Wayve's Alex Kendall, a billion dollar Kiwi founder. Plus, is SpaceX ready for One NZ's promises?

Peter was in California for the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket, carrying more satellites to support One NZ's satellite to mobile connectivity. 

We dig into the details of that deal, including whether competitors can possibly keep up.

Then, our featured guest is Alex Kendall, one of NZ's most successful tech expats in recent years.

Alex Kendall is the founder of Wayve, an autonomous vehicles company that raised US$1 billion earlier this year. 

He talks about his journey from being raised on a farm in Canterbury, to leading one of the most promising artificial intelligence companies in the world.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
I have four three two one mission engine.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
Full power and left off. Go Starlink, Go direct us out.

Speaker 1 (00:15):
This week the Business of Tech powered by two Degrees Business.
I'm back in California to witness my first rocket launch
and find out more about the satellite to mobile services
coming to New Zealand that those satellites put into orbit
this week by SpaceX will soon be provided.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
I'm Peter Griffin and I'm Ben Moore, and it's a
seriously innovation packed episode this week where rocket launchers, satellites
and autonomous vehicles and robots will be very soon. Hearing
from a special guest, doctor Alex Kendall, a Kiwi and
the chief executive of UK based startup Way, which raised

(00:52):
over a billion US dollars in funding earlier this year
to pursue Kendall's vision for autonomous vehicles and robot you.

Speaker 1 (01:01):
Waive is one of the hottest AI startups in the
world at the moment, and there's a New Zealander driving it,
which is very cool.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
Peter, your interview with Alex Kendall is coming up, but
first this week, we've both been at swanky industry events.
Although I think your Californian rockets and satellites definitely beat
my Auckland payments conference. So Peter, let's talk about this
SpaceX rocket launch. This wasn't another starship going up, was
it the one they caught with mechanical chop sticks a

(01:29):
month or so back.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
No, Actually, this is a real conventional Falcon nine rocket,
which is really the workhorse of the SpaceX fleet, so
that puts satellites into orbit on a regular basis. This one,
in particular, was putting up around twenty styling satellites to
join that constellation is about six thousand of those in

(01:51):
orbit now, but it also put up thirteen so called
direct to sell satellites. Now, these are forming their own
much smaller constellation, a few hundred satellites with the specific
aim of allowing people on the ground to send a
text message and eventually a call and send data directly

(02:12):
from a standard mobile handset to a satellite and then
out to the world. Connectivity in places that you don't
have a cell site, which in New Zealand is about
forty percent of the country, and even out at sea,
this will be available out to twenty kilometers out to sea,
So the ability to send a text message when you're

(02:34):
effectively in a black spot, a mobile black spot. That's
what this is about. SpaceX has been putting up these
satellites all year and it's getting to the point now
it's got three launches left. They told us where they
will then flesh out that constellation of satellites, which allows
One New Zealand here, which is their partner, their customer,

(02:58):
to start launching that service.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
Yeah, and that's the service that's been had a little
bit of controversy around it, isn't it, with One New
Zealand making claims in a campaign that it would provide
one hundred percent coverage across New Zealand. But the ComCom
has kind of come back and said, no, we think
you were a little bit misleading there.

Speaker 1 (03:17):
It is a bit controversial. The Commics Commission claims they've
reached the Fair Trading Act by making these claims not
being nuanced enough in their advertising. They said in their advertising.
This was about eighteen months ago when they rebranded, they
really chose to use mobile to satellite as the big
game changing technology to align with the One New Zealand brand.

(03:39):
So they did the big ad campaign. Now basically said
by the end of twenty twenty four we'll have this
in the market now. Time is running short on that
they're testing it. The only drawback or the thing that's
holding it up is Federal Communications Commission approval for SpaceX.
So all of the local authorizations have been achieved, so

(04:02):
that's not a problem. They're allowed to test it under
a license from SpaceX, but they need to get that
signed off in the US before they can commercially launch
the service, so that may roll over now, most likely
into the new year. On the coverage itself, yeah, so
this is a contentious thing. If you're inside a house,

(04:22):
chances are you're not going to be able to get connectivity.
It really is the line of sight with the sky.
So you start getting into issues off what if you're
on there's some coverage of trees, you fall down into
a gully, you want to send a text message because
you've broken your leg. Will it be able to get out?
And the testing they've done, they're saying that there are
some situations where you can, but officially it's a line

(04:45):
of sight with the sky. So Tiger Governor, who's the
general manager of mobile networks at one end zet this
is what he had to say on that coverage issue.

Speaker 3 (04:58):
The service will work anywhere you see the sky, but
we have tested it indoors, so near windows it works absolutely.
We've tested it in cars. Works in the car works
really well because clearly, you know, there's not a lot
of blockhead from the windscreen, so really impressive from a
coverage perspective. Now, also important to note is that you

(05:18):
will move onto this network. It'll say one and said
SpaceX network, so it's you know, you've kind of roamed
into the network. So you'll be very clearly aware that
you're in the network, and you'll only go onto that
network where there's no usable signal on the one insid network.
The algorithms that's you know, in the phone and the
network will make sure that happens all seamlessly in the background,

(05:39):
so you'll be able to roam onto the network under
the right conditions.

Speaker 1 (05:43):
That's interesting.

Speaker 2 (05:43):
Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of the old
days of the CDM a network which Telecom used originally,
and if you were in a pine forest, essentially the
needles scattered it and you can connect in a forest.
It is just a known limitation sometimes of these connectivity technologies.
But you know, it sounds like They've put some thought

(06:05):
into it, testing it in windows and things like that.
So I would imagine if you are trapped under you know,
touchwood rubbled in an earthquake might not be super helpful,
but if you could just manage to get into the
right area, you might be able to get something out.

Speaker 1 (06:23):
I think we'll see all sorts of scenarios play out there,
but ultimately the majority of scenarios I think will be
someone who's like, oh, I need to I need to
get a message out urgently to warn people or tell
people where I am. I'm going to climb up to
the top of that hill or at least get out
from under the undergrowth, so I could see those sorts

(06:43):
of scenarios. The reality is about this is that the
more satellites that they have up there, and this is
starting to come together now. But the key use case
of this is really, you know, disasters when the rest
of the network is down for whatever reason, like we
saw with cyclone Gabrielle, and we saw a case of
this a few months ago in the US and Florida

(07:06):
where the hurricane went through took out a lot of
the terrestrial mobile infrastructure, and so SpaceX actually turn it on.
They said, look, this is available if you've got a
cell phone, try and connect to it, see if you
can use it. And they did. This is what Tigan
had to say about that.

Speaker 3 (07:24):
They did a really loude scale test with the hurricanes
in Florida recently. The numbers they shared with US, and
I think it's public as well, is during that time
they had twenty seven thousand devices connect onto the network
and they sent two hundred and fifty thousand texts over
a few days. That's two hundred and fifty thousand people

(07:45):
communicated that would not have been communicating. It's pretty awesome
during an event where there was no coverage.

Speaker 2 (07:51):
So that's a lot of people connecting in one go,
two hundred and fifty thousand text messages being sent in
that case, So, you know, a terrible disaster, tragedy for
a lot of people, which is incredibly sad, but a
demonstration of how these kinds of technologies can help to

(08:12):
mitigate some of the impact of that disaster.

Speaker 1 (08:15):
Yeah, that was literally the biggest test to date. I mean,
they've been testing it in the US with T Mobile.
They've been doing some testing now in New Zealand and
apparently the New Zealand. Testing is going pretty well, but
it's not at the level yet where they're happy for
a commercial launch. The number of texts that have gone
through successfully, they need to get that up a bit,

(08:36):
so they will continue to work on that. But yeah,
in terms of the competitive dynamic in this market, there
are a bunch of companies that are trying to do this,
and they range from Global Star, which is the satellite
operator that underpins Apple's Emergency SOS service, which is available
in New Zealand. So you can see in a text

(08:57):
message if you're in trouble via an Apple device and
iPhone and it will go to some call center and
they will alert the emergency services. So that exists at
the moment. But the ones that are trying to go
a little bit further, there's a few companies. One is
called ast which is growing in terms of numbers of
customers that's got on board link We've talked about in

(09:20):
relation to two degrees in Spark, So that's the other
provider that is launching services here, but they haven't got
nearly as many satellites up there yet as SpaceX does,
so some question marks over them. This is what Tiger
had to say about that particular technology from Link.

Speaker 3 (09:40):
I'm not sure if it's well one that we tested
with them, probably a couple of years back now, I
personally tested went out to gisabonan and tested their service.
At the time, it was a two G service and
it wasn't very reliable. You had to stand like three
meters away from the mobile device because it might lose connectivity,
and it was pretty clunky at the time, no doubt.

(10:00):
You know, they have improved since, and it was at
that point that I said, yeah, they're not for us.
I'm recommending we go with SpaceX, and Space said nothing
at the time, but we chose to back a horse
who had capability than some underwared technology. So definitely Link
started earlier. And if you listen to their CEO, they'll
say they were the first to prove out the technology,

(10:23):
to prove the physics and whatever, and they've got a
whole lot of patents around it, which they do, but
they certainly don't have the financial backing. And if you
google them recently, they haven't said anything for months, which
is pretty you know, speaks a.

Speaker 2 (10:37):
Lot, a little bit of a spicy comment there. Clearly
clearly very much found that SpaceX was you know, like
that was kind of the comment that One New Zealand
was making when they first made that agreement. Yes, Link
has the proof of concept is a little bit ahead,
but SpaceX is infrastructure and funding is so much stronger

(10:59):
they go to overtake it. It sounds like that may
be very well becoming true.

Speaker 1 (11:05):
It's interesting, you know Tigan Governeder from One end Z,
the gm A for Mobile network, you know, saying there, look,
I was the one who really made this call. I
wasn't happy with the trials I saw with Link, so
I've recommended we go with this different technology from SpaceX,
which they have now done Link. It's going to be
interesting to see in the next few months. They still

(11:25):
have this merger to do this, this listing that they
were going to do to raise more capital that's been
delayed during the year. Apparently it's still on track. But
the bottom line is that, you know, when two degrees
and Spark get this going, it's going to be a
fair amount of time behind SpaceX's arrangement with One end

(11:46):
Z and how many satellites will they have. What will
that mean for the delay and getting a message up there?
And back Link was the one that came up with
this technology. But as we've seen many times in history,
it's not always the one it's first with the best
technology that actually wins.

Speaker 2 (12:02):
Yeah, it's the one with the most money. Yeah, in
which it happens to be the case with SpaceX the
other one.

Speaker 1 (12:09):
I said to the team at one end, Z, you
know what happens if Apple decides to expand from what
they're doing at the moment they're sending an SOS message,
would they move into providing voice data services via this
network of satellites that they're actually investing with Global Star

(12:29):
a lot more money in Tigan doesn't seem to think
so that there are a few barriers to doing that.
This is what he said about that.

Speaker 3 (12:37):
Like, we still own the customer relationship. So you know,
Apple can do over the top, Stuffy can even do
over the top voice, but you need a lot of
satellites to do voice. I don't see it scanting well,
but you know that's my prediction, and certainly I think
they will. They will never compete with the architecture that

(12:58):
SpaceX have when it comes to scale.

Speaker 2 (13:00):
It's I think, you know, he's identified that they had
different use cases. Really that in terms of what one
is aiming to do, sorry, in terms of what Apple
is aiming to do with their you know, emergency contact
service is a different situation to creating a full connectivity

(13:20):
in space cell tower solution. And yeah, I still think
it's interesting because you know, they're they're they're they are
a company, and they're growing and they're doing more in
that space. So it could potentially build out that capability.
But you know, SpaceX has such a dominant position in
so many ways that it might be difficult to contend

(13:42):
with them.

Speaker 1 (13:43):
Yeah, which I think is on the mind of regulators
in the US. Okay, space X is already massive in
satellite broadband. They're they're really building out this network of
you know, direct to sell satellites as well, either going
to own the game entirely. That's not what the US
government wants. It wants a diversity off players there. But

(14:06):
I think Tiger's right about the fact that it's unlikely
Apple would go over the top. They're more likely to
partner with the local provider because the local provider has
the primary relationship, the billing relationship really with the customer.
It's hard to go around that. You also need local
spectrum rights to run these services as well. So I
don't see that happening. But the big question might really

(14:28):
is what's the business case here? So they paid presumably
a lot of money, they haven't said how much, but
it's a significant investment to SpaceX to have exclusive rights
for a period of time to run the service. They've
said that the service will only be available on higher
end postpaid plans. They haven't said which ones yet, but

(14:51):
presumably you know you're gonna have to pay. At the moment.
Their entry level plan is about forty five dollars on
postpaid mobile, so presumably you might have to go to
a sixty five dollars plan to get this, and it
would be available on the eighty five dollars plan as well.
So are there enough people out there who work in
rural areas where connectivity is really patchy, where safety is
a big priority, where the boss will say, I can't'm

(15:14):
putting everyone on the next plan up. You'll get more
mobile data, sure, but you'll also get this ability to
send back to head office text messages and then eventually
make calls and send low levels of data from way
out in the boondocks of New Zealand. That's really the
play here, and either enough people between business people, agricultural

(15:37):
workers and then the enthusiasts going out into the great
wide open, and maybe bodies as well who are willing
to go on to a higher plan or stay on
a higher plan to take advantage of this. That's where
one in z is actually going to make money to
subsidize and pay for the service.

Speaker 2 (15:54):
Yeah, and can they do it at a way that
is more affordable than just having portable starlink that you
can roll out onto a site for all your workers
if you're doing you know, agriculture or something.

Speaker 1 (16:06):
Starlink Mini is coming as well, but a battery powered
version of that you can put in the backpack and
take with you as well, so there's more diversity. I
guess they would argue. We're also a reseller of that
as well. With Space six. This is now dominant. SpaceX
has suddenly become in the telecommunications industry in the space
of a couple of years. It's extraordinary, isn't it. And

(16:26):
you know I didn't really five years ago.

Speaker 2 (16:29):
I did not have on my Bengo card Elon musk
owns worldwide Telecommunications, but maybe I should have, you know,
all right, so we will keep an eye on progress
as one New Zealand approaches the launch of satellite to
mobile services as well as all those other satellites to
mobile services that have been promised and now let's go
from satellites two Autonomous cars. Wave is a London based

(16:53):
company founded by Canterbury born engineer and entrepreneur doctor Alex Kendall,
who studied at University of Auckland before heading to the
UK on a scholarship to the University of Cambridge.

Speaker 1 (17:05):
That's where he really started pursuing the idea of using
artificial intelligence to control autonomous systems like cars. He came
up with the idea for a sort of general purpose
AI that learns from its surroundings rather than relying on
exhaust of programming and Wave was born.

Speaker 2 (17:26):
Yeah, Wave's billion dollar rays in May, broke records for
a UK startup, and it's now moving to the US.
Has a partnership with Uber, as well as online grocery
firms like the UK chain Asda. Peter You caught up
with Alex to talk about Wave's unique approach to the
autonomous vehicle challenge and how it differentiates itself from the

(17:47):
likes of Tesla, Weimo and Cruz. So here's your interview
with Alex Kendall right after the.

Speaker 1 (17:53):
Brak Alex, Welcome to the Business of Tech. Thanks so
much for coming on the show all the way from London. Hey,
glad to be here, and what an amazing year you
have had. Just reflecting back, we had that announcement in

(18:14):
May which completely my jaw hit the floor here in
New Zealand reading the New Zealand Herald to learn that
you'd raised the best part of New Zealand dollars one
point seven billion, around a billion dollars soft Bank, in Vidia, Microsoft,
some huge names in there. Probably the biggest capital raise
at least for a New Zealand startup founder so far,

(18:37):
and I think she soon acted. The Prime Minister at
the time said it anchors the UK's position as an
AI superpower. Was one of the biggest AI capital raises
in Europe at that point. Just reflect back on that,
you know, seven or eight months ago, getting that deal
over the line, what was that like, what was that
feeling when you got that capital secured?

Speaker 4 (19:00):
Because a super exciting moment for our whole team. But
raising money is a bit of a lagging indicator of success,
and for us, it's a bit like reaching the start line.
So we've been a deep tech company for well seven
years since we incorporated. I've been working on these ideas
for many, many more years than that, and I think

(19:20):
this represents this special moment where we're transferring from being
an R and D focused company into a product company.
And what's exciting about this money that we're raised is
it gives us the ability to go and take the
embodied AI that we're building and go and get it
shipped into a product that can actually delight people around
the world. And being able to switch from that R

(19:41):
and D focus and move into a product journey is
a special moment. But because of that, it does feel
like the start line. So we've got a lot ahead
of us, and we're excited to get stuck in.

Speaker 1 (19:50):
Yeah, And I think when a significant amount of money
like that is raised, that's when you're on the mainstream
radar of a lot of people who potentially could be driving.
These guys already had the likes of Bill Gates in
the backseat of driverless coronets, so people in the industry
know the journey you've been on, but it's now become
clear to everyone else where it's going. But take us

(20:10):
into you've called this the space race of my generation
self driving vehicles. What inspired you to focus on this
particular field of technology.

Speaker 4 (20:20):
Well, I remember when I was going into Auckland engineering school.
You know, you had the choice of do you want
to do buy medical, mechanical, civil engineering. All of the
different like that all really fascinated me, and I ended
up doing mechatronics robotics engineering because it was the intersection
of pretty much everything electrical, mechanical software and you know,

(20:42):
for me, robotics and bodied eye self driving cars, these
kind of things are just the nexus of so many
different disciplines even today. A huge part of it is
everything from like public policy, regulation as well as of
course simulation, machine learning, and all of the engineering behind
these kinds of system So it's a really cross functional challenge.

(21:03):
I also can't understate how hard it is to build
an AI, let alone embody it in the physical world.
I mean the thing about of course, we're seeing AI
each impact earlier in area where from search engines to
knowledge retrieval to chatbots, because these systems, you know, don't
have the physical world integration or the level of safety
required to operate. But you know, what we're building at

(21:26):
Wave is an embodied AI that can bring AI into
the physical world. It can enable AI to be trusted
to do tasks for us, whether it's driving our car
or eventually in areas like manufacturing or domestic robotics. And
you know, what this represents is an opportunity for us
to develop the next level of tools. I mean, we've

(21:46):
built as humanity, We've built the wheel, calculated the computer.
But you know, largely speaking, a lot of the you know,
machines that we use are still relatively dumb, and I
think the opportunity to bring AI into them will let
us trust them, delegate more tasks to them, and ultimately
free up our time for what matters most. So it's
a long way of saying this is a huge opportunity,

(22:07):
but it's just so hard because of the level of
safety required. Let's take driving as an example. It's not
like it's a constrained area. You could have conceivably any
weather occur. You could have vulnerable road users or other
cars behave in a way that you can't predict. And
so what that requires is a system that has the

(22:28):
general purpose intelligence and reasoning to deal with things it's
never seen before. And to build that level of common sense,
reasoning and robustness on a robot that's out there in
the physical world in ways that you can't control once
you've shipped it. That is an extraordinary challenge.

Speaker 1 (22:46):
And so.

Speaker 4 (22:48):
You know, that's that's really what we mean when it's
when I say it's a space race of a generation.
I think it truly is one of the greatest engineering
challenges out there today, one that I'm passionate to be
spending my entire life working on.

Speaker 1 (23:01):
Yeah, and this idea of embodied AI another term you
use end to end learning. I mean the narrative around
autonomous vehicles. It's sort of been dominated by Tesla to date.
There's been other companies like Mobilized, a great Israeli company
I've visited many years ago. You've got Waymo vehicles. I've
seen around the streets of San Francisco, which is quite

(23:23):
surreal seeing a car there with no one behind the
steering wheel. You're probably used to that, but I find
it a bit freaky. Your approach. How is it fundamentally
differing or is it differing fundamentally from the companies that
sort of come before.

Speaker 4 (23:39):
Well, we've had a really contrar and approach this problem.
So when we say we use end to end learning,
what that means is that we have a machine learning
model in neural network that learns to drive our cars
all the way from input to output. So what that
means is that it's a data driven stack. We don't
program rules it'say if a red light stop or for

(24:00):
green light go. Rather, we just feed the system a
lot of data and let it learn those patterns in
the data. And so the result is that the scale
is a lot better, it's a lot more cost effective.
We don't need armies of engineers that program the exact
rules or matt that the the robot of self driving
car needs to follow. Instead, we can learn concepts that

(24:20):
more complex than humans can hand engineer. And the really
interesting thing is this has been a very contrarian approach,
which is something that New Zealand's certainly used to, and
it was I don't know, I really enjoyed it in
the early days of building Wave because I essentially I
finished my PhD and was convinced that this would be

(24:41):
the way that the future of robotics would work, that
we would have learning machines that could learn to understand
their world and interact in a way that would harness
the power of machine learning. And at the time in
twenty seventeen, this was an idea that was almost completely
rejected by the industry. We'd just seen billions of dollars
raised by the big tech companies to go and build

(25:03):
self driving cars. We've seen leaders predict that this technology
would be widespread in the next couple of years. And equally,
when I went and pitch these ideas to these folks,
they said, oh, into any will ever be safe and
gave a bunch of dismissive arguments. So I guess that
led me to go, go build the company, to go

(25:23):
go make this technology a reality. And today, probably last year,
I think we saw the turning point where a lot
of folks started to shift their position. And I wouldn't
say this is the incumbent approach day, far from it.
We've still got a lot to prove, but at least
it's no longer being dismissed out of hand. And the
exciting thing for us is that in terms of the

(25:44):
car companies that we licensed this technology to a year ago,
we couldn't even get a meeting with their executives, and
now we have CEOs of all the major car companies
around the world lining up to come experiences technology and
when they'd ride in it, they get this chat GPT
reaction going, oh my god, I want this and my
product yesterday. And that's a that's a really you know,

(26:06):
a really exciting moment. But for us from here, it's
it's all about, well, we've still got a lot, we've
got a lot of work to do, but at least
the core ideas I think are starting to play out
and our thesis certainly you know, still holds from from
when we started seven years ago.

Speaker 1 (26:24):
Yeah, just jumping back to the University of Auckland. Interestingly,
you went into the second year off your mechatronics engineering
degree there. What was that like sort of was that
a bit freaky sort of going in with all those
second year students as your first experience of university.

Speaker 4 (26:42):
Oh, look, they have some of my some of my
best friends now.

Speaker 1 (26:45):
So it was.

Speaker 4 (26:48):
I don't know, I don't I don't spend too much
time getting hung up about the whole imposter syndrome. I've
made enough of a fall of myself in life.

Speaker 1 (26:55):
So it was.

Speaker 4 (26:58):
It was an adventure right, Like I. I I don't
think I've ever had this great, you know, strategic plan
for how my life's going to play out. I've I've
certainly been fortunate enough with you know, the scholarships that
I've been able to win to Auckland or to the
University of Cambridge that have given me some of that flexibility,
which I certainly recognized. But beyond that, I've yeah, I've

(27:20):
just really tried to prioritize my time of whatever's most interesting,
what's what's what's the biggest adventure. And I think I
actually came to Auckland and ended up not doing starting
off in first year and I you know, I think
a couple of weeks in I started to look at
the material and second year and I thought it was fascinating,

(27:43):
interesting and sort of want to get stuck into that.
And so thankfully the dean let me in, let me
jump into that, and it was a it was an
awesome couple of years. What I really liked about it
the course, was just how practical and varied it was.
I I spent most of my time in the mechatronics
lab three D printing robots and building drones and all
these kind of things and some late night sleeping under

(28:04):
the desks there.

Speaker 1 (28:05):
But it was, it was.

Speaker 4 (28:07):
It was just a lot of fun and the friends
and memories I made were invaluable.

Speaker 1 (28:12):
Yeah, and you were a resident advisor at Arour Hall.
What was that experience like?

Speaker 4 (28:20):
Oh, look, that was just I think again coming back
to the theme of a bit of an adventure. For me,
being an RA was the most amazing year of teamwork,
of fun, pranks and everything like that. But whether it
was that or playing hockey for the university, I think

(28:41):
being part of those teams and I guess developing some
early schools of leadership have carried through to how I
aim to lead our teamate Wave today, you know, where
over three hundred people and the leadership challenges are certainly
demanding there and hopefully I learned a thing or two
through some of those experiences.

Speaker 1 (29:00):
Yeah, And I guess around about that time that you
were studying or just about to graduate, you know, we
had to like to Power by Proxy had been acquired
by Apple, you know, huge deal in terms of that
technology being featured in and iPhones, you know, whireless charging technology,
fantastic achievement for that company. UNI Services were spinning off

(29:21):
other companies. Was the kernel in your mind then that
I want to be a startup founder?

Speaker 4 (29:29):
As I said, I don't think it was some grand
strategic plan. It was And actually, I you know, when
people come to me and say I want to found
a startup for I guess, you know, finding a startup sake,
I think that's often I really don't look on that favorably.
I think it's a The problem with that is that
it's focusing on the outcome, not the journey. And because

(29:54):
these these experiences are so uncertain and so meandering and
how they go, you really need gristin stick ability, and
I think that really comes from being problem driven. So
what I was fascinated with is is building and creating
impact with with this technology. And I wanted to solve
the problem. Now, look, if there was amazing, an amazing

(30:17):
environment for me to work and to be able to
do that, I probably would have gone there. But the
reality was was that you know, in academia there was
no speed or resource and all of the industry if
it's at the time, we're taking the other approach, and
so you know that that you know, it was a
problem I had to solve and and led me to
starting a company to go get the resource and go

(30:39):
go create it myself. And so I think I think
it's always I've always had a problem driven mindset towards
towards building and and you know whatever I'm working on.

Speaker 1 (30:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (30:53):
So, but of course seeing people and being inspired by
what people have built it as a key part of it.
And I was fortunate enough to have a lot of
that around at the University of Cambridge where there was
a lot of entrepreneurship, but even in Auckland. I mean
I was at a dinner that Robbie from Ice House
put on a couple of weeks ago in London, and

(31:15):
seeing just the breadth of deep tech coming out of
New Zealand right now is inspiring. And the wave of
success stories that are now turning into angel investors that
are supporting their ecosystem. I think these kind of cycles,
they're fairly incompressible. You need to go through the winds
and failures and the success cycles to be able to
create that kind of ecosystem. You know, Silicon Valley in
the US has had forty fifty years of a head start,

(31:38):
but without a doubt New Zealand is going to grow
this as a muscle and hopefully it's something that I'll
be able to contribute to one day. But I better
get heads down and get a product ship first.

Speaker 1 (31:50):
Yeah, make this a massive, massive success and hopefully that
will then come as it has done for a lot
of New Zealand investors have done the start ups. That's
a great thing we are. Robbie has been integral to
that is, you know, leveraging some of those people who've
been through it and done it, the likes of Rod
Drury and Sam Morgan and Rowan Simpson, those sorts of
people who have then put their money back in very

(32:14):
different scale. As you said, Cambridge is at the height
of one of the biggest R and D sort of
areas in the world, has some amazing companies here. How
did that sort of change your perspective or impact it
in terms of autonomous vehicles and how to approach it
being exposed during your PhD to all this amazing R

(32:35):
and D expertise there.

Speaker 4 (32:38):
Yeah, it's there was this amazing experience where so I
want to I was fortunate enough to get this the
Wolffisher Scholarship which sent me over to Cambridge, and I've
never been to Europe before, and I turned up at
the university and look, if you haven't been, this place
is like a castle. I turned up and was told
down this corridor was Isaac Newton's old study, you know

(32:59):
by the way, you know Ernst Rutherford. This is where
he did his experiments to split the atom and all
of this kind of stuff. And I also I moved
into this room that was on the top floor of
a place that literally had cast layers on the on
the balcony. You know, there was no shower, only a bath.
There was no Wi Fi, only wide intoet. So there

(33:21):
were some things that was you know, it was more medieval,
but the people and the conversations and the sort of
space I had to go and get immersed in some
ideas was just awesome. And part of what I was
really enjoyed doing was bringing some ideas that hadn't been

(33:41):
connected together before, and you know, bring them together because
when I started to read and explore, machine learning was
starting to take a foot but hadn't yet really impacted robotics.
And so seeing some of the deep learning technology that
some people around me were working on and being able
to take that into problems like slam or localization or

(34:05):
figure teaching a robot to figure out where they are,
what's going to happen next, or even working with a
colleague that was working on how to measure the uncertainty
or safety of such a system and bring that in.
I think that cross pollination was really fantastic, But then
it was just a lot of really you know, share,
hard work and effort. I'm also a big believer that

(34:28):
there's no such thing as Eureka moments.

Speaker 1 (34:29):
It's not like you.

Speaker 4 (34:32):
It's not like you sort of sit in a bath,
spill some water and run down the street naked and
think that that's how the world works. It's sort of
sustained effort against something over many, many years is what
allows you to solve hard problems. And you know, if
you count that PhD time and wave now it's been
a decade of work on working on embodied AI and

(34:53):
we're still starting to scratch the surface. I also had
the chance to hit out and spend six months or
so with the startup in Silicon Valley, and I think
that experience was awesome because I got to see what
create looked like. I got to see an amazing robotic
startup sku Ideo that built drones take off quite quite

(35:15):
literally and learn from so many people there and be
mentored and inspired by them. And actually that was a
bit of a full circle for me because the first
robots was building in my family's farm back in christ
Church were drones, and I remember putting these things together
chasing a few sheep around the paddock. I actually the
final year engineering research project I did in Auckland was

(35:36):
a drone that we took to the domain and taught
it to fly around and follow people wearing an orange beanie.
So this kind of technology was quite fun to play
with back then. I actually entered that into the Velocity
Challenge in the final year of Auckland. We made the finals.
But I'll never forget one experience when we were pitching

(35:59):
a crowd of about three hundred people with our business idea.
It was actually to use this drone to automate understanding
pasture length around a farm. And look, I think Holt
has done a much better job at agriculture automation than
we were trying to do there. But long story short,
in front of this crowd, I flew the drone up
and I must have had a few too sleepless nights

(36:20):
because one of the roads fell off midflight. It spiraled
and crashed in front of that whole crowd and gone.
Gone was that business idea, but probably for the better.

Speaker 1 (36:30):
Well, what you're working on is probably a bit more
scalable in terms of the problem you're trying to solve,
and I understand that in terms of the physical testing.
A few technology started on the streets of Cambridge while
using delivery vehicles that were going around the area. You
started to automate them.

Speaker 4 (36:48):
Yeah, So today we have a fleet in the UK,
in the US and soon some other parts of the
world as well, and we're test this technology on public
roads with safety drivers. So we're still sort of monitoring
the system, but the technology is really developing quite rapidly.

(37:10):
It's able to drive in places it's never been to
before without a high definition map. This is something that
the industry struggled with and is a problem that we're
able to overcome. It can drive with just cameras or
camera radar, but essentially a really lean camera, a lean
census stack, the kind of thing you find on modern
luxury vehicles that you can buy today and a growing
number of consumer vehicles. And then we've also done some

(37:32):
tests with the largest grocery companies in the UK doing
grocery delivery. So all of this experience we are using
to train to make our system safer, to make it
more performant. But the first product that we're launching is
going to be with consumer vehicles. So very soon you'll
be able to buy a new car and it'll have

(37:55):
waves AI on it. And the awesome thing that we'll
do is improve the safety. It'll mean that that vehicle
or will anticipate and prevent a number of collisions that
might have happened otherwise. It will provide you with an
AI that you can collaborate with that can help you drive,
take the stress off your drive, and have a hands
off driving experience. And you know, as we grow an experience,

(38:18):
we want to as quickly as we can make this
a hands off, eyes off experience where you can pass
the liability of driving to the car. And that's the
ultimate point where you can, I guess, get value back
and when the vehicle is provably safe enough to be
a thing that we in society can trust. But as
a global product, and we want to bring this to
the entire world. And my family keep pestering me, I

(38:39):
can't of course, can't wait till it can drive around
the streets in New Zealand.

Speaker 1 (38:43):
Yeah, well, you know, that is an interesting question. I
think the former Transport Secretary Mark Harper, when he was
talking about way if he was saying we could have
autonomous vehicles on UK roads by twenty twenty six, at
least some those roads. But you know, much better infrastructure
in places like the US and the UK. I mean,

(39:06):
in terms of our our roads are one lane sort
of highways, and that sort of thing probably take a
bit longer, I guess. And of course the regulations have
to change as well. In the UK, I think have
been very proactive. The US, state by state have facilitated
a lot of testing of self driving vehicles and certain
levels off autonomy. I guess it's only natural that those

(39:28):
bigger centers are going to be the first places to
actually put these in the hands of consumers.

Speaker 4 (39:35):
Yeah, and look, the future of transportation is going to
be multimodal, from walking so I cycled to work every day,
or micromobility or public transport or vehicles, and I think
there's an opportunity for embodied AI to improve the safety
and efficiency of not just cars but also public transport
are making it more frequent customizable. You know, you might

(39:58):
not even need to follow the buses set route, but
it might be you know, might have shared mobility that
can go to many different actually drop you off your
door or things like this. I think there's a lot
of disruption we're going to see a mobility with autonomy.
When you think about also how it's going to transform cities.
Cars today utilized about three percent of the time, and

(40:20):
with autonomy, hopefully we can enable them so they don't
just sit parked all day, but they can actually do
useful things or go and park in some low value
piece of real estate and free up all the car
parking spaces. Of course, reduce the congestion which is largely
caused by by road accidents. I also think there's other

(40:41):
side effects that they might be able to accelerate electrification,
and I really do hope that New Zealand can benefit
more from electrification of vehicles. I know it can be
challenging on some of the long journeys you know, through
South Island and things like this, but certainly in cities
like Auckland, you know seeing seeing conversion to electrification over

(41:02):
dominant electrification transport network over the next decade is for
me a must and I hope autonomy can just accelerate that.

Speaker 1 (41:09):
Yeah, it'll happen. And the fleet is growing gradually and
more charging stations are being rolled out. The government wants
to roll out ten thousand off them, so that range
anxiety I think will dissipate. In terms of the where
we're at in the artificial intelligence sort of evolution, There's
been a lot of angst over the last couple of

(41:30):
years since the rise of generative AI, and you know,
the likes of Jeffrey Hint and esteemed researcher and Google
employee until recently have sort of sounded the alarm about it.
I guess it's one thing for chat GPT to be
spitting out misinformation or hallucinating. It's another thing when it
is embodied AI, when it's in part of a physical

(41:52):
you know, robot essentially that could but you know, potentially
hurt someone if it goes wrong. What's year view on
how quickly we are moving? You want to get the
stuff to market quickly, obviously into the hands of people.
Striking that balance of safety and speed to market. How
do you get it right? Yeah? Look, I.

Speaker 4 (42:15):
For sure respect what Jeff is saying in those regards,
but I think that I'd much rather be part of
building the future and building the right future in a
dulous technology, rather than, you know, just being worried about
some I think it is a it's a non zero
but low likelihood outcome of how this technology might be used.

(42:36):
But let's take autonomous driving it as an example. The
level of safety, and this is a really highly regulated
space already, right, and I know that there's something that
regulators have very switched on to. I have a lot
of ongoing conversations in that regard of how we can
make this technology safe. So, firstly, the amount of testing

(42:58):
and structured thinking that needs to happen before these systems
go on public road is immense ways that we systematically
and statistically prove a level of safety that will be
acceptable to the public. Ultimately that there's a political decision,
But where that's currently landing is these systems need to
be significantly safer than a safe and competent human driver.

(43:21):
So let's put impaired or drunk or those kind of
drivers out of the way and actually look at what
an attentive human drivers like we need to be significantly
safer than that, and it's a very high bar, but
an important bar to exceed and one that we can
statistically prove. And then when it comes to areas like
cybersecurity or vehicle integration, you know, there are some very

(43:45):
well known methods that can be used to make sure
that this is a secure and integrated deployment of this technology.
And so ultimately I think that this is going to
be technology that will be trusted, will be safe, will
be able to operate within a given environment, and have

(44:06):
the level of oversight needed that it's you know, the
way that it is built, no way it's going to
go off pieced and you know, do something beyond what
it's trained and authorized to do. And then when it
comes to actually improving upon the level of road safety
we see today, you know, these vehicles can see three

(44:26):
sixty degrees at once, They can see with different senses
aside from just vision, like radar or things like this,
and of course can make decisions faster than a human can.
And so the potential to drive in a safer way
and give you the New Zealand Police an easier job.
It's something that society should require because it's just going

(44:46):
to improve our lives so much.

Speaker 1 (44:48):
When you look at how many millions of people are
killed on the road due to human error around the world.
It's just it is a no brainer. It's going to
take us decade probably to get there, but hopefully, I mean,
could you're not using or not required to use such
specialized technology with your method, Hopefully we'll see a lower
barrier to entry in terms of price as well. When

(45:10):
a BMW or another provider or automobile maker incorporates this in,
it's going to be sort of commoditized. It's going to
be maybe a couple of thousand dollars premium rather than
ten thousand dollars.

Speaker 4 (45:22):
Well, that's a key point to make, right, is that
the current technology you see driving around in Beijing or
San Francisco, they follow high definition maps, which is infrastructure
that is expensive and challenging to roll out, certainly globally,
and that's why the technology is starting in affluent places
like Silicon Valley. And what we're building gives a vehicle

(45:44):
that comes off a mass production line, you know, the
kind of new vehicles you buy today that have cameras
on them. Gives the ability for a vehicle like that
to be able to drive anywhere, to drive anywhere in
a way that's so including roads that it might not
have been to in the very end of I don't
know South Island, New Zealand where I'm from, or something
like this. So I do hope that it can bring

(46:05):
this technology to a global scale, and ultimately embodied a
Eye is going to go well beyond our road vehicles.
We're going to see it improve goods and delivery applications,
commercial vehicles. We should see it improve manufacturing, and you know,
hopefully this can make manufacturing possible at a much greater scale.

(46:29):
You know, today manufacturing really centers or where say labor
is cheaper. But you know, in the future, when you
have robot workers, you know, the cost of a cost
of a robot manufacturing system should be fairly consistent around
the world, and so manufacturing will now start to depend
on things like electricity or supply chain, and I think

(46:49):
New Zealand might have more of advantage there with a
renewable energy that we have, or equally in domestic tasks.
I think having embodied AYE systems that can help improve
our quality of living. I think all of these systems
ultimately are going to just accelerate the things that we're
capable of doing. I think we should be clear that

(47:10):
the tasks that we ask them to do should be
ones that we want to free up our time around
and and we should be able to delegate what we
want but contain keep the tasks that we want as society.
But ultimately, it's going to be like giving an accountant
a calculator or you know, it's just another it's a
new tool, but it's an intelligent tool that's going to

(47:33):
allow us to do so much more. And that's something
that's the future that I get really excited about.

Speaker 1 (47:46):
You've been entrusted with a lot of investor money now,
so that's huge confidence that those companies have put a
new a lot of founders along the way. Often a
technical founder will either be paired up with someone who's
got real commercial now so or sometimes even replaced. You'll

(48:06):
see a technical founder sort of shunt it aside into
a CTO role or something like that. What is the
key in your journey to winning that confidence showing that
you understand this technology and you have a vision for it.
A bit like Peter Beck, who is a technical founder
but has been able to attract a lot of capital

(48:27):
to the business, so shows that he has business now
and as a leader of people as well. What's been
the journey that you've been on that has allowed you
to tick all of those boxes.

Speaker 4 (48:36):
Yeah, well, I look, I started in the CTO mind
just building out the technology, and it's been fascinating how
my role has changed every year, from writing the first
code to building a team, finding commercial partners, raising investment,
and now leading an executive team. And I've loved this
because it's almost like as soon as I get good
at one level of scale, all of a sudden, we

(48:59):
outgrow it and lenge comes. So that's been That's been
I guess, very rewarding personally to go through that growth.

Speaker 1 (49:07):
And I think.

Speaker 4 (49:10):
Perhaps one of the things that has allowed me to
do that has been a mix between being very strong
minded and passionate about ideas, but also being I guess
humble with a growth mindset. And what I mean by
that is that, look, I can be incredibly passionate and opinionated,

(49:30):
but also very open to feedback, very curious to learn,
and I think some of those values that we embody
as a company now at Wave, I think have been
key to success. So look, I had a vision at
the start that everyone was telling me this was crazy,
this would never work, and I had the resilience and

(49:53):
belief to stick with it. But also the way we've
implemented or solved this vision has just and changed over
the years as we've learned more. And you know, I've
had the humility to to be able to make hard decisions,
forego some costs, and and and learn along the way
and grow. And I think I think those those that

(50:15):
mindset and those skills and experiences have been crucial. And
you know, ones that I think were important to my
family growing up in the South Island, New Zealand, whether
it was a sense of adventure we had around the
Southern Alps, or you know, the all of the things
that we were able to learn and do growing up

(50:35):
in in New Zealand. And I think they have they
have largely been the key to I won't call it
success yet because we've got a lot of work to do,
but the key to to get into the stage that
we're at now.

Speaker 1 (50:46):
And your father engineer as well, so thinking about projects,
tinkering on things from a very early age with him
as well, probably helped.

Speaker 4 (50:56):
Yeah, and I'm really grateful to my mom and my
dad for I think again, having that that gross mindset, like,
you know, praising the effort that I did, not necessarily
the outcomes, you know, giving me the ability to to
learn and explore, and the sacrifices they made for that.
My Yeah, my dad was an engineer and he left

(51:18):
big corporate to you know, build a software consultancy in
christ Church that uh, you know, made some sacrifices for
for our family, but was also a bit of an
entrepreneur's in regard. And my mum was an entrepreneur, uh
starting various businesses from our school lunches at primary school

(51:38):
to a blanket importing business business to other other work
that she does now. And so I, you know, I
love that environment and very feel very fortunate to have
had their had their had them have had their mentorships
as parents, and yeah, it was it was awesome and
I couldn't ask for anything more.

Speaker 1 (52:00):
Well, it's been a huge year for you, Alex, huge
capital raising, lots of stuff going on on the technical
front as well, three hundred at least people and growing
as well to accommodate your vision and your plans. Congratulations
on an epic year. Good luck for next year, and
hopefully we will start to see autonomous vehicles really hitting

(52:22):
the roads at least in some of the big cities
around the world, including places like London and San Francisco.
So thanks so much for being on the business of tech.

Speaker 4 (52:30):
Wash the space and hopefully you can ride the wave soon.
Chess better.

Speaker 2 (52:36):
I really want to try an autonomous car. That's what
I'm getting from a lot of the conversation lately, like
everybody's talking about it, and I'm just at that stage
now where you know, you hear about a technology so
many times and you start itching to just check it
out for yourself. I think what's interesting about it in
the way that you've described it is how normal it
feels after the first couple of times.

Speaker 1 (52:58):
Yeah, I'm back in at the moment, obviously after visiting
this SpaceX launch, and I'm really dying to get back
in one when I get to Los Angeles because I
really love the experience. But what Alex Kendall is doing
is very different to what the lights of Weimo have

(53:19):
done with their driverless car. It has one model, one
single large model that learns all of these individual tasks.
Now that's a very different approach to what has been
taken before, and he's pitching this as suitable for autonomous vehicles,
but the same fundamental model will be useful for robots

(53:41):
as well, maybe even plain so autonomous planes and humanoid
robots that like optimis. You know the Tesla robot we
saw sort of debuted demoed a few weeks back. So
this is a fundamental different approach. It's obviously attracted a
lot of and a lot of interest, and there are

(54:02):
a lot of carmakers who are keen to get involved.
So is this safer? Is this as reliable fundamentally? Will
this win the autonomous vehicle race? Still to be seen,
but boys made some huge progress so far. Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 2 (54:18):
I remember the first ever tech conference I went to
was in Videos GtC twenty eighteen, and during that conference
in video was talking about exactly this kind of thing
about the future where you can use GPUs to basically
simulate terrain and you know, cities and countries potentially and

(54:40):
then tweak different things. You'll go to add more rain
or sleep or hail or or a car crash, and
you can do run simulations many many times and train
models to recognize different and react in different ways to
different situations. So it sounds like that Alex has really
taken that concept and it is working really hard to

(55:01):
put that into into practice.

Speaker 1 (55:03):
It's happening, and yeah, so he now has to prove
this with a large number of vehicles. You know, you've
got Waimo's doing one hundred thousand robotaxi rides a week
in in San Francisco, LA and Phoenix, China. You know,
Baido's Apollo Go Services is doing hundreds of thousands of

(55:24):
rides as well. So he's certainly not the first to this.
There are others out there doing autonomous taxi rides and that,
so he's got some catching up to do. But you know,
in an industry that's full of hype and over promising,
he seems to have got a lot of obviously financial
backing a billion in capital that's going to help him

(55:44):
accelerate everything, and he's already been doing that this year.
But it also that that appetite from the carmakers I
think is really important where they are seeing this is
the one that may hit that sweet spot of not
being too expensive but being safe and a good user
experien That's what they want for their customers, so they
seem to be showing a lot of interest in sort
of lining up to trial his technology now. Very cool.

Speaker 2 (56:08):
Hopefully we're the key we at the Helm. We might
see it land on our shores sometime soon.

Speaker 3 (56:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (56:13):
And just what a down to earth guy, you know.
He's had a great experience obviously at Auckland UNI, but
also growing up in Canterbury as well, his parents very
influential and just running this big business now and still
having his mates around to sleep on his couch in London.

Speaker 2 (56:32):
I think if you're a key we in London, that's
just something you've got to live with from my understanding.

Speaker 1 (56:40):
That's it for another episode off the Business of Tech.
Thanks very much to one in Z, general manager of
Mobile network Tiger Governor and Wave founder doctor Alex Kendall.

Speaker 2 (56:51):
Show notes for the Business of Tech are in the
podcast section at Business desk dot co dot z, where
you can stream this podcast in Phil every week for free.
Are available from iHeartRadio or your podcast platform off choice.

Speaker 1 (57:04):
Get in touch with your feedback and we'd love to
hear your suggestions for upcoming guests. To email Ben on
benat Businessdesk dot co dot MZ.

Speaker 2 (57:13):
You can find both of us occasionally on x but
mostly on LinkedIn, where you can also follow the Business
of Tech page for all of our updates.

Speaker 1 (57:21):
That's it for this week. Another episode coming your way
next Thursday.

Speaker 2 (57:25):
Until then, have a great week.