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[INTERVIEWER] Welcome to the GSB, Tekedra. [TEKEDRA] Thank you. Thank you. What a warm welcome! Thank you so much.
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[INTERVIEWER] I know a lot of us in this room probably took our first Waymo ride when we moved here for business school.
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What do you remember about your first Waymo ride?
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[TEKEDRA] What I remember most is because we had this vision that we would transport people safely from point A to point B with no one behind the wheel The question in the back of my mind always was, what would it take for people to trust technology, given that every person I'd ever met would say to me, "My cell phone constantly drops. How is this gonna work?"
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And so what was in the back of my mind when I got into the car the first time was, what are all the ways this is not like the technology that we've come to rely on, whether we view it as reliable or not?
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And how can those attributes become what we really emphasize?
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And so as I sat there, I just felt like a student of the experience. Like, what can I learn? What can I glean?
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What did I feel nervous about?
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You know, my mom was not...
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You know, when I told her I was thinking about going to Waymo, my mom was like, "Honestly, it sounds crazy."
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Like, "I understand what you do now.
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I understand what these companies do.
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Who is gonna get in those cars?" Yeah.
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And so I really also thought about the question how safe did I feel?
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And of course I felt safe, and the drive, the ride was, you know- Uneventful.
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And so it really became the beginning of this question and pursuit around how do we get other people to understand that? [INTERVIEWER] Yeah.
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I can relate to that feeling of being a little bit nervous my first ride.
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Something I remember about my first ride is that instinct I had when the ride was over to say thank you to the driver. But there was no driver.
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So I awkwardly said thank you to the car instead.
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So it feels really meaningful that you're here with us today, Tekedra, and we can say thank you to you— [TEKEDRA] Oh, that's so nice.
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[INTERVIEWER] We're helping to build such a transformative piece of technology.
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[TEKEDRA] Thank you, thank you.
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And I love that you say thank you to the car.
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I mean, I do love— It's like, "Thank you, Waymo." I do that every time. Every time.
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Just because we were raised with good manners. That's all. [INTERVIEWER] Sure.
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Well, I wanna start where your story begins.
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You were born in Mississippi and raised across the South.
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What did your early life— How did that influence your sense of ambition?
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[TEKEDRA] I think, you know, it's funny, living in California, a lot of people say to me, "Gosh, I never meet anyone from Mississippi."
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And I think obviously I was sort of in it, so I didn't know.
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But one of the things I've really, really grown to appreciate is the sense of family and community.
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You know, the way my grandmother would say it is, "You know whose you are and you know who you are."
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And that was both about faith, and it was about family, and identity, and culture.
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And so I think such a big part of who I am foundationally came from that, just like knowing I was loved and supported and had this big community on my mom's side of the family and my dad's side of the family.
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Both of them grew up, you know, across town in Mississippi, literally on two sides of the tracks.
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And so I think just getting to go back there every summer, you know, I didn't live there, but me and my brother went back there.
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And we got to do things that like, you know, we lived in the suburbs in Virginia and other places, but we got to do things that, like, you don't get to do in the suburbs.
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Like, you know, feed the cow, feed the pigs, which was my favorite.
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Like, throwing whatever you want in the, like, slop thing.
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That was, like, so exciting. You know what I mean?
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You don't put anything in the trash, you put it out in the bin for the hogs.
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Getting the eggs from the chickens.
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You know, I remember years later, one of my really good friends said to me, he said, "Dude." Yeah?
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And he said, "I was just at a peppermint farm, and I never really thought about all the ways that peppermint comes from that plant."
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And I just think that that, like, closeness to the earth and that understanding of where things come from was such a big part, both family and, you know, what grounded us, which was the earth and the farmland around us.
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So that's a huge part of the ambition of, like, you can make anything with this.
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These are all the ingredients you need in order to do anything in this world.
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[INTERVIEWER] And that ambition led you to Columbia Law School.
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You've said before that you went to law school and ultimately wanted a career in business.
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Most people with that goal pursue an MBA. So why law school?
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[TEKEDRA] Yeah, I really love that question because it's not one that I've spent a lot of time thinking about, and I think it's because I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about business school.
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When I was in high school, there was a program if you had a certain GPA where you could actually choose to go work in an office.
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And my mom didn't believe in, like, I was gonna have, like, odd-and-end jobs.
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She was just like, "No, focus on school or get a job where you're learning something."
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And so my GPA was such that starting my junior year, I left every day from two to six.
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And I worked at a law firm.
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And I worked for this lawyer, Carol Clark, who, you know, there wasn't anything glamorous.
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Like, she was so hardworking, but it really left an imprint.
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On me that she was doing something she was very passionate about.
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You know, she was helping people.
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She did real estate law, so it was a very limited insight, and I think it was commercial real estate.
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I was in the file cabinet clerk office.
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Like, I wasn't doing any of this.
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But what I saw from her was this ambition, this drive, this hard work.
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And I also saw things that should have not been that appealing.
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Like, she ate a scoop of peanut butter for lunch every day.
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You know, she worked around the clock and didn't really have much of a personal life.
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So there were these things that could have been unattractive, but mostly what I thought is, "Oh, with this degree I could do anything." [INTERVIEWER] Hmm.
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[TEKEDRA] Like, I don't have to decide yet.
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And that was high school.
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So then when I got to college, I kind of forgot.
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Like, I just got lost in learning, which I love.
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And I, you know, majored in poli sci and did a minor in economics and women's studies and learned all of these things I was interested in.
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But then when it came time to decide what I was doing for grad school, Mm-hmm I was immediately kind of like, "Oh yeah, you like at some point really wanted to go to law school."
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And so it was just the seed was already there. Okay.
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And so then I applied to all of these law schools and kind of never viewed it as therefore I have to be a lawyer. Okay.
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It's like therefore I can do whatever I still want to do after I graduate.
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[INTERVIEWER] Well, that path led you to hold legal and public policy roles at AOL, Yahoo, eBay, iconic early internet companies shaped by equally iconic leaders.
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Is there a story or lesson from that era of your career that still sticks with you today?
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[TEKEDRA] It might be hard to imagine this, depending on what era you grew up in, in this technology evolution, but I graduated law school in '96, which happened to be the year of the telecom, the 1996 Telecoms Act And so what did that mean?
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It meant just like students right now who are graduating in this AI era, like, I had a front seat in this new thing that was happening, which is the internet.
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And, like, trying to figure out what it would mean.
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And if you can believe it, like, back then, some of the biggest, most complex issues were, you know, if you made a TV show for distribution on a cable channel What are the laws and regulations that will allow you to transmit that copyright onto this thing called the internet?
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This was, like, before streaming services.
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And so those questions, like that entanglement of there's something that you own, there's a platform that's emerging.
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How do you actually bring discipline and order to that?
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Like, that to me— Sparked this interest that my career could have these attributes of constantly learning, growing, and building.
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And so that's what I remember the most, is at each step there was this new thing, shepherded by technology, and there were all of these questions that happened to need regulatory tools, public policy discipline in order to get from the ideation to the technology to then eventually the commercialization.
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That's really what I remember the most about each of those moments.
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Even though not each of those companies is thought of as riding a wave of burgeoning change, that was my personal career experience in each of them.
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[INTERVIEWER] So finding ways to learn and grow, solve complex problems, and see where you could also add value. [TEKEDRA] Yes.
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[INTERVIEWER] And then in 2017, you decided to join Waymo- Yeah, going from companies with millions of users- to one that had no guarantee its product would work at scale. [TEKEDRA] Yeah.
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Lawyers are trained- [INTERVIEWER] Or even not at scale.
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Lawyers are trained to hedge risk, Tekedra. Yes.
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And here you were taking a pretty big one. Yeah.
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What made you willing to take that bet?
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[TEKEDRA] So back in the day at Yahoo!
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Yahoo acquired this company Tumblr.
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One of my side things that I really like is inspirational quotes and sayings and personal development.
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And so I keep a Tumblr blog off on the side, and it's full of beautiful images and sayings. I still have it.
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Actually got my, like, you've had your blog for however many years, anniversary notice recently.
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But one of the sayings I look at so much that comes up in so many contexts is like, "If it doesn't terrify you, it's probably not worth it."
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And there was really something about when Waymo first started recruiting me, the person who was recruiting me has become a friend, but when she first started recruiting me, I was like, "Oh, yeah, no, that sounds super interesting for someone else."
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And I gave her names and I went, you know, back to work.
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And she called again, and she called again, and so we ended up in a conversation for a year.
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And what I realized when I went in for the interview, well, I actually went in for lunch, 'cause I think she realized I was never coming for an interview.
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So I went for lunch, and the pizza at that building is all it takes.
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And so, but then she's like, "Why don't you meet people now that you're here?"
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And I remember being like, "Uh-oh."
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I accidentally ended up in an interview.
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But mostly what I realized is I hadn't actually given myself the opportunity to be in a place that was genuinely a moonshot.
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And this is that lawyer part of me.
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Like, certainty and clarity was not part of what I worked on, but it was very much a part of the career choices I was making.
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I knew how to be an A student.
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I knew how to be studious and do a good job.
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I knew if I went to a place that was, you know, on the public markets, I knew how their stock performed.
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I knew what my compensation was.
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And so all of the certainty had always been in those choices, not necessarily in the business side.
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For the first time, this was gonna be me kind of saying I'm This is an opportunity, and I don't mean for me abundance I mean abundance in an environment where what would you do if all you had to do was take this technology and solve a challenge facing humanity?
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Like— Who would you be in that circumstance of abundance?
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And so that for me is what I had to realize was really the thing I'd never done.
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It was the thing I'd never imagined.
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Therefore I didn't even realize I wasn't doing it yet.
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And so that was the leap for me, was it wasn't about the risk of the business.
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It wasn't about the massive change in compensation that going to a startup is.
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It wasn't going from a team like the introduction said.
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Leading a team across five continents to Leading a team of one is what I came in to do. It wasn't any of that.
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It was really, do I have the confidence in my abilities as a builder?
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To go all the way back to the beginning and build something that's never been built, but also be a builder in that context.
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And so, Yeah, it terrified me, and it was like a put me in, coach moment for me professionally because I said, "This is exactly what that blog is about."
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Like, these are the kinds of bets you have to take on yourself.
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And so that's what made me say, "Yeah, I'm gonna go and do this."
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[INTERVIEWER] What advice would you give to students here in the audience today who may be thinking about taking a bet on something unproven for their next career move?
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[TEKEDRA] What I would say is, trust that small voice that is telling you that everything you've done has prepared you for this.
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You have everything that you need.
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And the way you will address it with what you have, your tools, your experiences, your victories, your defeats, that is not what anyone else has.
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And so it isn't something that people can advise you on because we don't naturally share All of who we are when we're having those conversations.
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We talk narrowly about what we've learned, or we talk narrowly about what we've done, or we talk narrowly about how we failed, but we don't talk about everything.
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It's just, it's not natural. We don't remember it.
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But there's, I believe, this very small whisper that will tell you, "You know what? You got this."
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And then there's a louder voice that might start challenging it.
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"What makes you think that? Da, da, da."
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It's like, know that you can work your way to the other side of that. [INTERVIEWER] Yeah.
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You have to have self-belief.
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[TEKEDRA] You have to have self-belief, and I think that voice- Is your experience speaking to you? Like you have...
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You know, it's just like when we hire someone at the company, it's very easy.
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You know, you hire someone, they're a, you know, let's say senior manager and they're doing a product role.
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Then you look at their resume, and they founded two companies, they went to Stanford, they, you know, they did all of these things and we have this tendency as an organization for organizing principles that are very valid.
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You sort of get someone down to the thing that they're there for.
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But there's so much behind that, and I think it's that's the voice is reminding you of everything else that you bring to that situation and circumstance.
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So that would be my very nebulous advice.
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[INTERVIEWER] Well, that, that paid off for you.
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In 2021, you were named co-CEO of Waymo, making you one of very few Black female CEOs Looking back, what steps did you take to position yourself for that role?
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[TEKEDRA] I always say this, first and foremost, know your craft.
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Like, I think it's easy to get infatuated with a problem.
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It's easy to get infatuated with sort of a title, a path.
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But I think knowing your craft, there's not a substitute for it.
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You know, which means constantly be learning.
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You know, know your path isn't static.
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You know, you have to always be learning. Know yourself.
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Which is also a constantly, who you are in this circumstance and that circumstance changes.
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Know that better than anyone else.
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Know what is your relationship with ambiguity.
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You know, what is your relationship with hierarchy?
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You know, what is your relationship with communication?
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All of that, the more you know.
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You know, those are the things that I've, that this position has given me a chance to bring all together.
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[INTERVIEWER] I want to move a bit to company culture. [TEKEDRA] Okay.
16:28
[INTERVIEWER] Safety is core to Waymo's mission.
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How do you ensure that safety-first mindset shows up in how people make everyday decisions, especially as the company scales?
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[TEKEDRA] Yeah, it's foundational to everything, how we've built the culture from the early days.
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I say I don't think you can build safety retroactively.
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We put it in our, obviously, our framework, which is about the software releases.
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We put it into our reporting mechanisms.
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People can raise concerns.
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We have multiple channels. We talk about it openly.
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We pause when we see things that require us to reconsider our prior plans.
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Like, I think you have to speak safety. I think you have to...
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Put it into the culture, and then I think you have to model what it looks like to make decisions that, you know, some people may say are counter to progress, but it's because we're only interested in advancing safely, and so we're not interested in progress for progress' sake.
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And that's one of the things I am most proud of.
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You know, when you come to a company and there's a technology and there's an opportunity, it's like what you do in the middle is really who you are, and what is your sort of do-say ratio, and are you really willing to do what you say?
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And so, I think we've worked really hard, and it is hard.
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You know, this is a hard thing to do.
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Educating the public that we're safe and not perfect, you know, accounting for things that happen that might be perceived safety but are not actual safety risks.
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All of that's a really complicated conversation to have with the public while having the cars on the road.
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And I think it's not for the faint of heart.
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And it also isn't for someone who doesn't believe that technology companies should be held to account.
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[INTERVIEWER] What does safe enough really mean in this industry?
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[TEKEDRA] So I think safe enough isn't good enough.
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I think, so I don't know what that means.
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I think, you know, we have to improve the status quo. You know, 1.
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2 million people killed globally on the roadways is unacceptable.
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And it's unacceptable because we can do better.
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And so, you know, right now we're showing a 13 times reduction in these serious injury causing crashes.
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That bar at Waymo that we can perform that much better than humans in the same places where we are driving.
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For me, takes the conversation from what's safe enough to whether or not saving lives is urgent.
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And to me, this is about we've been rigorous, we've built the driver, the Waymo Driver, we've been cautious, we've metered our scale and rollouts, and now we really feel that there's an opportunity for us to treat this like saving lives is urgent. And so, safe. Safety is foundational.
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Safety is aspirational, but it shouldn't actually be a floor, and it definitely shouldn't be a race to the bottom.
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[INTERVIEWER] Yeah, absolutely.
19:45
External dynamics are also really important here.
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Waymo operates in a heavily regulated space where progress depends on governments, regulators, and building public trust.
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This is something that people here in the audience today may have to navigate at some point in their careers.
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How do you think about bringing stakeholders along and building something with you that doesn't fully exist yet?
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[TEKEDRA] I think one of the early days, if I'd had this conversation with you, it's kind of funny now when I think about it.
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You know, one of the things we did in the early days at Waymo was we made these cardboard virtual reality goggles, and we took them to Congress to try to get people.
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To imagine what this experience of being in the car was like.
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I mean, what we hadn't accounted for is whether or not the virtual reality goggles would be a step too far, too. Right?
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I mean, that was—we were like, "Oh yeah, that's right."
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Okay, so this is how the cardboard works, and then now let's talk about you're in the car and look around, and this is the experience.
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The point is, we recognized in the early days that we have to try to bring that imagination to life. [INTERVIEWER] Mm-hmm.
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[TEKEDRA] You know, imagining a world, you know, the thing my mom had such a hard time imagining for me, that I would join this company, and one day people would trust, you know, their precious children in there, me, grown-ups in there. She couldn't imagine it.
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And so I think you have to be willing to engage at all levels, not just of government, but also community.
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So early days, of course, we did federal, state, local engagement.
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You also have to figure out who else in the ecosystem is trying to solve similar problems.
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Because this isn't a Waymo's gonna save society mission.
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We're on a mission to build the world's most trusted driver.
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There are a lot of organizations that have been trying to make the road safe for decades.
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And so we partnered with many of them, you know, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, National Safety Council, the list goes on and on and on.
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And then there are a number of organizations who've been, you know, trying to manage taking keys away from elderly populations, you know, vision-impaired children, children with epilepsy, all of these ailments that mean that on your 16th birthday, you have no more independence than you did before your 16th birthday.
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So, us going out and partnering with those organizations gave us the chance to authentically and organically Root for the same thing, which is another option, an option that's safe, an option that increases independence.
22:24
So I think really thinking about the landscape, what's the problem you're tackling, who else has been trying to tackle it, and how could this technology shed a new light so they don't have to be like technologists or focused on AI, they just actually get to benefit and their causes get to be accelerated by your inventions.
22:44
And so that's the way that I've thought about it.
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It's an entire flywheel, and I think it's important because then as things happen, those are the folks who come out on our behalf and say, "This is important. We need this. We want this."
22:57
And we're experiencing that now, and we've been experiencing it for the last five years.
23:02
[INTERVIEWER] But then there are also moments when the trust you're building comes under spotlight.
23:06
Just last week, Waymo issued a recall after a vehicle drove into a flooded roadway and was swept away. Yeah.
23:12
How do you think about, as a leader, navigating scrutiny, navigating crisis, but also maintaining public trust in your product?
23:22
[TEKEDRA] Yeah, I think we have to own those.
23:24
You know, this was in San Antonio, and it was during a flood, and I think the way we own it is, you know, one, this was a recall that we decided to issue.
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It's really important for us to understand what happened.
23:39
It's really important for us to continually improve.
23:43
So that recall is us saying, "We're taking a moment and we're making improvements."
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Whether they're operational or engineering improvements, that's critical to maintaining this trust.
23:55
You know, we think of ourselves as having an agreement with the communities in which we operate that we will do what we say and things will happen. It will not be perfect. So that's one.
24:05
Obviously, working with regulators, recall, NHTSA governs recall, so engaging with them quickly, transparently, and proactively is really important to us.
24:18
And then when the news is kind of out there, making sure that we're shaping that story and so that it's not told that we have no idea what's happening or why this happened or anything like that.
24:29
We really want it to be understood that we recognize exactly why this happened and what improvements are needed and that we're making them.
24:38
[INTERVIEWER] Another challenge to your business is scale and sustainability.
24:42
Your competitor, Tesla, has chosen a very different model than Waymo.
24:45
They sell cars to consumers for as low as thirty-seven thousand dollars.
24:49
You can buy a self-driving subscription add-on, versus Waymo owns and operates its own fleet with cars costing upwards of a hundred thousand dollars.
24:59
How do you think about those two very different models as you consider Waymo's path to profitability? [TEKEDRA] Yeah.
25:06
So we're building the driver.
25:10
We're not building vehicles, and this is why we want to be the world's most trusted driver.
25:15
That Waymo driver has already seen a life across multiple vehicle platforms.
25:22
You know, we have the Jaguar I-PACE vehicles now, but we had vehicles in the past and we'll have more— we have more coming online in the future.
25:31
So that generalizable driver is not only powering ride-hailing, it will also power local delivery, it will power Class 8 long-haul trucking, and it will power, through licenses with automotive companies, personally owned cars.
25:47
So this isn't where we're stopping, this is where we're starting. Why did we start here?
25:52
Because it gives us an opportunity to educate the public about this technology.
25:56
Most people have technology in their personally owned cars that they don't use, and in fact turn off because there isn't an understanding of how it works and how to trust it and why to trust it.
26:08
So it's really important to us that we build this generalizable driver and then pursue multiple business lines.
26:15
In addition to that, it's really, really important- To be clear that when we are talking about the Waymo Driver, we are only talking about technology that means you don't need a driver's license.
26:28
You don't need to be behind the wheel.
26:30
Back in 2012, Waymo had what you would think of as kind of an autopilot product where it would take you from ramp to ramp, and we asked employees, they were the only ones who had access to these cars, and we asked employees, "Pay attention."
26:46
You know, this is an experiment. Pay attention.
26:49
Make sure that you're alert.
26:50
You will have to take over.
26:52
And what we saw is that people trust the technology beyond its capability.
26:57
And so people were like putting on their makeup and shaving and turning around and plugging in things and doing the things they didn't get a chance to do that morning at home, right?
27:07
That's the whole purpose of giving people this free sort of time back.
27:12
And so that's when we decided back in 2012, beginning of 2013, that we were only interested in fully autonomous.
27:20
And so we don't want to be in the situation where we're inviting people to unplug from the driving task and then expecting them to take over at a really, really urgent moment.
27:33
And the way we think about this is for years and years and years, all of these companies, car companies, everyone, seat belts, airbags, we've all been patching around the problem because cars are getting safer, but humans are more distracted than ever.
27:48
So we want at the center of our strategy is humans don't have to worry about the driving task.
27:55
Humans don't have to have a driver's license.
27:58
Humans are not sitting behind the wheel. Go be human.
28:01
Like, jam out to your music, talk to your people, text who you have to text, shave if that's the thing you do on your way to work. Like whatever.
28:08
And they were like, men shaving.
28:10
It wasn't like people shaving.
28:11
They're like, it was just like a guy shaving.
28:15
You know, like, if those are the things you didn't get the chance to finish doing this morning, then by all means do it.
28:20
Just don't also be responsible for driving safely. [INTERVIEWER] Yeah.
28:24
I mentioned Tesla, but of course you have other competitors as well, Uber, Zoox, to name a few. Why will Waymo win?
28:30
Is it because of this bet on the Waymo Driver technology, or is it something else?
28:35
[TEKEDRA] So I'll answer that question in two ways. [INTERVIEWER] Okay.
28:38
[TEKEDRA] I think first and foremost, the reason that we have the lead that we have is because we've had a lot of discipline about safety And I think that kind of humility and patience that this isn't about how fast you can go, this isn't about how many flags you can plant before everyone else.
29:00
This is really about building a product that I would put my son in, that I would trust other people to put their kids in, that proves out its worth in societal benefit.
29:11
And so I think that kind of rigor and discipline I'm really proud of because what it does is it says to everyone in the space This is worth doing.
29:22
And I think that's the point we are at right now.
29:25
Like, a lot of people are getting involved in scaling and increasing their investment.
29:29
And I don't mean in Waymo, I mean in these competitive spaces.
29:33
And so one, I feel like we've done it, and that's great, and we've But on the question of like long term, why will we be most successful?
29:42
I think that's because riders are gonna choose.
29:44
Like, consumers are gonna decide who do they wanna ride, who have they grown to trust, and we won't get to decide that.
29:51
We're just gonna work every single day to not rely on the trust from yesterday, but earn the trust today, earn the trust tomorrow.
29:59
We recognize it takes a long time to earn it, not a long time to lose it, and we are committed to the work needed to keep earning trust.
30:07
[INTERVIEWER] So really building that trust day by day is the core focus right now? Okay.
30:12
I want to talk about the broader implications of this technology.
30:16
Autonomous vehicles will displace many driving roles.
30:20
You've said before that new roles will also emerge, but the Uber driver who loses their job today may not be the same person who becomes a fleet technician in the future.
30:30
How do you think about your responsibility as a leader in navigating that transition?
30:35
[TEKEDRA] Yeah, it's something we've been spending a lot of time thinking about.
30:38
We are actually finding through some of our fleet operating partners.
30:42
So we don't, you know, In some cities our fleet is run by partners and those partners are hiring people, and they've actually been able to take logistics specialists and drivers and move them into depot managers, fleet operators, you know, people who are dispatched to manage the job on an ad hoc basis.
31:07
Because when you're talking about- People who've been working in gigs, they don't necessarily have eight hours available, but they have time available to be helpful.
31:17
And so we are actually watching some of our partners be able to do that.
31:21
We're in the early days, so I don't want to say that that's what we're focused on the most as a company.
31:28
As a company, there are three things we know to be true.
31:31
Jobs are gonna go away, jobs are gonna change, and jobs are gonna be here tomorrow that were not here yesterday.
31:38
The last one we're already seeing.
31:40
The first one we've already seen evidence in markets where jobs, where we've been there, in Phoenix, in San Francisco, where the entire pie has grown.
31:51
So like the demand for people being driven in San Francisco grew 14%, I'm sorry, 7%, and the wages grew 14% our first year in San Francisco for cab drivers, limo drivers.
32:08
And so there is this, as people start to focus on whether or not- Driving is the safest way to get from point A to point B.
32:17
As tourists start to flock to cities to have the chance to check out this technology, there are surplus, and that surplus is actually benefiting traditional jobs.
32:28
How do I think about our responsibility in it?
32:31
We have to be in this conversation.
32:33
This isn't only about Waymo, this is about how is autonomy gonna shift- The world of jobs in the future.
32:39
And so this is a conversation We had it yesterday at our company-wide meeting.
32:43
We're going to continue to have it.
32:44
There are studies that are happening right now that are premature for me to talk about, but we're funding those studies.
32:50
There are job retraining programs.
32:53
There's an organization called TechForce.
32:55
We're taking traditional mechanic roles and turning them into autonomous mechanics.
33:00
We think that's important.
33:01
We have a partnership with Bronx Community College, where we want to teach the next generation of trade specialists how to work in the autonomous space.
33:12
So it's going to be a building block answer to your question.
33:16
But I think we have to say all the things we're doing, and then hopefully over the next year.
33:21
There will be these reports that we can put out that organize all of the data.
33:25
It's just too—the scale isn't there yet to really talk about it, and we haven't seen the job displacement impact yet.
33:34
And so that's also really important.
33:37
[INTERVIEWER] There's also another question about access.
33:40
If Waymo's meaningfully improved safety on the roads, it starts to feel like something everyone should have access to.
33:47
How do you ensure Waymo's technology isn't just limited to big cities or people who can afford it?
33:54
[TEKEDRA] Yeah, that was something we really thought about early, early days.
33:57
So when we launched in San Francisco and Los Angeles, we sought out, because you know, in those days we were launching, we didn't go direct to public, we went sort of through early riders.
34:08
And so we sought out a host of diverse transportation need use cases.
34:13
And as a result, we ended up with a diverse socioeconomic, racial, location, early riders, and we took that feedback.
34:24
And one of the things we learned in that was people would really find it useful if Waymo and transit operators had a closer tie.
34:33
And so in Los Angeles, when we launched we actually provided a credit for people who were coming from public transit into a Waymo, or vice versa to be able to save on their Waymo rides.
34:45
And so again, like, we are interested because this is about discovery and learning, and we have to make sure this technology improves on what exists.
34:56
Isn't just replicating what exists.
34:59
There's no reason for us to be here if that's all we're doing.
35:02
And so we feel like one of the ways we earn trust is by listening to communities.
35:07
How have you been left out of the transportation network?
35:11
How might we improve that?
35:12
Not by replacing transit and all of this. No, no.
35:14
By partnering with them to make sure that we're meeting the needs, that we're getting further out, you know, from the center city.
35:21
Some people are like, "It's just so congested. I just...
35:23
I'll always be late to work. I work at the hospital. I work overnight. Fine.
35:28
Let's do a partnership where we do pickups Outside of the city and drop-ups, drop-offs outside of the city, and then people take public transit to the hospitals in the city center.
35:38
So these are the conversations that we're having.
35:41
We don't have all the answers.
35:42
We receive those answers from the communities in which we operate.
35:46
[INTERVIEWER] In your view, what is the single biggest obstacle to widespread autonomous driving in the United States? [TEKEDRA] In the US?
35:54
I think, you know, always the question is, is the technology ready?
35:59
And so if you're talking about cities that have heaps and heaps and mounds of snow, some significant part of many months of the year, I don't think that, you know, certainly for the Waymo Driver, you know, we're at the early part of deploying in cities with that kind of snow. I think that that's one.
36:23
Second is the regulatory framework.
36:25
If the Driver can work- Then has the municipality actually figured out how they want to regulate the technology?
36:33
And I think that's in a lot of cities where we technologically could launch and aren't, it's because the regulators aren't ready.
36:41
And in other cities, it's because you know, there's a weather pattern of some sort that we need to continue to work on.
36:48
[INTERVIEWER] Before we get to hear from our student audience I have one more question for you. [TEKEDRA] Okay.
36:54
[INTERVIEWER] You have a teenage son who recently got his driver's license? [TEKEDRA] I do, yes. [INTERVIEWER] If... that's not the question. If...
37:01
[TEKEDRA] I was like, that's an easy last one. I'll take it.
37:04
[INTERVIEWER] If Waymo accomplishes its mission, what will the world look like in 10, 20, 30 years?
37:10
Will teenagers still be learning how to drive?
37:13
[TEKEDRA] You know, if it's my son, the answer's yes, because he really wanted to.
37:16
I mean, he knows, he knows Waymo. He loves Waymo.
37:22
And I think it's really exciting to think about driving when you want to as being when you drive.
37:29
You know, you drive when you want to.
37:30
You drive when you're on your way to a happy family vacation, and there's luggage hanging off of every part of the vehicle.
37:38
But I think in a 10 to 20-year horizon, people have decided if they want to keep driving or if they want to buy cars that drive them.
37:45
Because the Waymo Driver, as I mentioned, will have this opportunity to be in cars.
37:50
And for people who never want to drive- I still hope that people will take rideshare, or ride-hailing, like Waymo, because it still won't make a lot of sense for city centers to be congested with cars that just sit in garages all day.
38:07
You know, this technology gives you the chance to be dropped off and for that vehicle to make its way back and to come back and get you.
38:14
And so my hope is that we'll see cities with more green spaces, more convening spots, which will hopefully make them feel more like cities and communities and less like- You know, concrete jungles.
38:27
And that means transportation planners will take millions, tens of millions of dollars, and redeploy them into other really important services for people, which, you know, sort of lifts the tide of everyone in those cities.
38:42
And so I just hope there's a reimagination.
38:44
And I can only hope because this isn't my side of the line, right?
38:48
Like, this is for cities to really start to, you know, invoke their own imagination about that future.
38:54
And we're partnering with them on it, and we think it could be really exciting.
38:57
[INTERVIEWER] Absolutely.
38:58
Well, definitely given us all something to think about, and we'll stay tuned, I suppose, and see what happens. Yeah. Okay.
39:05
And with that, we'll turn to questions from the audience. [TEKEDRA] Awesome. [BLAKE] Hi, Tekedra. Hi. I'm Blake.
39:11
I'm a second year business student.
39:12
And I gotta say, as a car nerd, this was the best view from the top I've been to.
39:16
So thanks for being here. [TEKEDRA] Thank you.
39:18
[BLAKE] I wanted to ask you about the technology that underpins the Waymo Driver. Yeah.
39:21
So it feels like Waymo's made an implicit bet that LiDAR is necessary to sort of use autonomous driving safely, and Tesla's made a bet that you can achieve that safety with cameras.
39:32
And I'm curious, given that with the sixth gen Waymo Driver, you cut the number of cameras in half, like 29 to 13, but you only went from five LiDAR to four, how we should expect to see Waymo's tech suite evolve over time, and what it means for maybe the future where we could use this on a passenger vehicle. [TEKEDRA] Yeah. Thank you.
39:49
What a great question, and I love that.
39:55
For us, we think that we are the only company that's been able to achieve this over the last five years.
40:03
You know, it was October of 2020 that we removed the human from our fleets.
40:09
And we strongly believe that technology was at that time, the only way to have gotten there in 2020 is with LiDAR, and to have done so with the safety results that we care about.
40:23
So really, the question as I think about it is like, do we have to stay on that? Path in the future? Maybe not.
40:32
But now our world model has all of that data in it.
40:37
And so do we fundamentally believe that there's no reason to short-circuit the type of data that's in your model that's going to inform this technology as it drives on the roads?
40:50
Yeah, there's no reason to short-circuit that.
40:53
And so- We feel strongly that that was the right bet, exactly what you said.
40:57
When you see these changes, it isn't because we're making these kinds of...
41:03
we are trying to make sure we're costing down the product and that the capability is staying the same.
41:08
When we think about the future with personally-owned cars, this will be integrated into the vehicle, totally different than what you're seeing now.
41:15
You know, people are like, "I don't wanna own one of those."
41:17
Other people are like, "I want a Waymo right now."
41:19
People will have all kinds of preferences, and we have to think about that future But these are laser-focused safety... That sounded like a pun. It wasn't.
41:26
It's like a dorky AV pun, sorry.
41:30
But you know, just to be clear, we use LiDAR camera and radar.
41:34
Sounds like you already know this.
41:35
So it isn't just a bet on LiDAR, it's a bet on a multimodal, multi-sense sensor system.
41:42
And I see, and I hear, and I smell, and I taste, and I touch, And we just don't think there's any reason to eliminate those in these early days.
41:51
Thanks for your question.
41:54
[AUDIENCE MEMBER] Hi, Tekedra. Hi.
41:54
Thank you for speaking with us today. [TEKEDRA] Yeah. Thank you.
41:57
[AUDIENCE MEMBER] Waymo's safety data is compelling, and especially in dense cities.
42:02
But also as someone from the South, I know trust is often cultural and emotional.
42:09
And my family also thinks I'm a little crazy when I drive Waymo.
42:13
So beyond the numbers and the stats, what do you think has to happen for Waymo to earn trust from communities that are a bit more skeptical of tech companies and autonomous driving?
42:28
[TEKEDRA] Yeah, I really like that question because I think one of the things I am always reminded of, I have this experience often where I meet people who would never get in and they're like, "Oh, now I'll get in.
42:42
Like, I just assumed that I wouldn't see anyone who looks anything like you or me, or from my background," or whatever it is, "and therefore, I now feel more trusting of it."
42:55
And so I think one of the things we have to do as a company is continue to make sure- We are hiring people that feel the communities in which we operate, like people who understand the skepticism, the negativity, the exclusion that has happened.
43:14
And for us, sometimes it's like people have been excluded in industries that aren't even our industry, but because we are coming up with this technology to offer options, they're like, "How do I know it isn't just gonna be like this other thing?"
43:27
So we have to also have a very broad aperture and say, "How have people been left out of mobility?
43:33
How have people been left out of early waves of new technology?"
43:37
You know, how have people been- Sort of trained to believe that, this is like the really great question, this is for a select few. It's not for me.
43:47
And so we have to be very deliberate in each of our launches.
43:49
And so this is an example of that, you know we had very specific conversations If someone thinks, "Oh, that's not for me because I'm vision impaired, because I have to wayfind my way to the car, I have to wayfind my way into a business," obviously the benefit of being with a ride-hailing, ride-sharing driver is they can help me.
44:12
So then we had to build all of those tools into our toolkit, coming out of a building, making sure that there's a honk feature so you can honk and hear your way to the vehicle.
44:23
So it's like listening Learning, showing that we're humble, making sure that we're taking the feedback when we get it, and then improving.
44:32
And I think that's, like, it's literally the only way to do it is to do it. Like, there isn't...
44:38
And the whole team knows this.
44:39
Everything we're doing is difficult because it requires being deliberate every single day.
44:48
And this is one of the areas that we take great ownership in. Thank you.
44:52
[INTERVIEWER] Thank you, Blake and Gabby, for those questions. Okay, Tekedra. Yeah.
44:56
We like to wrap up our View from the Top interviews with rapid-fire questions. Okay. Are you ready? [TEKEDRA] I am. [INTERVIEWER] Okay. [TEKEDRA] I think.
45:05
[INTERVIEWER] What was the first car you drove, and did you have a name for it? [TEKEDRA] Oh.
45:09
The first car I drove was a Rabbit.
45:13
Does anyone even know what those were? Okay, thank you.
45:15
So it was a VW for those of you who are looking at me like, What the heck is a Rabbit?
45:18
And it did not have a name. [INTERVIEWER] Okay.
45:22
[TEKEDRA] But it was a stick shift. I'm very proud. [INTERVIEWER] Okay. You should be. [TEKEDRA] You should be.
45:27
My dad, that was a requirement.
45:28
Like, my daughter's gonna know how to drive a stick shift.
45:32
[INTERVIEWER] Waymo has a partnership with Stanford Athletics, so I have to ask, what's your favorite sport to watch? [TEKEDRA] Basketball. [INTERVIEWER] Okay. Classic. [TEKEDRA] Yeah.
45:42
[INTERVIEWER] If a Waymo could take you anywhere, where would you want to go on your Waymo road trip? [TEKEDRA] Oh.
45:48
Gosh, okay, so it can't go over water, so- I mean, I think it would be really fun for the Waymo to take me to Collins, Mississippi, where I was born.
46:00
That would be really fun.
46:02
I mean, everyone would conclude I'm crazy.
46:05
But that would be really fun.
46:08
[INTERVIEWER] What's something you love doing that might surprise people?
46:12
[TEKEDRA] Roller skating. [INTERVIEWER] Okay.
46:14
Where do you roller skate?
46:15
[TEKEDRA] Well, I did roller skate at a roller rink in San Jose until it closed.
46:19
It closed like a year ago, and I was very sad.
46:21
But I like indoor, old-school roller skating.
46:24
So now I roller skate on the East Coast when I'm back there, because there are still a lot of roller rinks open. But I love... I'm like that person. I love roller skating. Okay, okay.
46:32
Some of you are like, "Okay, sh- I was with her until until she said roller skating."
46:43
[INTERVIEWER] Who's more nervous when your son is driving, you or him?
46:49
[TEKEDRA] Well, he is probably made nervous by me.
46:55
But the truth is, And so he disinvites me from riding with him.
47:00
But I think he's not, Yeah, he's not nervous.
47:04
And so that both gives me confidence and makes me nervous.
47:10
[INTERVIEWER] The fearlessness of a teenager.
47:11
[TEKEDRA] Yes, he's not nervous.
47:14
Although, yeah, I won't say it. Never mind.
47:18
[INTERVIEWER] And I have one final question for you.
47:21
It is definitely not a rapid-fire question. [TEKEDRA] Oh, okay.
47:25
[INTERVIEWER] One day, when you look back on your life and career, what impact do you hope you've had on the world?
47:31
[TEKEDRA] So I love that the last question was about my son because of course, you know, impact on the world I think about him first and foremost.
47:39
And I think about it in this way, like, I just want driving to not be the risk that it is today.
47:50
I don't want him leaving the house to be as scary As it is.
47:55
I don't want the number of people whose mothers, fathers, loved ones just don't make it home.
48:06
It is such a stressful reality if you allow yourself to think about it.
48:13
And so what we mostly do is we say, "They're gonna be fine.
48:19
I want that to just be true, and I want that to be part of what we were able to offer people is if it's true, it's great.
48:27
If it's not true and someone just shouldn't drive, they're angry, they're distracted, they're drunk, they're tired, then there's this option available to them.
48:35
And when I was growing up and when so many of us were growing up, that just wasn't an option.
48:41
And so when I think about the impact, I would love for it to be that there's always a safe way home.
48:47
There's always a safe way to get from point A to point B.
48:49
And we don't lose as many lives as a result. [INTERVIEWER] Yeah.
48:52
That's a beautiful want for the world.
48:55
Thank you so much for being here today, Takedra. [TEKEDRA] Thank you.