Podcast Interview: Waymo Founder Sebastian Thrun

Episode Summary

Sebastian Thrun, the founder of Waymo and Udacity, recalls that in 2009, having just sold a company to Google, he was visited in his cubicle by Larry Page, who proposed building a self-driving car company for ordinary people in cities. Sebastian, whose robotic vehicle had won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, told Page flatly that it could not be done and was too dangerous. Page kept coming back for several days, eventually asking Sebastian to simply write down the technical reasons it was impossible so Page could explain the decision to Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt. Sebastian could not find one. That failure to object became the birth of Project Chauffeur, which later became Waymo.

Sebastian is candid that the same expertise that made him credible almost stopped Waymo from existing, and he carried that lesson into how he built the team. He hired an automotive expert early on who insisted the whole codebase be rewritten to match an existing industry norm, and Sebastian fired him for it. He staffed the project instead with former students and postdocs he already trusted, choosing people for their willingness to learn over their credentials.

On decision-making itself, Sebastian estimates that roughly eighty percent of the decisions made while building something new are not perfect, and that even successful companies would rebuild themselves five times faster with the benefit of hindsight. His answer is a decision system built around ownership rather than command: whoever owns a decision has to bring the right people into the room, reach a consensus, then document and freeze the decision so it cannot be quietly reopened. Once a decision is delegated further down, the original owner becomes an advisor rather than a boss. He credits a conversation with Jeff Bezos, who called himself Amazon’s “chief slowdown officer” because the next seven quarters were already locked in and he could only really influence the eighth quarter and beyond, with reshaping how he thinks about a leader’s actual span of control.

Sebastian says he long ago tried to abandon two emotions, fear and guilt, because they hold people back. For skeptics, he recommends two weekly experiments: a “no-grump Tuesday,” when you say yes to ideas instead of picking them apart, and a “no-complaint Thursday,” when you treat anything that goes wrong as something you might have prevented. He also points to Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which he calls his all-time favorite book and is now reading for the fourth time, and its lesson that leaders have to understand what their people really want.

What You’ll Learn

Pick problems you are not yet an expert in: Sebastian deliberately chooses work he’s bad at, because experts know the past of a field, not its future.

Experiment with AI yourself: Sebastian says today’s AI mostly makes existing businesses more efficient, the real transformation will come when AI combines with fields like crypto, cybersecurity, and robotics, and leaders should start by building with it hands-on.

People rarely leave over pay, Sebastian says: almost everyone wants more respect, dignity, ownership, and development, so connect what people want for themselves to what is good for the company.

Build on people’s strengths instead of fixing their weaknesses, Sebastian says, because people who feel supported in their strengths and passions perform better in every dimension.

Trust your instincts but test your ideas: borrowing from Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Sebastian says the big goal is usually right even when the steps you pick are wrong, so test ideas quickly and drop the ones that fail.

Treat leadership as engineering an organization, Sebastian says: everyone in it works for both the company and themselves, so find what people want and tie it to what is good for the company and the world.

About Sebastian Thrun

Sebastian Thrun is the founder of Waymo, the current market leader in autonomous driving in the United States, which grew out of a Google self-driving car project he helped start in 2009 as Project Chauffeur. He grew up in West Germany and earned his PhD in computer science and statistics from the University of Bonn, drawn to the field because it let him fully understand and build systems in a way other disciplines could not. Before Waymo, he led development of Stanley, the Stanford robotic vehicle that won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. He also co-founded Udacity, and he has long believed that computers should be trained rather than programmed.

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