111–120 of 200 posts
Wow, so anyone without preferred shares (i.e. all employees) will get nothing in the deal.
This is a cheap way to for Amazon to get into SDC, same way with their investment in Rivian. Neither have much of a shot but it's worth it to try if you're Amazon
I lived along one of the Zoox test routes in the North Beach neighborhood of SF. My corner (Filbert and Grant) was also a tourist hot-spot to get up to Coit Tower with families, segway tours, and other meanderers being common place. Suffice it to say that I don't think self-driving car tech is ready for city streets. Zoox never put anyone in harms way, but damn did it hold up traffic if there was an "out of place" pe…
This is why the main first application of autonomous driving is going to be long haul trucking.
The current regulations about duty time for humans in long haul trucking create inefficiencies. Now imagine that there are facilities just off of highway on- and off-ramps where truck drivers hang out. The autonomous vehicle pulls off the highway into a lot. A human then gets in and guides the truck to it's final destination.
Truck drivers get an immediate lifestyle increase (no more multiple days on the road, having to sleep in the truck, etc), labor costs drop dramatically, and travel times for cross country trips also drop dramatically.
The driver market for CDL truck drivers will turn into the "harbor pilot" model they have for large ships.
Zoox raised almost a billion so terrible exit for the investors, who basically just parked their money for several years. Zoox likely ran out of money and nobody wants to keep dumping money in this space given the anemic progress in the last couple of years. But here is an interesting take. Amazon is an formidable acquirer and probably the only big-tech that knows how to squeeze from their M&A activity. They probably…
> Amazon doesn’t invest in greenfield projects that are not customer facing I don't think this is very true, they are just very good at turning around and selling the internal tech. The underlying technology for AWS was developed internally and it was not customer facing at first. Similarly if you look at their internal data platforms, they have invested heavily even though it's not customer facing (yet, because even…
Will this myth ever die?
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-...
I lived along one of the Zoox test routes in the North Beach neighborhood of SF. My corner (Filbert and Grant) was also a tourist hot-spot to get up to Coit Tower with families, segway tours, and other meanderers being common place. Suffice it to say that I don't think self-driving car tech is ready for city streets. Zoox never put anyone in harms way, but damn did it hold up traffic if there was an "out of place" pe…
>Self-driving tech may be close to cruise control 2.0 - that is highway exit to highway exit navigation This is why the main first application of autonomous driving is going to be long haul trucking. The current regulations about duty time for humans in long haul trucking create inefficiencies. Now imagine that there are facilities just off of highway on- and off-ramps where truck drivers hang out. The autonomous veh…
Even so, these "lifestyle increase" jobs would only exist until autonomous driving gets better. Even if that's two decades it's not something you'd want to rely on as an occupation.
Not saying it's the wrong way to go - it absolutely is the right way to move logistics forward - but there will be significant impacts in a country where "Truck driver" is one of the top jobs in just about every state that can't be explained away with "lifestyle improvement"
This isn't a good outcome for Zoox, which raised its Series B at a $3.2B post-money valuation in July 2018. The company also raised ~$200M of debt in 2019 and nearly $1B in total funding. Meaning it's likely only investors will get paid out for this $1B exit.
How did Zoox start? In 2012, Kentley-Klay stumbled on a blog post about Google’s self-driving car project, then pretty much the only one in the field. He saw the company’s prototypes as unsightly half-measures.. Then, one day, he walked into his Melbourne office (animation, video production) and announced he was off to America to fulfill his driverless dreams. In a move that some will call devious and others will cal…
> Wanting to preview his line of shoes at Market Week at the New York Hilton, but unable to afford the purchase of a hotel room or showroom to display his items, Kenneth Cole inquired about parking a trailer two blocks from the Hilton Hotel. Upon discovering that permits for trailers were only granted to utility and production companies, Cole changed the name of his company from Kenneth Cole Incorporated to Kenneth Cole Productions, and applied for a permit to film the full-length film, "The Birth of a Shoe Company". In two and a half days, Kenneth Cole Productions sold forty thousand pairs of shoes, while chronicling the beginning of the company on film. [1]
Which is why it's still called Kenneth Cole "Productions" to this day.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Cole_(designer)#Birth_...
> Zoox has been by far the most ambitious self-driving tech company as it's been working on developing a fully integrated vehicle, not just the core autonomous technology. > Zoox planned from the beginning to develop the technology, build a car and operate a robotaxi service. Not even Waymo is trying to bite off that much (although Cruise is). Is Tesla intentionally omitted or am I missing something?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry for the naive question, how is this not illegal? I would understand if you get 2X after all the capital raised has been cleared, but in this case? You get 2x while other people lose their shirts off?
> Sorry for the naive question, how is this not illegal? Because investors are assumed to be sophisticated adults who can read and do their own research, or hire lawyers to do so on their behalf if they are incapable. Every investor, those who put in money and those who put in labor hours are assumed to have gotten the best deal available to them.
Amazon is the biggest logistic company in the world. It has never seized to surprise me that they don't have any presence in this space. Even if things are 10 years away, you want to be in this space if you were claiming to be biggest logistic corporation.
> Amazon is the biggest logistic company in the world. Not even close, Alibaba handles 200 million packages per day and is building out for one billion. Amazon is barely a tenth of that current volume.