Tekedra Mawakana | |
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 Mawakana in 2024 | |
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| Title | Co-CEO of Waymo |
Tekedra Mawakana is an American businesswoman and lawyer is the co-chief executive officer of Waymo. Previously, she was the company's chief operating officer, and prior employers have included Steptoe & Johnson, AOL, Yahoo!, and eBay. Mawakana has served on the boards of the Consumer Technology Association, the Global Network Initiative, the Internet Association, Boom Supersonic, Operator Collective, and Intuit.
Tekedra Mawakana was born in Mississippi and later resided in Georgia, Texas, and Virginia. [1]
Mawakana received her Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Trinity Washington University in 1993, [2] before earning her Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School. [3] [4]
Mawakana began her career at Steptoe & Johnson, an international law firm based in Washington, D.C., where she focused on intellectual property and telecommunication. She then held a corporate counsel position at the "mid-size Washington-area" telecommunications company Startec Global Communications. [5] Mawakana later held policy roles in legal departments at AOL and Yahoo! [6] [7] She worked at AOL for approximately twelve years before becoming Yahoo!'s deputy general counsel in 2013, [8] [9] where she led the Washington, D.C. office and efforts to combat mass surveillance. [5] She then served as eBay's head of global government relations for 14 months, [10] starting in 2016. [8]
Mawakana joined Waymo as vice president of public policy and government affairs in 2017. [10] In this role, she focused on expanding autonomous driving testing, regulation, and competition with traditional automobile manufacturers. [7] [11] Mawakana was promoted to chief operating officer in 2019, [12] [13] overseeing the company's communications and marketing, business development and operations, corporate social responsibility, and public relations and policy. [14] Mawakana has served as co-chief executive officer (CEO) of Waymo since April 2021. [15] Her role focuses on business, while co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov concentrates on technology. [16] In 2021, Pete Bigelow of Automotive News said the duo have a "somewhat unusual power-sharing arrangement", and have "developed a close working relationship and have been heavily involved in Waymo's most high-profile milestones". [1] She is the second Black woman to head a self-driving technology company. [17]
Mawakana serves on the Consumer Technology Association's board of industry leaders, [14] on Boom Supersonic's advisory council, and Intuit's board of directors. [18] [19] She is also on the advisory board of the investment company Operator Collective, [20] [21] as well as the board of advocacy group Saving Promise, which works to prevent domestic violence. [22] Mawakana has also served as chairperson of the Internet Association and on the board of the Global Network Initiative. [14] [23] [24]
In 2015, Mawakana was included in Washingtonian magazine's list of "100 Top Tech Leaders", in which she was noted for her work at Yahoo! to "protect the privacy of users" against surveillance by the National Security Agency. [25] She was included in Automotive News' 2020 list of "100 leading women" in the North American automotive industry for her work at Waymo. [3]
Mawakana lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and son. [26] [3]
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Waymo LLC, formerly known as the Google Self-Driving Car Project, is an American autonomous driving technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California. It is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google.
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Anthony Levandowski is a French-American self-driving car engineer. In 2009, Levandowski co-founded Google's self-driving car program, now known as Waymo, and was a technical lead until 2016. In 2016, he co-founded and sold Otto, an autonomous trucking company, to Uber Technologies. In 2018, he co-founded the autonomous trucking company Pronto; the first self-driving technology company to complete a cross-country drive in an autonomous vehicle in October 2018. At the 2019 AV Summit hosted by The Information, Levandowski remarked that a fundamental breakthrough in artificial intelligence is needed to move autonomous vehicle technology forward.
John F. Krafcik was the CEO of Waymo from 2015 to 2021. Krafcik was the former president of TrueCar and president and CEO of Hyundai Motor America. He was named CEO of Google's self-driving car project in September 2015. Krafcik remained CEO after Google separated its self-driving car project and transitioned it into a new company called Waymo, housed under Google's parent company Alphabet Inc.
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Mawakana was born in Mississippi but lived in Texas, Georgia and Virginia.
