Autonomous transportation is a multi-trillion-dollar market where Zoox, Kroos, and Waymo all compete without a clear winner. Founders should stick to their mission, not chase what competitors do. Zoox has focused on a ride-service model since 2014 rather than selling vehicles.
Chapters
I believe Zoox has many competitors. Kroos, Waymo, etc. How do you balance between working to achieve Zoox mission while also ensuring Zoox does not fall behind competitors? What advice would you give for a founder working in a market with many competitors? So yes, by the way, we consider them competitors and fellow travelers. This is a brand new sort of inflection point in transportation and so we have a collective responsibility. According to Morgan Stanley, it's a multi trillion dollar opportunity. The hands of Adam Smith says that and we've researched this. There aren't multi million, multi, multi trillion dollar industries that are basically dominated by one player. So several of us will succeed. And in terms of your focus, look, you have to be very, I mean one of the things about zoox is since 2014 we said this business model of selling rides versus selling a vehicle is the way to deploy autonomy. We also have been extremely consistent that if we agree that AI is going to replace the human for this particular model, it's important to re architect and redesign the vehicle to make it easiest and safest for AI to drive. So yes, competition is important but, but be very grounded in your mission and your approach. Apply a lot of consistency and yes, look around to see what they are doing and what makes sense and what doesn't. But that should just be a reference check as opposed to sort of turning your mission into oh, what do I do in reaction to competition. And in our case it particularly makes sense to do that because it's a big market and several of us will make it and that's okay, that's good.
