This is an interesting article about the end of Starsky Robotics, an autonomous trucking company, and a view into the challenges of doing venture capital in that particular industry. My summary:
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Trucking companies are not particularly tech-savvy when it comes to purchasing autonomous vehicles, therefore it makes more sense to run such a company as a trucking fleet business of its own.
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Venture capital tech investors are not very savvy when it comes to safety engineering, but proper safety engineering is critical when it comes down to making ground in the autonomous trucking industry. Too often venture capital tech investors are more compelled by new features, not safety improvements and statements of fact that the delivered features will statistically function most of the time, not just some of the time.
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Venture capital tech investors often times also don’t see companies individually, but see the sector as a whole. And when they feel the sector as a whole over-hyped, they will pull out of investing of all related companies, regardless of whether or not those particular companies were responsible for hyping.
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Technology doesn’t follow a pure exponential growth curve, but rather a series of S-curves, where diminishing returns on old technologies become apparent. What kept Moore’s Law going was the ongoing discovery of successor technologies in tournament competition fashion that could continue the larger exponential growth trend. But alas, many times in tech we can get stymied at the end of one curve and it can be quite a while before we find the next curve on the way forward.
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How close we are to autonomous vehicles in general greatly influences what kind of size of companies can make the final jump. When we are far, the difference between the biggest and smallest are negligible. When we are close, the small push that the biggest can make compared to the smallest may be enough to get us there.
20200321/https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-end-of-starsky-robotics-acb8a6a8a5f5