This Week in Startups - Apple's new Mac + Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt, driverless service in SF, the Origin (zero-emission shared vehicle) | E1404

Episode Date: March 9, 2022

First Jason and Molly recap the Apple event, including the new Mac Studio release (1:53). Then they discuss Pony AI's $8.5B Series D (34:41). Next, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt joins to discuss launching their driverless service in SF (46:40), their custom-built zero-emission shared vehicle the "Origin" (1:01:06), and self-driving maturity.   Show Notes: (00:00) Jason and Molly intro today’s topics: thoughts on new Apple products, interview with Kyle Vogt of Cruise (01:53) Jason and Molly talk about the Mac Studio (10:52) Indochino - Get $50 off any purchase of $399 or more by using code TWIST at checkout https://indochino.com (12:05) Big presentations aren’t needed for incremental changes (22:23) Vanta - Get $1,000 off automating your SOC 2 at https://vanta.com/twist (23:41) Guessing the next computer in the Mac lineage (25:40) More Apple products announced, and Apple TV for Friday MLB (33:33) Odoo - Get your first app free and a $1000 credit at https://odoo.com/twist (34:41) Startup of the day: Pony.ai (46:40) Jason interviews Kyle Vogt, CEO of Cruise (01:01:06) Carpooling with the Cruise Origin (01:07:45) Smoother rides and self-driving cars in different weather (01:19:05) Self-driving robo-taxis and sharing map data (01:27:00) What percent are we at for self-driving general accessibility? Check out Cruise: https://www.getcruise.com FOLLOW Kyle: https://twitter.com/kvogt FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Okay, everybody, we got a great interview for today. I interview Cruz CEO, Kyle Vote, on the show for a second time. He just retook the reins as CEO of Cruz after a few years as CTO. But before we get to that, there's a lot of car talk in today's episode. I'm going to warn you, but there's also a lot of Apple talk. We're going to recap the Apple event and talk about what they announced. And their legacy of making confusing names continues. We do our best to sort it all out for you, but essentially, they've,

released a Mac Mini that's twice as fat and four times the price. So big innovations coming from Apple. And then we talk about a different Robotaxy company called pony.aI and we debate their $8.5 billion valuation and when they will get these cars on the road. It's going to be a great episode. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Indochino. Indochino makes custom fitted suits, shirts, and casual wear at affordable prices. Shop for your next best look or book a virtual style consultant at Indochino.com. Right now, you can get $50 off any purchase of $399 or more by using Code Twist at checkout. Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business.

Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at Vanta, dot com slash twist and odu. Odo is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps that let you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business. Your first app is free forever. And right now, Odu is offering $1,000 off your first implementation pack at Odu.com slash twist. That's OD OO.O.com slash twist.

Apple had a keynote. And as we like to do, we're going to spend a little bit of time, criticizing Apple for their absurd decisions and branding, and then give them their flowers for when they do something correct. It's going to be a mixed bag today. But Molly, I think we both agree the most exciting thing to come out of today is the Mac Studio. Explain to the audience, in your perception, what the Mac Studio is. I am trying to decide at this moment if exciting is the right word. Okay. But it is interesting. It's definitely the biggest announcement of all of them, right?

Because I would say what we were really hoping for was the VR goggles, which like nobody really thought we were going to get, but Hope Springs Eternal. I think with Apple at the point at which they start leaking, they're probably still two years out. Anyway, the Mac Studio is actually a very interesting new desktop. Apple's, they announced their most powerful chip, the M1 Ultra, and this new desktop computer, which basically looks like if you just stack two Mac minis together and then fused them perfectly. It's a big, fat desktop that does seem, and this is important, right, because it's Apple sticking with the bread and butter, like it is aimed at actual creatives, designers,

video editors, musicians, the people who have historically made up the Apple brand. These are the core users who have felt left out in the cold for the last decade because Apple, Apple, I'm sorry, would not listen to them. And their complaints were you make computers that are not designed for us. You took our ports away. You don't listen to us in terms of extendability. We want to connect our own monitors. We want a customizable computer because we do things like make movies or do animation or

photos. And we need a very powerful computer. And we don't want to replace it with an iPad. So you have this consumerization of Apple that occurred because of the iPhone and the iPad and the IMAX. and then you have the original people who felt left out in the cold. It does seem that Apple has turned a corner

in addressing this group of people and not pissing them off by releasing the MacBook Pro with the M1 chip in it and putting the ports back and putting MagSafe back. And you don't have to live down a desktop. Right. I mean, they still had to wait

such a long time for a desktop. It is interesting because it's one or the either, and I'll be interested to hear your thoughts on the audience's thoughts. Either it is Apple finally, you know, giving the right product to its most core group of people, or it's Apple doing what it's done for the last 10 years, which is like occasionally trot out an updated desktop that is really expensive and has an all new form factor from the last one, isn't expandable, comes a year and a half after they've upgraded their most powerful laptop,

and still feels like, you know, you've got to run final cut X on it or final cut 10 or whatever, which is like crappy software. So like I'm not sure which one of this, these this is. This is going to be super confusing for people, but there is the cheese grater tower called the Apple Mac Pro. Right.

Now that is the one that you can put a bunch of hard drives in and it's got power supplies and a ton of ports on the back and that thing is like $7,000. So this is supposed to be for that same group of people but a little bit more affordable, I guess. And now,

Because of this new M1 chip, which is called the M1 Ultra, if you've been paying attention, there's an M1 that was in your phone. This replaces like the Intel and all these other chips. So they make their own silicon M1, M1, M1 Pro, M1, which is what we got in our last Apple Mac minis and in our MacBook pros, correct, Molly? I think I just have the M1. I have the M1. I think you have Max in your laptop.

So I guess we have the pros, which is incredible. Yes. There's the M1, the M1 Pro, the M1. the M1 Max and now the M1 Ultra? I believe this is the family now. I mean, guys, this is absurd. Like, luckily Apple makes a crap ton of money and always has, but they're just a mess. It's just like, and also, why not just say M1, 2, 3,4?

Would that not have worked? Right. Like, or are they just so different architecturally that they need to be a different category? And are we going to get an M2 max now, an M2 Pro, an M2, and an M2 ultra? be clear, we're dunking on the names and we're right to. And I will never stop, like, marveling at the fact that I have three different Apple devices that charge in three different ways. And, like, some of them are lightning and some of them are USBC. But then some of them are wireless, but not the same wireless. Like, the AirPods can't charge on the Apple Watch charger because they're

not that kind of wire. Like, that is ridiculous. However, as a matter of computer engineering, these chips are incredible. And I have no doubt that these machines are going to be ridiculous. I mean, that Mac Pro, Macbook Pro, with the M1 in it, is like almost scary best. And I think what they have designed these four is power to watts. In other words, how powerful can they be and how little power can they draw so that your battery lasts an obscene amount of time, which is what everybody says when they get one of these machines. Oh, my God, I'm not getting the spinning wheel of death as much. I'm you know my machine is super fast and the battery life is just bonkers like sometimes I forget

to charge it and I'm like I'm you know on hour 10 11 12 and I still have battery power left yeah and on the old ones with the intel you know you they're like yeah you can get eight hours all day and then like you use it and you get like six or five so for those of you who are not watching youtube.com slash this weekend subscribe there Spotify has a feature now I guess we're in the video beta when you're listening on Spotify there's some way to click a button and watch video, and then if you type This Week in Startup's video, you'll find the video feed in Apple.

There's, I guess, the three ways to watch us on video. So let's play the video, and we'll talk over it. The combination of M1 Ultra and Mac OS cranks up the performance of Mac yet again. Okay. So now, let's talk about where we're going to use this incredible new chip. Okay.

Today we're going to focus on the place where so many people create their life's best work, the studio. A studio is where creators, like designers, scientists and developers change the world. Whether it's in a home or an office, each studio is unique, customized with the tools that complete the user's workflow. Yes.

And for many, the Mac place... We have studios. I'm feeling it. It's working. This is me. I'm important. I'm a genius. I have a studio. We're creating my life's best work right now.

It's not an office. It's not a closet. It's not a garage. It's a studio. Yet there are some users who want even more. So they can push the limits of their creativity. First, they want breakthrough performance and capability

to turn their studio into a creative powerhouse. Next, they want a wide range of connectivity for peripherals that are key to their studio workflow. Yeah, we want to save files fast. And finally, many want a modular system and display so they can create their perfect setup. Kind of like saying you don't want planned obsolescence. Something totally new that gives our users exactly what they need

to build a studio of their dreams. And here it is. The studio of their dream. Yes. My studio is going to have this lighting. Whoa. Back it up. Whoa.

It's such a letdown, though. I'm expecting something so epic and they're like, and here is a Mac Mini. And I was like, I have a Mac Mini. It's not that awesome. It's like a double smash burger of a Mac Mini is what. It basically made a double double. It's a double double. I'll take it an animal style.

And studio display. And studio display. Mac Studio is an entirely new Mac with the unbelievable performance of our most powerful Apple Silicon. The lack of symmetry here is killing. And M1 Ultra. And the studio display is the perfect compliment to Mac Studio with a phenomenal set of features in that.

They're so precious. You mean you can plug them in? Okay. So you can plug the thing into the thing and then they will work together like monitors and desktop have for time and memoriam. Okay. Here's my take on this like craziness, Molly. Yep. Here's how you could have said it. A lot of you have wanted a more powerful Mac mini with more ports. We made one that's twice as fast with a lot more memory. Let me show it to you. Also, we made you an external monitor in case you don't, you want one with the Mac logo instead of

one for half the price with a Dell. Like that's the translation. We put more ports on the back of this thing. As the world starts to open up and we all start to travel again, you gotta look good. And how are you going to do that? You're going to use Indochino like me. When I go to the All InSummit in Miami, when I go to Australia again, I can't wait for them to open up.

Maybe Tokyo will be open up again soon. And I'm going to go to Italy this summer for a week or two. I can't wait to go to Indochino.com and get all of my new suits dialed in. With Indochino, you can customize everything from suits and shirts to chinos and bomber jackets at surprisingly affordable prices. And I had an amazing experience going there,

getting custom shirts, custom suits, every piece is made to your exact measurements, and you can customize every detail. The fabric, the lapel, the monogram, the statement linings that I love so much, I was amazed at the process. It was so easy and it was so detailed. So here's your call to action. Get $50 off any purchase of $399 or more by using the promo code twist at Indochino.com. That's $50 off. Any purchase of $399 or more at I-N-D-O-C-H-I-N-O-com. and then use that promo code T-W-I-S-T to get the 50. The $50 off. Great suits, a great process.

So easy, so stylish. You're going to look great. I think our real question is why are these big presentations still happening? Like, why is that the way to announce this? Here's a new computer. We put out a press release and people tweeted about it and then it went up on the website. I don't, like, every three years or so, they put out a new high-end desktop or tower for pros. Yay!

It's out now. It's just like it doesn't need a party anymore. It just doesn't. When it's incremental, here's the thing. I think what you're getting at. Just sell the chip and let people put that in their tower. Sorry, jumped on you. Well, if it's incremental, which this is.

Like, you stack two Mac minis on and you put two extra USBC ports, it's incremental. Yeah. When you do the Steve Jobs' MacBook Air reveal, remember he had the Manila envelope and he pulls it out of the Manila envelope? That was like mind-blowing. But they're using. that for this. Right.

And like, that would be the same as him doing that same trick. We pulls that out of the middle folder and he's like, now it's 16 gigs of RAM, not eight. Yep. It's like, you know, kind of. And I'm sure the chip is amazing, but there's no way to demonstrate that other than to let people benchmark it. Like, it's just not. I mean, I'm sure that sales spike, I get it. It's a good bump.

But the thing is, like, people are going to buy Apple no matter what. You don't have a real problem there. And it's just, I think at some point, we have now seen this so many times. And it's almost like the boy who cried wolf so that even if the chip ins, even if the M1 Ultra is in fact, like a generation defining technological achievement,

they would have called it that no matter what. And so we don't know. And so it's just gotten a little boring. I like the boy who cried wolf situation here because just to remind people, if you're watching the video, we'll pull up in sequence here. Here's the Mac Mini.

Here's the Mac Cube. And here's the Mac Cylinder. And then here is the Mac Studio. And Mac Studio sounds like a software product, not a hardware product. So it's kind of silly. This is like the Mac Mini Pro. That's actually what this is. It's the Mac Mini Pro.

It's a small footprint, not as small as the Mini, but it's for Pro users. So I'm going to call this the Mac Mini Pro. You want to call it Mac Studio? That's fine. I'm calling Mac Mini Pro. Or you can call it the Double Mini. It's the Double Double Mini. I don't know.

There's a better name for this. But pull up for a second here. The Cube. Now the cube was made. I had to pull up the year here, but this is like 15 years old, maybe. The cube is the shit. I'm sorry about to swear, but it just is. I always like the cube.

I think it's like underappreciated. It was at the time revolutionary. And so let's pull that out and take a look at the Mac cube. It was, this is when they had that plastic they were using that was see-through. That was like a big deal. Like Lusite. They were like the ones who like in the Mac cube. Like it levitated.

Like it levitated. Yep. And I think it had a handle if I'm correct. It did, I believe, have a handle. Yeah. Oh my God. I think there was like a handle or something. To the CNET offices at 50 Francisco.

This thing was sitting on my desk because I reviewed it for CNET. And everybody who walked by my desk was like, what is that? I just remember there was a handle on the inside that it effectively almost melted. It had some problems. Oh, here's the handle perspective. There's the handle. Yeah, you would pull it out. And you could actually, I mean, this was like the rare victim.

over the Steve Jobs lock it up mentality because you could actually access the pieces of it. It was, in fact, extendable. Oh, check out the printer port. What did they call those ports? The 48 pin port, the RGB connector at the top. And it had the parallel port, a parallel port? You can plug here. Remember the parallel port with the clickers on the side to snap it in so it wouldn't fall out?

But then if somebody tripped on it, it would go flying at the opposite of MaxSafe. So this was dope when it came out. I mean, and the way it floated. Like, these things were gorgeous. And then remember, they had the cylinder. Yep. And I have two of these. I bought these, you know, to make my video editors happy.

I like, you know, I try to give them a little, you know, hardware gift. It was lovely, but you have to admit, it got a bad reputation for looking exactly like a trash can. We're popping it up on screen here. But if you remember, it was like, it was a marvel of engineering in that it was a perfect, it was in fact a perfect cylinder. But it had this sort of odd dip at the top. There it is. It had a lip until you could carry it around by the.

the lip, which was genius, but then it looked like a garbage can. It really did look like a garbage can. I thought it was dope on a desk. It looked futuristic on a desk. I got like Gattaca vibes, you know, or like Star Wars vibes. It looks like a droid of some type. Plugs on the back was kind of dope, very easily accessible. But this is what they do, right? Every three years or so, every three or four years, like you get a new tower. Here's our little like, here's our sop to you creatives. Yeah, but they can't seem to decide if this thing should be tall or not. So let's pull up the Apple Mac Pro cheese grater edition. This thing is like $7,000 and I think they were charging like $300 for the wheels. If you wanted it to have wheels on the bottom, so this was the obscene thing they made for pros.

So now you have them saying this really was, yeah. This is for pros. We mean it this time. Here's the cylinder. Then they were like, you know what? You didn't like the cylinder. We're going to go back to the tower because you all want a giant tower. So here's the giant tower. where you can put in all your hard drives inside, take it apart, put hard drives in. And then everybody's like, you know what? Maybe I don't want the hard drives inside. Maybe I want to have a rate array and that'll be shared by a group of people.

Or maybe I'm using the cloud so I don't need a rate array and I'll just have it back up to that, whatever. Rate array for people who don't know is when you put like, you know, five hard drives and they all are redundant and they're faster because you can write to a couple of them at the same time. This is what video is like. And then they decide to go from this to now the double double. The double double.

And so... I mean, it's just confusing as hell. Yeah, you know, like just... Now here's the Mac Studio, which is ugly. I mean, let's be honest. I think it's ugly. It's not that pretty. It's not pretty at all.

This feels like, um, this feels like they punted on the design. It feels like a punt to me. Yeah. Like, let's make something that is, uh, yeah, just double size. I mean, which I guess fine. Like, you have a, a form factor that works.

But if your deal is that you're super creative and innovative and you know, as all of the Apple fanboys are going to continue to yell at us, they're innovating, like this is a double double. You put another burger on top of the burger you already had. So that's why I think if this was Mac Mini Pro, that would have been a better branding. It describes

it. So if this was framed as Mac Mini Pro, I'd be fine with this. That's really true. As the design. Yeah. But if you're going to say this is a new revolution, it should be a new design. just me. That's just me. Yeah. Now, am I going to buy it? Maybe. I don't feel the need to buy this. I don't think my Mac Mini with the M1 is any better. And I'll tell you what's just crazy about this is the price. It says from 1999, but if you put this new chip in it, which is why you would get it.

Right. Right. You know, then you're talking about a lot of money. I think it goes up to like $4,000. I think it starts at 399.99. There we go. Yeah. So if you actually make this the machine that you want, like an un-upgrade, right? reason to go from the M1 Mac Mini, should you have that? Then you're talking about, and you are talking about a beefy machine. Like, I don't want to downplay the fact that you've got... It's a beast. You know, it's a beefcake and you have like a really nice port situation, but it's 3999 starting. That's obscene.

20 core CPU. So if you want the ultra, you're going to pay $4,000. And honestly, you're going to pay $4,000 for a terabyte of storage. Like, a terabyte of storage is like what you get with Adel right now. Like, I'm not trying to be a jerk, but give me two for $4,000. They're so stingy. They're so stingy and so overpriced. You know, do I want it?

I honestly don't care if I had this. I don't think it would change my life. I don't think it's life changing. If I was a video editor, I guess I would, but video editors are going to look at this and go, a lot of video editors now are just looking at this kind of parade of rug pulling, and they're just like, I'll just go with them PC. You know, right? I think a lot of them are using Premiere now.

Yeah. Adobe works. They're editing on PCs. But at that point, then I think you would just like spend less for a more extendable machine. But I don't like, listen, I would love to know because before so long the Mac was the standard. The Mac in Final Cut, full stop. And then it was the Mac Plus Premiere. And that was great.

But I wonder, like, email us and let us know or tweet at us and let us know. Is this the machine that video editors have been dying for or that or podcasters or engineers or devs? Also, why don't they care about gaming? Yeah, it's so weird. Like now they're making this insane chip. Yeah, that's another thing. Like, shouldn't this thing be able to run like PlayStation Xbox level games? And then, you know, if I want to play Age of Empire as like, you know, definitive edition or whatever the new one is that I play. Like, I don't play it. I can only play it on my PC. And yeah, I don't get it. Let's just play this quick video here. This is the spec video. The exterior is machine from a single aluminum extrusion with the footprint of just seven 0.7 inches square, and height of only 3.7 inches. Inside, every element was designed to produce an unprecedented amount of performance in such a small form factor. The innovative thermal system begins with a unique double-sided blower pulling air into the system across the entire

circumference of the perforated aluminum base. Okay. The air moves over the custom circular power supply and through channels precisely placed to guide it. that's nice, but that doesn't change my life. Finally, the air is propelled through a low impedance rear exhaust containing over 2,000 precisely machine perforation. On the back, there are four thundercule. So you figured out how to cool your computer. Congratulations.

A 10 gigabit Ethernet port. Great. Standard. Standard. 10 years ago. Standard 10 years ago. Standard 10 years ago. Standard 10 years ago.

Or external amplified speakers. Okay, nobody cares. At least they didn't get rid of that. Yeah. Listen, when you're the founder, it's fun to trade war stories with other founders. Recently, Balloon CEO Amanda Greenberg, one of my awesome portfolio founders, told me how Vantas, SOC2 solution helped her save an important deal in the final hours. If you don't know, Balloon sells a SaaS, productivity and collaboration software package,

it's brilliant. And when they needed 10 documents in place within 48 hours in order to close this deal, well, Vanta saved the day by supplying customizable templates and helping them through the process to close. so if you don't have your SOC2 tight, you can't close major customers. And you know what? A lot of startups wait. Well, the waiting has to end.

You have to work with Vantas compliance software to make it easier to get and renew your SOC2. They continuously test against technical and non-technical SOC2 requirements, and they partner with over two dozen audit firms who have been trained to file SOC2 reports directly within VANTA. On average, Vanta customers or SOC2 compliant within just two to four weeks compared to three to five months without VANTA. And guess what? Vanta's such a great partner.

They're going to give you $1,000 off your sock too. Thanks for that, Vanta. Here's your call to action. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com slash twist. That's V-A-N-T-A.com slash twist. That's vanta. com slash twist for $1,000 off. Well done, Vanta.

So here's something interesting. They're doing this new double-double Mac Mini Pro, and it's faster than the Mac Pro, that's $7,000. So does that mean the next time are they going? to take the Mac Pro Tower Cheese Grater and put the M1 Ultra in it? Or are they going to do the M1 Ultra plus plus in that? And then charge 12,000 for that. Hope Springs a turn over the plus plus.

Yeah, who knows. Who knows? What's the name of the next? If they've gone Pro Max Ultra, what's next? So you have the M1, then you have the pro, the ultra, the max, I think, is the order. Or Max Pro Max, Pro Max, Ultra, something like that. Max. Pro Max Ultra.

What's the next one in this? lineage. What's number five going to be called? It's got to be infinity, you know what you think? M1 infinity. I mean, that is actually

an awesome name for a tip. What? Yeah. Search dog is almost certainly right here. It will be the M1 Ultra Max Pro. Plus plus. Well done, Serge Dog.

For those of you don't know, we do this live every day at it by 10 o'clock. And this is crazy, but bear with me, maybe it could be the M2. Yes. If you could do these incrementally,

I mean, I was kind of used to that. Yeah. You know, like iPhone, Max 13. I mean, it's just so. They are better names than the Intel chips, though, right? Like, didn't it? Yeah, Intel was just like, what did the developer call it?

The Pentium 5.2. A.B? Okay, yeah, that's good enough. Who cares? Nobody cares. It's just a chip. Yeah. You don't need to brand a chip.

Then they at least went to core, and then it would be like the core I-7. The 4-4-4-4-0. And the numbers went up, which is normal, instead of having it be like super max ultra plus plus infinity. I also like the idea of putting the year on it. Like, you know, with cars, we say like, well, this is a Mustang, a 22 Mustang. So you kind of get an idea of how old it is and, you know. Give it a vintage.

Give it a vintage. Yeah, kind of thing. In other as just like for a quick lightning round of other things that Apple announced. I cannot believe I'm back covering Apple events. By the way, it was so nice and I care about these for like six years. However, Apple did announce they don't only care about premium consumers, and I'm happy to see they announced the new iPhone SE, which is its most affordable phone, the A15 bionic chip. Okay, so we got the, whatever. I'm leaving it a little.

Better camera, obviously. But the price starts at 429. Even though this is their affordable model, it's getting more expensive. This is $30 more expensive than the prior version. They also announced a new iPad Air. Who cares about iPads at this point? but whatever, it starts at $599. And then in timing that I'm sure they wish had not happened,

just as Major League Baseball went on strike, Apple announced that they will be exclusively licensing Friday night baseball on Apple TV Plus. You know, that might be the second most interesting thing. We knew they were going to come out with an iPhone, S.E, coming out with a new iPad error, these are both incremental. Whatever. The S.E is their low-end phone.

So the low-end phone now has 5G. The low-end phone now has a decent camera. decent battery. That's the one for your kid. I mean, let's be honest, like that's the kid's iPhone. Yeah, 429. It's great.

That's their like accessible phone. And it's now got the A15 bionna chip in it. So that's great. It's going to be more powerful. It gets all the new. I guess you can use iOS 15 on it now, which is kind of nice.

iPad Air. I always love those. Great for kids as well. But I do think the Friday night, you know, doing the sports leagues is interesting because that's something that TNT, or ABC or

you know, whoever would have gotten ESPN would have gotten previously. And so that's a reason to download the Apple TV Plus app to get more people

to use it. That's got to be expensive. TV Plus, of course, being the service, not the device. Yes, there's Apple TV, the device. There's Apple TV plus

the free content and there's Apple TV Plus premium. I think TV plus paid. is the subscription service. You got to pay for that. You're not going to get this for free.

Friday night baseball is not for free. You have to have the paid service. So there's a way to get subscribers. But it continues. I mean, it shows that Apple is apparently continuing to invest in Apple TV Plus. I mean, they've obviously had some really expensive original content.

But I would argue that this is also a way to say, we're looking for reasons to keep people coming back after maybe they watch Foundation and then they cancel. Yeah, they had Ted Lassow. That's like American Apple Pie. Now they have baseball. That's as American as Appleby and baseball, literally. And I want to see this new one that the Ben Stiller,

dystopian like your work life and your home life is separate. I forgot the name of that. Oh, yeah, severance. I just started watching that. It's, yeah, with Adam Scott. Yes, we just followed me. Yeah, you just follow me on Twitter. So I'm, that could be another celebrity bromance for me.

Yeah, that's a bug in here. It is super upsetting. I watched two, I mean, in a great way. It gets really good to think about. I saw that they were releasing it weekly, so I specifically said to myself, I love Ben Stiller. I like that Danamore he did. That was good. I love Adam Scott from Party Down.

If you don't know that show, it's pretty great. Yeah. And Parksner. They're doing a new party down. I never watch Parks and Rec. So maybe I got to get into that. Oh, really? That's such a good one for you to start because it's like got a nice big catalog.

Oh, cool. That's a fun one. Is it fun? Yeah. Is it okay for a 12-year-old? Maybe I'll watch it my daughter. Yeah. Perfect.

Yeah. So I think this is, I think Apple TV Plus, good content. I give them some credit for this. I think this is kind of a good announcement for them. It'll be interesting to see if, you know, for these sports leagues, I think their future of the sports leagues is having a direct relationship with customers. Like, I am an NBA League pass subscriber for six or seven years because I'm out of market and My team is in New York.

It's just perfect for watching the Knicks games. And I pay $250 a year, maybe $300 to get that to watch the Knicks win 30 games. So I'm paying $10 for every Nick win. It's kind of brutal. But they have a direct relationship with me, which is the most important thing. And do you pay for any sports leagues directly? No. It's been a lot since I was that big of a sports.

I like sports a lot, but not enough to. I just don't. I mean, I know that on this show, it may have. appear that I watch a lot of TV because I'm like, oh yeah, I watch that. And what really happens is I watch two episodes of everything and then run out of time to ever watch anything ever again. But would you pay, because you like the Warriors, if you could just pay to have Warriors on demand commercial free, what would you pay for that? Like, if it was like, like five bucks a month. Okay, great. So you pay for the season, 50 bucks for the season or something? Yeah, I could do that.

I could pay 50 bucks for a season. Yeah. See, I think that's going to be the future is like, I just don't want to deal with, I just want to go to the Warriors website and just get it all. You know, or go to the NBA site and just get it all. And so it's kind of interesting, these intermediaries, like buying a slice of it. Because you, even if they have the slice of this, I think you're still going to be able to get those games on MLB, I wonder, or if those games will be blocked out and then people who have... No, it's exclusive. Yeah. That's like their big announcement, I think. So then in the local markets, that means, like, if you're a Yankee fan and this is a Friday night Yankee game, you don't get to watch it unless you pay for Apple TV. That's going to be super

annoying for those three games for Yankee fans. I mean, those exclusives already are annoying, but yeah, I mean, I think it's, it is, yeah, it's a tough one. This is when people go to Reddit and they type in Yankee stream Reddit into Google to find the pirated streams in Russia. I mean, you know how we've talked about this so much. Like, this is how I feel about exclusive content. It's, I don't want my entertainment ecosystem or any. of my ecosystems to be so cut off. Like, I hate it. I hate the idea that I can't just plug and play whatever I want into another thing.

And like, I'm sitting there in front of a TV that has 19 apps on it. But like this one, I can only get over here. And then the idea that you would pay for MLB, but also have to pay for Apple Plus just to get some exclusive games. It's just like, it's messy. And honestly, it's just going to make people want cable. It's going to make people want a pirate too. So I think that's the thing.

It's like, when you make this too hard for people with too many services, and too many carve-outs, they're just going to go try to steal it. I notice, like, on TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter, whenever there's a UFC fight, I see UFC trending. I'm like, I don't like the UFC enough to,

you know, pay for it. But, like, if I see it trending, I might be interested in seeing the knockout blow. You know, like the last 30 seconds of the fight is kind of interesting to me just to see how the person got knocked out. Yeah. And inevitably, you know, just,

even if you're not looking for, it you're going to see the pirated stuff. And so you kind of get, you know, these fights only the last 10 minutes or less. So you're going to find it very quickly being streamed somewhere. It seems like each new social network gets a free shot at it. So it was like Periscope had it for a while in Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and now it's TikTok. So TikTok is like the ultimate place to watch a UFC fight if you want to watch a pirated UFC fight. People just take out their TikTok, they live stream and they point it at their TV.

TV. And they can't keep up with it because it's a live streaming platform. Yeah, totally. I do wonder what piracy numbers are at. Yeah. Anyway, yes. I think it's generally kids who do it and just people who are not the core users. Because if you're the core user, you want to watch it in real time. You want to see the knockout blow before everybody else does in real time. Listen, when you start scaling revenue quickly, your company needs to be run professionally. And Odu is the software that helps you maintain control of your fast running. business. Odo is a suite of business apps where you can run your entire company from just one platform. This means you don't need to keep adding siloed SaaS products. Everything you need is there waiting for you to turn on when you're ready. Sales accounting, HR, website builders, and so much more. You're going to streamline everything by bringing your apps onto one platform. No more issues transferring data between platforms. And you'll have one customer support contact across all of your app. If you only need two or three apps to optimize your workflow, that's all you're going to pay for.

Odu has over 30 main apps and over 16,000 apps from their open source community. And the best part? Well, here's your call to action. Your first app is free forever. And Odo is offering a $1,000 credit on your first implementation pack. Just go to Odo.com slash twist for $1,000 off. That's Odo.com slash twist. All right, we got our startup of the day because we cannot get enough.

startups, but B, robotaxies. Pony.a.ai announced the first close of their series D at an $8.5 billion valuation to continue building its fleet in the United States and China. The funding amount and the investors, interestingly, were both undisclosed. Pony CEO James Pang was on episode 949, way back in June 2019 in the before times. Yes. Before the pandemic, when people did want to take taxes places. And B.M. Before Molly.

Yeah. Pony said it has a billion dollars on its balance sheet. The company has over 1,000 employees and is testing in China and U.S. markets, both, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Irvine, and Fremont. And it's on its sixth version of their Robotaxy kit. What do you think about an $8.5 billion valuation for building like a fleet of robo taxis? That actually, from a capital perspective, doesn't seem like crazy. Okay. So $8 billion.

if it was 10 times your top line revenue, your sales would be 800 million in sales if you had 800 million in sales and it was $8 a ride it would be $100 million rides. Oh, okay. So yeah, that's a really high valuation

probably because there's no way this car I've never seen before is doing 100 million rides around Fremont. Yeah, so 100 million rides. Although those are really big Chinese cities. I should maybe walk that back a bit. Like those are gigantic, you know, we don't always remember

how big those cities in China are. It's two million rides a day. Yeah. You know, ballpark. Two million rides a day. Two million rides a day in 200 cities, 20,000 rides in a city. It's not ridiculous if they were at scale. But now getting to scale, as we all saw with Uber and Lyft, Uber's in a lot of cities, like over a thousand. A Lyft is in a couple of hundred. Like it takes a decade to deploy to that many cities. So this is a future-looking evaluation. If you were to do it based on revenue, if they were to sell each car for 100,000, they would need to sell 8,000 cars, no, 80,000 cars or something.

But that's not their profit. That would just be the top line. That would be a low margin business. So, you know, yeah, it's probably a very rich balance. It's probably a very rich valuation, and it's based on them becoming a winner. And it's the same value. I don't know what Lyft's valuation right now is,

but that's comparable to Lyfts valuation, and it's a whatever. The market's really crushed right now, a sixth or an eighth of. probably a seventh of Uber's valuation and Uber is doing billions of rides. So yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Although, and Uber's not no longer in China, right? There's D.D.

And I don't know if D.D. is actually doing autonomous in China. So as a robotaxy play that's simultaneously in these big Chinese cities and the U.S., I could imagine them. It's just sort of an interesting reminder that there are more companies in this and that some of those companies are definitely being incubated and built. in the Chinese market so that they might get to scale without us even noticing.

And we have, you know, Cruz is doing a limited pilot in San Francisco in a limited area, basically the area is without a lot of pedestrians like pack heights. And it's working. And so, you know, we're probably five years out.

I think most people would say from having this work in, you know, the cities that don't have snow and ice. Yeah. And then maybe 10 years for the cities with snow and ice. And, you know,

the edge cases. So, Lyft is at 12 billion. So this thing's almost as valuable as Lyft. That doesn't make a lot of sense if it's two thirds of a Lyft. So the valuation probably should be three, four, five billion. But, you know, investors in these early stages are betting that it will 10x. And so, you know, that's not completely unreasonable if you wanted to place a bet. I've had a 10%

chance of 10xing. So, yeah. I do think you're going to see Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash be the beneficiaries of this technology because there's a group of people who want to compete with those startups. Then you have a group of people who want to sell to those startups. So which is a better combination? The fact that Uber owns a piece of Aurora, is that the one that spun out?

So they have that as a possibility. Then they have everybody else who wants to sell to them. So you'll have some people, I think Pony AI wants to do their own Uber Lyft competitor and D.D. Killer in China. And then you'll have people who want to just sell. to the ride-sharing companies and let the ride-chairing companies do everything else. Build a brand, do a super app.

That's what I'm trying to figure out about Pony AI is because it looks like they make a kit, I'm realizing, the more I look into this. Yes, it goes on top of cars. It goes on top of cars. And so maybe they don't care. Maybe they want Uber or Lyft to be a customer. Yeah, it's not clear from their website

if they're going to compete or they're going to be customers. And you know what? they might, if I was running one of these companies, I would leave the optionality there. Right. I'm trying to be aftermarket autonomous kit. Great. You don't have to make the cars. That's great. Right. You just focus on the kit. You add the kit to the top of cars now. And the fact that they can put this on five different types of cars. I see they have a Hyundai. They have a Lexus. So if they can put this on five types of cars, then they have, they get to draft off of the car innovations.

they don't have supply chain problems, but they don't get to do a full stack experience like the new crews that let you have no steering wheel and passengers facing each other. So it's pluses and minuses. I think they'll be able to deploy these quicker. And then they can either sell them or they can compete and they can just pick a market.

Maybe in one market they want to compete, another market they want to sell. So keep your options open is a good idea. That's pretty. That is, if indeed that's what they're doing and it's a little bit hard to tell, that is quite clever. Yeah.

Because I think in the future, don't you think we've talked a little, we've danced around the idea of like, what's not danced around the idea? We've like glanced on do electric conversion kits exist. There have been a, I've heard of at least two companies maybe that tried to make a run at autonomous kits, basically like plop this on and turn any car autonomous.

Yeah. And I don't know that that's a very fully fledged business. No, I think that works. It would be a cool idea if it's doable. I think it is doable. I mean, I think that's what Cruz did. originally than they got bought and that's essentially what they're doing.

Yeah. Is they're, you know, attaching these things and then they just take over the stealing, the breaking. All that stuff is easily controlled electronically. Yep. So, you know, it's coming. Adjunct producer Kuchal says, one of the notice says, comma AI is doing kit style in the U.S.

So maybe this is that. We had the comma AI founder on. He's a unique individual. You know, he's like George Hots, HOTZ. Yeah, he's a very, very, very, um, he's exactly who I was thinking of when I was like, I know there's a company that's trying to do this. Yeah, I met him ages ago at a concert and I was, or at a concert, a convention. A, what do you call those? Yeah. Anyway, like a convention type thing and was just like, you seem a little

nuts and maybe a genius. Um, he was just very vocal. Like, he wrote a lot of blog posts and was like trolling people and yada. Um, so there you have it. Startup of the day. The, the ecosystem is still vibrant people. There are lots of people doing interesting things. Super cool startups. We want to hear about all of them. Keep them coming. It would be good for us to do at some point a handicapping of the race. So I don't know that there's an expert in the space, but if we could line up, you know, these are the seven players. Here's how many employees they have. You could rank them by employees, number of cars on the road, number of miles driven autonomously, etc. We might be able to handicap, you know, who was in the, you know, like we did for the goggles and,

you know, XR, VR, AR, we kind of handicapped who we thought would win and who would win which percentages of market share. We could probably do a similar thing, Molly, with this. So, I like that. That might be an interesting idea. Yeah. Because people are still working on cars. Like, you know, I mean, it's not, it's nowhere near settled just because it's gotten quiet for now. Does not mean it's shaking out or consolidating in any real way. Like, people, it's still a dog fight. It is a dog fight. I'm putting this at five, to 10 years before, you know, anybody who's in our audience, you know, I would say five to 10 years for when the majority of our audience, you know, 51% of our audience in the United States,

is, has this as an option available to them. Yeah. Somewhere between five and 10. I think 10% of our audience might have this as an option in two or three years, but it's going to take time. Everybody keeps saying it's like next year or two years and everybody's said, been saying that people thought this would be available two or three years ago. But the edge cases are just too hard. I mean, you've had your own challenges with autopilot. And, you know, I don't, I'm not, I really want to get in the autopilot, uh, beta. Because people who, I'm watching the videos of those betas, you know, but you have to have a 99

safety score. And I have like an 89 or 90 or something because two people drive the car and one person cares about getting in the beta and one person does not. Oh, interesting. They're parceling out the autonomous base. on your driving score? Yes. So they gave everybody

who's like out a hundred gets it. So if you're not driving like making fast turns driving too close to the car in front of you, they're like, okay, this is a conscientious driver who we can put in the beta. And then if you look at those beta... Because I was going to say, yeah, it's almost like counterintuitive.

Like if you're a bad driver, you need autonomy. But I see what you're saying is you want somebody responsible who's not going to drive it and not going to lay in the backseat and take a video. That's the problem with this is like we're basically deploying this based upon stupid risk takers

stupidest behaviors. Like the people who stand on top of motorcycles or do whatever those drag races are called, the spinouts they do in Oakland and on freeways here at the Bay Area. What do they call them? Side shows. Yeah, these crazy side shows where people end up getting killed, like we're basically, you know, if people who are doing illegal side shows, like it's fast and furious,

like we'll deploy the technology based on their behavior. It's really dumb because it is definitely, the stay-in-lane stuff is now in a lot of cars. If we had stay-in-lane was required on freeways, like seatbelts and airbags are required now, man, what a game-changer that would be if when your car drifted into another lane, your steering wheel vibrated and it made a beeping sound.

Why is that not standard? Yeah. And it's surprising that it's not because it is available on a lot of cars it exists. I mean, it is super easy. You have to turn it on. It's solved technology, but in some cases you have to pay extra for it too.

And that is pretty unconscionable. It should be standard. Like, this is if we had functional agencies, what percentage of car accidents on freeways are people drifting into another lane, clipping another car? It's got to be half, right? Yeah.

Like, rear ending is half and whatever. Rear ending is a third. Drifting out of your lane is a third, and a third is other. Yeah. If you, like right now, you get most cars have the ability, to do an alarm or hit the brakes if you're going to hit another car.

The alarm should be 100%. If you're not the proper length, that should be standard like a seatbelt, right? Yeah, it really should be. I cannot disagree with that. And that would just, it would just improve so much. I was thinking about how on the 880 in Oakland, there are all these, all these like billboards that are basically, there's some word for it, you know, like if you just sort of rub up against somebody, they're like, just pull over.

Like it's, get off the freeway. It happens so often. There you have it, folks. If you have a startup of the day, email producers at this week at startups.com. Speaking of Robotaxie handicapping, next up is our interview

with Kyle Vote from Cruise. Enjoy. All right, everybody, I've been doing this show for a long time. So long, in fact, that we've been having a conversation about self-driving cars from the inception

of the commercialization of this industry. One of the first players in the space shortly after all of these amazing ex-price-style contest were going on to do autonomy in deserts and figure out if this was even possible 20 years ago was Kyle Vote. He is the co-founder

and CEO at Cruz. And he was the last time he was on and was back in 2014. And for those of you who are into the archive, just jump in and look for episode 459. And that was a year after he had founded the company.

Cruz was sold to GM, as many people know, in 2016, a really prescient and smart move by GM to dive into automation, and he was the founding CEO from 2013 to 2019. Today, he is back in the CEOC. He had stepped back to become CTO and president and actually announced that the day we're taping this,

Kyle is now the CEO again. Welcome back to the program. Gosh, how many years later is it now? Four, five, five, six years later. It's a few. Yeah, thanks for having me, Jason. Good to see you again. Good to see you. And I was just watching

on Twitter, a bunch of people talking about the mind-blowing experience of getting into a cruise vehicle in San Francisco. It's kind of think is one of the hardest cities to navigate given topography, pedestrian's regulation, California, high-regulation state, and certainly San Francisco

amongst the highest regulated cities of all. So tell me, how is the pilot going? I know there's, I think I heard there were two cars on the road. It's just cruise employees right now, but maybe you can tell us about what's going on. Well, my first ride and the first ride in a driverless car in San Francisco was back in November, November 1st, so just a few months ago. And since then, we opened up our wait list to the public. I think we're in the 10 to 20,000 people waiting to try out the service now. And we've been

adding people from it, but obviously, like, people are, you know, signing up on the list faster that we can deploy them. At this point, we're in the, you know, tens of vehicles deployed driverless. But what that means is right now we're only operating from about 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. And over time, we're going to expand the service area and the hours. But around 11 p.m., all of these cars launch. They go out of a parking facility and one by one without a driver. They kind of take off and start dispersing within the city waiting for rides. And then, you know, we've got enough users on the platform already that they're kept pretty busy throughout the night.

Wow. And did you say 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.? No, it's p.m. So it's mostly overnight. right now. And our approach is, you know, a gradual buildup. So we're going to start with the least busy traffic times, make sure everything is working, you know, well and that people are responding to it well, and then really quickly open up the hours and geo-fence. And I'm glad we did that because we've already seen some things where it'd be hard to predict until you open up the service and we don't

want to like, you know, roll into a new city and shock the city by having a thousand drive-lost cars on day one. I think there'd be a lot of confused people out there. So we've been taking our time, but things are looking pretty good now. And I think we're going to be gearing up. to expand pretty soon. And so to be clear, this is a level of automation where there is no safety driver. We saw Uber was doing some work, I think, in Arizona it was, and other folks have been testing self-driving. But there's always been a, what do they call it, a backup pilot, a backup driver.

Everybody's got a name for them, but it's a person whose job is to watch and take over if they need to. But really, you've got to break down the world of self-driving cars really into two categories. There's systems where no human is responsible for anything, or there could be no one in the car, as is the case for ours. Completely does not rely on a human at all. And then there's the other category, which is works some of the time but relies on a backup human.

And in the case of ADF systems by major car companies, they may do like steering while you're in the lane or do some other maneuvers, but they're counting on you to grab the wheel if the system makes a mistake. And the same is true for self-driving companies that are testing. They have people sitting behind the wheels ready to grab the wheel and take over.

But there's a certain level of performance or hurdle you need to cross before you can remove the human from the vehicle entirely. And that means there's all these backup systems built in. You're kind of ready to handle any sort of scenario, whether it's getting pulled over by a police officer or a hardware or software failure. No matter what it is, the vehicle can basically handle that situation without someone in the car. You mentioned it was geo-fenced. So it's a subsection of San Francisco because we both know there are some areas of

San Francisco and basically any city that's existed and wasn't pre-planned, you know, Europe comes to mind with tiny, tiny streets that are, you know, in some cases hundreds, maybe even a thousand years old. Which part of San Francisco did you decide to do the footprint in and what were the considerations there? In terms of area, it's about a third of the city. So it's big enough that you can actually use it to get around and, you know, go to a restaurant or something like that. And And if you live in this area, take it home. And it's in terms of neighborhoods, it's Pacific Heights, Richmond, Golden Gate Park, sunset, and a few other areas kind of near those neighborhoods.

And those neighborhoods for people who don't know in San Francisco have less pedestrian density. I'm sure that was taken to account. And also the overnight was taken to account. Pedestrians, are they still, especially in a city where people are enthusiastically out and about? I think would be a great way to describe San Francisco or New York. That was a major consideration. Wasn't it? Yeah, but there are, there are, you know, concert venues and bars and restaurants where people are there late, you know, until 2 in the morning. And so it's not like this is a desert absent of any vehicle or pedestrian traffic. They're out there. But we wanted to start somewhere. This is the best lowest risk place to do it. And we're pretty confident in the performance of the system because we actually test with people behind the wheel in the entire city 24-7. So we know what the most stressful situations look like. And we're pretty confident. like, but our approach has been a test in the difficult areas and then deploy starting in the

least risk areas just to build some confidence and make sure that all of our testing and all of our assumptions and all of the homework we've done matches up with our observed performance when there's no one behind the wheel. Because until you do that, you don't truly know. You can simulate and estimate and make all these assumptions about performance, but at some point you actually have to do it, measure the results, and start that feedback loop of learning from real customers. Tell me, what happens in these edge cases where a pedestrian decides to stand in front of the car or a double parked car on both sides of the streets, not able to navigate that? Do you have people watching in some command center somewhere who can say, you know what,

let's get a driver out there or somebody to navigate this? Because sometimes you run into that as a human. You, I don't know, a police activity on a block. Ambulance pulls up. Some crazy person decides to leave their car and block the whole street. These things do happen in cities. So what happens then in these like edge cases? Because, you know, driving on a grid or I use autopilot basically every day. I go to Tahoe, you know, on the 80, I can use my Tesla's autopilot the whole way, no problem, except for maybe some of the windy streets at the end.

But the edge cases seem to be where we're at in the industry, correct? Yeah. And the edge cases or the long tail of types of NCC is very long. There's a lot of random stuff that can happen. Longer than you anticipated when you started the company, I bet. Exactly. So the approach for us is like what's the minimum amount of capability we can build in the system to address the largest number of those edge cases.

So there are a number of things that can trigger basically a remote operator to be able to see telemetry from the vehicle and then guide it or navigate it in an example of being too far down a one-way street or any number of scenarios. we also have a system to try to detect whether there's been a collision or even a person walking really near and brushing against the vehicle. We want to know if there's any contact between a pedestrian and a vehicle. And so we see those events. And so, you know, if there's a pedestrian messing with a vehicle, most likely it's going to trigger a call to a remote operator that's going to review the footage and confirm whether there was, you know, something that needs to be addressed or there's an emergency, you know, whether it's, you know, the fault of the pedestrian. or not. We don't care. We want to know that something has happened and make sure we disable the car and

pull it over. And so those systems are there. The remote operators can basically determine whether they need to disable the car, where they need to pull it over, where they need to relocate it. A lot of tools at their fingertips to handle, you know, whatever we might encounter out in the wild, so to speak. And that's the ultimate safeguard is that somebody can actually take the car, remotely park it, basically drive it like a, like an RC car or something, remote. they can go drive around something, et cetera. And then if the car does get attacked by a pedestrian, which is not inconceivable in our fine city.

We've seen some strange things, yeah. Yeah, you can get weird. It's not like driving an RC car because we have these, you know, we're talking to a car over a cellular network, which is not necessarily reliable or, you know, high throughput. So the interface is more like you can reposition a vehicle and sort of drag its location, you know, like on a map from here to here, and it'll figure out how to maneuver over there.

And the goal is to not have any, safety critical actions like swerving or hitting the brakes. We don't want a remote operator to do that. We want them to give high-level directives, and the car, which can respond instantaneously, is responsible for all those safety-critical maneuvers. What does it like to sell your company to a big company like GM selling cars? How is that integration worked,

or they left the company on its own and just put it over here and said, Google did with YouTube, hey, you know what you're doing, go get it? or is it really tightly integrated into the product lines in the existing car company? Yeah, it's a good question. Well, to start with, I don't regret it. I think it was the right decision for the company in time. And I think it would have been hard.

You know, really, GM buying crews is what, in my view, created the flood of investments that flew into the self-driving space immediately after. It would have been harder for us to raise the capital we needed to. to get to where we are today absent a major OEM coming in and making that big bet and putting, you know, a lot of money behind these things. And so that was, I think it was important for us to get to where we are. And I'm glad we did that. But it's hard. It's hard when you get acquired by a big company because, and I think, you know, if you look at the statistics on these things, most times big company buys a small one, it doesn't go well. And I think, you know, a couple things that worked out well here is the leadership team at GM, you know, all the way up to the

CEO, Mary Barra and the president, Dan Amman, really saw around the corner. And I think the, where the future was. So this wasn't like a mid-level VP or a business development person pushing the deal. It was, it was from the tops. That's helpful. And then I think the other thing, frankly, is like, I'm really stubborn about this. I want to make this thing succeed. And so no matter what weird, you know, big company complications come up, you know, we're going to find a way through it and be persistent and stick it out. But like everyone operates with the best intentions. It's just these large companies. There's so many different departments and groups. Everyone feels like they have a role to play or a jobs do that, you know, it can be very

quickly, a small company can be completely engulfed by the parent company. And it can take the form of just lots of questions and communication or it can take the form of death by a thousand cuts where there's just like new policies and permissions and you have to talk to these seven people and get them all to say yes before you can do anything. And so I really take as a deliberate effort to keep that, you know, natural tendency at bay. Yeah. And the hardware package, when you and I last spoke, very expensive, maybe it was over $100,000 worth of LIDAR and things bolted to the top of cars.

Where are we at today? You know, if a car costs, you know, I think you're using the Chevy bolts, if I'm correct. So if that's a $50,000 car or something, what additional ballpark has to be put onto a car to make itself driving? Yeah, it's a good question. And I think taking a step back, though, there's really been two approaches that have, I guess, risen to the top in the self-driving world in the last few years. One is to take a minimal set of compute and sensing and try to put it in a retail car

and then through a software updates, you know, make it full self-driving. And that's unproven. But, you know, from logical reasoning standpoint, you can see how it would work. Our approach has been, let's equip these vehicles with whatever they need to make them driverless and start to learn from that and expand gradually and simultaneously drive down the cost through increasing the volume and other tech advantages. But at least we know we can actually operate the business. And then once it shifts into less of a science project and more of a engineering and operational cost down exercise, we have a better line of sight to, you know,

when we'll reach certain unique economics and when we can operate in certain cities and so on. the other approach where you put some minimal hardware in the car and hope that you'll sort of invent magical algorithms to get to the performance you need is in my view less proven but it works if your goal today is to sell lots of cars. Yeah. And so of course we're referring to another electric car manufacturer that has autopilot and it seems to be working pretty well. So what's a is it twice?

So you're basically saying you're putting more sensors than you probably need and over time that'll get cheaper and you may need less. Yeah, and it works out because like, you know, these cars, the way we operate them as robo-taxies, and we scale up a little bit, we're going to operate and be operating them like, you know, 20 hours a day. Right. And so that means from a upfront cost perspective, you can afford to pay a little more and still have good unit economics compared to a car that sits idle 90% of the time, like when you would buy.

So maybe it's 50 grand per car or something like that. I mean, the ballpark range. That's the whisper number on the street is that you think sort of getting below 100. It's a lot, but it's not that relevant to us today because we're not building that many of the expensive ones. We've announced that we have, we're building our own custom chips and custom sensors and other things that get really,

really inexpensive. There's a really funky looking vehicle, the cruise origin that you're working on. That looks kind of like, gosh, I don't know if it was the original Dredd movie with Sylvester Stallone in it or Minority Report, but a bit of a boxy transportation not a steering wheel type vehicle.

Tell me a little bit about the cruise origin. Yeah, I mean, one of our goals is to drive down the cost of providing like a ride-hale service. And the other is just to make it an amazing experience. And if you think about the cars that we ride around in today, especially if you hop into the back of a ride-chair vehicle, everyone's facing forward, your knees are at the back of someone else's seat. The driver can't look behind and see you. They don't know what you're doing, which can be a good and best.

and then, you know, you don't have a lot of space. And so especially if it's compact car, your, you know, leg room is minimal. With the origin, we flip that around, the seats face each other. And you have an enormous amount of space inside. It feels like your own train cabin or something. It's enormous. And why I think that's good is, first of all, it gives you, like, a lot of personal space. You don't feel like you're in the back of a, you know, compact car at all times.

But it also makes these vehicles much more conducive for shared rides because everyone literally has a lot of physical distance between them and they're facing each other. So you're not worried about what the person is doing behind that you can't see. Never thought about that, yeah. And the goal is if we can get more people to opt into pool rides, which make a lot of sense from a utilization standpoint, we can reduce congestion a little bit because there'll be fewer, you know, need for fewer cars.

And so that's a big motivating factor behind that form factor. That was a real bummer that Uber pool and Lyft line got sideline because of the pandemic. It felt like they were making progress. Certainly they were investing a lot. I think those segments for both of those ride-sharing companies were maybe break-even or perhaps even at a modest loss, but they did feel like they were figuring out the algorithms and in which cities, you know, it might work. You believe in that as well. You believe that the algorithms can figure out how to make these either like bus routes or, you know, just a little bit more conducive to multiple passengers, yeah? Yeah.

And, you know, we can experiment with this just like the ride-char companies have been, you know, because obviously if you don't have. have that dialed in perfectly, these cars can fall back to just serving, you know, rides for individuals. But for us, you know, the, the transportation solution of the future should be better in every way, right? It should be safer over time. It should be better for the environment. It should be, you make better use of our roadways. And really, we're trying to hit all of those. Because I don't think we want, you know, this, this glorious future we've been promised with self-driving cars and flying cars and all these things. We don't want to get halfway there. We want to, we want to nail this and really get people excited about it.

let's talk about safety, San Francisco has allowed you to do this, obviously. That's had to be a huge hurdle. Tell the audience what got you to, got you through of all this regulation and red tape. Our city is now really excited about this as opposed to maybe a little nervous about it when you got started. How has the climate change for regulation?

Well, I guess to start with a lot of cities have problems they want to solve. and, you know, self-driving cars, I think, can help with many of them. You know, San Francisco has a, I think it's a vision zero where they basically want to get pedestrian fatalities down to zero. And most cities want to be greener, have more environmentally friendly forms of transportation. And so self-driving electric self-driving cars can kind of help with both of those. But, you know, there are other things that we think down the road self-driving cars can really help with. One is the accessibility of transportation. So, you know, if you're disabled, you can use one of these things,

and our goal is to make them very, very accessible. And then also things we've done with the origin and bringing, you know, the sensor and compute costs down to all those other things. We think, you know, eventually this will be much lower costs than owning your own car or using Uber and Lyft, which increases job mobility and lets a lot more people do the things they want to do in a city. And so I think those things are, you know, all problems that cities want to solve. On the regulatory side, you know, we really have two big groups,

depending on where you want to operate in the U.S. One is NHTSA, who operates at the federal level, and they are in charge of making sure vehicles are safe on the road. And then at the state level, in most states, the equivalent of the DMV or Department of Motor Vehicles does permitting and registrations for vehicles. And so in California, they have a program for self-driving cars. So we've been working closer with the state

and making sure at least people in the city of San Francisco, like first responders and police departments and other people know how to interact with AVs. And then on top of that, we've tried to go above and beyond. We have this program called Cruise for Good. And through that, we've delivered over 2 million meals to people in San Francisco using our self-driving cars while they're testing. And so we're using this excess capacity we have,

and we've pledged to use 1% of our miles to give back to the community. And I think those things help build up some willingness to let a service like Cruz come in and operate and ultimately hopefully do really good things for the city. If most ride-chairing rides are about $10, $12 today in a major city like San Francisco or New York, where do you think crews will be able to get it to? What do you think consumers will experience when they start paying for this? Because the trial you're doing now is gratis, right?

It's free to participate if you are lucky enough to be selected. Yeah, for the time being, we're waiting on one less permit from the California Public Utilities Commission who regulates basically taxi type services. but yeah, I don't know. To be honest, I don't know. But what I do know is that it's ultimately going to be cheaper than hiring a human being to drive someone around and basically paying a full-time wage.

And I think the experience can be better too. I mean, one of the things, and this may affect people's willingness to pay or excitement about paying, whether the same amount or less or more. We don't know. But, you know, the way these robot cars drive, they're robotic, but in a good way. And by that, I mean, every time they approach a stop sign or accelerate, They do it with the exact same deceleration force. They take the corners with the same amount of acceleration.

It's predictable. And we've actually tuned it to minimize the amount of like, you know, jerkiness. Jerkiness forward and backward that you get all the time in a ride share car. So a lot of people will go on a ride and they're doing emails and stare at their phone and they get to the end of the ride and like, wow, I don't have any motion sickness. I feel fine. Whereas, you know, then if you take an Uber lift somewhere else in the city,

you're going to be like, oh, this is a bit, it's a bit rough. Yeah, I mean, I actually, one of the reasons. Like I actually invested in Uber back in the day was because the rides were smoother compared to taxis at the time. Interesting. Where taxi, you know, drivers, I think they usually rent their cars for the first seven, eight, nine hours. They're basically paying back the lease cost. And it turns out the last four hours of their 12-hour shift is where they make their profit, right? So they're- What do they call it?

Like the gate or something? Yeah. In New York, it was 130 bucks. So, you know, they all the medallions, I mean, this was like kind of the tragedy of the whole thing. All the medallions got bought up by rich people, lawyers. accountants like the professional class heard you could buy the medallions in new york and then rent them out and you'd make you know whatever amount percentage on it and you get a and yeah they would rent them out for it was 130 bucks it depends on if it was a friday saturday night or a sunday or a monday or whatever

but yeah you'd basically think 130 bucks so they you know if they get to the third or fourth hour you know they're halfway there then they get to seventh eighth hour and then they're finally break even but by that time you've been in a car driving for eight hours and you you just got to race for those last four hours to try to try to, you know, get into the black. It was kind of gnarly and unfair. And then this doesn't surprise me that they're going to be much smoother rides for everybody and much safer. Well, I mean, think about it. If you could pick your top one or two percent of Uber drivers that you have ever had,

I'm assuming you've gone on hundreds of Uber rides. Sure. You pick the top one or two percent and say, I want that quality of driving every time. You can't do that with people because the distribution of driving behavior is too wide, but you can do that with robots. It'll be perfect every time. And they're going to start to learn which streets are also the most unsafe or have the most unpredictability. I'm certain now in San Francisco, there are problematic intersections or streets.

Am I correct? And then has the feedback loop gotten to the point where you can say to a government agency or have you done this yet? You know, this really shouldn't be a stop sign. It should be a light or this is a light. It could be a stop sign or this block is just absurdly. challenging for whatever reasons. There's a club on it and people spill out into the middle of the street. Yeah, I think, I mean, that feedback loop would be a good thing to have. It's probably going to be slow in terms of generating change. But, you know, that reminds me. One thing that I, you know,

this got in the news a lot recently recently, but, you know, these automated driving systems treating stop signs differently than humans would. I think ultimately one day, once you can prove that, you know, driverless cars don't need to fully stop at stop signs because they're actually doing all the looking that a human driver is supposed to be doing and maybe more. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years, robots can kind of blow through stop signs and stoplights legally with permission so long as they've been proven to be safe in those situations. I'm really excited for that because anything that improves utilization or throughput on our roadways

is fundamentally good for cities. And so if we can get people places faster or put more people on a road, that's a good thing. And I think there's a lot of things there that just humans are never going to be able to do just because we're fallible and we're human that the robots can do. And that's opportunity. Yeah, I mean, we have to turn our heads and we can look in one direction at a time. Robots can be looking in all directions at all times.

So instead of coming to a full stop, they can come to a, or as we would say in Brooklyn, come to a full rolling stop, was the joke. But yeah, I mean, I think the Teslas were, I guess, had to be tweaked a little bit. There was a little controversy. I think they were going through the, maybe they were not fully stopping, I think. And so that is a, I guess, a question is how much do you have to stop? at those stop signs. And yeah, that would be amazing if you could just roll.

If the speed limit was 35, the rule for self-driving cars is, yeah, you can go 15 miles an hour through a stop sign. It's got plenty of time to stop. You know, it's probably more context dependent. You know, these vehicles, the way we build them, they know where they can see clearly, you know, that there's nothing there and there's no cars coming and where they can't because there's a truck blocking an oncoming lane or there's a building corner or a tree. and so if you can demonstrate both internally and obviously to regulators and others that when the

situation is right, there's no risk by proceeding. I think that's cool opportunity. But, you know, that may be a bit of ways out. I think until then we can all, we have a lot we can do driving within the existing laws. Yeah. And tell me about weather, because that was the other big thing that, you know, we live in a foggy town. There are towns that have snow. There are towns that maybe don't have lines drawn as crisply, you know, as a city might, you know, a suburb. might not be as well maintained or you could have very narrow streets. So let's tackle weather first. How are we doing with weather, specifically snow, rain, fog? Those seem to be the big three, right? Yep. So taking a step back here, like, you know, we've been working on this for like a cruise is about

eight years old. But in the grand scheme of thing, it's going from nothing to driverless cars and operation in a major U.S. city. That's a relatively short period of time. And the way we got there, is by picking the one thing that's most important for the company and doing that and basically only that, so that we can get there quickly and, you know, make progress as a company. And so we've deliberately chosen to launch an, you know, an urban environment that has less crazy weather than maybe like Boston and New York City in order to do that sooner and get some real world experience with customers, which we think will help us scale up faster than if we waited until we could solve everything before we deployed anywhere. But we've been working on a lot of like

our next generation sensors and compute systems and everything. else is designed to handle all kinds of weather. And the way these hardware cycles work is, you know, the cars that we have on the road today, a lot of the hardware and sensing decisions were made years ago. And as they go into production and get matured and validated, then they show up, you know, and they're on the road today. So we're working now on the technologies needed to handle, you know, all sorts of weather capabilities down the road. But in the meantime, you know, there are a lot of places in the U.S. that have climates that, you know, don't have a lot of snow, like the southern portion of the U.S.,

and so you're going to likely see us expand into those kind of markets in parallel to working on the hardware and software solutions for more challenging weather. But I will say in general, the systems work pretty well, even in the presence of rain or fog. We just haven't fully

validated them or not comfortable operating them in driverless mode in extreme circumstances yet. But as we expand out of the sunny, sort of clear sky, parts of the U.S., we'll take that much more seriously and spend more time on it. So once again, California gets the new cool technology first because we don't have snow

all over the road, most roads here. So snow is going to, snow and ice are the hardest conditions for humans. They're going to be the hardest conditions for the robots and the AI as well, right? I think that's right. I mean, it's one thing to handle, you know, a road surface where you still have full traction or most traction, but there's just stuff in the air, whether it's dust or fog or light rain. It's another thing when the coefficient of friction, you know, on the road changes because it's icy or in the auto world they call it split mu, meaning the coefficient of friction where you can have one tire on an ice patch and

another on a dry area. And the control problems get more complicated. And it's not something that's never been done before. It's just something we haven't spent a lot of time on yet because we're kind of focused on what's ahead of us right now. How necessary is LIDAR? I know Yalom was talking about we don't need LIDAR to do this. How much of your system is dependent on LIDAR versus computer vision today?

LIDAR is very convenient because it helps you get a really good picture of what's immediately around a vehicle, especially in the short range. And if you're trying to distinguish between a person laying on the ground that's wearing a dark jacket that from a camera looks just like a patch of road and a person lying on the ground, you know, it's nice to have a sensor that can give you an accurate, trustworthy depth measurement, especially in around the vehicle. You know, when you get to longer ranges, I think cameras and radars are the types of sensors to rely on more.

You can get great velocity information from radars. And the precise, you know, position or distance or orientation matters less when objects are far away. So you mostly just need to know what they're there. But as they transition from being far away to being closer, you really need a lot of cues. You want to know the exact heading of a vehicle. You want to know its precise velocity and other things. And so while, you know, many years in the future, I think you can maybe do all those things with cameras.

I would certainly want radars as well. LIDAR just kind of shortens the time to get to market with these things because you don't need a camera-based system to be bulletproof and perfect if you have more than one sensor to compare readings from. What dependency is there on GPS, if any? because a big part of the early days of self-driving was GPS-centric. Oh, we know where you are on the road. Now it seems the cameras and the fidelity has gotten so amazing.

The sensors have gotten so amazing. And GPS is kind of table stakes. You know, you're on Lombard Street. You know, you're on whatever market. It really is about what's going on around the vehicle. So what role does GPS play these days? Not a lot. You know, and GPS in cities is really bad because you have this,

I call it Urban Canyon, phenomenon where the GPS signals from the satellites are bouncing off the tall buildings that you're driving between and can shift your position a lot. And so you can't really rely on it anyway. But the way our systems work is they have basically a memory, which, you know, it's sort of, you know, maps are one form of memory. And once they get a lock on that map and know where they are, and you may use GPS to assist in getting that initial lock. Once you're locked on, you don't really need it anymore. And once you're locked on, you stay locked on. So the GPS isn't playing a huge draw the cameras in the LiDAR are playing the big role. And that means, and LiDAR may be less of a role

in the future, I think? Is it possible that these systems will be able to get past LiDAR? Or do you think LiDar is always going to be part of the winning package? Well, my personal view is that today, you know, people are relying on long range, really high power, high performance LiDAR to see things far away, especially on highway driving and other things. I think that's got to go away. because having a high power laser that you're trying to keep stable when you're bouncing up and down on a highway is just hard to do. But I think it's really useful for short and medium range, immediately around a vehicle and maybe out to 50 or 60 meters. And if that's your goal, that becomes really inexpensive with today's technology to the point where it's practically the same cost as a camera. And so again, if this makes it convenient and simpler and potentially safer, I don't see why you would ever go away from that.

that. Is Cruz's business going to be running an Uber Lyft competitor or supplying cars to ride chairing companies or undetermined at this point? Well, we're flexible. I mean, I think, you know, I think this has a potential to be very disruptive for ride share companies and, you know, your investor in Uber's, you know, all about their their model and everything. And so, you know, I think these companies can coexist, potentially work together. Right now, we're really excited about having, you know, fully integrated service because I want people when they experience their first driverless ride, I want to control every touch point on that experience and make it really magical and really fun. And maybe things stay that way or maybe they don't

down the road. We don't know yet. But at least for now, when people have their first experience, you know, in a driverless car, I want to make sure it's a good one. When will consumers be able to buy these or is that not going to be Cruise's business? Well, today given the higher cost, of the technology that we put in these. As I said, they make more sense for a robo-taxie application. But down the road, you know, we're aware that not everyone wants to use a robo-taxie service all the time, even if it's super cheap and super available. There may be times when people want to own their own car or get a different vehicle

form factor or whatever it is. And for those reasons, you know, we want to pull that benefit forward in time as well in terms of, you know, how self-driving can make it better. So, you know, with GM, we're likely going to put this technology in vehicles that you can buy or, or, lease or some form of ownership. And, uh, you know, we're working on basically the hardware and sensing and other solutions to make that happen now. And, uh, you could see it, you know, in the second half of this decade for sure. Kind of a, a wonky question, but you're collecting

massive amounts of data about your city. Uh, Waymo, Uber, Aurora, just so many companies are also collecting all this information about cities. And then, of course, you have open maps and you have the GPS companies, Garmin and Google Maps, Apple Maps. Is there going to be some collective, or has anybody talked about this, where you could, as one of a half dozen automation companies here, be able to share data on challenging situations and maybe have some sort of open mapping type product or project. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if down the road things standardized because, you know, I guess it depends on how things shake out.

If there are multiple AV players that are still around years from now, because right now everything is kind of consolidating around a handful of companies, if there are multiple players down the road, then it may become something where, you know, companies aren't competing or really differentiated on that map data. They differentiate in other ways. And in that case, I wouldn't be surprised if that happens, you know, because it makes sense on the surface.

If you have more vehicles contributing to this pool of knowledge, the pool of knowledge is going to be more comprehensive and more up to That's Elon's big advantage right now He's got so many Tesla's on the road He's got the best data set I would think of anybody Yeah, I think, you know, certainly in terms of exposure to diversity of data, having cars everywhere is helpful You know, it also depends what's the fidelity of the data

Like obviously a fully equipped car with lots of LIDARs and radars and camera The value of that mile of data or whatever could be more And then the question is really like Can you turn all that data into insights or improvements into the product. And I think that's what a lot of people are trying to build right now is this magic machine where you just feed it data, just like send in images and other things and somehow it gets better. Yeah.

It's not really the way it works today. There's a lot of people hand labeling data or scripts that are trying to label data and humans cross-check to make it's all sure, you make sure it's right. And then once you use all that data to retrain these neural networks, you still have to go and check and make sure that these new neural networks are better than the old ones and they didn't get worse in some way. And so we're not quite in this, you know, know, glorious future where you just throw more data at a system and it magically improves. But I think, you know, around the road, if we are down the road, if we do get to that point and you don't have access to a lot of data, you could be left behind. Yeah. It's one thing to have the algorithm, you know, throw up a bunch of posts of your friends

and be like, hey, maybe this birthday announcement's more important than this, you know, other, you know, kids picture or a bar mitzvah is more important than this or whatever. Like, there's no downside to getting it wrong. really, but getting it wrong and self-driving, you literally, if there's a stop sign that's challenging and the car needs interventions, you have a human look at that video and multiple humans look at it and train the data, right? It's very, on this edge case journey, I think a lot of the companies are on, there's a lot of manual consideration and thinking through what should happen at this intersection, correct?

Yeah, and this, right, and, you know, you can inadvertently teach a neural network slightly worse behavior just by throwing more data at it. And so the challenge is to curate data and show these neural networks examples of mistakes they've made in a very targeted fashion. And then we have like calling miners, little scripts that search through our data for certain types of mistakes and then feed that back into the training data. But it's a pretty complicated procedure and it's not really a turnkey solution quite yet to just go from lots of data to continuously improving product.

But that is the goal for us and I'm sure many others. Guys, they've made it so far. It's amazing as we wrap here. What's the hardest thing now? Is it getting the hardware tighter? Is it the machine learning aspect of it? Is it the edge cases? What's the most challenging thing you deal with every day?

I mean, you know, we have so many technical problems we're solving time simultaneously that there's not any one that I'm particularly worried about or keeps me up at night. Really, it's about execution. So continuing, this is going to sound simple, but continuing to bring in and retain really smart people to build the right tools and infrastructure to accelerate development, and then to just make steady progress and not, you know, sort of slow down as we grow in terms of size or start saying yes to too many things and lose our focus.

I really think if we just keep doing what we've been doing and stay focused and execute well, you're going to see driverless cars everywhere. And when do you think, you know, consumers in major cities will, this will become the predominant way people get round in taxis. You had to pick a year. It's hard to say, you know, and the reason for that is, you know, we're really seeing the tip of the iceberg right now. There's been years and years of exponential improvement to these products to get them to the point where you see your first driverless deployments and people can use them. And so that rate of progress has been rapid and

exponential during that time. Now we're starting with a very small number, probably going to see exponential scaling. And so it's really hard to predict the Y axis at any point in time, you know, when you have these exponentials. So I'm not going to not going to lock myself into anything. than to say, you know, we're in one major city. A lot of major cities look similar and we're moving as fast as we possibly can. Yeah, it's fantastic. Last time you were on in 2014, we did our bet, which expires in 2024. And we made this a 10-year bet when debts would be reduced below 5,000. We all know debts in the United States, about 30,000. Is that still the number? It's gone up. I think it's closer to 40 now. Jeez, Louise, it's got to always, and it's got to be

people distracted driving, right? I mean, that's got to be the main contributor. That's the theory distracted driving or maybe from COVID people are driving less or behaving more erratically. Whatever it is, it's going the wrong direction right now. It's just unbelievable. So we made this bet, $1,000 omelkase sushi dinner. It was inflation adjusted, so who knows what this will cost. Yeah, inflation's through the roof, so this could be expensive. I expected a reduction to about 10,000. You and five. You know, it's, it's, I think we're both in the running here. I mean, time is moving quickly. Overall, when you look at this, is this moving faster than you thought it were or a little

bit slower? Feels like we're going a little bit slower. Absolutely. It's slower than I anticipated. I think everyone in the industry thought this is going to happen sooner than it did. And the reality is until you start putting these products out there and exposing them to tough urban environments, you just don't know how difficult it really is. But our belief is, you know, like you said, if we're going to get to this lower number of fatalities in the future, it's not going to happen on its own. It's going to take driverless cars and people pushing forward challenging the status quo and really putting a lot of energy and firepower into this to make these products and to get them out there. Absent that, you know, the future is pretty bleak.

If you had to put a percentage number on how close we are to solving this problem, what's the percentage number you'd put on it? Well, will we solve it? Absolutely. Absolutely. If not cruise than someone else. Yeah. It feels like to me three or four people are going to figure this out. So the question is, what percentage are we at now? I have my own thoughts. Oh, I'd say 100% given that we've got it in a small piece operating in San Francisco. But to us, like going from R&D phase for seven years to having a product that people are using, that's it.

It's out there. Yeah. I feel like you guys are 85% of the way there. I think the snow is like in the climate weather in the Northeast and the five points. I think these educational points, you know, pedestrian, wackiness, and then winning over the public, which. If you're talking about general availability. I'd agree with your assessment. That's fair.

85 feels fair for general accessibility, yeah. But I mean, congratulations. I know this has been like a lot of hard work and it didn't go as fast as people thought it would and it's not been easy. There were a lot of people trying and now you're down to, you know, let's face it, what is it, a five horse race, I think, here in the United States, four or five horse race. And I think, you know, society's going to look back on this in the work you did. And it's a huge mitzvah for humanity that all of these people who die in the United States unnecessarily in these car crashes, it's going to go to zero. I think it's going to go to zero. I really sincerely do. I think it's going to be impossible to crash a car. It's going to be like

some random thing, like commercial aviation. Nobody gets on commercial aviation now and, you know, on a major carry and expects the plane to go down. I think people get in cars are like, yeah, this is real, you know, high risk behavior. A hundred people dying a day in the United States. Yeah. It's going to go down to you. We bump up against the laws of physics. Like the only crashes that remain are physically unavoidable. And those that are preventable, we can prevent. That's what's going to happen. It's to be like some boulder falls. It's nothing to do with driving. It's just a random act of God that a boulder fell. But seriously, congratulations. I think it's awesome what you're doing for humanity and to the team over there. You know, just, it's really just impressive to watch that you guys

didn't give up and, you know, the other players in the space are still grinding it out. I mean, obviously, there's a big prize here. It's great, you know, for economics and business. But there's a bigger issue here, which is young people die in car crashes. I mean, and it's just tragic and you're going to save a lot of lives. So to the cruise team, uh, congratulations, really, and keep it up. We can't wait to be riding around in these. It's going to be a wonderful future, even if it took an extra five years. That's great. Well, thanks, Jason. We appreciate that. All right. I'll see you in a couple more years when you're taking these things out in Boston and getting through tiny streets in Spain. But for now, I can't wait to ride in one in San Francisco

and have that nice smooth ride in Pack Heights and into the inner sunset and everywhere else you are. So continued success. Everybody can go to getcruise.com. They're always hiring. They need more engineers and people. And how do you sign up for the San Francisco?

It's right on the website. Getcruise.com. You can sign up on the waitlist. Go sign up and get on the wait list. And I can't wait to try it. And we'll see you all next time on this week and startups. Bye bye. Hey, everyone.

Producer Nick here. I want to tell you about the SaaS syndicate. If you're a founder of a SaaS company with a product and market, our investment team wants to talk to you. Head over to the syndicate.com slash SaaS, SAAAS to apply to raise from the Sass Syndicate. And you can join Jason's syndicate of over 9,000 accredited investors at the syndicate.com. Producer Justin here, no cool startup? Check out openscouting.com, where anyone can refer a startup to our investment team here at launch.

Even if you don't know the founder, if you're the first to flag a company for us and we decide to invest, you'll get 5K in cash or 10% of our carry. Hey everybody, producer Rachel here. Are you an early stage startup that has product and market, some traction, and are looking to raise at least $500,000? Apply today to Remote Demo Day for your chance to pitch to over 9,000 investors in Jason's syndicate. Submit your application at Remote Demoday.com. Our next event is on April 27th.

And if you want to learn how to invest in startups from the world's greatest angel investor, and no, we're not talking about Chris Scyll. then head to angel. . University to apply. The four-hour workshop costs $300 and all proceeds are donated to charity. To date, we've donated over $175,000 to various charities, and you can see the full list at angel. dot university slash charity.