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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“The different areas of the business and all the different aspects of a product and everything that comes into play and having the technical understanding of that Well, which is not always a given, but in order to be able to succeed in scale.”
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
“Sold it quite a decent amount. Obviously, in the beginning, it was all that 100%, just diving deep with the team. As we scale up, it's still absolutely critical to not just keep a pulse on product and product development, but still to be able to shape that with the same vision that you have and make sure that stays on track, make sure that it can use your drive forward with all the new inputs that you have and continuously shape the future of how you see that playing out. That's something that absolutely still hands on. I don't think that'll ever change. But there's no question that there's a lot of balls to juggle. There's a lot of stuff that has to happen. But they're all kind of synergistic, right? You know, you can't do engineering in a vacuum or product management in a vacuum or commercial work in a vacuum here. They all have to tie closely together. And this is where it's critical to have the frame of mind that combines all.”
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
“Been core to the philosophy, by the way, is make sure you get the right people on board that have huge domain expertise in the key areas that you really need it in. And sort of is easier said than done, but at the same time, if you have the right people there and can scale that like we did in this case, it makes all the difference.”
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
“Able to build the technology and build it at scale. And that was where we also built out that capability in Orlando. We have about 100,000 square feet worth of space that we've been driving that forward with in our facility. And that's where the manufacturing process that we have that's developed ultimately we will transfer and are transferring to the relevant contract manufacturers to be able to do the final assembly for series production. So that way, you know, we're not taking on thousands upon thousands of employees or selves as we scale up there too. We get to leverage outside resources for the more commodity aspect of assembly of the devices itself, whereas the formula, the automation, how you build it successfully, that's important to what we've had to do to keep in-house. So it's kind of a hybrid model. And that's something that just takes a lot of work, a lot of expertise with the right people to build it 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
“It definitely is a shift going from the core technology development, which we did for the first handful of years to being able to have a scalable operation that can build automotive grade product into series production. And the most important thing, that's always been our goal and focus. The reality is that even effectively all the autonomous vehicle companies today that are building products, it's really much more meant for R&D than it is for somebody that's ever actually going to make its way into a production vehicle. And that's a key distinction here of where you have to follow automotive process and the work around how you can build these sensing systems up. And that's, for us, we kind of leverage the core expertise around how you can successfully assemble these and doing the process engineering and the manufacturing engineering and everything to be able to get to a stage where we can have a formula for not just the technology itself, but how to 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
“So just walking through, you've got your early prototypes, a small team of people. You think it can be productized? How'd you go from that to you've got a manufacturing operation at scale that can obviously support the size of public company now?”
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
“An electrical engineer. And someone that had admired. I didn't know him super well previously, but my parents keenly pointed out and say, you know, your uncle does that electrical engineering thing. He's certainly good at rapid prototyping and definitely helped out early on 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
“A couple of key folks that we had. One of them that we worked with originally from a consulting perspective and then ultimately brought on as a co-founder into this was a guy named Jason Eichenholz, who's our CTO and kind of responsible for a lot of now forward-looking R&D programs and projects that we have going on from a LIDAR standpoint. He was actually helped establish the Orlando, Florida office that we have, you know, outside of the Silicon Valley presence that we had. And that was where we really started to scale up the hardware team out there and be able to build out of the capability. Turned out highest concentration of these type of LIDAR engineers out of anywhere in the world is in Orlando, Florida. So that's where you go where the people are. It's a space coast defense industry, Cape Canaveral, you know, and all that that really brought in a lot of the talent from. And then actually another interesting one, I did end up hiring my uncle, who was 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
“So it was just to you at the beginning. You had this interest in optics and photonics. You saw the market opportunity for LIDAR, particularly in self-driving cars. At the time 2012-ish, those systems were really big. I think Luminar's kind of advancement as you've made them smaller, easier to manufacture, right? You've made them more of a useful device. How'd you go from, I've got this idea to here's 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
“Would it do the next day? You know, it's like the same thing that it was otherwise doing. I don't know how much it fundamentally changes other than accelerate the exact same thing you're doing. And you just keep accelerating and accelerating and accelerating. And you have this compounding exponential effect that you can grow and snowball into something much bigger. And that's really what happens. And by the way, for things like the teal fellowship, I mean, don't get me wrong, the 100K check is great, but there's multiple ways you can generate 100K income to be able to start a business. But the real value is the network. How do you learn from the most successful entrepreneurs on the planet to be able to build this kind of business and scale this kind of business? And it takes a lot more than a great technology and concept to build a great business. And that's what's required if you want to actually have your tech seed, the light of day.”
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 make a difference. It maybe seems like a crazy long shot at the time for that to happen and materialize. But at the same time. Think you just have extreme focus around what you want to do and continue to solve for, build for it, learn from all the folks around you and just continue to deliver.”
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, I think when it comes down to it, there wasn't any kind of miracle step, so to say, involved in that of rather these were already somewhat ongoing projects, even at the time when I went into Stanford, when I got the Teal Fellowship. Everything was already somewhat in motion. I mean, it all starts with that innate passion and desire to be able to want to build, to create, to innovate and invent. In my case, I just had a specific interest around optics photonics and other types of systems that can end up making a huge difference in these kinds of new products and saw the application opportunity for autonomous vehicles. So really just went all in on that. And it's one of those things that if you knock it out of the park, it really is a trillion dollar industry opportunity with, not to mention the humanitarian aspect of, you know, 1.3 million lives lost on the road every year to be able to have an opportunity to impact 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
“Payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 month plan required, $15 per month equivalent taxes and bees extra. Initial plan term only greater than 50 GB is busy. C terms.”
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