Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:16:15 · Boris Sofman
[00:16:15] S0: a car? Amazing. Alright. Yes. We got a lot in common here. Okay. So where's Waymo today? Over 200,000,000 driverless miles, 10 times safer than a human. Like, it's superhuman. It's absolutely incredible. It's in 11 cities and various degrees of maturity. Driverless, fully driverless. San Francisco is the most mature where over 40% of ride hailing in the city is Waymo's. It's by far preferred to Uber and Lyft. And it's constrained mainly by the availability of cars where Waymo's like catching up on the like volume of cars. That's a really good signal of where things are going. There's 15 more cities announced including London, New York, Tokyo. So really aggressive ramp. I think they're it's something like 15 cities that are on the like, have been announced publicly for 2026. So you're gonna see this go exponentially where you're gonna get into billions of miles. And so if you fast forward at that rate by three, four years, I believe that every single major metropolitan area in The US will have very deep penetration of robotaxis. And if you fast forward into the 2030s, it's very natural that this goes from robotaxi where you can take advantage of being okay with higher price points because of utilization, some constraints on geography into a world where you're fully unconstrained on geography, the price points are lower and you start to infuse this into personal car ownership where you and I can buy a car that is level four capable. I would see that in the early part of the 2030s being a real thing. And so I literally
00:17:43 · Alexa von Tobel, Boris Sofman
[00:17:43] S1: cannot wait to own a Waymo. I just cannot 100%, [00:17:46] S0: right? And and that's like so worth it, but it just changes completely your entire existence of Your [00:17:50] S1: entire existence. [00:17:51] S0: Five, six years, I think that's like really, really doable. And so, yep, right around the time when ours are about to enter the roads, think it's actually a... Depending on where you live, like, it's a genuine decision on whether you need a car or not. [00:18:05] S1: Last question on this before we shift over to everything you're building at Bedrock. How does that change cities? How does that change things? Because I always say some of the most interesting stuff is the intersection of things. So it's not just that the autonomous vehicles are gonna replace drivers, but what does that actually mean for delivery? Are stores now gonna be on wheels? Like, does the Sephora need a store, or could it be an autonomous vehicle that moves? Like, how does that unlock the next layer of innovation in your mind once we believe that 85% of cars on the road are economists?
00:18:42 · Boris Sofman
[00:18:42] S0: First of all, I think, you know, that it's not just cars and trucks. It's also local delivery and packages and everything else. So first thing is I think you start to really start to see a shift in the layout of urban of urban environments. The amount of parking you need, the percentage of space is taken up by parking in cities is astronomically... Like, surprisingly large. That starts to disappear because, like, I I think I've read a stat now that that like, in city like Manhattan, a shocking percentage of cars on the road are actually driving around waiting for somebody or looking for parking. So it's like, you start to reduce the amount of parking required, the efficiency of the throughput of cities increases because it's just quicker and more efficient. I think the pain of driving reduces because now you can fully check out and have that be a time where you're relaxing, watching something, doing work. Eventually, the vehicles themselves start to shift to become more conducive to like an office style environment or sleeping or whatever the case might be. People become more comfortable with a commute that was 45 used to be really painful or an hour used to be painful, now becomes okay. And then obviously delivery and, you know, transportation becomes easier. And so you start to be able to probably rethink the entire layout of of cities. And I would imagine that you would start to see different form factors where vehicles can be customized for local delivery. They can be customized for long driving. And that... That's where it gets, like, really, really interesting where you start to rethink the form factors of today's cars and trucks into something of the future where you don't need a cabin on a truck in ten years. You don't need a, you know, you can optimize for the layouts of a car that optimize for comfort and work because of the expectations. So that's exciting. And and I think it'll change where people live and how they interact with their commutes and everything.
00:20:37 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:20:37] S1: Okay. So Boris, given that you were doing something incredibly interesting, you obviously left with a number of other amazing, Waymo leaders in 2024, to to found Bedrock. Tell us about Bedrock. Let's start there. First of all, like, what made you make this leap? What was the problem you saw? What was the moment that made you wanna start this?
00:21:00 · Boris Sofman
[00:21:00] S0: So the catalyst for us really getting excited about this was actually seeing the success of Waymo of the shift that we had taken to really aggressively move from like a classic robotics stack, where you're using engineered solutions and heuristics and search and the kind of more rules into really embracing machine learning and data driven approaches, where you're using massive scale data to explain how does a human interact with the chaos of Downtown San Francisco, or the like super crazy and diverse challenges you would see in general in driving. And not only did that big bet play out where when we launched San Francisco, it was able to reasonably quickly go and solve the diverse challenges of San Francisco, but it generalized super well to Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, from car to truck, surface street to freeway. We started to see astronomical reduction in the amount of data that you needed and the work that it took to open up new cities and open up kind of new platforms. And it went from giant engineering to basically qualification and operations to kind of go and stamp new cities over time. And so for us that became kind of a superpower where we started to think where else can you apply this? Where you have diversities of use cases, environments and conditions and platforms, and you have to have this sort of an approach to solve this problem. Otherwise it's just way too much fragmentation for a kind of hyper focused engineered solution. And that took us to exploring a lot of spaces, but we really landed on automating heavy machinery. And so we're starting with construction, but more broadly, is about automating these large scale machines that are the workforce behind a lot of the work in construction, but also mining, agriculture, lumber, garbage movement, environmental cleanup. And so it's these large machines like from Caterpillar and Deere and others where they're the ones manipulating the earth, the aggregate material farmland, like logs. And when you boil it down, have a... First of all, these industries account for over 20% of the world's GDPs. So, and these are the workhorses, and this is like has astronomical labor shortages while demand is skyrocketing because of data center construction and on shoring and manufacturing. We looked at it and industries are massive. There's this spike in demand that's just unprecedented.
00:23:21 · Boris Sofman, Alexa von Tobel
Over $700,000,000,000 of data centers being built this year, and it's gonna be over 1,000,000,000,000 next year. It's just unbelievable. But when you look at the labor pool, there's a kind of this generational transition where people have not been going into construction. And so retirement rate is accelerating. There was already a 500,000 workers shortage just as a baseline that's being exacerbated with the demand. And some of our partners are telling us they're expecting 50% retirement in the next seven years. And so what we're doing is we're enabling fully autonomous heavy machines, starting with construction to enable effectively turning these machines into operator less machines where Bedrock becomes the digital operator and the software services around it and enables the general contractors in construction or the miners and quarries and mines and farmers and agriculture to be able to operate these machines and meet the demands that they have from a labor standpoint, compress schedules by working not just eight, ten, but fifteen, twenty, twenty four hours a day, optimize the safety where this is construction is the most dangerous job in The US. And again, really transformed the physics of this industry. And so we're starting with construction and focusing on excavators as our first machine. [00:24:40] S1: First of like my young son would be so excited that you're focusing on excavators. I [00:24:46] S0: got so many many cool dad points. My five year old knows how to draw... Operate an excavator. It's amazing.