YouSaid · the spoken record

Austin Russell

lines on the record: 63
first: 2021-03-02
most recent: 2021-03-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I very much look forward to the interview we do when year 75 and I'm 90 and I play clips from this interview back at you. That's going to be a good time. Well, Austin, it's been terrific to have you on Decoder. I look forward to talking to you much more as time goes on. I personally cannot wait to have a car that will drive you to New York City. So hurry up.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely committed 100% to see it all the way through until every car has these kinds of autonomous capabilities and accelerated by way of being powered by Luminar.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're talking about phase one, phase two, all this? All this was our phase one. Now we're on to phase two. So this really is the beginning of a long journey. Being on the younger side, I'm going to fortunate enough position. You know, when talking about, you know, different public companies out there, you know, a lot of times, you know, you have CEOs that only plan to have a tenure of the order of like five years or whatever it may be. I think in a fortunate enough position, I don't know, probably the youngest public company CEO, but be able to have a time horizon and a vision more in the order of 50 years than five years as you see this through. I don't plan on, frankly, doing anything different. Now, you know, the scope of what Luminar will do will expand, absolutely over time. But we have the time and you just take it step by step.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have a similar mentality and drive and desire to be able to build ultimately to that level and scale of this kind of company. Certainly if there's any industry that's ripe for disruption that have the ability to enable this as a trillion dollar space, it's evolving, it is autonomy. And that's where absolutely going to be continuing to drive towards. It's a good question. The most important thing is you bring in the key and relevant top-notch A plus team members on board to be able to successfully execute. You know, you can have the best vision on the planet that's just the best strategy, the best product, the best commercial landscape. But you need to execute still. You know, we solve a lot of stuff to execute on. That's where, you know, we make sure to get just rockstar team members from across the board to be able to do exactly that. Whereas a lot of entrepreneurs, you know, maybe they see IPO as like the end of the journey.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And fair and reasonable question, you know, I think to ask for any founder along the way. And I think there's some folks that end up that scale better than others at different parts of the journey. You have different types of personalities along the way. A lot of times, you know, early on founder or founder, CEOs will go and take a more technologically or R&D focus role along the way or not really handle the business side of the equation with this, at least for me personally, the way that I've always seen it is that you have to have a system level technological solution as well as a really strong business case and business mentality if you want to be able to see this built and successfully scale. See, a lot of the great entrepreneurs of our era and the Zuckerbergs of this world or even the Bezos is up to this point, able to scale incredibly well. And I think that's where”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we've had a long conversation about how you started the company very early, very young, you were in stealth for a long time, you came out of stealth, you announced you have a product. Now you're a public company CEO at a remarkable young age. For a lot of people, that's the whole startup journey, right? Like you did the whole thing. Right. Is that done for you? Do you see another stage of this journey that isn't? Like most I'm wondering if you're feeling that or not.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then also mobili as kind of a lead ecosystem partner, including their foray into Robotaxis as well, which I think is going to be super promising. So that's where we're delivering against. But Volvo really helped set the clock for everybody. And frankly, a lot of the rest of the industry timing-wise, from our product perspective and how we scale that into the rest of the other OEMs. But I think they've had a really strong safety brand and focus around this and to see this as too critical. to be able to mess around with and be able to have the best technology and the best program and make it economical for their vehicles. So it's going to continue to get better and better over time via over-the-air software updates. But it's certainly going to be a great start to the whole new era of autonomy in the industry.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, Volvo is certainly there first with these programs. We're driving towards start of production with the programs. Actually, it's starting around the corner next year in 2022 by the end of that to be able to deliver this autonomous solution that can be enabled, or these really I should say, LIDAR enabled vehicles here. The things that you can actually buy. That is a key distinction when it comes down to it. It's something that is definitely going to be the first to market in terms of any kind of a level of autonomous capabilities that's functional and tangible as well for that matter by consumers or otherwise. So it'll be exciting to help enable that to happen. We have another host of other great partners and even most recently, just in the second half of this last year, over the past handful of months, announced Daimler Trucks as a lead partner on the truck side, just as Volvo is a lead partner on the car side.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A much tougher distinction there as it relates to that. So this is just going to be a normal car, otherwise that you can also use any day, anytime, that also has dramatically improved safety because it will now actively take over instances where it's predicting an accident could occur as well, which is something that really hasn't been seen before on vehicles. And another really interesting aspect of how you can start saving all these lives without having autonomy. You don't have to have autonomy everywhere to start doing that.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. But here's the thing that's the whole point of exactly what we're doing for 2022, not even 2030, 2022 on these different production vehicle platforms is enabling highway autonomy. The whole point is you take your car, like, yeah, let's say you're living out farther into the suburbs there and commuting into the city. Take your car, manually drive over to the freeway. Once you're on it, engage autonomous mode. hands off eyes off be able to recover that time or everything from using your phone to take a nap and then a few minutes before the final exit have a planned manual take over and then drive to the final destination and that's kind of that hybrid of a problem and a solution there whereas if you eliminate the steering wheel altogether it's only going to be able to work on whatever routes that you know it's it's effectively pre-programmed to be able to work on and that that's going to be a”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Production vehicles. That's going to take some time. I would say in theory, you could probably buy a car without a steering wheel that'll take you from point A to point B in a more limited geographic capacity between 2025 and 2030. But the question is, when you really want that, like when you buy a car that can only take you to certain limited destinations in a city, it's like.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably I would say early 2030s realistically. A couple different observations here. There's a key distinction to that question of when can you buy a car without a steering wheel? It's not clear that people will actually be selling these cars without steering wheels. If you get to a point where you don't have to have a steering wheel, then it likely will be deployed in a more robotaxi type application initially as it scales up and then ultimately be offered to consumers as well. But here's the thing. Interestingly enough from a regulatory perspective, it actually gets a lot more complicated when you start ripping out steering wheels, changing all the different functionalities of the core of the vehicles to be able to establish what you could see for a futuristic version of autonomy on these cars versus just enabling autonomous capabilities on existing”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, you're talking more in the order of 10,000 times the amount of performance that you have to have out of a LIDAR system just to be able to get that distance. You have to do that again at the same time while having it be economical enough that it's not a tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to actually build and to be able to put into a production of vehicles. So that was what we had to solve for. We were fortunate enough that we were able to over that five-year period of really deep, intense work and meeting all those different very stringent requirements. And yeah, having that be commercialized into production vehicles, I mean, that's kind of a whole theme of what's next. I mean, is that once you meet all those specs and once you get the commercial step right, it's all about getting into series production. And yeah, I mean, we're fortunate enough to be the first and only company to really be able to enable autonomy in series production from these different programs out there, starting with Volvo and then cascading some of the other OEMs that we're working with as well. So it'll be a good start, but that gives you kind of an idea around the performance of what it takes to make it commercially viable as well.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're talking, okay, so for example, an iPhone LIDAR sensor, you know, you're talking about seeing single digit meters out into the distance. Now, of course, in this case, it actually depends on whether it's daylight outside, whether it's night, you know, and you have that. We have to see, regardless of the condition, 250 meters out of the distance. Even if the sun is like shining into the sensor. So, you know, you're talking up to 100 times the range here of what you'd see on an iPhone Line are with orders of magnitude more resolution performance as well and something that's in an auto grade mass producible device so you know by the way it's a square function so the farther you go out if you're a hundred times the distance it actually requires exponentially more output power from a from a radiometry perspective of uh you actually have to you have to square that”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Help with some picture stuff, and there's a bunch of AR gimmicks, but that's how you can get a LiDAR sensor in your life. Just put the performance of the iPhone LiDAR sensor on a spectrum with what you're hoping to achieve or what you're building.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you're trying to solve a gap of like 10,000 X in safety, it'd be like a century or two by the time you got there. So that's the distinction. And that's where I think there can be often a gap between the understanding of where this kind of, and I would say more broadly, like autonomous related technology is today and where it actually needs to get to and how we successfully close that gap because there is a huge gap.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have to have that to get the clear understanding of everything going on. But if you know exactly where everything is, like we do down to centimeter level of precision, it makes all the difference. And there's no question. It's like, you know, yes, it's another sensor on board the vehicles, but there's a good reason why every effectively every autonomous vehicle company has been going down this. And to your question on data, there's no question that more data and better data absolutely helps. But the whole point is when you have a more limited quality of data set, like for example with cameras, it absolutely tapers off in terms of the utility of it. OEMs and the mobilize of this world, you know, only use a really small fraction of that overall data that's collected. It has kind of a marginal utility curve that only helps you so much. But let's say even if you were able to continue an amazing growth rate like 50% improvement year over year for these kinds of systems.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The hard part with cameras alone is that they give you a 2D view of what's going on. You never really know where the objects are. You effectively have to guess. And people have made software that gets better and better and better at guessing. And this is like, you know, effectively what MobileI and what Tesla and these companies have been doing. It gets to a point of where you kind of approach like 99% accuracy. Here's the problem. Even 99% is still not even remotely close to being good enough. You need like 10 nines worth of reliability in there and it gets exponentially harder with each nine. It's like, is it acceptable to run over one out of every hundred people because you didn't see them? And guess where it is right? You know, any rational person would say no. And that would not make it anything close to the same safety threshold as a human. So that's the whole point around it. And the LIDAR, assuming you have really high performance, long range, high resolution that you...”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's probably an underestimate. Now, let's clarify here. If you have a really low performance LIDAR that only gives you like a handful of points out there in the environment, maybe it's only incrementally more helpful. The whole point of the LIDAR is that it gives you a 3D map of everything around the world in real time. You know exactly where every object is.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely fantastic. But at the same time, when it comes to autonomy, we just need to make sure we get the terminology straight and what's actually possible because that's ultimately beneficial to the consumers. The last thing you want is people misusing the technology in terms of thinking it's capable of certain things when it's not. It's just, it's a really hard problem. It's a long way to go, even with the best performing LIDAR. It's still a long way to go, much less trying to make it 100 times harder without it.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Different. It's like not even kind of close. It really is like, you know, a factor of, I mean, if you want to improve to a point of where it's safer than a human level, where you would never need to take over, you need to take that disengagement rate from once every 20 miles to once every two million miles plus. And disagreement meaning you have to take over the wheel to prevent otherwise some kind of incident or accident, like in the current assisted driving system. The whole point of where LIDAR comes into play is to solve that problem. You know, obviously anyone that tries to or even just single person that tries to promise that without it, the hard part is you back yourself into a corner if you've been saying the same thing for five years and it will come out like you're supposed to come out every year the next year. But I don't want to make sure you have any respect loss for the incredible things that new players in the EV world and even folks like Tesla have built and disrupted on the EV side.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Development program. When you take a look at something like Tesla, it's again how does what you build align with the product you're trying to develop? And it's the same thing about assisted driving systems versus autonomous driving systems. If you want to build a great assistive driving system, you should be doing exactly what they're doing, everything spot on, collect lots of data, build the model, build everything. Now, arguably, I mean, listen, their system was originally powered by Mobileye some time ago with pretty much all the other major automakers. They kind of broke out from that. It was initially kind of worse. Now it kind of caught up to what mobilize had. But this is nothing like fundamentally novel in the context of having an assistant driving system that does these things. The real challenge is when you try and cross a threshold into calling things autonomous, but the reality is that the threshold for, and it's just a driving system versus an autonomous system, it orders a magnitude.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So just a couple things just to kind of level set with that. You see, you gave, for example, the Waymo example here. In terms of, it's all about, and the Tesla example, it's all about what problem are you trying to solve? Like what application are you trying to enable? What feature set are you trying to enable? For example, for what Waymo is trying to enable, being able to build these RoboTaxis for urban use cases and solving for that, they're absolutely doing the right thing. Like they're doing everything step by step that you should do and executing on it, you know, probably some in the industry would argue better than anyone else. So I'd agree with, or maybe at a quicker pace. Obviously, you have to be conscious around what is the application and also what are the different subcomponents that are there that it's still a long road ahead. There's other things like higher performance LIDAR that help accelerate you there much more quickly and something that you ultimately need to enable with. But nevertheless, I think that's the point. But like for urban Robots.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, 100%. Now, I mean, you have to start somewhere with it, right? But the point is that people aren't going to stop there. It's not going to be good enough. Good enough, at least in our view, is driving the 1.3 million lives lost every year. By the way, just putting that in perspective, that's like in the same vicinity of the crazy pandemic that we've had over the past year in terms of live loss. And it happens every single year and is completely doesn't discriminate against underlying conditions or whatever. It's insane, you know, how accepted this is just in everyday life. And that's where if we can have the opportunity to be able to solve for that and drive that toward zero, that's the mission that we should be going towards, right? We all need to be rallying around as opposed to just the human level of the safety threshold. Now, that's not to say that, like I said, you know, you're going to be 10x better or 100x better off the.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The more performance you get, the safer the vehicle is. And I don't think anybody's going to stop and say, yeah, you know, I think we can just decrease the safety of these vehicles by 100x. Like even if you got there, like even if you got to a point where you could achieve that human level safety threshold, why would you make your vehicles that much less safe? It doesn't make any sense. So that would be the, even not just in the near term, but I'm talking like even like a 50-year type time horizon. You don't really see it being disrupted. You see how do you continue to strive for even better performance?”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But versus true self-driving, true autonomy, hands off, eyes off, read a book, use your phone, work on your laptop, watch a movie, take a nap, that kind of thing. That's autonomy. And that's the key step function value. That's what this enables. That's the whole point of what this LIDAR enables. You don't need a LIDAR at all if you want your car to follow a couple lanes on the road ahead of you and keep with your hands in the wheel and eyes of the road. This is what it enables. It doesn't matter what you call your assistant driving system, you can call it autopilot, full self-driving, you know, whatever it is, or like I said, the other OEMs that conservatively name their systems more appropriately. So that's the key distinction there.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is improving. It's getting better. But the software is not going to be there for a while for more of these urban environment constraints, regardless of what anyone might say if you want to try to have it carco from point A to point B in these environments. It's going to take time, even with our sensors. It's going to take a lot of time. But the point is, how do you get this out there sooner than later? That's where you'll go for the more constrained environments. Now, Alyssa, of course, when talking about disrupting this, you have sometimes confusion that can arise. There's a very bright line between something. There's assisted driving and there's autonomous driving. One requires the driver constantly in the loop, ready to take over the wheel any given moment whenever it makes a mistake as it's following a couple lanes on the road ahead. This is the equivalent of effectively things like Tesla autopilot or the systems that company mobilize has been providing to OEMs for the better part of a decade now for other OEMs. They don't always enable the same full functionality that Tesla does more aggressively.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That the autonomous vehicle problem and being able to try and solve all these different edge cases is really, really hard. People try to say, oh yeah, we'll solve it. It's easy, you know, figure it out in 2022, 3, whatever it is. No, this stuff is really hard. And no one has ever actually solved it at this point today for the kind of application domain that you're looking at. Now, you really need to throw everything you can get out at it. There was definitely an idea a few years ago that it would be something that would be solvable by time and data collection and just what it takes but the reality is it just requires a lot of raw intense performance of a system to be able to understand what's going on and required even much better performance from a LIDAR standpoint to be able to enable the capabilities to have your understanding of everything going on around you very far out and with the level of resolution performance that's needed. On top of that, of course, there's continuing software capabilities that need to improve.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ends up being more simple if you have the range to be able to do it. At the same time, for example, the economics, if you have something that isn't that huge,000 roof rack full of stuff and you can actually have it embedded in a production vehicle for something more in the order of $1,000, it makes all the difference. And like, I mean, yeah, we're pricing our centers today at that, you know, at that mark for many of these applications. So that's where seeing this actually happen in a production vehicle, it completely shifts the mindset in terms of what's possible. And I'm not even sure that all these companies would have the same business model they do today if they knew this is possible for the beginning. I actually don't think that a lot of the Robotexic companies would at all. But when it comes down to it, anything beyond that, just from existential perspective about not just LIDAR disrupting LIDAR, but LIDAR or something disrupting it, not just improvements in the technology, but disrupting it altogether. The reality is that...”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a good question, and I think it's foundational technologies itself, but also the economics of those technologies, the performance of those technologies, what are the theoretical limitations in terms of what you can actually achieve with each of these different systems. And I would actually say that LIDAR is the perfect example of literally what we're just talking about here of a technology that's entirely disrupted the mindset and the business model around what was even possible from an autonomous perspective. For example, historically, LIDAR has been very limited in terms of the range performance of what you can actually do, how far out you can see. That was part of the reason why people were focused on urban environments for their autonomous vehicle setups, for the robotaxis, you know, operating at low speed. Now, when you can see very clearly out to 250 meters into the distance, different story. You can start to operate on highway speeds. You can now enable a different operating domain and something that's actually”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're back with Austin Russell. One of the things I always think about with what I would call foundational technologies, sensors, display technologies, batteries, right, is we tend to build software and products around the limitations of those technologies. And then sometime along the way, there's a huge shift in foundational technologies and our entire belief about what the products can do changes, and we have to build entirely new software. A really dumb example is the transition from CRTs to LCDs, right? There was a whole conception of what the world of technology would look like when CRTs were the display technology. We shifted LCDs and now literally everything is an Android computer. Do you worry that LIDAR is one of the...”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Safety on your vehicle that can be put out onto millions of production cars? Absolutely. So that's how you start generating a real business.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Solution that's tailored for production vehicles that actually can be put into a car in an auto grade solution in capacity and having the software that's focused around the use case in the application in the domain. You're going to have a completely different level of software complexity trying to build for an urban environment than you are for the highway environments that were focused on for the initial deployments with OEMs. And the whole point is how do you do all of that on the sensing side, okay, in the software side you solve that problem. You also need to make sure that doesn't require supercomputer in your trunk to actually process. And that's where it's like being able to get all of that work on the same kind of NVIDIA GPU that people are embedding into their production vehicles. That's key. And that's effectively what we've had to solve for, you know, as part of the full stack solution. Now, is it going to be driving you everywhere from point A to point B anywhere you want? Absolutely not. But is it going to be enabling some level of autonomy that's reachable by consumers and dramatically improving?”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. The whole point is to have a solution. You take that $100,000 roof rack full of stuff or $200,000 roof rack and effectively put into a package that's more on the order of $1,000 than it is $200,000. That's a huge part of the equation, no question. Is the cost and the economics there? But it's also just as much building”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Isn't that just a function of cost or that the cost versus the revenue opportunity? So if you're Waymo, you buy a Chrysler Pacific for $50,000, you put $200,000 worth of stuff on the roof to make it drive itself. No one's buying a quarter million dollar Chrysler Pacifica. Right. I can't imagine who would buy that. There's probably some hardcore Pacifica blog that's going to write this up now. I'm hoping they find us. But you use that as a taxi, your quarter million dollar minivan starts generating money. You've built a business that eventually returns profit as you scale down the cost of the roof rack. You're saying you're going to take on all of that cost and then sell a turnkey solution to automakers so they can ship a $55,000 SUV to an average family that can drive itself.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Deployed in the relative near term with an auto grade quality code that you can put your life at hands of. So it's a different trajectory. And that's why we really focused around developing this full stack solution for OEMs, for the automakers themselves, as opposed to us trying to do some rogue deployment with a robotaxi company or like a ridesharing company of like building our own network of vehicles. I mean, don't get me wrong. That's going to be a great route. It's going to be huge value at the end of the day that's created based on that and based on ride sharing. But we don't see that feasibly happening even with our, I mean, we have customers in that domain and we're helping accelerate, but it's still like a decade long problem than it is something that's going to be deployed next year.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cruise and all these like multi billion dollar software development companies that are taking that on. And here's the key distinction though. If that was applicable to all the same things we were doing and all the same OEMs we're working with, yeah, we wouldn't be in that game. But the key distinction here is that seeing the difference of, for example, it was very clear that everyone, I mean, virtually every company in the autonomous vehicle space has been focused on robotaxis specifically and all the big guys there. And that's their primary application. That's what they're developing the software for. But it's actually very different developing the software for a highly complex urban robotaxi scenarios and building R&D cars for that because that's the most advanced stage that they're at today, you know, with like $100,000 roof racks full of sensors and stuff versus building something for a production vehicle in a more constrained application, you know, something that could be”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You go Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We want to be a turnkey solution for this. And to some extent have already started evolving into that for these different OEMs. And really the reason why is to be able to build an autonomous vehicle. The LIDAR is just one part of that holistic solution. Now, it is a key bottleneck that's been preventing the deployment of in large part this industry just by way of having something that meets the performance requirements, that meets the economic requirements that can actually be scalable here. But at the same time, the LIDAR itself doesn't drive your car. You need the software to go along with it, as well as some of the rest of the ecosystem there to be able to push forward with that. Now, there's some argument that some would say of like, okay, well, what on earth, why are you guys screwing around with software? There's like, you know, yeah, okay, you carved out, you know, your value proposition in hardware, but you have like folks Waymo.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's where I think we were able to capture the attention of some of the world's largest automakers in terms of showing the art of what is possible. We had a system that had specifications people thought there was no way this was even doable from a physics perspective, much less something that could be economically produced. So that was kind of the start of where we gained a lot of interest from beyond just the technology, but from a commercial angle as well, and a key catalyst for scaling this up.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't try and give any people a reason for a head start here either. It oftentimes doesn't actually benefit you. I mean, you're not, at least initially, consumer or even OEM awareness is less relevant because you have to actually finish the product first. You want the first impression to be really good. And that's basically what we spent the first five years doing deep down in stealth mode, building out the core product and technology and getting to a stage where we could actually launch the company and scale this up. And that's really what we did starting in 2017, five years in after we had developed the laser, the receiver, the scanning mechanism, the processing electronics, all of our own chips that we had in the system. And it came together. It all worked. So, you know, almost somewhat miraculously unexpectedly. But, you know, at the same time, so.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You would have people that are announcing every phase. And I think it's still usually the case. Now every phase of their journey, oftentimes before you actually have anything to show for it. And at some stage, it kind of goes back to a core philosophy versus like show, not tell. Because it's really easy to have a lot of claims. And by the way, there is no shortage of claims in the overall autonomous video space. And it's part because it's easy to say things because you don't actually always show it or have to show it or have people have ways to easily evaluate if it's actually like real or not. I mean, it's some of the reasons why you've seen some of the recent activity from companies that maybe couldn't even raise private capital now, getting to the stage of where it's like trying to enter the public markets. But nevertheless, for us, it was always heads down focus on delivering. Don't let any noise affect you.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As exciting as it can be, and like something that you know you can solve for ultimately. That was a trade-off that you had to say, okay, remain focused, solve the LIDAR problem, see it through. Yes, we'll continue to build up the software stack in parallel for ultimately a more turnkey solution to the autonomous vehicle problem. But take a step by step. And that's effectively what we did. And it was a decently long journey, right? You know, as eight years with this. So I think that's where the last few years though, you know, we spent more time really ramping up the commercial side, ramping up the software side as well. One other interesting trade-off that we made from, take it from a totally different angle from a, talk about like a marketing perspective. You know, a lot of times being in stealth mode for some period of time is kind of like is really cool these days. But at this point, back when I first founded the company, a lot of times.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, the ultimate goal of the balancing act is to try and minimize one-to-one trade-offs and to be able to scale the business side as much as you can scale the technology side in parallel. But nevertheless, I would say, for example, one of the trade-offs that we had, I mean, we have no shortage of ambition in terms of what we're trying to solve for and what we knew we could build and make a difference on beyond just the LIDAR sensing system. And I think we probably, there was probably some desire to accelerate our software roadmap beyond our hardware roadmap even faster than we ultimately did, actually much faster. But at the same time, you have to be careful about stacking too many parallel programs together and too much parallel risk and taking it step by step.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, give me an example. You're saying you've got shifting from building the product, building a prototype to strategic decisions to make sure you can get to market. Giving you an example of a trade-off you've made along the way.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It sees widespread adoption in the industry. And that's where it becomes focused around being able to successfully enable that over the long run and being able to establish strategic initiatives and plans to be able to drive that forward to realization. So you have to apply always a business financial mindset to all of these things to make it work because if you miss even part of one of the pieces of the puzzle, you effectively end up with zero. It's like a binary equation here. You have to get everything almost perfectly right. That's why this is just so impossibly hard. Going from kind of the R&D stage to actually realizing it's through into a real product of business case and everything around it is a huge challenge. So that's what you have to keep your eye on.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say just over time as you build and scale a business, you kind of have to go from being comfortable with decisions with nearly 100% of the information to being comfortable with decisions with effectively what evolves to a smaller and smaller fraction of that for given things. And you have to have greater levels of delegation. You have to have greater levels of talent and quality of talent as you build it up and you have to continuously just keep raising the bar in terms of what you're going to be doing. And I would say from a decision making framework standpoint that goes at the same time in a parallel thread beyond just increased delegation. More shifted towards going from technology-driven decisions by just trying to do whatever you can to create the best product. It's like, okay, well, what do you do? You have the best product. How do you make sure?”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And whoever is leading company to be able to have that full staff understanding and be able to drive the business forward. And I do think that's why there have been some great celebrated leaders within the overall autonomous vehicle space, sometimes just purely based on that basic understanding rather than sometimes even any execution at all. But it's just so valuable in this space that to be able to have that understanding drives forward a lot of the different ideas in the industry. But that's what I'd say is the case for me. I'm continuing to bring on other great team members expanding the overall exec and leadership team you have. But it's been a very effective structure for how we're executing.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This really is something that from a technological perspective, as well as business perspective, it's never been done. I mean, even just carving out the fundamentals of the business model. I mean, when you take a look at like, where do all Google's and Facebook's revenue come from? Ads, you know, I mean, really, that's what you take a look at all these like fancy, crazy technology developments and everything and like, okay, what's it this model? It's ads.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just finally handed that off, which is great to be able to see, but had a similar type of cross-functional org structure for a huge period of time throughout their Amazon's growth trajectory and curve, among many other companies that really set that up. So you got to get the right insight and for the right folks in terms of how to set this stuff up. The hard part about this business, though, this isn't like your average internet company here, where having people that have built internet related companies and social media related work and had executed on paths and visions for those different types of business. For this”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A great question for that. And the key thing here is that it's something that we've been doing. It's something that I've been doing. To be frank, you know, this whole time throughout our journey as it relates to step by step through all this, I don't think there's any single person that you definitely hired to take the reins of the grown up doing X, Y, or Z, rather build the Rockstar team of all the respective leaders in their field and build a cross-functional org structure where you have a clear set of responsibilities for each one of these folks. It's really my job to synthesize all of that information and be able to make corresponding business and technical decisions based on that path and rely on the team from an execution perspective to be able to see that vision through. So it's a little bit of a different setup than maybe you would have with some of those folks, but at the same time not uncommon at all. You know, you take a look bezos here just, you know.”
2021-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet Austin Russell, the 25-year-old billionaire building the future of self-driving cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT