May Mobility Is The Future Of Autonomous Vehicles

Speaker A: Foreign. So maybe we could start off with, you know, maybe sharing a little bit about, you know, why you started the driverless. And I don't want to say cars really.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Because it's not necessarily cars. They're buses, they're trucks and whatever. So what, what got you guys to get starting on this path?

Speaker C: Yeah, so I've been in the AV space for, for a long time. I got my start back in the DARPA Urban Challenge days, uh, back in 2007 and have worked on a wide variety of autonomous vehicle programs, from MIT's to University of Michigan's to Ford and Toyota and now May. And what I think we saw through all of that time was that many people assumed that autonomous cars meant robo taxis or maybe personally owned vehicles that would drive around autonomously. And what I saw from working in the industry was that neither of those were very good outcomes for cities. And really one of the things we wanted to do was to figure out how can we bring autonomous technology to make cities more beautiful, more sustainable, make better use of land and get people where they want to go. And a lot of that means working with cities directly to help them solve some of their hardest transportation problems.

Speaker A: So it's very different. Right, so you have more like bus, I don't know if that's the right term, but buses or larger vehicles take more people in it, so you have less cars on the road and more, you know, efficient ways to bring people to wherever they want to go.

Speaker C: Uh, that's right, yeah. So the right, the optimal size vehicle is really a function of where do you operate. If you're in suburbia, then the likelihood that two different people are both going to and from the same location at the same time is close to zero. So there you really want to optimize for smaller vehicles that will take up less space, but provide that highly diverse agile transportation. But as you get closer to downtown Kors now you have an increasing likelihood that multiple people are going to the same place. And now you can start to look at shared mobility and shared mobility. And this is why I have such an issue with the traditional view of personally owned vehicles or straight up robotaxi. Shared mobility is the only way that you can address congestion. You need to address better land use and parking, getting rid of parked cars. Uh, but also how do you get fewer vehicles on the road? And you can only do that by putting more people on a single vehicle.

Speaker A: So the idea is that, hey, if we can get a larger vehicle with like 10, 20 people going into the same location, instead of 20 cars going, it's better for the environment and it's more efficient.

Speaker C: Uh, that's right. And actually the happy part of the curve starts way earlier. If you could just increase the average occupancy per vehicle to three, you'd be making a major improvement to congestion. And we would need fewer lanes of road, we'd need fewer traffic lights. Would, would be red for less length of time, everybody would be able to keep moving much, much better.

Speaker A: So here's something anecdotal. I don't know if this, like, really lends to what you're doing. Do you prefer Edwin? Ed, do you, do you have a preference?

Speaker C: Oh, yeah. So humans, uh, call me Ed. Google calls me Edwin.

Speaker A: All right, I'm sort of human, so I'll say Ed. Okay, I'll do the Ed. So, so in New York City, they have congestion price hikes now. And at first, you know, being a New Yorker and like, I'm like another tax, this is crazy. But we went into the city, um, I want to say it was Saturday night, I gotta tell you, we went and whoosh, just went in and when we got home, nice and easy. So I, I, it kind of, I think it works in the, in the sense that now, I don't know, the second order effects, does that mean it's bad for businesses because there are less people staying there? But I got to tell you, it was one of the quickest times I ever went from New Jersey to Manhattan back. I was shocked.

Speaker C: Well, yeah, absolutely. I think the problem that most cities have is that there are these feedback loops. And feedback loops can be vicious, uh, or happy.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker C: So if you have a transportation system and the quality is not so good, it's not so convenient, then more people are going to drive in, um, and that's going to deprive the transit system of the revenue that it needs to improve its service. So what happens is that the quality of the transit system starts declining. It gets this vicious cycle of declining ridership, declining service, and everyone sitting in their personally owned vehicles down Broadway waiting, uh, hoping to get, to get through the next traffic light. And if you can just start to reverse that, how do you start to make public transit a little bit better? Well, now you have a virtuous cycle. Now you can start to attract new people into public transit. And that gives public transit more resources, which means that the product gets better. And as the product gets better, more people come into public transit. And you run around this virtuous cycle a few more times, and now you can really transform A city and really make it easy to get around and, uh, safer for pedestrians and bicyclists. It really is a huge win win opportunity, and congestion pricing is one of the ways to bootstrap that virtuous cycle.

Speaker A: All right, don't laugh at me, don't mock at me, guys, but I'm kind of scared to go in a car that's driverless, where it's just a robot doing it. Is that normal for people to first feel that way? But then after a while you're like, oh, okay, I get it. Is that a, ah, natural. Is that also. Similarly, you kind of learn to say, all right, wait, this is pretty cool. This is, this is. You know, I like this.

Speaker C: Well, I'm an old nerd, Tom.

Speaker B: Yeah, I was going to jump in just because I feel like, you know, having been in the autonomous vehicle space for coming up on eight years. Right, Ed, much longer for you? Uh, we've gotten so used to it that sometimes when I meet people who have never taken a ride in our vehicle, uh, it's a really fun conversation because they're like you, Jack. Right. They've never tried it before. There's a little bit of trepidation of what is this going to be like? And then what I really enjoy is after they sort of take that leap of faith, if you will, uh, they ask some questions about whether or not it's safe, how does it work, how does the car see and control itself, etc. When once they take that ride, it's amazing how quickly people just sort of get used to it. Right. And what I like to say often is, uh, you never want an exciting autonomous vehicle ride where you want them to be boring. You want to not be thinking about it. Right. You're simply in the car, you're going where you need to go, uh, safely. Right. And efficiently and also with a nice experience. Right. Ed talked a little bit about how, you know, we have different vehicle form factors here at May. Right. So we have a, a Toyota Sienna that can seat, you know, six people in it pretty comfortably. Um, but we also have this larger vehicle that we're, uh, going to be introducing next year. So, you know, our goal is to really provide that great experience depending on the right environment and who the user

Speaker A: is, just for the audience to get a better picture. When you say Toyo Sienna, so it has about six people that you could accommodate comfortably. But then also, I think, don't you have even larger buses that could have even more people as well?

Speaker B: Yeah. I'll let Ed talk a Little bit about that. Uh, we just made that exciting announcement last week at the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas.

Speaker C: Yeah, so our Sienna's uh, uh, seat four people very comfortably and five if you're a little friendly in the back. Um, this is perfect size for a typical family that might be traveling together. And we really like that for a larger form factor, you know, in places where you might have more people traveling as a group or just with common itineraries. Then we just announced a new product called the Technobus. This is a really cool electric bus platform. It can be configured in a couple different ways. Uh, it can seat about 20 to 30 people in a higher density configuration. This is perfect if you are in a central business district or if you are providing a rental car shuttle at an airport or an inter terminal shuttle or those kinds of applications. But what's really cool about it is that it can also be reconfigured into what I think is going to have a huge impact on cities. Instead of 20 individual seats where you're kind of close to everybody else, you can configure this as eight business class seats. And the idea here is that if you can provide a rider experience that is competitive or better than driving yourself downtown, that's how you start converting commuters into public transit users. And so giving people the space, the comfort, the ability to be productive while they're in transit is a huge part of doing that. And with that higher occupancy that means we can go downtown without creating as much congestion as you would if we just one to one replaced personally owned vehicles with robo taxis.

Speaker A: And would it, ah, would it be where, let's say I would go to a certain designation and know that I'll have that robo taxi, robo bus, you know, to go into, let's say the heart of whatever city is going to go into. And is that, is that how eventually you're going to kind of scale it in that way?

Speaker C: Yeah. So we envision a couple different ways that this can come to come to be. Today we primarily work directly with cities and the cities know where their transit deserts are. You know, we've got this population over here which may not have good access to public transit, or we have this area over here where we're trying to turn them into transit users. And so we work with the city to provide the right kinds of vehicles with uh, to, to transport that, that population wherever they're headed.

Speaker A: And so you're not going to go, I guess the way of like what is the waymo and some others with the robo taxis. That's going to be. You're going to let them do their, you know, their thing and you're taking a whole different way of doing it, like, as you're talking about, which sounds like it makes it much more environmental friendly. Right?

Speaker C: Yeah. So the key thing here is that the philosophy of how we bring the technology to the world matters. And so the guiding overarching goal for May is that we want to help make cities more sustainable. We want to reduce the amount of real estate. I don't know if you know this, 30% of a typical city in the United States, uh, the land use is parking. It's ridiculous. So we just waste a huge amount of real estate storing cars. And of course, people spend so much time in congestion, uh, because there's too many individual cars on, uh, on the streets. So the real overarching goal of May is how do we make cities more sustainable, more beautiful? How do we make it so that your kids can wander off while you're having a cup of coffee at a cafe and you're not worried about them getting hit or injured by a distracted driver? And this means trying to create a new kind of city, a new kind of mobility service, a new kind of ecosystem where people get around easily and more safely. Now, to do that, we building technology that looks a lot like the technology that Waymo and other Robo taxi, um, players are developing. In fact, the product itself looks almost identical. You pull out your phone, you request a ride, the vehicle comes to you, takes you to your destination. Sounds very similar. But the key thing is how we deploy this. We want to do this in a way that makes cities better, not one that makes cities that adds to congestion.

Speaker A: M. Is that me or did. I think we lost Edward a little bit.

Speaker C: My camera just freaked out.

Speaker A: Okay. Yeah, it's, you know, when you go to the eye doctor and go, is this better? Not better. It had one of those things where it's like, oh, one.

Speaker B: Yeah, two or three. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker A: You know, you know, so hearing what you're saying is, is it also in conjunction with the different municipalities, in addition to the robo buses, let's say Robo, you know, uh, you know, Sienna vehicles. But then is the. Is. Is these cities themselves trying to make changes also the same way you're doing it to maybe cut down on emissions and what have you and to cut down with congestion? Is that when you say, when you're dealing with the different municipalities that you're doing this, but then also the city is also trying to make ways to make it more pleasant to be in these urban areas.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely, Jack. I think, um, Ed touched on an interesting data point earlier, which is just how much of our cities today comprise of parking. Right. And we all remember, you know, during, uh, maybe the height of COVID one of the positives out of the pandemic, at least for me and many folks who I know, was that we turned parking spots into restaurants and outside gathering spaces and, you know, places to kind of enjoy and socialize and be with one another. And that was great. Right? And I think for a lot of cities, um, you know, they think about, uh, how to be able to provide that type of experience and community for its residents. The other thing is, you know, cities do have to provide, uh, different forms of transportation for, for their residents, right? In terms of helping them, you know, get around, get to work, get to the, uh, essential places that they need to go. Well, one of the things that we see at May is just with existing transportation infrastructure, oftentimes, you know, you have these, like, big, uh, hydrogen or electric buses, uh, that are really underutilized, right? Because, you know, for someone who has to take the bus if they just want to go to Trader Joe's, there's a much faster way to get there than riding the bus line 45 minutes in the wrong way just to get there. Which is again, one of the things that we are excited about at May because our autonomous vehicles are really solve that for people, right? You, if you're a city, you're looking to May because we can replace your, you know, underutilized empty bus with a fleet of six or eight autonomous vehicles that provide a better, you know, point to point on demand solution for people, right? So, you know, the riders are happier, the city is providing a service that, you know, their money is actually being well spent for. Uh, and then there's a lot of other things too, that, that we've talked about with cities. We really have a great partnership where they also care about, uh, data and information, right? To be able to make decisions around how they plan the city. Right? What roads maybe are more congested, which intersections have the most accidents, right? And they can use some of the information that our vehicles collect to be able to make better, uh, informed decisions. Right? So again, that's something that we're really excited about here at May is the way that we partner not just with the cities, but also with the communities that we serve.

Speaker A: And it sounds like you kind of target one city or one area after another, right? To get all that data, all that information, see what works, what doesn't work. How many different locations do you have? Or is that the right even question for me to ask you? Do you break it down like, hey, we have a footprint in this city, this city, this city, or how's it going so far?

Speaker C: Uh, today we are in 10 cities across North America and Japan. These include a huge array of diversity. So from big cities like Detroit and Miami to mid sized cities like Ann Arbor, Michigan and Arlington, Texas, to smaller, uh, rural communities like Grand Rapids, Minnesota. It's a city of only 14,000 people in the very northern part of Minnesota where the snow's six feet high. Uh, then of course the Sun Belt where all AV companies, uh, like to operate because the weather is beautiful and gorgeous, but there are real use cases there. And then in Japan, from Tokyo to Nagoya to Kyushu. So I think we might be, uh, you know, of all AV companies, one of the ones that is most geographically diverse in the kinds of places that we operate, not just in terms of weather, um, but also in terms of density and driving culture. You know, pedestrian in Detroit behaves very, very differently than a pedestrian in Tokyo. And so we've been able to show that our technology can be adapted to these wildly different climates, wildly different driving cultures.

Speaker A: Did you do that purposely to say, hey, let's try different places, different locations, different weather patterns to make sure that it works, or did just you just randomly picked, all right, let's try Detroit, let's go to Tokyo.

Speaker C: It was very deliberate.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: So, you know, this is a, uh, you know, an AI driven kind of company. And data, of course, is incredibly valuable. And by getting a start in some of these difficult environments where there is snow and there is weather and there are crazy pedestrians and college students running amok, uh, that accelerates the technology.

Speaker A: So that's great. So like, you have to factor in the AI for like a drunk college student just ram, you know, just wobbling through town and that, uh, you're not getting hit by the bus. That's part of the whole thing. Right.

Speaker C: I think the preferred term is a college student drinking responsibly.

Speaker A: So I'm glad that we're having this conversation because I think most. Tell me if I'm wrong. I don't think you guys get the same visibility as Waymo, uh, the robo taxis and all that, but it seems like you made great strides. What's going on? Is it just that you're just testing it, testing, testing it, and then you could go, boom, here we are. Or It's a slow build. Is that purpose the way you're kind of rolling it out?

Speaker C: You know, there's a Japanese, uh, word, kaizen, which is sort of step by step improvement. And, uh, you know, I think that's always really resonated with, with our company. We're not really that into flashy, you know, press, um, releases. We really want to just go and build the company, build the technology, advance it one step at a time. And, uh, rather than tell people what we're doing, show them what we're doing, one step at a time. I think that's one major component. The other major aspect is that when it comes to growing our business, the fact that our primary customers, our transportation departments and enterprises, means that we spend the majority of our time marketing, not to consumers, but to those municipalities and enterprises. So our brand in the consumer space may not be as well known, but in the public transit sector, we are the number one brand for autonomous vehicles in, uh, transit. And that has a lot to do with the trust that we've built, the data transparency that we've created, our incredibly good safety record, uh, and the fact that we offer wheelchair accessible vehicles, which is really hugely important to them. And very few people are doing that.

Speaker A: So I believe I read, or maybe Tom, you told me, or what have you, that caters to somewhat, maybe an older audience and people who might have some issues in terms of getting in, you know, car, whatever it might be. So is that. Is that what you're referring to? That. That's another different differentiation.

Speaker B: Yeah, great question, Jack. Um, maybe it was something that, that you had read. Um, and I think to Ed's point, the reason that you saw that is because we, uh, have been for quite some time one of the only autonomous vehicle companies that operate vehicles that have been, uh, wheelchair, uh, accessible. And, uh, that's something that we're proud of. We really believe in this idea of making, uh, mobility with our vehicles, uh, accessible to people who maybe do need some help getting in and out of the car, who use a wheelchair. Uh, one of the things that I love about our May vehicles, the, uh, Sienna in particular, is that, you know, if you're, uh, wheelchair bound, uh, here in the U.S. typically, if you need to, you know, go to an appointment or something like that, you can schedule a paratransit ride, right, to pick you up from your home, take you to your appointment and then bring you back. The pain point of that though, is if you have a caretaker or someone who goes with you to the appointment, they actually can't ride in the vehicle, uh, with you when you get picked up. So then they have to drive themselves separately. Right? And what I love about RMA cars is that, you know, we have the ability to load a, uh, passenger with a wheelchair, and then there's still space for, you know, a caretaker or support person or a couple actually, to be able to go on that same ride with them. And that really changes things, right? When you think about the experience of needing to leave your home to get some care or get some help and having, like, your person with you, um, that. That's really different, right?

Speaker A: Um, I'm so with you on that, because I can't tell you how many times over the years you see in crowd in New York City or Brooklyn or wherever and there's someone with a wheelchair or some, you know, just need some extra help, and, uh, no one cares. No one's to help them. And it's awkward and it's uncomfortable, and the person who might be in the wheelchair, as you could tell, is just feeling like, oh, my gosh, this is just a so, so horrific situation. It kind of dehumanizes the whole, you know, the person. So it's really cool that you're think you're actually thinking about these things and trying to make a difference and then having that caregiver who's there too. Because if you have to have a caregiver, you gotta, you know, and you have your challenges and you have to do it by yourself. And you see that and it's rough and it's taught, and you see that all the time in the city, and it's great that you're working towards that goal to making their lives better.

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Um, I'm curious, Jack. I know, you know the podcast is called Blind Ambition, right? So, um, you know, uh, knowing a little bit about the listeners, I'm wondering, you know, as. As, uh, for the folks tuning in, like, what are some things that maybe they're wanting to learn more about when it comes to may or what it is that we're doing here, right? We talked a little bit about the technology, the, you know, business approach, our model. But, um, you know, something that you and I touched on in, in our conversation before the holidays was also the fact that, you know, we have very passionate individuals who have joined the company to work on these problems, right? To build this business and build this technology. So, you know, I'm always proud of the people who work here and would love to brag a little bit about them, but I want to go into the things that you think would be valuable for your listeners. Right?

Speaker A: Uh, you don't. No, it's a good question. It's really, it's really interesting so that it started out we're focusing more on the blind platform, which is, um, really, well, technologists. So these are folks who work at faang companies for the most part. You know, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, you know, you name it. Any, any top tier type of, um, you know, tech company. Also it could be within the financial sector, but, uh, tech is there as well. And in that space, you know, it's, you get, you get the highs and lows. So you get a lot of like, you know, things are great and you're hiring and then lots of layoffs. And then these are. Okay, lots of layoffs. So there. So the people who are watching this, or we're listening to this, let's say from the blind, you know, platform, they're kind of interested because they love new technologies. They love to, you know, their software design developers, their software. They're, they're software engineers and they may not have known that you guys exist and say, wait a minute, this is, you know, this is maybe really, this is the future. Let me check these guys out and see if they need somebody who has, you know, the skills that, you know, that they have. Um, but then also we kind of, we morphed into more of a more general to be, you know, so like for instance, with a podcast, we'll put it on LinkedIn, we'll put it on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. So to get a broad appeal, because you'll have some of the people who are really the die hard, you know, techies. But then also people are super interested and like, oh, this is cool, this is new, this is different, this is unique. I want to learn more about it. Yeah.

Speaker C: One of the things I've learned since I started May is that, you know, of course there are engineers that are going to be motivated buy a paycheck first and foremost. And for some people, they've got college tuition and things to deal with, that is okay. Uh, but there are also a lot of engineers who are going to make their decision based on the impact that they can have and their ability to see their own fingerprints on that impact. And that's one of the places where I think Mae has always offered something that a lot of other AV companies haven't been able to, being a smaller team. If you're hired here as an engineer, you're going to be on a very small team that owns a large part of the autonomy piece. You're going to be able to see how the work that you do on a day to day basis translates out into the field. You're going to see your code ship not just once a year, but many times a year, maybe once a month. That's really exciting for a lot of people. We go beyond that too, and they can see the positive social impact of how we're delivering our technology into the world. And I think this is one of the ways we've been able to attract such an amazing team by offering some of that potential for impact in fingerprints.

Speaker A: You know, that makes so much sense because I hear from these guys so often. And the reason I say guys, to be fair, the vast majority are men, but they're making great strides for women as well. Um, is that, let's say you're working for Microsoft and it's huge. And they say after a while they just feel like, all right, I'm writing some code, I'm, um, shipping some code. But like, uh, I'm one out of, you know, literally 100,000 other people. So am I really making a huge difference? And, and, and then they want to make a difference. They want to say, hey, you know what? And this, this, this goes on a lot. It's like the prestige factor. You weigh it like m, the prestige to say I'm working at Apple or Amazon against something affirmed that other people don't know about. So like, uh, but I, there is that feeling for a lot of people. As you pointed out. Ed is like, hey, you know what? I could actually make a difference. You know, there's, there's, you know, it's not like a hundred thousand people working on it. They need somebody who really feels like this is going to be the future. I could be part of it. I could make a big difference. And, and a lot of people who just, especially after a while when you see it get layoffs and this, that you realize, you know what? Let me do something I appreciate and enjoy and I could help and I can make a difference. So, yeah, that's a big thing,

Speaker B: I think for me. You know, when I joined the company four and a half years ago, I remember chatting with Ed and um, we really aligned on this idea about growing the team in a really thoughtful way. Right. I think we've seen over the last couple of years a lot of companies in our space grew very, very quickly. Right. And you know, in hindsight, too fast, right? They, they then had these huge burn rates, right? Um, very, very large teams. But, you know, we're Running into diminishing returns on the technology side of things. And then we're forced to downshift, downshift again. And a lot of players, uh, you know, are no longer here today. Right. Which is really unfortunate to see. But what I really like about May is that we've always taken this very methodical approach. Right. You asked earlier, are we just testing the reality is. No, we've been serving real passengers for many years now. We're actually in more cities than all the other AV companies combined today, which is again a little known fact, but something that's really cool. Um, what Ed touched on earlier though, I think is really the key. If you are someone who wants to work at May, most likely it's because our mission really is exciting to you. Right. You share that vision of transforming cities through accessible autonomous technology. And um, I'm obviously well aware of the blind platform. And while people are chasing for those high TC numbers, we have very competitive market, uh, pay. But you know, you want to be at May because you really want to have that, you know, ability to make a difference. Right. You're not just that cog. It's the code that you wrote last week now makes, you know, Beth's Ride that much more comfortable, you know, in Ann Arbor, Michigan or something like that.

Speaker A: And then I imagine, I guess down the road if, if and when you decide to go IPO too, that total compensation and those stock options could be pretty, you know, pretty nice, Right?

Speaker B: Definitely. I, I think one of the things about May is that, you know, we have tremendous upside in front of us as well. Right. And that's something that again is really exciting to people when they're looking at joining the company. While we have competitive, you know, base benefits, bonus, you know, our equity grants are, are also really, really, you know, competitive. And because, uh, we've been pragmatic in building the business, but also with our valuation. Right. So we have a ton of upside us still. When you look at some of the metrics and milestones that we've achieved at May, we're actually ahead of many who are valued, uh, several x higher than we are. So that makes us feel good because we know that that's where we're heading.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think one of the big mistakes, uh, or traps that happens to many startups is that they get excited by valuation and who doesn't like to raise around and see that many zeros. But the problem with that approach is that if you're not done raising capital, if you're not going to reach positive, uh, ebitda based on the capital you have on hand, then you have to leave Headroom so that the next investors can see a, uh, path to profitability or return on their investment. And this is something that's really guided May that at every raise we've been very thoughtful, like, yeah, we want an increase in valuation because we've had a great year, we've achieved X, Y and Z. But hey, we, uh, know we're going to have to do another capital raise in another year or two. And so we have to leave Headroom in there so that those investors are excited and motivated. If you don't do that, you end up burning out of cash, you end up running out of cash as a company that was worth many billions of dollars because nobody's going to invest. It's an uninvestable company at that point.

Speaker A: So I don't know if you look in these terms, but how big do you think May can get?

Speaker C: Well, the market that we're going after, we're starting today is, uh, this public transit, uh, B2G and B2B marketplace in the US, Canada and Japan, which are our three markets of focus. That's a $40 billion market. And so even if we only captured a few percent of that, that makes May Mobility a fantastically successful company and a great outcome for everyone. And it's worth pointing out that we are the only AV company playing in that space. So Waymo is not working in this space. The other AV companies are not working in the B2B. B2G. Uh, there's some interesting reasons I can unpack why, but this is ours.

Speaker A: So you got this whole lane, no pun intended, but like you have this whole lane to yourself, basically.

Speaker C: That's right, yes. And if you think about it, for a company like Waymo, um, of course technically they're capable of operating vehicles in a lot of the environments that we do. But what they can't do is they can't afford to have their vehicles drop below very high asset utilization. Right? So that if they come to a more rural environment, they're not going to be able to keep their vehicle busy 24 hours a day. And that's going to negatively impact their unit economics in that sort of classic robo taxi, uh, go to market strategy. So literally they can't make money in these more rural environments, uh, without, uh, replicating our business strategy. But they can't do that either because the typical customer for us might be a 20 or maybe 50 vehicle deal. They have to deploy hundreds of thousands of cars in order to reach profitability. And they can't do that 20 or 50 vehicles at a time. So this is really, I think, uh, um, something many people, analysts miss in the space that while Waymo's accomplished a huge amount, their product is great because of their size and their go to market strategy. They are prevented from going after the market that we are in, which has much better revenue potential. And it's worth pointing out that, uh, uh, we are now with the Lyft deal that we announced, uh, a few months ago, will be launching on the Lyft network in Atlanta, which looks a lot more like that robo taxi market. And that market is $400 billion.

Speaker A: Oh. So, yeah, tell me about that. So I'm not that familiar with the Lyft deal.

Speaker C: Yeah. So, uh, the idea here is for us to start learning more about the robotaxi go to market strategy. And each of these go to market strategies has advantages and disadvantages. The B2G space, where we start, really high revenue potential because we're replacing buses, which were very expensive, but it's also fairly fragmented, which is what keeps the waymos of the world out of that business. M In contrast, the robo taxi market is a, ah, very, uh, comparatively low revenue potential. You're competing with Bob in his, uh, 2012 Hyundai. Right. So the revenue potential is quite low. But the advantage of it is that it is radically scalable and that's why Waymo is in that market. They need to deploy hundreds of thousands of cars. They can deploy thousands of cars in a robo taxi, um, go to market strategy by just showing up with the cars. Now, we actually don't think that that's the right way to do it. We think that replacing trips with autonomous single occupancy vehicles just adds to congestion. But the fundamental aspect of now the rider is the primary customer rather than city, is one that we can adapt our philosophy about making cities beautiful to.

Speaker A: You know, it's interesting. I'm always curious about this. I wonder if, you know, tech folks are kind of wired differently because I find out I've interviewed so many, you know, CTOs and your tech folks and they just, you know, they feel so comfortable with it. But to me, I'm being very frank. It's a little scary. Do you find that out sometimes with your customers where, you know, let's say it's kind of a bus, looks like, you know, you know, the Sienna van or whatever it is, and you have, you know, a bunch of people sitting there and they're looking and there's no driver. And you have that moment where maybe all the passengers start looking at each other, go, wait, did I make a mistake here? Oh, no. What's going on is, does it just take a while for people just to feel comfortable or do they start getting comfortable right away? How does this. Because I would be uncomfortable first. But I think after a while I'll be like, oh, this is pretty cool.

Speaker C: Yeah. I think the key thing is the state of mind that you're going to be in when you first encounter an autonomous vehicle. If you're asking yourself a thought experiment, uh, would I get into, uh, an empty vehicle, driverless vehicle? And that's the whole context. That's when you might have thoughts and reservations like, well, why would I do that when I could do X, Y or Z instead? But that's not how people, everyday people, actually make decisions. People are really prioritizing convenience. When you've got a place to go and your choice is to wait up to 45 minutes for the bus to maybe show up or get into the nice warm vehicle that's going to take you directly to your destination right now that happens to not have a driver in it, basically every consumer in the United States will get into the will, optimize for convenience, and pick the path that's available for them right now. And that's the real difference between providing real transportation services and providing an R and D testbed. We're solving real problems. People have places to go, they have medical appointments to get to, they have grocery store trips to make. And we are solving that need for them. And when you solve someone's problem, the adoption really comes very, very quick.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's, it's so wild. It's so, you know, with, with oftentimes. Do you ever feel this way as where you, you, let's say instacart, Would you think, like, okay, you're gonna get somebody to go and get all your food and vegetables and bring it back and then bring it to your house in someone's car. But this I, I, I, I, you know, it's wild how it just crosses over where maybe you know, 10 years ago people say, well, no, this will never happen, or 20 years ago, and now it's almost anything goes could happen now. Right?

Speaker C: That's exactly right. Uh, my favorite example is Uber, uh, the Uber Lyft model that, uh, if you, if you just kind of pause a moment and think, like if someone random came up to you on the street and said you want to ride and you've never met them, you don't know car is safe, whether it's had its maintenance record. But then you just hop in, you're like, yeah, yeah, take me to the airport.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker C: Uh, that's a good example of people in the moment are optimizing for convenience. They have a place to go, they're willing to get into a random car with a random driver with a little bit of like, hey, Lyft has done a basic background check or something like that, but really the bar is pretty low. It shows you how much convenience weighs on the minds of people when they're actually making decisions on the other side. Because people optimize for convenience, we have an opportunity to really radically increase their experience. We can take safety, um, ah, of course, as our highest priority so that we know that they're going to have a safe ride even if they're optimizing for convenience. That's hugely important. The other thing that's really important, if you think about the traditional robotaxi, uh, excuse me, traditional ride hail like, uh, Lyft or Uber, they don't have a product. They have several million products and you don't know which one is going to show up when you request a ride. Right. It might be a great vehicle with a great driver or it might not be, but this is something that we can really elevate the experience. Every time you get into a May vehicle, it's an expert driver. Every time you get in, it's a clean vehicle. Because these are professionally maintained fleets and that's a consistency in service that I think is going to help convince people that they don't need their personally owned car to commute in downtown. This is just a better product. And that's really the MO of May. We want to out compete personal car ownership. Everything we do has to be working towards making riding in a May vehicle better than driving yourself.

Speaker A: I could see that, uh, when we travel, we'll have Ubers and lifts and what have you. And then too many times, too often I'm in the car and I have like maybe my wife, my kids. And then I'm looking at the person who's driving and I'm like, oh my God, what did I just do this where, you know, maybe his one. You ever see where the drivers have maybe one finger on the steering wheel or they're playing around with the radio or they're like, oh my God, this is crazy.

Speaker B: Wearing an Apple Vision Pro, you know?

Speaker A: Well, first when you get in the car, they're moving all the garbage they have on their seats, taking it off like, did I make a big mistake here? What am I doing? When they're flying in the fast, like. So I think there's a lot to be said to go to, to you know, have a may where they know, okay, this, this. I don't have to have the worry about a psycho who's, you know, driving 100 miles an hour. And, and I have to worry about like my life is, and my and my family's lives are in danger as opposed to like. Okay, I know. Even though there's not a driver.

Speaker C: Yeah. You mentioned every time you rode in a Lyft or an Uber, it was, you know, the top 10% of your rides.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: Like, you know that of today's rides, that's what we're providing a consistency of quality and experience and that consistency is going to help drive adoption.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: I think there's also, you know, there's the, the convenience factor, the, the safety. Right. In terms of knowing that you're going to get to where you need to go without worrying about whether someone's going to speed or do questionable maneuvers, etc. But you know, I'll share a personal anecdote. I was um, traveling overseas in, in Asia recently and there are, you know, Uber and Lyft equivalent apps. Right. And, and uh, similarly, they're, they're pretty easy to use. Right. You just type in where you want to go. It, you know, locates you via gps for pickup, etc. You don't even have to speak the same language as the driver typically. Right. There's usually a number or a code or a color. And then you know, you're, you've matched to the car, you get in and you go. One of the unfortunate experiences in a ride that I had recently was, um, you know, uh, with an Uber or a Lyft, if the driver is waiting for the passenger for a certain period before you get into the car, you get charged a little bit extra. Right. You made the car wait. And I actually had this ride where uh, the driver didn't start the ride even though I had already gotten in the vehicle like within a minute or so of them pulling up. Right. And I saw that I got charged this like hefty fee and, and it had happened to me more than once, uh, while I was on this trip. And that's something too, where again, you get into a mate car and when there's no driver, you don't have someone who's maybe trying to make a couple of extra bucks on you. Right. And that was again, terrible example and not A great story, but you don't have to wor about stuff like that when it's a robot driving, right? Cars aren't going to overcharge you for waiting around, Right.

Speaker A: You got to worry about them trying to cheat you out of it. Like, why? It's like an extra annoyance factor. Like, well, I have to worry that. And then do I want to start arguing with the guy who's driving? You know, because now they're driving and I don't want to really argue with him over $5. Then now he's going to drive 80 miles an hour just to be like, vindictive. So. Yeah, so. So you don't want to have to be involved with that. So I get that top for sure. So are there any other things that, uh, maybe I didn't ask you guys that you feel you, you know, the audience and people would really want to know and you shared a lot. But there are other things that maybe I didn't ask you about that that you feel will be very germane to, for people to know.

Speaker B: Yeah. So I think, you know, selfishly, uh, we are always looking for great people here at May, right? Uh, you know, strong technical talent in, in particular. Uh, you know, Ed and I, we've both today talked a lot about, you know, the, the business that we're building, right? Both in terms of, um, you know, mobility as a service in the form of a, uh, larger form factor vehicle, shared rides as well as, you know, we are moving into that robo taxi space right, in Atlanta with Lyft. And someday as well, we may be providing this elevated kind of business class experience. Also, um, these are all really exciting products, right, that require a lot of, uh, talented people to work on, right. Obviously would love, you know, great engineers here, but we also need product folks, right? We need marketing people. You know, we talked a little bit about who knows about May, right? And in some ways, uh, we've been kind of one of the best kept secrets in the industry. But we also want to change that, right? We want to be more of that, you know, household name. So I think, you know, for me, I just want to throw out there that, you know, while a lot of other AV companies have maybe kind of slowed in progress or downshifted on their growth, we continue to grow, right? Not, not like gangbusters. But, you know, as of today, right now, we've got, you know, 24 roles up on our careers page, right. So would welcome people to check us out, you know, see what we're hiring for, talk to people at May, too. We have a great team who can tell you a lot about what it is like to work here. Right. You know what we're looking for and, you know, tell you more about, um, some of the skills that, that we'd love to bring in house here. So that's my Shameless Plug.

Speaker A: That's good. No, glad you see, this is one of the cool things about this podcast. I'm very open for Shameless Plugs. That's, that's all it's all about. Because we try to help. I mean, the whole idea is like, hey, to bring, you know, to talk about your brand and what you're doing and how it's working so people could know about it. But then also now people can maybe find a job, maybe they're in between jobs and like, hey, I'm a marketing person. I never even thought of going to May. Let me check it out. Or maybe like we talked earlier, you know, uh, I'm a software engineer, but, you know, I want something different. I want something that's more meaningful. Something has purpose. Something has, you know, that I feel, I could feel proud of. So, so that's really, it is important, you know, so it's really, it's, it's helping everybody.

Speaker C: The phrases that I love the most is, uh, being an informed contrarian, which is the idea that, you know, your discipline frontwards and backwards. You are absolutely informed, but maybe because you're experienced, you have a different view on how to execute your job, uh, or how to achieve something in a particular context. And that's, that's. And being a contrarian is about being, being brave enough, uh, being given the latitude to go and try a completely different solution than maybe what is considered standard, uh, or right, the proper way of doing things. And maybe the most telling example of this is that with our overall technology stack, Waymo has shown a particular trajectory towards building an autonomous vehicle company, uh, that is very capital intensive. It's a great product. Very capital intensive. If we were to set out to replicate the way that Waymo builds their technology, then we would likely also inherit a lot of that capital inefficiency. And I think this is actually what you see across the industry. Many of the companies that ran out of cash tried to replicate the Waymo model, but didn't have the capital resources that Alphabet provides to Waymo. And that's a bad combination. And so right out of the gate, main mobility. I've worked in this space a long time. We set out with a contrarian view of how to build the Technology, it's not just about your standard feed forward deep networks, your transformer models and convolutional models, because that's not the entire way that humans drive the visual cortex. Those uh, that lives back here, that's where our feed forward models tend to live. They tend to be really good at certain kinds of tasks. And that's what those feedforward models are, good algorithmic analogs of just this. Other parts of our brain, like the prefrontal cortex are not well modeled by pure feed forward networks. But nonetheless it's the prefrontal cortex that is involved in edge cases. When you're in an unusual situation, something you've never seen before, you start to reason through how to handle that situation. You're not pattern matching, you're reasoning. And that capability has been largely missing. And so across the AV industry, the reason that Waymo and other approaches are so capital intensive is because they're trying to approximate this deliberative reasoning capability that humans have through algorithmically less efficient means. And so we set out at May to say, hey, let's try to approach this problem through both dimensions. Let's use state of the art feed forward networks, state of the art machine, uh, learning and AI methods, but let's add some new methods that allow us to model this deliberative reasoning component. So it's just one example, but I think this is one where we've set our own course. You do that by first making sure you know uh, as much about the industry as you can, all the different approaches, and then when you think you have a really great idea, you run with it. And we've done that on the tech side. We've done that in terms of Tom and how we build our people, organization, how we do performance reviews, how we hire, how we do all of these things. We know how other companies do this, but it's always been important to me to give my leaders the space to go and do it differently when they, they have a good ideas.

Speaker A: You know, I think also you're onto something too. What I've noticed anecdotally is in LA and San Francisco, where a lot of these autonomous vehicles aren't treated too well. They're not warmly recepted. And I don't know if that's, I'm not really sure why, but I don't think they would feel the same way. By May it just right. It seems like for some reason they look at those cars and like uh, you know how they would putting on the cones on top of the hoods and Stuff to, like, mess it up purposefully. I don't think they're going to do that to me. Is it maybe because one has that vision to make the world a better place, the other is like, hey, they're just trying to make money. I'm not. I don't know. But I do see a difference. Right.

Speaker C: I think that, um, in many places, uh, autonomous vehicles are viewed as. As toys for the rich. The affluent are making the lives of everyone else worse, whether it's because maybe they're tying up traffic or literally they're too expensive and inaccessible for other users. I think that our goal and, uh, I can't claim perfection here, but our goal is for communities to see us as something valuable to the community, something that they see us doing good in the world by. By reaching out to people who have accessibility issues or working with older people or being good partners to the city, or having a really great track record in terms of safety and data transparency. My goal is for everyone, when they see a May vehicle, uh, driving by, to be like, yeah, yeah, that's good. I'm glad they're here. And that's a constant effort for us to make sure we're on the right side of people's minds.

Speaker A: Well, that's great. I love it. I love the ethos. I love the vibe, what you guys are doing. And, uh, I'm so glad that you're on the podcast so other people could learn more about what you're doing and what you're up to. And what we do is, you know, we'll, you know, we edit the podcast, but with this, I don't think there's much editing to be in there, but. And then we post on social media, so this way other people could see it and get a sense of what it's all about and help you grow. And also, Tom, I'll keep my eyes out. I'll take a look at the job and see maybe if there's some folks there who, uh, you know, might say, hey, you know what? This. This is right up my alley. This is what I want to do to get help on that front as well.

Speaker B: That'd be great.

Speaker A: Jack.

Speaker B: Yeah. When you guys are ready to, um, you know, to publish this podcast, let's work together on, um, some of the things that maybe we want to say when you do launch it, and potentially at that time, depending on maybe some of our most critical or interesting roles, I can feed those to you as well. Right. We're promoting them hand in hand.

Speaker A: Excellent. Well, thank you very much. And uh, this is great. You know, I love. I, you know, uh, the way you walked it through. And I think a lot of people going to feel the same way, that this is a. This is probably a better way of doing things. Better for the environment, better for, you know, better for, you know, the world, better for cleaner air. And also, I think there's something made when you're going with a few people together. You know, it's more camaraderie. It's more, you know, your neighbors and, you know, getting together. It's helping that person in the wheelchair. So there's a lot of great elements to it, and it's very positive. And I love when people are trying to do things in a better way and make people's lives better. So I appreciate you guys coming on, taking the time and sharing. What would you all do? And, uh, yeah, I'm looking forward to see as you guys grow. Just don't forget about me when you're all big shots in the unicorn company.

Speaker C: No, never.

Speaker B: Jack, uh, really appreciate the opportunity. Thanks for having us today. We had a lot of fun chatting with you.

Speaker A: My pleasure. Thanks.

Speaker C: Thanks so much, Chuck.

Speaker B: All right, we'll see you guys.

Speaker A: Let me just hit pause.