A couple of years ago, Uber co-founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick gave a keynote speech at a niche industry conference called Food on Demand in Las Vegas. It was among the first public appearances from the executive in his role as CEO of CloudKitchens, a real estate and ghost kitchen company converting warehouse spaces into commissary kitchens for restaurants building delivery-only concepts, a business that was once predicted to reach a $1 trillion by 20301. In front of an eager audience, Kalanick laid out his growth and automation plans for the restaurant-adjacent company, invoking, as he is wont to do, Uber’s success.
“Can you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car?” he rhetorically asked the audience. That was his plan, he said, for CloudKitchens and its associated companies, a robotics business called Lab37, restaurant operations platform Otter, and Picnic, an office catering platform. Together, these initiatives become, per Kalanick, “infrastructure for better food.”
But CloudKitchens was never a restaurant company… and, spoiler alert, it wasn’t about the food, either. It was a huge, expensive bet on disrupting the restaurant industry by force and scale backed by over a billion dollars in investment; a familiar playbook in early 2000s tech. The trouble is, it didn’t work. CloudKitchens operated in a kind of permanent stealth mode, its secrecy hiding complaints, stumbles, and struggles common to tech-forward “restaurant” companies trying to scale food like software.
Last week, Kalanick said he would roll CloudKitchens into a new venture called Atoms, adding automation in transportation and, of all things, mining, into its portfolio, alongside all the restaurant stuff. “It’s not entirely clear how he plans to tackle mining and transportation,” TechCrunch reported after the announcement. Honestly, it’s not all that clear how the company, 10 years in, plans to tackle food, either.
I was in Vegas when Kalanick spoke at that conference in 2024, but not inside the Bellagio ballroom where he took the stage. I was denied a press pass because I wouldn’t provide a year of free access to this newsletter to the conference organizers. (I do not barter my coverage or paywalled content for access to industry events. Media passes are routinely offered to press interested in covering trade events, I am clearly still annoyed by this shut-out.) Instead, as Kalanick dazzled a friendly crowd from the stage without taking any questions from the assembled operators and technologists, I sat just outside, catching friends, contacts, and other industry pros as they exited the venue.
The consensus, based on reports from those in the audience: Kalanick painted an uncontested, rosy, even impressive picture of the business and his plans for scale. People loved it, and I understand why; Kalanick is a skilled presenter with an undeniable track record, and proximity to an internet billionaire tends to inspire a certain kind of awe in an audience less used to experiencing it.
I promise this is not my conference-related animosity talking, but I was never sold on the CloudKitchens stated bet on restaurants largely because of Kalanick’s track record as Uber’s leader. I followed the company’s meteoric rise from San Francisco, where [disclosure] my now-husband, then-boyfriend was an early tester of the service2. Later, I’d devour Super Pumped, a book by New York Times journalist Mike Isaac that recounts the early, formative, and ethically questionable days of the transportation disrupter with Kalanick at the helm. To anyone watching closely, the future playbook of Atoms Food-née-CloudKitchens’ restaurant delivery disruption (or optimization, as the industry loves to call it) was already written.
From the New York Times review of Super Pumped, written by Leslie Berlin, a noted Silicon Valley historian:
“Isaac depicts Kalanick as an evil bro-genius, bent on world domination through ride-sharing. A charmer when he wanted to be and a math whiz since childhood, Kalanick understood that Uber could succeed only if it grew faster than any competitor, attracting large numbers of riders and drivers in cities across the globe. He let nothing get in the way of that growth — not the livelihood of drivers, not the health and welfare of employees, not the counsel of his own advisers, not the laws and regulations of multiple states, and not the rules of Apple’s app store (which in Isaac’s account worried Kalanick more than a few pesky laws).”
Still, when Uber’s founder makes a move, the powerful respond. Just under a decade after he was forced out as Uber’s leader, Kalanick has reportedly attracted investment dollars from the transportation giant while still leaning on the restaurant business to carry his vision forward.
“Valuable unknown truths”
Atoms Food’s vision, as laid out in a rambling but vague statement published to its website, is the same CloudKitchens value prop Kalanick offered years ago from the conference stage: “Infrastructure for better food.” As covered in Isaac’s book and most stories ever written about the Uber founder, Kalanick, probably for (venture) capital reasons, thinks only at scale and speed — proven enemies to many food and restaurant businesses, like those CloudKitchens hoped to court as customers. Now here he is, again forcing disruption even though such grandiose ideas as those included in Atoms’ vision for its food division, when considered against the backdrop of actual food industry operations, kind of fall apart.
For example: In his treatise, Kalanick hypes the idea of a fleet of “gainfully employed robots,” by examining a restaurant hypothetical: an industrial kitchen that needs to make 1,000 pancakes per hour. That’s the equivalent of 333 short-stack orders — IHOP could never, but maybe a college cafeteria would want to try? The best way to solve this highly specific “problem,” Kalanick writes, is a purpose-built pancake-making machine to produce batter at a large scale and cook pancakes “with a heated iron apparatus” that can cook 100 at a time.
“This is where specialized robotics shine,” he writes.
I guess I can see the vision after writing about, among other automation efforts, salad- and bowl-making robots for the last decade. But even those, including the one that CloudKitchens sister company Lab37 operates, can be tweaked for multiple cuisines and ingredients. It’s less clear what an industrial-scale, purpose-built pancake bot might do in its free time, assuming there’s not a pressing need for it to produce hundreds of orders every hour of the day.
Or maybe the pancake bot is hypothetical, an easily understandable example of a future gainfully employed robot in this system that Kalanick dreams of implementing. But it’s too far detached from operational reality to hold water.
Also as part of his vision for Atoms, the restaurant/transit/mining company, Kalanick writes:
“In the battle against entropy, humans optimize for finding valuable unknown truths. Because when you are good at discovering valuable unknown truths, you know things others don’t know. And when you are good at knowing things others don’t, you can do things that others can’t.”
Here, he’s presenting the new company, pancake robot and all, as an antidote to chaos. He paints this chaos, which I’d simply call… life, as an unforgivable inefficiency meant to be corrected by a single solution. This analysis, both reductive and, in my opinion, untrue, begs two questions, which maybe the future Atoms Food will answer in its second decade: Did Kalanick bother to understand the food business to begin with? And, in service of Atoms Food’s future investment-fueled growth, does it even matter?
This was, of course, in the height of the 2020 no-contact, delivery-forward pandemic, though I don’t know that this prediction has ever been formally revised as the business evolved.
High-fives to anyone else who remembers the elusive white Uber Towncar among a sea of black Towncars and limousines fulfilling Ubercab’s earliest promise.