Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 200 posts

Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox

#131

Post by TuringNYC »

orbifold wrote: post #55
achow wrote: post #49

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…

Fake it until you raise 1 billion and then sell your company for 1 billion?

The sale was a distressed sale. Their earlier valuation was over thrice the acquisition price, so a $1B exit was not the intended outcome, and probably leaves many investors/employees underwater depending on liquidity preferences.

Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox

#133

Post by taway912 »

broken_symlink wrote: post #11

I work in an office that shares space with Zoox. I've never told anyone this but I find them incredibly annoying. Whenever they take their cars out for a test drive, they sit in the middle of the road in the parking lots. If you aren't going to be driving around anytime soon, just pull into a parking spot, instead of blocking all the empty spots and making it more difficult for people to drive around you.

I had the displeasure of meeting the Zoom executive team at their booth at CVPR some years back. They were cocky, sized me up, and completely ignored me and acted like I didnt exist. This all happened after I told them which Department at UCBerkeley I was studying at (which apparently did not meet their standards.)

I've been on booth duty and sales duty before and you should never snub people like this - ever. It is hurtful and people remember it, I remember it still so many years back. There are always more graceful ways of doing things.

Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox

#134

Post by taway912 »

sukilot wrote: post #116
samcampbell wrote: post #8

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.

Investors get their money back, employees get their wages, and Amazon gets their non depreciated capital goods and work product

Employees do get their wages, but most were probably working on depressed wages in lieu of equity compensation -- which will now be zero. Further, if anyone left/laidoff, and they forcibly exercised options due to windows, they are underwater.

Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox

#135

Post by sidibe »

csours wrote: post #126
goshx wrote: post #83

> 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?

Disclaimer up front: I work for GM, this is solely my opinion and it is my opinion alone. I think the tech press doesn't believe that Tesla is building a self-driving product. I don't know if camera based computer vision by itself will ever be enough for full self driving. I think we can demonstrate that it is not enough at this time, and we can also demonstrate that human vision also fails at times; human vision has…

They don't seem to actually working toward L4 any time soon. It's just a steady drip of little features like "stops at stoplight" that are progress to fans, since none of the other self-driving companies are releasing anything, but what Waymo/Cruise/Zoox are stuck on (and have been working on for many many years) are much more nuanced problems that Tesla still have to face some day.

Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox

#136

Post by smilekzs »

Thorrez wrote: post #72
broken_symlink wrote: post #11

I work in an office that shares space with Zoox. I've never told anyone this but I find them incredibly annoying. Whenever they take their cars out for a test drive, they sit in the middle of the road in the parking lots. If you aren't going to be driving around anytime soon, just pull into a parking spot, instead of blocking all the empty spots and making it more difficult for people to drive around you.

Funny, in their SF driving video, they tout their ability to go around 3 double parked cars in the road. They admit those 3 cars are Zoox cars. https://youtu.be/6r7vDhPXmiM?t=1212

Even if they are deliberately parked there, I don't think the fact that they are owned by Zoox makes any difference to the ego vehicle. It's likely they did it just to introduce this scenario predictably during the videoshoot. They could have used non-autonomous vehicles for the same purpose but arguably with more credibility.

Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox

#138

Post by buildawesome »

TuringNYC wrote: post #131
orbifold wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fake it until you raise 1 billion and then sell your company for 1 billion?

The sale was a distressed sale. Their earlier valuation was over thrice the acquisition price, so a $1B exit was not the intended outcome, and probably leaves many investors/employees underwater depending on liquidity preferences.

Ahh yes, the ol' buy high, sell low strategy!

Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox

#139

Post by smilekzs »

sailfast wrote: post #115
joncrane wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

SOME truck drivers (the ones that keep their jobs) will get a lifestyle "increase" because it will be local, but demand will drop substantially. 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 forwar…

A truck driver's job is more than, uh, driving the truck. Inspection of the cargo and the conditions of the truck are things unlikely to be automated any time soon even if feasible (there will be regulation resistance at the very least). Yard maneuvers too, or you would have seen fully automated airport ground traffic management by now. The job would pay less, not sure by how much, but my take is that the job will not go away entirely. In fact there might be more drivers hired with each driver serving fewer hours per week.

Disclaimer: I am waiting for my CDL Class-A test ;)

Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox

#140

Post by wutbrodo »

0x8BADF00D wrote: post #128
throw24234 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also kind of interesting that they are an opportunistic buyer (almost vulturous) that most of the times only pulls the trigger when the acquisition target is in their lows. Unsurprising since Bezos himself worked in a Hedge fund. The Autonomous Driving hype train is slowing down, so this is the perfect opportunity for this move. Interestingly, with this move, Bezos can soon rival Musk for the next 'billionaire supe…

> The Autonomous Driving hype train is slowing down, so this is the perfect opportunity for this move. Zoox in particular was a LARP of an autonomous driving company. Until any of these companies start manufacturing, they’re literally LARPing. At least Tesla shipped an actual product.

Tangentially, it seems like calling people LARPers has very rapidly become a universally-used cliche. Has anyone else noticed that? I've seen it used for months, sparingly, but in the last couple of weeks it's everywhere (I've seen it literally three times this morning, on different fora about vastly different topics).
Post reply on HN