Driverless Startup Zoox Suddenly Removes CEO | Hacker News Reader

Driverless Startup Zoox Suddenly Removes CEO

bloomberg.com

120 pointskuusisto48 comments

The story that came out earlier this summer in Bloomberg was pure HBO Silicon Valley-esque hyperbole -> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-17/robot-tax...

The degree I take a company seriously is inversely related to the hype spewed by these articles (see pre 10/2015 Theranos press)

But hype is part of the culture. I mean, there's a company whose motto was "do no evil".

I hate to be that guy, but it was “don’t be evil” not “do no evil”.

Basically meant “don’t be like Microsoft” back in those days.

Very different meaning than people often assume, and not about hype. More about not letting success get to your head and using it to crush everyone else.

Glad that worked out, right? *this post best viewed in Google Chrome

Companies change over time. Microsoft also isn't the same "evil empire" it was in the late '90s and early '00s.

> "Rather than working through the issues in an epic startup for the win, the board chose the path of fear,"

Is this a real person or a Markov chain trained on internet memes and Chicken Soup for the Soul books?

Board should've chosen the path of love: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vivEzQUGHOQ

"Without a warning, cause or right of reply the board fired me".. There is more from Tim Kentley's twitter: https://twitter.com/TimKentleyKlay

He just posted a bunch of messages he got from his team at Zoox. Seems like a lot of employees really liked him and his leadership.

"Kentley-Klay, 43, is an improbable entrant into the crowded race to develop self-driving cars. He has no engineering degree, no background in computer science. Through his early 30s, he was a successful artist and designer—creating music videos and ads for major companies like McDonald’s and Birds Eye frozen vegetables."

https://www.forbes.com/feature/zoox-autonomous-cars-taxis/#1...

"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."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-17/robot-tax...

The whole thing seems insane to me. I don't understand why you would fund someone with no tech or business background... I'm sure he hired some good people, but it still doesn't make sense.

As to why the investors booted him? Investors generally don't kick out the CEO unless they did something crazy. It doesn't look good for the investor, and it makes it investment look bad (and follow on investment less likely).

Tim has lots of experience in business and tech. From scratch he built a self driving car company valued at $3.2 billion, whose autonomous OS is outperforming efforts from major automakers and tech companies and with a fraction of the resources. Zoox has gotten to where they are now on about $300 million. Others have spent far more and have a lot less to show for it.

Your comment history suggests that you have some relationship with Zoox that you're not disclosing.

You've commented on Zoox several times before in an overly enthusiastic manner. You've also commented several times before on autonomy and your comments have been called out for astroturfing in a couple of instances.

Readers please beware and take this comment with a grain of salt.

I've been accused of working for Waymo and Cruise too, because I defend them against the unfounded bullshit you guys spread about them. And about me, too, apparently. I'm a self driving car nerd, I moderate a subreddit dedicated to the subject under the same username I have here, and I've been following the industry, the technology and it's players since the DARPA days. Relative to the rest of the industry Zoox is doing incredibly well, so if you want to challenge me about something, how about instead of making up teleological conspiracy theories, challenge me on the facts.

I'm interested in the facts of what they're doing so well - do they have deployed systems taking passenger rides? This is/was my industry, so I'm not just asking idly.

As an aside, the lack of clarity about who you do work for is probably what's contributing to the "teleological conspiracy theories".

Zoox did several years of closed course testing and started on public roads in San Fransisco about 1 year ago with just 10 cars. Last fall they did a press event and took a few dozen journalists around for rides and everyone had good things to say about the performance of their vehicles. Their first set of disengagement reports for 2017 had them at 1 every 430 miles, which is worse than Waymo or Cruise, but way ahead of everyone else, and especially impressive given how few test miles they had racked up at the time. It lends credibility to the claims some have made that Jesse Levinson is the brightest guy in the industry.

Ashley Vance for Bloomberg did a big puff piece on Zoox a month ago, the video is pretty interesting, it's the first we've been able to see of their prototypes in action, and I had been waiting years to see if they were actually following through with their original vision:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2018-07-17/zoox-and-it...

A couple days ago some pics of an unidentified av test vehicle was spotted, and one of the smart guys in my subreddit called it out as a zooxmobile with an new sensor configuration arranged to match the configuration of their protoypes:

https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2018/08/21/unidentifi...

So... Are you in any relationships with them?

I know a programmer who worked for BioWare in my home city who has been with Zoox for about a year. I met him once, years before he left for SF, because we have a mutual ex-girlfriend. So yeah, I'm right up in there.

Here we go. Gotcha! Mutual interest

Hey, as someone who is just observing this and doesn't have a dog in the fight -- thanks. (I am assuming that -- although you didn't say it -- this is a full disclosure of ALL your conflicts of interest.)

I am not quite sure what I believe about when it is appropriate to accuse someone of having undisclosed conflicts of interest. But I am certain that the best way to respond to such an accusation is with a full disclosure of all conflicts of interest. Regardless of whether the accusation was appropriate, the disclosure ends the issue. And conflicts of interest (to one degree or another) are perfectly normal and do not invalidate a person's opinions or eliminate them as a useful contributor to the discussion.

Rock on, dude. Eff the haters. People love to make claims like above or downvote as soon as a positive comment is posted on something they don’t like or someone else comes to their enemies defense.

Accusing someone of astroturfing (or in your case, merely suggesting it) undermines the integrity of online discussion. It has a chilling effect on perspectives that may be viewed as controversial.

Just because someone is enthusiastic doesn’t mean they’re a shill. Even if you’re ultimately correct you shouldn’t wield that accusation without exceptional evidence - being an apologist for a company is not exceptional evidence. Cynicism has a place but you can’t just use it like a blunt instrument.

Fair - and feedback noted. I would have chosen different words but I don't regret delivering the message of caution.

The author chose phrasing that seemed to carry an authoritative tone and it begged questioning into the author's background/history.

Valued at 3.2B USD, by investors who have just fired him...

It's a sign of how crazy things are when 300M USD can be considered a small amount of money to spend on technology development (particularly for a product that doesn't actually require anything inherently very-very expensive, aside from staffing costs).

I'm curious how likely it is that driving sequence (on real roads, not the track) from the Bloomberg video is as real as it looks. If so, is that impressive? It certainly looks more advanced than other demos that have come out, but it's unclear what they didn't include in the video.

> I don't understand why you would fund someone with no tech or business background...

Maybe that was the board's plan for the initial rocky phase of the company, without telling Tim?

Why would this be a good plan?

Booting a startup CEO always looks bad in my opinion and would likely concern anyone doing a follow on investment.

Because you think he was good for fighting his way through the early stages of a company but doesn't show the right skillset to go the next level.

If that were the case, you'd have a better managed transition.

Ideally you'd have the CEO onboard with this from the start. Alternatively when it came time to boot them, you'd a) already have someone in place to take over b) be able to pay them off sufficiently to not make a fuss, and help you frame it as transitioning to a new role (i.e. they'd stay on as an advisor, move to a COO role etc.).

Intel did the same - threw out CEO with some mud flying down. Decency seems to be out of fashion lately.

Yes, I think throwing out the CEO of an established company with revenue is quite a bit different than throwing out the CEO of a pre-product startup however.

With a startup, you've invested in the founding team. If you throw them out... you've effectively thrown out a significant part of what you invested in. It also calls in to question your own judgement as an investor. And it reduces your standing in the eye of companies looking for investment.

Overall, unless something really really bad happens you don't want to throw out the founder...

If you just don't have confidence? You either let the investment go, or you try and pump it and get someone to buy you out in a subsequent round.

The only possibility I can see if that someone wants to buy Zoox, they made a really generous offer... but the Zoox CEO blocked the sale. Acquiring company is willing to take Zoox without the CEO to get Zoox out of the market, and acquire the team for their own projects...

Ideally yes, likely, no. From the sparse details we do have it sounds like there were some fundamental disagreements between the board and CEO. The board may have seen firing the CEO as the path of least resistance. It seems harsh, but without extensive insider details, it's hard to know whether it was the right call.

I'd be curious how many of them were engineers.

I don't have a strong opinion on Zoox, this CEO, or even this story, but there sure does seem to be a lot of frustration in the self-driving world. Leaves me with two thoughts:

* There's a lot more runway for these bike sharing startups then I thought there'd be.

* Self driving is hard.

(^^ Copied from a duped post)

* There's limits to current AI/ML technology that create a hard ceiling and extends timelines long beyond the current hype cycle and nobody wants to admit it or else funding might stop coming in.

Exactly this. The hype was all in the prototyping phase of the technology, going as far as you can get to make a demo and impress some investors. Progress looked like it was happening quickly because a controlled demo could be made with existing technology.

Now that it's time to build full production systems the hardest problems and edge cases need to be addressed, which could be ignored for demo systems, and the solutions aren't available without some new research developments.

Zoox? Those "Web 2.0 Name Generators" are fine if your company makes games or some nerdy stuff but I don't know how comfortable most people would be turning operation of their vehicle over to something that sounds like it was invented by Dr Seuss.

When I was a kid, almost every company name ended on "tec", "tech" or "tek".

Every generation will be shamed by the next.

>It’s an abbreviation of zooxanthellae, the algae that helps fuel coral reef growth

For what it's worth

I think I'd have gone with Zooxa ("zuza"). How do they pronounce Zoox, "zooks"?

You don't just get rid of the founder and CEO for shits and giggles. I'd love to know what it was that prompted this, although I'm not sure if we'll ever find out.

Since he doesn't claim to know why, by far the most likely reason is that they don't believe he has what it takes to take the company further, whether technically or in terms of management or industry experience.

This is the cold hard world of business which is why founders should keep some decent equity to make sure they don't get stiffed like the guys at Fanduel: http://uk.businessinsider.com/fanduel-founders-likely-to-los...

Well he says he doesn't know why, but that seems disingenuous. If they had said they don't have confidence in his abilities to take the company forward that would be a reason - he could disagree but he would absolutely know why. So either they genuinely didn't tell him - which indicates it's something they think would cause trouble, or he does know why but won't tell us.

Of what I've heard of Zoox (admittedly 2nd or 3rd hand), there definitely has been some precidence for "engineering to fit design goals" rather than "fitting design around engineering realities". Wouldn't surprise me if this non-technical CEO was part of this.

I fail to understand the issue here - Successful companies do often stretch the limits of engineering to fit design goals (assuming that the design is an informed one to begin with). If design was always fitted around what is known to be possible with engineering, we would have much less innovation around.

Also, wasn't this practice (i.e. engineering to fit design goals) what made Apple successful in releasing the iPod, iPhone, etc?

I am an engineer but welcome the perspective of designers and believe anyway that both need to work hand in hand.

In the case of driverless vehicles however, I am not sure the focus should overly be on design because this is a very hard problem that has yet to be solved, and maybe there was a way of designing a vehicle that was evolutionary rather than revolutionary, while mostly focusing on the technical challenges that must be overcome to get us to autonomy.

The key is that if your design goals are ambitious but achievable then you end up with a killer product. If your design goals are unrealistic or unachievable you tank what's achievable chasing a dream. Being frank the difference is probably that Steve Jobs had 30 years being a hands on expert in his field, and this guy was just some bloke who fancied building a self driving car.

All too often I've seen people set design goals when they don't understand the underlying problem. If jobs had targeted building an iPod that was physically smaller than the current smallest hard disk available he'd have been in this position.

post-Theranos the attitude towards "fake it 'till you make it" is a bit different.

Just as likely that ye olde skeleton has come a-knocking.

You might say the startup is now without its ... driver.

Sorry.

Truly driverless.

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