00:00:00 · Ben Cera, Guillaume Moubeche
[00:00:00] S0: Take a button, get a company. Polsia is an AI that builds and runs companies autonomously. Stop thinking about what people want. Build something for yourself. Make it as weird as you want. AI controls the whole company. Make it fully autonomous, doesn't ask questions, just acts. I'm an AI and I'm raising money on behalf of Polsia, and here's a live dashboard with, like, the graph. Right? Instead of being an engineer, you'll be an orchestrator of engineering agents. [00:00:23] S1: Today on BILLIONS, I'm sitting down with someone who's carry real, like, two completely different bets on the future, and both turned out to be right. First bet, food delivery was going to be infrastructure, not logistic. He joined CloudKitchens as co founder to Travis Kalanick and spent four years building the global operating system for ghost kitchens across dozens of Second bet, the biggest bottleneck in building a company isn't capital or talent. It's the operating layer. The planning, the execution, the iteration, and AI can replace all of it. Today, he runs Polsia, an autonomous system that runs companies twenty four seven without human intervention. His goal is to reach $100,000,000 in annual recurring revenue in just three months, and I want to figure out how. Ben, thanks a lot for being here. [00:01:14] S0: Hi, Guillaume. How are you?
00:01:14 · Ben Cera, Guillaume Moubeche
[00:01:14] S0: Hi, Guillaume. How are you? [00:01:16] S1: I'm super excited to talk about everything you've achieved. The the first question I have is you were basically the cofounder of Travis Kalanick at CloudKitchens. Most people know, like, Travis from Uber and everything that happened over there. So what did you see in him, especially with that project that made you want to join the adventure?
00:01:40 · Ben Cera
[00:01:40] S0: Yeah. I mean, first of all, I wasn't co founder of, like, the the whole venture. I co founded a business division under Travis. I joined, like... I was one of the first employees he hired after he joined CloudKitchens, and and sort of bought the initial company that was built a couple years before that. But I was so lucky that, like, you know, I had made a great network, and I was able to, like, join CloudKitchens right when he joined that company and and and became CEO. And yeah, it's been... I mean, it it it was like... I think it had been the best five years of my life. I would say now now is the best year of my life, actually. But I think that, like, I needed to have those five best years of my life to be able to build what I'm building right now. I think, you know, there was a lot of, like, you know, a lot of controversy around Travis when he started CloudKitchens, and in... Meaning at the end of him running Uber, I was always such a fan. Right? Because obviously, I think that... Obviously, a lot of things happened that, like, you know, I wasn't I I just saw from the outside, I'm not gonna comment on, but I, being an entrepreneur myself, I know how difficult it is to build anything, and to even get to product market fit, and then and then and then to also scale product market fit, and then to scale it, and then to build new business divisions, like, you know, Eats, and then, like, and then self driving cars, which, you know, if he was still out around, probably, like, Uber would be a trillion dollar company at this point. And so I was just such a big fan, and, you know, honestly, starting to work with him in 2018, I was amazed at at the fact that, you know, he's an engineer, so everything is very logical, and it's very principled. And I'm an engineer too, so it was like a, you know, a breath of fresh air to just... I have a boss that's just like... There's there's no ambiguity. There's no... You know, it's like it's all, you know, data and principles, and and he empowered me so much. Like, I remember the first the first meeting I had with him. So he hired me as a product, sort of like a senior product manager. Right? And at first meeting, was like, okay, cool. So what should I do? And he was like, I don't know. I arrived a month ago. You tell me.
00:03:59 · Ben Cera, Guillaume Moubeche
And he was like he was like, I want you to, like, essentially, like, talk to everyone in the company, figure out, like, every customer problems, everything we could build, and build, like, a whole product road map of every single pillars of the products we could build. And then you tell me which ones you would like to work on. And I love that because I was like, you know, it's not like he's the boss. It's like he empowers people. He hires great people and then he empowers them to just be autonomous, which is what I'm doing at Polsia with AI. [00:04:34] S1: And what do you think was the number one thing you've learned from working with Travis during all these years and the things that you wanna take away for maybe like building the next project you're on right now?
00:04:47 · Ben Cera
[00:04:47] S0: I mean, I think that, like, there's a few there's a few episodes of me building with Travis that resonated a lot as I was building Polsia, and I would say two different phases. Right? I think the first phase was... I remember clearly... Because essentially at CloudKitchens, I built a business called Future Foods, which is a service that helps restaurants with their digital marketing. What we do is we create it... We create... We have a portfolio of, like, virtual brands, like, sort of, like, online food brands, and then we license them to restaurants and take on the whole operational marketing flow of onboarding them the platforms, marketing them, you know, figuring out pricing, etcetera, so that the restaurant can just do... Cook great food and and utilize their kitchen better and make extra revenue. And so very early on, I started building that initially for kitchen customers, so customers in all their kitchens. And then I told Travis, hey, Travis. Dude, there's like millions of restaurants in the world. They could all use that service. So today, we focus obviously on our kitchen's customers because they are like our most beloved customers because... But at the same time, it could be a huge business. And I remember him telling me like, dude, trust me. Because I was like, can I hire a few people? Can I hire a salesperson? And he was like, no. Trust me, you don't wanna scale something that doesn't work. Trust me, you don't want. So go... So essentially, what you're gonna do is you're not gonna hire anyone. You are good. You're the salesperson. You go sign up 10 restaurants. Like, I like the idea, but like, you go sign up 10 restaurants, and you prove to me that it works. And so I did. So myself, I started calling commercial restaurants. Or like, I I called also restaurants that like, had a kitchen in in in our dark kitchens, and said, well, you have a second restaurant. What about this one? We could do it there. Right? So just hustled my way, and a week later I came back to Travis and said, okay, I have 10 restaurants. And he was like, okay, cool. You can hire a salesperson. And so I think that was like the first thing. Essentially, moral of the story is do not... Like, be patient, and product market fit is actually some...
00:06:55 · Ben Cera
You don't want to scale something that doesn't have real product market fit, and so don't try to just grow something that doesn't work, because it's a waste of time, it's a waste of money, it's a waste of sort of like everything, wait until you really understand that you're adding value to the customer and that you understand your customer before scaling. So that's the one thing I I took off. And that's why, you know, I built I built Polsia alone for a long time. And I was alone for a long time. And I was like, why would I add someone? Like, I don't know if I market fit yet. So why would I waste... Yes, I raised a little pre seed that I I almost didn't spend any of it, but I was like, yeah, it's not because I have capital that I should spend it. I should reserve that capital, and so that I can use it when I have rock market fit and I need to put fuel in the fire, which by the way, I did recently where like, you know... Because I was like, you know, I didn't optimize all the costs, and I was like, you know, when things start scaling, you're like, oh shit, I need to really look at margins because I'm spending a lot of money on Anthropic. So I think that was the first good learning. I think the second learning was around scale, and that's something that like I have, is really top of mind right now, as I believe the product is not perfect, but, like, there's product market fit. Meaning, it really answers a pain point that a lot of people have, and it gives hope to a lot of people that have great ideas, that wanna be entrepreneurs, like, maybe are scared, maybe they, you know, they don't have like... Maybe they think they're not worthy, or they're not good enough, or maybe not this enough, or bad enough, right, which is like a lot of a lot of the blockers of usually people... Of people trying to to start companies. And Polsia is a little bit that hope of like, know, they try the onboarding and in three minutes, you have an AI who does... He creates a scaffolding in three minutes researching... You researching the idea, doing a market research report, you know, looking at competitors, pricing, creating a mission document that's very inspiring, creating a landing page, tweeting about it, sending you an email. And so you're like, okay. Well, clearly, seems like this AI is really smart. And if they're my cofounder, maybe I can achieve things. Right?