Atoms获a16z 17亿美元投资，Kalanick的物理行业计算机

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.

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.

(1) Travis is Back (with $1.7B from a16z)

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.

(2) Claude (and Levent Alpöge) Disprove the Jacobian Conjecture

During the World Cup final on Sunday night, Anthropic mathematician Levent Alpöge posted the finale of one of algebraic geometry’s most famous open problems: ‘hello there the jacobian conjecture is false.’ He thanked his friend Akhil for asking about it and his other ‘close friend,’ Claude Fable 5, for working on it during the game.

The Jacobian conjecture goes like this. Take a polynomial map from n-dimensional complex space back to itself. If its Jacobian determinant (the local measure of how the map stretches and squishes space) is always the same nonzero number, the map is locally reversible everywhere. The conjecture, generalized by Ott-Heinrich Keller in 1939, says that it must therefore be globally reversible, with a polynomial inverse.

Alpöge’s three-variable map has a Jacobian determinant that is always -2, satisfying the conjecture’s premise. But it sends three different points—(0, 0, -1/4), (1, -3/2, 13/2), and (-1, 3/2, 13/2)—to the exact same point, (-1/4, 0, 0). A map that turns three inputs into one output cannot have an inverse.

Look… I don’t know what I’m talking about here. Better to play with Simon Rezchikov’s visualization and explainer here if you’re really curious.

The bigger point is that these models, pointed by human mathematicians, are going on a conjecture disproving SPREE, to the point that Joscha Bach (jokingly?) proposed a moratorium on disproving until they’re good enough to prove.

That comment was in the replies to another disproval:

Adios Dinitz-Garg-Goemans! It looks like the Jacobian disproval was the 4-minute mile of disproving longstanding conjectures. Now everyone knows it’s possible, and they’re burning tokens on disproving their favorites. They’ll probably all fall soon (unless Anthropic keeps throttling (which I reproduced)).

At which point: 1) we’ll see how that translates into applications, and 2) neti neti.

(3) India’s First Private Rocket - Skyroot Vikram-1 - Reaches Orbit

Gopika Gopakumar and Nivedita Bhattacharjee for Reuters

Indian space startup Skyroot has reached orbit with Vikram-1, the country’s first privately developed orbital rocket.

My friend Christian Keil at a16z described Skyroot’s Vikram-1 like this: “Think of it as the Indian Electron. Roughly equivalent in size to the RocketLab rocket, also non-reusable.” I want to be clear that he described it that way. Apparently a lot of his “new Indian haters” didn’t like him comparing it to the “workhorse rocket for a $40 billion company (RocketLab).”

So just the facts: Vikram-1 is 22 meters tall and carries up to 350 kilograms. It has three solid stages and a liquid orbital-adjustment module powered by a 3D-printed engine. On its maiden flight, it delivered customer payloads to a 450-kilometer orbit. The whole trip took about fifteen minutes.