<story><title>CEO of Waymo John Krafcik is leaving</title><url>https://blog.waymo.com/2021/04/capstone-of-my-career-email-from-john.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>Having read hundreds of these sorts of CEO leaving letters I&amp;#x27;m a bit jaded and cynical. If you&amp;#x27;re interested in what I see when I read that message, I rewrote it[1] in more plain language.&lt;p&gt;Google demands a lot of its &amp;quot;other bets&amp;quot; companies. Some might say it asks too much. Mostly it seems to me that they want a &amp;#x27;moonshot&amp;#x27; company that has the original profitability of search advertising, full stop. And while it would be great for them if they found it, there is a lot to be said for having a bunch of businesses that just make anywhere from a few million to a billion dollars a year in revenue.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know if the attitude has changed since I was there but people creating $20M&amp;#x2F;year business revenue streams were not considered &amp;quot;successful&amp;quot; back in the day. I found that somewhat self defeating.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;gist.github.com&amp;#x2F;ChuckM&amp;#x2F;ff5fc8c800c7fe9160483b68ec45aac9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;gist.github.com&amp;#x2F;ChuckM&amp;#x2F;ff5fc8c800c7fe9160483b68ec45a...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>CEO of Waymo John Krafcik is leaving</title><url>https://blog.waymo.com/2021/04/capstone-of-my-career-email-from-john.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>choppaface</author><text>All of the big players in self-driving have shown that while they can try to solve the tech problem, nobody can solve the &lt;i&gt;team&lt;/i&gt; problem.  Self-driving brings together people with very diverse backgrounds (perception, planning, controls, hardware, safety, rideshare product, etc), very diverse incentives (established automakers vs start-up founders vs VC investors), and throws them in a pot with a huge amount of money and greed.  And does this to serve a public who largely doesn&amp;#x27;t trust self-driving AI today.&lt;p&gt;Waymo has had a ton of notable departures:&lt;p&gt;* Urmson made a good amount of money and left for Aurora.&lt;p&gt;* The founders of Nuro cashed in $40m each and left for their own thing.&lt;p&gt;* Levandowski made nearly a quarter billion and took off.&lt;p&gt;* Drago worked on Streetview and more Google-centric things, then went to Zoox to make about $100k (lol), then returned to Waymo.&lt;p&gt;* Now the era of Krafcik is coming to an end.&lt;p&gt;The perhaps unique thing about the self-driving problem is that all of the above individuals made tons of money without having delivered equitable value to end-users.  At least not today.  When Google was bleeding headcount to Facebook, both companies were making bank.  It&amp;#x27;s surreal to see people minted with money for life and yet deliver so little value.  That sort of arbitrage usually only happens on Wall Street.&lt;p&gt;I think it&amp;#x27;s worth reflecting on the era of Krafcik as a general success-- he was brought in to do hard work and he generally did a good job.  But by no means did he (nor any of his predecessors) solve the &amp;quot;team&amp;quot; problem.  Krafcik himself couldn&amp;#x27;t stick to the team he helped shape, nor the userbase he helped grow, at least nt long enough to actually deliver widespread value on the scale of his own compensation.</text></comment>