How do you build a Moonshot company like Uber? Oculus? Anduril?

How do you go from zero to a multi-billion-dollar valuation in four years? And reinvent an industry in the process?

I recently had in-depth conversations with Travis Kalanick, Founder of Uber and CloudKitchens, and Palmer Luckey, Founder of Oculus and Anduril, at the 2025 Abundance Summit.

I asked Travis and Palmer for their playbooks on building Moonshot companies. They didn’t just envision the future, they built it. Here’s what they shared—wisdom that could transform your entrepreneurial journey from incremental to exponential.

Travis Kalanick’s 4 Tips for Moonshot Entrepreneurs

1. Be Mindful About Timing: Getting It Right Can Make All the Difference

Timing isn’t just important—it’s everything. As Travis put it: “Being too early is worse than being wrong.” Before Uber, Travis spent four years without a salary working on technology that was both wrong AND too early—”blood, sweat, and ramen,” as he describes it.

The convergence of smartphone technology, GPS, and digital payments created the perfect moment for Uber to thrive—proving what Idealab Founder and Chairman Bill Gross has discovered: timing is the single most critical factor separating billion-dollar successes from noble failures.

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2. Focus and Refine Before Scaling: Don’t Scale Broken Systems

“Let’s not scale failure” is Travis’ mantra. Even with Uber’s meteoric trajectory, he spent a full year perfecting ops in San Francisco before expanding to a second city.

At CloudKitchens, Travis has initiatives growing at 6x every six months—but he’s resisting rapid expansion before core workflows are tight: “We’ll drown in ops” if the foundation isn’t solid first. The discipline to perfect your model before going global separates sustainable ventures from flash-in-the-pan failures.

3. Prioritize the Customer: Heart + Numbers = Sustainable Growth

While being customer-obsessed is crucial, Travis offers a nuanced perspective: “Customer-obsessed means you have to have a lot of heart for the customer… but you also have to have a lot of ROI.” This marriage of emotion and practicality is essential. Without sufficient returns, you can’t continue serving customers in the long run. Without genuine care for customer experience, you won’t generate the returns needed to survive and thrive.

4. Seek Valuable Unknown Truths: The Ultimate Competitive Advantage

“One of the most important things that innovators do is they are really good at finding valuable unknown truths,” Travis explains. These are insights that are both true and valuable that nobody else has realized yet. This approach enabled Travis to reimagine transportation as a digitized network for the physical world—”treating atoms like bits”—creating an entirely new paradigm for urban mobility.

Understanding customer obsession without sustainable economics creates fleeting innovation, while experimentation without clear purpose leads nowhere. Travis’ formula of “valuable unknown truths” is essentially a first-principles approach to identifying massive market opportunities hiding in plain sight.

Palmer Luckey’s 4 Tips for Moonshot Entrepreneurs

1. Be a Product Company in Entrenched Industries: Change the Incentives

Palmer’s approach to disrupting the defense industry was radical—and brilliantly effective. Rather than following the traditional “cost-plus contractor” model, Anduril began as a product company: “You spend your own money to make something that works and then you sell that as a product.”

This fundamentally changes the incentives: “You make more money when you move faster, you make more money when you make affordable decisions.” By investing their own capital, Anduril created autonomous fighter jets, submarines, and AI systems with unprecedented efficiency.

2. Find the Blind Spots (Limitations) of the Large Established Players

Palmer recognized that status-quo companies often face pressures that hinder innovation. Large defense contractors have become comfortable with contracts that reward inefficiency, creating openings for nimble disruptors.

“The United States has a long history of turning small technology companies into major defense companies. The problem is that we’ve now forgotten how to do that.” This insight allowed Palmer to position Anduril in the gaps where legacy players couldn’t or wouldn’t innovate.

3. Control Your Narrative: Choose Your Battles Wisely

Palmer’s journey has been extraordinary. He’s gone from being named “the most evil person in Silicon Valley” and having Anduril labeled “the most controversial company in tech,” to Anduril being heralded as one of the most extraordinary companies on the planet.

Rather than fighting every media battle, Palmer focuses on building products that speak for themselves. Anduril’s rapid growth to a $28 billion valuation demonstrates the power of this approach—letting extraordinary results change perceptions rather than fighting every negative headline.

4. Follow Your Skills Not Your Dreams: Leverage Your Unique Talents

In perhaps his most contrarian advice, Palmer challenges the conventional wisdom to “follow your dreams” as “the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard.” Instead, he advocates following your skills and talents to create maximum impact.

“A lot of kids have stupid dreams and a lot of people have dreams that aren’t going to impact the world,” Palmer explains. The more powerful approach is finding the intersection of your unique abilities and the world’s significant needs.

Palmer’s focus on skills over dreams isn’t abandoning passion but rather channeling it where it can have maximum impact. His four-part test for project selection (Pentagon cares, Congress cares, we can do it well, others aren’t doing it well) is a masterclass in strategic Moonshot planning.

These insights from Travis and Palmer powerfully align with the Moonshot Mindset I’ve observed in other extraordinary entrepreneurs. While most companies aim for 10% improvements, these visionaries pursue 10X (1,000%) transformations by thinking exponentially and seeing the world’s biggest challenges as the world’s biggest business opportunities.

You just heard straight from two of the boldest entrepreneurs I know: those who went beyond merely seeing the future and built it.

How will you apply these insights to your business? Do you have a Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP)? If you don’t, check out www.MyPurposeFinder.ai (it’s free and easy).

The next move is yours.

Until next time,

Peter