At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, Waymo’s co-CEO made it clear that autonomous driving does not move forward through speed but through trust. She said it with the calm of someone who knows that every decision carries weight. Her company has already surpassed 100 million miles driven in real conditions and adds two million more every week. These numbers might sound like a record, but Mawakana does not boast about them; she uses them as proof of maturity, not conquest. “A human driver covers about 700,000 miles in a lifetime,” she reminded. “We do almost three times that every week.”

That figure is not a trophy. It is a warning: with every new mile, the responsibility to do things right also grows.

Waymo has just received permission to operate at the San Francisco and San Jose airports and plans to reach one million rides per week by 2026. But Mawakana avoids talking about deadlines. She prefers to talk about method. “The question is not how far we advance, but whether we remain safe,” she said.

Her tone is not that of an executive excited about expansion but that of an engineer who measures every variable. In an industry that often rewards haste, she defends pause as a sign of intelligence.

The conversation turned toward risks. Waymo’s internal studies show that its vehicles are five times safer than humans and twelve times safer with pedestrians. But Mawakana does not promise perfection. “It is not about saying there will be no mistakes,” she explained. “It is about taking responsibility for them.”

Soon, testing will move to New York, a completely different environment. “When it snows, the streets stop being the same,” she said. “And that complexity is exactly what we must master before launching.”

Transparency, she added, also has limits when it comes to power. She confirmed that Waymo has rejected government requests for access to its cameras when it considers them excessive. And when asked about Tesla, her answer was direct: “If you are not being transparent, you are not doing what is needed to earn the right to make roads safer.”

In an ecosystem like Silicon Valley, where growth is often mistaken for success, Mawakana represents another kind of leadership: one that does not seek to dominate the future but to deserve it.