Who’s Behind the Wheel?
By: Chris Quirk | Categories: Alumni Achievements
Kohli is the senior director of automotive partnerships and assistant general counsel at Waymo (formerly the Google Self-Driving Car Project), the autonomous driving technology company under Alphabet (Google’s parent company). His expertise in electrical engineering, honed at Georgia Tech, combined with his proficiency in the law, makes him the ideal translator between the nuts-and-bolts creators at Waymo and those tasked with securing the company’s long-term interests and satisfying the complex regulatory demands of an innovative industry.
Waymo runs a fully autonomous ride-hailing service, currently active in San Francisco and Phoenix, and soon to expand to Los Angeles and Austin. When the car pulls up, there is no one behind the wheel. You just get in, and the car takes you to your destination. In April, Kohli had the pleasure of accompanying President Cabrera and Dr. Beth Cabrera, on a Waymo ride when they visited San Francisco. “It was pretty overwhelming to see how positive their response was,” says Kohli.
From an early age, Kohli has felt drawn to the role of facilitator and helper. “I think I’m a people person, and I want to be someone in the room who understands what different people are saying,” he says. “I love learning from others and understanding the different ways they think and the different perspectives they bring to the table.”
Engineering came naturally to Kohli. He grew up in Essex, Vermont, home to a major IBM semiconductor facility. His parents were both engineers who worked at the plant, and Kohli was steeped in technology. “There was a real emphasis on STEM education in the community. We also had events at IBM, and it was cool knowing that down the road they were designing chips for ThinkPads and PlayStation consoles,” he recalls. “The internet was starting to take off, and it resonated with me how much utility the technology was creating.”
But Kohli also knew his goals included advocacy and work across disciplines, and after graduation he went directly to law school at Boston College. “My grandfather was a defense attorney in India, and I did some mock trial work in grade school and loved problem solving,” he says. “I have a growth mindset, and wanted to work where there is a convergence of business, legal, and technical considerations as you take technology to the market. There’s often a translation gap between stakeholders, where decisions are sometimes not made in the most efficient ways.”
Waymo’s business model involves incorporating its autonomous driving technology to the vehicles of car manufacturing partners, rather than building automated vehicles from the ground up. “There are a lot of things that have to be right about a car to put an automated system on it. You need redundancy for critical safety systems, and because you’re putting a super computer in the car, you need to really think through the thermal elements,” Kohli explains. “I spend a lot of my time working with the automakers and engineers, thinking about the scope of our collaboration, the economics, and deploying the vehicles in the field.” Internally, Kohli works to smooth connections between divisions. “It’s about understanding what all our teams need and making the operations cross-functional.”
Besides getting an education at Georgia Tech, Kohli met his wife Purvi (Patel), ChBE 07, there as a freshman, and they now have three children. “She majored in chemical engineering,” he says. “She’s now in finance at Google, but we still have a constant battle over whether chemical engineering or electrical engineering was the more difficult major.”
