Travis Kalanick sees benefits of stealth mode. ‘You build a culture of people that want to build’

The new company is called Atoms and sprang from his real estate company, City Storage Systems, which owns ghost-kitchen operator CloudKitchens.

“The whole idea was can you get a meal that’s prepared and delivered to you so efficiently that it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store,” Kalanick said on the TBPN show on Friday. “Because if you do, you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car.”

He also said that he’s on the verge of acquiring Pronto, a self-driving startup focused on industrial and mining sites that was created by former Uber colleague and Trump official Anthony Levandowski. The Information first reported the deal and said the company also has backing from Uber.

Kalanick was ousted as Uber CEO in 2017 via a shareholder revolt amid allegations that he ignored reports of sexual harassment at the company.

Google also sued Uber for allegedly stealing trade secrets related to autonomous driving. Levandowski was convicted but avoided prison after getting a pardon from President Donald Trump.

During his interview on TBPN, Kalanick acknowledged the challenge of running Uber during intense public scrutiny and “dealing with 100 headlines every day.”

“So I was just like, I gotta wake up every day and sort of just get to work and build,” he recalled. “So I went under the radar.”

But that also meant thousands of his employees were not allowed to put the name of the company on their LinkedIn profiles. That’s despite choosing a purposely nondescript name, City Storage Systems, after previously toying with the idea of calling the company “Super.”

Instead, he decided to go “full underground, full stealth” which created some obstacles when recruiting talent to the startup. 

“You have a name like City Storage Systems, and it’s like, ‘so do you guys just have like these these boxes sitting in parking lots?’” Kalanick said.

But there are advantages to being in stealth for so long, he added. For one, he said he has the best recruiters in the world.

Flying under the radar also attracts a certain type of employee and contributes to a more progress-oriented, unselfish environment.

“What you get when you create a culture around that is you have you then build a culture of builders,” Kalanick explained. “You build a culture of people that want to build and do not need to be famous when they do it, which basically means emotional intelligence.”