Nat Beuse  
I remember, you know, talking to other companies and they're like, Yeah, but if you have somebody safety concerns, that means your things are broken. I'm like, No, it doesn't it means the employees are taking ownership of the things that they're seeing. And they're reporting them and they're not worrying about whether they're going to get penalized for it. They're not worrying about audit like am I overburdened the safety team, we sort of remove all of those those barriers to reporting something.

Jeff Ma  
Hello, and welcome to Love as a Business Strategy, a podcast that brings humanity to the workplace. We're here to talk about business. But we want to tackle topics that most business leaders shy away from, we believe that humanity and love should be at the center of every successful business. I'm your host, Jeff Ma. And as always, I'm here to have conversations and hear stories from real people and real businesses. Nat Beuse is the vice president of safety at Aurora, a self driving technology leader, building autonomous semi trucks, and passenger vehicles. His team defines and implements Aurora safety approach, which includes overseeing operational, organizational and product engineering safety, as well as working with regulatory agencies to support the development of best practices and safety standards. Prior to Aurora, Nat led the safety team at Uber's Advanced Technologies Group, and was an executive at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. It's so awesome to have you here with us today. Nat, how are you doing?

Nat Beuse  
I'm happy to be here, Jeff, thanks for having me. Looking forward to this conversation.

Jeff Ma  
I am too and you know, just I just kind of shared your high level resume here around safety. And I think there's just going to be a lot of interesting conversation around safety, because we're talking about love as a business strategy. And you're talking about safety before. Before we bring bring that all together and connect it. I want to ask a little bit about you personally and kind of your story. What's your passion that and what what brought you to what you do today?

Nat Beuse  
Yeah, it's it's a really great question. You know, it all started, I think, from this deep desire to help people no matter where they are, and I started my, the early part of my career and kind of, even in grad school, really working on what I would say helping people who got in car crashes and like, trying to figure out, you know, how they were getting injured and these car crashes. My dad was doing a little bit of this, but he was doing it from the other side of the business, which is, you know, folks are in the crash already. And maybe they have extensive injuries. And it's like, how do you kind of put them back together? I was always focused on how do we prevent it from happening in the first place. And in the early days, it was really about belts and airbags, it was really about kind of this unnecessary assumption that the crash was inevitable, it was the cost that we were paying for transportation United States. And, you know, right now we sit at 43,000 deaths a year, which is just a crazy, crazy number. But we've kind of advanced our thinking and a little bit that we can actually avoid some of these crashes. And so at Aurora, you know, we're working on self driving technology, which is the ultimate avoid, avoid the crash, because there's a lot of things that, you know, the computer can do, that humans just do very poorly at. And that's how I kind of found myself on this journey from really protecting people, assuming they're going to get the crash to really kind of evolving that journey to let's actually try to prevent the crash and the first place. And it's, it's been a really, really fun journey. But it really is deep seated in this kind of really strong desire just to help people

Jeff Ma  
What roots you in that desire, like what keeps you kind of pushing forward and making safety, such an important part of your, your mentality?

Nat Beuse  
I mean, I feel like it's sort of a basic of humanity, right? Like, we all want to be safe in one way, shape, or form. And transportation is such a big piece of how we move and live in our society today. And so if I can be even a small piece of making that safer, and giving people that comfort of feeling like they're not going to get injured, or have God forbid, die on on their way to wherever they're, they're going, you know, I've always had this deep seated conviction that we place a lot of trust, let's say in aviation, none of us get on a plane and even think twice as might fall out of the sky. I kind of want that same experience for vehicles. And as I mentioned with 43,000, we're a long ways away from that, and we have a lot of work to do to get there.

Jeff Ma  
Absolutely. You know, when we talk about love as a business strategy, we talk about love in the work that we do, you know, Safety often comes up as a neighboring topic, because there's nothing more inherently loving than protecting each other, and making sure that we stay safe. However, I think that safety culture, or at least safety culture, within businesses, sometimes there's so many different ways to go about it. And I think sometimes it's an element of fear, or coercion to ensure people stay safe. There's other elements of awareness, and education. So there's this there's this element of safety culture itself, a culture of safety that that many businesses tried to adopt and understand better internally, in your case externally as well. Can you talk a little bit about what safety culture means to you? Like, what is the culture of safety? And what should it look like?

Nat Beuse  
Yeah, it's a really, really good question. And I'd say you have to kind of start at the top. You know, I think if you have leaders who say they're, you know, support a strong safety culture, but really don't put any action behind it, you actually don't get a strong safety culture. So you know, here at Aurora, and something that we believe very strongly in is, it's kind of measuring, like, measuring safety culture, you do that through a bunch of different ways, surveys, periodic events, throughout the year trainings, there's all sorts of way you can sort of engage the workforce to understand how they feel about safety. You know, you mentioned this, I'll use this word retaliation. That's not the word you use. But you know, I think it's the same. Same just have like, this fear that if I, if I speak up, am I going to get reprimanded for it? Am I getting fired for it? And certainly, I think we have a no retaliation policy here for sure. But how that embodies in the employees, they actually believe it right. A lot of companies will have things where they say, oh, quote, we have a policy for it. But nobody's checking if anybody's following the policy. And we're we do both of those things. We're not only just have a policy in place, but we actually check that the policy is being enforced. And then we actually measure whether employees believe that the policy is been effective, and they can use it, etc. And that's just one example of safety culture. I think there's another piece around this new, I'll say it's new, but I think people talk about it more as this idea of psychological safety, and sort of the psychology of the employees, how do they feel about the company? How do they feel about their managers how they feel about their colleagues, again, it's an our case, you can have all the great processes in the world, and you can have great engineering, but if your safety culture is poor, you actually can't deliver the product, it's actually a fundamental piece of how you deliver a strong engineering product, you know, my days, and that's in D. O T, there are plenty examples where companies have policies and then employee sort of like did something against the policy. And the next thing, you know, you, you're in a situation where you have real fatalities and injuries on the public roads, you know, your force with doing very expensive fixes, paying fines in some cases, and that stems from a broken safety culture. And so we're constantly monitoring, measuring, supporting, I think the the term we use and inside the safety org is, it's a journey is never a destination. It's just a journey that you're always on. And you're always trying to do better, do better do better accounting, never happy with with the with the status quo. But it's something that, unfortunately, doesn't get a lot of attention. I think people view safety culture, psychological safety as sort of like this the soft side of the business that is a lot different than bending metal and, you know, putting circuits together and things like that. But I would argue it's, it's as important as those things.

Jeff Ma  
Absolutely. I was on a campus of a large company that prioritize safety, safety was absolutely number one. But one of the first things I noticed when driving on campus was this large electronic sign that said number of safe days on campus, and it was a counter. And when you talk to people about their behaviors around or their thoughts around that, their number one focus was I don't want to be the person to reset that counter. And on one hand, it was okay, that makes sense. People are trying to be safe, but then you really dig in and you have people, you find that safety incidents have to be reported in a certain way that are very escalated. Very scary, very intimidating. And when you really dig into it, it's not so much that less accidents are happening. It's more that people are less willing to admit it, share it, or try to even cover it up. And that psychological safety that you mentioned, is is huge. To me, it's such a big part of a good culture, safety or otherwise. How do you approach what you were talking about where it gets people to actually care about the safety less so about the punitive measures, but how do you actually get people to buy into safety?

Nat Beuse  
Yeah, I think for us here, there's a big part of when you join, there were a family that, you know, you're joining a company whose first priority is safety. I mean, part of our, you know, ethos, and what we're doing is we want to deliver the benefits of self driving safely, quickly. And broadly, safety is not there by by accident as the first thing. And so joining this company already sort of in the right frame of mind, I think the second piece of it is really around. When we when we onboard people, right, they go, you know, no matter what department they're in, there's some some version in there where there's a safety element of it. And the first thing we focus on is how to report a safety concern, right? We believe, you know, reporting safety concerns is everyone responsibility. And it's not a good or a bad thing. Yes, my team tracks the numbers and whether they're going up and down. But it's a mental shift, actually think that the more safety concerns you have, the better you are the strongest safety culture you have, because that means people aren't afraid to speak up. And I remember, you know, talking to other companies, and they're like, Yeah, but if you have somebody safety concerns, I mean, sure things are broken. I'm like, No, it doesn't, it means the employees are taking ownership of the things that they're seeing. And they're reporting them. And they're not worrying about whether they're going to get penalized for it or not worrying about audit, like, am I overburdened the safety team, we sort of remove all of those, those barriers to reporting something. And then we continue like that. The other piece of it that's really, really important, is transparency in the process. So yes, I submitted a safety concern. But if you don't explain to anybody what you did with it, and what happened to it, even if it was a non non issue, like then people start losing faith in the process, and then you're you start eroding that kind of that, that, that belief in the system. And so part of what we also do is share pretty routinely, by so actually open to the entire company, you know, which safety concerns came in? What was happening to them, What was the issue around them, and most importantly, how it was adjudicated, that people don't think undervalue transparency in an organization as well about how that also builds a culture that is feels feels safe feels like, hey, if my boss is willing to share all these things with me that, you know, are important, and if they got out, you know, could cause harm, then that builds a trusting relationship. Like there's a close relationship, I think, between kind of safety, culture and trust, if you have a company where the employees don't trust each other, trust the manager, whatever. You can't really build a strong safety culture in that environment. You know, you might convince yourself like, I'll just do a bunch of surveys, but that doesn't fix the problem.

Jeff Ma  
I couldn't agree more Nat. Can you talk about Auroras story? Can we talk about what made I guess, brought Aurora to life and what the story is behind that?

Nat Beuse  
Yeah, I think there's not speaking for the founder founders. But I'll say why, why I came here and why I believe in their mission. You know, I think self driving and automated vehicles in general, hold the potential to really transform societies in a way that I think we don't even fully comprehend, right? There's the safety benefits that I mentioned, right? If you looked at the fatality picture, it's sort of the big three, you know, there's speeding, there's alcohol, and there's belt belt use are sort of like the quote, unquote, the big three, and then there's other things like distraction, and also in that same camp, but the AV doesn't have to do any of those things, right. And so automatically, you're saving lives right off the bat there. And of course, it doesn't mean we won't have other issues to deal with, it just means from a number of 43,000, we can have a huge impact on that. And one of the things that I always like to remind people is it's not just a number of people. If you think about the families that are impacted siblings, many of those people, they don't recover from it, right. So some of them really don't recover. And on top of that, if you the things that you can count in terms of dollars, lost productivity, traffic jams, all those kinds of things. It is a huge number, we're talking trillions of dollars of cost to society, all attributed to how we move from point A to point B. So we can have a small dent in that that's a huge benefit for the for the world. Right, then there's the quickly which is every day we don't get our product on the road. We're not helping. And so we want to get there quickly. We want to get there with focus. And then there's a broadly piece which is, you know, I've had the opportunity to travel all parts United States, you know, Europe, you know, lots of many interesting places. And I've been in communities where it's like the things we take for granted and sort of, we'll call it urban centers. You know, they don't have the same same opportunities and many places in the US. And so if we can expand this technology broadly, that starts to unlock the whole lot of opportunity for a whole bunch of people who never had it in the first place. And so there's a real, strong commitment within this company to solve this self driving problem, right? It's a very strong engineering challenge, it's very difficult. But we'll be leaving it there. Start with trucking, because there's huge benefits and trucking. If you think about a truck driver who has to spend days away from their family, it's a very, I think, at one point, it used to be literally the most dangerous job in the United States. Because you can't help but have health issues you count, of course, crashes and all those kind of things, it's actually a pretty dangerous job. If we can transform that where you know, the computer is taking the vehicle from point A to point B, and maybe you have a local delivery person who's then maybe doing a bunch of runs, and sort of in the inner city core, what then that unlocks a whole new number of jobs for people, it also allows more freight to move. I mean, there's a lot of benefits to just that simple solution. And then I think the other piece is really around, transforming the way mobility is delivered in the United States, but more more broadly. And so I think when I think of Aurora and the founders that we've worked for, I think we all share this aligned view of like, we can have a huge impact on safety. We got to get there quickly, because it matters. And this, we can unlock a lot of things for a lot of different people in a way that we haven't even thought through.

Jeff Ma  
Wow. 43,000. And you said that's just fatalities, correct? Yeah. What what's the number look like when it comes to just accidents or injuries,

Nat Beuse  
there's about 6 million or so police reported crashes. Some Some say that the actual number of crashes is probably closer to seven. Because you know, sometimes people get in crashes. And they're like swapping insurance and they go about their merry way, then those same people show up five days later going to their doctor because they have whiplash injury. We don't even capture that. Right. So I think this is what I mean by some of the hidden cost of, of just transportation, but specifically of motor vehicles, you know, on public roads. Wow, it's a huge number.

Jeff Ma  
Yeah. I did not even realize that's annual Correct? Yeah. Wow.

Nat Beuse  
Yeah. And unfortunately, this year, even after all the COVID, and people stayed at home or not at home, you know, we're on something like a double digit increase. So things actually got worse. There's all sorts of theories about why that happened, you know, more risky behavior. Some people argue that, you know, actually, traffic helps because people drive slower. So you get, you get less severe crashes, but you get more minor crashes in that scenario, you know, but at the end of the day, I'm like, It's doesn't really matter how we ended up with this huge increase in 2023. Like, how is it that we have vehicles that are the safest they've ever been all sorts of technologies you can get on vehicles, you know, some cars come with, like, you know, 20 airbags kind of thing. And yet, we're still killing an alarming number of people. We need all the tools on the table. And, you know, I firmly believe self driving is one of those tools. And I think what one of the things we have to dispel is this idea that you're going to go to your local dealership and buy your self driving car. And that's, that's all you're gonna need. You know, that's, that's not the, you know, the reality, right? The reality is more, you know, staged deployments where it makes sense, while at the same time, you know, there's other technologies that will be on our personal vehicles that will also continue to advance, you know, safety in that realm. But all of these things together are really the only way we're going to actually make a big divot and in the number

Jeff Ma  
can we talk a little bit about, obviously love, that is the title, the podcast, but love can show its form in a lot of different ways. I know, we've already talked about the mission itself, and how safety and is a very loving mission to even align around. Can you speak a little bit about what love as a culture and love means even for yourself or for the organization internally, like, where does that show up? For you all?

Nat Beuse  
Yeah, I think it starts at least as a leader and as executive having empathy. Like I think you have to have empathy in order to lead your people and and be a strong leader. I think the other thing I would say is a general caring about people, you know, businesses have to make tough decisions. I mean, we see some of these decisions playing out right right now in Tech where, you know, there's layoffs and you know, people are worried about the economy and so they're taking steps to kind of, you know, deal with that situation, but there is there is a A human way you can do that and empathetic way you can do that still accomplish the, you know, the mission of the business. And then there's sort of like, the not great way to do it, you know, sending people an email and saying, you know, you've been eliminated kind of thing. And I think Aurora is definitely more on the exciting the human side of it, I believe, it's certainly, when I look at our founders, when I look at how I lead, it's very much in the realm of like, these are people, these are people who took a gamble on us took a bet on us, they're here for a reason, you know, let's lead them with empathy. And then, you know, we have to have a hard conversation, sometimes around performance and things like that. But that doesn't mean it's a one or the other. They they actually are together.

Jeff Ma  
It sounds like, in order to build this, you have to build a lot of the trusts within the organization. Is there an intentional way you all go about building and fostering trust?

Nat Beuse  
Yeah, I can point to a couple of specific examples. And I mentioned it earlier around really about transparency, you know, the transparency, if you do it, right. And I'm talking about real transparency, not like telling people one thing, and then you're off doing something else in the back. Like, I mean, true transparency, that that engenders trust, because, you know, if you and I are having relationship, and I'm telling you things that are, you know, clearly, you know, in a transparent way, and then you believe them, well, that builds a trusting relationship between, you know, you and I. But if, if I'm telling you something, and you know, for other reasons that it's actually not true, then that's eroding the trust, right? Because you're like, Why can't trust anything this guy is saying, so like, I'm not really going to talk to him anymore. And so I think, for us as a company, transparency is one of the key ways we do that. So we share a lot of information with our, with our employees, you know, lots of documents are open, we have a lot of conversations about things, I think one of the things we we kind of have as one of our core beliefs and core values, ideas, like you can disagree with someone, but you don't have to be a jerk about it, right, you can have a fruitful conversation over on very difficult issues. I mean, what we're doing is very hard. And, you know, there's gonna be differences of opinion, and you got to be able to raise those and voice those in a way that are respectful. But they get heard, you know, one of the things that's right now, right, so there's kind of the anniversary of the Challenger disaster. And one of the things that came out of that was an increasing amount of transparency within NASA, for example, on making sure the right voices are heard, on, you know, issues that someone might have seen, and making sure those issues are elevated. And so like, within Aurora, for example, on the safety side, we actually have those processes set up where, you know, people can raise, you know, through safety concerns that are actually monitored by our safety review board. Or alternatively, like, people can literally ground the entire fleet if they want to. And there's no fear of retaliation and that, so just think about, like, we have to, you know, do missions on the road, we have to collect data, we have to do all those things. And we are so trusting in our employees, and we have such a strong bond within the company that we are willing to tell them, you can actually ground the fleet if you see something that doesn't seem seem right. And that's pretty powerful. Just that in and of itself. Very few companies have that.

Jeff Ma  
So any employee can ground the entire fleet have? What does that look like? Has it happened before? Has it happened?

Nat Beuse  
Yeah, yep,

Jeff Ma  
it looks like that play out?

Nat Beuse  
Yeah. I mean, it plays out as you would hope it would play out. So employee raises a concern. The decision is made to ground the fleet, the fleet gets grounded, immediately, everybody starts digging into the bug or the issue, whatever it was, we figure out what the remedy is, we we implement the remedy. In some cases, we might, you know, resume operations, but with some, some limitations. And other cases, we will not resume operations until the fixes is implemented. And it plays out, you know, pretty routinely like that. And then we take the lessons learned from that, and we actually feed it back into the engineering process. And so for us, we think it's very healthy, healthy thing. And we've actually celebrate those things when they happen, right? That's the other thing is, you know, you're not, oh, my gosh, but another grounding. Everybody pulls their hair out. It's more like, hey, let's figure out what happened here. And actually, what what broke, let's say in our processes, or what did we missed or something like that, and we fix it, so it doesn't happen again.

Jeff Ma  
I can't stress enough how important what you just said was, to me, at least I think when it comes to mistakes and issues. Many teams get so caught up in either finding the blame or the point of blame or deflecting the blame from themselves. That to me, that's a critic that's a way you can easily step in to a team and tell just how much psychological safety and trust is in that culture, because it's the big difference between being able to celebrate. And even if not, it was completely your fault. You know, do we have an organization where you can stand up and say, Look, everybody, that's, that's my bad. It is a mistake that I overlooked. I'm going to do better. And everybody embraces that versus you needing to protect yourself find reasons and other people to throw under the bus to soften that blow and kind of spread the blame and people get caught up in the politics have, really, I mean, spending a lot of time and energy just not moving on to solve the problem, but really trying to to settle the score before we move on.

Nat Beuse  
 Yeah, Jeff,I couldn't agree with you more. I think as I think back over my career, and the many people that I've had, you know, either as leaders or bosses or colleagues, you know, the ones that seem to get the best out of their people are the ones that are usually I mean, I'll use the term the the humblest. They are the ones who are the first to say, Hey, I made a mistake here. In fact, I'm not saying I'm one of those people. But literally this morning, I did that with my team. I said, Hey, I think I think I might have pushed us in the wrong direction here. Let's course correct and go go the other way. And I think it matters, right? I think anybody can blame anybody. Right? That's not the point. It's more like that, you know, that I, as a leader make the mistake. And can I own it? Right, I think another part of what you said that I really want to highlight is more around this idea of in search of the truth, right? Like, I'm always a big believer that, you know, this, people are generally good. For the most part, they come to work, and they want to do the right thing. And if they're not doing the right thing, well, in some ways, like the company, you know, failed them. Was there a policy that wasn't in place, or a policy that wasn't being enforced? Or, you know, clearly there are folks that will do malicious things, and whatever, and you have policy set up for that, but I'm talking about people, you know, this idea of like, blaming other things, you know, the first place I'm always in my team always looks like, hey, what process broke here? Like what let's do a retro and figure out where where did we have something in place that maybe should have been stronger, we maybe need a new policy that was not in place ever. And now we need to put put one in place. And I think those things matter. And I think, you know, certainly in the software world as you can appreciate. There's a healthy dose of like, when you write good code, and you kind of saw good problems, that every every opportunity, there's like a chance to a retro and learn something different. And I think it always built a better, better product.

Jeff Ma  
Absolutely. Well, it sounds like the team is set up, you know, no team is perfect. But it sounds like there's an environment here that's really setting you all up for for success and high performance. What? What's next what's on the mission statement? That's what's what's next in the backlog for Aurora?

Nat Beuse  
Yeah, so I think from a product perspective, we are super focused on you know, delivering the Aurora driver ready at the end of this this year, that that's a huge milestone for us. I think, particularly as, you know, we see some of our competitors sort of stumble, and some of them even close up, close up shop, you know, I think we feel we're, we're in a really good position, as long as we continue to execute as as we have and deliver the things that we say we're going to do, and actually do them which we have a strong track record of doing that. And I think we're really excited. I think, having worked now at two different self driving companies, my time in the government, I can honestly say that it feels really, really good now, like, we're super close. And I feel like the environment probably doesn't really understand that meaning the macro environment, right? They're just like, oh, some people over there working on some tech, but I think they're gonna, they're gonna wake up, you know, in the not too distant future and be like, Oh, my gosh, those guys actually did it. And I think it's really exciting. We see some of some of our other competitors. You know, there's already driverless vehicles out there. I mean, that's one thing I try to remind people is, there are small scale pilots happening already in United States. So it's already an exciting time. And I think what we really have to square is, you know, the public trust piece of it, which is, you know, we have to bring everybody along on the ride. And then we also I think, have to work on people's vision of like, what they might have thought George Jetson kind of era or you know, Knight Rider if you're a kid of the 80s like me, that that may not be what it actually looks like, but man it's gonna be awesome. And so I think for us that's really what's next is continue to stay focused, continue to execute and really deliver Aurora driver ready by by the end of this year.

Jeff Ma  
Well, that it's an incredible mission. It's an incredible story, and I'm loving what I'm hearing. I'm so so excited about what you and the team have to offer coming up. So best of luck to you and the team at Aurora for all the all the game changing sounds like disruptive things that will hopefully come soon.

Nat Beuse  
Yeah, thanks, Jeff, I really appreciate it. I think if if we can make a just a small dent in this fatality and injury picture and give, you know, give people some time back, give people some lives back, you know, I think it'll, it's worth it. You know, it's, it's gotta be worth it. So, you know, I definitely feel feel good about, you know, us as a part of the company. But I also think, you know, there is a inflection point here where we're really going to make some some real changes on these numbers.

Jeff Ma  
Yeah, and my confidence in you and the team comes not from just a great mission, and some smart folks, but also just hearing from you, how you handle your conflicts, your feedback, your your safety within the organization, I think is key. And I think that is what really sets good companies apart from others is how are you going to be resilient in these times that are definitely going to come? And so I'm very excited. I think that the sky's the limit for you, folks. And I'm just, I'm just, I'm just thrilled to have you here today to share that with us. I really appreciate the time you spent. ,

Nat Beuse  
Yeah great. Awesome.

Jeff Ma  
Awesome. So thanks so much for being here tonight. And to our listeners. Thank you as always for being with us as well. Hope you've checked out the book by now Love as a Business Strategy is still available all in all the places. And if for some reason you haven't subscribed already, this podcast is your first time here. Welcome. And we hope you enjoyed this show. And we will be back every week with another guest. So with that Nat. Thank you again. Hope you have a great week and we'll see everybody else