When Tekedra Mawakana told her mother she was thinking about taking a job at Waymo, her mom had a question: “Who is going to get in those cars?” The company, which calls itself the “world’s first autonomous ride-hailing service,” currently operates self-driving, for-hire vehicles in about a dozen cities across the United States, including San Francisco, Phoenix, Atlanta, and Austin.

“We want to be the world’s most trusted driver,” Mawakana tells Amira Weeks, MBA ’26, in a View From The Top conversation recorded live at Stanford Graduate School of Business. “Cars are getting safer, but humans are more distracted than ever.”

She envisions massive safety gains — “We have to improve the status quo: 1.2 million people killed globally on the roadways is unacceptable” — and cities remade by a reimagined mobility infrastructure. “My hope is that we’ll see cities with more green spaces, more convening spots — which will hopefully make them feel more like cities and communities and less like concrete jungles.”

Mawakana held legal and public policy roles at eBay, Yahoo, and AOL before she became Waymo’s COO. “I hadn’t actually given myself the opportunity to be in a place that was genuinely a moonshot,” she reflects. “Trust that small voice that is telling you that everything you’ve done has prepared you for this.

This conversation was recorded on May 21, 2026.

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S9E8: Tekedra Mawakana Wants to Build the ‘World’s Most Trusted Driver’

View From The Top

S9E8: Tekedra Mawakana Wants to Build the ‘World’s Most Trusted Driver’