
Aurora Innovation Raises $90M, Adds Reid Hoffman, Mike Volpi to Board - clintliddick
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2018/02/28/aurora-on-the-rise-robocar-startup-snags-90-million-adds-reid-hoffman-mike-volpi-to-board/#4352872c2f33
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Fricken
I'm bullish on Aurora's potential in the robotaxi space. The cofounders are
powerhouse in the self driving world. Sterling Anderson was the director of
Autopilot for Tesla. Drew Bagnell was head of autonomy at Uber, and Chris
Urmson was program manager for Google's self driving car project (now Waymo).
One thing they all have in common is that they left their previous employers
due to C-suite bullshit tripping them up.

I started to suspect Waymo was making poor executive decisions back in 2015,
and the suspicion was confirmed by an email from that time, revealed in the
Waymo v. Uber lawsuit, from Urmson to Larry Page and Sergey Brin in which he
wrote "Over the last six months we have stopped playing to win and instead are
now playing to minimize downside"

Aurora has managed to secure an integrated partnership with VW, another
promising one with Hyundai, and one with startup Byton (which may or may not
turn out to be another Faraday Future, we'll have to see). These are the sorts
of arrangements Waymo should have secured years ago, but the executives felt
they could hold out for a better deal, and now Waymo doesn't have a
straighforward answer when you ask them "Who's going to mass produce your
Robotaxis?"

The common perception is that to make a successful Robotaxi operation the
Autonomous OS is the secret sauce, the hardest ingredient to get a hold of.
While developing an autonomous OS is still an unsolved (or barely solved
problem), and mass vehicle production is a well understood problem, mass
producing cars is still harder than developing an autonomous OS.

Going forward, it's the legacy carmakers who have the strongest competitive
moat. I mean, there are at least a half dozen Autonomous Operating systems
being developed that are showing good progress, but in vehicle mass production
Tesla is the only successful new entrant in a century, and they're still tiny
and unprofitable. Aurora respects this, and I believe they will do well
because of it.

Also, if you've got talent and passion in this field and want to get shit
done, and work with the best, Aurora is the place to be. Talent is super
important.

