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All-In · 2 min · Apr 17, 2026
Compute scale and customer growth can reinforce each other
Travis Kalanick
Travis Kalanick argues that faster growth can compound through compute and customer network effects, drawing on Uber’s race with competitors.
In this episode
Full episode- 22:09Enterprise coding is driving Anthropic's faster growth5 min
- 39:55Compute shortages could put a ceiling on AI growth8 min
- 1:15:55AI's enterprise payoff still lacks scaled proof8 min
- 15:16Compute scale and customer growth can reinforce each other2 min
- 51:06Gulf-state data centers can add capacity beyond U.S. grids2 min
- 36:07City licensing can erase scooter-market economics3 min
- 1:00:08Friedberg heard Swalwell allegations months before they surfaced3 min
“network effects around compute network effects around the number of tokens you're pushing out for”
Travis Kalanickat 16:15 · All-In
Takeaways
- Growth can compound through compute and customer network effects.
- More customers and revenue can support further compute investment.
- Kalanick says he saw scale pull Uber ahead of competitors.
About this segment
Travis Kalanick argues that faster growth can compound through compute and customer network effects, drawing on Uber’s race with competitors. That makes growth rate a key signal in the frontier-model race.
Travis Kalanick is a technology entrepreneur with Uber experience.
Built Uber and now leads Atoms, applying industrial AI and specialized robotics to automate food, mining and transport.
Chamath Palihapitiya, Host · Founder & CEO, Social Capital
Led Facebook's growth team; his firm backed Slack and AI chipmaker Groq.
Jason Calacanis, Host · Founder & CEO, LAUNCH
Early Uber angel; sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL; hosts This Week in Startups.
David Sacks, Host · Co-founder & partner, Craft Ventures
PayPal's first COO, founded Yammer; White House AI & crypto czar 2025–26.
David Friedberg, Host · CEO, Ohalo
Founded The Climate Corporation, sold to Monsanto for about $1.1B in 2013.
From “OpenAI's Identity Crisis, Datacenter Wars, Market Up on Iran News, Mamdani's First Tax, Swalwell Out”, Apr 17, 2026. Watch the full episode
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 15:20
got to isolate the enterprise team and let them do what they think is right. Travis, there's a big debate going on amongst the investors. The FTPs also questioned the $850 billion valuation of OpenAI. Secondary markets have now priced Anthropic higher than OpenAI for the first time. This is the flippening that people predicted. One investor said OpenAI would need to IPO at a valuation of $1.2 trillion for the last round to make any sense. But there's no buyers currently at the $850 billion valuation that OpenAI just closed, according to Bloomberg.
- 15:54
Travis, how do you handicap this race between these two meetings? frontier models growth is king right now in this in this world uh in this segment growth is the whole damn thing and if anthropic is growing faster than open ai by a significant clip the investors right now are going to play it forward and they're it you know you start to get network effects around compute network effects around the number of tokens you're pushing out for various customers, enterprise or consumer. And ultimately, it's not great today, but how that plays into reinforcement learning and the things getting smarter over time. There's so much upside to volume and scale that if they are growing faster at the same size, even if OpenAI is still growing, but if they are half the growth rate, a third the growth rate, a fifth the growth rate,
- 16:55
I would be, I'd be worried. And you saw this at Uber specifically when you accelerated away from the competitors like Lyft and DoorDash. Yeah. Yeah. You had to get network effects was the whole thing at the end of the day and network effects was based on scale. So yes, I'm sort of like coming from my very specific experience, but if you believe there's network effects with the scale of data that you have and the scale of customers and the revenue that's this cash that's coming in that you redeploy into compute, and so say there's network effects of large compute, I'd be very worried if I'm OpenAI and seeing somebody growing faster at the same