5 Business Lessons from the Founder of Uber (Travis Kalanick)

0:00I worked for Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber, for almost 5 years. Reporting directly to him, I built a huge business that I [music] built from scratch. He taught me his playbook, the values and techniques it takes to operate at the highest level. Do you want to be part of the future? Or do you want to resist the future? When you face adversity, when you get knocked down, you get back up. If it is not painful, [music]

0:28you're clearly not pushing hard enough. Now that I'm building Cloud Kitchens, I'm applying [music] everything I've learned from him. But I keep asking myself, will the student surpass the master? Can I build Cloud Kitchens into something as massive as Uber? Can you tell us a little bit about your mentor, Travis Kalanick? I've been an entrepreneur for like over a decade. I've worked in different teams, but I think the person that had the most impact on me is Travis Kalanick, and I also gave me a a lot of pointers of like how to scale Cloud Kitchens, how to think about growing Cloud Kitchens, how to be extremely

1:03ambitious about the vision for Cloud Kitchens. [music]

1:13I moved to LA right after living in New York for 7 years. In a New York, I was like building like apps. But since in LA, it was more of a mellow time, well, until I met Travis Kalanick and like we started like building Cloud Kitchens at scale like all over the world.

1:41Let's try this. Mhm. Mhm. Very good. I'm going to choke on the cheeseburger. Very good.

1:56I met Ben. We were in downtown LA and he was doing laps around the office uh speaking on the phone. And he had like a a French accent and reach out to him and it was like, "Hey man, like uh you know, I'm Guido. Like would love to meet you. Love to spend some time with you. You

2:11know, by the way, I also speak French." And I remember him looking at me like doing a little smile and then say, "Do you really speak French?" Immediately under pressure I started speaking French and then look at me and say, "Okay, that's good enough." And then he started with that. [laughter] We started talking. Yeah, we kind of became like, you know, work buddies. Uh we're both both building business. It was a fun experience. Um Guido is a really good buddy of mine. We used to work together with Travis Kalanick at Cloud Kitchens. He was leading like a a software business line and I was leading [music] a marketing

2:39business line. Uh so yeah, so we were always like with Travis, traveling with Travis, and meeting with Travis. So like we got we became really tight along the 5 years we worked together. He became an investor of Fosia, which is cool. Always great reminiscing about the Travis years cuz we you know, we both love Travis and we both like, you know, spent a lot of time working with Travis. He actually worked at Uber with Travis where he was leading like a a huge market for Uber

3:03Eats. He's an OG.

3:09[music]

3:17The journey of building Fosia as a company started like all of 2025 when I decided to leave Gift Shop. And the first thing I decided to do was like, "You know what? Let me go travel the world." Well, I'm on my solo retreat. [music]

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3:52April to November when I started to build Botia, [music] I essentially was hustling, traveling, talking to AI all day, building blanks. [music] And then I was like, "Oh, but I decided to build a company OS. I could build this company that builds companies and like I could do this and could have all these agents work for me and then orchestrate them and it could help me as a founder. But essentially like I was grinding so hard. I was like then I was like, "Oh, [music] but then in to make blanks better but then I'm going to build like a terminal app." The idea was like building all those SaaS and have

4:20them independently work and then later connecting them into company OS. But I realized like it was such a grind and there was a lot of hustle into like building those and never giving up and like I remember in October 2025 I started becoming a little depressed. So that's how I've been feeling a little my essentially body stress. [music] Head stress not so much but body stress which

4:45is like a little annoying. That's what entrepreneurship is about. It's [music] like, you know, this champions mindset. This like, you know, when you get pushed down you get back up. That's what Travis [music] Kalanick always told me and this is how you move forward. It's like you never really give up and you never Yeah, sometimes it affects you a little bit and then you move on and you get back up and you move on and you go to the next. Obviously like there's a way to approach grinding and hustling that [music] could feel negative and feel like, "Oh, I'm grinding. I'm like it's a negative. Like

5:16I'm tired." But when Travis says, "No, no, no. [music] It's one of the core values of entrepreneurship. If you're an entrepreneur, always be hustling is cool. It's like this is the way to go." Uh I see a number of entrepreneurs who don't have that hustle. And they they're afraid and they act out of that fear and when you act out of

5:36that fear you make big mistakes. October to November 2025, you know what? Let me stop trying to play small. Let me go big.

5:53[music] You know, another value of that I learned from Travis is big ball bets. So big ball bets is about really setting up seeds today that may pay off in 10 years. And so as a company, if you're setting up big ball bets regularly, and then you you write half of the time or whatever, then you you're going to continuously create a company that innovates and that creates strong

6:16innovation. The harder it is, the more weird, gnarly, whatever words, whatever superlative you want to put in front of it, the more awesome it would be to solve it, the more excited I get. And the problems that are more awesome to solve are the ones that people think are are impossible to solve. [bell] [music] The initial bet I make I was making on Pulsia was a big ball bet on itself to to have you know, a company that can make companies, can help people become

6:48founders. From beginning of November to mid-December when I launched it, I was just like all in like 24/7 building it. And when you're inspired with those tools, it was just like magic. [music]

7:06Number six, make magic. The way we [music] you would think about make magic is like really to delight users, like to delight people, to make [music] products effortless, to make them like you know, joyful. And obviously [music] like when it comes to Uber, it was you know, like the fact that like on the device, you could see the cars driving by [music] around you and then when you called one, the car was like going towards you and like you could see it go towards you and like at

7:32the time it was very novel. And so [music] when you see magic, you know it. It inspires. It can be aesthetic on the outside, but sometimes you can't see it. I think in terms of like make magic, one of the things that like I obsessed over at one point was like the idea that like there would be a personal [music] connection with with the AI, right? So, like the fact that I added like the mood, and now it's like actually faces that are like pre-designed, [music] but initially it was like literally Obvious just designing something every time it had a mood. So, sometimes it was a face, and sometimes it was like a

8:01little heart, and sometimes it was like a little It was anything the AI was thinking through how it would show its emotions as it was working on the problem. That added a lot of personal touch to the product, and they're also part of Make Magic. And essentially trying to make everything I do for Balsamiq, just like think through like

8:18how can I make magic? The lifestyle of entrepreneurship [music] is this sort of pride in I can take more pain than the other guy. You go, "Why?" Well, [music] the best example is like world-class marathoner. On mile 21, is that dude smiling? Mhm. [ __ ] no. [music] What is the difference between feeling pain and not feeling pain? Is that extra push. That extra push means he loses [music] if he's not getting into that pain. And

8:46that's what excellence is.

9:01You know, like towards [music] March 2026, like you know, like the marketing stunts of AI raising around started blowing up, and I started to [music] get tons of customers and all of that. So, I was starting to be much more public into my marketing and building more and more in public. And then the customer base became [music] so big, and really what I

9:18had built initially was an MVP, right? That broke a lot of things, and like it was pretty stressful stressful, right? I essentially had built an agent that would like check the health of the infrastructure, and I would say, "Hey, post on Slack either green and just don't say anything else. If it's yellow, you can start giving more information. If it's red, like you know, it's got red, like just explain [music] what the issue is. I would go to bed at night and like I would wake up every 2 hours and just check my phone and check if like it was green or yellow or red. And

9:45sometimes I remember at like 5:00 a.m. I woke up and I was like, "It's red." And I was like, "Fuck." And I was so exhausted and I would go to my computer and be like, "Okay, Claude, like, we need to figure this out."

10:00It's about hustle. [music] It's about not being scared of failing. It's about understanding that the the learnings come [music] from failure. The the concept of failing and then winning is what Travis Kalanick would say. The he calls it champion's heart, which is when you get punched, you get back up, always. Every time you get punched, you get back up. You're

10:21unstoppable. Because it's actually you're not scared. You always get back up. The person in front of you will eventually give up. Then I obviously I had the bill. When suddenly I had like a million-dollar bill and that was such a mess because I was like, "Well, I'm going to go bankrupt if it discontinues. If the growth continues and like the bill goes from 1 million to 2 million to 3 million to 5 million dollars a month, like, you know, I don't have unlimited money and like no investors would fund a

10:45money-losing business." And same thing, it's like, "Okay, there's a setback, but let me hustle and let me, you know, get back up and you go fix it." And then like when it's done, you're good.

11:08Bid, on the other hand, is like this notion [music] of like, you know, build it, break it, move fast, play with a bunch of different ideas, look for the signal. If you don't have any signal, move on to the next set of ideas and go. [music] And that's very much the Travis. I know Travis well and that's my sense is how [music] Travis really works. Like, a lot of direct reports, you know, very controlling, really [music] founder driven in each aspect of the business. Everything from engineering to growth marketing, [music] to finance, to market whatever it is. Just everything really having your hands in it. And

11:44[music] Ben is that type of entrepreneur.

11:59Customer-centric focus. Yeah. Speak to that for a moment. A lot of people go, "Oh, I'm going to be customer-obsessed. I'm going to lower the price." Well, if you don't exist in business Yeah. next year cuz you went out of business, you aren't customer-obsessed. So, customer-obsessed means you you have to have a lot of heart for the customer. You have to have a lot of love for them,

12:21but you also have to have a lot of ROI. So, what was your experience using Pulsya um for our tech? Well, right away when I signed up, I was like, "Oh, wow. Okay." Cuz based on your interview and what you said about it, if this works at all, I'd be impressed. And it did. And I instantly saw the potential for certain people in certain kinds of businesses or services or whatever they

12:45did. Yeah. And if they were just like, "I don't know how to get started. I don't know what to do." that this was like, "Get on the freight train and hold on, you know, cuz it's we're we're going, you know." And what I want to do with Pulsya is really enable like non-technical people to realize that AI is so powerful as AI gets better and

13:02better and better. We don't get a world where like only the happy few in Silicon Valley and New York and Miami benefit and become like super rich, while everyone else is just doesn't know. It's really good to meet people in person [music] and lucky that's well, a bunch of customers in SF, so we'll be meeting more of them. Sort of like telling the story about how they use it, you know, there's people from different walks of life that use Pulsya. Some of them are more technical, some of them are less technical, and it's really good to meet people in person to understand what they like, what they don't like,

13:32how to make it the product better. It's trying to be a very universal product, so it's really important to like stay really in touch with customers, and I'm very excited for for that, and it was so good to hear Mike's story.

13:49I think that Travis is one of those entrepreneurs that like, you know, shaped my entrepreneurial career. If I didn't work for Travis at Cloud Kitchens, then me being in the situation where I built Pulsia, and I think this clarity and this like sort of like multifaceted sort of vision on like engineering, product, marketing, finance, and seeing as a whole and being like, "No, I want to impact a billion people." Of course, it's easy to say I want to impact a billion people, but like I worked for a [music] guy, Travis, that impacted a billion people with Uber. I feel like you taught me everything I need to

14:24[music] know, and I worked for you for 5 years, and I feel I can make you proud, and I think that like I can build something very meaningful. And yeah, and that's what I'm doing at Pulsia, [music] and like and of course, it's easier said than done. It's a lot of grind. You have to have a champion's heart. You have to always be hustling. [music] You have to make magic. You have to make these big bold bets, and you have to be customer obsessed. But I think that together all these values, I think [music] are going to give me the wings to give it my best shot and to take a swing

14:50[music] at it, and I really think I'm I'm going to achieve it. And like it's it's all thanks to my experience [music] with him, and yeah.

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