uuilly

Difference is you can't "hold in" a pre-term birth b/c you're afraid of covid.

The total deal with Uber was worth about 20M upfront. The rest was milestone driven. Milestones didn’t happen bc Anthony got fired and there was a fatality that shut the program down.

Lidar is solidly worse than the human eye in dust, rain etc. Waymo has struggled w/ dust devils in AZ. Cruise has struggled w/ steam vents in SF. I work at a John Deere subsidiary and we are quite interested in dust performance for field work. From our tests Lidar is low on the list for seeing through small particles.

Lots of things could fix this, less beam divergence, custom signals processing on multiple returns. But out of the box, it’s this statement does not hold true.

Hey! We’re moving it to row crops to save herbicide. I miss Salinas but stoked with what we’re doing in the Midwest.

There are a lot of variables and these events don't happen that often so rules are hard to come by. That said being, I've been through three acquisitions and it really depends. How valuable are you personally to their strategy? If you're not, you're likely not going to enjoy it. IE: if you're in accounting and it was an engineering talent acquisition, then it's probably not good. If you are valuable to their strategy, then expect things for you personally to stay the same or improve. The big thing that happens is the company will likely become unbundled and they'll take the parts they like.

My latest has substantially improved the company. We're still very independent, employees made great money and now we have a strategic rudder and a patient investor that we didn't have before. In this case, our tech is very critical to their long term strategy.

I haven’t read your link bc your title is incredibly presumptuous. You don’t know who I am or what problem I’m solving.

I used to work for Anthony at 510 systems. He tried to hire me for Otto as well. Watching this whole thing unfold from, obscure story in 2011 to the Waymo Vs. Uber trial to federal charges and national news is rather surreal. Anthony is one of the most creative, energetic thinkers I've ever encountered. If he stopped taking shortcuts he'd probably be the next Jobs or Musk.

John Deere / Blue River Technology | CV/ML - Software (robotics / embedded) - Full Stack | Full Time | Sunnyvale, CA & San Francisco, CA | ONSITE

For the last 100 years John Deere has been giving farming equipment power in the form of diesel engines. The next 100 years will be about giving machines eyes. If machines have eyes, they can do better work. If they can do better work people get higher yields.

Email me at: willy dot p at bluerivert dot com

You know how in war movies when the guy leaves the trench only to come back and find that all his friends have been killed?

In the valley you leave the trench and come back to find that all your friends are rich.

No words can alleviate that regret. But if you’re having near misses like this you’re actually really close to something good.

Yup. A few days ago we (60 people) got bought by John Deere for $305M b/c our machine reduced herbicides by 90% using CV/ML. Our only moving part was a solenoid. Would not have survived if it had been more complicated. You clearly get it.