Waymo Co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana | Full Interview | Code 2021

[Music] hello hi how are you doing great thank you for the warm welcome yeah it's very exciting all right waymo self-driving cars what's taking so long so um we've been at it for a while it's i would say the engineering challenge of our generation that's what's taking it so long to do it and do it well and right i think means one safety has to be at the core of everything we do safety takes time and then secondly we actually have to learn along the way it's like a process of discovery and so what's funny to me is when i think back you know i joined waymo almost five years ago and when i think back i thought oh product market fits probably done you know it's ready to commercialize and i realize no you actually have to put the technology into the real world and that's how you get it ready and so that's what we've been focused on doing and learning and receiving feedback from now riders in phoenix i'm very curious to ask how that feedback's going but you're new to this role you only took it in april a co-ceo which is used to be kind of an unusual arrangement now kind of like a trendy arrangement what's the split with you and your co-co yeah so my co-ceo dimitri dalgov is one of the founders so he's one of the people who've been working on this problem for his whole career he was the cto before this role i was the ceo and so we still focus primarily on the two areas that we know the best i think about how you commercialize deploy the technology introduce it to communities and he focuses on building the waymo driver and then we come together to figure out what's the best strategy how do you sequence it what's going to be the rollout plan and so it's going great we have very different and complementary skill sets yeah i think there's there's the capability what the technology can do and then there's what you're allowed to do with it which seems challenging at this point in time i asked this question of every executive that comes on decoder which is a plug um how do you make decisions how do i make what's your strategy for making some of the complicated decisions you have to make so it's something that i've had to relearn in my time at waymo i like data to make decisions and i think when you're introducing a new technology introducing a new business model introducing consumers to an experience that's never existed before it's really about getting comfortable when you have enough data and also getting comfortable with your own sort of gut and so i say one of the things i think that people at waymo who really enjoy it get out of it is this sort of reinforced sense of your own sort of internal guide that's what i use a lot now because it's pioneering there isn't a playbook no one's done it before we're figuring it out as we go along it requires a lot of humility and a lot of openness around learning and so i learn i listen i make a decision if it's not the right decision we pivot and we keep going and so really having the mindset that like this is a learning journey so the stakes are really high in this particular learning journey absolutely people in robot cars going places taking rides i want to talk about the technology and then i want to talk about what kind of business you're going to build with it yes um let's start with the tech is the waymo driver is it ready could you just deploy it and give people rides right now are you is that is the bottleneck regulation in safety or is it we're still working on it so the wemo driver is in the world as we speak today we have a service called waymo one it's in phoenix arizona anyone who goes there can download the app they will hail a ride it'll take them from point a to point b when the car shows up it's empty there's no one in the car there's not a person in the car who's not driving there's no one and the wonderful thing about the service in phoenix arizona is people get to have their own space they're in there you know they get to have conference calls do whatever they want to do so it's happening i want to say that like the future is already happening now in addition to that we are like a tiny part of phoenix arizona in a 50 square mile territory which is also the size of san francisco so i i'm not going to concede that it's tiny it is though yes it is a specific jurisdiction that we're doing it in that's the way to do it safely and and also we have launched a trusted tester program in san francisco so now residents of san francisco are having the chance to try out our service too so do you think your core technology stack is is done and it can be deployed at scale or are you still learning and testing that part of the system so yeah i think that's one of the ways in which this is quite different um it's not a one and done and it's also not a get the technology up to a certain point and now we're ready to deploy it everywhere um you know geographic sort of you know street lights are different weather is different you know there's a lot about each domain that's quite different and so what you'll see us do and what you've seen us do now is now that we're operating in two fairly different environments that gives our tech stack the opportunity to learn you know we've driven over 20 million miles on public roads autonomously across 25 cities over 20 billion miles in simulation which is quite important and so this is the way the waymo driver learns and all of that learning is shared across the fleet that area in phoenix which i grant you is quite large thank you the boundaries of that area have not expanded inside of phoenix for quite some time you're starting to launch in san francisco should we see a faster ramp of market expansion now so i think the question is what is the goal our goal in phoenix push a button in a robot comes and gets yeah well that's the goal for the that is the goal for the customer our goal in phoenix was to learn right you know malls have 7 12 entrances which one do you expect to be picked up at because the reality is when you give us that address we may not be at the one and when there's not a human in the car for you to call or to call you you know what is the what are the operational challenges associated with actually having a fully autonomous service so that's what we've been doing so we haven't been expanding we've been really taking the feedback from our riders and making the service more and more delightful and that's what we're also doing in san francisco now we have riders some have lived in the city for a really long time and they're excited to provide feedback to bring this technology to market yeah you're kind of describing that you said 20 million miles which is waymo's favorite statistic you've got more than anybody else but the problem we're describing is very local it's a very small like you could get 100 million miles and you still might not know where the exit of the shopping mall is is that a challenge that you're splitting is are you attacking that differently yes so when we talk about the number of miles that we've driven that's across all 25 cities and that's really important i mean you know we've tested rain we've tested heat in sun valley you know snow so those miles are training the driver for scenarios that we're not currently operating a service in when i talk about pickup and drops off drop-offs or like the chaos of a parking lot those are very specific to the service that we're offering and the feedback that we're getting yeah one of the big questions i have about the technology which seems to come up a lot there are a lot of self-driving companies on various parts of the stack some of them are deeply integrated with cars some of them are kind of far away and they're just selling a sensor you have a you have a line right you're like the main bulk of your fleet is modified chrysler pacificas now you've got eye paces do you think that you have a challenge of how the car itself changes once it can drive itself or are you happy to leave the cars to someone else we're really happy to partner with oems for the cars like you said we partnered with stolantis and jlr they've been building cars over 100 years we actually think figuring out how to make the driver safer is a really exciting challenge and so that's what we're focused on is the act do you think of the actual wheels drivetrain crash impact stuff is that a kind of a commodity to you no you swap those in and out yeah i think the you know i think the underlying base vehicle is in and of itself an evolving platform and i think that's the way to think about it right i mean right now we see all of this innovation around evs and despite 100 years of internal combustible engines trying to become more efficient you know gasoline is only 25 and diesel 33 but it's now that we have evs that it's over 95 right so that's an innovative platform it's just not the one we're focused on the one we're focused on i'd say has three sort of sides of innovation one is building the driver like can you actually take the human out and have the car drive itself yes we're doing that it's very exciting second is what are the business models that that unlocks once you can do that and so we're focused on deploying the waymo driver across three main lines of business today and so that's waymo one which is ride hailing as well as waymo via which is long-haul trucking as well as local delivery and then eventually we will also focus on personal car ownership which is when you license the technology but then the third part of this innovation is actually being less comfortable with 40 000 people being killed on our roadways every year i mean like really deciding that if 94-ish percent give or take the debate of those are caused by human error then like we have the opportunity to innovate and remove the human from the equation which means you don't rely on the human to sort of be alert at any point so you don't need a driver's license you get in the car and the waymo driver takes you where you need to go safely obviously we're on stage after elon was on stage tesla has something called full self-driving which is level two plus on this complicated scale of self-driving that no one understands you're level four you want to go to five do you think that the full self-driving driver assist stuff where people kind of tune out it's poisoning the well of the self-driving conversation at all so early days we focused i guess 2013 uh the self-driving the google self-driving park car project focused on you know auto assist technology and what we learned in our experience is people trust the technology beyond its capabilities and so we witnessed employees actually shaving and sleeping and plugging in you know sort of to the back seat even though we told them that that's beyond the capability and so i think the problem is like we're human and when we get in the car we have other stuff to do like we're leaving home and we need to get to work but like we have three emails we meant to send but the cat ran out or the dog got whatever right and so i think the problem is you have to give people the chance to just do what they want to do which is not focused on driving and so what we're focused on the reason we're focused on level four is we believe that is the only way to safely deploy this technology in a way that improves road safety which is the mission that we're built on and so it's a very different business model when you're talking about driver assist i mean i have that in my car it makes me stay in the lane it's delightful for what it is but it isn't something that allows me to tune out you mentioned that one of the business models we pursue in the future is licensing the technology is that something you're actively going to pursue with car makers buy the waymo stack put on your cars take the steering wheel out sell the cars you're good to go yes we have already sort of announced uh partnerships that we have along those lines but we've been very open that like you know obviously if you buy a car you want it to go everywhere right you want us to be able to say it's level five and you can go everywhere and you can sort of face any conditions so it's naturally later it's not soon are you competitive in that market you don't have some partnerships or other companies that are fully focused on it are you winning those deals or is everyone just signing the hey we got to have a bunch of suppliers let's see who wins stage that market i think that um until people create a level four system it's really hard to start negotiating viable deals about a level 5 capability and so i can't speak to what people might be doing but i know that there isn't anyone else offering a public service today with level 4 technology would you license the level 4 system i mean there are chrysler pacificas and jaguar i-paces is there some reason i can't buy a hot rodded self-driving chrysler pacifica today yes we would not license that one because as i said it's a you know we're in the process of learning and two you know we're operating it as a fleet we're not licensing the technology and then three there is a map i mean you yourself said it's a particular jurisdiction um and so i think car makers would say to us that that's not really a viable product we got a market at least one and i bet quite a few people in this room okay who doesn't love the chrysler pacifica um let's talk about the actual business which is waymo one and then the trucking business is that business baked the revenue models set you understand how it's going to scale what have you learned operating it at the scale you have that you're going to need to change as you expand i think you know one of the reasons that we do the early rider in phoenix we had an early writer program now we have the writers in san francisco is actually learning what do people care about because i think one of the opportunities everyone's thinking about like sustainable cities right like what's the city of the future and how will evs help shape that and when you think about the trade-offs like we want transportation on demand when we want it the reality is that will lead to more congestion so will people make trade-offs you know will people say i'll take an additional eight minutes to get that car if it means it's not idling and congesting my city and so we have a lot to learn about these sort of business models and that's what we're testing and so i'm not going to sit here and say we've figured out you know all of the various sort of commercialization opportunities for the next 20 years we're actually listening and seeing how people will value the service accordingly and that's yeah testing pricing i mean all of the like normal corporate strategies but really really having customers at the center of that out of the data you've collected so far in phoenix what has surprised you the most about what customers want and what is the change you were not expecting to make i think one of the surprises for me has been the communities of people who feel very excluded from transportation today and so in there on i'll say i'll just give two examples that are on two different ends of the spectrum one are people who've had to have their driver's license take away or their keys taken away because they're older and so they now those families are like oh my goodness we get to avoid that conversation because that's a that's a tough time and then on the other end it's you know we partner with the foundation for blind children and these are kids who like their 16th birthday doesn't mean the same yeah and so really giving people independence where they don't need mom or dad or girlfriend or boyfriend to carry them around has been a delightful surprise have you had to adjust pricing is it are people willing to pay what you thought they were going to pay people are willing to pay we have a lot of demand we have you know we don't use our entire fleet for the customer service right we're still using the fleet also to advance the waymo driver and so we have demand beyond the supply that we're offering in the market one of the reasons i ask about the pricing question is and you know i've briefly talked about this before once you get to self-driving cars and if you've ever ridden one it is remarkably boring by design once you get to that stage what is going to differentiate you from every other self-driving robo taxi service that exists yeah right value proposition right i mean we as consumers we go to the experience that's the one we think is the best it's certainly not only because there's one and so that's some of what we're thinking about right now i mean when people get into uh wemo one one of the early observations we made despite the fact that you can get into a ride hailing service and take over their music people don't like it's a very small percentage of people who want to do that because it's your car that i've just entered i'm sitting in the back seat you're in the front seat you're driving me i'm only going to be in your car for three minutes people get in the waymo one they immediately start playing their own music why because it's their space and they have this privacy they can get on a phone call they're not speaking cryptically et cetera and then for people who want to like safely get their kids home after they've been you know pub crawling in chandler uh they're able to do so they're they're 20 plus 21 plus year old kids just to be clear yeah but at the end of the day you know if this technology is available for sale from you or other suppliers uber will have it lyft will have it the drunk kids coming home from chandler or not they're just going to take a car home right and what will make them pick you what will keep your price high relative to everybody else so i think one of the premises of your question is that everyone will have it because everyone will have solved this problem versus everyone will have have it because a few companies will solve this problem and then those will be our partners and so i think it's a i think it's i would think of this as you know one like how will we win we will actually figure out how to scale this driver and once you figure out how to scale this driver the question will be will we try to solve every sort of mobility opportunity directly or will we partner and we've already shown an appetite for partnering in phoenix we have a partnership with lyft and we put some of our cars in their fleet and that's giving us the chance to see the difference between when someone opens a waymo app and they know they're going to receive our service versus when someone opens a lyft app and then they're told hey you know there may be this opportunity to take this ride are you open for that yes or no but i want to keep pushing this a little bit yeah right that that moment is still surprising right you open lyft app one of the greatest innovations of the past decade is you can summon a toyota camry it will in anywhere in the world right but when that experience turns into the robots coming to get you obviously that's surprising but if you look 10 years from now and the robot's always coming to get you how do you solve that challenge so i think you know the way that i think about this you make me think about when i was in law school i lived in new york and my mom was in atlanta and we talked on the phone and i paid long distance phone bills um and maybe that's just really dating myself but like it was a lot of phone bills and i thought about this recently like nothing's really changed about the phone right i mean obviously now they're smart phones but the reality is the entire business model now is about how do i just stay connected to loved ones with my smartphone without monthly charges without long distance charges without these limitations and so i think the question that you're asking is like how do you make sure that what you're creating is delightful enough that it feels like a change and it feels like an innovation and that's what we're focused on i think when i'm in a waymo car and i all of a sudden one it's a consistent experience we own the fleet i get in the jaguar i-pace it's a beautiful ride it's clean i know exactly what to expect i play my own music look out however many years what is that car gonna like tell me about me when i get in because i've been using it so often what does it know about my route where do i tend to go on friday nights what do i like in my coffee i mean there's so much to think about from a commercialization perspective and it's really what keeps me excited so there's an exciting version of that i'm duty-bound to ask you about the other version which is the car rolls up it has no steering wheel it's full of screens and like advertising is playing at you like is this all an effort to just like make more google advertising inventory that's certainly not what i spend any of my time focused on i mean we're heads down focused on this and the business model i mean when you talk about like i mean when i think about the vehicle form factors of the future i'm thinking about us doing code in a car where we're facing each other over a dining room table like that's exciting to me um and so cert that's not what i'm spending my time thinking about right and i love that you're due to bound to ask so thank you i mean like i'm curious like way most part of alphabet yeah what is that relationship to google like yeah so being you know i mean i joined right the week weimo spun out from google's the week that i interviewed and um you know they said alphabet's going to be here we're going to support you that has been my experience since joining obviously they're our lead investor we took external funding last year for the first time and again this year and even having these world-class investors that have expressed confidence in us having alphabet as our primary investor and supporter has been invaluable so obviously cinderpatch is now the ceo of alphabet and google when was the last time larry and sergey came by and just checked in on lemo you know larry and sergey drop by whenever they'd like whatever they'd like but we've all been sheltering we've all been sheltering so it's not as common experience as it was before copenhagen are they taking an active interest in the business always i want to ask you about regulatory issues we were both ex-lawyers i made sure we didn't burn the whole 25 minutes on regulation uh what are the blockers right now is it is are our governments ready for this do they have the frameworks in line to do this right yeah i think at every level of government they're figuring it out um in the u.s i think um you know nitsa has had a voluntary framework primarily and at the state level every state is a little different but most of them are motivated for figuring out how to do it how to enable it how to enable it safely with varying degrees of concern um at the state level and same thing at the city and local level so when you look at you know in arizona for example we had a executive order that we were operating under for those initial years and then in the legislative session this year waymo and the policy team led the charge to get that sort of through the legislature and codified into law and so that's just one state there are a lot of examples like that and i think you know there's a sort of bipartisan recognition that this train is pulling away from the station the question is how not whether do you think things like i mentioned it so they've got a proposed standard for crash reporting out of autonomous vehicles do you think it goes far enough do you think that needs to be standardized is that a differentiator for you if there's everyone's talking about how safe their cars are you know i think that a holistic approach to how our company is able to establish their safety sort of case would be ideal and i say that because all of our technology is going to be different to some degree if you put a multiplier and you say you know you have to you you have to report how are you assessing safety within your technology and make it available to the public and so that's what we've done last october we issued information about the crashes that we've had in phoenix and the reason we did that is we wanted to build not only confidence but also show that our technology performs better than humans under those same scenarios i'm going to ask you one more but we're ready for questions if people want to line up cars i'm actually pretty interested in this one cars in tech are pretty male dominated field you now run a one of the leading self-driving car companies you're trying to change regulations to enable your business to succeed how has this been for you it's been the ride of a lifetime we're done good night everybody um i tried my best sorry i just couldn't i mean really it has been it's it's sorry it's um you know no two days are the same um it's really really creative problem solving which is something i love and um and it's a fantastic team of people who want to make a difference in the world and so it's a great way to spend the days but for you personally you think the space is opening up to be more inclusive um i think we have work to do i think we have work to do and i um and we're focused on that very cool all right see if we have any questions ena see you back here now she's cruising by the mic there we go here's one hi charlene chang from vox media um you're in phoenix and san francisco are there other markets you guys are looking to test in and are you looking to test different terrains climate things like that yeah we have tested other so we've tested like i said some snow in detroit as well as thunderstorms in miami but we haven't launched an actual service that riders would be able to use in any of those jurisdictions yet and we haven't made any sort of public announcements about what's coming next let me follow up on that do you think you can run this thing in denver in the snow like are you ready for is have you tested that stuff such that you're confident you can do it when it's time um no no it's early days for that i mean yeah it's early days it's a vehicle platform question also and so that's why you don't see us sort of putting riders in the cars in those jurisdictions yet yeah any other questions for takedra okay thank you very much delightful talking to you you

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Length: 26min 47sec (1607 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021