Why policy must be a core operating function in frontier markets

Lessons from the frontline: Sarah Gates, VP, Global Affairs & Assurance, Wayve

Sarah Gates started at Wayve as the Head of Policy in 2022 , a day after the Series B closed, when autonomous driving remained a long-odds bet. Five years later, Wayve is preparing deployments across multiple cities, and Sarah’s remit has expanded from policy to include safety, assurance, cyber and legal. This evolution says something important about the policy function in frontier markets - that it is no longer just a support function, but is on the front line of getting product to market as quickly as possible.

We sat down with Sarah to tease out the lessons she’s learned on her journey at Wayve and how they apply to the next set of companies building frontier tech in complex, regulated markets.

Lesson 1: In frontier markets, startups need to be selective about where they invest in regulatory policy. Not every battle should be yours to fight but choosing the right battles is key.

Being a startup that wants to conquer the world in a regulated market requires a lazer-focus on where you can build your competitive edge, and leaving the rest to incumbents.

That said, almost inevitably some of your private investment in regulatory trailblazing will create public infrastructure - such as new approval pathways - for the entire market, and that’ll help both you and your fast-follower competitors. You can’t do everything, everywhere when you are working with incredibly lean teams so understanding where you should focus your time and resources is key.

Lesson 2: Scaling requires quickly starting on the strategically significant, hard-to-crack markets, while simultaneously deploying in less important, but easier to access markets.

Prioritising markets in frontier technologies is tough - it’s a juggle between market size, unit economics, and regulatory access. It’s all too easy to avoid the hard markets, but that’s a false economy.

Harder regulatory markets will naturally take longer to reach deployment (especially in the case of automated vehicles) but you can’t kick the can down the road forever. You need to start early to eventually break it open. Conversely you need to balance this with also deploying in markets with easier access so you can actually deploy and learn alongside your longer-pole market entry. If you never deploy you can’t demonstrate performance of your product.

Lesson 3: To be most effective with government and customers, policy leaders need to become de facto multidisciplinary operators

While policy roles in more mature industries are more messaging focused, in new markets, policymakers and regulators are constantly seeking reassurance that the new product or service is safe, and so the policy role needs to be far more integrated into the core operations of the company.

So much of what we need to do for regulatory approval relates to explaining how the technology works, communicating performance and how we measure safety. In larger companies, this would sit in three separate teams but in fast scaling start-ups, you can create leaner functions where these disciplines work in tandem. I think this is more important when regulations are emerging because governments don’t always know what they want from the outset: you need to show them what good looks like.

Lesson 4: To be most effective internally, policy needs to be woven into the product function

In regulated markets, policy sets the requirements a product needs to serve. So, policy drives product direction and product influences live legislative development simultaneously. And in frontier regulated markets, where the policy and compliance requirements are not so clear, the relationship between policy and product functions is crucial, because the policies themselves might not be stable, and are almost always subject to change.

Lesson 5: Regulatory expertise is a key differentiator when selling frontier technology to traditional manufacturers in highly regulated markets.

AVs are highly regulated, disrupting a legacy highly regulated auto-industry. Early on I knew Wayve would have an uphill battle convincing OEMs (vehicle manufacturers) that we were serious on the policy side i.e. that we knew how influence product specifications and that we could meet the most detailed vehicle safety standards.

I made a conscious decision from the outset to hire highly technical policy specialists and engineers to replicate the types of expertise we’d need to show OEMs we could meet regulatory demands for a safety-critical technology.

Over time this became a serious differentiator for a company that could otherwise appear too bleeding edge and uneducated about the legacy auto world. I had my team focus on making strong connections with auto regulators globally via the UNECE (where vehicle regulations are globally harmonised) to ensure we would have a relationship with the OEMs regulator independent of them i.e. that we do not rely on our customer to advocate for us on regulating technology that they do not build.

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Thanks so much to Sarah for sharing these insights and congratulations to Wayve on their incredible progress. Sarah is one of our Form Scouts, a group of policy leaders at some of the world’s most impressive tech companies. We’ll be writing up more discussions with our Scouts in the coming weeks, so if there are themes you’d particularly like us to explore, please reach out!