PJ Vogt

And that's the moment of incredible pain because I go home and I can't think of a technical reason why not.

It was this kind of moment where I felt, look, I'm the world expert on self-driving cars and I'm the person who denies that it can be done.

Like that taught me an incredibly important lesson about experts.

that for the rest of my life, I decided experts are usually experts of the past, not the future.

And if you ask an expert about innovation, something crazy new, they're the least likely person to say, yes, it can be done.

So this is where the Google self-driving car project begins in 2009.

It's led by Sebastian, joined by others from the DARPA challenges.

The methodical Chris Armisen was running most things day to day.

Anthony Lewandowski, the flashy motorcycle guy, would work on hardware.

Dmitry Dolgov, another DARPA veteran, would be responsible for planning and optimization.

It was a secret project.

They'd report directly to Larry Page, a small enough team that there'd be no bureaucracy, few emails, fewer meetings.

Just 11 engineers who writer Alex Davies says represented some of the best young talent in the country.

And so Google builds this very quiet team, and it says to them,

build us a self-driving car.

And because that goal is super nebulous, they give them two challenges.

They say, safely log 100,000 miles on public roads, but they also give them a challenge called the Larry 1K.

So Larry and Sergey and I sat together and the two of them carved out a thousand total miles of road surface in California.

They open up Google Maps and they just click around and they look for 10 separate 100-mile routes

that are really tricky.