[iaw]

> I'm biased because I used to work with many of the people Uber hired for self-driving cars, but they bought really great engineering talent

I think that's a fair perspective and I don't discount the capabilities and talents of the people working at Uber, it's the people running Uber that I don't believe are capable of steering the ship.

A friend of mine who has been an executive at a couple tech companies have chatted about the "no grown-up" phenomenon. Essentially, you can have a ton of super-talented people but if there isn't a 'grown-up' (irrespective of age) providing the managerial/fiduciary discipline (think Steve Jobs and Elon Musk as the epitome of this) then the challenges of running a successful business will quickly outpace the efforts of the talented engineers working there.

The number of teams/engineers that unilaterally work on overlapping projects or projects that don't serve any purpose can rapidly drown the needed forward progress.