Transcript

The “invisible army” behind Amazon’s robotaxi revolution

0:01 The very best founders I know are brilliant at building systems. They connect teams, they remove bottlenecks, and they eliminate single points of failure. And yet When it comes to their own wealth. Most are running a disconnected stack. A tax accountant here and a state attorney there, a wealth manager who doesn't talk to either one of them.

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0:53 Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more. Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great, We want you there with us too.

1:20 Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. While sending machines out there to go drive amongst humans, uh people should ask us questions. People ask me all the time, what's waking you up at three a.m.? What's stressing you up?

1:42 And I think they expect me to say, I don't know. Capital or execution or this or that, but I'm I'm constantly asking myself, are we going as fast as we can, but as slow as necessary. We just passed two million miles. That's Driving the smile on the robot taxi.

2:00 On US public roads. It's a huge milestone. And as you do that, you too become a household name because you earned it, not because you said so. That's Aisha Evan, CEO of the autonomous vehicle business Zux, ZOO X. As robo taxis increasingly pop up across American cities, I wanted to hear about Zoux's strategy as a subsidiary of Amazon, about its competition with Waymo, and about the plan behind the new Zoux partnership with Uber.

2:34 Aisha talks with me about what it'll take for Robo Taxis to go from consumer novelty to everyday routine, and how far down that path the industry actually is in 2026. She also shares, both positive and negative, from her time at Intel, and why she has what she calls an invisible army of rebels. within the Zooks team. Aisha is direct, funny, and a beacon of optimism, so Let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

3:06 I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Aisha Evans, CEO of Zooks. Aisha, thanks for joining us. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. So Zooks is in the red hot center of building a new mobility future electric autonomous vehicles. You have a new partnership with Uber. Your Robo Taxis are operational in Las Vegas and San Francisco. How close are we though really to like a dramatically different mobility paradigm? I think as an industry, um, there's a lot of progress. So I think we're at the proof point stage, uh, I wanna say that over the last twenty years we've had a lot of uh, you know, kinda

3:48 Oh, it's happening tomorrow morning. Oh, it's never going to happen. And uh we're past that stage now, the proof points are there, uh, us and also fellow travelers. And now it's a matter of starting to prepare for scale. But I've always been very, very consistent that this is not going to be like uh a consumer product where all of a sudden, boom, a hundred million people experience it. It's gonna be step by step, but we're well on our way, which is really exciting. Your most well known uh fellow traveler, Waymo, has chosen to r retrofit existing cars. You guys have opted for sort of purpose built vehicles with a striking design, right? It's got two benches sort of facing each other. There's no driver controls, no steering wheel. It doesn't it doesn't really look like a car. Why make that choice? If AI is going to be the doing the driving, uh it's really now about the customer experience and it's about also uh what is the best way uh to uh materialize this product. First, you have the safety aspect. In a regular passenger car that is architected for a human driver, the safest place to be is actually the front seat for us. We were able to look at redundancy, we were looking able to look at our optimal sensor architecture so that we can see things and we can see occluded things.

5:06 In Silicon Valley, sometimes maybe we think about the customer secondhand. Here they thought about it firsthand and the customer experience. It just does not feel like you're in a car. What we're seeing from uh folks are both people who ride, but also in the communities that we ride in, we're seeing curiosity. First couple of minutes, oh my gosh, what is this? And then wow, this makes so much sense. Look, you're not doing the driving. So why have a bunch of things that are involved in the driving? Calling an A V still feels like a novelty. You know, like that's what I hear from others who sort of request these these robo rides. Do you have clarity about what it's gonna take for sort of self-driving to become, I don't know, more more routine? Like is that about the design? Is it about the tech? Is it about the product, or or is it something else?

5:56 Look, this is a big deal. I mean these types of transformation They don't happen overnight, right? Look at aviation. It took a while. But then uh now you're in uh a JFK and you're like, how can so many planes be coming and going? So I think uh we're gonna have to continue to uh to deploy, continue to really put safety at the forefront, continue to engage in a dialogue. with the regulators and the communities. And then I don't know, maybe a decade from now we'll be like, or maybe two, I don't know for sure. I'm not in the floxicating business, but at some point I know we'll be like it's just yeah, I still own a car, but for certain modes of transport it just makes More sense to use a robot taxi. You must be good at uh at at projecting in some ways because you were part of the team that you know made Zooks a subsidiary of Amazon, which acquired it for one point three billion dollars in in twenty twenty.

6:52 H how does Amazon help Zouks's trajectory? Like, is it about financial resources, access to technology and AI? I mean, how how is Zouk's different than if it were on its own? Focus, focus, focus. The financial backing is important, right? A strong relationship also with AWS that goes without saying the compute One of the things I love about Amazon is uh the plurality and multitude of businesses and industries that it has been in.

7:21 We forget. Amazon started by selling books. So they've seen a lot. They've experienced a lot. There's a lot of pattern recognition. There's a lot of uh the customer obsession. So we we get a lot of advice. When something's going really well, well, can you do more of that? When something is going poorly, why is that? And how are you looking at bottlenecks? This summer it'll be six years, so we're way past the the dating phase. And I've been both sides of an MA. at big companies and I would say uh Amazon gets gets an eight and a half. out of ten. Eight and a half. Yes. I have the freedom I should have.

7:57 Uh I I tell people all the time, it's not like when you have a uh a startup that is fully uh in the private sector with a board. I mean, I've been on the other side where you know, you have VCs and you have institutions, you have independents. There's always a decision maker and a boss, make your peace with it. And you know, we're sending machines out there to go drive amongst humans. Uh people should ask us questions, whether it's the regulators or our bosses, it is the right thing to do and I welcome it and we get b we are better for it. There are people who get uh nervous about the idea of Robots.

8:33 Taking over All necessarily, you know, robots on the road, but robots in our lives. Absolutely. I mean I have uh two teenagers and uh I'm like Oh my gosh, on the one hand you're so lucky because this is really an a era of uh transformation in almost every sector because of AI. On the other side, I'm like oh why did I have to have uh young adults slash teenagers during the transformation phase? Because there will Be a lot of change. Having said that, I'm on uh team uh team optimism. Uh you know, humanity, couple thousand years. Uh I know we take ourselves very seriously because we're the the ones alive right now, but uh there's been a lot of change throughout those years, and somehow We're still here. So I tend to think that statistically why should it be different this time? Uh we'll have a lot of hard conversations, we'll have some hard hard transitions, but in general things will be better because they always

9:30 That's how it's always been. W with your kids. Do you teach them to drive or or is driving an a skill that they're not gonna need uh you know in the world they're going into? Well, they are you know, they are what, uh eighteen and uh almost uh twenty, so they they They did learn to drive. Uh but with my son it's interesting. If he's in the city, he'll uh he'll order a zoo's if he's uh around uh our house, he'll order a Wamo, which is totally okay, by the way. It's great product. I use it too. I need to sit down and ask him on what basis is he making those decisions, and hopefully I like the answer.

10:07 Sure. Y your partnership with Uber I I'm curious how big a a deal that is. 'Cause Uber also partners with Waymo. What makes that Deal meaningful for you.

10:20 So I mean, yes, they do partner with uh almost everybody, which is great. Uh if I were in their shoes I would probably do the same. Dar has uh taken rides in uh in a zooks and he totally gets and uh totally gets the the differentiated experience. For Zooks, it for for twelve almost twelve years, this summer will be twelve. We've been so focused on building the tech, on uh building the processes. And I want to say that over the last couple of years we've really started thinking about commercialisation and how we're going to do this. I don't see this category as just uh uh oh taking share from whatever exists today. I I actually see an expansion of the market. As far as Zooks and Uber, for us it's about learning.

11:06 It's about experimenting. I'm pretty sure uh if you arrive in Las Vegas You Maybe you know about zooks, maybe you don't know about zooks. Now you will see them on the strip and be like, What is that? Oh my gosh. But I'm pretty sure you know about Uber. So right there, that makes it worth it to uh to Zeus. And

11:27 Some element of transportation has nothing to do with pleasure. It's frankly it has to do with you know, being utilitarian and if we can help serve that together and scale faster, the experiment will have worked. Mm-hmm. Expanding into other cities, you're testing in LA and Austin and Miami. How do you decide where to go? I'm not sure how how soon before I might see them here in New York. I uh some cities Tougher than others for AVs? How much of that is weather? How much of that is density? How much of that is regulation? A little bit of all of the above. Weather is important, no question about it. For example, for Zooks, snow is not really a short term. I mean, we're working on it, but uh that's not a city we're going to pick to start.

12:12 having at least some evidence that uh this is something that the community welcomes, at least the seed of demand. Uh the regulatory environment. You know, I've said publicly in the past that New York is the holy grail, but first it has to be uh legal uh to have a robo taxi there. So uh These species uh tell uh the political and governmental infrastructure that you would like robot taxes in New York? Zo's Isn't yet quite a household name, but it's kind of an old timer in A V terms. I mean he mentions around for for twelve years.

12:48 Is that An advantage in A Vs or is like You know, the tech stack changes so fast. There's so much going on that you know that building today could be just as fast. Like what what are the pros and cons of that time? I think part of it is choice, uh and uh sort of um leadership style and culture, being a household names, um, you know, to me I believe in the earned life. Uh nobody has a God given right to anything.

13:18 You have to work hard at it and uh as we're out there serving more customers. Uh we just passed two million miles for us, that's driverless miles on The road taxi. On US public roads, that's a huge milestone. Uh, we have Roughly five hundred K people on the wait list. We have close to four hundred K writers who have given us feedback. And um continuing putting points on the board and as you do that, you do become a household name because you earned it. Not because you said so.

13:48 The explosive growth in the Generative AI. How does that change What you do, how the A V world is gonna develop from here. We're going faster. That's really how it's impacting us. Uh simulation is more capable, um ability to sort of correlate data and information, engineers, actually I shouldn't even say engineers, every zoos employee is way more productive.

14:15 uh you get to answers quicker. Yeah. Everybody's talking about physical AI too. I'm like, wow, yeah, we've been doing physical AI since we were born. Um every time there's one of these big transformation, uh New set of uh sort of giant companies are born. And some companies also maybe don't adapt and uh don't figure out how to be the elephant that can dance and uh are replaced. And uh I expect basically the same dynamics, but just bigger And probably the fastest we've ever experienced. Do you think about like, Oh, we should sort of rebuild our

14:51 stack from scratch because we have this new capability. Not for us. We have a certain architecture we believe in. There are really big parts of the stack uh that we are able to essentially modernize. And it's not the first time we've modernized it, by the way. Um sometimes uh I'm like uh Well what if somebody s looks at our code? I'm like by the time we can understand it, uh it'll have changed again.'Cause we're learning constantly. applying new techniques and new algorithms. We basically modernize our stack as we go, but it's important to have explainability and to have traceability because uh no matter what we do

15:33 the systems will be safer than uh than humans, but they will also make mistakes. They will not be perfect. And being able to understand when a mistake was made, why that was the case, and be able to correct that is really key. You can't just have this part where just you just throw a bunch of things and then a soup arrives and You you can't decompose the suit backwards. Yes, I do I do love that uh that term explainability, which is like in for for for many Silicon Valley companies is a a euphemism for we really don't know how we got to these outputs and we're trying to trace it back and figure it out. Yeah, well, at least in driving, I'm I mean I don't like commenting on other People's businesses because I don't like it when people do it to me because I have no idea what's going on inside. But at least for physical AI, for driving uh these robo taxis in uh in human communities

16:26 Uh that is unacceptable. That's obviously You have to know. You have to You have to know. Period. I talked with uh Ford CEO Jim Farley recently and he was all amped up about China's auto industry, the scale, the advances, the pace. How much do you do you look at China and what's and what's happening there.

16:46 From an A V standpoint, our expectation is that uh there will be an ecosystem in China that uh we don't have access to as a as an American company. No, I think that uh when it comes to Europe, uh Middle East, Africa, Latin, and so on, we're pr you'll probably have a mix on both ecosystems. Uh so We keep track of them with that basic foundational premise. I think with EV, as you go from um uh uh internal combustion engines or ice to EVs, you start going from uh sort of a a machine with wheels to a computer.

17:21 And that means that uh integration between hardware and software And not treating software just as uh uh, you know. basic control functions or controlling the infotainment. But really software being a first class citizen in the architecture, design and having decision rights becomes very important. Lots of people very good at hardware, lots of people very good at software, not a lot of people good at both and treating them as um sort of equal rights uh decision rights when it comes to uh major architectural and uh sort of strategic decisions.

17:59 The ecosystem in China When you look at a lot of these these consumer electronics companies that came from uh the smartphone era and that by definition had to be good at hardware and software and system level thinking are finding a glide path foundational knowledge and mindset is already native to them.

18:24 And if you're not native, then get busy being native. Aisha is definitely busy. She's digging into the details of Zeus's operations, managing Amazon oversight, and trying to create a whole new future. So how does she use what she calls her invisible army inside Zeus to get things done? And where did the idea for an invisible army come from anyway? We'll talk about that more after the break. Stay with us. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI.

19:01 There's gonna be two types of companies. Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi. And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more.

19:19 As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. and we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show.

19:48 Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the rapid response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. Before the break, Zux's Aisha Evans talked about how she's leveraging both Amazon and Uber to get more robo taxis on the streets in 2026. Now she talks about leveraging enthusiasm without slipping into hype, why she deploys what she calls an invisible army inside Zooks, and lessons from her tenure at Intel.

20:40 Let's dive back in. You clearly have a lot of enthusiasm uh about this area. And you alluded to this before, this sort of this balance between You know, not extending too far into hype. But You know, maintaining that enthusiasm over a long period of time.

21:00 How do you think about that, about about sort of modulating those two things? So I live by something that I was taught by a friend of mine, which is you uh you have to think about uh um going as fast As possible. But as slow as necessary. You also have a to build a uh a culture where you earn it.

21:19 A lot of transparency. Uh, sometimes people visit and they're like, How do you know all these people? I'm like, I work at it'cause I wanna know that they all feel comfortable telling me if they think there's a problem somewhere, so that we can deal with it because uh you have to earn it. If it's a culture of fear or if if it's a culture where you're not making easy and providing several channels to do that. You won't go as fast as possible. People ask me all the time, you know, what's waking you up at three AM? What's stressing you out? And I think they expect me to say, I don't know, capital or uh execution or this or that, but I'm I'm constantly asking myself, are we going as fast as we can, but as slow as necessary? Because we all know what happens when you go too fast and you don't consider safety, then bad things happen, and they should happen, by the way. So the balance in the blend is the the struggle and the the triumph. Prior to Zooks, you spent uh some years at Intel.

22:15 A are there things from that experience that you draw on or is Zook such a different business you look elsewhere for for lessons and inspiration. Both uh in general I'm a curious person. Uh I um have this wonderful coach who taught me uh very uh fifteen years ago that it's okay to ask for help. Uh that is actually a sign of strength. So when I'm stuck, I'm known to pick up the phone and say hi, I'm Aisha Evans from Zooks, an Amazon company. I please need some help. I was uh But so and so told me about you or introduced me to you. Uh but taking it back to Intel Island on the tongue at Intel. Twelve years, it's uh it's a company that's important. Uh I root for that company to this day. Uh I learned about hardware software integration. I had a

22:58 Fronti to people who are hardware only or software only. And uh I was like, Huh, that's a problem. I learned about you're gonna laugh. Uh inside of and probably some ex Intel if some ex Intel uh or current Intel people who know me Listen to this day, I'm gonna chuckle because I was known as a little bit of a rubble. I complained about every process and why we're so slow and so dogmatic and so bureaucratic and don't you understand? And uh yeah, well, guess what? Uh thank you, thank you for that training, because then I came to Zooks and it was still a very early startup, roughly a little less than five hundred people.

23:33 Well. and uh had a lot of technology, but really needed to be orchestrated and coordinated and put processes in place, put uh organs in place, put uh sort of a common language language in place in order to succeed. So lots of learnings that I apply, but also, you know, lot of lots of things not to do that I won't tell you about. You won't tell me. Yes, well you'cause you have to move as fast as you can as well, right? Not just not just slow. That's I guess that's what being the rebel in that group means. I guess you wanna ha you wanna have your own rebels within your own organization.

24:10 Uh but maybe not too many of them? I want enough of them because you need a uniform distribution in all functions. One of the things that uh at Zooks is because we're vertically integrated, one day you are talking to a traditional sort of automotive engineer. You're talking chassis, battery, suspension, brakes, harnesses. Uh the next day Uh you're talking to marketing about, you know, how much do we want to emphasize safety or not. So You wanna make sure that I call them uh affectionately my invisible army or the invisible army. You wanna make sure that they're distributed uh across

24:47 And the cooperation, but we also have to have a contract that we will debate, we will discuss, we will consider alternatives, but once we make a decision. We commit and we move and we don't revisit unless there's evidence uh that uh or assumptions that were incorrect and then do a little bit of a feedback loop and then keep moving forward. I talked to The leader of uh Big well known brand.

25:15 Who you know, was distraught about the way Uh, immigrants and other diverse populations and women are are being sort of things have been made more difficult for them over the last year or so since the Trump administration came in the second Trump administration came in. But at the same time she felt like

25:35 As a woman of color who was born in another country It is not her place to talk about it. Like she just can't. It makes her too much of a target. And I I I don't obviously I don't want you to feel like you're a target, but I'm just I'm I'm Yeah, uh I'm wondering whether um you have any thoughts or experiences about this or how you

25:58 How you manage that part of being who you are. My views pre and post this administration haven't really changed. The person I admire the most uh Um Is Mary Curry. Well there are two of them, Mary Curry and Nelson Mandela, and I'll explain why. Mary Curry

26:17 Every time I'm like, uh yeah, of course I get disrespected or assumptions are made that are very annoying. Yeah, I mean that happens on a daily basis. But I've basically made the decision that I was gonna live my life happy and not miserable. And uh I am going to shut people up by doing the work. And uh when I succeed it feels really good. And when I fail, I'm like what the hell happened and what can I learn after a good cry, of course. And maybe that's a very selfish way of living life, but that's what I learned from Mary Curry. Nothing is to be feared. Everything is to be understood. So that we can feel this. And on my worst days I'm like, wow, she was an immigrant

26:54 Uh, she was a wife. Uh she was in physics way back then. She was a mummy. Uh, you know, she uh she added way worse than I did. And somehow she figured out to thrive and get uh two uh Nobel Prizes, by the way, along the way. And uh so let's just understand why what's happening is happening, what we can do about it, and also understand that progress is never fast uh and it's also rarely linear. So that's how I live my life. Then you have Nelson and the other side. I don't understand how you

27:28 are in jail for twenty seven years. Mm. Twenty seven years, that's a long time. And by the way, it's totally unjust, right? By any I mean I think I need this time.

27:40 You become friends with the trailers, you I mean And what Seriously. And then you come out of jail. And you don't go on a revenge tour.

27:50 You go on a, okay, what have I learned? And uh what do I understand and how do I bring together people together? So That's sort of how I look at the whole situation. I think there's been a lot of progress. I also fundamentally believe that uh Inclusion is more important than diversity,'cause if you do inclusion, you will get diversity. If you only do diversity, you will get some drama.

28:15 And I think that's sort of what's happening. But it will all work out because it always does. This was great. Thank you so much for doing it. I really enjoyed the conversation. Listening to Aisha, I was reminded of the move fast and break things era of tech development that turned social media from a promising tool to something impersonal, often angry, sometimes addictive. Her admonition to move as fast as possible and as slow as necessary is a prudent mantra, not just for robotaxis, but for all of us in the age of AI.

28:51 I also want to double click on her encouragement that asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness, especially when things are changing so fast. We need to rely on each other for perspective and support. On Friday, we turn the tables on talking to the other side of Zooks's recent partnership, Uber. Sitting down with President Andrew McDonald on how autonomous vehicle their evolving business model, plus Uber's surprising expansion into hotels and what gas prices are really doing to their driver community. If you're listening to us on Master Scale right now, search for Rapid Response and subscribe so you don't miss that episode. Rapid response comes out each Tuesday and Friday. So if you just listen on Masters of Scale, you're missing out on half of our shows. I'm Bob Safian.

29:40 Thanks for listening. Rapid response is a wait what original. I'm Bob Safian, our executive producer is Eve Tro. Our senior producer is Alex Morris, and our associate producer is Masha Makutonina.

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