Travis Kalanick's return: doing to the kitchen what Uber did to the car
Key takeaways from an a16z reunion conversation with Travis KalanickDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, CEO of CloudKitchens, and Ben Horowitz (August 2026):
Do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car. Kalanick's thesis for CloudKitchens is to make preparing and delivering a quality meal so efficient that it approaches the cost of a grocery-store trip — restructuring food the way Uber restructured personal transport.
Built deliberately in stealth. He kept the parent name intentionally forgettable — City Storage Systems ("people think it's CSS, HTML") — to stay under the radar, over the objections of former Uber board member David Drummond.
A three-part physical-world stack. The model combines co-located production and logistics real estate, automated ("robotic") food production, and robotic couriers — an "internet food court" delivering high-quality meals near grocery-store prices.
Framed as digitised manufacturing and real estate. Kalanick describes the opportunity as "CPU and storage for the physical world" — digitising manufacturing and real estate — and treats it as a portfolio play with room for innovation well beyond his own venture.
Labour is the restaurant's biggest problem. He argues robotics is core because labour is the largest cost and constraint for restaurateurs; solving it, plus selling the tooling to brick-and-mortar operators, is where the scale lies.
Why come back at all. Reflecting on his 2017 Uber exit amid lawsuits, Kalanick says the drive to build again is "not about where you start, it's about why you start" — one of the rare founders who made his money and still wanted to keep playing.
Read more: a16z
