"The consequences of success more than justify the risk of failure," he said.A group of landmark giant sequoias has so far been spared by a blaze sweeping through a California national park, authorities said.
Khosla believed Glydways could replace half the cars in major cities in less than 20 years.
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Or it could be an expensive flop, buried in the archives along with a video of the TV news anchor Walter Cronkite taking a test drive in a 1960s StaRRcar prototype, another dream of personal rapid transit that never materialized.Įither way, the Glydways team is inching forward on plans to roll out the vehicles in the Bay Area as soon as 2024. It could either change the future of public transportation so that hailing a Glydways would become as ubiquitous as booking an Uber. Of all the autonomous-vehicle projects out there, Glydways arguably has the most to prove in terms of its ability to scale and the potential risks. An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment. "I want to get the trucks off the road, and if they can move a package at a lower cost, they are more profitable," he said. For Seeger, a delivery partnership would be a win-win that aligned with his passion to lower carbon emissions. The team confirmed that a representative from Amazon's M&A team had visited the Glydways site in recent weeks. Glydways estimated a cost per ride of $0.25 a mile, which means Glydways could compete, or partner, with Amazon, FedEx, and UPS to move packages. There's another sizable market opportunity: autonomous delivery. Seeger declined to disclose the company's valuation but confirmed that he'd already kicked off conversations for the next round - cash that would come in handy to make it to 2024, when he expects to put Glydways' first vehicles on the road. To date, Glydways has raised about $30 million from VCs, a relatively small amount in today's frenzied funding environment. "It can make public transit cheaper, faster, unscheduled, and on demand 24/7, and do far better than autonomous cars," he said. Khosla said that, if successful, Glydways could solve one of the world's most consequential but hard problems. Two months later, Seeger received a term sheet from Khosla Ventures, his first institutional round raised from a VC.
Seeger anticipated another no, but Khosla said, "I've written about this idea already." Before he could finish the pitch, Khosla stopped him. In April 2019, Seeger traveled to Sand Hill Road, the epicenter of the startup-funding world, to try pitching another venture capitalist, this time the billionaire Vinod Khosla and his namesake firm, Khosla Ventures. "The costs are high, we service very few people, the experience is terrible, and the economics are just awful," Seeger said. He started Glydways in 2016 because he was frustrated with the lack of affordable public transportation options in the US, after spending his childhood bouncing around Europe and Asia. "Mobility is currently unsustainable, whether it's cars or trains or boats or planes," Mark Seeger, Glydways' founder and CEO, told Insider during a recent test ride - the first given to a news organization at its secret testing site in Concord, California. This time, the startup's 26 employees met with a local county representative to show off their ambitious project: a fleet of autonomous, electric pods that they hoped would soon be transporting commuters throughout the Bay Area. Inside a converted military bunker on the site of a former naval weapons station about 34 miles east of San Francisco, the small Glydways team prepared for its 115th meeting with a government official.
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