17 ms·

CEO of Waymo John Krafcik is leaving

149 points by mgreg 6y ago

bertil 6y ago
Am I the only one to read like an acknowledgement that Waymo didn’t achieve what it was supposed to do and he was asked to go for lack of performance?
- andrewcl 6y ago
  The CEO lists several accomplishments in the press brief. It doesn't appear to say that he's being let go specifically for performance concerns.
  - stefan_ 6y ago
    Well, they never say that. I personally think it's because of that horrendous "Waymonauts" moniker.
  - blihp 6y ago
    It rarely does unless there's been a very public screw up on the part of the executive that results in bad PR the company.
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  I read it as a state of self-driving cars in general. The technology isn't developing as fast as people had hoped. Waymo is still in the lead, even if this guy failed to deliver (he announced Waymo would be a public service for 2018, and that obviously didn't happen).
  - bumby 6y ago
    >The technology isn't developing as fast as people had hoped. I can’t help but think people conflated what the problem statement of self driving really is. We’ve made huge strides in perception in the last two decades but self-driving is a much more complex problem than just accurately perceiving the world sound us.
  - solutron 6y ago
    Definitely google some Tesla FSD beta videos and watch them. Waymo doubled down on a technology set and data methodology that is not scalable. Tesla is going to win in this space 100%
- SilasX 6y ago
  No, he wants to spend more time with friends and family and travel the world.
  - pasttense01 6y ago
    Maybe. But a lot of us are cynical when we hear this kind of language from departing CEOs.
    - Judgmentality 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure the person you were responding to was being sarcastic. Then again it's the internet, so who knows?
- solutron 6y ago
  That's exactly how I read it. It's a huge red flag.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
I hear Anthony Levandowski is available, having been pardoned by Trump in his last day in office on January 20, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski#Criminal_conviction_and_pardon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski#Criminal_c...
- rajrkrish 6y ago
  I don't think neither google nor uber would want him back.
endisneigh 6y ago
That's sad. 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. 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.
- meteor333 6y ago
  Even for airplanes and trains, we still have pilots and humans behind the controller with 100% attention.
  - minhazm 6y ago
    We don't have fully automated planes because they're already safe enough and the economics aren't there. The probability of crashing with a plane is extremely low, even factoring in the higher risk of takeoffs and landings. The entire process is coordinated with Air Traffic Control. Since planes are so safe already and pilots are relatively inexpensive, there's no strong financial incentive to fully automate planes.
    - endisneigh 6y ago
      Planes are also substantially regulated. I mean if there was a Vehicular Traffic Control on every intersection the same way there's Air Traffic Control we probably wouldn't have any accidents now, negating the main purported benefit of self driving to begin with.
    - meteor333 6y ago
      Disagree on the economics. Pilots cost significant money and since the airline industry runs on low margins this can be a huge plus. But the main reason we won't see planes without pilots is political and related to trust. I think for the same reasons we are less likely to see truly driverless cars.
mrpippy 6y ago
It'll be interesting to see where he goes next and if any info comes out about why he's leaving. Brief summary of his jobs: - 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
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  Apparently Apple is rumored to be working on a car...
iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago
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?
- cbanek 6y ago
  I can only think of The Office: "It doesn’t take a genius to know that any organization thrives when it has two leaders. Go ahead, name a country that doesn’t have two presidents. A boat that sets sail without two captains. Where would Catholicism be without the Popes?"
- pasttense01 6y ago
  From the Wall Street Journal: "The company said Friday that it is promoting its chief technology and operating officers, Dmitri Dolgov and Tekedra Mawakana, to lead a decade-old effort to make self-driving cars a reality. They will share the title of co-chief executive... Mr. Dolgov is one of the founders of Google’s self-driving car project. He joined the program when it began in 2009 and led the development of Waymo’s autonomous system, known as Waymo Driver. He studied physics and math at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology before earning a doctorate in computer science from the University of Michigan. As chief operating officer, Ms. Mawakana has led the effort to commercialize Waymo’s self-driving system. She has a law degree from Columbia University and previously worked at other tech companies such as eBay Inc. and Yahoo." https://www.wsj.com/articles/waymo-ceo-john-krafcik-is-leaving-the-company-11617385836 https://www.wsj.com/articles/waymo-ceo-john-krafcik-is-leavi... My guess it that traditionally the chief operating officer would have been promoted and the chief technology officer would stay as the chief technology officer--but that there was a significant risk of the chief technology officer leaving if he wasn't promoted. So you end up with co-CEOs.
- solutron 6y ago
  This is a huge red flag. Especially when Waymo's had no significant milestones and when the CEO is using language like 'spend time with friends and family'. That usually means they're being pushed out, or that he's made the realization it's not going to work out and is jumping ship.
tdhz77 6y ago
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.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
  >Self driving is not possible without changes to infrastructure Humans seem to be perfectly capable of doing it though.
  - throwawayfrauds 6y ago
    36,000 US driving deaths annually would beg to differ.
  - lrem 6y ago
    Humans come with their own liability :(
  - wetpaws 6y ago
    Humans are probably the single worst possible candidate for handling a car
    - oldgradstudent 6y ago
      Except for all the other options.
- xnx 6y ago
  There were a lot of things that weren't possible in the 1960's that are possible now. Highway driving is the easiest type of driving. If Waymo wasn't limiting their driving to specific areas, I have no doubt their Driver could easily drive through the US interstates without issue.
  - 6y ago
specialp 6y ago
"To start, I’m looking forward to a refresh period, reconnecting with old friends and family, and discovering new parts of the world." I suppose that is a nice way of saying wait out my non-compete....
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  Is Waymo not headquartered in California?
  - specialp 6y ago
    Yes you are correct and it probably is unenforceable if it exists. My mistake. It just reeked of that.
- lrem 6y ago
  Even without a non-compete, taking a couple months off between jobs is nice. But yeah, at that level I imagine non-competes reach to the full legal extent and then some ;)
layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
This combined with the recent announcement of Waymo pivoting to monetize their research in what's basically a garage sale (https://waymo.com/lidar https://waymo.com/lidar) tells me that Waymo is soon to be interred on killedbygoogle.com.
- choppaface 6y ago
  That lidar has been for sale for years, it's not really a pivot. See e.g. this older post on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19319233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19319233
Sherl 6y ago
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?
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  Do you need to exchange data with every other driver when you're on the road?
  - jdavis703 6y ago
    Isn’t this what turn signals, horns and brake lights are for? Not to mention making eye contact with pedestrians at crossings.
    - jedberg 6y ago
      Self driving cars have turn signals, horns, and brake lights too. And can also read that data from other cars. And some of them even replicate eye-contact now.
- modeless 6y ago
  Do factory floor robots communicate with each other in any meaningful way? I'm under the impression that they mostly just follow pre-programmed paths and all you need for that is clock synchronization.
throwmeawayhaha 6y ago
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. 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.
joefourier 6y ago
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? 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?
- thomasikzelf 6y ago
  More context on the -no safety driver- issue. "Eliminating the safety driver is an important step toward making Waymo's service profitable. But it may not be enough on its own because Waymo says the cars still have remote overseers. These Waymo staffers never steer the vehicles directly, but they do send high-level instructions to help vehicles get out of tricky situations. For example, a Waymo spokeswoman told me, "if a Waymo vehicle detects that a road ahead may be closed due to construction, it can pull over and request a second set of eyes from our fleet response specialists." The fleet response specialist can then confirm that the road is closed and instruct the vehicle to take another route." https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/10/waymo-finally-launches-an-actual-public-driverless-taxi-service/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/10/waymo-finally-launches-...
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    As long as you can get a good ratio, says 10:1, that sounds workable as a robotaxi, actually.
  - oldgradstudent 6y ago
    The language seems to be chosen very carefully. They say that they don't do one very specific thing, and they give one very specific example of something they do. Leaving it open to interpretation. I'll remain very skeptical about their no safety driver claims. We'll probably have to wait until the first fatality or serious injury to know in certain. The lawsuits and police/NTSB investigations will expose a lot of the inner workings.
modeless 6y ago
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. 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.
- bob_theslob646 6y ago
  This is a highly under rated take. The reason they didn't do so was industry pressure/competition. The counter point could be that the technology is there, but the regulation is not. Why must everything be retrofitted versus a complete system overhaul? The initial costs may be immense but the return on investment will be far greater. Just my two cents.
  - ironman1478 6y ago
    Partnering with an existing car company helps a lot. They know how to build vehicles at scale and they also can provide a lot of support when it comes to interfacing with the control systems for the car. Controlling the car (engine, doors, wheels, wipers, lights, etc) is a surprisingly difficult task on its own. It requires a lot of control systems knowledge, a complex test infrastructure, and a lot of specialized talent that's probably hard to get. It could've been seen as too difficult to take on in addition to figuring out how to actually do all the self driving specific tasks (mapping, planning, detection, etc.).
    - sumedh 6y ago
      > They know how to build vehicles at scale The actual car companies also outsource lot of stuff to other manufactures e.g lights, wires etc. I would imagine understanding and maintaining those relations woulds also be a hassle for Google instead its just better a car companies does all that.
choppaface 6y ago
All of the big players in self-driving have shown that while they can try to solve the tech problem, nobody can solve the team 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. Waymo has had a ton of notable departures: * Urmson made a good amount of money and left for Aurora. * The founders of Nuro cashed in $40m each and left for their own thing. * Levandowski made nearly a quarter billion and took off. * Drago worked on Streetview and more Google-centric things, then went to Zoox to make about $100k (lol), then returned to Waymo. * Now the era of Krafcik is coming to an end. 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. 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.
- that_guy_iain 6y ago
  What evidence there is a team problem. Like building cars requires all those things and companies manage to do it all the time. Adding the self driving tech in there, ok, but these cars already have teams upon teams of tech already working on them. Each part of the inboard computer has a different tech team which works with a different company it's outsourced to. In fact, sometimes different teams work with the same outsourcing company for different parts. That seems a very much a solved problem. It also seems like you're not really also applying in the fact self driving cars are approved in how many places? And it takes approximately 5 years to get a standard car to market, getting a self driving car that has been tested in just 10 states, it's unreasonable to expect the value to end users you're expecting to see here. Getting the car to market seems to be the actual problem and that seems more of a legal issue of no one wanting to say yes on the major scale. This is a very slow moving industry, electric cars are basically a solved problem, yet we'll be seeing people buying combustion engine cars for decades. How long has this project been going on for? 12-years? Seeing management change over that amount of time seems normal. It would be notable if we were seeing 1 or 2 people a month leave for 6 months.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
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. 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. 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. [1] https://gist.github.com/ChuckM/ff5fc8c800c7fe9160483b68ec45aac9 https://gist.github.com/ChuckM/ff5fc8c800c7fe9160483b68ec45a...
- iJohnDoe 6y ago
  Your rewrite was extremely well done. It’s too bad CEOs don’t write their PR like you have done. Like when they drive companies into the ground, lay everyone off, and then they exit with millions.
  - karljtaylor 6y ago
    they do, it just usually gets re-written to hell in about 30 very anxious email rounds
  - muskrat_wire 6y ago
    that's capitalism
- TheMagicHorsey 6y ago
  This is the funniest thing I've read in a while. And potentially true.
- jpm_sd 6y ago
  This is fantastic. You accurately describe the Other Bets climate when I left X in 2015, and I hear it's even worse these days from friends who recently left when Loon shut down.
teslaberry 6y ago
the best way to 'solve' self driving is just to build new cities entirely with new transportation infrastructure specifically built for self driving vehicles to be on roads, and in parking spots. not for 'human driven vehicles'. just to make things simpler , and clear, the cars themselves should not even have steering wheels. any vehicles that are outside of the city, can be driven onto a self driving wheeled platform kind of thing, and that platform ( a self driving cart ) will drive those vehicles around as needed . that's actually SIMPLER. than 'solving' self driving in reality. Musk's updates will not solve self driving . they will abdicate driving responsibilty, for every edge case in which it fails, which , ultimately, requires the driver to supervise the car , at least , while in complex city environments. which means, ultimately, you cannot have fully robot taxis. if you cannot have robot taxis, you can call 'self driving' whatever you want. but it's not effectively 'self driving' for the purpose of mega profit silicon valley ponzi-nomics. if you want mega profit, let alone, real world self driving solved. just start building the entire infrastructure from scratch to ensure the system as a whole works. right now, you're trying to solve 'self driving' for the individual vehicle as if it will be as 'smart' as a human by mimicing human driving styles with complex hardware and software. not gonna happen. at best you get mimicry of the highest order. still doesn't work. cannot mimic persistent capacity to deal with novel situation. 'self driving' is effectively non-deliverable, until at least the next AI revolution in hardware, which is still 15-20 years away from being commercialized as a suite of different asic chips are built out and then taught to communicate with one another by some hyper sophisticated universal buss system.
solutron 6y ago
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.
tmsh 6y ago
Just wanted to say, from the outside, John Krafcik seemed to me like a strong leader. 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. 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. 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.
- Traster 6y ago
  I talked to someone who was working with BMW 5 years ago and they had a similar story- automotive companies hated Tesla because they all understood that one screw up on self driving probably meant he death of their brand in terms of safety and probably a massive set back for the entire industry. That’s something a start up can afford but for a large car manufacturer it’s an existential threat.
- chambers 6y ago
  From the outside, he doesn't seem like a strong leader at all. Besides him not leaving a clear successor[1][2], I think his communication is disingenuous. The kind of management-speak that aims to hide poor decision-making behind a facade of cheer and care. People are scared of "might makes right", but I've found "nice makes right" to be far more insidious and pernicious in our society. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26674228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26674228 2. https://a16z.com/2013/07/03/shared-command-2/ https://a16z.com/2013/07/03/shared-command-2/
csours 6y ago
Disclaimer, I work for GM, not on SDC; anything expressed here is solely my opinion. 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. 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. If this liability was not an issue, SDCs in hands-off, eyes-off, brains-off mode would be available today, right now. So how will the paradigm of liability change? Or will it?
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  > It seems quite likely that manufacturers will want to disclaim liability for SDCs. Why though? They could just accept the liability, charge an insurance premium slightly lower than legally mandated liability insurance for human drivers and then self-insure (and potentially re-insure against bigger risks). This would not only solve the liability problem, but also allow them to make a nice profit because the car presumably gets into at-fault accidents much less often than the human drivers.
loourr 6y ago
This reads like an obituary
perryizgr8 6y ago
Everyone except Tesla is approaching self-driving in the wrong way. 1. This is a looooong term bet, so you need revenue NOW to sustain your company until you get to full self driving. 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. 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. 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. 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 https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/.
- spaceflunky 6y ago
  As Elon said, 'everyone chasing LIDAR is doomed to failed. DOOOOOOMED.' Waymo is just one big cope party filled with HBS grads who can't fathom that they didn't succeed at something.
xnx 6y ago
I believe I read that he's moving to Austin, so Tesla could be a next step.

149 points by mgreg 6y ago

Am I the only one to read like an acknowledgement that Waymo didn’t achieve what it was supposed to do and he was asked to go for lack of performance?

andrewcl 6y ago
The CEO lists several accomplishments in the press brief. It doesn't appear to say that he's being let go specifically for performance concerns.
- stefan_ 6y ago
  Well, they never say that. I personally think it's because of that horrendous "Waymonauts" moniker.
- blihp 6y ago
  It rarely does unless there's been a very public screw up on the part of the executive that results in bad PR the company.
Judgmentality 6y ago
I read it as a state of self-driving cars in general. The technology isn't developing as fast as people had hoped. Waymo is still in the lead, even if this guy failed to deliver (he announced Waymo would be a public service for 2018, and that obviously didn't happen).
- bumby 6y ago
  >The technology isn't developing as fast as people had hoped. I can’t help but think people conflated what the problem statement of self driving really is. We’ve made huge strides in perception in the last two decades but self-driving is a much more complex problem than just accurately perceiving the world sound us.
- solutron 6y ago
  Definitely google some Tesla FSD beta videos and watch them. Waymo doubled down on a technology set and data methodology that is not scalable. Tesla is going to win in this space 100%
SilasX 6y ago
No, he wants to spend more time with friends and family and travel the world.
- pasttense01 6y ago
  Maybe. But a lot of us are cynical when we hear this kind of language from departing CEOs.
  - Judgmentality 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure the person you were responding to was being sarcastic. Then again it's the internet, so who knows?
solutron 6y ago
That's exactly how I read it. It's a huge red flag.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

I hear Anthony Levandowski is available, having been pardoned by Trump in his last day in office on January 20, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski#Criminal_conviction_and_pardon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski#Criminal_c...

rajrkrish 6y ago
I don't think neither google nor uber would want him back.

endisneigh 6y ago

That's sad. 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. 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.

meteor333 6y ago
Even for airplanes and trains, we still have pilots and humans behind the controller with 100% attention.
- minhazm 6y ago
  We don't have fully automated planes because they're already safe enough and the economics aren't there. The probability of crashing with a plane is extremely low, even factoring in the higher risk of takeoffs and landings. The entire process is coordinated with Air Traffic Control. Since planes are so safe already and pilots are relatively inexpensive, there's no strong financial incentive to fully automate planes.
  - endisneigh 6y ago
    Planes are also substantially regulated. I mean if there was a Vehicular Traffic Control on every intersection the same way there's Air Traffic Control we probably wouldn't have any accidents now, negating the main purported benefit of self driving to begin with.
  - meteor333 6y ago
    Disagree on the economics. Pilots cost significant money and since the airline industry runs on low margins this can be a huge plus. But the main reason we won't see planes without pilots is political and related to trust. I think for the same reasons we are less likely to see truly driverless cars.

mrpippy 6y ago

It'll be interesting to see where he goes next and if any info comes out about why he's leaving. Brief summary of his jobs: - 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

908B64B197 6y ago
Apparently Apple is rumored to be working on a car...

iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago

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?

cbanek 6y ago
I can only think of The Office: "It doesn’t take a genius to know that any organization thrives when it has two leaders. Go ahead, name a country that doesn’t have two presidents. A boat that sets sail without two captains. Where would Catholicism be without the Popes?"
pasttense01 6y ago
From the Wall Street Journal: "The company said Friday that it is promoting its chief technology and operating officers, Dmitri Dolgov and Tekedra Mawakana, to lead a decade-old effort to make self-driving cars a reality. They will share the title of co-chief executive... Mr. Dolgov is one of the founders of Google’s self-driving car project. He joined the program when it began in 2009 and led the development of Waymo’s autonomous system, known as Waymo Driver. He studied physics and math at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology before earning a doctorate in computer science from the University of Michigan. As chief operating officer, Ms. Mawakana has led the effort to commercialize Waymo’s self-driving system. She has a law degree from Columbia University and previously worked at other tech companies such as eBay Inc. and Yahoo." https://www.wsj.com/articles/waymo-ceo-john-krafcik-is-leaving-the-company-11617385836 https://www.wsj.com/articles/waymo-ceo-john-krafcik-is-leavi... My guess it that traditionally the chief operating officer would have been promoted and the chief technology officer would stay as the chief technology officer--but that there was a significant risk of the chief technology officer leaving if he wasn't promoted. So you end up with co-CEOs.
solutron 6y ago
This is a huge red flag. Especially when Waymo's had no significant milestones and when the CEO is using language like 'spend time with friends and family'. That usually means they're being pushed out, or that he's made the realization it's not going to work out and is jumping ship.

tdhz77 6y ago

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.

layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
>Self driving is not possible without changes to infrastructure Humans seem to be perfectly capable of doing it though.
- throwawayfrauds 6y ago
  36,000 US driving deaths annually would beg to differ.
- lrem 6y ago
  Humans come with their own liability :(
- wetpaws 6y ago
  Humans are probably the single worst possible candidate for handling a car
  - oldgradstudent 6y ago
    Except for all the other options.
xnx 6y ago
There were a lot of things that weren't possible in the 1960's that are possible now. Highway driving is the easiest type of driving. If Waymo wasn't limiting their driving to specific areas, I have no doubt their Driver could easily drive through the US interstates without issue.
- 6y ago

specialp 6y ago

"To start, I’m looking forward to a refresh period, reconnecting with old friends and family, and discovering new parts of the world." I suppose that is a nice way of saying wait out my non-compete....

whimsicalism 6y ago
Is Waymo not headquartered in California?
- specialp 6y ago
  Yes you are correct and it probably is unenforceable if it exists. My mistake. It just reeked of that.
lrem 6y ago
Even without a non-compete, taking a couple months off between jobs is nice. But yeah, at that level I imagine non-competes reach to the full legal extent and then some ;)

layoutIfNeeded 6y ago

This combined with the recent announcement of Waymo pivoting to monetize their research in what's basically a garage sale (https://waymo.com/lidar https://waymo.com/lidar) tells me that Waymo is soon to be interred on killedbygoogle.com.

choppaface 6y ago
That lidar has been for sale for years, it's not really a pivot. See e.g. this older post on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19319233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19319233

Sherl 6y ago

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?

whimsicalism 6y ago
Do you need to exchange data with every other driver when you're on the road?
- jdavis703 6y ago
  Isn’t this what turn signals, horns and brake lights are for? Not to mention making eye contact with pedestrians at crossings.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    Self driving cars have turn signals, horns, and brake lights too. And can also read that data from other cars. And some of them even replicate eye-contact now.
modeless 6y ago
Do factory floor robots communicate with each other in any meaningful way? I'm under the impression that they mostly just follow pre-programmed paths and all you need for that is clock synchronization.

throwmeawayhaha 6y ago

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. 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.

joefourier 6y ago

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? 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?

thomasikzelf 6y ago
More context on the -no safety driver- issue. "Eliminating the safety driver is an important step toward making Waymo's service profitable. But it may not be enough on its own because Waymo says the cars still have remote overseers. These Waymo staffers never steer the vehicles directly, but they do send high-level instructions to help vehicles get out of tricky situations. For example, a Waymo spokeswoman told me, "if a Waymo vehicle detects that a road ahead may be closed due to construction, it can pull over and request a second set of eyes from our fleet response specialists." The fleet response specialist can then confirm that the road is closed and instruct the vehicle to take another route." https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/10/waymo-finally-launches-an-actual-public-driverless-taxi-service/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/10/waymo-finally-launches-...
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  As long as you can get a good ratio, says 10:1, that sounds workable as a robotaxi, actually.
- oldgradstudent 6y ago
  The language seems to be chosen very carefully. They say that they don't do one very specific thing, and they give one very specific example of something they do. Leaving it open to interpretation. I'll remain very skeptical about their no safety driver claims. We'll probably have to wait until the first fatality or serious injury to know in certain. The lawsuits and police/NTSB investigations will expose a lot of the inner workings.

modeless 6y ago

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. 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.

bob_theslob646 6y ago
This is a highly under rated take. The reason they didn't do so was industry pressure/competition. The counter point could be that the technology is there, but the regulation is not. Why must everything be retrofitted versus a complete system overhaul? The initial costs may be immense but the return on investment will be far greater. Just my two cents.
- ironman1478 6y ago
  Partnering with an existing car company helps a lot. They know how to build vehicles at scale and they also can provide a lot of support when it comes to interfacing with the control systems for the car. Controlling the car (engine, doors, wheels, wipers, lights, etc) is a surprisingly difficult task on its own. It requires a lot of control systems knowledge, a complex test infrastructure, and a lot of specialized talent that's probably hard to get. It could've been seen as too difficult to take on in addition to figuring out how to actually do all the self driving specific tasks (mapping, planning, detection, etc.).
  - sumedh 6y ago
    > They know how to build vehicles at scale The actual car companies also outsource lot of stuff to other manufactures e.g lights, wires etc. I would imagine understanding and maintaining those relations woulds also be a hassle for Google instead its just better a car companies does all that.

choppaface 6y ago

All of the big players in self-driving have shown that while they can try to solve the tech problem, nobody can solve the team 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. Waymo has had a ton of notable departures: * Urmson made a good amount of money and left for Aurora. * The founders of Nuro cashed in $40m each and left for their own thing. * Levandowski made nearly a quarter billion and took off. * Drago worked on Streetview and more Google-centric things, then went to Zoox to make about $100k (lol), then returned to Waymo. * Now the era of Krafcik is coming to an end. 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. 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.

that_guy_iain 6y ago
What evidence there is a team problem. Like building cars requires all those things and companies manage to do it all the time. Adding the self driving tech in there, ok, but these cars already have teams upon teams of tech already working on them. Each part of the inboard computer has a different tech team which works with a different company it's outsourced to. In fact, sometimes different teams work with the same outsourcing company for different parts. That seems a very much a solved problem. It also seems like you're not really also applying in the fact self driving cars are approved in how many places? And it takes approximately 5 years to get a standard car to market, getting a self driving car that has been tested in just 10 states, it's unreasonable to expect the value to end users you're expecting to see here. Getting the car to market seems to be the actual problem and that seems more of a legal issue of no one wanting to say yes on the major scale. This is a very slow moving industry, electric cars are basically a solved problem, yet we'll be seeing people buying combustion engine cars for decades. How long has this project been going on for? 12-years? Seeing management change over that amount of time seems normal. It would be notable if we were seeing 1 or 2 people a month leave for 6 months.

ChuckMcM 6y ago

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. 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. 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. [1] https://gist.github.com/ChuckM/ff5fc8c800c7fe9160483b68ec45aac9 https://gist.github.com/ChuckM/ff5fc8c800c7fe9160483b68ec45a...

iJohnDoe 6y ago
Your rewrite was extremely well done. It’s too bad CEOs don’t write their PR like you have done. Like when they drive companies into the ground, lay everyone off, and then they exit with millions.
- karljtaylor 6y ago
  they do, it just usually gets re-written to hell in about 30 very anxious email rounds
- muskrat_wire 6y ago
  that's capitalism
TheMagicHorsey 6y ago
This is the funniest thing I've read in a while. And potentially true.
jpm_sd 6y ago
This is fantastic. You accurately describe the Other Bets climate when I left X in 2015, and I hear it's even worse these days from friends who recently left when Loon shut down.

teslaberry 6y ago

the best way to 'solve' self driving is just to build new cities entirely with new transportation infrastructure specifically built for self driving vehicles to be on roads, and in parking spots. not for 'human driven vehicles'. just to make things simpler , and clear, the cars themselves should not even have steering wheels. any vehicles that are outside of the city, can be driven onto a self driving wheeled platform kind of thing, and that platform ( a self driving cart ) will drive those vehicles around as needed . that's actually SIMPLER. than 'solving' self driving in reality. Musk's updates will not solve self driving . they will abdicate driving responsibilty, for every edge case in which it fails, which , ultimately, requires the driver to supervise the car , at least , while in complex city environments. which means, ultimately, you cannot have fully robot taxis. if you cannot have robot taxis, you can call 'self driving' whatever you want. but it's not effectively 'self driving' for the purpose of mega profit silicon valley ponzi-nomics. if you want mega profit, let alone, real world self driving solved. just start building the entire infrastructure from scratch to ensure the system as a whole works. right now, you're trying to solve 'self driving' for the individual vehicle as if it will be as 'smart' as a human by mimicing human driving styles with complex hardware and software. not gonna happen. at best you get mimicry of the highest order. still doesn't work. cannot mimic persistent capacity to deal with novel situation. 'self driving' is effectively non-deliverable, until at least the next AI revolution in hardware, which is still 15-20 years away from being commercialized as a suite of different asic chips are built out and then taught to communicate with one another by some hyper sophisticated universal buss system.

solutron 6y ago

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.

tmsh 6y ago

Just wanted to say, from the outside, John Krafcik seemed to me like a strong leader. 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. 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. 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.

Traster 6y ago
I talked to someone who was working with BMW 5 years ago and they had a similar story- automotive companies hated Tesla because they all understood that one screw up on self driving probably meant he death of their brand in terms of safety and probably a massive set back for the entire industry. That’s something a start up can afford but for a large car manufacturer it’s an existential threat.
chambers 6y ago
From the outside, he doesn't seem like a strong leader at all. Besides him not leaving a clear successor[1][2], I think his communication is disingenuous. The kind of management-speak that aims to hide poor decision-making behind a facade of cheer and care. People are scared of "might makes right", but I've found "nice makes right" to be far more insidious and pernicious in our society. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26674228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26674228 2. https://a16z.com/2013/07/03/shared-command-2/ https://a16z.com/2013/07/03/shared-command-2/

csours 6y ago

Disclaimer, I work for GM, not on SDC; anything expressed here is solely my opinion. 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. 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. If this liability was not an issue, SDCs in hands-off, eyes-off, brains-off mode would be available today, right now. So how will the paradigm of liability change? Or will it?

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
> It seems quite likely that manufacturers will want to disclaim liability for SDCs. Why though? They could just accept the liability, charge an insurance premium slightly lower than legally mandated liability insurance for human drivers and then self-insure (and potentially re-insure against bigger risks). This would not only solve the liability problem, but also allow them to make a nice profit because the car presumably gets into at-fault accidents much less often than the human drivers.

loourr 6y ago

This reads like an obituary

perryizgr8 6y ago

Everyone except Tesla is approaching self-driving in the wrong way. 1. This is a looooong term bet, so you need revenue NOW to sustain your company until you get to full self driving. 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. 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. 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. 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 https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/.

spaceflunky 6y ago
As Elon said, 'everyone chasing LIDAR is doomed to failed. DOOOOOOMED.' Waymo is just one big cope party filled with HBS grads who can't fathom that they didn't succeed at something.

xnx 6y ago

I believe I read that he's moving to Austin, so Tesla could be a next step.