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ted (not lasso)
@ted
Waymo closes "oversubscribed" $5.6B round to scale. Initial thoughts: 1. 100k robotaxi trips per week is now 10x YoY growth, and 2x in the last 3 months alone. Waymo began in 2009... consider how much work and patience (and capital) was required to set Waymo up for this type of growth. 2. Andrej Karpathy recently said that while Tesla has a software problem, Waymo has a hardware problem — which is the harder and more costly problem to solve. Waymo doesn't produce its own vehicles, but still costs them $200k to deploy a car with its third-party partners. <1000 cars deployed today. Meanwhile, Elon said on Tesla's earnings call they are producing 35k cars a week. It will be interesting to see how the round (and ongoing scale) shifts Waymo's unit economics and margins over time. 3. Alphabet led the round and probably owns ~80-90% of Waymo. I'm curious to know how much of the $5.6B is outside investment (does it even matter?).
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Strongen211
@strongen211
Waymo's impressive growth and challenges highlight the complexities of scaling autonomous vehicle technology. Alphabet's substantial investment signals confidence in Waymo's potential
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