The Secret to Scaling Ambition Across Industries | Dreamforce 2026

Marc Benioff
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#Dreamforce #AgenticCRM #Salesforce
Marc Benioff and Travis Kalanick explore what it takes to scale ambitious ideas across software, robotics, fulfillment, and autonomy. Hear how leaders stay focused while building across vastly different industries.
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Video Summary
AI GeneratedMark Benioff interviews Travis Kalanick, who discusses his transition from founding Uber to his current venture, Atoms. Kalanick explores the concept of \"digitizing the physical world\" by applying computing logic to heavy industries. He details his vision for automating food production and logistics through specialized robotics, industrial real estate, and a philosophy of truth-seeking leadership.
And now, our CEO and Chair, Mr. Mark Vinioff.
All right. Thank you so much, everybody.
I'm really excited. How's everybody doing today?
Did you all have a good time at the concert last night?
And is Dreamforce going well?
All right. Fantastic.
Well, we have a fantastic entrepreneur here and a great leader of our industry
who I've known for a tremendous amount of time,
and I'm thrilled that he's back at Dreamforce.
So welcome, Travis Kalanick.
Good to see you.
Good to see you too, Mark.
All right.
I want to get Matthew McConaughey pitching my stuff.
That was awesome.
I'll buy whatever he's selling.
This is going to be a very easy interview, so...
You know we've known each other for 21 years?
Yeah. Amazing, huh?
Do you remember where we met?
I do.
Should I tell or you?
Davos.
Yeah.
We met right when you were discovering the concept for Uber itself.
Yeah, that's true.
You were like in Davos trying to get a car and you could not.
That's fair enough.
That's funny.
Well, I'm sure there's a lot of Mark Benioff fans in the audience.
Why don't you actually just tell us the vision?
What happened, actually?
There you are.
It's two decades ago.
You're in this little ski town.
You're having all these thoughts.
Whoa, why can I not just get a car on my phone?
Look, here's the thing.
I'll make it quick on the Davos thing.
They allow young entrepreneurs to come.
They call them tech pioneers.
We're just there for entertainment and we're the crazy weirdos.
They let a few of us through every year.
I was watching you hold court at Davos and I was like,
okay, that's a thing.
Basically, Mark runs Davos.
The idea for Uber, and it's crazy.
I don't know what it's like today because I don't go anymore.
The idea for Uber was originally in Paris.
We were at a conference, me and my buddy.
It was sort of in between things.
It was the end of 2008 and my buddy Garrett was like,
I wish we could push a button and get a ride.
It was December.
It was snowing.
Before Uber in Paris, if you went out to a restaurant,
had dinner, you're walking home.
It doesn't matter how far.
That's just what it was.
The metro shuts down and taxis won't pick you up.
We were on a three-mile walk back.
He said, I wish we could push a button and get a ride.
I'm like, damn, that's pretty good.
He was like, let's go buy 20S classes,
hire 40 drivers, and get a parking garage.
I'm like, no.
There's enough cars out there.
Let's use them better.
The way we started Uber was my co-founder, Garrett,
he brought the classy and I brought the efficiency.
It was off to the races.
You mentioned Paris.
That was a memorable moment.
You rolled Uber out in Paris.
Were you shocked to see the reaction and kind of the
tension that started to develop in that kind of a unique
moment versus San Francisco?
We saw tension everywhere we went.
My line back then was, I sort of scratched my head and I'd
be like, I really don't know how one citizen taking another
citizen across town became so damn controversial.
It's kind of interesting when you think about it that way
because that's all it is.
We started in San Francisco and three months after we launched,
there was a cease and desist by the city of San Francisco and
the state of California.
All we were doing was black cars.
In California, you see it has a TCP license on it.
They're all licensed, commercially licensed,
commercially insured.
Instead of picking up their phone and taking an order,
it was picking up your phone and taking an order.
They decided they're going to send us a cease and desist that
threatened me with 90 days in jail for every ride that had
happened.
That was the beginning of Uber.
Three months after we launched.
That'd be a long jail time right now, huh?
At that time, it was 20,000 years in jail.
Today, I don't know.
It'd be like 100 billion years in jail.
Yeah, it was a little weird.
But it goes to show you, like, we weren't doing anything wrong.
That's why I'm not in jail.
It's funny.
Okay.
But it goes to show you when you're disrupting something,
what can come back at you, especially if it's an industry
that, at its very core, outlaws competition,
which is a pretty wild situation.
That's the taxi world.
Happy to get into it if we want,
or we could use our time in another way.
It's up to you, Mark.
I mean, the world has transformed now from that moment.
I mean, looking back over two decades,
you've completely transformed how we all get around.
Well, you now can push a button and get a ride.
And so, you know, there's like a fun trajectory of sorts.
You can sort of look at the different companies I did.
The thing I did before Uber was called Red Swoosh,
and it was networking software to move data around networks
really efficiently, like a super geeky networking thing.
And the way I think about it is, like, there's, you know,
a lot of times I talk about bits and atoms and digitizing
the physical world, which is really,
and I'll get into what that means,
it's really treating atoms like bits.
We know the bits world is a computer.
CPU manipulates the bits.
Storage stores bits.
Network moves bits from point A to point B.
If you're digitizing the physical world,
treating atoms like bits, you're like, okay,
CPU manipulates bits, what manipulates atoms?
Manufacturing.
Storage stores bits.
What stores atoms?
That's real estate.
Network moves bits from point A to point B.
What moves atoms?
That's transport or logistics.
So you have these three core computing resources
in what I refer to as a atoms-based computer.
And I did networking software before Uber.
Then I did Uber.
So I went from networking software, networking bits,
to networking atoms.
And after Uber, I was like,
I want to go after the computer as a whole.
And, you know, there's a ton of things to do
in digitizing real estate,
and there's a ton of things to do in digitizing manufacturing,
CPU, and storage for the physical world.
And so the first thing we rolled out was a food computer.
We are automating an entire industry
known as the food industry
with manufacturing real estate.
That was how this started, Cloud Kitchens.
Yeah, that's right.
The post-Uber company.
That's right.
Cloud Kitchens.
We don't call it Cloud Kitchens anymore.
Well, it's still called Cloud Kitchens.
We just do a lot of things besides that.
So the overall company is called Atoms,
and we automate industries.
Some people might call it physical AI, industrial AI,
but it's more than that.
It's just we take an industry
and we automate the whole damn thing,
but they're physical, gritty, atoms-based industries.
Food is one of them.
Started as Cloud Kitchens.
We're also doing mining.
We're also doing transport.
There's a lot of cool things in there.
A couple months ago,
I was in a mine in the middle of the Amazon.
There's nothing there but that mine,
and there's a truck fully loaded
that's 2 million pounds going 35 miles an hour autonomously.
And so there's a lot of really cool...
This is the company that you bought, this company?
Is that right?
So what happened is...
Okay, so we're...
Catch me up on this.
Mark's keeping me honest here.
Okay, so...
We have that relationship, don't we?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
You should see us.
It's good.
I like it.
Okay, so we're like, okay, let's...
The first thing I did was called Cloud Kitchens,
and we're like, we're going to digitize food.
We're going to make a computer, a food computer,
and the overall idea is can you make a meal
that's prepared and delivered to you
so efficient that it approaches the cost
of going to the grocery store?
I mean, if you can do that,
you've done some really cool stuff.
What you do is you're basically giving people their time back,
which is often what happens in the,
let's call it the Atoms-based computer.
You're giving people their time back,
the most important luxury in life.
And so you go, cool story, but how do you do it?
It's, one, you need to automate the production of the food.
So that's food robotics.
Two, you need to automate the movement of the food,
whether it be inbound logistics, trucks, freight,
midsize commercial, all the way to the end user,
a vehicle that brings the food to you autonomously.
So think of like, you see the Waymos out there,
but what about something that keeps food at temperature
that's going towards you 35, 45 miles an hour,
but safely and high-quality meal at the end of that?
But then the third thing you've got to do
is industrial real estate,
because online delivery is essentially,
online delivery of food is,
you know, when you do DoorDash, River Eats,
that is e-commerce.
And so you need industrial warehouses
to do the logistics from,
but because food has a 30-minute half-life,
after it's made, every 30 minutes,
it's like just getting less valuable.
The manufacturing, i.e., the production of the food,
has to happen in the same place the logistics do,
and it has to be close to you.
So we have facilities in this industrial e-commerce
real estate for manufacturing and logistics
in every major city in 30 countries around the world,
many of them.
So like here in the Bay Area,
probably like 20 facilities.
That is the digitized real estate robotics
that makes the food,
and we're getting into the courier piece of it now.
And the minute I went into courier,
I had to get the band back together,
because at Uber, we had an autonomy program
that was catching up to Waymo.
When I left Uber,
the team that came in divested autonomy.
We don't have to go there.
It's not that interview.
I agree.
But we got the band back together,
because we're getting back to autonomy.
But we do want to know the origin story on Cloud Kitchens.
That is important.
I was at Uber Eats.
We were building Uber Eats.
We were making it awesome.
And we started seeing kitchens,
restaurants that were on Uber Eats,
that were just in kitchens.
There's no restaurant as you know it.
It was a regulated kitchen.
It had the little letter grade and all that,
but it wasn't a restaurant as you know it.
It was a commissary.
We started, the first ones we saw were actually in Melbourne.
And the idea around Cloud Kitchens
was how can you do this in a much more efficient way?
So 30 kitchens in a single facility.
We buy the land.
We do the construction.
And then we lease the kitchens,
these delivery only locations to restaurants,
restaurant groups, restaurant enterprises.
And how many of those locations are there now?
Oh, I mean high hundreds.
Yeah.
So you have basically that's like restaurants.
And then who's picking those up?
Is it Uber Eats and DoorDash?
Totally.
So first of all, the high hundreds,
but multiply by 30 or 40
because there's 30 kitchens in each.
So tens of thousands of restaurants.
Yeah.
And so what happens is they'll list in Uber Eats and DoorDash
the same way you normally would.
You push a button and order.
The courier comes to our facility
as if they were coming to a restaurant.
But they wave the phone in front of a camera
and the locker pops open
that has the food they're supposed to pick up.
Behind the scenes, when you order,
the restaurant starts making the food.
An AGV comes, picks the food up when it's done,
brings it to front of house, it gets put in a locker.
And then of course the courier
waves his phone in front of a camera,
locker pops open, he gets it.
And you're saving minutes everywhere.
Those minutes mean that the distribution of the food
gets cheaper and cheaper and cheaper
because people are waiting around less.
And your food is higher and higher quality
because you're getting it faster.
Now in the facility, is it robotic?
Is it humans?
What is going on?
How do you make that happen so quickly?
So it starts, everything starts, you know,
sort of very manual.
It's a normal kitchen.
And little by little you automate it.
We just rolled out food robotics.
Like we rolled out a bit ago.
We have restaurants using it.
Think of it as like if you walk into a Chipotle,
the front line of Chipotle is just automated.
What that means is your meal to the gram
has everything it's supposed to have.
There's far fewer mistakes.
You get it faster.
You get it at a higher quality.
And it's cheaper.
So the meal, we talk about the cost of meals these days,
et cetera, the cost comes down.
And what's interesting is like, you know,
look in AI there's a lot of discussion about jobs
and labor and things like this.
But what's so interesting when you're talking
about home meals, these are meals you have at home,
the labor that we're taking away is yours, right?
So this is not labor in a restaurant.
This is labor for e-commerce essentially
so that you don't have to do it yourself.
And this has gone very well, right?
Because how many years have you been at this now?
So we started this eight years ago.
Yeah.
And it's turned into an incredible business
almost overnight.
So we're having, yeah, we're having a lot of fun.
I think the thing to keep in mind,
and you see this with folks who really go after
Adams heavy industry, is the Adams take longer
than the bits.
I think it was like the other night, Mark,
you introduced me to an entrepreneur.
He was like 24 years old or something.
He's like got a two-year-old business,
three-year-old business that's doing like
$4 billion in revenue or something wild like this.
And I'm like, and he's like, yeah,
we went from like, you know,
a hundred million last year to four billion this year.
And that's cool.
It's cool.
Okay.
But the Adams-based world works slower.
So like, think about this, like Elon with Tesla,
like how many years did it take before he was doing
100,000 vehicles a year?
I mean, it was probably like 15 years.
It took 15 years to get the rocket that's going up
to come down and land.
But once you get it, oh, wow.
And so we're starting to get to that, oh, wow, now.
Because I have a robotics division that's pushing out
a lot of robotics that helps with the production.
We're about to get the courier thing going.
And now the food computer's working.
Now you can, you know, and I'd say in a short period
of time, in some short period of time,
you're going to start seeing the cost of a meal
that's prepared and delivered to you starting
to come down dramatically.
And when that happens, it's a big deal.
Right now, online delivery, which is thought of
as a huge category, it's 2% of all meals in the U.S.,
just 2%.
E-commerce, on the other hand, retail, is 25%.
So when that cost comes down to parity,
you're going to see a huge multiplication
in sort of the number of meals, of course,
that are coming across, the quality and sort of variety
and selection you get.
And the time that you get back because of it.
So you're in this post-Uber moment.
You have this vision for cloud kitchens.
You have this idea that you're going to have these hubs.
You can have multiple restaurants in every hub.
The hubs are kind of hybrid robots and humans
and automation and all that's going along.
And now this is working after eight years.
But then all of a sudden this year, you all of a sudden
said, wow, this is a really cool company.
I could acquire this and now turn this
into another industry.
Is that a fair characterization?
It's close.
So like I said, I was starting to look at the courier stuff.
Word got out that, oh, ----,
Travis is coming back to autonomy.
Partners started to come out of the woodwork.
It's like, hey, I want autonomous wheelbase for freight
or I want autonomous wheelbase for blank.
Uber came back and said, hey, I know we'd love to use
your autonomous stuff if you're going to do it again.
And so getting the band back together meant, okay,
well, the guy who's running ATG,
when Uber had an autonomous program,
is working for me doing my robotics.
There's another guy, Anthony Levandowski,
who was doing an autonomous mining company
that I was the largest investor in.
I acquired his company, brought them in.
He's our CTO of autonomy.
And then we're off to the races.
And we're also now in the mining business.
And that's how the whole thing wraps up.
It is kind of awesome, right?
Restaurants, mining, in the same company.
It's frickin' awesome.
But the thread that pulls through it,
of course, you have this framework
for atoms-based computation.
But it's also, we go after large industries
and automate them one after another.
And when we're done with mining, we're going to go to another.
So we got, right now we've got food and mining.
And then there's platforms we do, like we do
a real estate platform that we use for ourselves, of course.
But we also build things for other people.
We have a transport platform
that, of course, we do for ourselves
for all of the autonomous things
that are happening in our industry efforts.
But other people can use as well.
It helps subsidize and pay for
the investment that we're making.
What is a transport platform?
Explain that to us.
So as it relates to robotics,
we believe in specialized robotics
that move and act in the physical world.
And I'll explain what that,
another way to think about that is non-humanoids.
That doesn't mean that I think humanoids suck.
They're going to do lots of cool things.
But you don't put a humanoid in a car to drive it.
You don't put a humanoid in a kitchen to make,
if you needed 1,000 pancakes an hour,
you wouldn't have a humanoid do it.
You'd have an iron apparatus, you'd put batter in it,
it would cook it perfectly brown, perfectly circular,
and you'd be churning out 500 a minute.
So when you go to industrial scale,
humanoids aren't the thing.
Specialized robotics are.
And the minute you go to specialized robotics,
you're like, well, they do two things.
They move and they act.
If they're going to move, that's on wheels, usually.
And if it's on wheels,
you need to do wheel-based autonomy.
You can't depend on somebody else to do that.
Because honestly, almost nobody does it.
And if you depend on them, they're going to say,
hey, you can use our wheel-based autonomy.
It'll just cost you 120% of your revenue.
So you just got to own it.
And so that's why we do that.
It sounds like this could be more companies
or more technology that starts spinning out of this.
There's lots of cool stuff.
So, like, for instance, you hear about the Frontier models,
and you talk to Dario and Sam.
But, like, there's Frontier models in the physical world, too,
that are totally different.
Because instead of, like, the input being all of the internet
and I'm downloading all these words
and trying to do something with it,
we have sensors that sense the physical world
and bring in point clouds and video.
And you go, okay, what do I do with that?
And, like, driving's really interesting, right?
Because in digital AI,
the output is a paragraph of something.
In physical AI, the output is speed and direction.
Just two things.
That's it.
Like, your tokens on the output side are, like, two tokens.
And so it's a totally different thing.
And so to do that well,
there's a whole effort we have internally
is defining the frontier of the physical world AI,
or what I call industrial AI.
Yeah.
I'm riffing hard.
No, that's right, right?
There's going to be frontier robot models
and frontier industrial models.
Because the current frontier models,
you know, they're reconstituted Reddit,
internet data they've scraped off the internet
or that they've been able to achieve from their users,
but they don't have that kind of data that you're talking about.
Yeah.
So it provides an opportunity for another capability.
That's right.
And so in the digital AI, you just download the internet.
In physical AI, there's no internet to download.
If you want to teach a car how to drive,
you then have to get lots of miles
and pull that in and teach it.
And you can't go download it somewhere.
So there's a whole effort of the production of the data
that you then use to then teach and learn.
Well, coming back to Cloud Kitchens,
what was the hard part there?
I mean, you're obviously a hugely accomplished entrepreneur.
You've done multiple companies,
large companies, small companies,
crossed industries.
You're exiting Uber.
You're looking for the next idea.
You have the vision of the hubs and the restaurants
and the autonomy.
What's the greatest challenge
that you had to really overcome to make Cloud Kitchens work?
I mean, going...
Look, it's one thing Uber people think about.
Oh, digital and physical, pretty cool.
But, like, child's play
compared to real atoms in physics.
We buy property in every major city in the world
and do construction in all those cities
and then sell to restaurateurs in that market.
We have software that is running that facility
but helping those restaurateurs run their business
in every single one of those markets.
The thing I would say is the atoms grind is real.
And remember, I was doing B2C,
like Uber is a consumer business.
I just put it in the app store.
Piece of cake.
I think there is, amongst the consumer guys,
what they don't really get
is the B2B grind is actually a really...
It's an art and a science
and being the best at it
is the difference between winning and losing.
And so that's also a thing about Salesforce
I have a huge amount of admiration for
is what you guys have done in go-to-market,
in reaching your customers, teaching them,
persuading them, and winning together with them
and doing that well.
And it comes down to the finance geeks
talk about LTV to CAC and ARR
and all these other metrics.
The magic number or whatever.
But the bottom line is at the bottom of it
has to be an inspired go-to-market process.
I tell my guys on the SMB side especially
is that the most important product we have
is go-to-market.
On the SMB it has to be.
You still have to have great products
but if you don't do go-to-market, it doesn't matter
how good your product is.
So I think that's also another one that's like
when you go from B2C to B2B
reality slaps you upside your head.
It's a real thing.
And you also very intentionally kind of went offline.
You went from a very public persona
to kind of seem like Travis disappeared for a while
but we all knew what you were doing.
You're building this incredible company.
And that was a very intentional strategy
that you personally took.
Is that a fair way to look at it?
Yeah, so we went stealth on this company
eight years ago.
I had a whole strategy like a deck that I would teach
like with my leadership team.
And we called it Be Uniconic.
And we worked our asses off to be unknown.
So up until a few months ago
I had thousands of employees.
Not a single one of them was listed on LinkedIn.
Think about that.
How ******* crazy is that?
That is one of the weirdest things of all time.
All my employees' families thought they were in the CIA
but what happened was at the end of my time at Uber
I was just like the world was getting weird.
Business became politics.
And you were starting to make decisions
based on what the New York Times was going to say tomorrow.
And I just wanted to wake up in the morning and build.
So it was a very intentional strategy.
Oh yeah, yeah.
And at some point we put the toothpaste back in the tube
like people forgot who I was.
And then this acquisition was kind of the door opened
and you're like now I can relaunch the company.
I just think there are a lot of things that happened all at once.
The world changed, right?
So when business becomes politics in the mid-2010s
people didn't realize it.
Think of your favorite politician.
Now go online and search for them
and what kind of terrible, horrible things are said about them.
Sometimes it's true.
But you know what I mean.
You can't really believe everything you read
and you know that there's going to be the haters.
We know this in politics.
What happened is it then got applied to business.
But we all sort of digested that,
came out the other side and were like okay,
we know that media is weird and it's not always correct.
And there are now channels where you can go out there
and optimistically talk about what you're building
and what you're trying to do.
So the world changed too.
You're a walking master class for entrepreneurship
because of the diversity of your entrepreneurial experience
on such a long period of time.
I think few people have as much learned knowledge as you do
on being able to create a start, create,
either sell or take a company public
and run a company and also continue to innovate
and transform and change.
So let's take that at the tippy top.
What are the top three rules for all entrepreneurs
going forward based on now what you know
as the master entrepreneur?
What are the three things that every entrepreneur must know?
That's funny.
I'll answer it and then tell a funny story.
Look, I've been working on this a long time.
All of us in the entrepreneurial game,
the leadership game, culture is the whole thing.
People talk about culture.
Sometimes they don't totally understand,
but it's basically how do you do what you do every day?
What does it feel like to be doing it?
And it in many ways has to be wrapped.
Success has to be woven into it.
But there's style points for how you do it.
So our three values are truth, trust, and passion.
Truth is about truth-seeking, obviously,
but we do a special kind of truth-seeking.
We call it valuable unknown truths.
This is a huge shift for you
from where you were a decade ago.
I don't know what you're talking about.
I mean, that would be like the last thing that you would say.
I just wanted to say that
because we had some pretty serious fights
like all the way down,
like blood on the floor on those words.
It's all good.
I can't say that I didn't learn from you, Mark.
Okay, much love.
All right, truth, trust, and passion.
Truth, trust, and passion.
So truth is about truth-seeking.
It goes two ways.
Valuable unknown,
how can you seek valuable unknown truths?
Are you good at it?
Valuable unknown truths,
things that are true that nobody else knows.
If you get good at that,
you know things other people don't know.
If you know things other people don't know,
you can do things other people can't do.
When you do that at scale,
you're bringing change,
interesting change, fast, okay?
But there's the other side of truth,
which is inward,
which is who are you,
self-awareness,
and what am I strong at,
what am I weak at,
and how do I get better every day?
So at Uber, we had a mindset called
be yourself.
We upgraded that in this one,
because each of these values has little mindsets.
We upgraded it.
We called be your best self.
Yeah?
Yeah.
So that's truth.
Yeah.
And I think that I have a teacher
who's no longer alive,
Thich Nhat Hanh,
he would say,
no mud,
no lotus.
I don't even know what that means.
Okay, no.
Okay, oh, fair.
Okay, it took me a second.
All right, gotcha.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
And that's kind of what you're saying.
Yeah.
And also, yeah,
so yeah, we all have strengths and weaknesses.
So everybody at my company,
we talk about our T's and B's,
the top three things,
the bottom three things.
And it's just honest.
And it's in a performance management system
where everybody's doing reviews of everybody else,
written,
not like secret 360 bullshit,
like straight up.
If you can't say it to the person's face,
you don't say it.
This kind of thing.
So that's a cultural choice.
I could go into the whole passion and trust thing.
Yeah, look, passion,
it's about making magic.
It's about winning.
It's about, you know,
it's about really loving your customer
and really delivering for them.
Trust is really important
because if you're making change really fast,
because you find valuable unknown truths at scale,
if you can build trust while you do that,
you have advocates versus adversaries, right?
And I could go on.
We have eight hours of content on this,
but that's basically how we do our thing.
That's how we think about it.
Yeah.
So speaking to other entrepreneurs out there,
this idea of aligning your core values like this,
you're talking about truth, trust, and passion
with now the core, you know,
vision or mission of your company,
this becomes critical going forward.
Is that right?
What else do entrepreneurs need to know
so they can really manifest at every level?
You know, look,
the way I think about truth, trust, and passion
is not just like that's for me.
I think that's for everybody,
which is we sort of develop what we call
a handbook for innovation,
which is about innovation at speed and at scale.
You know, like part of the trust thing, right,
is like don't...
On the trust thing,
we have this one called just change.
Okay?
So what does that mean, just change?
It means just change,
but it also means change that is just,
which means don't force change upon others
unless it's obviously and massively good.
No pyrrhic victories.
Like there's like...
So like I could go on,
but like the point that I guess I'm getting at
is we've tried to make a universal playbook
for how to innovate and do it with heart,
do it well, win at the end of the day.
How you apply those things to your business
is like very specific to your business.
You know, but one time I got in an Uber pool.
This was back when I was running Uber,
and you know, somebody recognized me.
I was on my way to the Uber office,
and somebody recognized me in the Uber pool,
and they're like,
oh my God, it's Travis, the founder of Uber.
He's in our Uber pool,
and he's like on the phone telling his friends he's texting,
and on my way, he's like,
dude, Travis, what do you have to say for an entrepreneur?
Like what's the thing?
Like what's your advice?
And I have a tough time with the one-liners,
and I'm just like,
you can bend reality, but don't break it.
That's all I could,
I just made it up.
He's like, oh my God,
he said bend reality and don't break it,
but I don't know.
I don't really have the one-liners
for how do you win, you know?
Yeah, so if we hit the big 180
and we went to the Wayback Machine,
and there you are,
you're starting Uber,
you're a different entrepreneur today
than you were then, right?
You've learned so much,
you've grown,
you've kind of taken yourself
to a whole nother level.
What is that one seminal jewel
that if you could go back
and give the pre-Uber Travis,
what would it be?
Yeah, look.
I'm sure you've thought a lot about it.
Yeah.
The company I did before Uber
was a very difficult one.
I mean, they're all difficult,
but this was tough
to just get off the ground.
The first four years,
I didn't have a salary,
I ran out of money many times,
I was on welfare,
you know, that kind of thing.
And in order to pay
for the groceries next week,
I had to be epically precise
to just make ends meet.
And I grinded it out
and barely made it out the other side.
So then Uber happens.
And it's like so vertical,
it's starting to tilt to the left.
You know, it's like up to the right.
No, no, this is like bending back.
I don't know.
It doesn't make sense,
but it's just a joke.
Okay, I'm trying to warm him up here.
Okay, so yeah.
So when you take that hardcore,
hardscrabble,
gnarly, intense entrepreneur
that barely could make ends meet,
trying to figure out how to pay for groceries,
and then apply that to the Uber problem,
that's what makes Uber Uber.
But you can get too close to the line.
And so I had a lawyer once who's like,
I defend every decision I ever made at Uber.
It was good intentions
and did the right thing.
I'll defend every single one of them.
But, you know, I had a lawyer who said like,
you know, you don't have chalk on your shoe.
He would make this sort of comment.
I'm like, yeah, I don't.
But in order to determine that,
you would need an electromagnetic scanning microscope
zoomed in.
You're like, you know what,
I don't think he, reverse, slow-mo.
And you're like, yeah, he doesn't have chalk on his shoe.
But the problem is is that when you get big,
there are different expectations.
And if you have to zoom in hard and think hard
and really look at the atoms
to make sure there's no chalk on the shoe,
you lost the plot.
Is that when you're big,
people think of you differently.
You have to act differently.
It's not that the,
even though there are one set of rules,
the world works in this way
and I didn't really get it.
And so you can get too close to the line when,
you know what, just be two inches off the line.
It's not a big deal.
And it was like that.
It's like, I was always doing the right thing,
but I had to prove,
I had to over and over and over prove it
because I was too,
too intense on that epic extra alpha,
too intense in being clever,
you know, that thing.
So now give us some inspiration.
You know, five years from now,
here's this incredible company, Atoms.
We've got the cloud kitchens now fully underway.
We've got the mining fully underway.
Sounds like we've got some incredible transport
kind of capabilities coming as well.
You know, where are we going?
What's the big shift that we can all expect,
you know, as we kind of head towards 2030?
Well, I'll do it from,
I mean, there's so many ways to answer that.
I'll just do it from my own perspective,
like what we're doing for a living.
When you sort of go down this industrial AI path
or automating industries,
you know, really what's happening is
we're going into a new industrial age.
Whether you are a fan of the first industrial revolution
or the second one,
I like the second one.
You've got some interesting characters
like Henry Ford and Carnegie
and a bunch of those guys,
and it's very physical and very Atoms-like.
We're entering an industrial age,
and we have made the call
that the best way to enter that
is to go full stack with that industry,
with those industries' leaders,
and help them automate things
in a way that makes sense for them.
And so we're just going to keep going
through a bunch of different industries
and help them in that automation.
These are physical industries.
It's sort of how we roll,
and I think we're going to,
you know, I think Elon talks about abundance.
I think there's a really good argument
for that's where things are ending up,
and I don't believe in no money or infinite.
I don't believe in infinity.
We're just going to be at a different level,
but human progress is going to see
a massive increase in the next 10 to 20 years
that I'm quite optimistic about.
Yeah.
Would everybody please thank Travis Kalanick
for coming to Dreamforce?
We're so thrilled to have you here.
Thank you.
