Transportation underpins the whole economy, it's how we get around tower stuff gets around.

If we really wanted the roads to be safe we would ban cars from them.

The Aurora driver is this integrated platform, it's a combination of the software, the hardware

and then the off-board data services that enable the vehicle to drive itself.

Today there's a real need in the freight and trucking space.

We are short 60,000 drivers in America and by the end of the decade we're going to be

short 160,000 drivers and this is the backbone of the US economy.

We think in the long term ride healing is going to be an even bigger business than trucking.

When we think about scaling and growing the business we really had to be building the

company almost ahead of the product.

That's Chris Irmson, CEO of Aurora, the self-driving technology company that's slated to go

public via SPAC later this year.

Tesla's self-driving efforts have been under intense scrutiny recently but Aurora represents

another wave of tech companies who are advancing an autonomous future in a very different way.

I'm Bob Safian, former editor of Fast Company founder of the flux group and host of Masters

of Scale Rapid Response.

I wanted to talk to Chris because autonomous driving has the potential to reshape not

just the economy but societal habits.

Chris has been a leader of the movement for nearly two decades from early robotic challenges

to helping pioneer Google self-driving efforts.

He's built Aurora to a more than $10 billion valuation in just four years alongside colleagues

from Tesla, Uber and elsewhere.

...