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Ford Hires 550 Former Argo.ai Engineers, Creates Latitude.ai

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Re: Ford Hires 550 Former Argo.ai Engineers, Creates Latitude.ai

#41

Post by beambot »

pengaru wrote: post #30
dylan604 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the company was not profitable, stocks/options don't really seem that valuable. if the company folds, there's 0 value to them. so it's not like they "lost" anything. also, if a company closes and you're on the brink of having no job, a job "@ Ford" seems like a pretty fancy parachute to me.

> if the company was not profitable, stocks/options don't really seem that valuable. if the company folds, there's 0 value to them. so it's not like they "lost" anything. Plenty of unprofitable startups have worthwhile acquihire-style exits. But it requires the leadership actually doing their jobs in marketing the company to potential buyers and getting some competing offers. Just because you're unprofitable doesn't…

Look at comps then: Aurora has a market cap of $1.6B with approximately $0.9B cash on hand ($1.1B as of 12/31, burning $200M per quarter). In short: It's trading for less than 2x cash-on-hand. Argo was underwater -- certainly not above a $1B liquidation preference.

Re: Ford Hires 550 Former Argo.ai Engineers, Creates Latitude.ai

#42

Post by mvf4z7 »

jdhn wrote: post #36

I wish Ford the best of luck. The last time I worked at Ford AV, there wasn't a clear sense of direction after the initial kickoff project that was done to publicize Argo's AV chops. Hopefully this will have a better ending than that initial attempt.

Jonathan, is that you?

Re: Ford Hires 550 Former Argo.ai Engineers, Creates Latitude.ai

#43

Post by bluGill »

jnsie wrote: post #14
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly they wanted to restart the company without the external partners (mainly VW)?

Maybe but there's got to be a less expensive way of doing that. Buying VW's stake?

I doubt they can buy VW. The German government has an interest and Porsche most of the rest.

Re: Ford Hires 550 Former Argo.ai Engineers, Creates Latitude.ai

#44

Post by garyfirestorm »

bluGill wrote: post #43
jnsie wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe but there's got to be a less expensive way of doing that. Buying VW's stake?

I doubt they can buy VW. The German government has an interest and Porsche most of the rest.

I think he meant buying VW’s stake in Argo AI. Not buying VW itself.

Re: Ford Hires 550 Former Argo.ai Engineers, Creates Latitude.ai

#45

Post by dmix »

bwhitty wrote: post #33
hd95489 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No problem with it on ioniq 5. The equivalent on the Kia was disastrous implementation. The one on Toyota is simple but robust as well

Yes, another anecdote to add to this thread of anecdotes is that my HI5 with HDA2 is stellar. I do hours at a time on highways in CA without a disengage.

Does it follow the car in front's speed on the highway while keeping you in the lane?

I would absolutely love a car that could do that well while I still paid attention while listening to podcasts/audiobooks.

I haven't tried any newish midtier cars, only been in a friends Tesla which is beyond my needs.

These niche applications are 100% what car companies should have focused on from the beginning rather than robotaxis.

Re: Ford Hires 550 Former Argo.ai Engineers, Creates Latitude.ai

#46

Post by dmix »

kjksf wrote: post #8
paxys wrote: post #5

> Ford hired about 550 employees formerly of Argo AI is pretty weird framing. Did they acquire the company? Or certain parts of it? I'm gonna guess they didn't actually recruit and interview all of them one by one.

Well, Ford (and VW) were major investors in Argo AI. Argo AI ran out of money, no-one else was willing to put more money in so Argo AI had to shut down. It looks like Ford effectively acquired the company by hiring all the people (who would otherwise be out of the job) but without actually acquiring the company. They waited for the company to dissolve and then picked up (most of?) the people. I'm sure it was possible…

When you have 500+ people at a startup and they spend 90% of their time working with a single partner on some failed venture it's not surprising they'd end up at the partner. You end up building personal relationships within the partner and the workers there will vouch for you.

It's not like a small startup team with close vested interests doing the exact same project absent the aquihire. The robotaxi thing was very ambitious and shooting for the moon, and now they joined a megacorp with a much more modest long term project with corporate leadership/management.

If the bulk of the Argo leadership staff joined and rehired their teams it'd be different though.

Re: Ford Hires 550 Former Argo.ai Engineers, Creates Latitude.ai

#47

Post by PragmaticPulp »

pengaru wrote: post #25

That can't possibly be the outcome Argo.ai engineers were hoping for, since any stock/options they had in Argo presumably vanished and all they got in the end was a job @ Ford.

Given the timing of their investments and the extreme valuation they had during the bubble, it’s likely that most recent hires’ option packages would be worthless in today’s market.

The startup options market has become very skewed against regular employees in recent years. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bulk of the cap table and preference stack was captured by early management hires and investors. Other comments in this thread suggest that leadership wasn’t acquired into Ford, so maybe wiping them all out and giving the employees good jobs at a real company with real stock is the best outcome for the current market.

Re: Ford Hires 550 Former Argo.ai Engineers, Creates Latitude.ai

#48

Post by fwlr »

I wonder if there’s space in the self-driving field for a self-driving-only company. Like, your product is a sensor and software package, and car manufacturers install it in their cars. They get to skip the R&D investment (I imagine there’s a mismatch between current car company management expertise and the management required for overseeing self-driving development), and potentially they get to avoid some of the liability (in the media at least, although probably they still take on the bulk of legal liability).

Re: Ford Hires 550 Former Argo.ai Engineers, Creates Latitude.ai

#49

Post by RC_ITR »

p1esk wrote: post #9
roseway4 wrote: post #6

Not mentioned here, but in this Techcrunch article, is Ford’s expensive flip-flopping on AV: https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/02/ford-forms-automated-drivi... > Argo AI burst on the scene in 2017 stacked with a $1 billion investment from Ford — and Iater an investment from VW. The startup shuttered suddenly in October 2022 after Ford and VW determined they would no longer pursue AV technology, at least not under the Ar…

Wait, so they killed the 550 person AV startup they were funding, took 2.7B loss, and 4 months later hired those same 550 people to resume the same work? Something looks seriously wrong here.

Generally, in GAAP accounting, financial investments don't show up on the P&L (the thing that leads to earnings, which is the main metric a company like Ford is valued on). So even if they take $2bn of cash and send it to a start-up, it doesn't really affect their books (it has a balance sheet impact, but that's less important for short-term share pricing).

A financial investment does have a P&L impact when the value demonstrably changes (either a new funding round, a bankruptcy, or some other event that defines a new share price). The most clear examples of this are in investment-based companies like Berkshire-Hathaway and Softbank, where quarters with billions of dollars of profit will be followed by quarters with billions of dollars of losses (despite very little cash actually moving in/out of the company).

Ford, for whatever reason, figured that this startup wasn't worth what they paid (or that the structure wasn't the right one for their long term goals) and took the full P&L hit all at once (in a way that is easy to explain to Wall Street, since nobody likes ambiguous zombie investments living on the balance sheet).

Operationally, they thought there was still value in the idea, so they directly hired the 550 people (closer to a $150mn/year cost) and that will now manifest as an ongoing cost on their P&L. Arguably, if Ford sees their work as core to Ford's future, then Ford should employ them directly and keep the costs on the P&L, so weirdly, this may be a signal that Ford is taking their work more seriously.

Re: Ford Hires 550 Former Argo.ai Engineers, Creates Latitude.ai

#50

Post by mparkms »

pengaru wrote: post #25

That can't possibly be the outcome Argo.ai engineers were hoping for, since any stock/options they had in Argo presumably vanished and all they got in the end was a job @ Ford.

Someone I know was rehired to Ford from Argo and got an extremely generous offer. He seems pretty happy about it.
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