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.

Cover photo by Josh Hild on Unsplash

Whether it's said out loud or not, invariably something like this comes up when talking about new housing development:

“There’s another solution,” says Lucas, mulling over the housing shortage. “I’m not saying I know what it is. Maybe the city’s full. What’s wrong with Windsor instead? Or Cornwall? A hundred years ago, manufacturing and employment were spread out way better than they are now. Everybody needing to be in Toronto and Vancouver is killing us.”

So, is Toronto full? Do we need to return our urban economies to what they were a century ago? To use rough whole numbers, let's consider that Toronto's average population density (in the city proper) is upwards of 5,000 per km2. It's much higher in the downtown core, but our low-density inner suburbs bring down the average.

Now, let's consider Paris, as we often do on this blog. Paris proper has roughly 1/6th the footprint of Toronto (again, the city proper boundary) and roughly 4x the population density (upward of 20,000 people per km2). So, if Toronto is full, what the hell is going on with Paris?

Even Paris is nowhere near full. The opportunities for intensification in central neighborhoods may not be as obvious as they are in Toronto, but urban Paris continues to grow through small-scale projects, office conversions, and, most notably, through ambitious transit projects and mixed-use developments designed to stitch together the greater urban region.

Cities do, of course, face constraints, but they're never technically "full." "Full" is generally shorthand for, "I already live here and I like the way things are, and so I would prefer no one else come and disrupt what I've presently got going on."

Because if this weren't the case, then I suppose you might hear more people say, "I really wanted to move to Toronto, but it was quite literally full. Like, absolutely no physical room for me. I couldn't do it. I would have had to sleep on the streets." Nope. We've got a space allocation for you. In fact, if you're in the market for a new home, give me a call.

Importantly, this is different from a city being, maybe, too expensive. That is not the same as not having any more room. But the two are interconnected: saying a city is full and then blocking housing because of said fullness creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of artificial scarcity. This drives up prices and can then create a false sense of being full.

Of course, in this scenario, you aren't out of land; you're out of permission to use the land differently. "Full" is a funny thing.

Cover photo by Julian Gentile on Unsplash

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.

Cover photo by Josh Hild on Unsplash

Whether it's said out loud or not, invariably something like this comes up when talking about new housing development:

“There’s another solution,” says Lucas, mulling over the housing shortage. “I’m not saying I know what it is. Maybe the city’s full. What’s wrong with Windsor instead? Or Cornwall? A hundred years ago, manufacturing and employment were spread out way better than they are now. Everybody needing to be in Toronto and Vancouver is killing us.”

So, is Toronto full? Do we need to return our urban economies to what they were a century ago? To use rough whole numbers, let's consider that Toronto's average population density (in the city proper) is upwards of 5,000 per km2. It's much higher in the downtown core, but our low-density inner suburbs bring down the average.

Now, let's consider Paris, as we often do on this blog. Paris proper has roughly 1/6th the footprint of Toronto (again, the city proper boundary) and roughly 4x the population density (upward of 20,000 people per km2). So, if Toronto is full, what the hell is going on with Paris?

Even Paris is nowhere near full. The opportunities for intensification in central neighborhoods may not be as obvious as they are in Toronto, but urban Paris continues to grow through small-scale projects, office conversions, and, most notably, through ambitious transit projects and mixed-use developments designed to stitch together the greater urban region.

Cities do, of course, face constraints, but they're never technically "full." "Full" is generally shorthand for, "I already live here and I like the way things are, and so I would prefer no one else come and disrupt what I've presently got going on."

Because if this weren't the case, then I suppose you might hear more people say, "I really wanted to move to Toronto, but it was quite literally full. Like, absolutely no physical room for me. I couldn't do it. I would have had to sleep on the streets." Nope. We've got a space allocation for you. In fact, if you're in the market for a new home, give me a call.

Importantly, this is different from a city being, maybe, too expensive. That is not the same as not having any more room. But the two are interconnected: saying a city is full and then blocking housing because of said fullness creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of artificial scarcity. This drives up prices and can then create a false sense of being full.

Of course, in this scenario, you aren't out of land; you're out of permission to use the land differently. "Full" is a funny thing.

Cover photo by Julian Gentile on Unsplash