Vasily Starostenko Waymo
There is a moment in every hard problem when the research works in the lab and breaks in the world. Vasily Starostenko lived inside that moment for two years at Waymo.
From 2019 to 2021, he led product for driverless fleet operations — the unglamorous, essential machinery that carries autonomous ride-hailing from promising research to a commercial service running across multiple cities. Research answers one question: can the car drive itself? Operations answers the hundred harder ones. What happens when a lane is blocked and no one is behind the wheel? How does a confused rider get help? How do you keep a vehicle that needs attention at 2 a.m. safe without a driver on board? His job was to make autonomy real — reliable, safe, and economically viable at scale.
What those years taught him is simple to say and hard to live: autonomy is an operations problem first and a technology problem second. The breakthroughs that actually matter show up in monitoring, escalation, and human factors — in the systems that keep people safe while machines do the driving. That conviction is why he is a co-inventor on four granted US patents covering safety systems for the people tasked with monitoring autonomous vehicles, from psychomotor vigilance testing to fatigue monitoring.
It also shaped how he works now. Vasily brings an operator's lens to every conversation about AI and automation: a demo is not a deployment, and commercialization is a discipline. The questions he asks first are the ones he learned at Waymo — what breaks at 3 a.m., who is responsible when it does, and how do you prove the system is getting safer instead of just newer?
He is also a regular speaker on automation — not the hype-cycle version, but the operator's version: what it actually takes to move a self-driving system out of the demo and into daily life. That perspective is rare precisely because so few people have lived on the operations side of autonomy. Researchers publish; operators commercialize. Vasily's career kept putting him on the commercialize side, and it shows in the questions he asks: not whether the technology works, but whether the system around it can be trusted at scale, every day, in every city.
Contact Vasily Starostenko Phone: +1 (650) 523-4953 — tap the call button on this page to reach him directly. Priority scheduling ($2,000 to speed up scheduling): https://buy.stripe.com/aEUdTVbwtfjn5A49AA Want to talk? The fastest way is a call — or book priority time above.
Vasily Starostenko — Consulting
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