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We’re mixing things up a bit this week to focus on what was said on, and off, the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025. In short, it was a banger with a number of high-profile execs and founders working on the future of transportation.
Here are a few: Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana, Slate CEO Chris Barman, Nuro co-CEO and founder Dave Ferguson, Uber CPO Sachin Kansal, Wayve founder and CEO Alex Kendall, and Kodiak AI founder and CEO Don Burnette. Videos of those interviews will be posted on our YouTube channel over the coming week.
The Slate Auto interview with Sean O’Kane and Chris Barman is already available. If you watch it, pay attention to Barman’s comments about the accessories that can be added to any Slate EV. The startup will design, make, and sell accessories, but it’s also going to share data so owners can make their own. And even sell it to other owners.
“We will release all of the data information on that and anybody can 3D print their own,” Barman said. “So we also want that individuals don’t feel they have to come to us. We want to create an ecosystem that’ll be on our website Slate marketplace.”
O’Kane then asked if Slate would take a cut on those accessories if creators add them to the Slate marketplace.
“Yeah, we’ll take some amount of fee when we work with them,” she said, quickly adding that creators can sell elsewhere (and without Slate taking a cut). “If they wanted to, they could choose to market it on Etsy. It’s their power of choice and what they do. It’s not as if we’re going to behold them to us.”
Techcrunch event Join the Disrupt 2026 Waitlist Add yourself to the Disrupt 2026 waitlist to be first in line when Early Bird tickets drop. Past Disrupts have brought Google Cloud, Netflix, Microsoft, Box, Phia, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, and Vinod Khosla to the stages — part of 250+ industry leaders driving 200+ sessions built to fuel your growth and sharpen your edge. Plus, meet the hundreds of startups innovating across every sector. Join the Disrupt 2026 Waitlist Add yourself to the Disrupt 2026 waitlist to be first in line when Early Bird tickets drop. Past Disrupts have brought Google Cloud, Netflix, Microsoft, Box, Phia, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, and Vinod Khosla to the stages — part of 250+ industry leaders driving 200+ sessions built to fuel your growth and sharpen your edge. Plus, meet the hundreds of startups innovating across every sector. San Francisco | WAITLIST NOW
Among other highlights … San Francisco mayor Daniel Lurie said he was happy to have Waymo on SF’s streets and welcomed other companies to use the city as a testbed for autonomous vehicle tech. And transportation-focused Glīd was declared the winner of Startup Battlefield 2025. Oh, and Sean O’Kane and I took a demo ride through the streets of San Francisco in a Wayve vehicle.
Plus, Mawakana made a number of interesting comments onstage, including that she believes other companies working on autonomous vehicles need to do more to prove their technology is safe and that in the face of the promise of greater safety, the public would accept a death caused by a robotaxi.
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