Photo: Screenshot from company website
Sebastian Thrun, a former Google employee and Stanford graduate, has stated that an engineer specialized in self-driving cars is “worth” about $10 million.
The value presented by Thrun did not come out of the sky, as he says that he calculated it by the acquisitions made by large corporations that want to have access to proprietary self-driving technology.
As Recode notes, two values were given as examples by Mr. Thrun - the takeover of Otto, a company specialized in self-driving technologies, which was purchased by Uber for almost $700 million, when the six-month-old Otto only had 70 employees.
The second example presented by Thrun comes from General Motors, which paid $1 billion to acquire Cruise. The latter was a self-driving car startup that wanted to offer an aftermarket system that would have been compatible with some production cars.
Since the company had approximately 100 employees at the time, they were rated at $10 million each, since Thrun says that the purchases were more about acquiring talent than only getting technology.
We must note that Mr. Sebastian Thrun is offering a nanodegree program through Udacity, which promises to help enterprising programmers to become self-driving car engineers.
They will get the chance to work with automakers, and the latter do not exclude the possibility of hiring some of the students if they discover talented ones.
Recode explained that Mr. Thrun knows his way around driverless cars, as he used to work at Google when the company developed the first steps of this program.
Thrun says that businesses are “desperate for talent,” and that he is “surrounded” by those companies. Evidently, there is bidding war amongst head-hunters, but some start-ups are acquired to attain the talent that is already hired by those businesses.
Sebastian Thrun has already explained that car companies have so many competitors in the field of autonomous cars because the technology required for this domain requires a different set of skills than traditional automotive design and manufacturing. For that reason, various corporations are buying start-ups to acquire talent, among other valuable assets.
As Recode notes, two values were given as examples by Mr. Thrun - the takeover of Otto, a company specialized in self-driving technologies, which was purchased by Uber for almost $700 million, when the six-month-old Otto only had 70 employees.
The second example presented by Thrun comes from General Motors, which paid $1 billion to acquire Cruise. The latter was a self-driving car startup that wanted to offer an aftermarket system that would have been compatible with some production cars.
Since the company had approximately 100 employees at the time, they were rated at $10 million each, since Thrun says that the purchases were more about acquiring talent than only getting technology.
We must note that Mr. Sebastian Thrun is offering a nanodegree program through Udacity, which promises to help enterprising programmers to become self-driving car engineers.
They will get the chance to work with automakers, and the latter do not exclude the possibility of hiring some of the students if they discover talented ones.
Recode explained that Mr. Thrun knows his way around driverless cars, as he used to work at Google when the company developed the first steps of this program.
Thrun says that businesses are “desperate for talent,” and that he is “surrounded” by those companies. Evidently, there is bidding war amongst head-hunters, but some start-ups are acquired to attain the talent that is already hired by those businesses.
Sebastian Thrun has already explained that car companies have so many competitors in the field of autonomous cars because the technology required for this domain requires a different set of skills than traditional automotive design and manufacturing. For that reason, various corporations are buying start-ups to acquire talent, among other valuable assets.
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