YouSaid · the spoken record

Daniel J. Krawczyk

lines on the record: 78
first: 2026-05-28
most recent: 2026-05-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“By the way, it's my favorite car. And I keep asking RJ that question all the time. Now, you talked about decisions, you talked about trade-offs and us delivering the R2 before the R3X, you can imagine it's a big decision. It's also a hard decision because in our hearts, we all deeply want to have the R3X as soon as possible. Now we also know that the R2 has the best ingredients to be a wildly successful car. The US needs another alternative for a great SOV for families, and this is what the auto brings. We ship the R2, as we scale our volume as a company, we will earn the right so that we bring fantastic and such emotional cards like the R3X.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“XYZ sharp, your account is already configured and then the assistant will pick the destination, will get you to your favorite restaurant. All of that is integrated. You just need to do it through one voice command. Like those type of experiences where things become so seamless, where things become so easy as if you're talking to a human, which connects the dots across multiple surfaces of your digital ecosystem, would only be possible through such integrations.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Honestly, we don't worry about that because we know the opportunity that we have and we know the level, the breadth of capabilities that we can offer. No other assistant will be able to know as much as Dervin assistant about the car controls. None. Similarly. The fact that we have the surface of integration sitting our own operating system enables a ton of opportunities in terms of use cases that you cannot simply do with your phone or you cannot simply do by calling another assistant. Like imagine, okay, I'm driving and then in the near future, we should be able the technology to have an agentic integration with your favorite food delivery. And then you would say, okay. I need to be the guarant knows exactly when he would be home. You'll say, okay, order my favorite sandwich from...”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason I'm asking this in this way is at some point you have one main assistant and every all the other things are sort of like agents that can talk to and then maybe no one's ever talking to Rivian assistant again, right? Like this is kind of it you pull that thread all the way and Gemini's just doing everything for you all the time is that is that a danger or you just know we're close to even having to worry about that”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, think about it as the assistant in the car will know how to talk to your, say, Gemini, your own personal assistant, and then in that case, your own personal assistant would be controlling your phone.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It could be possible through phone projection. I think the challenge with phone projection again is that, I mean, first of all, you have to go like as you're driving, you'll have to go through your phone. In some cases, you have to press multiple buttons so that you get to the menu of your own app. The other thing is that it takes over the entire screen. That is a degradation of the experience. Now, is the alternative solution available right now? No, but I think the beauty of the wave of technology in which we are is that we finally have the building blocks so that we can really redefine those type of interactions and we can allow hooks now into your own personal device through a different way of interaction rather than truly integrating end-to-end the app.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, this is the beauty of the technology disruption in which we are today. And the answer in that case does not necessarily need to be we will build an agentic integration for that particular app. It can be if it is like, say, Spotify or an Apple music, absolutely. But then if it's a small app, the answer to that could be that from Derivian assistant, we have an integration to your favorite voice assistant on the car and then you can ask the voice assistant on the car to play that particular app through Bluetooth audio. That is possible as we open up the framework and as we allow more integrations to bring your own digital ecosystem to the cop.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we're actually seeing right now with the advancement of AI technologies is just another reason why I deeply believe that RJ and Rivian, we made the right choice in terms of investing into our own technology and our software. Cars are moving from, as you said, the buzzy world of software defined to AI defined. The possibilities that we have now to have such deep AI integration into the car, it will make the entire carplay debate in the future completely obsolete. I really believe that the way you interact with apps, with which are monothreaded single buttons, single icons, a lot of that will be now completely shaped into a world where it will”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“is really what is resonating with a lot of our customers. I mean, even if I look at our own internal statistics five years ago when we first shipped the R1T and the R1S, the number one request from customers was CarPlay. And at the time, like we do all sorts of surveys with customers, more than 70% of customers were requesting CarPlay. In the recent survey, that number is less than 25% now because with the level of features that we have ship to customers, with the level of end-to-end integration, with the level of convenience that we are bringing, CarPlay ought to that extent is no longer the topic of discussion. And I think”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think first of all, it's really important to go through our philosophy of how is he software in the car and how we see user interface. The challenge with screen mirroring solutions is that they take over every single pixel in the car. And that's not the way we see ourselves interact with our users. You drove our car four years ago and you drove the car in the past few days. And I hope you have seen how much change happened in the car. And that's truly by bringing the end-to-end features. I mean, not only changing the user interface, but having your navigation know exactly about your drive mode, know exactly about your efficiency offering that level of convenience.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You knew it was coming. I have to ask you about carplay here because it strikes me just as you imagine this future of the car where it's connected to your calendar, it's connected to all its context, you just it has autonomy, which is something you're also working on. You get in the car and it knows it's time to go to work and you just say, let's go and the car takes off driving. This is when you would use like a vast number of applications, right? This might be when you have the focus to push the buttons again. I'll just make that argument. But this is one you would want a whole number of apps. And I hear from our readers every time I talk to a car executive, the reason I want carplay is because there's 5,000 apps on my phone and no car OEM is ever going to support them on the built-in infotainment. This is why you would say, okay, project your phone to the center stack. The car is driving itself. Have at it. Phone projection all day. Do you think that the tide is turning? Are you still absolutely committed to not having carplane Rivian vehicles?”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I deeply think that voice has the chance to be the primary interface in the car. I also think that buttons can exist, but then they shouldn't be the primary way with which you interact with the car. I think there's much more that is possible through voice where you can not only do one single function, you don't have to go and fiddle with so many functions, you don't have to go even deep into the touchscreen to look into specific features. A great voice experience can really elevate all of that and allow users to talk to the car as a human would do and really take the overall experience. To the next level.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let me just ask you this question again now that you've shipped the software, people are using it, you're getting extremely detailed feedback from me. Do you still think having buttons in the car is an anomaly?”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It really depends. It's a great question. Now, obviously, in these cases, there's all sorts of techniques of what we call rate limiting that we can apply. Like if we have seen in your case that you're spending 20 hours discussing with the S system, then we may do something behind the scenes. Similarly, in the way we configure the models, I mean, given the types of interactions that you have in the car. you would not be interacting with the latest and greatest say Opus 4.7 model so that you bring you burn so many tokens and then a lot of it also depends on the aggregation across users in terms of the types of requests as well as arbitration that we do between the edge and the cloud and as I mentioned the more we move to edge and local compute, the better it is for us in terms of overall inference costs.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It actually should, in theory, connect real time. And then this is where the grounding with the Google results comes into the picture. And in theory, it should give you the latest headlines. So if it didn't, then that's another one on me.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because I could probably make up a spreadsheet to argue. The reason I ask it Actually, the architecture that we have built is not model dependent. So really one of the foundations of the architecture is it allows us to interact and plug and play pretty much with different foundational models. And similarly, it can use different modalities in the way users can input their requests, whether it's voice in this case, but then it can use vision as well. It can use text if we want to enable that. When it comes to the models themselves, we use currently a combination of internal models for everything that runs locally on the edge. And then we use models from Google. We have partnership with Google. Things are going really well in terms of”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Arjay, absolutely, it was no discussion that we will equip the car with higher inference compute and then higher memory because this is really the future and it's an opportunity for us to completely reshape the way people interact with their cars. And actually in the long run, to be honest, it solves itself from an unit economics standpoint because as we do more and more interactions locally in the car, we avoid the back and forth with the clouds. We avoid the connectivity costs and then we also don't have to pay for the inference costs on the cloud. In the long run, it's actually economically positive as well.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, this is what I love about AV, which is what has always attracted me with Arge is that Arj thinks long term and he knows that in this case, that the world is moving to AI. And this is why the way we do decisions, for example, from a belief material standpoint, it's a very hard process where there's a ton of trade-offs all the time. And you can imagine the tension between people wanting to push for a better exterior part and then people wanting to push for a better interior part and then people wanting to have better technology. And then we have what we call the fun or the differentiation budget in the car.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“meaning that the local computer on the R2 will have up to 200 sparse tops of compute dedicated to III. I know this sounds like extremely technical, but think about it as this is more capable than some of the self-driving platforms today, and it's more capable than the amount of AI compute that you have in your smartphone. All of that will be available locally in the R2 car, which is coming soon, and that allows, as you mentioned, to basically not face such limitations and issues with connectivity, but truly get to much lower latencies because a lot of the processing will happen directly on the embedded locally and get to a truly conversational experience where It's pretty much instant.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“vehicles like the Rivian Arwen today. most of the interactions will happen with the cloud so as you say it's connectivity dependent and then they will happen best when there's a strong connectivity with the external world now there's a number of interactions that happen locally with the car and if you tell the car i am cold that interaction is being managed by a small language model that sits directly on the edge now the beauty of what will happen next as we get to r2 not only will we have 5g but then edge ai will be way more powerful and capable on the r2 on the r2 just speak”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“two things one we need to get you and r2 the r2 has 5g there you go it's coming soon and it's amazing um and then two uh and i think you touched base really on one of the architecture considerations uh for the technology which is uh when you look at”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is special to review and everything which is AI stack is developed uniquely for Rivian. I mean, this is Rivian's brand priority as we see cars becoming more and more AI defined, but we're in discussion so that we can have some new technologies for the Volkswagen group.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think actually the way I think about it, I think it would be both. And I think this is really the big difference between the old world. with vehicle controls, with the vehicle operating system, it understands safety, understand which things to do, which things not to do. And nobody else can develop that better than us because we develop the entire vehicle software. But then at the same time, it has interfaces and connections to other agents. And this is just the beginning. I think think about it in a way where in the future you can actually probably be able to bring your own personal favorite assistant and chatbot to the car and then it can share context with Derivian assistant. I mean, this is really the possibilities that this new world, this new type of integrations is allowing us to do.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's say you have an invitation in the calendar with XYZ details, and then you can start having reminders saying, okay, do you want to go to this place? Or you're actually really late to your meeting? Do you want me to start preconditioning your car? So that's the beauty of bringing the debt of the agentic integration.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Calendar, for example, like I can go to the assistant now and I can tell the assistant, okay, I want to plan a trip from San Francisco to San Diego and I want to have two charging stops. I want them to be close to an Italian restaurant. I love Italian food. The assistant would go and play that. And then I'll say, okay, print the summary and add it to my calendar and then send it as a text to my wife. This type of integrations when you have behind the scenes the authentic framework can really allow many more capabilities, which in the future as well, and this is where a can be even further utilized, you can start going into more autonomous functions in the sense that”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, you can actually build it with an API integration. I think the advantage of an agencing integration is that you can share the context and then you can perform multiple integrations within the guar. And in this case, it's based on this is an MCP integration, which also allows us, I mean, think about it in a way where you can imagine that in the future, instead of having that mono access to every single app, on your car or honestly to that extent, even on your smartphone, you can start aggregating and connecting many of those apps through the authentic framework and have them present a unified user experience. And this is how we're able to connect the navigation to”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ask you about the word a gentic in this context. So the way the Google Calendar integration works with Ruby and Assistant, just describe it quickly for people. It shows you a QR code. You connect your Google Calendar to it, and then Rivyne Assistant can like read your calendar, add events, remove events, do calendar stuff. I'm very curious how that's a gentic and how it's built such that the word ageentic is meaningful because I have like 500 apps over the past 10 years that can do Google Calendar stuff through the standard API. So one, how is it agentic? Is it MCP? Is it something else? And why build it that way versus just doing a bunch of API integrations?”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“open defront. I can say open the front trunk. Or actually, I can say I have a bag in front of the car and it will actually open the front. And I think that completely changes the way you interact with the car. On top of that, we have now the opportunity with all the authentic framework so that we truly can give people their time back in the car. And I hope you tried our Google Calendar Agentic integration, but you can imagine how the experience will be in the future where you're driving and then you should be able to perform operations on your calendar. You should be able to perform operations on your email and then in the future with the framework that we have with the agent. integration, you can actually interact with many more ads from your own digital personal ecosystem.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we are on the cusp of something really big. And I deeply believe, like when you think about it, you're in a car, you're driving, you're focused on the road. So in theory, the primary interface with which you should be interacting with the car is actually your voice. The only reason that drivers and consumers so far did not interact with the car through voice is that like to put it really bluntly, the technology has been broken. And I think that's really the beauty of what we have now through the technology disruption which is coming with the foundational models. The foundational models are providing us this wonderful opportunity so that we can truly get to a conversational experience and we're drivers can interact with the car in human language. I don't need to tell the car.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You mentioned that I was going to get you in trouble. I'm going to get you in trouble again. In 2024, you said using buttons in a car is an anomaly of modern design, and people love buttons in their cars so that you got in trouble for saying that. But the thing you said was that voice should be the future. Okay, this is the first gesture at voice being the future. Is it good enough? Because we're right on the cusp of are these things actually good enough to build the kinds of products people want?”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, pretty much, I think about... Does not make us comfortable to expose them to the end users. But that's really like the beauty of the internal in-house orchestration layer that we have built where we have a ton of guardrails which allow us to control which functions are exposed by the assistant or not.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that piece where it's how do you talk to the computer and what permission does that other computer give you? Every assistant at every level is running into that specific barrier. And I'm just curious what you think the answer is.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not telling you what sensor I'm trying to make That one is on me, and I think the beauty here is that, I mean We have that even house and then we'll be able to calibrate that answer and then we'll fix the top of it. I'll send you a note here next time. That's very”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's just a moment where maybe it's for safety reasons or maybe it just can't work right now and the version I have where the LLM has to go talk to another computer and that computer has to give it permission. And I don't know if anyone in any part of the tech industry has figured out exactly how that should work. And I'm just wondering what your point of view is.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other one that struck me, you know, cars have rear seat sensors. We have kids. So every time I get out of my car, it reminds me there might be a kid in the backseat because it has sensed the weight in the backseat. I think this is one of the funniest sensors any car can have because the car seat is always in the backseat. So it's always reminding me that the kid might be in the car. So I asked it, is anyone in the back seat? And maybe this is just a bug, but it said I'll find out. And then it said, I can't access that sensor. And I said, what sensor are you trying to access? And it refused. And I probably had a five-minute argument with your assistant about why it wouldn't tell me what sensor it was trying to access. The reason I'm asking this is not because it's a bug or I really needed to know if anyone in car seat at the time. I'm just very curious as you think about building the assistant that can access all of the sensors and the architecture of how that might work and how we might interact with cars.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's honestly, that's one of my favorite features. And the way I like to interact with it is I don't tell it to change the right height. I tell it, okay, give me drive mode with more pep. And then it does it and it changes to sports mode. I mean, this is really the magic of having that true conversational experience. Now, the reason it does not do Viper is by design, we actually block a number of features which are safety related. And cars are obviously homulated, regulated. So everything related to wipers, things related to windshield controls, things related to highway assistance. Those are regulated functions, which today through our framework, we block them for safety reasons. And like safety is really one of the core tenets in how we develop the entire experience.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. I could raise and lower the car at 55 miles an hour with the air suspension, which was cool. And it was like the slowest low rider experience you could possibly have. And then I couldn't turn on the wiper. So what is the split?”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Awesome. So there's a lot of things here. I mean, first of all, I think you describe it really, really well. Our approach, our philosophy for the Reverend Assistant is not just put a chat bot and then slap it on top of the UI. It's really developing what will become the connective tissue that enables our users to interact with pretty much every single feature in the car. And even more than that, bring their own personal digital ecosystem in the car through the authentic integration. Now, to your question, what it can do and then what it cannot do, us controlling the wiper, it's obviously possible. And I'm sure that you have seen that it can do way more. It can change your drive modes. It can change your ride height. Right.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I thought, is that a safety reason? Is that you just don't know how to do it? You're like lost in the zonal architecture. And I asked it and said, I can't tell you why I can't do these things. But here's where the button is, which is really interesting for an assistant at Car to do. It said, I'm not going to do it for you, but the button is on the stock. Push the button. How do you make those decisions in the context of an assistant of what it can and cannot do?”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To glue an assistant onto, uh, I have a Cadillac EV. If you try to glue an assistant onto that, it has to like go talk to its CCUs. Like, it's just very obvious that something else is happening with Google Assistant in that car. That's the opportunity. The assistant can talk to the whole car. Then there are places where it just can't for some reason. I'll give you one example. It just struck me as very odd. I was driving in the rain and I said, hey, turn on the back window wiper. And it just won't.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is Rivian assistant. I've been playing with it for a few days now truly had some searching conversations with it. Just to push the boundary of what it can do, it's super interesting to have a car where even in the interface, it does the wavy line and the main screen. It's very much the car is running its assistant, not an overlay. You can tell that the assistant can go and address lots of parts of the car. And then there are places where it can't or it won't. And it actually, I think one of the most interesting things about it is that it won't tell you why it can't do things. It is insistent that it won't tell you why it can't do things. Don't worry, I have very specific questions about that. But it strikes me that this is a natural evolution of, okay, the whole car is run by a finite set of computers, and that means our assistant can just run around and talk to those computers and talk to the functions of those computers control in a way that I don't know if you”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's multiple of them, and I think probably one of them is like leading to probably the next. topic of discussion that we will have which is our overall approach around AI and we had a ton of debates internally of whether we should basically just use a third party AI solution or develop our own solution and there's a ton of tension because you look at the advancements in the AI world and you would think that with everything which is happening This is obviously a hard problem to solve. Now, it was really clear for me given the opportunity given how transformative this is for the entire user experience that we really need to own our destiny in terms of having a platform that allows us choice, that allows us to change foundation models as we wish and own that integration layer that allows us to power the entire car operating system.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm a product builder at heart and I know that some of the decisions, even if the data are against me, then I would go with my feeling. And in some cases I'm wrong and I'm the first to recognize that. Now, if it's a one-way decision, then that's a different process which requires much more preparation, requires much more data and then arbitration for how we do things”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Options and then make a recommendation. I want a culture where I empower my team to be really a force of proposal and then come up themselves with recommendations. The rule that I use in terms of how much time should I spend on a decision is really Is it a one way door decision or is it a two way door decision? If it's a two-way door decision, then I don't need to spend that much time on it. It doesn't need to be really a hard framework. We don't need to go into an extreme in some cases of collecting tons and tons of data so that we get to a decision. And in some cases,”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the number one rule, I mean, obviously my job every day is making decisions, but there's a number of guidelines that I try to apply. First of all, in terms of coaching with my team, I try to push decisions as much as possible to the lowest levels of the organization. And I think really one of the anti-patterns that I see in a bunch of companies where they try to bubble up decisions to the highest levels of executives, and that tends to create a culture where things are slow and then employees don't feel really empowered. Now in cases where I personally have to make the decision, few guidelines to the team, never come to me with one option. Show that you went through an analysis.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“automotive industry and as RJ and I started the discussions with Oliver Blumer his number on priority was we need to keep the Rivian way of doing things we realize that you are bringing not only a software IP you are bringing not only an electronics IP but you are bringing a different process you are bringing a different culture and we need that change from the inside for the VW group and I think across the past 18 months I mean obviously in some cases their daily tensions I mean there are cases where as you mentioned one brand might request a different requirement than another brand but what really helped us to continue is that support that we have from the highest level of the leadership in the Volkswagen group to really help drive that transformation and that cultural change of the group.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great question. And I think lots of people look at joint ventures, and I think there's probably many more failure stories than success stories. And this has been really one of the guiding principles, and we spent a lot of time discussing with the VW leadership before we engage in such partnership. Now, really what made RJ and myself lean heavily into this partnership is one, the opportunity and then to the honest and constructive partnership from the Volkswagen group leadership. I mean, first of all, we are talking about taking derivative technology into the second largest OEM in the world. This is by far the biggest licensing deal in the”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It strikes me just talking to you about this that there aren't a lot of models in an industry as big as the auto industry like this where the big player is letting the smaller company define the culture and the opportunity, define the architecture which will define its roadmap in the future. What things have you looked at that are similar that you say that's successful, we should build the model based on this and operate like this? And what versions of this have failed that you've looked at where like, I want to avoid those mistakes?”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What wins is how can we do the software in a way that allows different expressions? And I think in this case, Revenge interface will show up through Unreal Engine, but then we need to have hooks in our framework so that, like to your question, I know you will ask me that Volkswagen cars can have carplay and the team will develop that even though Rubian will not adopt car play so it's really about creating those different hooks into the operating system so that we allow different ways to express the user interface.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the reasons I ask that is, you know, there's Rivian decisions that maybe Volkswagen will make. Rivians right now, they run Unreal Engine, right, is the graphics and the infotainment. It's really fun. I'm not sure that every single Volkswagen.”
2026-05-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rivian's software chief thinks you don't need CarPlay or buttons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT