Who are Waymo's decision-makers?

Waymo is led by co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov, in place since 2021. Mawakana owns the business — operations, commercialization, public policy and government affairs — having joined in 2017 from senior policy and legal roles at AOL, Yahoo and eBay. Dolgov owns the technology and serves as CTO; he joined Google's self-driving project in 2009 and previously worked on autonomous vehicles at Stanford and the Toyota Research Institute.

The company traces to the Google Self-Driving Car Project founded in 2009 by Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun (a DARPA Grand Challenge winner who later founded Udacity). It spun out as the Alphabet subsidiary Waymo in 2016, which is why Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai sits above the co-CEOs on strategy and capital allocation.

Strategy and big-ticket capital are set at the top — the co-CEOs and, for major commitments, Alphabet — but day-to-day budgets sit with functional leaders. As an operations-heavy company scaling a consumer service across cities, the budget owners that matter to vendors cluster in fleet operations, infrastructure and facilities, safety and regulatory, rider product and support, marketing/growth, and the engineering platform org.

Mawakana's side of the house (operations, policy, commercial) controls most of the non-autonomy spend that a typical B2B seller can reach. Because Waymo is an Alphabet subsidiary, procurement, security review and vendor onboarding run to Google-grade standards — so the economic buyer and the security/IT approver are often different people, and both need to be sold.

Waymo is organized around a vertically integrated stack — it builds the Waymo Driver software, integrates the sensor hardware, and operates the fleet — which means engineering, hardware and a large operations function all sit under one roof in Mountain View.

As it expands to 20+ U.S. cities plus London and Tokyo, the operations side is growing fastest: each new market needs local fleet depots, mapping, support staff, regulatory engagement and partnerships (e.g., Uber for distribution, Moove for fleet management). That city-by-city expansion model is the key to understanding where new headcount and new budgets appear.