Zoox meet Rivian, Rivian this is Zoox. Curious to see how that pans out.
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Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox
151–160 of 200 posts
Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Having more data on the nuanced problems than any of the competitors is Tesla's most significant advantage, IMHO.
Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox
#153What’s Amazon’s plan? The article says something something Amazon delivers lots of things something, but I don’t see how building their own driving systems follows naturally from that. Further, I would think a firm promising enough to seed a self driving program to power Amazon’s delivery fleet would be worth more than a billion dollars. Would love to hear some thinking on this. Update: There’s a comment up thread to…
To me the future of SDC tech is clear: General public expects driverless cars, car companies want level 3 automation, Google says there is only level 2 and 4 which is probably right, and the technology is going to stay level 2 for at least better part of next decade if not couple decades. What’s working is Level 4 betas in Level 2 mode with driver monitoring for safety, what I would call a “driving simplification”. “…
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Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox
#154> 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?
"not even" in the sense that the leaders in self drive aren't doing it.
Tesla is doing exactly that.
Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox
#155Zoox 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 is an formidable acquirer and probably the only big-tech that knows how to squeeze from their M&A activity. Not really sure how you're using "squeeze" here, but Instagram and Whatsapp were both, with the benefit of hindsight, phenomenally successful acquisitions.
I agree with you. Instagram was an excellent acquisition. WhatsApp was an OK acquisition, not because is not a great product or good ecosystem play, but mostly because it came at a premium price and it hasn't been monetized yet.
Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox
#156I 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…
Sorry that happened to you. You never know who people are or where they will end up, and everyone has value and should be treated with respect. I have had similar things happen to me at conferences.
nit: You should edit this and change Zoom to Zoox before the edit window closes.
Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm hoping there will be a market shift where startups stop over hyping the value of stock options. Things like exercise windows and sparse liquidation events make stock options a raw deal.
Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox
#158Zoox 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…
As someone who works for Amazon, I can tell you there is plenty of impressive technology built within Amazon that is only used internally to Amazon.
Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
The underlying technology for AWS was developed internally and it was not customer facing at first. Will this myth ever die? https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-...
I think the internal tech is definitely part of original AWS, but of course, quickly it grows beyond that, and the majority of aws has no relevance with other Amazon tech. But the statement is definitely right at the beginning.
Plus, AWS no longer use such narrative anyway.
Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Investors often have 2x liquidation preferences, if not more. Exceedingly unlikely common stockholders would have any value.
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?
Freedom of contract.
Think about this situation: a company is in dire straights, and will likely go bankrupt and be worthless. The founders and the employees still believe they can turn it around, however. As an investor, you may be unwilling to invest with a 1x liquidation preference, given the high likelihood you lose all your money. So the company and the investor may negotiate a 2x liquidation preference as a way to sweeten the deal and induce the investor to invest in a riskier than usual proposition.
Similarly, right after the dotcom bust when many investors lost their shirts, terms became much more investor friendly because the risk was perceived to be higher.
At the end of the day, the terms are negotiated between the company and the investors, and it’s a market - if the environment is founder friendly and there’s plenty of capital looking to invest (like today), it’s almost always 1x. If capital is scarce, you take what you can get, otherwise, no capital.
The founders are well aware as they negotiate these terms. The rank-and-file employees may not understand the company’s liquidation preference stack, but they can always ask, and if not given or satisfied with answers, ask for more cash comp than equity. It’s again a free market.