The Exchanges

Q You did amazing work on Cruise, and then you decided to start another company, which I always think is a really brave endeavor because anybody who's been through multiple startups knows how painful and terrible it is. Could you tell us a little bit more about the impetus behind the bot company and what you were doing there?

A Yeah. Well, we talked about this a little bit when I was, uh, making that decision, what, what to do next. And, uh, I did some soul searching and determined that I'm, I'm just a builder. I'm, I like building things and I was sitting on the sidelines or helping other entrepreneurs or doing something else, um, I think would be fun, but not quite scratching that, that same itch. Uh, I'm 39. I feel like I got at least one more startup in the tank. So the question became of like what to do. And I look back on my career. This is my, I guess, Depending on how you count, like third major startup. And the first one was, you know, Twitch and Justin TV, and that was straight out of college. And that was just doing anything, doing a startup and trying to make it work, um, was the priority. And that ended up being video games and entertainment. The second time around for a cruise, after doing entertainment, I decided I want to focus on impact. So like, what's, what's something where we can use technology to meaningfully improve people's lives? Self-driving cars, they save lives, they give you tons of time back. That was like squarely in the, you know, impact category. Third time around, um, I, I definitely care about impact, but also fun. So it's like working with people I like on problems I like, uh, really challenging technical problems and, and building amazing products. And so we're bui…

AI assessment note: “we're building home robots. And, uh, the impact side of that is”

Q In retrospect, is there, was there like a right year to start a self-driving car company? You were so ahead of the ball on this.

A It takes a long time to sort of spin up automotive pipeline and everything. So probably like, you know, circa of 20, 20 or so would be the right time to get started. And then, you know, around now, I think you'd be having like a combination of hardware and software that's mature enough. If you have a, a nimble enough engineering team that's able to adopt new technologies when they pop up and quickly pull them into the pipeline, you're actually well positioned, even if you started a while ago and your tech stack was based on some older technologies, if you have all the infrastructure in place for validation and testing and training models and deploying on, you know, on public roads with test drivers, Um, I think you can go a lot, uh, a lot faster, uh, even if you have to like sort of rip out and change some of your tech staff to adapt with the times.

AI assessment note: “probably like, you know, circa of 20, 20 or so would be the right time”

Q On this topic, how do you imagine deployment To, to work. You're obviously like, hey, Tesla had the right path here. Is there a Tesla analogy where you make billions along the way? Um, it's not obvious. Like, are there constraints you can put around it where you have tele-op, right? Or just a couple tasks or a more constrained environment in the messiness of a home?

A There's a number of ways to, to attack that. Approaches I've seen are like, you sell a really high priced robot today, uh, like a humanoid or, or something resembling a human. That's like fully teleopt and you just tell someone this is going to cost, I don't know, like something crazy, like 50,000 dollars and a thousand dollars a month, but it's a, it's the first robot you can buy that will like do stuff in your house. I think that's one approach to try to, um, you know, make money along the way. I think your market size is pretty small doing that, but that's, that's a viable approach. And the other side would be to sell robots that don't fulfill like the promise of a, of a household robot that does all your chores, but do like little bits of useful things. I just saw at CES this year, They have like little iRobot Roomba type things that have a tiny little hand that could come out and like pick up a sock that's in the way. And so these are like incremental approaches to sell products and get, you know, data and hopefully like learn about what it would take, um, or train, or train models or try things to, to be able to work up that, um, that ladder, I guess, to the Holy grail, which would be like, you know, a robot that, that takes the place of your butler and your housekeeper and just, just about anything else that you would ever want. You know, if you could have an infinite st…

AI assessment note: “these are like incremental approaches to sell products and get, you know, data”

Q You've already been through the ringer once on the regulatory front with AV. If you could wave a magic wand, we just call Trump right now. What do you think is the right policy approach to make sure we have a competitive domestic robotics industry, if that's relevant?

A First of all, I mean, I think there should be tons of regulation on AV. It reminds me what's happening in the AV space and sort of You know, companies like Cruise got wiped out. Companies like Waymo are growing or are expanding, I think much more slowly than they should based on the merits and the safety of their technology. Uh, and it reminds me of like when the first airlines were formed in the U S and there was no FAA, there was no regulation. If you had basically any kind of plane crash, you would get sued out of existence and you just wiped out. And many of the first airlines are no longer in existence because of this. And so the FAA was created because You know, the government decided that actually we should have airlines and if they keep going out of business, no one's going to start an airline anymore. And so create the FAA, monitor airplane manufacturers and airlines, make sure they meet safety criteria and in exchange, give them, you know, reasonable protections and limits on liability so they can actually operate, you know, in a, in a society like the U S that hasn't happened for self-driving cars. And so I think the only candidate today, the only companies that stand a chance, um, are the ones where, you know, they can afford to, to take on that liability. Um, cause they're a giant tech company that makes money in other places. You know, otherwise it's very bleak. S…

AI assessment note: “make sure they meet safety criteria and in exchange, give them, you know, reasonable protections”

Q What do you think of the criticism that you can't get there? You can't get to full self-driving from like mostly self-driving.

A That statement is, is almost certainly wrong given a long enough time span. Again, going back to what Elon's approach was, he, he doesn't have to like finish by a certain date. Or run out of money. He's like making money along the way. And so, you know, I think the only risk is that, you know, customers get fed up and and you know, of rage quit his program, but they're getting something they like along the way, Tesla full self-driving. So I think that's the right approach, but in in,, in in in for sure, in, in in in,, in in in in,, Um, with large language models and, and that, you know, generative models and other things that, that, that sort of class of technology applied to the classical challenges of perception for autonomous driving, even motion planning for autonomous driving, completely changed the game in terms of the magnitude of compute that you need, the expense of that. Um, and I think now from cameras, as long as you have sufficient redundancy and low light sensitivity and, you know, some robustness there, uh, you can extract from a single camera image, not even stereo. You can get beautiful depth data. Really accurate. And those models are getting better every day. And so, you know, if you're making a bet on the right technical approach in 20, 25, it does not involve a bunch of expensive LIDARs or exotic sensors. It involves the, the most commodity is sort of, you …

AI assessment note: “That statement is, is almost certainly wrong given a long enough time span.”

Q I think that was for just one car model too, right? That was like a BMW or something in the time.

A That is the challenge with a retrofit business. It's like without the blessing of, of the car makers, you have to kind of reverse engineer protocols and figure out how to attach motors to steering wheels. So it wasn't necessarily sustainable, but we were still gonna, you know, try to figure that out. I'd say that peaked, you know, around the time we went to YC demo day and, uh, Sam Altman was in the car actually, and we, we rode to, you know, turn it on and, and rode it to demo day. And, uh, we took that product for about a year and a half and then realized that we had done enough technically that maybe we didn't have to do this lean startup approach. Maybe we had just go straight after, um, the big fish, which would be building robo taxis. And around that time, Uber and Lyft had sort of risen in popularity and now we're becoming these household names. And like, you know, talk of going public and all this kind of stuff. And they had this big hole in their unit economics, which is paying the drivers. And so suddenly there was like a strong market pull for self-driving technology, whereas before I had been seen as just kind of a cool sci-fi thing. And so we were able to raise some money from Spark Capital and go straight into that. Within a year of that, I think we were acquired by, uh, GM. You know, we had working prototypes driving around San Francisco, obeying traffic lights, …

AI assessment note: “That is the challenge with a retrofit business. It's like without the blessing”