Larry Page on the improbable dream that became Waymo
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It’s the World’s Most Innovative Companies week at Fast Company. Our annual ranking of organizations across 58 industries is live on our site, and bursting with bright ideas that are changing business, society, and, well, life. I hope you’ll take a look.
My primary contribution to this massive undertaking was writing a cover story about our No. 1 company, Waymo. The feature looks at how the self-driving pioneer’s robotaxi service went from an unlikely skunkworks project at Google to a commercial service now serving 200,000 riders a week, and what might be next. Read it, and you’ll hear from Waymo’s co-CEOs, Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov, along with others inside and outside the company.
But along with all the fresh interviews I did, I revisited one I conducted in September 2013. That’s when I sat down with Google cofounder and then-CEO Larry Page for a Time magazine story. The piece focused on the company’s “moonshot” strategy of assigning itself improbably ambitious projects—especially a division it had started, Calico, that was charged with investigating ways to extend the human life span. (It’s still at it.)
At the time, Waymo wasn’t yet Waymo. Announced less than three years earlier, the effort was a mysterious research project within the Google X lab. The company was secretive enough about the whole thing that when I took a brief highway trip in one of its self-driving cars near the Googleplex in Mountain View, it was with the understanding that my Time article wouldn’t detail my impressions. (Almost a dozen years later, I can finally spill my guts: I thought it was incredible.)
I knew that story should touch on Google’s autonomy project, and that speaking about it with Page was a rare opportunity. Even then, he granted as few press interviews as his PR team would let him get away with. My contacts at the company warned me that he might fall silent or even walk out in mid-conversation.
When the day came, Page turned out to be both engaging and—as far as I could tell—engaged. But his handlers didn’t exaggerate his dislike of talking to the press. My interview turned out to be among the last he gave. After creating Alphabet as a new holding company optimized for managing moonshots and handing Google’s reins over to Sundar Pichai, he pretty much retired from public life altogether. What he thinks about Waymo’s present momentum, I’m not sure.
Back in 2013, however, Page told me quite a bit about the origins and goals of Google’s self-driving initiative, explaining that it stemmed from his own interest in the technology, which had been percolating since the mid-1990s. He stressed—again and again—that he was in a hurry to see autonomous cars become an everyday reality. He might even have been happiest if someone had pulled off the feat before Google was in a place to give it a try.
“I was at Stanford as a grad student when I became interested in that,” he told me. “Nothing really changed between [then] and when we started working on it. I’m sure computers got better, and sensors got better, but there’s no reason why people couldn’t have been working on it 10 years earlier, for real.”
Now, it should be noted that Google’s self-driving project didn’t spring out of nowhere: Its founder, Sebastian Thrun, current co-CEO Dolgov, and others involved with the effort over the years contributed to Stanford’s entries in a series of “Grand Challenges” put on by the U.S. Department of Defense’s DARPA lab from 2004 to 2007. But those competitions were races among experimental autonomous vehicles conducted in the desert and other isolated environments. By moving quickly to test its self-driving cars on public roads, Google really did give the technology an abrupt shove toward reality.
“Ten years earlier, it would’ve been harder,” Page allowed. “It would’ve cost twice as much as it does now. But that’s not a major cost. I’m sad that it didn’t get done earlier. My key insight is that there are just such opportunities out there to do things faster and do things that matter to people. What’s limiting those things getting done is people wanting to pursue them, and being organized about it, and understanding the opportunities.”
According to Page, one of his primary roles as CEO was to identify moonshots such as teaching a car to drive itself—though he added that he considered his indispensability to this process as a limiting factor. “A bunch of these things we’re working on have come from me,” he said. “It actually kind of worries me, because I wish that we had a more scalable process to do that. That’s a big part of what [Google] X is doing, to both think about more possible ideas and also have a deep technological understanding of what’s possible.”
Still, the question remained: Why Google? The company had made its bones and its fortune with its namesake search engine. Its most successful follow-ups, such as Gmail, were in closely related areas. Even the Google+ social network, which was in the process of flopping when Page and I spoke, wasn’t far removed from the company’s comfort zone. But on paper, it wasn’t obvious why a search company might be poised to disrupt the transportation industry in the most fundamental way imaginable.
Page did point out that some of Google’s existing skills and intellectual property could be applied to the autonomy challenge: “We have a lot of technologies for 3D modeling of the world that we developed, to really make Street View work and to make all of Google Maps work.” Mostly, though, he argued that wildly disparate moonshots might be easier to get right than products requiring thoughtful integration with existing Google mainstays. More than anything else, it was his and cofounder Sergey Brin’s willingness to connect dots that other corporate leaders didn’t see that made something like self-driving cars make sense within the company.
“What I’m saying is we have people who can apply [their expertise] to a variety of projects,” he said. “And I find that to be more scalable than some of what you might think of as our core businesses.”
During our interview, Page noted that “in some industries, it takes 20 years to go from idea to something real,” bringing up the time span as a problem to be solved rather than an unavoidable fact. Rather than investing his full attention to steering Waymo and other new initiatives through to completion, he ended up stepping down as Alphabet CEO in 2019. He remains on the company’s board but is also launching an unaffiliated AI startup, The Information’s Jessica Lessin and Erin Woo report.
Still available in only a few cities, Waymo is following the 20-year trajectory that Page found so frustrating. Yet it may remain the Alphabet moonshot with the biggest shot at changing the world. It’s a testament to his vision that its journey continues well after he moved on.
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