Building in stealth for 8 years across 30 countries with thousands of employees creates a self-fulfilling invisibility where media can't cover you because the narrative gap is too wide.
Kalanick explains how remaining in stealth for eight years created an information gap so large that even when leaks happened, journalists couldn't build a coherent story around them. ✦ AI generated
Travis Kalanick · a16z Podcast · 2026-07-22 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 33:20
if you go that long … there's this break in your narrative … it's discontinuous. It stops and there's this … long period of time now where nothing is filling in. And what happens then is the media doesn't want to cover a story because it's so hard to discuss a thing that has a gap a few years before it. So you get to this place where it becomes self-fulfilling — it's easier to be stealth over time because even if somebody tries to leak, nobody even knows what to do with it.
verbatim transcript · starts at 33:20
33:14>> Yeah. You don't really I don't you know but eventually there's this break in your narrative like there was this story arc and it was going going and then it's discontinuous. It stops and there's this Whoops. Sorry about that guys. There's this long period of time now where nothing is filling in. And what happens then is the media doesn't want to cover a story because they it's so hard to discuss a
33:47thing that has a gap a few years before it. So it's too hard to do the story and it's too hard to cover it. So you get to this place where it becomes self-fulfilling. >> Yeah. >> Where it's easier to be stealth over time because even if somebody tries to leak, nobody even knows what to do with it. >> They're just like, I don't even understand. And by the way, we did crazy
34:10stuff. So people know it as cloud kitchens in the US. >> But it's casinos in Latin America. >> And we have different names. That means like magical kitchens essentially. Uh we have like kitchen valley in Korea. We have Flash Kitchen and three other names in China. We have I mean food stars in London like go it goes you know >> you know I think it's uh Kitchen Park in
34:35Middle East. We were going to go with Yala kitchens like you know it's like a bunch of things like this. So it was very hard to connect the dots. >> Yeah, [laughter] you're extra still. >> Yeah. >> Anyways, >> it worked. And so at at some point an even bigger vision for for this company emerges to to digitize the physical world. We're we're category creating the you're creating a new category the term
34:56industrial AI. >> Yeah. >> Talk about when this bigger vision starts to culminate. >> So look the the vision for digitizing the physical world for me started at Uber. Okay. And treating atoms like bits started at Uber. You were it was sci-fi at one point. I promise you would touch glass and a car would come to you. >> Yeah. [snorts] >> And you had satellite view. You're