Hello 👋 I’m David Silver. I write about self-driving cars and trucks and autonomous vehicles, generally.

I am a software engineer at Kodiak, on the Planning, Controls, and Simulation Team. Self-driving trucks are amazing and I am fortunate to work them!

Earlier, I was at Cruise, in the Motion Planning & Controls group. Cruise acquired Voyage, my previous employer, where I was an engineer on the Decision-Making Team.

Before Voyage, I spent four and a half years at Udacity. I joined Udacity to build the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree Program, together with Sebastian Thrun. Subsequently, I led Udacity’s School of Autonomous Systems. Ultimately, I managed Udacity’s entire Curriculum Team, teaching everything from web development to artificial intelligence to data engineering to product management.

Prior to Udacity, I worked on the autonomous vehicle team at Ford Motor Company, in Palo Alto, California. I was part of the Domain Controller Team, which evaluated and optimized embedded platforms for Ford’s autonomous vehicle program.

Before I joined Ford, I bootstrapped Candidate Metrics, a recruiting software company. HireVue acquired Candidate Metrics.

Preceding Candidate Metrics, I was a product manager at mSpot, a pioneer in mobile audio and video applications. Samsung acquired mSpot.

I came to Silicon Valley as an MBA student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where I still assist with the Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital course. While I was a student at Stanford, I interned in product marketing at Scalent Systems. Dell acquired Scalent Systems.

Before Stanford, I studied computer science for a year in Brazil, as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar at the Federal University of Santa Catarina. Brazil is a wonderful country!

My first professional job was as a software engineer for America Online during and after college. AOL was our hometown tech company in Virginia. You’ve got mail!

I earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Princeton University.

Before Princeton, I grew up in Virginia.

Before Virginia, I was born in Alaska.

I have a wife and a son, both of whom I love. Although my son only loves me back “sometimes”, depending on whether I let him watch YouTube recently.

All of my public writing, on this site and elsewhere, represents my own views, not those of my current or former employers.