My take on that but by no means I'm knowledgeable in those topics:
As far as I've heard Waymo was considered to be #1[0] when it comes to self-driving cars, thus it's probably someone of Waymoers
So if he was actually doing a lot of work there (basing on experience and how important for Google he was) then I think it's fair to consider him as a pretendent to be industry leader
[0] - Basing on Googling "most advanced autonomous cars"
