Jeff Holden, chief product officer at Uber, took the stage at the Bloomberg Technology Conference in San Francisco on June 14th to talk about what’s next for the ride-sharing behemoth. Bottom line: Uber’s self-driving cars are coming “sooner than you think.” Holden described driverless cars as a major priority for Uber, and recalled an earlier conversation with CEO Travis Kalanick about why that’s the case. Holden remembers telling Kalanick, “Driverless is … basically a disruption wave in our rear-view mirror right now. That is not a situation where the technology is going to be evenly distributed. It’s going to be very proprietary. If somebody can build a driverless car, they’re going to have a massive economic advantage if they employ that in a fleet at scale.”

“Either we need to usher that in, or make a bet that somebody’s going to give it to us to plug into our fleet,” Holden said. “So we started building it.”