DoorDash co-founder and CEO Tony Xu told Fortune Brainstorm Tech that the path to autonomous deliveries has been filled with “lots of pain and suffering.”
00:00We've been on a long journey with autonomous, you know, delivery and autonomous technologies in general.
00:05We've been working on it since about 2017.
00:07And, you know, candidly, it's mostly been filled with lots of pain and suffering.
00:14But on the flip side, I think you're starting to...
00:17In what way, though?
00:19Well, one of the things that you're burning, burning dollars, is it...
00:22No, I mean, you don't have to, you know, burn dollars to have pain and suffering.
00:26But what I mean is, you know, a lot of what we're doing is you have to do many things well in order to get something like autonomous delivery or autonomous technology of any form, you know, at scale, at quality, at the cost structure that I think people are expecting.
00:45And most importantly, with the, you know, guaranteed service promise to customers.
00:50And, you know, it requires you understanding how hardware components work together.
00:58It requires you understanding, obviously, how do you build autonomous software.
01:02It requires you understanding how to integrate the two.
01:04It requires you understanding how do you build the network and how do you take care of the network, especially if there is a vehicle that needs rescue.
01:12There's a lot of things that you have to get right, and it's very rare that one company are equally good at all of those skills.
01:20And, you know, I think we have the potential to be one of those companies, but I think we're still very early in building the competence.
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