Aurora CEO Chris Urmson on Driver Gen 2, Career Choices and Leadership

A bridge to automotive scale

The interview was conducted by Fadhil Lawal, a junior at Vanderbilt University, and was edited and condensed. It was previously published on the Posse Foundation's website. The Jeff Ubben Posse Fellows Program gives five Posse Scholars $10,000 each and the chance to spend 4-6 weeks in the summer shadowing a major industry leader.

Asked how the second-generation Aurora Driver launch feels compared with his expectations, Urmson called it "very exciting." He said last year's release was a big deal and let Aurora run the whole process of getting something safe on the road. This one is "even bigger," he said, because the company can scale continuously from here with more capability.

Urmson said the release gets Aurora to about 1,500 trucks on the hardware side. He described it as broad and capable, but said it will still need to be augmented for more weather conditions, with snow eventually, and for more places. In his words, it is the bridge to true automotive scale, which kicks in when Aurora launches with Aumovio next year.

From the DARPA Challenge to the CEO seat

Urmson said he never planned to become a CEO. He studied computer engineering as an undergraduate, earned a PhD in robotics and expected to become faculty. He said he "stumbled into this," and that he had no career roadmap, instead taking the branch that seemed most interesting each time. Being willing to seize opportunities as they come, he said, is the important part.

He named taking part in the DARPA Grand Challenges as the single decision that mattered most. He was nearly finished with his PhD when the chance came up to build a robot to race across the desert from LA to Vegas. He figured success would create visibility and opportunities, and he talked it over with his wife. He traces everything since to that moment: the three DARPA Challenges, being recruited to Google to start what is now Waymo, and eventually founding Aurora.

On founding the company with Sterling and Drew, he described starting something ambitious as inherently unreasonable and therefore a leap of faith. He said conviction is needed, because without it it is hard for anyone else to have it.

Culture, investors and leadership

For new graduates weighing an employer, Urmson put culture first. He suggested watching how people treat each other when they do not think they are being watched, and said he notices how candidates treat Aurora's EA team and recruiting coordinators. He listed three things that matter most to employees: a mission they believe in, interesting work with good people, and fair pay.

On long-term investment, he said technology like this often takes more than a decade to show results. His approach is to find the right investors and lay out plainly what Aurora is planning, why it matters and why the team is the right one to do it. He said transparency builds trust, and that trouble starts when people are told what they want to hear. Some investors passed, he said, and that is fine.

On leadership, Urmson said he began as a fairly micromanaging engineer, was told to back off, and then swung to the other extreme. He now believes neither works and that the right approach depends on the person and the moment. He also said chasing a title as a goal in itself is the wrong mindset, and that people should decide what they want to contribute and find where they add the most value.

Leave it better than you found it

Asked for ten words to pass on to the next generation of leaders, Urmson answered: "Leave it better than you found it." He said he is disappointed that many tech leaders do not appreciate the investment others made that enabled them, including a country built on the rule of law, federal and state research behind the underlying technologies, and the people who supported them. He called for giving back rather than dismantling what came before.

For the market, the interview offers a few signals from the company's CEO: the second-generation hardware is tied to about 1,500 trucks, more weather and geographic coverage is still to come, and the Aumovio launch next year is the step Urmson links to automotive scale.