Building Hard Tech in Hard Markets: Kyle Vogt on Cruise, Twitch, and The Bot Company

**Elad Gil** (0:05)
Hi, listeners, and welcome back to No Priors. Today, we're joined by Kyle Vogt, a serial entrepreneur who has helped build some of the most influential tech companies. He co-founded Twitch, shaping live streaming. Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company acquired by GM for a billion dollars. And now, Kyle has launched The Bot Company, a start focused on building consumer robots. Kyle, welcome to No Priors.

**Kyle Vogt** (0:26)
Awesome. Let's get going.

**Sarah** (0:27)
Obviously, you've done a variety of different things over time. Everything from co-founding Twitch, you started Cruise, you're now working on a new startup. Can you tell us a little bit more about your Cruise experience? Because I think that whole era was incredibly formative for everything that's happening today in AI. And we'd just love to get your perspective on why start Cruise when you did, how that all evolved, and then how that's informing what you're doing now.

**Kyle Vogt** (0:46)
Sure. Yeah, we can go back to the beginning. This is 2013 And back then, there wasn't really self-driving car technology like there was today. There was just Google working on their self-driving car project. And Rumor had it, they had spent 100 million dollars, and they had the world's best engineers. And so going after something like that was a little bit crazy. And even after having worked on Twitch, you'd think that'd be enough credibility that as a repeat founder, I could go back and raise money. But it turned out even that was kind of a crazy enough idea, and Twitch hadn't been acquired yet.
I had a hard time. I had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to raise money. I pitched like 120 investors over the course of probably a couple of years to raise all the money we needed. But our thesis back then was very simple. We were going to start by finding, instead of going directly after what Google was doing with self-driving cars, they were trying to make the ultimate self-driving car, I think, as a moonshot, we took an approach of, what's the lean startup approach of this? Can you build something that has the minimum quantum of utility that is maybe lower cost or easier to execute so you can get to market more quickly and move from there? We started with a retrofit system where we would take a regular car, put some sensors on it, a computer in the back and get it to drive. We got that working pretty quickly, like an early version of Tesla full self-driving.

**Sarah** (2:01)
I think that was for just one car model too, right? That was like a BMW or something in the time?

**Kyle Vogt** (2:05)
That is the challenge with a retrofit business. It's like without the blessing of the car makers, you have to reverse engineer protocols and figure out how to attach motors to steering wheels. It wasn't necessarily sustainable, but we were still going to try to figure that out.
I'd say that peaked around the time we went to YC Demo Day, and Sam Alton was in the car actually, and we turned it on and rode it to Demo Day. We took that product for about a year and a half, and then realized that we had done enough technically that maybe we didn't have to do this lean startup approach. Maybe we had just go straight after the big fish, which would be building robotaxis. Around that time, Uber and Lyft had risen in popularity, and now we're becoming these household names, and talk of going public and all this stuff. And they had this big hole in their unit economics, which is paying the drivers. And so suddenly there was a strong market pull for self-driving technology, whereas before I had been seen as just a cool sci-fi thing. And so we were able to raise some money from Spark Capital and go straight into that. Within a year of that, I think we were required by GM. We had working prototypes driving around San Francisco, obeying traffic lights, changing lanes, going from point A to point B with an iPhone app back in 2015

**Sarah** (3:12)
That's pretty amazing. How do you think about the different approaches that people are taking today? So, there's Tesla on one side with a very specific approach, kind of moving everything to things that are a bit more camera-centric, but training on sort of a richer set of sensors and approaches. There's sort of the Waymo approach, which is much heavier on the hardware side in terms of what's actually on the vehicle. Both seem to be doing very interesting things. One is robotaxies. One is kind of still building mainly cars. How do you think about the different approaches, both from a business model perspective and also from a technology perspective?