Good morning,
"If you go out in San Francisco, on any evening, we've got hundreds of cars that are operating without anyone behind the wheel,” Bill Nash, CFO of Cruise, an autonomous vehicle company, tells me. “I take rides a lot, probably at least every two or three weeks, to see how the service is progressing.”
Cruise, majority owned by General Motors, but a fully independent company, is based in San Francisco. The company announced in February that its fully driverless vehicles have traveled over 1 million miles. In November 2021, Cruise completed the first fully driverless ride in San Francisco. Since then, it launched the first driverless, commercial robo-taxi service in a major U.S. city, and completed its first public, driverless, paid rides in Austin and Phoenix in December.
This year, the company plans to introduce Origin, an autonomous car without a steering wheel or pedals. Nash has taken a ride in a test vehicle. I asked him how it went.
“Sitting in the back of an Origin, I’m kind of a tall guy, so I appreciate the extra legroom,” he says, describing the trip. “It feels like you’re in a business class train scenario, and it’s driving you around. But we’ve still got some work to do in terms of bringing it to the market."
Nash joined Cruise in 2018, serving as head of finance and accounting, and then as VP of finance, before taking on the CFO role in 2020. His philosophy as a finance chief: “CFOs have to understand the business, the challenges of the various business partners, and give them the resources to solve it,” he says.
Life at sea and a special mentor
In our conversation, I found out he’s also an engineer, and his journey to financial leadership started at sea. “I was in a submarine underwater for three and a half months,” Nash says of his longest tour as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, Submarine Force.
A lot of time to be introspective about life? “You work so hard that you're really just focused on what's in front of you,” Nash recalls of the experience. And engineering projects “created plenty to do,” he says.
His parents served in the Coast Guard, and their parents were also in the military, he says. Nash followed family tradition and attended the Naval academy for his undergraduate degree. He later earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering while in the Navy, and ran the engineering department on the submarine.
After eight years of service in the Navy, Nash was hired at biotech company Amgen and earned his MBA, which drew him to finance. “What I liked about finance is that it’s cross-functional,” he says. Before joining Cruise, he served as senior director of finance at Oracle and Theravance Biopharma, and was the division CFO at biopharma firm UCB.
Mentors and sponsors are essential, “even if they don’t look like you,” Nash says. Who were your mentors? “There’s been an army of folks who’ve helped me along the way,” he says. But he named a special one: “My wife is also a CFO, so I see her as a mentor as well." Shannon Nash is the CFO of Wing, a drone delivery company and subsidiary of Alphabet, Inc.
Changing the transportation landscape
At Cruise, Nash has about 80 people under his purview, the finance team, in addition to the corporate workplace, real estate, purchasing, and strategy teams, he says. The company is in a “rapid scaling phase,” he says. “We’re going to build out the business to be able to capitalize on the opportunity we have in front of us.”
As CFO, Nash is the strategic partner of Cruise founder and CEO Kyle Vogt. “One of the greatest shifts that will occur in our lifetimes is going from driving to being driven,” Vogt told my Fortune colleague Phil Wahba, in a recent interview. Regarding the safety concerns about autonomous vehicles, “what we see is that a lot of people are initially pretty nervous about getting into driverless cars,” Vogt told Wahba. “But within two or three minutes of riding around, they get it. Over the next year or two, I think everybody will know someone with firsthand, on-the-ground anecdotes that will change perceptions.”
“Our goal is to really change the landscape of transportation,” Nash says.
And he’ll most likely be testing out each new venture for years to come.
Enjoy your weekend.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
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