Our guest today is comma.ai’s Senior Vice President of Operations, Viviane Ford.

Comma.ai is based in San Diego. Most new cars on the road today are built with features designed to assist with driving but fail to deliver. comma’s open-source software, openpilot, enables your car to steer, accelerate, and brake automatically in its lane. It is easy to install and trusted by thousands of drivers over 10 million miles. Currently, openpilot performs the functions of Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and Automated Lane Centering (ALC) for compatible vehicles. It performs similarly to Tesla Autopilot and GM Super Cruise. openpilot can steer, accelerate, and brake automatically for other vehicles within its lane.

Viviane previously worked at Eastwick Communications for 1 year, back when it was 6 people in a garage in San Francisco.

In This Conversation We Discuss:

How comma.ai’s startup team of 13 has created an open-source self-driving development kit to enable automation across various brands of cars

Becoming profitable in the world of the open-source business

The pain points of identifying comma.ai’s image – deciding what to scale into as it develops and gains stability

What is considered value for projects and services for the team to provide their attention to and when to say no

Interesting Highlights:

Comma.ai sells development kit hardware that runs their open source software named Open Pilot to enable driver-assist functionality to motor vehicles

Open Pilot is under the MIT license, which is maintained by Comma.ai but can be licenced out and built upon

Comma.ai allows anyone to read into the code (open-source), especially for anyone concerned for safety.

Resources:

Connect with Viviane Ford: LinkedIn

Check out comma.ai: comma.ai

Connect with Cameron: Website | LinkedIn

Get Cameron’s latest book “Meetings Suck: Turning One of The Most Loathed Elements of Business into One of the Most Valuable.