Earlier this month, self-driving car company Waymo announced that it had raised $16 billion (largely from its parent company, Alphabet) at a $126 billion post-money valuation. This is a big number. And according to Bloomberg, the company's annualized revenue run rate is around $350 million, meaning its current valuation is sitting at 360x revenue.

Multiples can often be sky-high for new, huge-bet companies, but Om Malik recently offered an interesting take on the "physics of the problem."

As of the end of 2025, Waymo was operating approximately 2,500 vehicles across its cities, with San Francisco and Los Angeles currently responsible for about 68% of the company's rides. And these cars are already running 16 hours a day, with an estimated 18 minutes of average idle time between trips.

To get from 400,000 trips per week (where they are today) to 1 million trips per week (where they want to be by the end of 2026), Om estimates that the company will need to add at least another 3,500 vehicles to its fleet.

If I then ask Gemini to extrapolate this out such that its revenue increases enough to drop its multiple down to 30x revenue, the company needs a global fleet close to 25,000 vehicles. That's ~22,500 more than it has today, and at $175k per Jaguar, that's an additional $4 billion in vehicles.

I guess it has the money for that, but it'll be fascinating to see how easily the company is able to scale around the world. This year, the plan is to expand to 20 more cities (with a list that erroneously leaves out Toronto). If successful, this will have a profound impact on our cities. And the lofty valuation represents an expectation that it will be.

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Last week, we spoke about one of Toronto's failures when it comes to new "missing middle" housing, namely our inability to look forward to the Toronto of tomorrow, as opposed to only thinking about the Toronto of today. But let's not forget that there are greater biases at play here influencing these outcomes.

Beneath our concerns about not enough parking (how dare you wage a war on the car?) and congruency with neighbourhood character is a deeply rooted aversion toward higher-density apartment living; one that is arguably most prevalent in the English-speaking world.

Consider Toronto's response to the handsome Spadina Gardens apartment building at the start of the 20th century. We were certain that only people of questionable moral fibre would ever want to live in a four-storey apartment block!

Since then, we've become far more open-minded, but survey people in the Anglosphere about whether they'd like to live in an elegant Parisian block, and you'll often discover a stark preference for detached housing. In contrast, survey people on the European continent, or in Asia, and you'll often see different preferences.

Combine these preferences with the common law system prevalent throughout English-speaking countries — where individuals can more easily object to and block projects if, you know, the "vibe" is off — and the broad result is very different housing outcomes. There's data to suggest that civil law countries tend to build more housing.

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Development density used to have significant value here in Toronto. Every square meter mattered. In fact, as many of you know, entire development businesses were centered around assembling sites, rezoning for the maximum amount of area, and then selling to another developer who would then build out the final project. The process of rezoning a site often takes years, and sometimes much longer, so there's a logic to splitting up these efforts.

But then demand waned and, all of a sudden, development density had much less value, if it was even liquid at all. This business model no longer works. On top of this, the City of Toronto is now in the process of updating its zoning by-laws to allow greater heights and densities across 120 major transit station areas and protected major transit station areas across the city. These updates are expected to be brought to City Council in the spring of this year.

The result is that these areas will have minimum heights and densities that may take a site's zoning from 4 storeys to 30 storeys. And the great irony will be that sites that spent years, and sometimes decades, battling for taller buildings, may soon receive as-of-right permissions that exceed their hard-fought zoning approvals. This is how much the planning and development landscape has changed in Toronto over the years.

And it further reinforces the point I made back in 2024 when I wrote that development value has shifted from land to the build. Density is now widely available. Execution is what matters most today.

Cover photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash