Waymo’s CEO said early-stage startups often make one big mistake that kills them.
In a Sequoia Capital podcast released Friday, co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov said startups tend to get excited by new technological breakthroughs but focus on quick solutions rather than addressing the complex edge cases needed to make systems truly reliable.
Speaking in the context of the autonomous vehicles industry, he said it is very easy to get started but “very difficult to take it all the way to a real product, full autonomy, and superhuman performance.”
He said big breakthroughs like large language models fuel hype cycles, drawing in a wave of startups that don’t last.
Dolgov said these breakthroughs change the “early part of the curve,” and not the “long tail.”
A Waymo spokesperson told Business Insider that the “long tail” for autonomous vehicles refers to edge cases — rare driving situations that occur once every million miles that the self-driving system must safely navigate.
“Today, worldwide, somebody loses their life in a crash on our roads every 26 seconds,” Dolgov said in the podcast. “It’s the combination of knowing that the mission is really important and understanding what you’re up against — not looking for easy wins or quick solutions or silver bullets — that helps the team have the stamina to go the distance.”
Waymo was founded by Google in 2009 as a self-driving technology company. It launched its first autonomous vehicles in Phoenix in 2020, and is now available in several US cities, including San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Miami, and Nashville.
The company’s robotaxis are all electric and use AI, mapping technology, and sensors to drive autonomously. Waymo is one of the few autonomous-vehicle companies to offer robotaxi services in the US, alongside Tesla and Uber.
Before joining Waymo in 2009, Dolgov worked on self-driving car technology at Toyota and at Stanford. He shares Waymo’s CEO title with Tekedra Mawakana.
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