John Mark Nickels: belief

Transcript context

…What about Waymo? What's something that you took away from that experience as a thing that you want to do more of or something you want to try to avoid? Waymo is, you've probably seen people in San Francisco, they're quite prolific now in terms of they're all over San Francisco and you see them all the time. And I'm not sure, I can't remember the last time I saw one towed, I don't want to say that they've solved self-driving, but they are obviously driving at scale with very minimal, at least real world intervention. You can't tell by looking at the cars how many humans behind the scenes might be helping provide guidance of the car or whatever. But yeah, I would say what's really interesting about Waymo is they've largely solved the self-driving piece, however they've done that, and in a complex environment like San Francisco, and you see them driving in fog and rain and puddles, and it's like, wow, that's pretty cool. But I think what Waymo was learning, and I was trying help them learn is that building a self-driving car on a test track is a very different problem statement than scaling a fleet of thousands of cars. And how do you operate them, clean them, charge them, maintain them, and then how do you build the ride share network? It's like, okay, well we got to build an app and we got to acquire users and do classic growth stuff and think about that marketplace and matching and pricing and those are very different skills. And so it's like a warning that those are different things. And trying to hire for that and build culture around that was hard, honestly. It's just like you're kind of a different thing than the host organism. Most of the host organism is just obsessed with perception and planning and all the core autonomy pieces and you're like, the commercialization people there, "Well, now we've going to make money with this thing." That's why I think that's an example where your overall vision would say Waymo is to build Waymo One. Just be mindful that it's more than just one. There's multiple pillars of that. There's the self-driving piece, there's getting a lot of cars at scale, financing them, operating the fleet, getting the demand, filling the cars with people, and then it has to all come together. Right. Yeah. It's so interesting that your title is Lead Product for Commercialization of Autonomous Ride Hailing at Waymo, and now it's come full circle where at Uber, that's going to be in a sense the way that people call Waymo. And so it's so interesting that you've seen both sides of this.…

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