From a top leadership role in Silicon Valley to rescuing a self-driving startup burning $30 million a month
In early 2019, Aicha Evans walked away from one of the safest seats in Silicon Valley. As senior vice president and chief strategy officer at Intel, she held the kind of role most executives spend decades trying to reach – one with stability, scale, global influence, and thousands of engineers under her leadership.
Instead, she chose uncertainty, eventually leaving Intel to become CEO of Zoox, a self-driving startup that, at the time, was burning more than $30 million a month, projected to run out of cash within a year, and locked in a trade-secrets lawsuit with Tesla.
She didn’t take the job because it was safe – she took it because she believed she could help it survive. And perhaps that decision tells you almost everything you need to know about how she thinks about leadership.
A curiosity that carried her across the Atlantic
Evans was born in Senegal and grew up between Dakar and Paris, spending much of her childhood being curious about how everything worked. She has described herself as “born and raised an engineer,” often drawn to the way technology shapes daily life.
It was that same innate sense of curiosity that eventually brought her to the United States to study computer engineering at The George Washington University.
Her career soon unfolded in the gritty, capital-intensive worlds of wireless and semiconductors – industries where breakthroughs take years and mistakes cost millions. At Intel, she spent more than a decade rising through the ranks, helping push the company toward a more data-centric future while leading large, complex teams.
By 2019, she had nothing left to prove – yet everything to risk.
Then she chose uncertainty
To her, Zoox wasn’t just another autonomous vehicle startup. Its ambition was to build a fully electric, driverless robotaxi from the ground up – no steering wheel, no driver – rethinking transportation entirely.
It had raised roughly $1 billion in venture capital and once carried a $3.2 billion valuation. But by early 2019, the math was tightening fast. The company had no revenue and was consuming cash at an unsustainable pace. It was tangled up in legal battles, experiencing leadership upheaval, and, when the pandemic hit, laid off about 120 contract workers while also halting road testing.
Evans could see that Zoox was at a make-or-break moment. The company had impressive, cutting-edge technology, but it was also running out of money and facing serious challenges that could have shut it down.
Still, she believed her experience running big teams, making tough decisions, and staying calm under pressure made her the right person to steady the ship – and either help the company survive on its own or find a strong partner to keep its vision alive.
She later shared on Stanford Graduate School of Business’s “View From The Top” podcast that if you’re going to take a job that puts you on a path of uncertainty, you should only do it if you feel genuinely pulled toward it. When things get rough (which they always do) you need what she has called an “irrational belief” that you will always “find a way, make a way… reassess, pivot.”
But belief alone wasn’t the strategy.
The risk became a responsibility
Once in the role, Evans focused on extending Zoox’s runway and stabilizing operations. She and co-founder Jesse Levinson spent significant time fundraising while continuing development of the company’s autonomous vehicle system. In various interviews, Evans has repeatedly acknowledged the intensity of that period, including sleepless nights and constant pressure.
She emphasized direct communication with employees, investors, and the board as the company navigated financial and legal uncertainty. In 2020, Zoox settled its trade-secrets lawsuit with Tesla, removing a major distraction.
Later that year, Evans led the company into an acquisition by Amazon for what was reported to be roughly $1.2 to $1.3 billion, securing the long-term backing Zoox needed to continue building its purpose-built robotaxi. Evans herself remained at the helm.
The challenges didn’t disappear after the deal closed, though. Zoox still faces cautious regulators, intense competition from Waymo and Tesla, and the slow, grinding task of proving its technology is safe at scale.
In a 2024 interview with the women’s network Chief, Evans acknowledged their approach may “take a little bit longer” than some people would like, arguing that careful progress is the cost of getting disruptive technology right.
But leadership, in her world, meant absorbing pressure so others could build
Through all of it, Evans keeps returning to the belief that leadership is service, often describing a leader not as a boss chasing headlines or quick wins, but as an enabler. Someone responsible for taking on and clearing obstacles so their team can do the real work.
At the end of the day, her story isn’t about fearless risk-taking. It’s about choosing hard things on purpose. She left a powerful role to take over a nearly broke startup entangled in lawsuits and burning tens of millions a month. And she did it with an irrational belief that it could work – pairing that belief with very rational, very demanding execution.
In Evans’s world, hope isn’t naïve. It’s a starting point. And the work is what makes it real.
