Very impressed with some of Voyage's recent hires. A question for @olivercameron, What makes Voyage different? From what I understand, you pick canonical routes inside private communities. Let's assume demand on these routes are high enough, and there are enough private communities to make a significant market. What prevents Google from coming in and mapping the area in a week and run you out of business? Let's say,…
>What makes Voyage different?
We are going to market with autonomous vehicles in a very different way, focusing on large private cities first and foremost. We intend The Villages, Florida to be the first (retirement) city that's traversable end-to-end (all 750 miles of road) in an autonomous vehicle.
We'll eventually make the leap to public cities, and it will feel gradual when it does happen.
We think about our technology quite differently, leaning on lots of partners for the infrastructure (mapping, simulation, sensors, tele-operation, middleware, and more) behind the scenes. This enforces a real focus on the un-solved autonomous algorithms.
We'll also be sharing later this year a project we're in the middle of that's dramatically different technologically to what we've seen elsewhere, utilizing the community itself to make a leap in autonomous performance.
>From what I understand, you pick canonical routes inside private communities.
We design our autonomous systems to traverse _any_ point-to-point route within an entire private (retirement) city. We intentionally don't just focus on a single, shuttle-like route. It turns out that pretty much any route in a place like The Villages is far less complex than other city-like environments, but that the business opportunity is just as large.
>What prevents Google from coming in and mapping the area in a week and run you out of business?
Voyage has exclusivity clauses in our agreements with our communities, where we also grant the community a slice of Voyage in the form of equity. Contracts are unfortunately meant to be broken, which means that we put a lot of effort into making sure relationships with these locations are great. We frequently host Town Halls and make sure the community is heard. This is crucial.
>I'm a self driving car engineer, why would I pick Voyage over other big players who have a lot more capital and much bigger team with a lot more people like Drew Gray?
It's a lot of fun here. Contrary to the hype, there's relatively few full-stack self-driving car startups at the Series A level. We believe our people, our technology, and go-to-market to be the best of that group.
Most importantly, when searching for new Voyage team members, we don't optimize for specific degrees or backgrounds. One of our greatest strengths is the team we've built with that philosophy.