John Mark Nickels: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, thank you. I appreciate the compliment. Thank you, Brent. That is a great quote. Wow. Yeah, I mean there's no magic toolkit or manual. I've long ago given up on the notion that I'm one book away from the perfect elusive answer to whatever plagues you in life. And there's obviously lots of books about strategy and you get into all that. I guess for me, a couple of things have been helpful. One is you mentioned earlier finding a mission that you're really passionate about. I think it would be hard for me to come up with a strategy for improving the healthcare system. It's like, sure, it's important. I hope someone does it and figures out how to deal with HIPAA and whatever, all this stuff, but it's just not for me. It's not my purpose, mission and vision in life. And so step one is, am I working at a place and in a product area in which I have a tremendous amount of passion? Because for me, that is the fuel and the motivation that helps me break through to getting the strategy. That's the first step. So that's where I feel enormously lucky because again, this revolutionizing transportation and car ownership and what happens with autonomy and form factors and future of cities is something that I'm super excited about. I think about my daughters growing up and having a different world to live in that's safer and more environmentally friendly, all this stuff, and I get really jazzed when I think about, wow, the work I do could actually impact their future lives and other people. It's like, whoa, I can feel the chills right now. It's just super motivating. So that's the first place, just getting myself fired up. And then the next thing I guess that's been helpful is I've deeply immersed myself. I haven't really jumped around between crypto and gen AI, this stuff, and a lot of people do that. It's great, nothing wrong with that, but I've been in this largely focused on mobility space for 10 years now with some stints over in the restaurant tech and delivery side, but very related in terms of last mile logistics. And so I think it's hard to come up with a great strategy if you've only been working in an area for six months. Especially things like this, they're super nuanced. Shared rides is another a good example where it's a super hard problem to crack and it's going deep on that for a long time is a precursor to being successful. The other thing I would say though is people always talk about first principles thinking, but if there's truth in it, I think that's like when Elon's like, "Well, why does the rocket cost a gazillion dollars to launch? And there's no reason they have to throw away the materials and blah, blah, blah." One example might be, why do we need a 4,000 pound vehicle to move a human three miles? Okay, well... Or even a couple of humans. We do an Uber Pool or a Share, and you move two humans or three humans, even then that's pretty inefficient. If you think about just the physics there, the energy expenditure. even a couple of humans. We do an Uber Pool or a Share, and you move two humans or three humans, even then that's pretty inefficient. If you think about just the physics there, the energy expenditure. And that's where I think you might come up with bikes and scooters and little other things. And sure it's not always, it's raining or you want the car, but that's sort of an example of why questioning why are things the way they are, and then is the way they are super inefficient or not optimal in some sense? And that is often a doorway to opportunity to see, okay, well maybe things could be different. And so I kind of extend that at a larger level to the future. My general thing is just like, yeah, that's the mountain thing is I try to just close my eyes and imagine the future as far out as I can. It's like five years from now, 10 years from now, whatever. And it's develop a really salient picture of what that looks like. It's like, we could do this right now, it's okay. 10 years from now, what could San Francisco look like? Or some city? What happens to the parking spaces? Are there still parking garages? Are those parks now? What are the modes of transport? Are there bus-like things that are autonomous that are connecting people to bikes and scooters? And how are people living? Do they live in the far suburbs even more because autonomy and they have a nicer house and they come in, or is all the space repurposed and actually it's cheaper to live in the city because we compact things, blah, blah, blah. It's not even about having the right one, it's more just developing some sort of picture of the future that gets you fired up. And then yeah, you got to go articulate that and communicate it and get people to come on the journey with you. But from that picture, it's like, well, first principle, what's going to be true 10, 20 years from now? Well, autonomy is a given. I think most people would probably agree with that, and we'll probably solve it with just cameras and won't need lidar because humans don't have lidar. The cost of vehicles and sensors will come down, remote support will come down, and at some point it'll be super cheap and it's like, okay, I can extrapolate, that will be a thing. Separate from which player wins. I'm not saying I can predict the ecosystem of companies that will win here. It's more about just the underlying dynamics. And then that would be one, and another one would be sharing. It's like, well, a lot of people are like, "Oh, well, once we have cheap autonomous cars, everyone can just have their own super cheap Uber, Tesla or whatever it is here in the city." And you're like, "Well, that doesn't work because then we're going to hit this induced demand concept," which is what economists call it, and you used to, when text messages cost 50 cents a piece, how many did you send versus now when it's free, it's in the millions. Same thing when they add a lane to a highway, the traffic just gets just as bad as before because more people drive and so forth. So if we flood the streets with super cheap autonomous cars with single occupancy, we're just going to have even more good luck than we do right now. as before because more people drive and so forth. So if we flood the streets with super cheap autonomous cars with single occupancy, we're just going to have even more good luck than we do right now. Maybe we'll do The Boring Company thing and dig tunnels, but that seems unlikely. So then for me, it's like, well, from first principles, shared rides is going to continue to be an important part of the future of transportation. And other modalities where yeah, back to the three mile thing, it's like, well, there probably will be various form factors of bikes, scooters and little mini golf cart things and whatever we end up building. And so that's hopefully an example of how I try to think about what are the likely things to be true in the future, and then how does that lead to a potential ecosystem and strategy around what we might build towards that future.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.