Nuro

Vision There are not many places where you could make an impact on society that may end up in the history books. Nuro is one of them. Aiming to improve everyday lives through robotics and focusing on delivery robots as its first application is quite intriguing to me.

Team Nuro has one of the best engineering teams I have seen. It has been an enjoyment to work with smart and competent people around, and to learn from them. Nuro also has a high hiring bar and smaller teams compared to other companies in the space. As a result, everybody has a large scope to tackle, gets better exposure to the whole system, and thus is more motivated. It is not uncommon for a new grad to get full exposure/mastery of all aspects of a complex system (e.g., perception) in a year or two, which is not possible if you have a much larger team.

Product Delivery robots as the first product allow Nuro to take a progressive approach in realistically deploying the service and improving it over time. Compared to robotaxis, delivering goods removes some constraints like occupant safety and comfort, and can operate at lower speeds, or even route differently to avoid hard cases when needed, thus presenting a lower bar for deployment. Being able to deploy quickly and at a large scale would enable Nuro to iterate quickly from data collected in the real world.

Leadership The founders communicated a clear vision and have good transparency on how decisions are made.

Nuro is working on a very challenging problem that requires seamless collaboration from all fronts: self-driving software, hardware, operations, product, etc. Reducing the overhead of cross-team communication and avoiding misalignment are important to how fast the company is able to move.