The Peter Pan Economy: Waymo and the Market Distortion of Infinite Runway

I'm obviously biased, and I probably have more gripes than most about Waymo as a corporate entity, but the premise this article seems to be based on is "Waymo is a zombie company who will never release a real product" or something similar?

They seem to be scaling just fine. Here in SF they're ubiquitous and most people I know use them regularly (and usually prefer them to rideshare). Sure, it's not the type of growth possible with pure software, but they're doing 500k rides/week and are looking to be doing 1MM/week by the end of the year. What scale does this business need to be for the author to consider them a real company?

>Alphabet keep funding Waymo. >Friendly venture funds agree on a higher valuation. >Everyone marks up their spreadsheets. >No one has to find out what the company is actually worth in a public market.

While true to date, this can't go on literally forever. Waymo has to somehow bridge the gaps between hype, revenue, and eventually profits that justify the valuations (i.e. "grow up"), but they have a huge advantage to do this: their tech actually works. The moat isn't just capital availability, they solved a very hard problem, and that will protect them for a while going forward.

Author here, I'm a former Microsoft Sr Director and Phd Economist, and someone in my network asked me for my assessment of Waymo (he/she is an employee). This is my unfiltered take.