On My Mind: Waymos Everywhere

Plus, a framework for finding the generalizable from the specific

Photo of the week: Golden hour in San Francisco

On My Mind

Waymo’s Everywhere

I spent most of last week in San Francisco. It’s the third time I’ve been in the past 6 months, and every time new things strike me about the city. Last trip, in February, it was clear how quickly and dramatically the tides had shifted in favor of Claude usage – a sharp difference from my trip in late December. The way people were using, integrating, and debating AI felt much deeper than the average experience in NYC.

This trip, what struck me most was the presence of Waymos. Everywhere. It seemed as though at least 20% of the cars on the road were Waymos – in SF proper, on the highways, around SFO, and more.

Waymo now completes over 500k rides weekly. This year, the company has opened service in Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Orlando, and Nashville (with even more cities on deck).

So, on my mind are the second-order effects of significantly greater autonomous vehicle adoption. There’s broadly two ways to approach this question: 1) new behaviors (i.e. new markets) and, 2) new demand within existing markets.

On new behaviors: anecdotes of interesting ways people were using Waymos included sending a car to pick their children up from school and calling the cars to autonomously deliver goods across town. These are both relatively new use cases unlocked by Waymos offering a (perceived) higher degree of trust / safety than a human-operated rideshare. What might be other examples / markets with this throughline?

On new demand within existing markets: if we anticipate that the number of Waymos is going to grow several orders of magnitude, where are there bottlenecks in the supply chain? Many folks have made a killing by identifying and investing behind the bottlenecks in the AI infrastructure supply chain. Maybe there’s a parallel when thinking about the growth of Waymo fleets.

Finally, new technologies can cause things to disappear. One of the things that struck me most about the cars is that they’re by-default locked; you need to click a button in the app for entry when it arrives. In a world in which everyone uses autonomous vehicles, what happens to car keys? Will, in some distant future, they be a relic of the past?

All-in-all, it was cool to see the growth in Waymos. I frequently think about the adage “The future is already here it’s just not evenly distributed” and its implied follow-up: if the future is already here, where can we find it? Again and again, the answer feels like San Francisco. It may be three hours behind, but it’s often months ahead. That certainly feels true on autonomous cars.

Frameworking

Specific vs. generalizable: a framework for discovery.

Whenever I want to figure out how something expands or is replicable, I try to start with as specific an example as possible.

Thus, this week’s framework: start with the specific to identify the generalizable.

This thought exercise is how many things in life play out. Begin by identifying something that’s clearly working. It doesn’t matter how narrow the instance seems. What matters is that it’s a concrete instance you can evaluate, probe, and understand deeply. Then, ask yourself: in what ways does this generalize? Can I replicate parts of the process or product to serve a larger market?

Running through this line of thinking is a forcing function for disaggregating the component parts of a use case from the function the product is serving. It’s like how, during COVID, many manufacturing lines were repurposed to create masks and gloves. Were those factories created with the intent of producing personal protective equipment? Not at all. But were the component parts still useful and adaptable? Yes, and those who recognized the opportunity did tremendously well by identifying how the parts could be adjusted to create numerous end products.

Content I Consumed this Week

1. The Economics of Intelligence from Citadel. Very strong macro-level perspective on how AI is affecting many parts of the economy. TLDR: the job market is evolving but going to be just fine, and compute remains a bottleneck.

2. Grip, Rip, and Scale (an essay about the economics behind PopUp Bagels). Shoutout to my friend Eliza for the recommendation. A really interesting deep dive on the unit economics of PopUp, the QSR industry, and the key assumptions behind Tiger Global valuing the business at $300M.

3. The Prince of Egypt – a surprisingly wholesome movie. I was on a weekend trip with some friends and one of them selected this as part of our Saturday evening activities. It reminded me that 1980s/1990s Dreamworks is heavily underrated. The movie had excellent music and a lot of inspiring messages. Would recommend.

Currently reading: Currency Wars by James Rickards. On deck: The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby.