Hi, I’m Drew!
After leading teams at Tesla, Cruise, Otto, and Uber ATG, I’ve learned a lot of lessons on how to build a self-driving car. I am excited to finally talk about Voyage, the company I believe that is uniquely positioned to bring autonomous vehicles to production.
It has been a busy first month getting up to speed, talking with new and former colleagues, and recruiting top engineers and leaders to join the team. In every conversation so far, I’ve inevitably been asked the question: “Why Voyage?”
It’s a great question, and I thought I’d take a break to talk about my thoughts on the self-driving landscape, and why Voyage was the obvious choice for my next adventure in the AV landscape.
The Go-To-Market
Many startups working on self-driving cars focus on a “canonical route”. These routes tend to be simpler complexity-wise, but are selected with a specific business purpose. This strategy has pushed many ride-sharing teams to the Phoenix area, where the roadways are relatively simple, but the population supports a concentrated demand for rides. For mobility companies, it’s meant a focus on single, fixed routes that move passengers back and forth. In reality, this looks a lot like a modified shuttle service, where the demand for rides is often theoretical.
At Voyage, we’ve found an entire city (The Villages, Florida) where every point-to-point is a simpler canonical route, and more importantly where there is a real mobility need for the 125,000 residents. We intend to serve all roadway within this city.
Private communities like The Villages are often much simpler with respect to roadways and traffic patterns, and allow us to implement creative technical solutions that aren’t possible everywhere else due to regulation. We believe there to be a massive un-tapped autonomous ride-sharing business in locations like The Villages — all with approachable autonomy requirements we believe we can solve sooner rather than later.
The Changing Landscape of Autonomous Vehicles
When work began on self-driving cars more than a decade ago, it was a brand new industry where the only approach was to build everything in-house. For some teams this included sensors, simulation tools, mapping, tele-operation, middleware, and even the physical vehicles themselves.
Today, that has fundamentally changed. The ecosystem of startups is now rich with companies solving particular technical challenges, and offering off-the-shelf solutions. Where there was once no build vs. buy decision to be made, there are now multiple startups offering solutions some of the core autonomy verticals.
Voyage moves incredibly quickly by embracing the supporting ecosystem heavily, while keeping the core autonomous technology in-house. For example, we are the first customer of a stealth, cutting-edge simulation product that has already had a tremendous impact on our technology. That simulation tool wasn’t even available a year ago. We have awesome partners like Carmera, Renovo, Scotty, and Velodyne to help solve our mapping, middleware, tele-operation, and sensor needs.
Today’s ecosystem uniquely supports a partnership approach, and I fundamentally believe that this provides an incredibly fast path to market for Voyage.
The Voyage Begins
After leading six different teams in the AV industry, I have learned a ton of lessons. Most important is knowing what not to do! With Voyage’s incredibly smart, focused and collaborative team, a unique go-to-market, and a thriving ecosystem of startups providing core robotics and machine learning infrastructure, we can move fast and safe on our road to driverless. We are delivering one of the very first real applications of autonomous technology, and I’m really excited to be part of it!
Want to join me to deliver a driverless product to those who need it most? We’re hiring for a lot of roles. Get in touch!
