Having read hundreds of these sorts of CEO leaving letters I'm a bit jaded and cynical. If you're interested in what I see when I read that message, I rewrote it[1] in more plain language.<p>Google demands a lot of its "other bets" companies. Some might say it asks too much. Mostly it seems to me that they want a 'moonshot' company that has the original profitability of search advertising, full stop. And while it would be great for them if they found it, there is a lot to be said for having a bunch of businesses that just make anywhere from a few million to a billion dollars a year in revenue.<p>I don't know if the attitude has changed since I was there but people creating $20M/year business revenue streams were not considered "successful" back in the day. I found that somewhat self defeating.<p>[1] <a href="https://gist.github.com/ChuckM/ff5fc8c800c7fe9160483b68ec45aac9" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/ChuckM/ff5fc8c800c7fe9160483b68ec45a...</a>
All of the big players in self-driving have shown that while they can try to solve the tech problem, nobody can solve the <i>team</i> problem. Self-driving brings together people with very diverse backgrounds (perception, planning, controls, hardware, safety, rideshare product, etc), very diverse incentives (established automakers vs start-up founders vs VC investors), and throws them in a pot with a huge amount of money and greed. And does this to serve a public who largely doesn't trust self-driving AI today.<p>Waymo has had a ton of notable departures:<p>* Urmson made a good amount of money and left for Aurora.<p>* The founders of Nuro cashed in $40m each and left for their own thing.<p>* Levandowski made nearly a quarter billion and took off.<p>* Drago worked on Streetview and more Google-centric things, then went to Zoox to make about $100k (lol), then returned to Waymo.<p>* Now the era of Krafcik is coming to an end.<p>The perhaps unique thing about the self-driving problem is that all of the above individuals made tons of money without having delivered equitable value to end-users. At least not today. When Google was bleeding headcount to Facebook, both companies were making bank. It's surreal to see people minted with money for life and yet deliver so little value. That sort of arbitrage usually only happens on Wall Street.<p>I think it's worth reflecting on the era of Krafcik as a general success-- he was brought in to do hard work and he generally did a good job. But by no means did he (nor any of his predecessors) solve the "team" problem. Krafcik himself couldn't stick to the team he helped shape, nor the userbase he helped grow, at least nt long enough to actually deliver widespread value on the scale of his own compensation.
Just wanted to say, from the outside, John Krafcik seemed to me like a strong leader.<p>I used to live in Mountain View and at one point I saw a few Waymo vans (this was 3-4 years ago when they were more active) speeding on El Camino (just barely, and being manually driven at the time, but even though I work for a competitor I was concerned if an accident happened it'd be a bad publicity event; i.e., Waymo vehicles should always be extra, extra careful, etc.); and it just made me wonder what was going on. So I connected with him on LinkedIn; and then ended up reaching out to some QA folks I believe.<p>Anyway, John was super responsive and I always appreciated that. From what I could see (just one anecdote), he was a CEO who dived deep into customer concerns. There's a lot to be said for that.<p>My two cents is it's a very delicate space. One bad event and the whole industry can be set back. So it's an area (despite extremely cutting-edge tech; deep learning, etc.) that has to roll out gradually.
I still think it was a mistake to hire this guy and partner with the auto industry dinosaurs. Should have kept going down the path of being independent and building their own cars without steering wheels. I never liked "Waymo" as a brand either.<p>Maybe just retrofitting off the shelf cars made sense if they thought they needed hundreds of thousands of cars ASAP, but it turns out they would have had plenty of time to develop the car and even build factories for it while waiting for the technology to mature. And they didn't really need to partner with any manufacturers just to retrofit existing cars anyway.
That's sad.<p>I must be the only one who thinks full self driving will not happen before year 2100. Is there an example of anything that's completely automated that's dangerous? I cannot think of a single thing. At best things are partially automated and need humans still.<p>The thing is, if you have "partial" self driving, you might as well just drive yourself IMHO. The consequence of being wrong with a car is literally your life. I know people like comparing this with airplanes, trains, or the elevator, but cars in the USA is just too chaotic an environment. It's nothing like any of those.
It'll be interesting to see where he goes next and if any info comes out about why he's leaving.<p>Brief summary of his jobs:<p><pre><code> - NUMMI (GM/Toyota), 1984-1986
- MIT, 1986-1990
- Ford, 1990-2004
- Hyundai America, 2004-2013, left as president/CEO
- TrueCar, 2014-2015
- Google/Waymo, 2015-2021</code></pre>
I'm curious about the co-CEO thing. That seems like it is universally something that doesn't work and is just what happens when nobody wants to make a tough decision. Is there any context on why it might be the right move here?
Some comments are saying self-driving cars are not currently possible and that Waymo isn't successful, but aren't they currently available to the public in some areas in Phoenix, with no safety drivers?<p>There may be many limitations, but self-driving in sunny flat suburban areas would already cover a decent portion of the American market. Sure they might not be ready for chaotic, busy city centres or regions with harsh weather conditions, but that's letting perfect be enemy of the good - those living in areas suitable for self-driving cars would certainly appreciate them, and who's to say there can't be a gradual retooling of infrastructure to accommodate them as they expand to more and more areas?
Everyone except Tesla is approaching self-driving in the wrong way.<p>1. This is a looooong term bet, so you need revenue NOW to sustain your company until you get to full self driving.<p>2. The self driving car should be a practical product, to be purchased and operated by actual common people who drive cars today. So you need to avoid $10k LIDAR spinners on top of the car.<p>3. Self driving is not going to be a binary thing. It will be a gradual increasing capability. You need to let people use it in every intermediate stage and feed telemetry back to you so you can incorporate it in your development.<p>4. Self driving cannot rely on extremely detailed mapping of all public roads that exist on the planet. The system will have to be smart enough to figure out what to do, without specialised external help.<p>If you don't follow these, be ready for a long haul (10-20 years) without any revenue, because that's what it is going to take. And google does not seem to be the long-haul type of operation that this needs, judging from <a href="https://killedbygoogle.com/" rel="nofollow">https://killedbygoogle.com/</a>.
Disclaimer, I work for GM, not on SDC; anything expressed here is solely my opinion.<p>I think SDCs (self driving cars) are great, and will be available in some capacity in the very near future, BUT I think we are at least one more paradigm change away from the dream of SDC.<p>Take for instance liability. It seems quite likely that manufacturers will want to disclaim liability for SDCs. It is easy to see the roots of that in current driver assist features. They are very careful to call out in the documentation (if not in the naming and presentation) that the human driving is responsible for safety.<p>If this liability was not an issue, SDCs in hands-off, eyes-off, brains-off mode would be available today, right now.<p>So how will the paradigm of liability change? Or will it?
On one hand this kind of makes sense to me - his experience in the actual auto industry must have seemed invaluable when he was hired in 2015 and people thought self driving would be brought to mass market in a couple years.<p>But now that everyone assumes we're in for the long haul (Aurora says 2025 for L4 in some cities), it doesn't make sense for him to want to stay.
I don't wanna be 'that guy' but the news of this on the same day of Tesla's Q1 p/d beat speaks volumes about who's winning in this space. Watch the FSD beta vids, especially the Weimo & Tesla comparison in Phoenix. It's clear who's going to dominate this space.
"To start, I’m looking forward to a refresh period, reconnecting with old friends and family, and discovering new parts of the world."<p>I suppose that is a nice way of saying wait out my non-compete....
I hear Anthony Levandowski is available, having been pardoned by Trump in his last day in office on January 20, 2021.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski#Criminal_conviction_and_pardon" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski#Criminal_c...</a>
For fully autonomous driving need to happen, all cars must exchange data with each other how robots do in a factory floor.
Image and depth perception can solve some problems but a crash or a vehicle can maneuver in any direction. If two self driving cars need to take a decision at a intersection, how are they gonna do it?
Self driving is not possible without changes to infrastructure. We know this because NHS tried in 1960’s and was able to succeed with this approach. Government will have to solve problem first. How? Installing sensors on our highways that cars can use. Anything this big in scale can’t be solved by the private sector alone, you also need better infrastructure.
This combined with the recent announcement of Waymo pivoting to monetize their research in what's basically a garage sale (<a href="https://waymo.com/lidar" rel="nofollow">https://waymo.com/lidar</a>) tells me that Waymo is soon to be interred on killedbygoogle.com.