Y Combinator
Angel investor and Y Combinator group partner Jared Friedman spends a lot of time in a Waymo.
To be more exact, Friedman told Business Insider in a recent interview that he estimated spending about 4% of his waking hours this past year in a Waymo robotaxi, getting to and from his home and office in San Francisco.
"For me, the great thing about self-driving cars is you can really work out of them," he said. "So I just get into the Waymo, I tether my laptop to my phone, and it's basically like my office on wheels."
According to his stats from the Waymo app, which Friedman shared in a post on X, the angel investor has spent 12,536 minutes inside a Waymo, traveling 2,105 miles for a total of 517 trips in 2024.
"Hit 2,000 miles in Waymo last year," he wrote in the post. "Hard to imagine life without it at this point."
A spokesperson for Waymo confirmed to Business Insider that Friedman is in the top 1% of Waymo riders.
Friedman's enthusiasm for self-driving cars may not come as a surprise.
He was an early angel investor in Cruise, the robotaxi company founded in 2013 and acquired by General Motors three years later. Friedman said he knew Cruise cofounder Kyle Vogt back when Vogt was working on Justin.tv, which eventually became Twitch.
Vogt, who stepped down as Cruise's chief executive in 2023, recently criticized GM after the automaker announced that it was pulling back its investment in Cruise.
"In case it was unclear before, it is clear now: GM are a bunch of dummies," he wrote on X.
Friedman recalled one of his first rides in a Cruise from more than 10 years ago and reveled in the progress self-driving technology has made since then.
"I remember getting to do a very early ride in a Cruise car when it was still just driving around in parking lots, and it was very jerky and kind of terrifying — very far from where we are now," he said. "But even at that time, there were some bold people who believed that this would be possible and 10 years and $10 billion later, it is."
Mario Tama/Getty Images
Last August, Friedman said on X that he would exclusively get around San Francisco via self-driving cars since Cruise and Waymo at the time were more available to the public.
Cruise paused its robotaxi services in October 2023, shortly after California regulators suspended the company's permit to operate in the state due to several safety incidents.
Friedman said he took his first Waymo ride around the summer of last year. While he believes anyone can work in an Uber, Friedman said the Waymo experience is much smoother. He said he hasn't dealt with safety issues in any of his rides with a Waymo.
"You can do that in an Uber, but the Uber drivers are often quite aggressive," he said. "The Waymos are just very smooth drivers. You can really just focus. I think this has the potential to change the way people live and work."
Few technological innovations in his lifetime have instantly given Friedman that impression.
"One of them was the first time I picked up an iPhone," he said. "One of them was when I first used ChatGPT. And one of them was my first ride in a self-driving car."
"It was just absolutely obvious — instantly — that the world would never be the same," he said.
