FULL TRANSCRIPT

‍

Slava Rubin (00:00)

All right, let's get started. My name is Slava Rubin and I'm one of the founders here at Vincent. We're your platform getting you access to all things alternative investments. We have our alternative investment reports, the daily newsletter, as well as the Smart Humans podcast. We love to do these Vincent Presents, also this pre-IPO series talking about what's in the zeitgeist and all kinds of pre-IPO companies. With us, the famous, the only, Jan Erik. Say hi.

Jan-Erik Asplund (00:24)

Great to be here.

Slava Rubin (00:26)

All right, Jan-Erik from Sacra always bringing awesome research to the table. Many of you have asked that we're finally delivering. We're talking about autonomous driving. I was just actually in L.A. about a week ago. I was walking down the street and I was shocked to see how many Waymo's and autonomous cars that were driving around, Teslas that were doing self drive. So this is of the moment. Let's talk about, you know, who are the companies to invest in? Where is the market headed? Should you get in today? Is it early? Is it late?

⁓ So I'm excited to jump into this. So let's talk about who's here. All right. We have three quarters of the folks are accredited, which is pretty usual, but a little bit higher. We have an intermediate level of pre-IPO investing and quite a bit, two thirds are thinking about investing into the pre-IPO market in the next 12 months. So let's go on to the next slide. A word from our

Compliance department nothing in this presentation should be construed as an offer to sell securities or solicitation of offer to buy securities all Investments involved risk and the possibility of loss including loss of principle and neither past performance nor forward-looking information is a guarantee of future results Now next slide and we're gonna ask a poll question, which is you're here to talk about autonomous How many of you are thinking to invest into the autonomous space one way or another?

in the next 12 months. Now that does not mean are you investing into Waymo or Tesla, but those would count. Really, are you thinking about investing into autonomous? Have you already invested? Thinking about putting more? Let's give it 15 seconds, yes or no, unsure.

All right, survey says.

Only 9 % no and 50 % on the fence, which is why they are here. All right, thank you. Let's remove that and let's just jump right in, which is 50 % of the people in this audience don't know what they want to do, so this should be very informative. There's gonna be four chapters to this conversation. First chapter is gonna be some background. We're all gonna be level set, so we're all on the same page. Second chapter is we're gonna talk about some of the companies that you could be thinking about. Third chapter is we're gonna talk about competitive dynamics.

And the fourth chapter, I'm always most excited about, is we're gonna talk about the future and potential picks. Along the way, feel free to use your Q &A to ask any questions you may have. I'll be reviewing that as possible and try to track everybody and incorporate it to every question. So, how did we get here, Jan-Erik? What's the state of the market?

Jan-Erik Asplund (02:57)

Yeah, so I think the simple way to understand autonomous vehicles today is to look at it in terms of three eras. The first being early 2000s, where you had DARPA and Stanford researchers actually prove that this was technically feasible on some level. The second era came about a decade later, where you had this really huge kind of

land grab from all these different big tech companies, but also automakers. So you had especially Google, Uber, GM, Ford, who were pouring billions of dollars into this space with the expectation that this technology was going to take off fairly soon. And most of those attempts failed. cruise is gone, Argo is gone, Uber and Lyft both.

shut down their own self-driving labs, which they had operated at great cost, obviously. A lot of those shutdowns came right as things tightened up with COVID sort of precipitated a lot of those projects coming to an end. The technology was still too difficult, still too far away, and the capital burn was way too high. So what we're seeing today, this sort of third era, which has taken form over the last five years is,

more, a little more about consolidation. There's a little more focus on commercialization as well. you have kind of a few big players in RoboTaxi, you have Tesla, you have Waymo and you have Zoox with Amazon. These are companies that have massive permanent capital behind them. Or you have other companies that are sort of taking a more capital efficient approach, which we'll talk about like Wayve and Waabi ⁓ more software focused.

kind of thing. So it's a different era, a bit more diverse, interesting players to look at as investments.

Slava Rubin (04:42)

It's interesting. remember like a decade ago, literally, I was in a Waymo in San Francisco and no driver in the car. As a matter of fact, they were in the passenger seat trying to track how the car was doing. And I was there with my friend and it was just pure science fiction at the moment. It was just fascinating. know, I was like a little kid, kind of enamored watching how this was happening. Now, if you look at one of the numbers on the right side of the slide here, 15 million rides.

from Waymo in 2025. So this is not science fiction. This is happening for real. It's amazing how quote unquote quickly this is happening because a decade ago when in the middle section, people probably thought this was all too good to be true. Science fiction are not gonna happen. Let's fast forward to the next slide, which is give us some perspective on some of the market traction.

Jan-Erik Asplund (05:34)

Yeah, so that 15 million rides in 2025 is key to the reason that investors are paying attention to this space again. Why it sort of had a resurgence. You know, we're seeing tons of capital flowing back into the space. We're seeing the companies themselves expanding. You know, sort of geographies where they're operating, because right way Mo started in Phoenix, which is maybe the sort of R &D, you know, sandbox to play around in, no pun intended.

for autonomous vehicles. And they've expanded from there to SF as their biggest market, think, LA, Austin, numerous other cities. And so it's expanding geographically, vastly expanding in terms of rides. The number's doubling year over year, more than doubling year over year. So yeah, we're seeing a huge amount of investor interest in this space again, because it has been proven out to be

to be functional with different approaches, Waymo, Tesla not quite as far along, but also showing very promising results here. And we're also seeing this interesting fragmentation between the US and between China, where you have very different cost of goods and manufacturing costs and a parallel kind of market is evolving there to the US one.

Slava Rubin (06:52)

So you already said this, but that 15 million growing to 36 million, we've said the word Waymo quite a few times already. What percentage of that 36 million in 2026 do you think Waymo is?

Jan-Erik Asplund (07:04)

A vast majority of it is Waymo, I believe. You know, it be practically all Waymo, basically, because they are the only at-scale commercial player in the US. Self-driving.

Slava Rubin (07:15)

We're a little bit ahead of ourselves, in the future, there's potential for many companies to competing in this space, right? Whether it's Waymo or Tesla or Lyft or Amazon or which ones am I missing? Lots of good ones. So what we're going to go through at the moment is we're going go through some private companies.

Jan-Erik Asplund (07:32)

Yeah, exactly.

Slava Rubin (07:37)

as opportunities that you might be able to invest into. that right?

Jan-Erik Asplund (07:41)

Yes, both on the sort of RoboTaxi, fully integrated RoboTaxi, as well as some of the more software-centric players.

Slava Rubin (07:50)

Okay, let's do it. Let's go through some companies. Give me Waymo first.

Jan-Erik Asplund (07:53)

So like we said, yeah, pretty wide margin. Waymo is the commercial leader doing 500,000 rides a week or somewhere thereabouts, a little more than that and having real revenue as well. So the latest is 355 million in February, 2026. That basically doubling annualized revenue, a little more than doubling from the end of 2024.

And you sort of described it already, the sci-fi vision, but for people who haven't experienced it, it's like taking an Uber or a Lyft functionally, but there's no cancellation. There's no awkward experience with the driver.

Slava Rubin (08:38)

my gosh, there's no cancellation because they don't want to take you where you're going. ⁓ that's the worst.

Jan-Erik Asplund (08:44)

I can't believe that that still happens, but yeah, exactly. There's no human agency on the other side of that button that you press to get a ride. There's no pressure to tip or make a conversation. It's currently priced at a premium to Uber and Lyft. And from a lot of the consumer sentiment, it seems to be that people are not only paying more for the novelty, but they're sort of willing to pay more because you...

avoid all of those little frictions in the experience. So yeah, great customer experience is sort of the whole reason for this to exist. financial highlights, the other sort of side of that is obviously the profitability question, which is one of the main questions with autonomous vehicles. And I won't be able to go into all of it today at a super fine-grained level, but this is sort of the main thing to understand about the business model.

is the equation of vehicle costs, which are obviously higher for US companies versus ones operating in China, versus utilization percentage, how much of the day are these vehicles actually actively delivering someone? And then how many miles are they traveling sort of in between? So these are important variables that need to be, they need vehicle costs to come down and utilization to come up.

in order to be profitable, which they're not, right? They are supposedly close to ⁓ profitable or supposedly contribution margin positive in San Francisco, which is their top market. But that is sort of the key question. Can this become a national transportation network where I take a Waymo in suburban Connecticut to go to the coffee shop? That would all depend on this question. right, can it become profitable out of that scale?

Slava Rubin (10:18)

We just got transitioned to the next slide, which is interesting, right? Which is in short, in San Francisco, Waymo is already making some headway, right? Which is fascinating. Obviously Uber is still, let's call it the dominant player, but you know, these things can flip and obviously Lyft is already kind of number three. Spoiler alert, I'm long Waymo, not exactly a novel concept, but can we go back?

to the previous slide for a second, because I think there's something crazy and I would like to unpack this, which is they're doing $355 million of annualized revenue, which in itself is a big number, okay? But they were doing 131 in 24, grew 117 % to 284, right? Which is a nice, you know, 100 % growth. That's not an anthropic growth, but it's perfectly lovely off of big numbers, but then only growing to 355 annualized, right?

So at the moment, it's not showing massive year-over-year growth, right? Is that fair?

Jan-Erik Asplund (11:24)

Yeah, I think it's not like super linear exponential growth.

Slava Rubin (11:29)

So a $126 billion valuation is a 355 X revenue. mean, Elon would be proud of that. mean, Elon doesn't even get 355 Xs sometimes. So we talk about Elon's multiples being space level, pun intended. So how does Waymo get a 355 X multiple?

Jan-Erik Asplund (11:57)

Yeah, it's a question. I think there's similar dynamics to some Musk company Elon Empire valuations. And with Waymo, I would think that the rationale is essentially that this is a technology that, and we'll go into this, at maturity and whole proliferation will fundamentally transform so many aspects of life that we barely can even imagine.

⁓ and will be, you know, if it's, you know, cheaper than owning a car and paying for maintenance and all that by, you know, two, three X, then it will have an enormous market in terms of who will buy it. So I think the fact that Waymo is so far ahead towards getting there and has the entire, you know, the entirety of Alphabet behind it, this massive war chest,

gives it kind of carte blanche, I would say, to have kind of whatever evaluation it wants. So I think that's probably the main way I think about it.

Slava Rubin (12:55)

So we're going to go faster through the other companies, but Waymo is the 755 pound gorilla. So I just want to spend another minute here on Waymo. I'm looking at Uber real time. Uber's market cap today is 151.7 billion. That's their market cap today. And they are doing like buckets of revenue and making

boatloads of profit. So this is just like fascinating. I mean, again, spoiler alert, I'm long Waymo and I think you can make money investing in 126 billion, but I'm just shocked that it's able to get such a huge valuation today. Yeah, it's not cheap to say the least.

Jan-Erik Asplund (13:47)

Yeah, and you know, it's probably worth mentioning as well that the biggest investor in Waymo in that round, valuing it at sorry, what did you say? 126 billion is Alphabet. So obviously there are other investors involved, but that is part of it.

Slava Rubin (14:01)

Right. Somebody somebody's asking questions. What would your way most revenues be if they could actually meet all the demand? How much of it is supply constrained? It's a bit of an unfair question because they would have to spend a ton of money to not be supply constrained. Right. So it's really a question of, you know, how long will the build out take? And along the way, how much market dominance could they have? Or will these other players?

like Tesla, Uber and others be able to eat into that market and is this deserving? think we, anything you want to say at the moment, Jan-Erik, or should we just go through the other companies?

Jan-Erik Asplund (14:40)

On the next slide, there's just one thing I wanted to point out, is that the market share is an interesting facet of this question, because Uber obviously has much higher market share than Waymo. But there is sort of the line of argument for Waymo to stay around this 25%, 30 % market share zone that folks have made, which is that by staying at a somewhat lower market share, they are actually sort of skimming

you know, they're increasing their utilization because folks are using Waymos at these high traffic times. So they don't have as big of a fleet as Uber, right? You're using Waymos at high traffic times, but they're staying more or less well utilized throughout the day. Whereas Uber drivers are more, you know, kind of all hours being used in lesser amounts during the night, which is an advantage for Uber that they can sort of just turn.

people loose, right? They don't have to care about the maintenance of the cars. They fully, you know, offload that to drivers. Whereas Waymo does have to think about that depreciation, maintenance, charging, fuel, all that kind of stuff. So they, you'll see them stay at this sort of somewhat lower sort of market share in some markets, but in a way that is sort of better for the union economics at the moment anyway. So I just wanted to point that out on my graph before we move on to the next company.

Slava Rubin (16:02)

Super interesting. All right, so we're gonna move fast now through a bunch of other companies and some more slides. ⁓ I do see some hands up. You don't need to put your hands up, just ask your questions and I'll try to find it. Jan-Erik, take us to the next company.

Jan-Erik Asplund (16:15)

So, Zoox is Amazon's acquired self-driving company. Waymo started with basically taking regular cars, Jaguars and now Hyundai's, and modifying them. Zoox started with this idea that the car should look completely different if there's not going be a driver. So, there's no steering wheel, no pedals, the sliding doors, the seats face inward like you're on an Amtrak. It's like a small moving ⁓ living room.

And the idea is this is a much better rider experience for the future where you have autonomous vehicles being used regularly and potentially better fleet economics. It's a simpler car, cheaper car, but obviously it's 12 years old, still need regulatory approval. They're well behind Waymo. So that's kind of the big risks for the issues, but definitely a very interesting sort of design take on the question of ⁓ building it. Yeah, a robot taxi.

Slava Rubin (17:05)

So going back to Waymo, really hard to get into, but if you're lucky enough, you could try to invest. Zoox really, you're just getting into through Amazon, so there's not a back door to try to invest directly. It might be one of those things where these ⁓ autonomous all spin out of their parent companies, but we'll see. Let's go on to the next one.

Jan-Erik Asplund (17:22)

Great, Wayve the sort of ⁓ software platform story here, right? So instead of owning cars or operating fleets, they're trying to basically license this software for self-driving to various OEMs and fleet operators. And so the sort of core insider idea is the idea that AI can be, you know, can generalize across cities without doing a whole bunch of engineering specific to cities, which is.

different from the 10 years ago AV model, which was all about mapping a specific city with cameras, testing, tuning for that specific city, doing that over and over. So Wayve is trying to build a more generalizable model, which they think that they can sell into Nissan, Stellantis, but also Uber and Lyft so that those companies don't have to do as much work on the self-driving software side. The advantage is obviously they can sell to everyone.

The downside or the risk is that what we've seen is that companies like Stellantis who have many car brands don't necessarily want to fully outsource this sort of, if you believe in autonomous driving, very, very important software layer to a third party business. We're seeing resistance to that.

Slava Rubin (18:32)

And they actually raised very recently at a 2.8, is that right? Sorry, at a 8.6. I mean, that's again, not a valuation to laugh at. Do know what they were valued at prior to that?

Jan-Erik Asplund (18:37)

Yeah, 8.6.

I don't have it off the of my head. No.

Slava Rubin (18:48)

and any knowledge on revenues.

Jan-Erik Asplund (18:52)

I don't think it's, yeah, it's hard to say. It's probably a lot of contract project driven stuff. Really hard to estimate.

Slava Rubin (18:59)

Nice, 8.60 revenues. Welcome to 2026. All right, next company.

Jan-Erik Asplund (19:07)

Waabi, ⁓ similarly, they're kind of more on the software side, but they're just starting with trucks instead. So there's a decent history around self-driving in trucks versus self-driving in cars, which has been popular because there's a lot of built-in enterprise demand. It's a highway-centric use case, which is much more predictable than doing a robotaxi in a dense urban environment. Highway driving is...

In fact, largely, a lot of it is already automated if you drive a modern vehicle with L2, L3 automation. And they also have an Uber partnership. Uber wants to potentially use Waabi as an AI model for robot taxis. So the idea is one model for both trucks and taxis, which would be a big advantage if they could make that work.

Slava Rubin (19:59)

I think this market is a no-brainer. The U.S. has massive highway system, really big country, the world as well, but really for the U.S., you we don't have incredible train systems. So I just think the trucking logistics is just such a big market and just taking out the human uncertainty or the human issues and adding that self-driving. I think there's gonna be a lot of money to be made here for sure.

Jan-Erik Asplund (20:21)

Absolutely. And you get valued about half, you 3.75. So about half Wayve

Nuro you might remember Nuro from roughly a decade ago, starting with autonomous delivery, which delivery robots, that was a very tough business then, still is now. They sort of pivoted into licensing, similar to Wayve, the autonomy software to OEMs and ride-hailing platforms, big partnership with Uber and Lucid Motors, which has been their big foothold. So yeah, they're in competition with

with Wayve, with a bunch of other companies out there, too. Mobileye, Aurora, Applied Intuition are other ones.

Slava Rubin (20:58)

So these guys sounded like the other OEM partnering company, right? Which was, ⁓ that company? What was that one called? Yeah, Wayve. Yes, Wayve, exactly. So what's the difference?

Jan-Erik Asplund (21:11)

There's really no, you know, meaningful difference in kind of what the surface, you know, what they're trying to do is I think that they're, you know, they're both partnering or attempting to partner with a lot of the same automakers in that, because they're still kind of a, you know, a land grab or a race to see who can sort of make this, you know, prove this out the best. So it's a lot of these kinds of pilots and partnership programs that are, that are still, you know, in the evaluation and the testing phase.

I think Nuro has a little bit longer period of time of working on this because they started off so long ago doing delivery. But yeah, so it's a bit of a knockout fight.

Slava Rubin (21:51)

yeah, it's interesting. The idea of partnering and licensing, you know, to OEMs, think that's just like a harder sell to me of that being a big company. especially with autonomous, you know, safety, integrity, like trust. it'll be interesting if, if there could be a highly valued company with this kind of go-to-market. we'll see. I personally am not the most bullish on this go-to-market.

But we'll see. Any other companies?

Jan-Erik Asplund (22:18)

I think that's it, but no, I agree. I acquisition makes sense.

Slava Rubin (22:24)

more of a consumer question in terms of the market. You know, in the early days of Uber and Lyft or whatever the other companies, people started just looking at all the different prices and just trying to compare and contrast and they would just take the cheapest. And then they figured out that maybe it's not just the cheapest, there's other variables they might care about or loyalty or whatever. Then people were asking about aggregators, et cetera. Do you think there's, how is that dynamic going to change in terms of the prices of a regular car versus autonomous car?

Are people gonna go for the cheapest? Are there gonna be different prices? Is there gonna be an aggregator app? What do you think about all that?

Jan-Erik Asplund (22:57)

Yeah, think there's a good chance that it's gonna be just very similar. People compare on price, obviously. So one thing is cheaper, people will switch. I think in other factors like wait time, whoever has the highest density of cars is gonna have the lowest wait time. They're gonna win in a lot of those head-to-heads. Trust, comfort, today that's not really a...

You can sort of have some version of that with Uber. can request a woman driver, for example. But autonomous vehicles sort of move at that point. Some of them might be avoiding highways, complex airport, pick up areas. can imagine some companies not being able to handle all those kinds of areas. So that might be a new one. But otherwise, I see it as being kind of similar to what we have today as far as that price comparison goes.

Slava Rubin (23:44)

Cool. I agree. I don't think it's going to be much different. I think it will just evolve similarly. People are to pick for what they care about, whether it's cleanliness or safety or quickness or density or loyalty, et cetera. So this is just an illustration of just comparatively just how much further Waymo is ahead versus all these other companies. But we're not including here really Tesla, which is not really an autonomous company yet.

as a robo taxi company so that can really turn on a dime, right? Do we have any visibility of when that might happen?

Jan-Erik Asplund (24:17)

It's hard to say. know that they're, or I've read recently that it's being piloted in Austin. So before anyone comments, think they are starting to test it. But yeah, hard to say how quickly it rolls out anywhere else.

Slava Rubin (24:31)

Okay, great. Next slide.

Why don't you talk to us a little bit about the competitive dynamics that are happening out there.

Jan-Erik Asplund (24:39)

Perfect. yeah, Uber, like we said, Uber and Lyft both sold off their self-driving businesses and have partnered instead. so Uber famously partnered with Waymo. You can order a Waymo in the Uber app. The sort of upside for them is if we can't own the fleet, at least we can own the demand and take a cut of every sort of self-driving interaction that happens. And we don't need to own the car, just like with regular Uber.

What has sort of shifted in 2026 is now, like we've talked about, Uber has formed a lot of other partnerships and Lyft has also formed several partnerships with self-driving companies because the dynamics of that kind of position in the market and then the value chain obviously point towards them wanting to have more options, be able to give people a faster ride. Maybe the Waymo app tells you a ride is six minutes away, but on Uber it's two minutes because they have access to other fleets that they can send you to.

And then also they can sort of collect a take rate no matter who you go with. So that is the direction that we're now seeing Uber going in, which makes sense and obviously creates tension with Waymo, which will want to funnel people to their first party app. And same with Lyft.

Slava Rubin (25:52)

The headline Uber putting 10 billion into robo taxis, what 10 billion is that? Like where did that go?

Jan-Erik Asplund (25:59)

Yeah, they're making various investments. So two that I pulled out were Lucid Motors and then there's also Rivian, which is working on Robotex. So they are, you know, forming...

Slava Rubin (26:08)

That's like 1.75 of the planned 10 billion you're saying.

Jan-Erik Asplund (26:12)

Yeah, exactly.

Slava Rubin (26:14)

Got it, got it, because 10 billion is a real number.

Jan-Erik Asplund (26:17)

Yeah, yeah, it's a lot of money that they are pouring into making sure that they have a stake in the future of robotaxis, future of the fleet vehicles.

Slava Rubin (26:27)

Is Lyft doing anything with autonomous?

Jan-Erik Asplund (26:31)

Yeah, it's much smaller. Like if you use a Lyft app in Nashville, you can order a Waymo there. And then there's also programs in Atlanta and a few other cities where you can get a self-driving car through Lyft, but it's not at the scale Waymo or Uber yet.

Slava Rubin (26:51)

Hot take is Waymo Buying Lift.

Jan-Erik Asplund (26:52)

It's interesting. Maybe. I'm not sure what's market cap. 5 billion. mean, seems like good idea.

Slava Rubin (26:56)

Like nothing.

Google. You heard it here first kids. Just so you know, feel free to come on back. All right, what's the next slide?

Jan-Erik Asplund (27:07)

Cool. Yeah, obviously we haven't talked about Tesla.

Slava Rubin (27:10)

Yeah, yeah, we haven't talked about Tesla that much. I want to talk about the future, like all this stuff. Where is this all headed? Where should we be investing? So let's like start placing some opinions, predicting the future, hearing some questions from the audience. Let's do it. Go for it. So what's Tesla with all this?

Jan-Erik Asplund (27:25)

Great, yeah, so Tesla has sort of gone away from the traditional way of doing self-driving. What Waymo does is all through a LIDAR radar sensors, and that has proven to work for Waymo. What Tesla's trying to do is something extremely different, much cheaper at scale, which is using its install base of Teslas and the cameras that they have on them, and you're just using those cameras themselves to sort of build out full self-driving and then turn full self-driving into a robotaxi service.

And in the future, turn everyone's Tesla into potentially another node in a robo taxi network so that while you're at work, you can rent out your Tesla to go do robo taxi stuff in the city and come back to you and have made you money. And they have the advantage of a ton of real world driving data, this potentially much cheaper hardware path and first party factories that they have. So if they can get to reliable, full autonomous

driving, can do so at a better cost basis. sort of only problem, I mean, it sounds great. The only problem is that they haven't really proven that they can operate safely without drivers at scale and get regulatory approval to launch into cities, which Waymo has done, which is why Waymo is still the commercial leader. But obviously, with Elon, it's tough to bet against him. So it's definitely one to watch in the future.

Slava Rubin (28:44)

I am very long this idea. So obviously you could just play this through the Tesla stock. But I think the Tesla robotaxi network, like I don't, I'm not a car guy personally. I have a car, but I'm not like, I can't wait to have this other car. And what about these horsepower and blah, blah, blah. To me, it's like point A point B like car as a service via Tesla because they've been doing self driving for so long already.

It's like a no-brainer. Sign me up.

Jan-Erik Asplund (29:16)

Yeah, I agree with you. It all depends on if you see ⁓ driving your own car as being worth it in the future when it's a niche, expensive activity. ⁓

Slava Rubin (29:26)

question from the audience, which is a great question. Probably it's a mistake by us, but the audience remind us of an awesome company. I don't know if you got time to do research on this one, but Applied Intuition, $15 billion market cap. We failed to include it. What do think of Applied Intuition? It should be in this here, in this deck.

Jan-Erik Asplund (29:43)

Yeah, they could be. There's a bunch of these software players and they are a bigger one, ⁓ know, supposedly 830 million in a recurring revenue. They're doing a lot of work, you know, in other areas of self-driving as well. you know, industrial mining, some drone stuff, agriculture. These are some of the big verticals. It's a very heavily enterprise-based business. They are doing

Slava Rubin (30:07)

some work on. You're saying it's not as consumer oriented?

Jan-Erik Asplund (30:11)

Not until recently, last year they launched kind of self-driving four OEMs. So they are definitely trying to make a play and they're a long standing player in this space. Definitely could have included them. I think it was just sort of a toss up, but yeah, definitely a big player revenue wise.

Slava Rubin (30:32)

Yeah, I'm gonna agree with the audience. think that's good one we should have had. So talk to me here, where as the future evolves, what should we be looking out for, for how to make money here?

Jan-Erik Asplund (30:45)

Yeah, so going quickly, you know, I think there's kind of the Waymo approach, the Zoox approach, Tesla approach, full stack fleet. You have the cars that you own and you rent them out, you run your own software. You kind of own the entire stack. Then there's the wave, wobby, neuro approach where you're licensing out software. It's much lower capex. You can go around the world and sell anywhere, you know, relatively frictionlessly. And you don't have any of the

sort of cost problems that full-stack fleets have. I think that's one of the key distinctions that you should look at. You have sort of consumer versus let's say enterprise, trucking being the biggest segment in enterprise, but there being other ones as well that are worth looking at, like applied intuition with agriculture, construction, that kind of thing. Data, Waymo and Tesla being the clear and away leaders, at least if we're talking sort of the US market.

They have the most data that they can use to improve their own driving models. Then you have, like I just pointed to, gesture to US versus China. We haven't even talked about Baidu or Apollo Go here, but they are sort the major other player globally and can produce cars much cheaper than Waymo. They also use LiDAR and they can build LiDAR sensors much cheaper. So really important to look at there as well.

And then obviously capital structure, we sort of talked about this at beginning, but the companies that are winning right now are these ones that are backed by billions of dollars from Alphabet or Amazon. The ones that failed 10 years ago were generally not backed by this kind of permanent capital. So that's another important kind of moat to be aware of. yeah.

Slava Rubin (32:26)

And this is just such an enormous market, right? So many people have cars. There are so many cars and trucks out there. I do think there's going to be some big winners, but I don't think there's gonna be a winner that takes it all. So I do think there's an opportunity for several companies to really become quite large. Do you have an opinion on full stack versus licensing?

Jan-Erik Asplund (32:49)

Yeah, I think the full stack approach seems to make more sense from what we're seeing, at least with Waymo's success. And I think the licensing question is a little bit, yeah, it doesn't seem like, it's hard to imagine OEMs being excited to sort of sign away the most critical function of their vehicles in the future to a third party and pay rent on it.

potentially, you you could see a GM or Ford acquiring one of these companies in order to acquire their tech and integrate it. But so in that sense, it could be interesting, you know, to own one of these companies early and see it acquired. But yeah, I'm more interested in Waymo and Tesla, I would say.

Slava Rubin (33:35)

What are the chances of a Chinese network of cars in America?

Jan-Erik Asplund (33:41)

I would say pretty low, pretty low given the current state of our relations with them. Even Waymo has had trouble getting Chinese made cars just to use as kind of the vehicles for their self-driving to use in America. I think with, yeah, it's hard to imagine that happening.

Slava Rubin (34:03)

All right, let's go to the next slide.

Give me some future predictions.

Jan-Erik Asplund (34:08)

Yeah, so I think if you take the logic of autonomous driving and, know, say most people are like Slava, you know, you don't really think of a car as being anything, you know, an extension of you. You're happy to use autonomous vehicles once they're available and cheaper than maintaining a car or maybe not even cheaper. But basically, if everyone starts driving around autonomous vehicles or riding around them, then a lot of things start to kind of shift and

in a lot of ways that open up, I think, investable opportunities outside private markets, pre-IPO startups, because of just how much the world can sort of be reshaped around this form of transport. So for example, parking lots are no longer as necessary if you have a autonomous vehicle fleets dropping people off door to door everywhere they go. So those become redevelopment opportunities.

totally different looking malls and stadiums, airports, hotels, multi-family businesses. You can have local businesses pulling demand from further away. Once a car ride is not something to endure, you also can have kind of second ring suburbs further away from the cities, areas around airports can become more investable once a 45 minute drive is not a big deal.

You also need, know, these cars are going to need significant amounts of, you know, a grid for charging, zoning, physical space. So it creates a lot of a huge infrastructure need on that side. yeah, you can sort of imagine all day the ways that everyday life could be different and that all these sorts of things could be different in an era of 80s.

Slava Rubin (35:54)

I love this visual and also this perspective, the idea of less parking, less traffic, less parking lots, better use of space. I am super pro this obviously it'll come with some negatives associated with that, but I'm quite bullish from that perspective. With this in mind, let's go back to the three predictions of how this, you know, EV market could evolve. So give us kind of the base, bear and bull case for the market.

Jan-Erik Asplund (36:22)

Yeah, I think the bare case is basically that the hardware costs don't come down, which make it hard for companies like Waymo to really expand geographically outside where they are now. You might also have regulation. Right now, seems like robot taxis are significantly safer than human drivers, getting less accidents. But you never know.

Slava Rubin (36:44)

Yeah, I've heard that insurance companies now charge you if you use full self-drive on Tesla and they track it, they charge you like half the price on the insurance per mile for the mile. Oh yeah. That you use the self-drive. Almost like gamifying to have you use self-drive more.

Jan-Erik Asplund (37:04)

I think I've seen that with, I know lemonade launched.

Yeah, exactly. That's great. I hope they don't look at the YouTube videos of people going and sleeping while they do full self driving. But it's all about using it the way it was intended.

Slava Rubin (37:18)

In this chart, what's today's EV market? What's your AV, your automatic vehicle tech, and then the sector EV? What are the numbers today that you're comparing with these numbers here?

Jan-Erik Asplund (37:29)

Today, think probably close to, well, I think the AV tech market is probably quite, maybe 20, 30 billion, if I just sort of ballpark it, or maybe a little bit more than that, maybe closer to 50, 60. So I think we're building in a little bit of growth in the bear case based on the momentum that they currently have.

Slava Rubin (37:48)

What's the difference here between AV tech and sector EV?

Jan-Erik Asplund (37:51)

the sort of,

Sector EV, think is more the sort of market caps, a bit of a fine distinction, but like, yeah, like revenues versus market caps or TAM versus market caps.

Slava Rubin (38:03)

Okay, so your bare case is not so much bigger than we are today. Your base case is we're actually growing like four or five X, is that right?

Jan-Erik Asplund (38:14)

Yeah, exactly.

Slava Rubin (38:17)

got it. And then what does the board case look like?

Jan-Erik Asplund (38:21)

Well, both cases, know, hardware costs come down quite significantly and regulation continues to be, you know, or even kind of eases up. I think there's been a lot of progress made, but gets easier. You have Uber and Lyft, you know, fully integrated with these different fleets driving demand. And I think you would have one other player besides Waymo sort of scaling up. So whether that's most likely would be the biggest candidate.

But I think that's the world where this kind of becomes a major market by 2030, where anyone in a sort of metropolitan area or just outside of one is going to be experiencing an autonomous vehicle at some point within the year. So yeah, that would be obviously very exciting.

Slava Rubin (39:05)

So using Waymo's bull case revenues of 10 billion and their 355 X multiple right now, Waymo would be worth, what is it, three and a half trillion?

Jan-Erik Asplund (39:20)

Yeah, seems right.

Slava Rubin (39:22)

Is that right? Anybody in the audience can correct me. That is bananas. Okay, so obviously their multiple probably won't stay at 355, but let's say they are doing 10 million of 10 billion of revenues in 2030. What's your prediction for Waymo evaluation?

Jan-Erik Asplund (39:39)

10 billion of revenue in 2030, I would say, I mean, I think you could make a case for them at, you know, at least a trillion dollars valuation, right? About a third of them on Microsoft or the leader in autonomous driving, 100X multiple. But yeah, that's just ballpark.

Slava Rubin (40:00)

Nice, trillion dollars. I love how we just say that so casually. We didn't have a trillion dollar company until a few years ago. It's amazing.

Let's go to the play by play. So we have some predictions per companies. Let's go to the final slide, which is give us some predictions for all these various companies. Give us your one-liner for each. So we have on the left, some of the traditional companies and what we're going to predict for them in 2030, kind of the top five OEMs. And on the right, the five most obvious kind of platforms that are leading the way.

So talk to us. As you give me your one liner, just give me red, green, or yellow in terms of green. super bullish on this company. Red, you're super bearish. And yellow, you're just like, hold.

Jan-Erik Asplund (40:50)

Yeah, think GM, know, GM probably a red, I think they tried to own the robot taxi market early. They bought cruise, spent a lot of money on that, then shut it down, safety issues. The most sort of realistic outcome is basically them, you know, continuing to reuse that cruise talent to build, you know, to build levels of automation into their current vehicles.

Slava Rubin (41:18)

Ford.

Jan-Erik Asplund (41:20)

Yeah, Ford had Argo, which was another big robot ex company or self-driving company. And I would say roughly the same as GM Red, because I think, you know, what they're basically focused on now is adding in, know, highway, highway self-driving essentially into their existing fleet.

Slava Rubin (41:39)

Is there any company on the left side that you're green

Jan-Erik Asplund (41:44)

yeah, I, I, couldn't say, think like Honda has a little bit more heritage on autonomy, ⁓ from a lot of what they've done in Japan, but yeah, it's hard to say. Maybe yellow. I think I'm not quite green on any of those.

Slava Rubin (41:50)

Sort of.

Here's a bold question. In 2040,

Do all five of these companies exist?

Jan-Erik Asplund (42:12)

I think so. think that the supply chain and factories, I think will be essential for manufacturing vehicles. I think Toyota right now has that sort of, of these Toyota is maybe the furthest ahead in that they've been sort of supplying vehicles to Waymo for some time. whoever can make kind of durable, high volume, low maintenance, elite vehicles, I think will have a huge business around this.

Yeah, it's easy to see how things might turn for some of the other ones.

Slava Rubin (42:41)

I'm going to say all five of these do not exist in the form that they exist in. They might still exist, but they might not be the parent. Maybe somebody owns them for their quote unquote manufacturing capabilities.

I'm not buying any of these stocks on the left. Talk to me on the right. Let's give the one-liners and give me your red, green, yellow.

Jan-Erik Asplund (43:00)

Yeah, for me Waymo, I'm green. think they have produced the clearest proof that this business works, that technology works. And now it's question of optimizing vehicle costs and utilization and expanding city by city, which is, I think, of a, well, slightly more of a solved problem. But I'm also green on Tesla. So I think they...

had the cars manufacturing base, they said this huge brand, all this driving data. And I think they'll get there in terms of full automation. I don't see it not happening. So I think, yeah, I'm pretty much agreeing on both those.

Slava Rubin (43:41)

How about Zoox GreenRider, y'all, Amazon.

Jan-Erik Asplund (43:45)

I think Red on Zoox. Yeah, I don't, it doesn't seem like they're anywhere near the others in terms of progress.

Slava Rubin (43:56)

Uber

Jan-Erik Asplund (43:56)

It was a good question. I, yeah, I, ⁓ I don't know. I think, I think yellow. I think, I think yellow, depends, I guess, on how Waymo's rollout goes in other cities. I'd be interested to see how the consumer brand does, but it seems anecdotally, it seems pretty good. you know, I have very tech pessimistic, skeptical brands who happily jump into Uber and to Waymo's. ⁓

in LA, it does seem like the brand is pretty good. Maybe they don't need Uber to drive demand. So I feel yellow and then I feel red on Lyft unless obviously Alphabet, as you suggested, buys them.

Slava Rubin (44:41)

Got it. Super helpful. So I am bullish on Waymo, but I do think in the near term, they're going to have some rollout scalability challenges that I do think it is expensive today. So I don't know if it's an obvious $500 billion company in the next year, but I do think it has the potential to be a $500 billion, if not even a trillion dollar company in the future.

a decade forward. So I do think Waymo is a long green but choppy in the near term is my opinion. I am totally bullish on Tesla. I can't wait to pay for a Tesla subscription and not have to own a car. I agree on Zoox. I am red on Zoox. I am green on Amazon. I just think Amazon has not prioritized this market appropriately.

I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon somehow becomes a major player in the trucking autonomy business to lower their costs for their own prime and delivery services. So I wouldn't be surprised if they add a whole lot of autonomy, whether it's airplanes, trucks, drones, et cetera. But I just don't think they're focused on the consumer and I think that's fine. So long Amazon, but short read on the car opportunity. I am differentiating with you on Uber.

I think Uber is a good entry point today in the public markets in the 70s. And I think that Waymo is getting a ton of love. Uber's priced down. And I think the demand that they've created will not go away. I think they can become another competitive player in that market. I'm not diminishing Waymo. I just think that Waymo is overpriced and Uber is underpriced. And I am sure Lyft will not be a standalone company in the years to come. Cool.

I'm sorry we did not get to everybody's questions. There's lots of very unique specific ones. Any other quick thoughts, Jan-Erik?

Jan-Erik Asplund (46:31)

You know, my only thought is, you know, it just comes to mind when you say green on Amazon, red on Zoox. It seems obvious that they would repurpose Zoox to be a delivery mechanism for Amazon packages. And if that happens, that would be very interesting and exciting. But yeah, doesn't seem to be the focus now.

Slava Rubin (46:53)

Yeah, that's kind of my, let's call it, prediction. That and Lyft won't be a standalone company. But it's fun to say how it takes. We just get to do this on the show and the world gets to actually execute. Thanks again, Yon-Erik. This was fun. everybody have a great day. We'll talk to you all soon.

‍