In 2012, Kentley-Klay stumbled on a blog post about Google’s self-driving car project, then pretty much the only one in the field. He saw the company’s prototypes as unsightly half-measures.. Then, one day, he walked into his Melbourne office (animation, video production) and announced he was off to America to fulfill his driverless dreams.
In a move that some will call devious and others will call ingenious, Kentley-Klay reached out to some of the biggest names in the field and told them he was making a documentary on the rise of self-driving cars. The plan was to mine these people for information and feel out potential partners. His first “interviewee” was Sterling Anderson, then a robotics researcher at MIT and later Tesla Inc.’s self-driving car chief. “I played the oldest trick in the director’s book: the vanity card,” Kentley-Klay says. “I showed up at MIT with a Canon and a bullshit microphone and interviewed Sterling for two hours in a grassy field..."
This reminds me how shoemaker Kenneth Cole started, who also used "making a film" as a cover story:
> Wanting to preview his line of shoes at Market Week at the New York Hilton, but unable to afford the purchase of a hotel room or showroom to display his items, Kenneth Cole inquired about parking a trailer two blocks from the Hilton Hotel. Upon discovering that permits for trailers were only granted to utility and production companies, Cole changed the name of his company from Kenneth Cole Incorporated to Kenneth Cole Productions, and applied for a permit to film the full-length film, "The Birth of a Shoe Company". In two and a half days, Kenneth Cole Productions sold forty thousand pairs of shoes, while chronicling the beginning of the company on film. [1]
Which is why it's still called Kenneth Cole "Productions" to this day.
The sale was a distressed sale. Their earlier valuation was over thrice the acquisition price, so a $1B exit was not the intended outcome, and probably leaves many investors/employees underwater depending on liquidity preferences.
"You always seem to play the vulture @Kvogt
— we all know the @cruise
Origin’s origin is @zoox
. While flattered, you do make a valid point in seeking the best: Zoox engineers are better than yours, and soon better funded :)"
Wow that's pretty funny, but what's the context for that tweet? Did Cruise try to poach talent from Zoox ? The tweet definitely gives me an early 2000's Dotcom over the top rivalry/ceo vibe!
Unfortunately, if you look at his pattern of behaviour, it's probably entirely untrue. It's most likely something he thought would be a good story to tell. It's an exploitation of the silicon valley game - since everyone else is embellishing their stories and achievements you can just make things up entirely and pay no price for it.
Even the Obama-Os story is 90% fake, the story PG tells (and is repeated) is not even close to the story that the founder himself told on a startup podcast
Zoox raised almost a billion so terrible exit for the investors, who basically just parked their money for several years. Zoox likely ran out of money and nobody wants to keep dumping money in this space given the anemic progress in the last couple of years.
But here is an interesting take. Amazon is an formidable acquirer and probably the only big-tech that knows how to squeeze from their M&A activity.
They probably saw this years ahead. Many companies were going to develop technology in this space and it was likely better to acquire one of those than to develop in-house. And the reason is very simple: Amazon doesn’t invest in greenfield projects that are not customer facing. Look it up. Almost all the behind the scenes impressive tech they have was acquired at certain time.
For example. AWS proprietary chips come from their acquisition of Annapurna Labs.
All their warehouse robotics come from their acquisition of Kiva Systems.
All their modern video tech comes from their acquisition of Elemental.
Their customer facing acquisitions also play a similar playbook but in a more -fill the market gap- kind of way. “We need a supermarket, let’s buy Whole Foods”.
“We need routers for the Alexa ecosystem, let’s buy Eero”.
Also kind of interesting that they are an opportunistic buyer (almost vulturous) that most of the times only pulls the trigger when the acquisition target is in their lows.
> Amazon doesn’t invest in greenfield projects that are not customer facing
I don't think this is very true, they are just very good at turning around and selling the internal tech.
The underlying technology for AWS was developed internally and it was not customer facing at first.
Similarly if you look at their internal data platforms, they have invested heavily even though it's not customer facing (yet, because eventually they will start selling services inspired by the internal systems via AWS).
I remember watching a presentation on how they invested large amounts of money into prototyping FC robotics technologies.
If you look at AWS Kinesis or EventBridge, the technologies were developed for internal usage before they were sold. There is also considerable investment into distributed consensus technologies that hasn't been turned directly into products (yet).
You're kind of right in that Amazon doesn't spend much time working on greenfield projects that don't have any forseeable business value (in contrast to say Google), but that is in many way a product of their organizational structure where two-pizza teams are supposed to do 'research' as part of their product work rather than having a pure R&D division.
Wasn't there an edict that amazon internal services have to be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. So even internal technology is designed with being customer facing in mind.
> Also kind of interesting that they are an opportunistic buyer (almost vulturous) that most of the times only pulls the trigger when the acquisition target is in their lows.
Unsurprising since Bezos himself worked in a Hedge fund. The Autonomous Driving hype train is slowing down, so this is the perfect opportunity for this move.
Interestingly, with this move, Bezos can soon rival Musk for the next 'billionaire super genius rock star' position.
> The Autonomous Driving hype train is slowing down, so this is the perfect opportunity for this move.
Zoox in particular was a LARP of an autonomous driving company. Until any of these companies start manufacturing, they’re literally LARPing. At least Tesla shipped an actual product.
>Amazon is an formidable acquirer and probably the only big-tech that knows how to squeeze from their M&A activity.
Not really sure how you're using "squeeze" here, but Instagram and Whatsapp were both, with the benefit of hindsight, phenomenally successful acquisitions.
I agree with you. Instagram was an excellent acquisition. WhatsApp was an OK acquisition, not because is not a great product or good ecosystem play, but mostly because it came at a premium price and it hasn't been monetized yet.
That’s customer facing. Read my comment again. I’m talking about non-customer facing / utilitarian technology that is used to facilitate their customer facing services and products.
I work in an office that shares space with Zoox. I've never told anyone this but I find them incredibly annoying.
Whenever they take their cars out for a test drive, they sit in the middle of the road in the parking lots. If you aren't going to be driving around anytime soon, just pull into a parking spot, instead of blocking all the empty spots and making it more difficult for people to drive around you.
I had the displeasure of meeting the Zoom executive team at their booth at CVPR some years back. They were cocky, sized me up, and completely ignored me and acted like I didnt exist. This all happened after I told them which Department at UCBerkeley I was studying at (which apparently did not meet their standards.)
I've been on booth duty and sales duty before and you should never snub people like this - ever. It is hurtful and people remember it, I remember it still so many years back. There are always more graceful ways of doing things.
Sorry that happened to you. You never know who people are or where they will end up, and everyone has value and should be treated with respect. I have had similar things happen to me at conferences.
nit: You should edit this and change Zoom to Zoox before the edit window closes.
Even if they are deliberately parked there, I don't think the fact that they are owned by Zoox makes any difference to the ego vehicle. It's likely they did it just to introduce this scenario predictably during the videoshoot. They could have used non-autonomous vehicles for the same purpose but arguably with more credibility.
I lived along one of the Zoox test routes in the North Beach neighborhood of SF. My corner (Filbert and Grant) was also a tourist hot-spot to get up to Coit Tower with families, segway tours, and other meanderers being common place.
Suffice it to say that I don't think self-driving car tech is ready for city streets. Zoox never put anyone in harms way, but damn did it hold up traffic if there was an "out of place" person.
Self-driving tech may be close to cruise control 2.0 - that is highway exit to highway exit navigation - but I have yet to see a self driving car handle a city street with actual people on it.
>Self-driving tech may be close to cruise control 2.0 - that is highway exit to highway exit navigation
This is why the main first application of autonomous driving is going to be long haul trucking.
The current regulations about duty time for humans in long haul trucking create inefficiencies. Now imagine that there are facilities just off of highway on- and off-ramps where truck drivers hang out. The autonomous vehicle pulls off the highway into a lot. A human then gets in and guides the truck to it's final destination.
Truck drivers get an immediate lifestyle increase (no more multiple days on the road, having to sleep in the truck, etc), labor costs drop dramatically, and travel times for cross country trips also drop dramatically.
The driver market for CDL truck drivers will turn into the "harbor pilot" model they have for large ships.
SOME truck drivers (the ones that keep their jobs) will get a lifestyle "increase" because it will be local, but demand will drop substantially.
Even so, these "lifestyle increase" jobs would only exist until autonomous driving gets better. Even if that's two decades it's not something you'd want to rely on as an occupation.
Not saying it's the wrong way to go - it absolutely is the right way to move logistics forward - but there will be significant impacts in a country where "Truck driver" is one of the top jobs in just about every state that can't be explained away with "lifestyle improvement"
I was watching an interesting video about this the other day [1] which suggested that one approach might also be a convoy of trucks, where the first one has a driver (even though it may be driving autonomously on the highway) followed by several autonomous trucks. The human driver can handle bad road conditions, mechanical problems, etc. It seems like a logical step on the way to fully autonomous, and significantly increases the capacity of freight per driver.
Well, I assume they err on the side of caution "too much". Sensible guidelines would be for self-driving cars to be approved by regulatory guidelines when they cause less accidents (and less severe at that) on average. But currently a single accident could cost a company its license to test on public roads, and that is basically a death sentence.
This isn't a good outcome for Zoox, which raised its Series B at a $3.2B post-money valuation in July 2018. The company also raised ~$200M of debt in 2019 and nearly $1B in total funding. Meaning it's likely only investors will get paid out for this $1B exit.
Employees do get their wages, but most were probably working on depressed wages in lieu of equity compensation -- which will now be zero. Further, if anyone left/laidoff, and they forcibly exercised options due to windows, they are underwater.
These guys are supposedly launching their ride hailing fleet this year on public roads.
"unorthodox entrepreneurial zeal of Kentley-Klay, an Australian native with no prior automotive experience." was the key mover on all this and "touted Zoox’s strategy of building its own vehicles for full autonomy as wiser than the standard approach of retrofitting existing cars that Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo and others are taking."
Their CEO did attack silicon valley for choosing the path of fear "at the expense of profound progress for the Universe."
Heady stuff! Will be very interesting to see their launch if all this talk pans out! Full new vehicle assembly from scratch PLUS autonomy! Very impressive.
That's kind of funny. Have they decided where they will be building their cars? Normally those types of announcements (new car plant) will get big coverage.
What’s the logic of them selling to Amazon? Why didn’t they just continue on and try to raise more money? I assume this was purely a move of desperation and they couldn’t. Is this just a full blown acquihire?
Also, what happens to employees? Presumably, their stock is worthless. Will Amazon just give them all new stock packages to keep them on?
They sold for what they raised so it's a loser for investors.
Likely they didn't have a business model and so were a fire sale.
Amazon will almost assuredly eye this for autonomous delivery. They have the cash, the legit need, the ambition ability to make it work. So it can be commercialised 'internally'.
Unlike Google who have to build a business around their self-driving cars.
This is one of those 'tech may eat the world' things that should legit scare FedEx because I doubt FedEx will be able to compete on terms like this.
Readit News
In 2012, Kentley-Klay stumbled on a blog post about Google’s self-driving car project, then pretty much the only one in the field. He saw the company’s prototypes as unsightly half-measures.. Then, one day, he walked into his Melbourne office (animation, video production) and announced he was off to America to fulfill his driverless dreams.
In a move that some will call devious and others will call ingenious, Kentley-Klay reached out to some of the biggest names in the field and told them he was making a documentary on the rise of self-driving cars. The plan was to mine these people for information and feel out potential partners. His first “interviewee” was Sterling Anderson, then a robotics researcher at MIT and later Tesla Inc.’s self-driving car chief. “I played the oldest trick in the director’s book: the vanity card,” Kentley-Klay says. “I showed up at MIT with a Canon and a bullshit microphone and interviewed Sterling for two hours in a grassy field..."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-17/robot-tax...
> Wanting to preview his line of shoes at Market Week at the New York Hilton, but unable to afford the purchase of a hotel room or showroom to display his items, Kenneth Cole inquired about parking a trailer two blocks from the Hilton Hotel. Upon discovering that permits for trailers were only granted to utility and production companies, Cole changed the name of his company from Kenneth Cole Incorporated to Kenneth Cole Productions, and applied for a permit to film the full-length film, "The Birth of a Shoe Company". In two and a half days, Kenneth Cole Productions sold forty thousand pairs of shoes, while chronicling the beginning of the company on film. [1]
Which is why it's still called Kenneth Cole "Productions" to this day.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Cole_(designer)#Birth_...
I gave up on the first four...
https://twitter.com/TimKentleyKlay/status/126933132126166630...
For one, I'm glad to live in a world where those kind of things still exist.
Lying your way to success?
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But here is an interesting take. Amazon is an formidable acquirer and probably the only big-tech that knows how to squeeze from their M&A activity.
They probably saw this years ahead. Many companies were going to develop technology in this space and it was likely better to acquire one of those than to develop in-house. And the reason is very simple: Amazon doesn’t invest in greenfield projects that are not customer facing. Look it up. Almost all the behind the scenes impressive tech they have was acquired at certain time.
For example. AWS proprietary chips come from their acquisition of Annapurna Labs. All their warehouse robotics come from their acquisition of Kiva Systems.
All their modern video tech comes from their acquisition of Elemental.
Their customer facing acquisitions also play a similar playbook but in a more -fill the market gap- kind of way. “We need a supermarket, let’s buy Whole Foods”. “We need routers for the Alexa ecosystem, let’s buy Eero”.
Also kind of interesting that they are an opportunistic buyer (almost vulturous) that most of the times only pulls the trigger when the acquisition target is in their lows.
I don't think this is very true, they are just very good at turning around and selling the internal tech.
The underlying technology for AWS was developed internally and it was not customer facing at first.
Similarly if you look at their internal data platforms, they have invested heavily even though it's not customer facing (yet, because eventually they will start selling services inspired by the internal systems via AWS).
I remember watching a presentation on how they invested large amounts of money into prototyping FC robotics technologies.
If you look at AWS Kinesis or EventBridge, the technologies were developed for internal usage before they were sold. There is also considerable investment into distributed consensus technologies that hasn't been turned directly into products (yet).
You're kind of right in that Amazon doesn't spend much time working on greenfield projects that don't have any forseeable business value (in contrast to say Google), but that is in many way a product of their organizational structure where two-pizza teams are supposed to do 'research' as part of their product work rather than having a pure R&D division.
Will this myth ever die?
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-...
Unsurprising since Bezos himself worked in a Hedge fund. The Autonomous Driving hype train is slowing down, so this is the perfect opportunity for this move.
Interestingly, with this move, Bezos can soon rival Musk for the next 'billionaire super genius rock star' position.
Zoox in particular was a LARP of an autonomous driving company. Until any of these companies start manufacturing, they’re literally LARPing. At least Tesla shipped an actual product.
Not really sure how you're using "squeeze" here, but Instagram and Whatsapp were both, with the benefit of hindsight, phenomenally successful acquisitions.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-ivona/amazon-buys-...
>Amazon to acquire Yap, move into speech recognition?
https://www.theverge.com/2011/11/9/2550764/amazon-acquires-y...
>Amazon has reportedly acquired Evi for voice-guided search
https://www.engadget.com/2013-04-17-amazon-may-have-quietly-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evi_(software)
Whenever they take their cars out for a test drive, they sit in the middle of the road in the parking lots. If you aren't going to be driving around anytime soon, just pull into a parking spot, instead of blocking all the empty spots and making it more difficult for people to drive around you.
I've been on booth duty and sales duty before and you should never snub people like this - ever. It is hurtful and people remember it, I remember it still so many years back. There are always more graceful ways of doing things.
nit: You should edit this and change Zoom to Zoox before the edit window closes.
https://youtu.be/6r7vDhPXmiM?t=1212
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Suffice it to say that I don't think self-driving car tech is ready for city streets. Zoox never put anyone in harms way, but damn did it hold up traffic if there was an "out of place" person.
Self-driving tech may be close to cruise control 2.0 - that is highway exit to highway exit navigation - but I have yet to see a self driving car handle a city street with actual people on it.
This is why the main first application of autonomous driving is going to be long haul trucking.
The current regulations about duty time for humans in long haul trucking create inefficiencies. Now imagine that there are facilities just off of highway on- and off-ramps where truck drivers hang out. The autonomous vehicle pulls off the highway into a lot. A human then gets in and guides the truck to it's final destination.
Truck drivers get an immediate lifestyle increase (no more multiple days on the road, having to sleep in the truck, etc), labor costs drop dramatically, and travel times for cross country trips also drop dramatically.
The driver market for CDL truck drivers will turn into the "harbor pilot" model they have for large ships.
Even so, these "lifestyle increase" jobs would only exist until autonomous driving gets better. Even if that's two decades it's not something you'd want to rely on as an occupation.
Not saying it's the wrong way to go - it absolutely is the right way to move logistics forward - but there will be significant impacts in a country where "Truck driver" is one of the top jobs in just about every state that can't be explained away with "lifestyle improvement"
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlPrAKtegFQ
These guys are supposedly launching their ride hailing fleet this year on public roads.
"unorthodox entrepreneurial zeal of Kentley-Klay, an Australian native with no prior automotive experience." was the key mover on all this and "touted Zoox’s strategy of building its own vehicles for full autonomy as wiser than the standard approach of retrofitting existing cars that Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo and others are taking."
Their CEO did attack silicon valley for choosing the path of fear "at the expense of profound progress for the Universe."
Heady stuff! Will be very interesting to see their launch if all this talk pans out! Full new vehicle assembly from scratch PLUS autonomy! Very impressive.
I mean, this a bad prognostic sign if there ever was one in an engineering company.
Whether or not Zoox is a bust from the investors perspective, the synergy with Amazon seems obvious.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/19/20873947/amazon-electric-...
Also, what happens to employees? Presumably, their stock is worthless. Will Amazon just give them all new stock packages to keep them on?
Likely they didn't have a business model and so were a fire sale.
Amazon will almost assuredly eye this for autonomous delivery. They have the cash, the legit need, the ambition ability to make it work. So it can be commercialised 'internally'.
Unlike Google who have to build a business around their self-driving cars.
This is one of those 'tech may eat the world' things that should legit scare FedEx because I doubt FedEx will be able to compete on terms like this.
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