Tech Unheard Episode 4: Aicha Evans

Rene Haas (03:04)
Aisha, thank you so much for joining.

Aicha Evans (03:21)
My pleasure. I’m so looking forward to this. We’re going to have fun.

Rene Haas (03:37)
So Aisha, you and I had lunch a while back.
You told me a little bit about your background, which was utterly fascinating in terms of not only where you grew up and got started, but how you got into engineering in this field. So recast that for the audience, it’s just a fascinating story.

Aicha Evans (04:22)
Yeah, I do remember that lunch too and many dinners since. Look, I’m from Senegal, West Africa. My dad was in telecommunication engineering back then, sort of France was wiring up Senegal and other countries. And I grew up, I ended up growing up in Paris back and forth. And every time I was in Senegal and I wanted to talk to my friends in Paris, I couldn’t really. I remember this is pre-internet and what have you. And so we had a rotary phone. And yeah, I decided to figure out how to hack it because it had a little lock.

Rene Haas (04:57)
Ha ha.

Aicha Evans (04:58)
Lock on it so you couldn’t make phone calls. Now in retrospect, really, it was sort of silly because then the phone bill came and my dad was like, what is going on here? But I just saw the difference when you have technology available, what it makes possible versus when you don’t in two countries that I love. And then I happen to be good at math, physics, not biology, by the way. And so that’s how I fell in love with STEM and building things, hacking things, and I do like the combination of hardware and software. And then eventually came to the US to study computer engineering and the rest is history.

Rene Haas (05:37)
So born in Paris and then lived in Senegal or born in… So, and what was the back and forth to Paris then? Why that?

Aicha Evans (05:41)
The other way around. Born in Senegal and then yeah.

So my Dad had this, it’s funny, he wanted me to have that education and really be around sort of elite people in STEM, but he also wanted me to remain very Senegalese and so family, friends. So every vacation I did Air Africa, Air France, Paris, Dakar for maybe a week, a couple weeks, and that’s how I sort of stayed in touch with my original country and do to this day, this summer will be Dakar and London.

Rene Haas (06:20)
Amazing, amazing. And the lock on the rotary phone, was that to disable country codes? What was that lock about?

Aicha Evans (06:28)
It was, it turns out to first of all, back then not a lot of households had those. And so there were issues with sort of people going to somebody else’s house and making phone calls. And so this was locking it so that only authorized people with the key could make a phone call because it was so expensive except that one of the unauthorized people was me, the daughter who wanted to talk to my friends in Paris.

Rene Haas (06:44)
My goodness gracious.

Fantastic. I grew up in the United States, but my mother was Portuguese, my father was German who grew up in Lisbon. similar thing in that they would make calls overseas. And we didn’t have a lock on the phone, but I would remember usually every month when the phone bill came in, my father being in complete stupor, finding out what calls my mom had made overseas.

Aicha Evans (07:22)
It was crazy back then. I tell the kids today who at the moment noticed are on a video call with friends all around the world and they’re like, you just don’t know how good you have it.

Rene Haas (07:30)
Yeah. Yeah, no, the world got unbelievably flat. So where did you go to university?

Aicha Evans (07:39)
GW in DC, which is yet another story. Finally, he agreed, my dad, that I could go to the US, but he wanted me to go in DC where he had a lot of friends at World Bank, IMF. There was also a small contingent of Senegalese students because he was like, okay, in Paris, I lost control of this child. She’s this little French girl. She’s smoking, dating, drinking, going out. We’re not doing that again.

Rene Haas (08:02)
You

Aicha Evans (08:07)
And the funny story is very shortly after being in the States, I met my American husband. And so the recipe didn’t really work out too well.

Rene Haas (08:18)
And studied engineering or computer science? Was your studies?

Aicha Evans (08:22)
It was computer engineering, so I had this thing that I didn’t like electrical engineering. I like hardware. I like to build things. But you could already tell that computers were taking over. And computer science I liked, but I was going to miss the hardware. So there was this mixed degree that’s kind of nice where you do a little bit of both, which worked out really well for me.

Rene Haas (08:41)
Interesting, interesting. I didn’t know that story, but my degree is also in computer engineering and actually for the very same reason. Electroengineering, electromagnetic fields and waves, that stuff I did, power circuitry, transformers, good to learn. But computer engineering, when I was in college was really the time of, the PCs were just starting.

Aicha Evans (08:57)
You get it.

Rene Haas (09:07)
And I had worked, around with Commodore 64s and VIC-20s in high school. So very similar. Computer engineering was exactly what I was attracted to as well. So I knew we had something in common here.

Aicha Evans (09:20)
There we go, now it makes sense.

Rene Haas (09:22)
And then what? So you’re out of GW. What is your first role?

Aicha Evans (09:26)
I am at, well first was stay for grad school and don’t stay for grad school but married, my husband had a job in Austin and so that was kind of like, you want me to move where? Austin, Texas, are you crazy? But we did and it turned out to be a good decision so I went to work for Sky, well back then it was called Brook Three which was, yep.

Rene Haas (09:49)
Oh sure, yeah,

Aicha Evans (09:51)
A big startup and…

Rene Haas (09:52)
Yep.

Aicha Evans (09:52)
Totally bombed the interview too. I don’t know why they hired me or at least that’s how it felt. But it was great. I was the youngest by many, many years and they just took me under their wing and worked on essentially AV sync. Back then recording live video was just starting and streaming and then quickly, I think four years or five years in with my big mouth and always having opinions moved into management. At first the tech lead and then from there went to, where did I go? Skyworks and started working on cell phones. I was just talking this morning about sending those first text messages on a small little LCD screen and saying, yeah, it’s gonna be computers in your pocket soon.

Rene Haas (10:32)
My goodness. So very, but we’re two for two here, because my first job out of college was also in Texas, and I was with TI, and so gosh, at Houston, so we’re two for two here. But Brooktree, I remember they were doing like RAM DAX and analog, how big was Brooktree? Because when I joined TI, you know, a monstrous company, how big was Brooktree?

Aicha Evans (10:59)
About 500 people working on the project was with, I think it was EchoStar maybe, and basically what were you gonna do with storage and replay and synchronization, the audio and the video are recorded separately, so they sent me to Sarnoff Research Labs in New Jersey to learn about all that, and that was my area of the chip and the product.

Rene Haas (11:08)
Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. So when I joined TI, they were a giant company. I think they were the largest semiconductor company in the world. To be honest, I knew no different about joining a small company versus a big company. But Brooktree must have been interesting. Did you have a desire to join a company of 500 people? Because when you’re going to go of college and you’re new to everything, it’s not obvious how the culture is going to be at a small company versus big company, how one’s going to fit. did you end up there? How did you end up at Brooktree?

Aicha Evans (11:59)
Okay, so I have to be careful here. So this is what happened. I joined a big company. And I spent two weeks at the big company because it was the right thing to do and because I was on a senior project at GW with them. But then when I went to work, I was like, this is not going to work. This dude,

Rene Haas (12:08)
Okay.

Ha ha ha.

Aicha Evans (12:29)
Was like, you’re gonna do this? I felt like I had a roadmap of tasks with no thinking for five years ahead of me. And so I quit. I was like, and they were like, how, two weeks. So then they said, hey, are you sure you’re intimidated? I said, no, this is not gonna work. I have opinions, I need to think, I need to be part of things, and I can just tell I’m not gonna be happy here.

Rene Haas (12:29)
Wow. Within two months? Two weeks.

Aicha Evans (12:57)
And so they gave me two more weeks of vacation to kind of get my mind right because they thought I was just scared and I never went back. And during those two weeks, I looked at the Austin Statesman, think was the thing, the Sunday pages. And there was this ad from Brook Three that said, come make waves with us together. And I called them and I said, hi, I’m Aisha Evans.

Rene Haas (13:18)
Gosh.

Aicha Evans (13:22)
I’d love to work for you and they’re like send your resume in I sent my resume in and then they called me in for an interview and I interviewed and then I got an offer and I was screaming first time I had ever done anything by myself for myself

Rene Haas (13:30)
Gosh. But you had obviously shown some level of entrepreneurial risk taking and no, really seriously, and courage because to know something at that young age isn’t right for you and to make a decision that fast is pretty amazing. that, looking back, is that something you look back and say, gosh, what was I thinking? I was crazy? Or do you look back and say, that was me and that’s how I think about things.

Aicha Evans (14:04)
No, I mean, I’m not saying it’s good or bad. It’s just me. By the way, there are also other sides of the issue where I love to cook. This is something that makes me happy, cooking and making dish and doing dishes. And so you are now in the US. Even though DC is very international, there is no Senegalese food and I need my Senegalese food. So I make my Senegalese food. My friends tell me how much they love my Senegalese food. I come into a little bit of money and I decide it’s a good idea to start a restaurant. So I buy a restaurant with my American boyfriend who we’ve been together for three months. And I learned a lot about leadership at that restaurant. Turns out the dishwasher dude, he’s the boss. And so I did that for a year now, like back to computers, please. Let’s go back to the regular program. So sometimes it’s kind of crazy. In retrospect, I want to ask my parents-in-law.

Rene Haas (14:35)
My gosh. Ha

Aicha Evans (14:58)
I mean, they were probably like, this woman, what is she doing? But I don’t know. That’s just me. I’m weird.

Rene Haas (15:03)
Was the Senegalese restaurant done in parallel with your career or was it a hiatus and you went up and said I’m going to go do a restaurant for a bit?

Aicha Evans (15:11)
So first I thought it was going to be done in parallel. It quickly became clear that that was not going to happen. So I ended up taking a semester off and then going back to school.

Rene Haas (15:23)
Unbelievable, I did not know that story, that is amazing. So after Skyworks, is that what brought you to Intel or was there something in between there?

Aicha Evans (15:34)
It was being married 10 years, not wanting to have children because anytime I’m around children, it’s loud, it’s complicated, and you have a responsibility. And then all of a sudden, you decide that, no, no, no, you want to have children. And so it was, OK, I need to slow down and have kids. It ended up being difficult also having kids. Now I can talk about it publicly because it’s been a long time, but had a very difficult miscarriage.

Rene Haas (16:02)
Mm.

Aicha Evans (16:02)
And so I was like, okay, the new project is to have a kid. So I left. But then in the meantime, until after I had my first child, was like, hey, we’re looking for wireless people because of WiMAX. And we happen to live in Portland, Oregon. So it was very practical. So I kind of, you’re going to say this woman, I kind of eventually said, fine, I’ll come to work for you. But

Rene Haas (16:19)
Sure.

Aicha Evans (16:30)
For the first year, no travel because I had a three-month-old brand new baby that I really wanted to have. And I think I said something like nine to four. And they said, okay, fine, no problem, just for the first year. And of course, I went in there and, you know, that’s not what ended up happening. I ended up working like crazy and traveling. But I also figured out how to, I wouldn’t say balance because I think that’s a myth, but integrate being a mom and working. So yeah, it was Wimax that got me there.

Rene Haas (16:43)
Right. So do you have, and I have two daughters and their mom did not work when the kids were growing up, which I think was hugely beneficial to them. And now my youngest daughter has had a baby and she’s also staying home for a bit. But I look at that and then I think about your story, which is just amazing. i mean, what…

Aicha Evans (17:15)
Congrats!

Rene Haas (17:28)
How did you do that?

Aicha Evans (17:42)
You’re too kind. So a few things. So first of all, you know how in when you’re on an airplane they say you have to put your oxygen mask first before you help anybody else? I like working. I enjoy it. It makes me happy.

Rene Haas (18:00)
Yeah.

Aicha Evans (18:07)
That journey from the young Senegalese girl all the way to here required a lot of managing myself and understanding what’s important to me. So I like working, I like creating things, I like having an impact. I love my kids, I have two of them, one is now 19, the other one 17. I have a wonderful husband, a wonderful support system. By the time, remember, I said I waited 10 years, so how it worked out for me is that by the time I had them, I could make choices and afford choices in terms of what I did myself versus what I got support for versus frankly what I outsourced. And so I built a wonderful flexible support system around myself and I have a wonderful husband too and we partnered in doing that. And along the years sometimes I sped up from a career or impact standpoint. Sometimes I took a step back and just kind of ebbed and flowed.

Rene Haas (19:01)
For folks listening who might be thinking about those choices, is there anything that you look back and say, had I known X, I may have done something a little bit differently.

Aicha Evans (19:19)
Not particularly when it comes to raising the kids. would say, well, the jurors start out, they are young, so we’ll see. But so far they are wonderful kids. Look, the thing I would have told myself is something that applies to almost everything in my life. That same entrepreneurial, risky, seeks sort of crazy things, wants to have high impact, sometimes also goes out of control and is too intense. And so I would say, Take a chill pill is what I would have told my younger self. In general, it works out. then, yeah, that’s probably what I would have told myself. As far as the advice, you just need to be consequential. Be happy and be consequential. So when you make the decisions, make sure you understand the pros and cons, and be happy with the pros and live with the cons.

Rene Haas (19:51)
That is absolutely wonderful advice. now you’re at Intel, certainly not a small company at the time, and probably pretty close to the peak of their strength as a company. And you were there, what, 12 years? what were the areas that you worked inside of Intel?

Aicha Evans (20:27)
Indeed. Twelve years. So it was mostly 10 years of wireless because when I came, when I went in with Wimax, I was kind of like, wow, they’re either onto something incredible or something’s really wrong. So it turned out that the idea was correct, but the implementation, mean, Wimax is a great technology, but when you look at the incumbency of 3GPP back then, that was almost mission impossible in terms of the ecosystem, network operators. I ended up meeting, it was sort of fortitude, I was in some open forum type thing with David and Sean. David Perlmuter back then ran all of engineering and Sean ran kind of the business. And they were sort of outside the CEO, they were kind of like running the company. And I put my hand up and I said, hi, I’m Aisha Evans. I have a question, I work on WiMAX, and I see all these challenges, and so I’d like to understand what’s the goal? What are we trying to do? And so they responded, but that got me an audience with them afterwards. And so it ended up being that Grove had seen that the PC and the connected world were going to converge. And so having a wireless portfolio was important. License, IE modems, unlicense, IE Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GNSS, that type of stuff. I basically worked on building those products for mostly PCs, a little bit of edge devices, and then a smartphone from a company that I’m not allowed to name.

And that’s what I did for a long time, enjoyed it, had a great team worldwide and was in the soup with operators and base stations and it was really fun. Back then MWC in Barcelona in February was a must. And yeah, that’s what I was doing. But in doing that, I started, it almost felt like a startup inside of Intel. I don’t know how to say it because everybody else was doing processor memory and what have you.

Rene Haas (22:27)
Absolutely. Mm-hmm. Yep.

Aicha Evans (22:40)
And then there were changes and then I received the directive to make a couple of changes. One was a processor change and the other one was to build internally, i.e. not at TSMC. And that’s when I encountered the beast.

Rene Haas (22:49)
Yeah, and we promise not to go too deep on the Intel thing, but the one thing I always, I look at Intel and I think a super power to some extent is vertical integration, I thought to some extent because I go back to my early days at TI and then back in the day, we built everything internally. We built testers and memory access and all the programming. And it just seems to me that

Aicha Evans (23:02)
It’s okay.

Indeed.

Rene Haas (23:26)
The strong coupling between the process and the product is a pretty amazing power if they can get it right. Without getting too deep in the Intel broader strategy, when you think about vertical integration in semiconductors versus the horizontal model, do you have a perspective on, in the long game, which should win, or one way the other?

Aicha Evans (23:47)
I don’t think about them that way. First of all, I always kind of go back to what I call the helicopter view, meaning above the forest. Success is poison. If you don’t manage your success and you lose track of what is the basis of your success and is that basis a truth that is self-evident and should continue or be modified, thou shall run into trouble. And so there is absolutely no doubt that the vertical integration is a strength, but if it’s not done in a way that is flexible and modular and can quickly adapt to trend, either in the building, the material, the testing, or the cadence of the market, trouble arises. And then you go into protect and defend mode, and that is never, ever a winning strategy.

Rene Haas (24:41)
I 1,000 % agree. i mean, the technology graveyard of tech companies is filled with companies that have done just that. And I was in Austin doing a fireside chat at South by Southwest. And we were literally chatting about that and that just how punishing our industry can be if you miss a window and you think your past success is a predictor of a future strategy, you are going to be in huge trouble.

Aicha Evans (24:53)
Yeah.

Rene Haas (25:07)
You made a very brave move to go to a technology area that I think everyone would know and would disagree that autonomous vehicles and autonomy in general is what’s going to happen. So your move to Zoox, now you’ve gone from something that’s very big to something that’s not so big, but in some ways was fairly well capitalized. What made that jump for, what was the jump to Zoox all about?

Aicha Evans (25:36)
Well, towards the, kind of, I don’t think you should wake up every morning thinking 100 % of the time you’re gonna be happy at work. But you know, the majority of the time you should be happy and energized and you’re learning and you know, and you’re contributing. And towards the end, at Intel, I could feel that, you know, I had more unhappy days than happy days. Let me put it that way. Not because people were mean or anything like that. It’s just, I didn’t agree. And so I’m starting now to, you know, I’m very curious. That’s how we’ve met, but I’m stuck. I’m one of those who says, hi, my name is Aisha Evans. I need some help, please. I don’t understand. May you please help me? And so I had met a lot of people in the industry and a lot of folks were telling me, should go do this. You should go do that. And…

Rene Haas (26:11)
Yep, absolutely.

Aicha Evans (26:26)
I don’t know that I knew what I wanted to do exactly, but I knew how I wanted to spend my time. And so I was getting a lot of offers and I’m not trying to sound arrogant or anything like that. That’s just what happened. A lot of phone calls. And eventually I got one about Zoox. By the way, I first told the recruiter, I don’t think so, because we had, Intel had bought Mobileye. So I had a little bit of a window into that ADAS AV world.

Rene Haas (26:50)
Yeah.

Aicha Evans (26:55)
and we were also supplying wireless cards to EV folks. And so I was like, these people, no, this sounds crazy. But then a couple of people that I really trust told me, hey, you should go talk to them. They might be onto something. And so first, of course, I meet board members. I like them. And then I meet Jesse Levinson, one of the two co-founders. We walked around Zoox for about a couple hours. And I don’t know, it’s one of those when you know, you know.

I just fell in love with the idea and the product. I felt the vibe. I could see myself spending the time that way. It’s a product that matters. It’s been a while since there’s been, in physical transportation, since there’s been like a big revolution. And it just makes sense. I mean, I was like, we’re not building that many more roads and how many more cars can we stuff? Plus I hope that 10 years, 20 years from now, we ask ourselves how it was okay for 40,000 plus people to pass and that’s just okay. And so it just, they had a business model that made sense to me. And so I came home and I told my husband, I think I’m leaving and this is what I’m doing. And so then we went on vacation for I think two weeks in Jamaica and I sat there on the beach and.

Rene Haas (28:11)
Hahaha

Aicha Evans (28:19)
You know, I trust my intuition a lot and my intuition didn’t say don’t do this. So I came back and told Intel and then took like a little bit of detox time and then started in February 2019. Haven’t looked back and I still giggle every day.

Rene Haas (28:35)
Six years, and the progress that you’ve made has been incredible. I do want to touch on that, but I want to dig into a comment you just made because I see that in your personality. You’re not afraid to ask for help. I’ve been a CEO now for three years. You’ve been one for six. It’s not always easy for the CEO to stand up and say, I need help. People look at us and say, the buck stops there. You’re the answer man or the answer woman. How do you balance that because you’re great at it in terms of the I’ll ask for help when I need it But at the same time, I’m the CEO and should I be seen as asking for help?

Aicha Evans (29:17)
So I think being open and transparent is extremely important. i think telling people the why before you get to the how is really important. My job right now at least is to get some 2,800 people or so from many different backgrounds, Some are traditional automotive, some are new automotive, some are AI geniuses, some are mechanics, some are embedded people, some are policy and regulatory people, some are comms and marketing people, some are product experience. I am not an expert at all that. Number one. Number two, I already know what I think. What’s most important is what I don’t think and that’s good. And so my job is to treat everybody as a customer. kind of take all of that input in, synthesize it. If there are better ideas, say thank you and tell me more and let’s do it. If my idea is bad, I’m in a safety critical business. People trust me with their lives in our robotaxi. I would want a culture where if people think we’re doing something wrong or unsafe that they tell us. So to me, it’s more like earning it.

Rene Haas (30:33)
Yeah, perfect, perfect answer. That’s how I feel about it. And in fact, the CEO probably has the good excuse that can say, I’m an expert of nothing, so teach me something. And I find that my own job here. I learn every day from folks who I interact with. So much has happened in Autonomous in the short time that you’ve been with Zoox, although six years maybe doesn’t seem like a short time. When you started, large language models, vision-based learning, that was not a thing. And now, six years into this, what has changed, if anything at all, relative to how you think about autonomous and the rules and how that gets handled in the light of these new models that seem to be just incredible in terms of learning?

Aicha Evans (31:30)
First of all, AV is a space where it’s important to ask a question first, which is, is there a driver behind the driver’s seat? Yes or no? So if our view is that if there’s a driver behind the driver’s seat, but that driver can be distracted, that driver is not fully in charge of the driving, they are just in charge of making sure they are available to take over. basically supervised versus unsupervised. So I think that LLMs have accelerated things, but for us, where there are no manual controls and there is no human driver, so there is no takeover because we don’t want the customer involved in the driving, LLMs have been more helpful in simulation, in the magnitude and the speed at which we can process edge cases, the understanding cost, just because you have to, in our case, supplement cameras, that doesn’t mean you have to, like, if we were redesigning our robotaxi today, I’m pretty confident it would have less sensors than it does today. And then in terms of also anything that requires a lot of estimation and forecasting, so it’s been an accelerant for us. We are not yet at the point where we’re thinking,

Rene Haas (32:37)
Right.

Aicha Evans (32:51)
Without any manual control, it will do the driving by itself. We think that from a safety standpoint, and the easiest way, not everybody lives in this technology, but if you prompt one of, pick your favorite agent, and you give it a prompt and it gives you an answer that’s slightly right and a little wrong, that’s not a big deal. Well, when it’s in real time control of a robot taxi, that is a big deal. So that’s the gap we’re maneuvering. But we think that over the next, I’m sure that gap will narrow and narrow and narrow over time given how fast things are going.

Rene Haas (33:25)
Yeah, that does feel like something that time can address and the models are moving remarkably fast in terms of not only their learning and reasoning capability, but just simply you throw more compute at it. To get to a point where you think the models are actually end quote good enough to be a good augment to what you’re a couple years away, multiple years away,

Aicha Evans (33:55)
There are already a good augment now. There are many times when you have perception and mapping and localization, but then really the pipe is perception, and well, prediction, planning and control. First of all, prediction and planning and control have basically merged. And second of all, every trajectory has essentially, there is a machine-learned version that is generated. It’s just we don’t pick it all the time. So it’s happening.

Rene Haas (34:22)
Right. to get to a point where it’s picked the majority of the time or 90 % of the time, how far away is that?

Aicha Evans (34:31)
I think 90 % of the time is very soon. The problem is when we get to 95, 99 % of the time, I think to get to that last 1 % is where it’s going to be very hard. Because even if it can, we want to know that it can every single time. And that’s the little funnel that’s difficult to deal with. But it’ll come.

Rene Haas (34:35)
And well. is the threshold, you mentioned 40,000, 50,000 that death a year in auto accidents, which is just awful. Yet it seems like with autonomy, the threshold for accidents is,

Rene Haas (35:26)
Essentially zero.. How, how, where do you think the threshold level is relative to the tolerance for, for accidents? And I know this is kind of a crazy subject relative to trading off humanity, but in reality,

Aicha Evans (35:27)
Mm-hmm.

Rene Haas (35:54)
Does it need to get to essentially zero for this to be able to be broadly and widely accepted? Is it regulatory? Is it insurance? How do you think about all that?

Aicha Evans (36:02)
No, so I’m trying to give you the best answer that I can give you. I’ll answer it in a philosophical way. I think you have to be trusted. People have to trust that you know how important this is and you’re trying for zero. And there has to be a track record holistically, whether you’re dealing with regulatory, the community, your own engineering, your own methodology. There has to be a track record. You have to develop a track record of transparency, communication, and how you talk and how you do things so that people trust that you’re trying for zero. I think if that, and also it has to happen. mean, look. the human benchmarks are fairly clear. We can argue about 10 or 20K here and there, it’s around, no matter how you look at it, it’s around 10 to, let’s say, 50K when it comes to collision. It’s around 30 to 100 million when it comes to, sorry, when it comes to injuries and then fatalities, right? So, You can’t really, you know, if, for example, if Zoox deploys a robot taxi and has something really bad happen after two miles, we do not deserve to be trusted. So I think you have to build all those muscles and have a lot of transparency and make sure that you build your safety case in a way that some of the tougher incidents happen down the road so that you have enough of a track record of that so people know you tried.

Rene Haas (37:21)
Right, right, right.

Aicha Evans (37:42)
And then they come and then you have to explain what happened and make sure that you, nobody has the impression that you didn’t tell them what happened. Even if you did, know, perception is reality, you’re a CEO, you know how that works. And then you have to show what you’re gonna do differently.

Rene Haas (37:57)
Totally. Do you think it’s a couple years of having no accidents, for example? I was wondering, because I think about air travel, which is unbelievably safe, even given the issues that have taken place horribly over the last number of months. Statistically, it’s incredibly safe. And statistics will show, and have shown, that the vast majority of airline crashes was pilot error. Yet when I look at autonomous, just to your numbers, I would almost think that the math will be there very soon, that they will be less than what you just cited. Yet I also feel like today’s culture and philosophy is almost a zero tolerance. And I just wonder how we get through that threshold.

Aicha Evans (38:45)
So it’s interesting you should say that. I work in foster city, so I see the planes landing all the time. Aviation, no matter what we say, over a lot of miles in the air, over a lot of takeoffs and landings in a very ubiquitous way, has shown and proven that it tries for zero, very rarely.

Very seldomly, when something bad happens, but we have this contract that we trust the process. And I think that autonomy, especially unsupervised autonomy, is working its way there. But the bar should be high, because we’re trading people’s lives, and that’s important.

Rene Haas (39:31)
Yeah, 100%.

Aicha Evans (39:34)
One last thing though, You have to deliver value too. Because you know what? You can decide that airplanes are not safe and you’re not flying. Well, that’s going to limit a lot of things in your. And we have to, so we have to deliver value at the same time.

Rene Haas (39:38)
For sure.

Yeah, Just a last couple of questions, Aisha. When I became a CEO, a lot of folks asked me afterwards, what surprised you about being CEO? And there were so many things. But a small one was that I didn’t quite realize was just how the eyes are on you all the time. And that’s from an employee standpoint. used to, the job I had before running the company was I had the number two job in the company, which was a big job, et cetera, et cetera. But I would notice I could walk down the hall and people would maybe not look at me and not say hello. And when you’re the CEO, I think everyone is watching you and making sure that not only they wanna say hi or hello, which is obviously great, but they’re also reading your body language and such.

Aicha Evans (40:41)
For sure.

Rene Haas (40:49)
You’ve been at CEO for six years. What was something that has surprised you about the role?

Aicha Evans (40:55)
Definitely what you said, but in addition, how bloody lonely it is, It’s just lonely. It’s very isolating. It’s funny because you’re isolated in public. On the one hand, you have to do exactly what you said, shoulders up, because I’m on stage, people are reading my slightest body language or smile or nod of the head or how I’m talking to somebody or wagging my finger.

Rene Haas (40:59)
Haha

Aicha Evans (41:22)
And at the same time, yeah, sometimes I just need to let loose and I’m not sure or I’m scared or I am hilariously happy. And it’s just, it feels like you’re just, you’re always in public, but you’re also so lonely.

Rene Haas (41:36)
That is very well stated and that’s why I do this podcast and I have people like you on because it’s my one time of the day to feel not such a lonely person. Last question and this is something I’ve never quite been able to figure out the answer to. Why is the bread in France so much better than anything you can find anywhere else in the world? What is the secret sauce there?

Aicha Evans (41:56)
Look, I don’t know and I’m not a baker, but hang on, hang on, hang on. But I have something. one of my daughter’s best friends, he’s French and the mom is French and they’ve known each other since middle school. And I can tell you that I’m very mad that they just moved to Paris because when we are invited, when we used to be invited, to get an invite to their house for dinner.

Rene Haas (41:58)
What?

Aicha Evans (42:24)
In Los Altos, I’d be like, my god, this is going to be like the bread in Paris. And so I finally asked her and I said, hey, how come you’re able to do this? And I’m not able to buy this anywhere. Now you’re sitting down. She imported every single ingredient from the butter to the flour to the salt. mean, every single ingredient she imported to make the bread.

Rene Haas (42:38)
I’m sitting down.

I have to believe that’s probably the case because what I have found is either one of two things. People have imported all the ingredients or they do what you just did and don’t tell me what the answer is in the beginning for somebody who lived in Paris. Aisha Evans, thank you so much for spending the time with us. This was wonderful.

Aicha Evans (43:10)
My pleasure, Rene. Good to see you.

Rene Haas (43:12)
Merci beaucoup.