YouSaid · the spoken record

Kyle Vogt

lines on the record: 70
first: 2019-02-07
most recent: 2019-02-07
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

“After this, I guess we're going to go and talk to your class. But one of the big things is going from prototype to production for autonomous cars and what does that mean? What does that look like 2019 for us is the year that we try to cross over that threshold and reach superhuman level of performance to some degree with the software and have all the other of the thousands of little building blocks in place to launch our first commercial product. So that's what's in score for us or in store for us. And we've got a lot of work to do. We've got a lot of brilliant people working on it. So it's all up to us now.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I'd say I probably spent an extra year or two working on that. And I'd say like I would have just tried to do something different sooner. Those were two years where I felt like From this philosophical or existential thing, I just felt something was missing. And so I would have, if I could look back now and tell myself, it's like, I would have said exactly that. Like, you're not getting any meaning out of your work personally right now. You should find a way to change that. And that's part of the pitch I use to basically everyone who joins Cruz today. It's like, hey, you've got that now by coming here.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I've made a lot of mistakes, like, you know, pretty much everything you can screw up. I think I've screwed up at least once. But I don't regret those things. I think it's hard to look back on things, even if they didn't go well and call it a regret, because hopefully it took away some new knowledge or learning from that. I would say there was a period, yeah, the closest I can come to is this there's a period in Justin TV, I think after seven years where The company was going one direction, which is towards Twitch and video gaming. And I'm not a video gamer. I don't really even use Twitch at all. And I was still working on the core technology there, but my heart was no longer in it because the business that we were creating was not something that I was personally passionate about.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Read success, right? If you're surrounded by really brilliant, hardworking people, you're going to feel sort of compelled or inspired to try to emulate them or beat them. And so even though I had done it once before and I felt like I'm pretty self-motivated, I thought like, look, this is going to be a hard problem. I can use all the help I can get. So surrounding myself with other entrepreneurs is going to make me work a little bit harder or push a little harder, then it's worth it. why I did it, you know, for example, the second time.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No one size fits all answer, but if your ambition, I think, is to. See how big you can make something or rapidly expand and capture a market or solve a problem or whatever it is, then going to venture back route is probably a good approach so that capital doesn't become your primary constraint. Y Combinator, I love because it puts you in this sort of competitive environment where you're surrounded by the top maybe 1% of other really highly motivated peers who are in the same place. That environment, I think just breeds.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever it is that you're not passionate about, whether that's finance or HR or operations or those things, as long as you are grinding away and working towards that North Star for your business, whatever it is, and you don't give up and you're making progress every day, it seems like eventually you'll end up in a good place. And the only things that can slow you down are running out of money, or I suppose your competitor is destroying you. But I think most of the time it's people giving up or somehow destroying things themselves rather than being beaten by their competition or running out of money.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I think having a true passion that you can fall back on and knowing that you would be doing it even if you weren't getting paid for it helps you weather those tough times. So that's one thing. I think the other one Really good people. So I've always been surrounded by really good co founders that are logical thinkers are always pushing their limits and have very high levels of integrity. So that's Dan Kahn in my current company and actually his brother and a couple other guys for Justin TV and Twitch. And then I think the last thing is. Just, I guess, persistence or perseverance. And that can apply to sticking to sort of or having conviction around the original premise of your idea and sticking around to do all the unsexy work to actually make it come to fruition, including dealing with, you know,”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's sort of survivor bias here a little bit, but I can try to find some common threads for the things that worked for me, which is In both of these companies, I was really passionate about the core technology. I actually lay awake at night thinking about these problems and how to solve them. And I think that's helpful because when you start a business, there are Like to this day, there are these crazy ups and downs. Like, one day you think the business is just on top of the world and unstoppable, and the next day you think, okay, this is all going to end. It's just going south and it's going to be over tomorrow.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then, as those restrictions start to fall away, like maybe you add capability to drive really well and safely in heavy rain or snow, that probably opens up the market by two or threefold in terms of the cities you can expand into and so on. And so the real question is, you know, I know today if we wanted to, we could produce that mini autonomous vehicles. We wouldn't be able to make use of all of them yet because we would sort of saturate the demand in the cities in which we would want to operate initially. So, if I were to guess what the timeline is for those things falling away and reaching hundreds of thousands of vehicles.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the. I'd say that it seems the consensus. Among the people developing self driving cars today is to sort of start with some form of an easier environment, whether it means lacking inclement weather or mostly sunny or whatever it is, and then add capability for more complex situations over time. And so if you're only able to deploy In areas that meet sort of your criteria or the current domain, you know, operating domain of the software you developed, that may put a cap on how many cities you could deploy in”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I'd love to have it two years ago, but we're not there yet. So I guess the way I would think about that is.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and the exciting thing for me is I don't think that grinding ever stops because there's a moment in time where you cross that threshold of human performance and become superhuman. There's no reason, there's no first principles Forever to build the best possible product.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, increasing in a pretty steady clip, but there's no one thousands of little things and just like polishing functionality and making sure that it handles every version and possible permutation of a situation by either applying more deep learning systems or just by adding more test coverage or new scenarios that we develop against and just grinding on that. We're sort of in the unsexy phase of development right now, which is doing the real engineering work that it takes to go from prototype to production.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This continuous improvement process where we find sort of the most uncomfortable or the things that could lead to a safety issue, other things, all these events. And then we sort of categorize them and rework parts of our system to make incremental improvements and do that over and over and over again. And we just see sort of the overall performance of the system.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completed the functionality needed to get someone from point A to point B. As in if we need to do a left turn maneuver or if we need to drive around a double parked vehicle into oncoming traffic or navigate through construction zones, the scaffolding and the building blocks was there pretty early on. And so the challenge is not any one scenario or situation for which we fail at 100% of those. It's more, you know, we're benchmarking against a pretty good or pretty high standard, which is human driving. All things considered, humans are excellent at handling edge cases and unexpected scenarios where computers are the opposite. And so beating that baseline set by humans is the challenge. And so what we've been doing for quite some time now is basically”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess you could say self driving cars at scale will lower the collective blood pressure of society probably by a couple points without all that road rage and stress. So that's a good externality. So, back to your question about the technology and the, I guess, the biggest problems. And I have a hard time answering that question because we've been at this. Specifically focusing on driverless cars and all the technology needed to enable that for a little over four and a half years now. And even a year or two in, I felt like we had.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a lot of time you're giving up. And if you compare that to people being on the road, if another vehicle, whether it's a human driver or autonomous vehicle, delays them by even three seconds. They're laying it on the horn, even though that's one-one thousandth of the time they waste looking at Facebook every day. So there's definitely some psychology aspects of this, I think, that are pretty interesting. Road rage in general. And then the question, of course, is if everyone is in self-driving cars, do they even notice these three second delays anymore because they're doing other things or reading or working or just talking to each other? So it'll be interesting to see where that goes.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. I think before we go to that, though, I just want to, I like what you said about the psychology aspect of this because I think one observation I've made is I think I read somewhere that I think it's maybe Americans on average spend over an hour a day on social media, like staring at Facebook. And so that's just, you know, 60 minutes of your life, you're not getting back. It's probably not super productive. And so that's 3,600 seconds, right? And”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of the liability, I guess. I wouldn't know. I'd say within reasonable bounds, as in we're not going to. I think it'd be highly unlikely we'd expose any knob that would let you significantly increase safety risk. I think that's just not something we'd be willing to do. But I think driving style or like, you know, are you going to relax the comfort constraints slightly or things like that? All of those things make sense and are plausible. I see all those as nice optimizations. Once again, we get the core problem solved in these fleets out there. The other thing we've sort of observed is that you have this intuition that if you sort of slam your foot on the gas right after the light turns green and aggressively accelerate, you're going to get there faster. But the actual impact of doing that is pretty small. You feel like you're getting there faster. So the same would be true for AVs, even if they don't slam their, you know, the pedal to the floor when the light turns green. They're going to get you there within, you know, if it's a 15-minute trip within 30 seconds of what you would have done otherwise if you were going really aggressively.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These once you have this core technology, which is the fleet of autonomous vehicles, there's all sorts of different business opportunities you can build on top of that. But I think the important thing, of course, is that there's zero monetization opportunity until you actually have that fleet of very capable driverless cars that are as good or better than humans. Sort of where the entire industry is sort of in this holding pattern right now.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. And I think that there are some real benefits to having. Cars without drivers compared to sort of the status quo for people who use rideshare services today. You get privacy, consistency, hopefully significantly improve safety, all these benefits versus the current product. But it's a crowded market. And then other opportunities, which you've seen a lot of activity in the last, really in the last six to 12 months is delivery, whether that's... Parcels and packages, food or groceries, those are all sort of, I think, opportunities that are pretty ripe.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How are you generating revenue? And I think that's kind of what you're asking. And I think the obvious things today are the ride sharing business because that's pretty clear that there's demand for that. There's existing markets you can tap into.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the things that drive the economics for fleets of self-driving cars. One is the cost to build the vehicle itself. So the material cost, how many, you know, what's the cost of all your sensors plus the cost of the vehicle and all the other components on it? Another one is the lifetime of the vehicle. It's very different if your vehicle drives 100,000 miles and then falls apart versus 2 million. And then if you have a fleet, it's kind of like an airplane or an airline where once you produce the vehicle, you want it to be in operation. As many hours a day as possible producing revenue. And then the other piece of that is.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Occurs inside of an automotive assembly plant, that is a lot of work that I am very glad that we don't have to reinvent to make self-driving cars work. And so to have partners who have done that for 100 years now, these great processes and this huge infrastructure and supply base that we can tap into is just remarkable because the scope. Surface area of the problem of deploying fleets of self driving cars is so large that we're constantly looking for ways to do less so we can focus on the things that really matter more. And if we had to figure out how to build and assemble Yeah, build the cars themselves. I mean, we work closely with GM on that, but if we had to develop all that capability in-house as well That would just Make the problem really intractable, I think.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, from what I've seen, it's impressive. And I think, especially in Silicon Valley, it's easy to write off building cars because, you know, people have been doing that for over 100 years now in this country. And so it seems like that's a solved problem, but that doesn't mean it's an easy problem. And I think it would be easy to sort of overlook that and think that we're Silicon Valley engineers. We can solve any problem building a car. It's been done. Therefore, it's not a real engineering challenge. But after having seen just the sheer scale and magnitude and industrialization,”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To solve these complex problems in any way, shape, or form, or coming up with crazy ideas that 90% of them won't work. And so meshing that culture of sort of continuous improvement and experimentation with one where everything needs to be rigorously defined up front so that you never slip a deadline or miss a budget was a pretty big challenge. And that we're over three years in now after the acquisition. And I'd say like, you know, the investment we made in figuring out how to work together successfully and who should do what and how we bridge the gaps between these very different systems and way of doing engineering work is now one of our greatest assets because I think we have this really powerful thing. But for a while it was both GM and crews were very steep on the learning curve.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not to say those two cultures don't clash, they absolutely do. There's different sort of value systems. Like in a car company, the thing that gets you promoted and sort of the reward system is following the processes, delivering the program on time and on budget. So any sort of risk-taking is discouraged in many ways because If a program is late or if you shut down the plant for a day, you can count the millions of dollars that burn by pretty quickly. Whereas I think in a most Silicon Valley companies and crews and the methodology we were employing, especially around the time of the acquisition, the reward structure is about”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to start by acknowledging that GM is made up of tens of thousands of really brilliant, motivated people who want to be a part of the future. And so it's pretty fun to work with them, the attitude inside a car company like that is embracing this transformation and change rather than fearing it. And I think that's a testament to the leadership at GM, and that's flown all the way through to everyone you talk to, even the people in the assembly plants working on these cars. So that's really great. Starting from that position makes it a lot easier. So then when the people in San Francisco at Cruise interact with the people at GM, at least we have this common set of values, which is that we really want this stuff to work because we think it's important and we think it's the future.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A pitch also at the time. The other big problem we ran into, which is perhaps the biggest problem from a business model perspective, is we had kind of assumed that we started with an Audi S4 as the vehicle we retrofitted with this highway driving capability. And we had kind of assumed that if we just knock out three make and models of vehicle, that'll cover like 80% of the San Francisco market. Doesn't everyone there drive, I don't know, a BMW or Honda Civic or one of these three cars. And then we surveyed our users and we found out that it's all over the place. We would to get even a decent number of units sold, we'd have to support like, you know, 20 or 50 different models, and each one is a little butterfly that takes time and effort to maintain that retrofit integration and custom hardware and all this. So it was a tough business.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or if the car's anti-lock brake systems or other things kick in, or the software has been, it's different in one version of the car, you retrofit versus another and you don't know because the manufacturer has updated it behind the scenes. There's basically an infinite list of long-tail issues that can get you. And if you're dealing with a safety-critical product, that's not really acceptable.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not at all. I've come full circle on that one. Trying to build a retrofit product, and I'll touch on some of the complexities of that, and then also having been inside an OEM and seeing how things work and how a vehicle is developed and validated when it comes to something that has safety critical implications like controlling the steering and other control inputs on your car, it's pretty hard to get there with a retrofit. Or if you did, even if you did, it creates a whole bunch of new complications around liability or how did you truly validate that or, you know, something in the base vehicle fails and causes your system to fail whose fault is it?”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Working on that after about a year of working on the highway autopilot, we had it working at a prototype stage, but we just completely abandoned that and said we're going to go all in on driverless cars now is the time. Can't think of anything that's more exciting. And if it works, more impactful. So we're just going to go for it.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I thought, what can I do to sort of go from zero to significant scale so I can actually solve the real problem, which is the driverless cars? And I thought, here's the strategy. We'll start by doing a really simple problem or solving a really simple problem that creates value for people. So eventually ended up deciding on automating highway driving, which is relatively more straightforward as long as there's a backup driver there. And the go-to-market will be able to retrofit people's cars and just sell these products directly. And the idea was we'll take all the revenue and profits from that and use it to do sort of reinvest that in research for doing fully driverless cars. And that was the plan. The only thing that really changed along the way between then and now is we never really launched the first product. We had enough interest from investors and enough of a signal that this was something that we should be working on.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My analysis of the situation is that Google is putting a lot of, had been putting a lot of money into that project. They had a lot more resources. And so, and they still hadn't cracked the fully driverless car. This is 2013, I guess.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it works, it's going to be both a huge business and therefore probably the most positive impact I can possibly have on the world. So after that light bulb went off, I went all in on cruise immediately. To”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was thinking about that for a while, and I made like a tried writing a Gmail clone and looked at some other ideas. And then it just sort of lightbulb went off like self-driving cars. Like that was the most fun I had ever had in college working on that. And like, well, what's the state of the technology has been 10 years? Maybe times have changed and maybe now is the time to make this work. And I poked around and looked at the only other thing out there really at the time was the Google self-driving car project. And I thought, surely there's a way to have an entrepreneur mindset and sort of solve the minimum viable product here. And so I just took the plunge right then and there and said, this is something I know I can commit 10 years to. It's probably the greatest applied AI problem of our generation.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly, I think rears the bar on what you choose to work on. So for me, the three things where it had to be something where the technology itself determines the success of the product, like hard, really juicy technology problems, because that's what motivates me. And then it had to have a direct and positive impact on society in some way. So an example would be like healthcare, self-driving cars because they save lives, other things where there's a clear connection to somehow improving other people's lives. And the last one is it had to be a big business because for the positive impact to matter, it's got to be at large scale.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After going through Twitch, Twitch and is today pretty successful. But the work was, the result was entertainment mostly. The better the product was, the more we would entertain people and then make money on the ad revenues and other things. And that was a good thing. It felt good to entertain people. But I figured like, you know, what is really the point of becoming a really good engineer in developing these skills other than my own enjoyment? And I realized I wanted something that scratched more of an existential itch, like something that truly matters. And so I basically made this list of requirements for if I was going to do another company. And the one thing I knew in the back of my head that Twitch took like eight years to become successful. And so whatever I do, I better be willing to commit at least 10 years to something. And when you think about things from that perspective,”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it was my sole responsibility to figure that out. And I think it's those setting deadlines, trying to move quickly and everything where you're in that moment of.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a little hair coating. Yeah, it's a little lonely because there's four of us working on the company, and only two people really wrote code. And Emmett wrote the website in the chat system, and I wrote the software for this video streaming device and video server.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and putting these like, you know, sort of protocols on top of all that to reassemble and reorder the packets and have time buffers and error correction and all that kind of stuff. And the night before, it was just static. Every once in a while, the image would go staticky and there would be this horrible, like, screeching audio noise because the audio was also corrupted. And this would happen every five to ten minutes or so. And it was a really...”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was pretty messy to get a live video feed that looked decent working from anywhere in San Francisco, I put together the system where we had like three or four cell phone data modems and they were like, we take the video stream and sort of spray it across these three or four modems and then try to catch all the packets on the other side with unreliable cell phone networks. It's pretty low.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe 10 a.m. the next morning, and it's, I don't know, it's 5 p.m. now. So how many hours do we have left? What is that? Like, you know, 17 hours to go. And that was going to be fine”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. Well, first of all, that's nice of Justin to say that. I think I would have been maybe 21 years old then and not very experienced at programming. But as with everything in a startup, you're sort of racing against the clock. And so our plan was the second we had this live streaming camera backpack up and running where Justin could wear it. And no matter where he went in the city, it would be streaming live video. And this is even before the iPhone. So this is like hard to do back then. We would launch. And so we thought we were there, and the backpack was working. And then we sent out all the emails to launch the company and do the press thing. And then we weren't quite actually there. And then we thought, oh, well, they're not going to announce it until.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wasn't as popular. I'd say the general flux of people out of MIT at the time was mostly into finance or consulting jobs in Boston or New York. And very few people were going to California to start companies. But today I'd say it's probably inverted, which is just a sign of the times, I guess.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I didn't know, but just trying something for a month during IAP seems pretty low risk, right? And then, well, maybe I'll take a semester off, MIT's pretty flexible about that. You can always go back, right? And then after two or three cycles of that, I eventually threw in the towel. But I think it's. I guess in that case, I felt like I could always hit the undo button if I had to.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Month off, one-on-one way ticket, and basically never went back. We were having so much fun. We felt like we were building something and creating something. And it was going to be interesting that I was just all in and got completely hooked. And that business was just in TV, which is originally a reality show about a guy named Justin. Which morphed into a live video streaming platform, which then morphed into what is Twitch today. So that was quite an unexpected journey.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I said, I always wanted to do a company or start a company and this opportunity landed in my lap, which was a couple guys from Yale were starting a new company and I Googled them and found that they had started a company previously and sold it actually on eBay for about a quarter million bucks, which was a pretty interesting story. But so I thought to myself, these guys are rock star entrepreneurs. They've done this before. They must be driving around in Ferraris because they sold their company. And I thought I could learn a lot from them. So I teamed up with those guys and went out during California during IIP, which is MIT's.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This has become commercially interesting to very large companies and the amount of money going into it and the amount of people going through your class and learning about these things and developing these skills is just orders of magnitude more than it was back then. And so there's enough momentum and inertia and energy and investment dollars into this space right now that I think they're I think they can just say mission accomplished and move on to the next area of technology that needs help.”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I haven't thought about it from that perspective. Is there anything DARPA could do today to further accelerate things? And I would say My instinct is that that's maybe not the highest and best use of their resources in time because kickstarting and spinning up the flywheel is, I think, what they did in this case for very, very little money. But today this has become...”
2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source