Forbes magazine recently released their annual billionaire line up, crowning twenty six year old Austin Russell as the youngest billionaire on the list this year. Russell is the CEO of Luminar Technologies, a company with the technologies for self-driving cars.
He became a billionaire practically overnight when Luminar Tech went public in 2020, with Forbes currently valuing him at $2.4 billion. Russell has the distinction of being the youngest billionaire on the list, along with the founders of Door Dash, and the crypto currency investor, Sam Bankman-Fried. So how exactly did he get here?
At age seventeen, Russell launched Luminar hoping to use a technology called LIDAR sensors to improve self-driving cars. The sensors are installed inside of the vehicle and help detect movement and objects around it by sending short pulses of light. The technology is able map out any obstacles in its way. Although Elon Musk called LIDAR a “doomed” technology back in 2019, companies like Toyota and Volvo have been using it to create their versions of self automated vehicles. LIDAR technology is being used for short distance mapping in automated vehicles, but Luminar claims to have come out with a range of 250 meters (820 ft), a breakthrough in this type of technology.
Back in 2012, Russell was attending Stanford when he received a grant of $100,000 from Peter Thiel. You might be wondering, how did he go from $100,000 to several billion in under ten years in the industry. According to Russell, his involvement with LIDAR technology was “already a project” at the time he received the grant. To Russell, everything starts with a desire to created, innovate and invent. In Russell’s case, he was just a student who was interested in optics. How was he able to learn from the entrepreneurs on the market to grow and scale his business? The value, says Russell, is in “the network”.
When Luminar was first formed, LIDAR technology was much larger and far less accurate. A key step in making the technology and the company what it is today, according to Russell, was learning to build and optimize the technology, but also having a clear vision for how to build it. Luminar uses about 100.000 square feet of space for its facility, but final assembly is ultimately transferred to contract manufacturers.
As the company has scaled up, they have been able leverage resources for the more “commodity” aspect of the device itself. On the other hand, the automation, the formula and how to build it successfully, are all aspects that are kept in-house. It’s been the core of Lumina’s philosophy to build the strongest possible talent team as they scale up production. According to Russell, hiring the right people for the right roles has been tremendously important to his company’s success and growth.
Bringing top talent into the company has been a definite focus for Austin Russell and perhaps the key to his success. He points out that as the company has scaled up, he has had to have a greater level of delegation, and a greater level of talent to continuously raise the bar for his company. Russell knew he had the best product, but how did he ensure its widespread adoption by the industry?
That came down to being able to establish strategic initiatives and drive them towards realization. It is very important to apply a business and financial mindset to the model, in order to see it grow and succeed, as well as remain a leader in the field of LIDAR technology. LIDAR is not the only technology Luminar is developing. but Russell notes that he has to watch himself closely when it comes to having too many parallel projects stack up.
The goal, he says, is to create a software stack for a turn key solution to the automated vehicles issue. And that is exactly what he did at Luminar over the past 9 years. For him and his employees, it has always been “head down, focus on delivering, don’t let [anything] affect you” he explains. You want the first impression of the product to be really good, which is why Luminar spend the initial five years focusing on building the core technology and developing the product before thinking about moving to large scale production or integration.
Luminar has a system with specifications that were previously thought to be impossible from a physics perspective, which is what helped the company gain interest for not only the technology, but the commercial side of it as well. It was something people had not seen executed so well before. While other companies chose to focus on ride-sharing or the robotaxi scenario, Luminex takes a more constrained approach.
Their goal is to make a product that could be deployed in the near future, that would be able to comply with the vehicle safety standards that are being developed for automated vehicles now. Russell wants you to be able to put your life in the hands of this type of technology, so he recognizes how much is at steak. This is why they took a different route than a lot of the other automation start ups and chose to focus on developing a full-stack solution for OEM’s, as opposed to trying to do “rogue development” with a robotaxi or a ride sharing company.
LIDAR has historically been limited when it comes to the range performance, but now that the range has been extended to 250 meters, it has changed the way the industry thinks about automobile automation and what is possible. Despite the advances in technology, Russell is certain that it will take much longer than “a few years” for us to see fully automated vehicles on the roads.
Even with all the recent advancements in LIDAR technology, Russell himself is the first to admit that what he and his company are working on is “very hard” and is uncharted territory. No one has really figured out all the solutions to the many questions that vehicle automation poses, but with minds and leaders such as Austen Russell, it is possible that we may see vehicle automation become a reality in our lifetime.