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Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

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Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#81

Post by as-j »

throwawaynum2 wrote: post #12

That's too bad. I thought Kyle was a great CEO. I felt he really kept a positive, safety oriented, and accountability mindset. It's hard to find CEOs these days that know the in's and out's of the product you're making. Usually they'll just slap someone on with an MBA that knows neither the HW nor SW, but since this was Kyle's project from the beginning, he did. Coming from some other poorly managed startups, it was…

Kyle was a fine CTO, and these are the qualities you listed.

CEO is a different role, and without any checks in pace he’s pushed the organization so hard it is where it is today. Even the incident aside, just look at the handling and drip drip of news since going from bad to worse.

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#82

Post by snewman »

dang wrote: post #75
Sebguer wrote: post #74

Why was the submission title changed from the much more descriptive actual article headline? I have no idea who Kyle Vogt is without the context of 'co-founder and CEO'.

Because readers can figure this kind of thing out. It's not hard.

Help me understand, what was gained by removing "co-founder and CEO"? The fact that readers can figure it out is not actually a statement of a benefit, it's merely an argument that the loss is bounded.

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#83

Post by avrionov »

cyrux004 wrote: post #15

I am going to leave this here https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-1/ https://comma-ai.medium.com/a-100x-investment-part-2-569b714...

He is probably right to some extent, but he didn't solve self driving. He left his own company claiming that the problem is solved and only the boring part was left.

He also claimed that he can fix the search in Twitter, but he left after 2 months and now he is working on something else.

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#84

Post by anon571984 »

tsunamifury wrote: post #11

I’m guessing cruise is pretty much over. What’s really unfortunate is I worked with many people who worked with Kyle and no one had a single good thing to say about him. And I’ve often heard that before with people who knew other CEOs but they kinda grudgingly admitted they did what was needed to get it done. However over and over I just heard phrases like “lost” “aimless” and “confused mess” with Kyle and it never w…

When I was in college in 2011 and was offered an internship to Justin.TV, Kyle had it rescinded without notifying me, almost leaving me without an internship for my junior year.

After giving me the offer ("We would like to offer an internship position to you. I'll call you today with more details.") the recruiter emailed me that Kyle wanted to talk. Since I'd already been offered the internship, I took it as a sell call to learn more about the company.

But shortly thereafter when I emailed to accept the position, the recruiter responded

> After your conversation with Kyle, we felt that we will need a more experienced intern for the projects we have. So, we are not going to pursue your application any further.

At no point had I been told—until I tried to accept the offer—that it had been rescinded.

Thankfully, I hadn't yet reached out to the other companies who had given me offers and ended up at what turned out to be a much more successful startup. But if I had done it in the other order I would have been screwed.

This was more than 12 years ago, and I still don't know what happened internally. Having worked in many startups since then, I can understand the level of dysfunction that can occur even with well-intentioned leadership.

But in any case, Kyle clearly didn't care what happened to some random college student, and it's left a bad taste in my mouth for all of these years.

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#85

Post by dmazzoni »

amacneil wrote: post #58

Since there is so much negativity in this thread, let me balance it with my take as someone who worked at Cruise for 5 years (left 3 years ago). Kyle is the smartest, most technically capable, driven person I have ever had the opportunity to work for. He had a deep technical understanding of the system, a great intuition for unnecessary complexity, and a constant desire to find and resolve engineering bottlenecks. An…

Honestly everything about Cruise seemed awesome until they pushed to start offering driverless rides at the same time as Waymo, when obviously they weren't as far along.

Whose decision was that? I'm really curious if there were internal disagreements.

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#86

Post by neuronerdgirl »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #46
minimaxir wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The accident was one thing, but Cruise's response to regulators about the accident escalated the heat. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/board-...

I don’t understand, but I suppose I’ll have to accept not understanding. The article vaguely gestures towards some sort of misrepresentation, but doesn’t elaborate. Thank you for pointing it out though.

They cut the video they first showed the DMV of the accident to remove the last error made by the car, which was arguably the worst aspect of the accident as far as Cruise's default behavior failures. The DMV found out about the cut segment from the news.

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#87

Post by qgin »

bigyikes wrote: post #65

Everyone laughed at Tesla for their gung-ho, vision-only approach. Only Waymo and Cruise will make it, they said. Will be very interesting to see who is left standing. Maybe Tesla will never crack self-driving, but an insolvent company definitely won't either.

Very few have said Tesla isn’t good at selling cars and making a profit. They’re very good at that. I don’t think many people said Tesla would go out of business. What people said was that Tesla had made the decision to go vision-only because they wanted to start selling FSD packages 8 years ago when LiDAR was very expensive to tack onto a consumer car. Now LiDAR is much cheaper and getting cheaper by the day, but they insist on doubling down on this strategy.

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#88

Post by pierrefermat1 »

amacneil wrote: post #58

Since there is so much negativity in this thread, let me balance it with my take as someone who worked at Cruise for 5 years (left 3 years ago). Kyle is the smartest, most technically capable, driven person I have ever had the opportunity to work for. He had a deep technical understanding of the system, a great intuition for unnecessary complexity, and a constant desire to find and resolve engineering bottlenecks. An…

Could you speak to the unnecessary complexity a little more ? What were the design decisions to didn't agree with ?

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#89

Post by mcmcmc »

babl-yc wrote: post #6
minimaxir wrote: post #2

The situation at Cruise is so similar to OpenAI (political removal due to prioritizing success over safety) that the coincidental timing is almost contrived. At least in this case, Vogt is doing a clear resignation on his own terms.

I don't see the situations similar at all. Cruise is an extremely tough spot right now after its handling of the San Francisco accident, and it's nationwide pause of testing. OpenAI has been extremely successful but is having strategic disagreements within its non-profit board.

If you’ll excuse the tinfoil hat, the OpenAI disagreement could very well stem from a dangerous accident or near miss covered up by Altman that we just haven’t learned about yet since the board didn’t publicly state how he deceived them. And that would be pretty analogous to the Cruise situation.

Anyway Altman gives me the ick, serious lizard person vibes.

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