Way More Waymos Are Coming Near You
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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Thursday, June 5th. I'm Julie Chang for The Wall Street Journal. Online dating has lost its spark. From the Future of Everything event stage, the CEO of Match Group tells us how he's planning to reignite it. Plus, Google's driverless unit Waymo recently hit 10 million rides. We'll explain how it's going from novelty to norm.

But first, Gen Zers have spent most of their early adult years online, and yet they have not been swiping. That's bad news for online dating giant Match Group. Earlier this year, it hired Spencer Raskoff as CEO to bring younger users back onto its platforms.

Raskoff sat down with WSJ reporter Chip Cutter at this year's Future of Everything event. They talked about how Match's problem may be rooted in an epidemic of loneliness, and the solution could lie in providing Gen Zer's Connections IRL.

Here are highlights from their conversation. I think there's been so much written about how Gen Z just doesn't want to engage with online dating at all. Do you think that's just temporary and that's going to change? Or is there something more fundamental here that you have to do to try to get younger audiences back into these apps?

I think that the high pressure kind of product offering of looking at a photo and judging it, that is cringy for a lot of Gen Z people. And so if we can introduce lighter weight, lower pressure ways to meet new people, like double dating, for example.

What is this? Yeah. This is a product that we've launched in Europe. It's now in about 15 countries globally. It'll be in over 100 countries by later this summer. It'll be across Tinder globally. And this lets two friends partner up. You and I are now in the app together and our profiles are sort of merged and now we're swiping on two guys, two girls, one of each, et cetera. And we're connecting in a lower pressure way. Once we match, we're now having a four-way chat and then able to connect in real life. And

this is the way gen z wants to connect they want to have a journey mindset not a destination mindset and this is an example of a product that speaks to that what that generation wants and needs people can find their spouses find their partners through your apps it's so meaningful how do you make it so it doesn't feel like homework though because i think you talk to a lot of people who use your apps and it's like oh my gosh i'm staring at a sea of matches who have all said like hey how's your weekend or whatever it might be and you just it just feels like work to get through this so you change that so it there

features and product innovations that we can do to solve that. So for example, Hinge introduced a feature, a very popular feature called Your Turn Limits, which caps the number of conversations that you can be having at any point in time at typically seven. So you're really forced to make some choices. Am I actually interested in this person or should I close out that thread? And by reducing the paradox of choice so that it's more finite, we're creating more meaningful conversations. Tinder, for example,

and Hinge both have introduced AI as ways to make it easier to create profiles, to pull out great content from my camera roll or great content from my brain so that I can be a more creative and charismatic version of myself using AI. It'll tell you if your answers are bad and could be worse or could be better. Yeah, we give prompt feedback. So it'll say, what's a Sunday like for you? And if I write brunch...

The AI will say, oh, that's nice, Spencer, but how about you explain more about what do you like to have for brunch? And then I'll write scrambled eggs. It'll say, that's great, but instead tell us a story about the last time you had scrambled eggs. And so through conversation with AI, it can tease out for me better insights that make me shine to others. Since you've been CEO, I'm sure...

Tons of people are asking you for relationship advice all the time. What do you tell them? What would you tell all of us? How are you advising people to go about their dating lives? If you use dating apps, you know, it's important to put your best foot forward. And again, we've built a lot of tools, but we need to do more. You'd be amazed at how really terrible people are at articulating what they're about.

And so it's important to know yourself and then be able to explain that to other people. For men in particular, I would offer the advice that you should be more polite and less piggish. And that's something that we're working on as a society and also as a company. In fact, we have a feature called Are You Sure? Which is...

Which is when you're in messaging, once you match with someone and now you're chatting, if you type something that our AI detects as might be questionable, either off color or distasteful or maybe unwanted, we pop a prompt that says, are you sure you really want to send this? We think this might not be appropriate or might not be well received by the other person. And many tens of thousands of times a day, that little speed bump that we introduce improves the way people behave.

That was Match Group CEO Spencer Raskoff speaking with WSJ reporter Chip Cutter at the Future of Everything event. You can find the full talk on WSJ.com. We'll also link to it in our show notes. Coming up, Google's robo-taxi unit has been way more successful than some anticipated. More on that after the break.

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While most of America has yet to see, let alone sit in, a driverless car, this tech is no longer a thing of fiction. In California, streets have been inundated with Waymos from Google's self-driving taxi unit. And according to passenger transportation data published by the California Public Utilities Commission, Waymo just topped 10 million rides.

WSJ Science of Success columnist Ben Cohen spoke with my colleague Victoria Craig about Waymo's rapid growth and how its ridership has hit a critical inflection point, a point in which products go from novel to banal. How successful has this company become? I live in New York City where the idea of self-driving cars still sounds like a fantasy, but...

If you go to Phoenix or LA or especially San Francisco, you will find that the streets there have been invaded by autonomous vehicles. So the best way to measure the success of Waymo at this point is to just look at the number of rides per week over the past year. So in August 2023, Waymo was doing 10,000 paid driverless rides a week.

By May 2024, that number was 50,000. And that is 5x growth. It seemed like a lot at the time. And now it just looks like a blip because by August 2024, a year later, it was up to 100,000. And now they are at 250,000 paid rides a week. And that number just keeps growing every month and every year. And it's pretty astonishing how quickly...

the business of self-driving cars has grown over the past two years, especially since they were cleared to operate in San Francisco. And is this huge growth because Waymo is expanding into new markets, or is it because people who are using it are actually liking it and becoming repeat customers? Yeah, it's a little bit of both. So they are conquering new markets, but they are also conquering more market share in the markets where they already exist.

exist. So over the past few months, they've expanded to Austin. They are going to Atlanta this summer. Next on the list are Miami and Washington, DC. So you will see the numbers rise across the board. However, if you just look at the markets where they've existed for that entire time, like California, for example, you will see more and more Waymo rides in that market. So like in California alone, it's

It's now doing 700,000 paid driverless rides a month as of March. I'm sure the number is already much, much higher now that we are in June. And if you track out that trajectory, you will see this consistent month-over-month growth in the markets where it is already operating.

And it's so interesting because I was taking a look at the comment section of this story and I was surprised by the number of people who were in the comment section saying how much they actually like taking Waymo rides. What is the reason that people keep coming back to Waymo? A couple of things that Waymo has to think about are price and also wait time, right? If you are opening the Uber and the Lyft and the Waymo app, those are the two first things that you're going to look at. How does the price compare? How does the wait time compare? But

If you're thinking about like why you would take a Waymo, one is, you know, not having to speak with another human, which strangely is something that is very attractive to humans. One is that Waymo says that its cars are safer than the ones that are driven by actual people behind the wheel. Another one is just like the sheer novelty of it, but that wears off after one ride. So in order to keep coming back, it has to keep winning the customer over.

So the thing about Waymo is that it isn't profitable and it has been burning through billions of dollars to try to be one of the first in this sort of like new class of robo-taxi, I suppose, and beat the competition.

So why isn't it making money yet? And does it have a path to profitability? And when we look at the competition in this space, Elon Musk, now that he's left Doge, has said that he plans to focus more on his own robo-taxi service. So how does that sort of fit into this overall picture with Waymo in this industry? Tesla and Waymo have taken different approaches to both the technology and the economics of robo-taxis.

Waymo's technology is super expensive because it does not just rely on AI and cameras the way that Tesla's does. It also relies on LIDAR and radar and human input from actual engineers and mapping data. And all of that stuff is really, really expensive. So last year, the company raised about $5.5 billion of funding in addition to all the billions of dollars that it's already raised.

Alphabet, Google's parent company, doesn't break out Waymo's specific finances, but Waymo is part of their Other Bets division. It's actually called Other Bets. Last year, Other Bets reported a $4.4 billion loss. So it's clear that they're losing money now. If you ask the company, they say they are not profitable, but they are on a path to profitability, but it's unclear when it's going to get there. And the real...

interesting thing that is now coming up is that Tesla is finally preparing to launch its own robo taxi program, a small pilot to start in Austin, Texas, that Elon Musk says is going to happen in June. Now, Elon Musk has been promising

self-driving robo taxis available the next year starting six years ago. He has a long history of over promising here, but it seems like years is finally a matter of days and there soon will be driverless Teslas on the road next to driverless Waymos in Austin, Texas. And

It's pretty clear that like Waymo has a big lead in the race for self-driving supremacy right now. And the longer that it has the only driverless cars on the road, the bigger that lead will get. But it might not have the only driverless cars on the road for much longer. And the real competition here between Waymo and Tesla in the US anyway, is just starting to heat up.

That was the WSJ's Victoria Craig speaking with our Science of Success columnist, Ben Cohen. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by me, Julie Chang, with Deputy Editor Chris Zinsley. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.