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Comment by benatkin | Hacker News Reader

Curious what the founder of Starsky Robotics is up to. The site is still up and there's even a blog post after the post about them shutting down: https://www.starsky.io/ https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-poor-roi-of-aut...

Here's the post entitled "The End of Starsky Robotics" https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-end-of-starsky-...

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That's a terrific post; thanks for linking. It seems like Starsky did everything right— they focused on a highly safe system for only highway driving, and an elaborate teleop setup for covering the last mile and exceptional conditions. Basically they just hit a wall as far as VC timelines and expectations.

But I wonder if Waymo can basically follow the same playbook and do it long enough to make it work courtesy of Google's pocketbook.

CEO of Starsky here. My assumption is that they won't - Waymo has a lot of inertia around trying to build full autonomy, and it working in a corner of Phoenix seems to not have convinced that that it's way too hard.

The winner in this space is almost certainly a company that hasn't been founded yet, doing an updated version of Starsky's approach...which is why I've been trying to explain Starsky's approach in detail through blogposts.

60 Minutes continues to show repeats of their glowing feature on them, how they're going to be the next big thing and how they're set to make hundreds of thousands of truckers unemployed.

I haven't watched the full thing again to see if they mention the company has since closed down or that basically everything that was promised in the report isn't coming true anytime soon, or ever.

Website is still up because it's too sentimental to bring it down. I also still have a ridiculous amount of Starsky swag in my closet.

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