The Man With the Most Valuable Work Experience in the World
Chris Urmson led Google’s self-driving car team from its early days all the way until the company shed its Google skin and emerged under the Alphabet umbrella as Waymo, the obvious leader in driverless cars.
But though Urmson pushed the organization far enough up the technological mountain to see the possibility that Waymo would be the first to commercially deploy automated vehicles, he did not make it to the promised land.
Instead, after current Waymo CEO John Krafcik took control of the enterprise, Urmson left in December of 2016. After a few months pondering his next move, he cofounded Aurora, a new self-driving car start-up, with Sterling Anderson, who’d launched Autopilot at Tesla, and Drew Bagnell, a machine-learning expert who’d been at Uber.
When the company came out of stealth in early 2017, it was greeted with something like awe. This was a fearsome new team in the self-driving car space. Last month, they raised $90 million in their first venture round from Greylock Partners and Index Ventures. LinkedIn founder (and Greylock partner) Reid Hoffman also joined their board.
Recently, I sat down with Urmson to talk about his new company, the state of the self-driving car business, Ford Escorts, and why the cost of all those sensors on self-driving cars doesn’t really matter.
What was most surprising is that Urmson’s vision for implementing self-driving car technology has not really changed, but his view of the industry has. Waymo plans to own and operate its own service, contracting with car companies to manufacture the vehicles for its fleet. Aurora plans to partner with the big car companies to provide the tech for them to build their own legions of driverless vehicles. Why build your own car service, when you could sell your technology to all of them?
Aurora, then, is a bet that scaling up self-driving car technology will be as complex, fraught, and expensive as developing it in the first
