They pioneered the idea of end to end learning for self driving, they were talking about it seriously earlier than most and yet Tesla got a hang of it and within a year Tesla has released a fantastic e2e model miles ahead of whatever comma released. Tesla’s model is that good, I can see it becoming a robo taxi.

I can’t help but think that if they weren’t fixated on bootstrapping, shippable intermediaries etc etc, they could have been what Tesla is now. What if they actually tried to scale? It would have been off the vibe they are going for, but if they went the standard route and raised say 500M+ which is reasonable in this space, bought a ton of GPU’s, hired a bunch of ML superstars, hired a bunch of drivers to collect data, they could have already been leading against FSD. Of course whether they actually could have raised enough capital to do all this, is a hypothetical but it would have given them a fighting chance.

Then they tried to reinvent hiring, create good PR’s, solve challenges, they said which sounds like a good idea only if you’ve never tried to scale a company. When you’re a small startup, this may be a good way to sift through candidates but if you want to play in the big leagues this is a naive no go.

First off, most superstar candidates probably have not heard of you or even if they did wouldn’t be bothered to do your challenges, PR’s (god forbid microinternship etc). You need recruiters and head hunter to go after them, go to their universities, actively seek them out. Then you also need a reason for them to join when Anthropic is offering 600k to new hires, no one will choose comma ai in comparison. (Which is why you really need to scale, scale, scale to be able to afford them). Even if you offered them higher salaries, it’s still hard to hire them, you need a nexus of existing talent, a few well known names initially which will convince them to join. This will inevitably lead to some bad hires, some over hiring since you won’t be literally vetting them to a micro internship etc, but you can let them go quickly once you identify them. This will also lead to some redundancy. Having just 21 engineers is not a good thing, when the competition is literally running away with your product. There is a tendency to become too big like say cruise with 800+, but aim to at least have a 100+ , your organization speed will ramp up, and the product can defend against competition much more quickly.

TLDR; Comma for some reason acted allergic to scaling, when a traditional scaling route could have done them wonders. Now it might be too late. I also find it ironic that the best car on the streets right now is a Waymo, I took it through China Town SF no issues and this was the company Comma spent so much time shitting on. Apparently you could just scale up traditional robotics and solve robotaxis (whether it will ever become a profitable business, jury is still out)