Travis Kalanick reignites VC criticism: '1% are helpful'

Travis Kalanick 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 — before 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 landed $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 catastrophically damage the fund — it just raised another $2 billion across two new funds in June.

Kalanick’s worldview on VCs is generally low, and not based on just one experience: he warns that “a super high bar for a VC is ‘do no harm,’” yet in his experience just 10% of VCs are capable of meeting that bar. A far smaller share — “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.” 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.

Still, Kalanick isn’t telling founders to avoid VC money. He advises founders to have a pitch so honed it creates a bidding war among firms, sharing a modestly detailed plan — too little detail won’t attract funding, but too much is off-putting, especially when the AI world is moving so fast that heavy detail comes off as naive.

Kalanick also reflected on his own role in the Uber battle, saying the bigger risk for founders is falling into a “victim mentality.” He believes he didn’t handle relationships with disgruntled people well, and that his management style was an issue; while he stands by his decisions at Uber and says he broke no rules, he acknowledged the optics were a problem: “I ran too close to the line in too many situations,” he said, tracing his hard-charging style back to his earlier startup Red Swoosh, which ran without salary for four years.

Kalanick isn’t alone in revisiting old VC grievances this week: entrepreneur Mark Pincus used the podcast as a jumping-off point to air his history with Accel, which he says pushed to replace him as CEO of Support.com during the dot-com era, and other founders piled on with their own accounts. Andreessen Horowitz, which is leading the Atoms round, amplified the moment on social media — notable given a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen’s own public friction with Gurley.

Why it matters

Kalanick’s renewed public criticism, timed to a $1.7 billion raise for his own startup, is a reminder that founder-VC power dynamics remain contentious even as the same VCs write ever-larger checks for AI-era ventures.