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Why Travis Kalanick believes humans are on the verge of a ‘golden age’

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The Uber-famous founder, Travis Kalanick, says a new golden age is coming — and it’s robots that are ushering it in.

Kalanick announced a new venture called Atoms on Friday in a 1,600-word screed in which he said the automation of the physical world is the next phase of the AI era.

“Software has automated tasks of language and math, but the complete automation of the physical world — autonomy — remains largely untouched territory, the principal unlock to the next era of progress and abundance,” he wrote. “History refers to this kind of moment of radical progress as a Golden Age.”

Kalanick said this “golden age” is emerging as production and transportation become driven primarily by computation, minerals, and energy. With autonomous machines building other machines and software constantly improving itself, he said, productivity could reach unprecedented levels.

“The organization of human capital becomes superhuman,” he wrote.

Kalanick later said on the tech talk show TBPN on Friday that Atoms has been operating in stealth mode for the past eight years. Now, the company aims to expand its delivery infrastructure beyond food into industries such as food service, mining, and transportation.

He said in his announcement that the company’s goal is to create “gainfully employed robots.” He defines these as “specialized robots with productive jobs that bring abundance to their owners and society at large.”

He also said humans should be careful about building robots in their own image. “I watched the half-marathon and couldn’t help but think how much better it would be if they just had wheels,” he wrote, referring to a competition in Beijing last year that pitted humanoid robots against each other.

Kalanick cofounded Uber in 2009. He led the company as CEO until 2017, when he stepped down amid reports of a toxic workplace culture and ongoing regulatory battles.

He isn’t the only tech executive who believes AI robots should extend beyond humanoid form.

The cofounder and CEO of World Labs, Fei-Fei Li, said on the No Priors podcast last year that building physical AI in a singular form is energy inefficient.

“Just an extreme and trivial example, if we put robots underwater, they should not be the shape of humans,” she said. “They better be in the shape of fish. Just think about energy efficiency. The same with flying.”




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The ‘Godfather of SaaS’ says he replaced most of his sales team with AI agents: ‘We’re done with hiring humans’

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Jason Lemkin, known to some as the Godfather of SaaS, says the time has come to push the limits of AI in the workplace.

In practice, Lemkin, the founder of SaaStr, the world’s largest community of business-to-business founders, said on Lenny’s Podcast recently that this means he will stop hiring humans in his sales department.

Instead, SaaStr is going all in on agents, which are commonly defined as virtual assistants that can complete tasks autonomously. They break down problems, outline plans, and take action without being prompted by a user.

He said the company now has 20 AI agents automating tasks once handled by a team of 10 sales development representatives and account executives.

That move from an entirely human workforce to an agent-based workforce was rapid.

In May, SaaStr had just one AI agent in production that it used for various digital tasks, Lemkin said. That month, though, during the SaaStr Annual — its yearly gathering of over 10,000 founders, executives, and VCs — two of its high-paid sales representatives abruptly quit.

Lemkin said he turned to his chief AI officer and said, “We’re done with hiring humans in sales. We’re going to push the limits with agents.”

Lemkin’s calculus was that it just wasn’t worth the cost of hiring another junior sales representative for a $150,000 a year position who would eventually quit, when he could use a loyal AI agent instead.

Amelia Lerutte, SaaStr’s chief AI officer, told Business Insider by email that by June, the company began ramping up the number of agents it had in production.

“We had only 1 non-core agent at the time with Delphi, but didn’t go deep on 2 to 20+ until the beginning of June,” she said. “It was a conscious choice after their departure to reallocate some (but not all) head count spend to agents.”

At the SaaStr office, the 10 desks that once belonged to humans on the go-to-market team are now labeled with the names of agents, like “Quali for qualified,” “Arty for artisan,” and “Repli for Replit,” Lemkin said.

Lemkin said SaaStr is training its agents on its best humans.

“Train an agent with your best person, and best script, then that agent can start to become a version of your best salesperson,” he said.

SaaStr’s process is similar to how Vercel, the cloud-based platform for developers, trained a sales agent off its top performer for six weeks by documenting every step of their work, and then building an agent to mimic their process.

Many companies are experimenting with AI agents, but risks remain. One of the big ones is the threat of data leaks and cybercrime.

“AI agents, in order to have their full functionality, in order to be able to access applications, often need to access the operating system or the OS level of the device on which you’re running them,” Harry Farmer, a senior researcher at the Ada Lovelace Institute, recently told Wired.

All of that access creates more potential attack points for cybercriminals.

Security threats aside, Lemkin said that the net productivity of agents is about the same as humans. However, he said, agents are more efficient and can scale — just like software.




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