Waymo’s first autonomous demo took eighteen months. The product took fifteen years. Today the @Waymo Driver runs 500,000 trips a week — 4 million fully autonomous miles across 15 cities, with 17x fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers. At Startup School 2026, Waymo co-CEO @dmitri_dolgov shares the seven lessons behind that journey, from bridging the gap between a demo and a real product to building systems that can safely operate in the physical world. 00:07 — 7 Lessons From Building Waymo 02:21 — Why Physical AI Is Different 06:52 — The Gap Between a Demo and a Product 11:34 — Why Reliability Lives on an Exponential Curve 14:17 — Pick the Right Technology Curve 16:05 — Why Waymo Uses Cameras, LiDAR, and Radar 21:07 — Ride Every Technology Wave 24:43 — Inside the Waymo Foundation Model 30:09 — The Bitter Lesson Still Wins 36:41 — Why Every Physical AI Company Needs a Simulator 41:36 — Build an AI Flywheel 43:22 — Evals Are Your Competitive Advantage 46:09 — How Waymo Became 17x Safer Than Human Drivers 47:59 — The Next Decade of AI Will Be Physical