Uber, Nissan, and Mercedes Chose This Self-Driving Startup | Alex Kendall, Wayve
Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AIShow Notes
"Every vehicle is capable of driverless operation. That's clearly the steady state of where we're going." Wayve started in a rented house in Cambridge with $1.5M, a car in the garage, and an aim to integrate end-to-end AI into driving. A decade later it's driven across 506 cities without a single HD map and is worth over $8.6 billion. In this episode, CEO Alex Kendall joins Lukas Biewald to talk about how he built the AI driver Uber, Nvidia, Mercedes, and Nissan all backed, and why putting self-driving AI into 100 million cars a year is a far bigger bet than 10,000 robotaxis. Waymo and Tesla both come up. He doesn't shy away.
Connect with us here: Alex Kendall Lukas Biewald Wayve Weights and Biases
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Samuel Rodriques left physics because there were no unsolved problems left. Instead, he built an AI scientist named Kosmos to cure every disease, solve aging, and map the human brain. In this episode: The cure his AI proposed for blindness Why he would never touch a peptide Whether we'll need human scientists in 20 years What's stopping America in drug discovery
"Companies designing for agents, not humans, are going to get a lot of lift." ClickHouse started as an internal tool at Yandex. Today it's the database Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Tesla all run on. In this episode, CEO Aaron Katz joins Lukas Biewald to talk about how he turned an open source project into a $15B company, why he acquired LangFuse knowing it could cost him customers, and what he's actually building for the agent era. Snowflake, Datadog and Databricks all come up. He doesn't shy away. Connect with us here: Aaron Katz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-katz-5762094 ClickHouse: https://www.linkedin.com/company/clickhouseinc/ Lukas Biewald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbiewald/ Weights and Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb/ 00:00 Trailer 00:57 The Origin Story: From Yandex to ClickHouse Inc. 04:43 Building ClickHouse Cloud & Raising $300M 10:36 Growing Up Around Xerox PARC 12:51 Salesforce, Mark Benioff & the Dot-Com Bust 15:32 Cloud Skeptics vs. AI Skeptics | History Repeating 18:05 Building a Modern Go-To-Market Playbook 21:57 The SaaS Crash, Agents & the Future of Infrastructure 27:09 The Datadog Love-Hate Story 35:21 Hardest Moments: Russia, SVB & Sleepless Nights 43:16 Outro