Travis Kalanick certainly has had a love-hate relationship with VCs over his career. As the founder of Uber he was a VC darling, raising what was then an unprecedented roughly $15 billion in venture funding during his tenure. Then, a boardroom battle with key investor Bill Gurley of venture firm Benchmark led to him being pushed out in 2017.
Now, he’s back raising mega funds for his robotics company Atoms, which just nabbed $1.7 billion, led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Ben Horowitz joining the company’s board.
In an episode of David Senra’s podcast that aired last weekend, Kalanick made clear he’s still salty about the Uber boardroom battle and that he tells founders not to raise from Benchmark. (His animus hasn’t seemed to have catastrophically damaged the venerable fund. It just raised another $2 billion across two new funds in June.)
His worldview on VCs is generally low, and it’s not based on just one traumatic experience. Kalanick, who has formed numerous companies across his career, warns that “a super high bar for a VC is ‘do no harm,’” yet, in his experience, just 10% of the VCs out there are capable of meeting that bar.
A far smaller percentage —”1%” by his estimate — are actually “helpful,” he told Senra. “But it’s hard. How the f* are they supposed to be helpful? … It’s hard for them to participate because they just aren’t in that deep.” On the podcast, he compared a founder to the “chess master” of the company, while the VC is a “chess enthusiast” that drops in once in a while to check the progress of the game.
