Kyle Vogt picked his next startup using three filters: problems that need deep technical work, direct positive impact like healthcare or self-driving cars, and potential to scale. He committed to a 10-year horizon, assessed Google's self-driving project as the main competitor, and founded Cruise.
Chapters
Twitch was and is today pretty successful. But the result was entertainment mostly. Like, the better the product was, the more we would entertain people and then, you know, make money on the ad revenues and other things. 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 and developing these skills other than, you know, 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 a new 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, you certainly, I think, raise the bar on what you choose to work on. So for me the three things were 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 a large scale scale. Yeah. And I was thinking about that for a while and I made like, I tried writing a Gmail clone and looked at some other idea and then it just sort of light bulb went off like self driving cars. That was the most fun I had ever had in college working on that. And like, well, what's the state of the technology? It's 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 the probably the greatest applied AI problem of our generation. And 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 and got to work.
