 Okay, here we are with Oliver Cameron, VP of Product at Cruise. Oliver, can't wait to talk with you about self-driving cars and the future. But before that, why don't you tell us a little bit more about how you broke into product? Absolutely. So the truth is, I mostly fell into product management. When I was young, the thing that I was most passionate about was building products. And my means to do that was coding, right? And the truth is, I never became passionate about coding itself. Like I would consider myself a very mediocre software engineer, but what it meant and what it enabled was this ability for myself to make something out of nothing, just this super satisfying feeling, right? So that was really my first taste of product. And that led to my first startup, which ended up going through the startup incubator, Y Combinator back in 2011. And that was really my first step on the journey to product. So as I look into your own career path, you started as a builder, which is awesome. And then there's been a VP of product at companies such as Udacity and now Cruise. So how does someone go from being a good builder to really be a good builder of teams? So most of the skills tend to be transferable, right? There is a need in a small group of builders to communicate well, to get the team excited, to be really focused on what problems you're solving. And it turns out most of the intuition that's necessary to do that in a small team transfers rather well to that of a big team. Now, the tactics in which you go about doing those things between a small company and a big company, they're very different, right? And need to be very different. But it turns out that the skills are mostly transferable. The truth is though, the slightly longer story is that it's a process of iteration, right? What works at a company of 10 people tends to break down a company of 25 people, as it does to a company of 2,500 people, which is where Cruise is today. So learning those lessons, making those mistakes, trying out different things, experimenting, those have been important to me to understand what tactics I need to be using to share an exciting path with the teams I work with. So for people who are not familiar with Cruise, which I don't think there are many who are not, but what do you tell us a little more about what is Cruise about and more specifically, like what you're taking to the future of self-driving cars? Absolutely. So simply put, Cruise has built the most advanced self-driving cars in the world. These are cars that can drive entirely by themselves on the streets of San Francisco, which is a ridiculously complex place to drive. And what we're doing with these vehicles is putting them to work in two different applications, ride, hail, and delivery. With ride, hail, people will be able to request a car like they can Uber today, but the experience is significantly better, significantly more comfortable, safer, and just better across many different dimensions. And then we also have a delivery business. And the idea is that these vehicles can not just move people, but move goods. And we're today partnered with Walmart to be able to do that. And both of those businesses are growing very fast, which is exciting. So that's some school. Now, I'm looking at your background, right? And you've worked in software for the longest time. Now you are living an organization that has both software and hardware components. So how do you actually merge both worlds just to make sure that there's a smooth transition? And the end user, which at the end of the day doesn't need to know all these details, is going to use an app to request a car. So I hear this question a lot and I hear it because folks tend to have a bit of a freakout moment when they transition from pure software into something that involves both software and hardware. And I personally went through this freakout myself. And the truth is it's less about the area being more complex or anything like that. And it's more about scaling your own ability to connect dots. So what I mean by that is I truly feel the great PMs, not the good PMs, but the great PMs, they intuitively understand which dots to connect at any one time. And what that means is that in more maybe consumer software is, well, engineering needs to connect with design, who needs to connect with product, who maybe there's some sort of operational element and connect all those things. Now, in self-driving world, there's just more dots to connect. You have legal dots, you have hardware dots, you have operational dots, you have marketplace dots. Like you have all of these different parties to connect to make, like you said, this one experience of pressing a button and a car showing up feel utterly seamless. And really it's about scaling up yourself versus learning a new discipline. And that just takes time and some experimentation. And I think it speaks to the mindset of great PMs. You're tasked with figuring out complex challenges. And that doesn't probably you haven't never figured them out before. And maybe nobody has ever figured them out before. So I think that's the kind of the exciting piece of being in a position where you have to learn fast and you don't need to be the expert of every single piece. You probably have to build a team of experts. Exactly that. I don't anticipate any PM broadly speaking is the subject matter expert of every single thing. But what I do expect the PM to be able to do is again to understand, well, this person needs to talk to this person and we need to make this happen by this day. And as long as they can help each partner team that they work with understand what's necessary to ship a truly great product, then that PM is more than doing their job. So you mentioned that you're running some there's some cars in San Francisco. I live in San Francisco. I see your cars all the time, really for the rest of the work. What is the state of the art in self-driving and when can we expect to see some global adoption of this technology? It's a great question. So the state of the art and this will sound self-serving, but it's just true is a is a cruise self-driving vehicle. And the reason I can confidently say that is the case is because there is a big difference between the tens of companies that are out there testing self-driving cars and the number of companies that have successfully removed the need for human oversight on those self-driving cars. So if you go to San Francisco today or other cities across the world, you might see a self-driving car, but there's a human set in that front seat. That human's there in case the self-driving car makes a dumb decision. Now, for the companies, again, cruises the first in San Francisco that have successfully removed the need for that person in the front seat. That's a that's a huge leap and that presents the state of the art in this in this field. And, you know, this technology really stands on decades of development in robotics and software in machine learning and sensors and compute all to make that simple looking thing of removing a human in the front seat happen. So you think about the design thinking approach now to to a real car. I mean, we're not talking about software, changing the color of a button, you know, moving things around on the website or mobile app. How do you really apply that principle like user testing? How do you make sure that, you know, you're taking the input not just from machines in terms of safety, but really the user just to eventually make them see, make them feel safe enough choosing this technology over what they are used to doing today. So this is where self driving and other industries is one and the same, right? We're building a transportation product, whether it's self driving or not. From this perspective, it mostly doesn't matter. We're building a transportation product and we look at metrics like any other transportation product would look at. We look at repeat usage. We look at star ratings. We look at the extremes of the product and we use those things to guide our guide our roadmaps and our intuition. And ultimately, I am a huge believer of assembling a team of PMs that does have a strong intuition about what's necessary. You can have a whole bunch of data, endless amounts in fact. But I do believe it's important, in fact, critical that you empower your PMs to make decisions that might be unpopular according to data that they are strongly attuned with what the needs of their customers are. And the truth is, again, it goes back to old school product management. What's the best way to develop that intuition? Talk to your customers, right? Ride along with them, watch their facial expressions as something happens in the car and develop that intuition that you can then use to inform what you build and when you build it. So when I think about the mission that the company has, it's really incredible. We're talking about replacing the manual cars for self-driving cars, and I am aware of the benefits. But at the same time, there is like a mental barrier there for a lot of us where we're used to driving by ourselves. Like how and then as I think about you building a team of really smart people who are going to make this mission happen, like how do you go about finding that talent? Absolutely. So the key you pointed out there is that this is something brand new. This is something that hasn't been scaled in any sense today. And as such, when building a team to go attack this problem, the core or the key thing I look out for is what things have you built that simply wouldn't have happened were it not for your input that you drove. And that to me is a great signal of folks who have not just, you know, perhaps hidden in the background or folks that have have been able to kind of piggyback on momentum that a company already has or other team members, but folks that really took ownership to say, I'm going to make this happen. I'm going to shift this thing. And in self-driving, you just can't have enough of those people because it's such a complex world with so many challenges and so many gotchas that you need, again, a density of people that have solved problems and made things happen almost by themselves. You mentioned in the beginning that companies around 2,500 people today in terms of product team, like how do you structure the product team? How many people work on the brother product? So Cruz has two product teams. We have what we call consumer product management, and then we have technical product management. I lead the consumer product management team today. We're about 24 p.m. based across four different product areas. And it's just a world-class team that I'm incredibly proud to work with every day. You know, when you think about it, it's really insane. There are 24 people tasked with one of the most critical missions in the world. And, you know, they're going to make it happen. And I think I love to ask this question because when you look at a big number, like, oh, a company's over 1,000, 2,000 people, that's cool. Then you look at the product teams, they're not just the p.m.s, right? I'm sure you're also interacting with engineers, designers. What are, like, other than the engineer, designers and marketers, which is, like, the most obvious things, what are other teams that your product team has to interact with? So, Cruz, we have a commercial operations team because, you know, we're going to be deploying hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of these vehicles over the coming years. And to stand up those fleets across the country, across the world, that's an intense task, right? And a very exciting one. So, we collaborate very closely with this team to say, what are the limitations of scale? What is preventing you from deploying a further 100 vehicles in this geo? And we then take that problem and try to turn it into a tool, into a bug fix, into a product area, whatever it might be, and try and solve that particular problem. I find that work to be particularly fascinating because that's all under the surface. A customer, a rider is likely never to directly experience that. But by optimizing these things, we improve the customer's experience quite significantly. So that's a team we work very closely with, especially as of late. And I can imagine also the legal barrier that it has to roll out a worldwide product with different legislation. So something that is physical. So, I mean, it's not something that I can see very commonly in e-commerce platforms, at least at the very beginning, like, as a PM, how much do you really have to be aware of? Limitations that are not just technical. There's many, many times over. And this is, again, where the great PMs separate themselves from the good PMs, right? That there is a handful of constraints that they are given. Most of those are real and legit constraints. Some of them turn out to not be constraints. And the great PMs know when to push on that. They know when to change those constraints and what comes after it. So short version here is we have many, many constraints. And that's OK. You know, it forces fast decision making. It forces us to get creative when we're building products. Like you're saying, it's not just technical limitations we have. We do have legal limitations. We have operational limitations. We have product limitations in many cases as well. And we have to work around those to ensure that the customer never never feels that there's a limitation. For all day care, it's simply as a product that works. So for you today, Oliver, you're now you talk about how great PMs anticipate some of these limitations. You are now in a position where you are taking care of your team at the same time you're looking into the future and trying to anticipate some of these situations. So how do you personally invest in yourself and make sure that you are also growing? It's a good question. Well, the truth is, whether I like it or not, that the challenges that I am and have been presented with just enforce growth, right? Like Cruz is an incredibly ambitious company. And I wouldn't have it any other way. That ambition forces me to learn new things and forces me to learn from mistakes and continue growing. The truth is, though, you know, when I look at my career, one of the things I felt is that I've taken companies from zero dollars all the way to that sort of hundred million dollar mark in annual recurring revenue. And that's a period I really enjoy that. That's effectively something from nothing, right? And taking it to reasonable scale. The next step of going from a hundred million to a billion in revenue, and I don't say that lightly, but that's that's a step I look forward to a Cruz. That that's a step that I think we all surprise people by how fast that step occurs here. And that's something I'm looking forward to understanding and learning. Well, OK, you can take something from zero to a hundred, but a hundred million. How do you then take it from a hundred million to a billion? What new things will present itself? What challenges will be unearthed along the way? It's going to be it's going to be quite the journey. Yes, to to grab things up, there's some people in the audience. Then when all of us are product people, different stages in our careers, not everyone is a VP yet. So, you know, you were to look back and think, OK, like, what are some of those key moments in my life that really helped me take those lips of faith? You just talked about one of them going from zero to a hundred is different than going from a hundred to a billion. So for people who are meeting their careers today, listening to you and thinking, oh, my God, like those are really cool projects, the challenges to face. How can they really accelerate some of some of those steps and get to where they want to be a little bit faster? So most of the time, I think a lot of folks talk themselves out of asking, right? So if I was to to put a point on the moment in my career where a lot of things changed, it was a result of asking someone for something. So here's an example. Back, I forget the date, but I'd started building my first iPhone app and it was close to completion, but it wasn't quite ready just yet. And this was just me in my bedroom. I've been tinkering with jailbreaking and a few other things. And I just thought, I'm just going to build something new. And when I was a teenager, I'd started to get to know a bunch of folks in the Mac ecosystem. And there was this one guy that came to mind who I'd saw as I was growing up, advancing to lots into software distribution effectively. And I it was like 1 a.m. And I built this app and I didn't really know what to do with it. And I just thought I'm going to age me. I literally went on a AOLs instant messenger. And I thought, maybe I still have his name. Maybe not. I don't know. But let me log on and see. And I went online and I saw he was there. So I thought I'm just going to send him a version of this app. I'm just going to get his feedback. And through that one connection, which I'd randomly built up on like message boards in the Mac ecosystem, he connected me to a publisher for my first app. And this publisher offered to publish my app and promote my app and help me, you know, get this thing out the door. And that moment really triggered so many subsequent steps for me. I owe a lot to that one person and that one chance encounter of saying, will you help me take this a little further than I feel like I can currently take it? And I often feel people just sometimes don't ask or they don't feel like they can ask or they feel like it would be rude or something of that nature. And the truth is, you can only just ask with no replies. It doesn't matter who cares. But if they do answer and it does tend to have to be something pretty cool, well, you might have found this kind of game changing moment in your in your career. I think that's that's beautiful and I'm very powerful. I think to not self-reject is important because you already have that know. But thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure to learn from you. Thank you. This was fun.