Hi friends 👋,Happy Friday and welcome to the 203rd Weekly Dose of Optimism. At least here in New York City, the weather is 10/10, it’s a summer Friday, and you probably want to spend some time outside. So let’s cut this intro short and here’s an audio version (my AI voice, so please excuse the pronunciation of “a16z”) if you want to pop it in your ears and walk around. 0:00-11:09Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.Peep the Extra Doses for some wild science, an excellent essay on the Frontier, and an absolutely stellar 50-year land art project.Let’s get to it.In Dose #185 in March, we talked about Travis Kalanick’s emergence from the stealthiest stealth in startup history with his new/old company, Atoms, which plans to do everything. Well Travis is back again. On Wednesday, Atoms announced a $1.7 billion equity investment led by a16z, with Ben Horowitz joining the board, which is a very rare occurrence these days, to make up for past mistakes on both sides, per Travis:I’ve known Marc and Ben for a long time, and we got oh-so-close to partnering up at Uber in 2011. I blame Marc, Ben blames himself but let’s just say it was on all of us and in 2017 Uber suffered the consequences of not having Marc on the board - iykyk.Notably, Uber is also participating. Benchmark is not. “On many levels, this round is a bit of unfinished business,” Kalanick wrote. In 2011, a16z came very close to leading Uber’s Series B before the deal fell apart and Menlo Ventures led the $32 million round instead. a16z, which is assembling the mid-2010 founder Infinity Stones with Kalanick and Adam Neumann, doesn’t make the same mistake twice.Not that it really matters when it’s Travis Kalanick, but what is a16z investing in? After leaving Uber heartbroken in 2017, Kalanick bought City Storage Systems, turned CloudKitchens into its best-known business, and spent eight years building in near-total silence. Employees couldn’t put the company on their LinkedIn, for example.Meanwhile, the company hired thousands of people, expanded across 30 countries, bought and developed real estate, wrote restaurant software, built robots, and learned what it takes to operate complicated physical systems every day. As part of this round, those businesses have been merged into one Atoms equity structure.Atoms looks less like a startup than a conglomerate: food, mining, and transport all under one corporate umbrella. Kalanick’s unifying idea for Atoms (and Uber before it) is that physical industries can be built like computers. In Kalanick’s model, manufacturing is the CPU that transforms atoms, real estate is the storage layer, and transportation is the network that moves atoms from one place to another.Food is the furthest along version of Kalanick’s computer today: CloudKitchens supplies delivery-first real estate. Otter is the restaurant OS. ProFood builds large-scale food infrastructure. Picnic handles office lunch delivery. Lab37 builds the robots. Lab37’s Bowl Builder takes an order from a restaurant’s point-of-sale system, dispenses and weighs the ingredients, applies sauce, lids the bowl, labels it, puts it in a bag with utensils, and closes the bag. The machine can assemble up to 300 bowls per hour (200 if it has to bag them, which Kalanick said on TBPN is surprisingly hard), and Lab37 says it can reduce assembly labor by more than 40%. It is already operating in restaurants. On the Mining side, Atoms acquired Pronto, the autonomous-haulage company founded by former Uber and Google autonomy pioneer Anthony Levandowski, and made it the technology engine of Atoms Mining. Pronto retrofits existing Caterpillar, Komatsu, and other haul trucks instead of requiring a mine to buy an entirely new fleet. At Heidelberg Materials’ Lake Bridgeport quarry in Texas, a mixed fleet running Pronto’s system autonomously hauled more than two million tons of limestone in under eight months. Pronto now has an agreement to deploy on more than 100 trucks across over a dozen Heidelberg sites, is expanding to two more quarries this year, and signed a partnership with Hitachi Construction Machinery last week. In his latest TBPN interview, Kalanick says autonomy can improve mine productivity by 30% to 40%. Transport, the third Atoms division, is still mostly hidden. Kalanick describes it as a wheelbase for robots. TBD. In total, Atoms has assembled seven operating companies and shown credible proofs in food and mining. It is yet to be seen whether he can turn all of those pieces into one really big computer, if he ends up with a disconnected menagerie of good businesses, or if the whole thing crumbles under its own weight. But this Travis Kalanick waging war on some of civilizations’s biggest challenges, all at once, with potentially the biggest chip on any billionaire’s shoulder and a desire to make Benchmark miss out on trillions of dollars in returns. If you want to bet against him, that’s on you. I’m happy cheering on The Return of the King. levent@__alpoge__hello there the jacobian conjecture is false thanx to my close friend akhil for asking about it and my other close friend fable for working during the world cup final