Storage Lot Self-Driving Tests

A story about how Shaan invested in and visited a self-driving car startup that was testing their technology in a storage facility.

"I invested in this company after meeting the founder at our live podcast show in San Francisco. He was running the perception team for Uber's self-driving cars division, but was leaving to start his own self-driving car company.

He noticed from Uber's data that 60-something percent of rides were just one passenger going less than 3 miles. He thought it was inefficient to have a 6-seater car weighing thousands of tons with one driver taking one person such a short distance. So he started working on creating a one or two-person electric self-driving vehicle optimized for very short trips.

I invested $50,000, and a year later he was grinding away in a garage in San Mateo. He was working literally out of a storage unit. I would go to the public storage facility, and he'd roll up the garage on unit 333 or whatever and put me in the vehicle. We'd drive in circles around the storage facility parking lot to test it. It was bizarre sitting there having the thing drive me.

It was working in that closed environment, which was pretty easy, but then he started working on taking it out a mile, going to get a sandwich from the shop. That's what he was doing for about a year."