Kalanick argues that industrial robotics need their own autonomy stack to scale across multiple hundred-billion-dollar industries. ✦ AI generated
Travis Kalanick · a16z Podcast · 2026-08-14 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 12:23
If you're not doing humanoids, right, humanoids are like low scale, do low-scale tasks in human environments. If you're doing high-scale tasks, industrial scale tasks, you are going to make specialized machines that move and act in the physical world. The key part is move. If they're moving, they got to have wheels. if they have wheels, you gotta you got to make the autonomy for those machines, those specialized robotics which are transforming that industry. Um, and if you depend on only one or two companies that exist, you're not going very far. Um, so autonomy is sort of like a critical part or critical platform you have to first make for yourself.
verbatim transcript · starts at 12:23
12:23is move. If they're moving, they got to have wheels. if they have wheels, you gota you got to make the autonomy for those machines, those specialized robotics which are transforming that industry. Um, and if you depend on only one or two companies that exist, you're not going very far. Um, so autonomy is sort of like a critical part or critical platform you have to first make for
12:47yourself. Um, but there's lots of other industries that you can make it for, right? So, we know Phelps is the gold medals guy, but I like to say that transport is full of silver medals, right? A lot of people think about ride sharing as a gold medal. What about food delivery? What about parcel delivery? What about personal autonomy? What about trucking, freight? What about off-road autonomy? Like with mining? There's many
13:15hund multiundred billion dollar industries that are going to be powered by these specialized robotics and that are made for industry. These computers made for industry. And here's sort of like a breakdown of some really interesting just several of the silver medals that are out there. And I say, look, if you make autonomy and you make it really fast, faster than than Whimo's making it, let's just say,