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CEO of Waymo John Krafcik is leaving

blog.waymo.com

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Re: CEO of Waymo John Krafcik is leaving

#231

Post by petra »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #217
petra wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe businesses don't need revenue streams. I wonder by how much the Moonshot program, increased Google's Market Cap.

This is a fair question. After all, an increase in market cap means, as execs, you're paper wealth is that much greater. The challenge is that market cap isn't durable. Specifically businesses that just provide net revenue, even if it is only a "small" amount relative to the overall company, are helpful in mitigating shocks to the market. So it may be intoxicating that the stock going up 10% adds a few billion dollar…

The Moonshot program created a lot of optimism about Google for many years.

Over that long time, I'm sure there are benefits for the executives' personal stock(don't CEO's diversify every few years?) , and for Google in general(for ex. Better talent).

Re: CEO of Waymo John Krafcik is leaving

#232

Post by exmadscientist »

rsj_hn wrote: post #206
dealforager wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the sentiment, but $20M/year really is a waste of time for a $200B/year business. I have a hard time thinking of a way it wouldn't be a loss given the added organizational complexity having those kinds of projects would bring. I thought the entire purpose of "other bets" was to pursue ideas that have the potential to become $XXB/year revenue streams. So of course they want 'moonshot' companies.

I think this is the wrong approach. If you don't want to deal with an X$M/year company, you can sell it. Google isn't too big to sell stuff are they? They still sell advertising space, afterall. So take it to an IPO, collect the proceeds and use them to re-invest in more moonshots. There is as much reason to shut down a profitable company as to throw away gold. That's literally what you are doing, and no one is too b…

Selling off is the obvious — and correct — answer.

But these companies were founded inside Alphabet, and grew within Alphabet's infrastructure. This is how they gained a decent chunk of their initial bootstrapping advantage, as described upthread by Chuck. To decouple them out into something suitable for sale is extra time and cost, and beancounters never like time and cost.

So, ironically, part of what makes these attempts possible at all is part of what ends up killing them.

Re: CEO of Waymo John Krafcik is leaving

#233

Post by newusertoday »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #102

Having read hundreds of these sorts of CEO leaving letters I'm a bit jaded and cynical. If you're interested in what I see when I read that message, I rewrote it[1] in more plain language. Google demands a lot of its "other bets" companies. Some might say it asks too much. Mostly it seems to me that they want a 'moonshot' company that has the original profitability of search advertising, full stop. And while it would…

that was hilarious :)

Re: CEO of Waymo John Krafcik is leaving

#234

Post by mrshu »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #179
dealforager wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$900M/year is If something happened to their core business, it's unlikely that those tiny projects ( What you said is mostly correct and is exactly what they are doing. The only problem is that at the scale of a trillion dollar company, they need 10, 20, even 30 business lines generating $XB - $XXB of revenue each.

In the case that I am completely familiar with the business was returning $20M/year in net profit margin on roughly $180M/year in revenue. Google threw it away. Their reasoning was that the resource usage to net profit numbers wasn't "good enough." The comparison was always search advertising.

Would you be at liberty to describe at least generally what sort of a business it was?

Thanks!

Re: CEO of Waymo John Krafcik is leaving

#235

Post by pclmulqdq »

liaukovv wrote: post #137
lumost wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear that there is a resource curse for businesses with a singular "successful" product line. In order to expand the business and not have people sucked into the "successful" part, the teams need to be split. Once the teams are split the "successful" team wonders why the "new" team sucks. In the case that the successful business is Ads/Search... it's tough to compete. I'd imagine even within Ads/Search there is a…

Sounds to me like what they shoukd be doing is instead of trying to "reinvest" profits from ads instead pay them out to shareholders so they can more efficiently redistibute it to multiple smaller businesses

That is exactly what they should do, but the fact that a majority of voting shares are held by 2 managers makes the company have a huge conflict of interest that favors growing more and more rather than pulling cash out.

Re: CEO of Waymo John Krafcik is leaving

#236

Post by sumedh »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #146
dealforager wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the sentiment, but $20M/year really is a waste of time for a $200B/year business. I have a hard time thinking of a way it wouldn't be a loss given the added organizational complexity having those kinds of projects would bring. I thought the entire purpose of "other bets" was to pursue ideas that have the potential to become $XXB/year revenue streams. So of course they want 'moonshot' companies.

> $20M/year really is a waste of time for a $200B/year business. That's the thing though, it isn't a waste of time. One can hear very similar logic from people with investments. They will say "The stock market is returning X% / year and is way better than those bonds with only 3%/year. Investing in bonds is a waste of time." They say that because they have yet to internalize the value of having a diversified their in…

> Consider then the alternative where there are 10, 20, even 30 business lines within Google

They could not even succeed with one of their messengers, there are so many of them out there. What makes you think they will succeed with 30 business lines?

Re: CEO of Waymo John Krafcik is leaving

#237

Post by sumedh »

ironman1478 wrote: post #88
bob_theslob646 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a highly under rated take. The reason they didn't do so was industry pressure/competition. The counter point could be that the technology is there, but the regulation is not. Why must everything be retrofitted versus a complete system overhaul? The initial costs may be immense but the return on investment will be far greater. Just my two cents.

Partnering with an existing car company helps a lot. They know how to build vehicles at scale and they also can provide a lot of support when it comes to interfacing with the control systems for the car. Controlling the car (engine, doors, wheels, wipers, lights, etc) is a surprisingly difficult task on its own. It requires a lot of control systems knowledge, a complex test infrastructure, and a lot of specialized ta…

> They know how to build vehicles at scale

The actual car companies also outsource lot of stuff to other manufactures e.g lights, wires etc. I would imagine understanding and maintaining those relations woulds also be a hassle for Google instead its just better a car companies does all that.

Re: CEO of Waymo John Krafcik is leaving

#238

Post by peytn »

avidiax wrote: post #187
echelon wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm willing to longbets $5000/20 years: We won't have self driving cars that replace 30% or more of driving on existing roads and highways by 2040. The problem is too hard and everyone's drunk the ML kool-aid. (Just like everyone is drinking the NFT kool-aid right now.) Hype, unrealistic dreams, and spin. We'll be on Mars before we have generally available self-driving cars that do not require humans.

I think it will happen, but in China. We are trying to solve the wrong problem. When cars were introduced, people kept getting hit in the street. "Jaywalking" as a crime was created to shift the blame away from the technology (cars) to the victims (pedestrians). For self-driving vehicles, it suffices that we outlaw the edge cases, and enforce it to make them insignificant. The Uber ATC crash? Blame the jaywalker. Kid…

The ruling party can’t even keep the factories north of Beijing from dumping pollution into the capital city’s air (and thus the lungs of the leadership and their families) for more than a few weeks at a time. I wouldn’t count on them here.

Re: CEO of Waymo John Krafcik is leaving

#240

Post by bumby »

bumby wrote: post #170
mrshadowgoose wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can, today, go to Pheonix Arizona, download the Waymo One app, and summon a full self driving vehicle. This happened silently at the end of 2020, and was overshadowed by the ongoing pandemic doom and gloom. https://blog.waymo.com/2020/10/waymo-is-opening-its-fully-dr... On the subject of danger. Literally everything we do is dangerous to some degree. Everything. Self-driving does not need to be perfect, but only…

> On the subject of danger. Literally everything we do is dangerous to some degree. Everything. Self-driving does not need to be perfect, but only better than human drivers. The problem is this statement is written like a technocrat wrote it rather than someone who makes public policy. From an engineering perspective, it’s true that it would only need to be better than a human driver. To be implemented though, it nee…

There’s been a few downvoted without elaborating on the disagreement, so I’ll add if you think this is incorrect take some time to think about how well policy and science were received during the pandemic. Policy will never be completely data-driven because humans do no intuitively think on statistical grounds.
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