'If you actually are solving a problem, you don't talk about any of the hype,' investor says

The hype is palpable: As tech folks from near and far converge for TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Fransisco -- one of the only places where Waymo is available to the public -- there's ample chatter about the autonomous vehicle service. "If you think about AI hype and all, everyone gets excited about what 10 years down the line looks like, when you look at self-driving cars," Pegah Ebrahimi, co-founder and managing partner of FPV Ventures, said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. The excitement around Waymo among Disrupt attendees from outside San Francisco is a clear example of how hype operates: We get more invested in what might happen, as opposed to what is actually happening now, which is that Waymo is slower (and sometimes more expensive) than Uber.