PJ Vogt

An owned car is being used about 4% of the time and it's parked 96% of the time.

Imagine a city without parked cars where every car is being utilized, call it 50% of the time, which means we have like only 10% number of cars needed that we need today when we all own cars.

That's going to happen.

There's no absolute question.

What Sebastian is describing here so matter-of-factly is a fairly radical re-imagination of American cities.

The idea that robo-taxis would be so cheap and widely available that most people just wouldn't own cars, that we could put something else, anything else, in the places where we put most of our parking lots and parking spaces, that is a far-fetched idea, just given how much of American identity is tied into personal car ownership.

A far-fetched idea, and for it to begin to happen, Google would have to bring a product to market.

But the years passed, and they didn't.

And some people who were there felt stuck.

Don Burnett says he believes life at Google got dangerously cushy.

The food was great.

The money was, too.

These former academics making much more than they'd ever expected.

there was a lack of urgency on the team to actually make something viable.

We had a funding supply that effectively felt infinite.

And maybe it was, maybe it wasn't.

But it certainly felt infinite.

And when you have infinite funding, you're not forced to make hard decisions.

You're not forced to focus.

You're not forced to look at the opportunity, the market, the customer, and be the best.