years now, so he's doing,

Ejaaz:
he's kind of speedrunning the Steve Jobs arc, and there is a world in which

Ejaaz:
he might come back to Uber.

Ejaaz:
Now, Polymerca says this is improbable at 14%. It's not looking very likely.

Ejaaz:
In fact, it was a 40% chance earlier

Ejaaz:
in the month, I guess prior to the announcement of this new company.

Ejaaz:
It seems like whatever they saw with this new company announcement it dropped

Ejaaz:
from 46% to 14% so perhaps it's not going to happen although man how cool would that be the.

Josh:
King is back yeah no someone knows something I mean that that that decline is

Josh:
like super steep and like almost instantaneous it like dumped 20% in like an hour or so that's crazy

Ejaaz:
Yeah pretty brutal well thank you to Polymarket for sponsoring that

Ejaaz:
segment of the pod and I think that leaves us with a comeback arc not complete

Ejaaz:
there's still a lot of work left to be done but this at least sets the stage

Ejaaz:
for what's next which is this new foundational company built on doing what we

Ejaaz:
just did to bits to the world of atoms and naming it after that by one of the

Ejaaz:
best entrepreneurs to do it.

Josh:
And that's the end of the episode thank you so much for listening a bit of a

Josh:
different flavor of the episode today we were passionate about telling the story

Josh:
of travis because it makes sense to explain why he's going after this big company

Josh:
versus just explaining the company itself.

Josh:
Let us know if you enjoyed this format of an episode. Also, a ton of new subscribers.

Josh:
We officially hit, as we're recording this episode, 40,000 subscribers,

Josh:
which is crazy because nine months ago we had, what was it, 10,000,

Josh:
Josh? Maybe even less than that.

Josh:
Pretty crazy growth from then, and we welcome all of you.

Josh:
A bunch of you have also subscribed to our newsletters. If you haven't, please do.

Josh:
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Josh:
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Josh:
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Josh:
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