Don Burnette
Founder and CEO of Kodiak AI and an early member of Google's self-driving car team. In the episode, he reflects on the technical and organizational challenges of building autonomous vehicles.
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271 snips
Mar 20, 2026 • 1h 11min
Are Human Drivers Finally Obsolete?
PJ Vogt, Search Engine reporter and narrator, follows the secret Google project that put driverless cars on real roads. Don Burnette, Kodiak AI founder and early Google self-driving engineer, recalls the messy challenge of teaching a Prius human-like judgment. Sebastian Thrun, Stanford roboticist and DARPA winner, revisits the race, the Google bet, Waymo’s rise, Uber’s chaos, and the looming threat to driving jobs.
Mar 14, 2024 • 50min
CEO Don Burnette: Kodiak's Autonomous Trucking Innovations
Don Burnette, CEO of Kodiak Robotics, discusses the potential of autonomous trucking to triple asset utilization, leading to increased revenues. The episode explores Kodiak's approach to proprietary data, safety, and redundancy in advancing autonomous trucking technology. Topics include the evolution of Don's career, real-time perception, strategic partnerships, and the readiness of autonomous trucking for deployment.
Jan 13, 2026 • 38min
Episode 361 | De-Risking Autonomy with Optionality
Don Burnette, Founder and CEO of Kodiak, shares insights on the company’s journey toward autonomy and its recent public offering. He reveals Kodiak's innovative asset-light model, where partners like Atlas operate trucks, allowing a focus on AI development. They discuss strategic partnerships, notably with Bosch, to create a redundant, OEM-agnostic platform. Don emphasizes the importance of long-term vision in technology validation and highlights plans for upcoming driverless operations. He foresees a future of Kodiak as a leader in physical AI, expanding beyond trucking.
