> Not exactly standard Silicon Valley MVP style prove the business model, acquire customers, and then get series A investment.
It's solving a hard problem and you don't build a Series A around an unsolved hard problem even when you know that there's market demand. That's why nobody is running a startup selling electricity below cost as an MVP for their fusion reactor back-of-a-napkin sketch.
If it's just a matter of aggressive driving, I'm sure Waymo has a dial they can turn that would make them go faster, and then Uber has already proven the market for them. But they need to get the safety margins up before doing that, which is a hard problem.
Is it the Silicon Valley model? Well it's not the get rich quick VC model. It's much more like the Bell Labs model of growing a transformative but immature technology in house until it's ready to deploy.
I think the comma.ai approach of trying to solve the problem incrementally while producing a profitable company at each step of the way is much smarter.
Waymo is just throwing money at the problem without a clear path to return on investment. We all know how patient Google is with that kind of project. It's asking to get the whole thing cancelled. It runs very much counter to the typical Silicon Valley model.
It's solving a hard problem and you don't build a Series A around an unsolved hard problem even when you know that there's market demand. That's why nobody is running a startup selling electricity below cost as an MVP for their fusion reactor back-of-a-napkin sketch.
If it's just a matter of aggressive driving, I'm sure Waymo has a dial they can turn that would make them go faster, and then Uber has already proven the market for them. But they need to get the safety margins up before doing that, which is a hard problem.
Is it the Silicon Valley model? Well it's not the get rich quick VC model. It's much more like the Bell Labs model of growing a transformative but immature technology in house until it's ready to deploy.