CEO of Alphabet’s Waymo self-driving unit steps down

On Friday, John Krafcik, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Alphabet’s Waymo self-driving unit announced that he will be stepping down. However, Krafcik who has served as a chief executive for Waymo for more than five years will stay on as an advisor of the company, Reuters reported.

Waymo in a statement said that this decision has been taken by John after a long and successful career in the automotive business.

Under John’s management, Google‘s self-driving vehicle project successfully became Waymo. In 2015, Krafcik had joined Waymo as its first CEO. Waymo is an independent driving technology company with an aim to make it easy and safe for people to commute in a driverless vehicle.

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Under Krafcik, Waymo secured deals with big car manufacturing companies like Volvo Car AB, Daimler AG’s truck group, Stellantis NV, Jaguar Land Rover Automotive Plc to put its technology in passenger cars and freight trucks.

Krafcik will be replaced by Tekedra Mawakana, who has worked as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Waymo, and Dmitri Dolgov, the company’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), as they will be jointly working as co-CEOs for Waymo. 

Takeda has over twenty years of experience advising consumer technology companies on how to propel their business interests all around the globe. Earlier Tekedra held a senior role at Yahoo, AOL, and EBay Inc. 

However, Dmitri Dolgov as Chief Technology Officer, led the development of Waymo’s in-house design, custom, fully autonomous tech stacks. Before Waymo, Dmitri worked on autonomous driving efforts at Toyota and Stanford as part of Stanford’s DARPA Urban Challenge team. 

While Krafcik got Waymo’s technology in vehicles, he had stated that the quest for autonomy was a challenging one and it could take more time than anticipated for people to truly experience driverless vehicles on the road.