The System Behind Self-Driving: Waymo’s Dmitri Dolgov
episodePreviously titled “From Models to Mobility: Building Waymo with Dmitri Dolgov” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 4, 2026
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How does Waymo achieve fully autonomous rides?
When you're driving around or being driven around, say, you know, we think about what we're building as a driver. I kind of imagine building a big model that understands how the physical world works and understands the important properties of what it means to drive, the social aspects of driving and what it means to be a good driver as opposed to a bad one. I would say that we've clearly moved past the stage of scientific research and deep core technology development to this new phase of accelerated global scaling and deployment.
Waymo is now doing nearly half a million fully autonomous rides a week across multiple cities, a shift from long-term research to real-world scale. In this episode, originally aired on the CheekyPint podcast, Waymo co-CEO Dmitry Dolgov joins John Collison to break down how they built the system behind it, from the sensor stack and why LiDAR still matters, to the role of simulation and critic models in training the AI. They also get into why driver assist won't naturally evolve into full autonomy, what it takes to scale globally and how the product itself is changing from custom built vehicles to entirely new economies of ride hailing.
Dimitri Dolgov is co-CEO of Waymo.
What technology underpins the Waymo driver system?
He joined Google's self-driving car project in 2009 as one of its first engineers and was repeatedly promoted until he took it over in 2021. Waymo is Google's most successful moonshot and now provides over 500,000 fully autonomous rides each week. Cheers, by the way. Yeah, cheers.
You grew up in Russia, right? I grew up in Russia. Then I was actually a Soviet Union. Right, exactly. My dad is a physicist, so the Soviet Union started falling apart, and then he had a visiting position in university, in Kyoto University for a year. We moved there as a family, and then he went to Berkeley, and I kind of tagged along. And then I graduated from high school. I was thinking about the next thing I wanted to do, and I really liked that opportunity. that technical school in Russia.
How does sensor fusion work in self-driving cars?
The Russians are serious about their physics. They are, they are. So I went back to Russia and I got my bachelor's and master's there.
What year was this that you went back to Russia? 1994. Okay. So that was kind of almost peak Russian optimism in a sense where it was opening up.
It was, it was. Yeah, yeah. No, actually I remember talking to my mom about it. And, of course, my parents grew up in the Soviet Union. They've seen it. They were born right before the war. And then they saw, you know, they lived through some really tough times. And I remember talking to my mom and saying, she, you know, in fact, I got my green card here in the U.S. before I went back. And she insisted that I do it. And I was actually at the time I wasn't thinking of coming back.
Why is full autonomy different from driver-assist systems?
But then I was pretty excited about where Russia is and the trajectory it's on. And, you know, being young and naive, I was like, there's no turning back. And so why did you decide to come back? There's more of a playback way than... studying math and computer science. And while the undergrad and master's that I got in physics and applied math, that I think was still an incredibly strong kind of foundational school of Russian math and science, graduate school, it was very clear to me that the best way to do it was in the US.
So I came back. I'm struck by the founders of the two most valuable UK companies are Russian math nerds who both went to the same school, Nikolai at Revolut and Alex Gurko at XTX. But yeah, it's a strong diaspora.
there is a company not far from here where one of the founders also has, you know, a similar pedigree.
Right, a company that we're close to. Exactly. You know the classic engineering interview question of, you know, what happens when I type google.com and hit enter? As you know, talk me through, you know, whatever you like, you know, HTTP and DNS and BG. You can go down to whatever level of stack you want. Do you want to maybe just describe when I take a ride in a Waymo today, What's happening at a technical level? Like what is the architecture?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How does Waymo achieve fully autonomous rides?
0:00–1:25
2
What technology underpins the Waymo driver system?
1:25–2:14
3
How does sensor fusion work in self-driving cars?
2:14–2:58
4
Why is full autonomy different from driver-assist systems?
2:58–5:20
5
What challenges does Waymo face in scaling globally?
5:20–7:41
6
How does AI influence decision-making in self-driving vehicles?
7:41–11:56
7
What operational infrastructure supports Waymo's services?
11:56–14:44
8
What future advancements can we expect from Waymo?
14:44–1:03:52
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The a16z Show
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