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Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation

bloomberg.com

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Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation

#281

Post by alooPotato »

UebVar wrote: post #244
alooPotato wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are many reasons why a conglomerate like Alphabet doesn't want to hold all of that directly on the balance sheet Can you tell us those reasons? I think this is basically _the_ question.

"Tech" was incredible light on CapExp compared with everything else (until AI hit, that is). That is what allowed its explosive growth. On the one hand alphabet is not used to that. On the other hand it is turning into a more normal business with more CapExp, and like other more "normal" business it uses more external investment. As a general rule of thumb: The more capex, the more leverage; for example commodity ext…

Right but thats usually debt, not equity financing.

Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation

#282

Post by seanmcdirmid »

nradov wrote: post #254
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't really maintain electronics, you swap them out when they are detected to be bad. Electric vehicles don't need tune ups or overhauls, it is light maintenance and full on component swaps. Send the defective components back to the factory for refurbishment and/or recycling.

Nah. The local car dealerships and Tesla service centers seem to be pretty busy doing heavy maintenance on electric vehicles. The drive train might be marginally simpler but there are still a lot of moving parts that break or corrode just like any other vehicle.

Body work, misaligned panels, I mean surely there is a lot of work to do on Teslas. But you don't need to build out for that, you could just get repair shops to do it under contract.

Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation

#283

Post by bsder »

GuinansEyebrows wrote: post #243
yfdrea wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a woman, while 95% of the ridesharing trips I take are perfectly pleasant and sometimes great with conversation the 5% of rides where you are trapped in a car with a creep asking you extremely off putting questions sours the entire concept of ride sharing for me.

the situations you've described and the fact that our answer as a society is seemingly to throw up our hands at our inability to solve these situations other than by increasing the number of cars on the road in a way that funnels even more wealth to a tiny group of unfathomably wealthy sociopaths who also use ourour personal information to impact our spending habits... very depressing. i really hate it here.

Erm, what would you propose as an alternative answer?

Presumably women are giving those creepy drivers bad ratings, and yet they are still on the road. So, that's clearly not working.

Sure, the US should fix their transit system, but that doesn't help women now.

So, the default answer becomes, "Get your own car, plebe." And that's super expensive and requires you to drive.

Or, a woman can take a Waymo.

I'm right there with you about hating the megajillionaires, but I'm open to hearing your alternative suggestions.

Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation

#284

Post by tialaramex »

askl wrote: post #279
tialaramex wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an urban area the "last resort" cases add up. The last time I was in a taxi it was the middle of the night, and I'd just smashed my head open, so I had concluded that I must not trust my own judgement and should seek immediate medical attention, buses don't run in the middle of the night (on that route)

I think ambulances were invented for this use case.

Ambulances are for emergencies. An ambulance could be dispatched depending on availability, but the dispatch team has more experience with this than I do and so they - like the hospital's initial triage team - would put me in the "injured but not dying" category and maybe I get an ambulance in an hour or two depending on other priorities.

They don't want me to go home and fall asleep, because it is possible that I have a brain injury and will never wake up, but their advice is going to be "Can you get somebody else to drive, or maybe call a taxi?" not "We will Blue Light an ambulance to you ASAP".

Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation

#285

Post by belter »

UebVar wrote: post #233
belter wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo is not solving driving , it is closer to a sophisticated Disney Parkland ride. It is running inside a tightly constrained Operational Design Domain: - Geofenced areas - HD pre-mapped roads - Curated infrastructure - Remote ops fallback This is not general autonomy, it is highend automation inside a controlled distribution. The system degrades exactly where humans do not: construction, unmapped lane shifts, poli…

Roads are not solving transportation , they are closer to a sophisticated trace track. Roads are a constrained Operational Design Domain: - Geofenced areas - pre-build structures - Curated infrastructure - fallback to gravel in times of the inevitable event of maintenance. This is not general transportation, it is a highend infrastructure inside a controlled environment. The system degrades exactly where humans/horse…

Asphalt is not marketed as Level 5 intelligence. You can make analogies but that is very different from a rebuttal...that you did not do. The hard part is still unstructured human chaos. Time will prove which one of us is right.

See you at the next construction zone...

Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation

#287

Post by infecto »

kolbe wrote: post #273
infecto wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they truly wanted the capex, this would not be a mixed round A fully internal recap would have been simpler. The presence of outside capital, even minority, is consistent with a gradual transition toward shared ownership, asset light structures, or operator partners. They have made many comments over the years about this too.

What gradual transition? Alphabet's ownership percentage is unchanged.

Notice I left a list of potential reasons. Not that ownership has changed. Just pointing out for folks like yourself that Google has made commentary about this exploring the idea of partnering with companies that operate the physical fleet. $3bn even if chump change for you is still a larger placement and has some level of signaling indicating the want to get other folks involved at some level.

Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation

#288

Post by belter »

nradov wrote: post #248
belter wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you address my other technical comments on what Waymo really is?

From a consumer perspective, no one cares what Waymo really is. If customers can pay and get from point A to point B reliably and safely then it doesn't matter how the sausage is made. Regardless of technical challenges and limitations they're obviously going to expand coverage to more areas.

If you put human lives on the line, both on the shared public road and inside the Waymo then how the sausage is made totally matters, as directly applies to what the failures modes are. Safe from A to B only holds in ideal conditions and limited zones. The hard problems like rare edge cases, weather, unpredictable humans, are precisely why it cant scale easily.

If the tech was truly solved, Waymo would not be geo fenced or expanding so slowly.

Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation

#289

Post by infecto »

kolbe wrote: post #55
notyourwork wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reply also falls in the category. It’s easier and faster to downvote poor responses and move on.

Not when there's three like-minded accounts upvoting each other.

There were pretty good responses so far and the only people coming below the bar are folks like yourself. Time for some self reflection. Instead of complaining about comments on HN perhaps you should review your own behavior.

Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation

#290

Post by rubslopes »

nradov wrote: post #236
elijaht wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pilots and surgeons surely have easily accessible bathrooms as a part of their workplace, no? They’re also compensated significantly more and (IMHO) given a lot more dignity In my city public bathrooms are extremely rare and it’s not trivial to find one. I’m sure taxi drivers are a bit more in tune with where they are out of necessity but even then it’s no guarantee they can find convenient parking/be in the right pl…

No. Not for some surgeons at least. Once you start cutting you may have to stay until the job is done so get good at holding it. In the The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe podcast episode Dr. Rahul Seth talks about doing 12 hour surgeries. No breaks, no bathroom, constantly on his feet working. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-the-way-i-heard-it-with-m... Commercial pilots flying airliners generally have it a bit eas…

It sounds that I'm joking, but I'm not -- would it be so weird if those surgeons wore diapers?
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