Right from the start of Nuro, we were adamant that we wanted to build a company where the very best people in the world could come do the very best work of their career. I think you could critically look back on this industry and say what happened to the promise of fully self-driving vehicles that was made a decade ago. We're now at the point where integrating this into a personally owned vehicle we believe is very, very doable from a cost perspective.
Dave Ferguson is co-founder and co-CEO of Nuro, a physical AI company bringing scalable self-driving to robo taxis, commercial fleets, and personally owned vehicles. Before founding Nuro in 2016, he was a principal engineer at Google self-driving program, now known as Waymo, leading teams in computer vision, machine learning, behavior prediction, and scene understanding. He also led the planning group for Carnegie Mellon's winning team in the 2007 DARPA Urban Grand Challenge. Dave, how are you doing today?
Great. Wow, you went way back with that bio, Harry. Good to see you.
Sometimes I just look at my notes. I'm not sure where these bios came from, who came up with them, and if it sounds good, I just roll with it.
Sounds good. I just sound old, which is fine. Which is fine.
Well, luckily for those watching on YouTube, you do look young for someone who's been in the industry for 15 years. And I also saw that Nuro just celebrated a milestone, 10-year anniversary. Honestly, I didn't realize it'd been that long. So would love, you know, maybe take a quick look back on the last decade. Is there anything that stood out to you or did time fly, you know, as much as it did for others as it did for you?
Yeah, honestly it's hard to believe it's been 10 years, Harry. I mean the startup journey has been absolutely a labor of love. It has not been easy. But it has also been the most rewarding career journey that I've ever had. I would say, you know, there's a few things that have stood out to us over this journey. And my co-founder Jiajun and I spoke a little bit about this at our 10-year anniversary party, which was a couple weeks ago.
One thing that has remained pretty consistent is right from the start of Nuro, we were adamant that we wanted to build a company where the very best people in the world could come do the very best work of their career. And I think we both feel very, very proud that 10 years later, we can look back and say that we genuinely think that's the case. We've had the blessing of having an unbelievable team throughout every stage of the journey.
And that has made it both incredibly inspiring showing up to work every day and made us feel very blessed honestly to have so many amazing people give some or many years of their lives to this mission alongside us.
Yeah. So definitely inspiring to kind of have, you know, a cohort of teammates and, you know, folks that you work with, a co-founder who you like you said have known for 15 years. You guys obviously, you know, still like each other because you're still going strong. But, you know, I'm kind of thinking about like I feel like there's been a number of executive CEOs of AV companies that have been in the industry for 10 to 15 years. A lot, you know, as you, you know, got their start at Google, you know, Google self-driving car project. So, I don't know, is it the industry or is it the topic or the tech? What do you think keeps, you know, yourself and others going and is there a WhatsApp group for all of you guys who have 10 years plus?
Therapy. Group therapy. Group therapy for all us. I think it's a problem that keeps on giving in both a very good sense and in a challenging sense, right? I mean, I think you could critically look back on this industry and say what happened to the promise of fully self-driving vehicles that was made a decade ago. You know, where are we relative to that? And it feels like we're a little bit behind certainly what most of us expected 10, 15 years ago. I think in order to work and to dedicate much of your career to a space and a problem like this, I think you have to have a pretty strong optimistic bent, right? Because you're taking on a problem that's never been solved before. And so I do think that you have to be somewhat optimistic in nature that you can solve a problem that hasn't been solved. And I think that ends up coloring a little bit some of the expectations and timelines of hey once we solve this obviously we'll be able to scale it immediately. And I think the reality is that it's taken a bit longer but those of us that have been in the space for a long, long time are in it because we are deeply, deeply passionate about the impact that this will have. None of that has changed. So, you know, it's taken a little bit longer, but now we're really right at the finish line, at the inflection point where we're going to start to see some of this enormous potential being realized.
And I think we don't want to miss that. So, I think there's a good reason why a lot of us that have been around for a while continue to stick around while we're able.
Yeah. No, that's cool because I think in general, you know, working at any company or any industry for that long is impressive and especially one that is this challenging but sounds like quite rewarding. So, luckily I get to sit in the cheap seats and just observe and comment and chat with you. So excited to, you know, dig into a lot of those topics. I think you foreshadowed many topics that we're going to cover today. And I kind of wanted to start, you mentioned your co-founder, Jiajun. You guys are co-CEOs. I guess Waymo actually copied you guys on the co-CEO thing because you've been doing that for a while, but how does that setup actually work? What are your kind of roles and responsibilities there?
Yeah. Well, so technically Waymo, Teedra and Dmitri became co-CEOs before Jiajun and I were CEOs on paper. But I would say effectively since we started, failed me on my research, ever since, once in a while it does that. We can come back to sort of the recall of LLMs versus autonomous driving later but we've effectively been running the company as very, very close partners and co-CEO since day one. The reason that we made the shift on paper from me being technically president and him being CEO to being co-CEOs was that a couple years ago we realized as we were starting to sign some of these pretty massive partnerships like the Uber one, which I'm sure we'll talk about, there was some additional leverage that we believed we'd get from having two CEOs effectively. I think in general that's a very risky proposition and a good reason why a lot of companies don't do it is because it adds complexity, some confusion of who's actually in charge and that relationship, obviously the CEO role is so, so important that if you're splitting that and you're introducing a relationship between two people as part of the risks of that title that's a lot of risk to add. I think in our case, we have worked together for so long and we are so close and have only gotten closer and I would say love each other more through this journey that we had a huge amount of confidence that we were going to be able to do this basically just to continue to operate the way we had together.
And so that has actually worked out really well for us. You know, one of the things that you get as a founder in general, Harry, is leverage. You know, you get some, there's some additional value that I think you're able to bring that's almost unfair to a company that is not about your capabilities, but it's about the fact that you have been there forever and that this company, everyone recognizes this company is a child for you and that you're going to care as much or more than anyone else. And that is something that if you're able to hold on to and take advantage of, it can provide value. It can provide value in relationships and partnerships. People know that the commitments that you make are not going anywhere. There's not going to be any sort of changing of the guard from a founder to not being involved and caring about the company in whatever capacity they're in. So, you know, similar to that leverage that you can get from the founder role, we saw a sort of similar amount of leverage we could get if we had two CEOs. And so far, it's worked out great.
Yeah. No, I definitely like the sort of reasoning and the personal relationship that the two of you have. It's sort of not something you can take lightly, it sounds like, to do the co-CEO, but if it does work, you're able to take advantage of the leverage and some other opportunities. And, you know, one thing I guess I noticed from both of your backgrounds seems like more technical based background for both of you where as, you know, with other companies there might be a technical CEO and a business CEO. So tell me a little bit about, I know even though you guys are both technical, what do you work on? What do you focus on on your day-to-day? For example,
Yes, great question and you're right, both of us come from predominantly a technical background. I spent a little bit of time in finance but it was still very technical. I did high-speed machine learning for a quantitative hedge fund in New York, which gave me a pretty good crash course in finance and the markets. Which has been more useful than I expected at that time.
Be ready when you go public. Is that what you're saying?
That's right. Moving back into robotics. So today it's evolved a bit over time, Harry. And in general, we both try to sort of jump on whatever needs the most attention. But today all of the tech organization rolls up to Jiajun as does people and product and then I would say more of the commercial business sides. So, partnerships, finance, legal, regulatory, policy, that rolls up through me.
Now, we're both still very involved in almost every really substantial decision that needs to get made, which is great. But otherwise there is that technical breakdown across the orgs.
Got it. Makes sense. Cool. And I mean I guess would you say that, you know, I want to dive into the partnership. My last question I guess on the structure because I think it's very unique and seems to have served you well so far. Would you say that the kind of technical piece and the business piece of running an AV company like Nuro today, is there one that's harder than the other? Is it 50/50? Where do you think the, you know, general KPIs or focus of the team is at right now?
You know, I would say that our philosophy or one of the sort of core principles that we've tried to maintain as a company is that, I mean what we're building is tremendously hard from a technical perspective. So when we think about road map and risks, I would say the entire company outside of autonomy is trying to make sure that they are not the long pole, that they are not the biggest risk for the company either in terms of things that need to get done prior to a launch or being able to fund the rest of the organization and to fund autonomy. And then autonomy is trying to make sure that they're not the long pole by very much. So I think that in building a product like this, it's obviously a herculean technical task. You know, we're building stuff and solving technical problems that were never solved before like when we started the company 10 years ago for sure.
But it is also a massive, massive challenge to pull together all the partners, the ecosystem. You're building a safety critical product. There's hardware involved, real world assets and depots and safety and regulators and communities and the public trust and that's what makes it amazing. You know, going back to your original question of why are there so many gray beards that have been in this space for so long, Harry, I think that, you know, it is a very, very challenging but very rewarding entire ecosystem of a problem. And when we get it right, it's going to be a pretty phenomenal product and service that genuinely will really improve people's lives. And that's why we're in it and that's what we remain excited about 10 years later.
Definitely. No, sounds like a lot of opportunity and challenges and I can see why you've been at the company for 10 years. If I could hold down a real job, you're almost inspiring me to go look at Nuro's job board and see what openings there are. But I haven't had a real job. You know, I haven't had a real job in 12 years, so I probably wouldn't be a good fit. But in that 12 years, you know, I've obviously met a lot of people in the industry. I was excited about a year ago to have one of my old Uber friends Andrew Chapin who's your COO now on the podcast about a year ago and we talked all about the Uber Lucid Nuro partnership that was announced then. So maybe for our audience who, you know, hasn't listened to that episode or hasn't been around since then, why don't you remind us of what makes Nuro's approach to autonomous vehicles unique and then kind of maybe give an update on the status of the product and where you guys are at today.
Yeah, absolutely. So, we are building a universal autonomy system and our goal is to really focus on the driving part and so we build reference hardware in terms of the sensors, the compute, the eyes, ears and brains that would go onto a quote unquote normal vehicle.
And then we work with our partners to integrate that into a vehicle, but we focus mostly on the autonomous software. So, basically the driving capability that goes on it. So the relationship that we have with Uber and Lucid is a really good example and one that, you know, has in some ways formed a blueprint for other partnerships that Uber has subsequently gone to do. So in that relationship we help provide the core Nuro driver hardware design which is all the sensors and compute. We work with Lucid to integrate that and to design the integration of that into their Lucid Gravity platform, which is a consumer vehicle that you can buy. Jiajun, my co-founder, has one of them. And then Lucid does all of that integration on their production line and what rolls off at the end is an L4 capable from a hardware perspective vehicle. Uber then buys a bunch of these vehicles and latest is, you know, up to sort of 35,000 of this plus the next generation and then Uber owns and operates them. So Uber handles all of the depots, the charging, the maintenance, whatnot. Uber also handles the app and the consumer side. So you or I can use our Uber app and get one of these vehicles. And as these vehicles drive and operate on the Uber network, Nuro is compensated through, you can think of it as effectively like a per mile rate. So as the vehicles drive, the AI driver gets paid some revenue.
And what we find really compelling about that setup is that it genuinely allows each party to focus on what they are best at.
Right? So in a previous, you know, iteration of Nuro maybe like 5 years ago we were doing the full vertical custom vehicles for goods and really owning and operating and providing the entire service but that involved us taking on a lot of stuff that we certainly weren't world class in at the time and we were willing to invest to get there. But today Uber manages operations something that they are perhaps best in the world at doing. Lucid builds amazing vehicles and Nuro works on the autonomy side and so it feels like a really nice marriage of how the ecosystem can come together to build what we hope is going to be an absolutely phenomenal product.
Yeah. Yeah. When I put my startup hat on and whenever I see people tackling like two really big problems, I always think that's challenging, right? When you're building an autonomy system, okay, everyone says that can't be done. That could be a startup. And then you're also building out a new vehicle company. Okay, Tesla is the only new vehicle company that's come around in the past 10 or 20 years. So, you're also doing another very, very hard problem and now let's try both of them, right? I mean, I guess obviously, you know, it's very ambitious. And do you sort of feel like the industry is trending towards this type of specialization? Is it just you? Because this is obviously Uber's pitch to AV operators and partners that they're really good at the items you mentioned. You know, if you're an AV operator and you're really great at software like Nuro, come and build that software layer with us.
You know, I think for sure over time we're going to see specialization. I think it's what we end up seeing across almost all mature industries. And so even if a company is technically taking on the umbrella of the entire vertical operations, I think they're inevitably going to be working with partners that end up taking on big pieces of that. And I think that just makes sense again like folks being able to really, really focus on the things that they are best at and scale and operate with multiple partners and so on. So I definitely think that we'll see that and we've already started to see that even with Waymo and Uber and their existing operations, right? Where there are partners that take on depots, there are partners, you know, rental car companies that are doing bits of it. And so we think that that's the right way. Going back to something you mentioned about focus in general, Harry, you know, I do think as a startup, you have to really exploit every advantage you have because goodness knows there are some advantages you don't relative to big companies. You know, you don't have massive balance sheets and you don't have perhaps existing high revenue businesses that can sort of subsidize your growth. But what you do have is the ability to focus. And that really in my mind has to be a superpower for a startup. And it reminds me a little bit of one of Steve Jobs's quotes about how it's more fun to be a pirate ship than the Navy. You know, the ability to focus and move quickly and really be incredibly determined to get one thing really, really right and make sure that that's the right thing. I think that has been a very key principle for us over time.
Yeah. And I think one thing you mentioned around Nuro's approach was the software piece. I mean, I guess talk to me a little bit about the software versus hardware because I guess I thought of Nuro as, you know, this kind of hardware software combination system. You know, I was ready to ask you, okay, what's in the hardware stack? Do you sort of see that more as on Lucid or, you know, future vehicle manufacturer partners that side? You guys are just the software. Obviously, they're very tied in, but how do you think about the two?
