Co-CEO of Waymo and a founding member of Google's self-driving car project, which he joined in 2009.
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Their wordsYour your models can be leaked, algorithms can be replicated, but hundreds of millions of miles of fully autonomous operations in the real world, backed by evidence-grade evaluation and publicly audited proof, that is much, much more difficult to replicate.
Their wordsthat your model is really table stakes, but eval and metrics, that's your most important. That's your strategic moat. So, build your eval before you build your technology.
Dmitri DolgovCo-CEO of Waymo and a founding member of Google's self-driving car projectcommon failure mode is picking the tech that gives you the fastest early ramp, riding that steep curve, feeling like you're winning, projecting that, you know, steep slope into the future and feeling like the sky is the limit, and then hitting the plateau, and discovering that the technology path that you picked actually flattens out way before the performance that is required by your product.↗Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Workyoutube.com · 3 Aug 2026 · 15:16 into the videoAll korrents from this video
Their wordscommon failure mode is picking the tech that gives you the fastest early ramp, riding that steep curve, feeling like you're winning, projecting that, you know, steep slope into the future and feeling like the sky is the limit, and then hitting the plateau, and discovering that the technology path that you picked actually flattens out way before the performance that is required by your product.
Their wordsAnd a working demo is 1% at best of the work that you have to do. The many nines of performance, the many nines of reliability that follow, that's where the real work happens.
Their wordsSo, a deployment of your agent uh in the real world generates data. That data then grounds the simulator and makes it more realistic. The simulator generates harder edge cases for the critic to score and for the agent to learn from.
Their wordsIt took us about 10 more years to begin providing a service, and then 5 more years to scale to half a million trips per week. So, the demo took 18 months, the product took about 15 years.