All of the big players in self-driving have shown that while they can try to solve the tech problem, nobody can solve the
team problem. Self-driving brings together people with very diverse backgrounds (perception, planning, controls, hardware, safety, rideshare product, etc), very diverse incentives (established automakers vs start-up founders vs VC investors), and throws them in a pot with a huge amount of money and greed. And does this to serve a public who largely doesn't trust self-driving AI today.
Waymo has had a ton of notable departures:
* Urmson made a good amount of money and left for Aurora.
* The founders of Nuro cashed in $40m each and left for their own thing.
* Levandowski made nearly a quarter billion and took off.
* Drago worked on Streetview and more Google-centric things, then went to Zoox to make about $100k (lol), then returned to Waymo.
* Now the era of Krafcik is coming to an end.
The perhaps unique thing about the self-driving problem is that all of the above individuals made tons of money without having delivered equitable value to end-users. At least not today. When Google was bleeding headcount to Facebook, both companies were making bank. It's surreal to see people minted with money for life and yet deliver so little value. That sort of arbitrage usually only happens on Wall Street.
I think it's worth reflecting on the era of Krafcik as a general success-- he was brought in to do hard work and he generally did a good job. But by no means did he (nor any of his predecessors) solve the "team" problem. Krafcik himself couldn't stick to the team he helped shape, nor the userbase he helped grow, at least nt long enough to actually deliver widespread value on the scale of his own compensation.