David Estrada (lawyer)


David Estrada is a Silicon Valley lawyer and Chief Legal & Policy Officer at Nuro Inc., a Mountain View, California-based robotics and self-driving car startup. He was Vice President of Government Relations at Lyft Inc., where he shaped laws in dozens of states for Transportation Network Companies, leading to an age of ride-hailing. During 2011-2013 he helped develop the earliest state-level autonomous vehicle legislation in Nevada, Florida, and California while serving as the Legal Director at Google X. In 2013, he spoke about the benefits of self-driving cars at a Computer History Museum event called Reinventing Law. He was recently cited for asserting that autonomous vehicles used for goods delivery, like Nuro's, do not need steering wheels or seat belts.
After his work at Lyft, he worked with Sebastian Thrun to build the Kitty Hawk Corporation, a flying car company backed by Google co-founder Larry Page, which launched a one-person VTOL aircraft called the Flyer. He sits on the board of directors of , a joint venture of Kitty Hawk and Boeing.
Estrada joined Bird Rides Inc. in 2018 as Chief Legal & Policy Officer, where he partnered with city leaders to establish electric scooter sharing in Los Angeles and over 100 cities globally. In March 2019, Bird had grown to a valuation of $2.5 billion, the fastest ever a company has been known to achieve unicorn status.
In 2006, Estrada was the second attorney to join the online video startup YouTube before it was acquired by Google, and he worked with Apple to make YouTube the only non-Apple application included on the original launch of the iPhone, as announced by Steve Jobs in 2007.

Education

David Estrada is a 1993 graduate of the UC Berkeley School of Law, where we was an articles editor for the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, a judicial extern for Judge Charles A. Legge of the Northern District of California, and taught a class called to empower high school students with legal tools. At UC Santa Barbara, he was a research assistant to and lived in the farming valley of Querétaro, Mexico during the summer of 1991 studying the ejido system's local power dynamics.
David Estrada is the first in his family to attend college, and he and his wife contribute to the to benefit others whose parents did not attend college. He grew up in Vallejo, California. His father was a house painter who grew up on Potrero Hill in San Francisco. His mother was a nurse at Kaiser Hospital who grew up in San Bruno, California, site of the PG&E pipeline explosion. Estrada spent time in his youth riding motocross motorcycles during summers at his uncle's home on Clear Lake and tinkering with basic programming on a Commodore 64 computer.
Estrada lives in Los Altos, California with his wife Gina and their children. He enjoys mountain biking in the Santa Cruz Mountains that overlook Silicon Valley, and Gina is an avid community volunteer. He has raised the issues of climate change and city congestion as motivating factors in his recent work at companies aimed at transitioning local transportation away from combustion engine cars.