Speaker 1: Pushkin. For a while there, the discourse was full of
Speaker 1: self driving cars. They were right around the corner. Then
Speaker 1: they were not right around the corner. Now we have
Speaker 1: robotaxis in a few places, but not in most places,
Speaker 1: And for normal cars, autopilot does not really mean autopilot.
Speaker 1: In all this binary will they or won't they drive
Speaker 1: themselves talk? We've lost sight of something. Lots of people
Speaker 1: are figuring out big, interesting ways to bring new technologies
Speaker 1: to cars, even before we get to self driving cars,
Speaker 1: which looks like at this point it could take a while.
Speaker 1: These new technologies could save thousands and thousands of lives.
Speaker 1: I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem, the
Speaker 1: show where I talk to people who are trying to
Speaker 1: make technological progress. My guest today is Austin Russell. He's
Speaker 1: the founder of Luminar, a company that is developing a
Speaker 1: technology called lidar. Austin's problem is this, how do you
Speaker 1: make lidar cheap enough and good enough to use in
Speaker 1: millions of cars. LDAR stands for light detection and ranging.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a technological sibling of sonar and radar.
Speaker 1: A lightar system makes a detailed map of its surroundings
Speaker 1: by sending out pulses of light and analyzing the reflections
Speaker 1: that come back. Luminar's LDAR system will come standard on
Speaker 1: a new Volvo SUV that's going into production later this year.
Speaker 1: The company also has deals with Mercedes Benz and with Saic,
Speaker 1: a Chinese car company. Austin says LDAR can do a
Speaker 1: lot for cars even before we get to full autonomy.
Speaker 1: It's not about replacing the driver, it's about enhancing the driver.
Speaker 1: I think this is a really really important part around
Speaker 1: what we're doing is they we're not trying to do
Speaker 1: some moonshot of replacing the driver altogether and having are
Speaker 1: welcoming our robotaxi overlords in a city near you like
Speaker 1: that's actually a very very challenging problem out on its own.
Speaker 1: Our goal is about enhancing the driver, making cars dramatically safer,
Speaker 1: going back to the original vision around what all this
Speaker 1: stuff was supposed to be in the first place, except
Speaker 1: actually making it happen. The reality is is that right now,
Speaker 1: you know, as many as one and a half million
Speaker 1: people have their lives lost on the road every year
Speaker 1: as a result of vehicle accidents. And this is something
Speaker 1: that's totally preventable for that matter. Like you know, it
Speaker 1: sounds like a basic problem, but just don't let your
Speaker 1: car smash into the thing right in front of you.
Speaker 1: That's how you prevent most accidents. Turns out that's actually
Speaker 1: not as straightforward as a problem as you think, and
Speaker 1: to be able to have the confidence to you know,
Speaker 1: fully take over from the driver and those kinds of
Speaker 1: situations is not an easy thing. So that's where the
Speaker 1: lighter is coming into play for this kind of high
Speaker 1: performance lightar that gives you confidence to do that and
Speaker 1: can enable the car to take over the breaking system
Speaker 1: and steering wheel to get you out of those kinds
Speaker 1: of situations. Austin has been working on this problem for
Speaker 1: a long time. He founded Luminar back in twenty twelve.
Speaker 1: At the time, Austin was just seventeen years old. Also,
Speaker 1: at the time, the use of LDAR in cars was,
Speaker 1: like Austin, barely out of its infancy. You take a
Speaker 1: look back in the day, you have these hundred thousand
Speaker 1: dollars fitting systems, you know, out of the roof of
Speaker 1: these you know, test cars that are out there, and
Speaker 1: you know, generally low performance, you know, not something that's
Speaker 1: nearly as high performance is what it can be. So
Speaker 1: the moment you're starting to think about this is that
Speaker 1: moment when like what we kind of think of as
Speaker 1: like the LDAR on the roof of whatever, the early
Speaker 1: like self driving Google vans or something like this great
Speaker 1: big thing and it costs one hundred thousand dollars. I
Speaker 1: mean it feels sort of analogous to the like vacuum
Speaker 1: tube computers of the like nineteen forties fifties. I mean,
Speaker 1: is that the right way to be thinking about it? Like, Oh,
Speaker 1: it's this giant thing. It doesn't work that well, but
Speaker 1: it's clear that somebody should be able to figure out
Speaker 1: how to make it smaller and cheaper and better. Absolutely, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean the key thing is is that you could
Speaker 1: see some times of things up to one hundred meters
Speaker 1: out with those systems. But the hard part was is
Speaker 1: seeing you know, low reflectivity objects like like dark objects
Speaker 1: like a like a plaque car, a tire on the road,
Speaker 1: at person in dark clothing and anything begin to is
Speaker 1: very very difficult. So you set out to make this
Speaker 1: thing smaller and cheaper, like about two orders of magnitude cheaper, right,
Speaker 1: You got to drive down the price, like it's got
Speaker 1: to customs of what it costs, and it's got to
Speaker 1: be better. Right, that's that's that's what you're setting out
Speaker 1: to do. It's got to be tenets better at one
Speaker 1: of the cost. Yes, very good classics tech problem a day.
Speaker 1: It's just hard because it's hardware. Um. So, so I mean,
Speaker 1: tell me a little bit about about doing that, right, Like,
Speaker 1: surely there were moments when things weren't working, when you
Speaker 1: thought it was harder than it seemed. Tell me tell
Speaker 1: me about one of those moments. Yeah. Absolutely, Um I
Speaker 1: would say, by the way, it's actually absurdly difficult. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't necessarily recommend it for anyone there too, just because
Speaker 1: in this case it's a convergence of multiple things all
Speaker 1: at the same time. As you pointed out, hardware is
Speaker 1: hard already on its own, very very challenging. There's two
Speaker 1: other aspects of it are unique. There's the hardware. There's
Speaker 1: the fact that we're building crazy lasers and you know,
Speaker 1: and receivers and new custom chips that go into the systems.
Speaker 1: This is not something that you're using official parts like,
Speaker 1: you're creating new kinds of you know, three five special materials.
Speaker 1: You know that are not you know, your everyday silicon,
Speaker 1: you know that you can just be able to go
Speaker 1: and use and fab with. So there's a lot of
Speaker 1: very special things that go into this that we had
Speaker 1: to truly innovate from the physics up. So there's that part,
Speaker 1: and then there's also the automotive side of it, which
Speaker 1: by the way, is absurdly difficult out on its own.
Speaker 1: You know, just to be able to create something for
Speaker 1: automotive series production isn't by no means an easy task
Speaker 1: at all, high regulatory barriers, has to be super reliable,
Speaker 1: has to be super scalable. Yeah. Yeah. But the thing
Speaker 1: is that these are long design side goals here too.
Speaker 1: I mean you're talking about you know, five plus years
Speaker 1: of planning, you know, to go into it before where
Speaker 1: we're going to see the light of day in a car,
Speaker 1: and you know, very serious stuff, and you're and you're
Speaker 1: talking also probably the better part of a billion dollars
Speaker 1: worth of investment to be able to get there if
Speaker 1: you want to actually get into a production car. Good.
Speaker 1: So I am persuaded that it's really hard that you're
Speaker 1: setting out to do this very very hard thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I can imagine there must have been multiple
Speaker 1: difficult moments, moments when some didn't work. Tell me, tell
Speaker 1: me one of those. Oh, that's probablys of like, you know,
Speaker 1: hundreds of things, but you know you don't in the
Speaker 1: earlier stages and something else, especially you know for some
Speaker 1: crazy sixteen or seventeen year old at the time you know,
Speaker 1: first started out, you know that not everyone was always
Speaker 1: on the same page. You know, they're too or even
Speaker 1: understood half the things I was saying, or ninety percent
Speaker 1: of the things I was saying. I mean, especially in
Speaker 1: the very early days. I mean, architecturally, tried every different
Speaker 1: type of combination of components, of wavelength of lights, of
Speaker 1: you know, semiconductor materials, of everything to be able to
Speaker 1: do this, and I think we actually counted, Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was over two thousand. I think it ended up being
Speaker 1: four thousand different ways of failing before you could actually
Speaker 1: have the right combination of components that can solve all
Speaker 1: of these different problems that you're trying to solve. For
Speaker 1: what does it even mean to say you're trying four
Speaker 1: thousand different things. That's a lot of different things. It's
Speaker 1: it's a lot of different things. I mean, in some
Speaker 1: of those cases we were prototyping it. In most of
Speaker 1: those cases, it was it was more on paper or
Speaker 1: in simulation, and you know, it turns out the really
Speaker 1: presumably to some extent, you're putting things on cars, you're
Speaker 1: trying things. You're putting Jane prototypes on type of cars
Speaker 1: and driving around the parking lot or whatever. Yeah, totally, totally, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I think the first system that you have together, you know,
Speaker 1: took up a whole trunk, you know, of the car,
Speaker 1: just to be able to prove out the concept. By
Speaker 1: the way, when you first put together these prototypes, you know,
Speaker 1: without your own custom components in it, there too still
Speaker 1: would blow up. You'd have you know, receivers that would
Speaker 1: like suddenly fry themselves. When you say blow up, do
Speaker 1: you mean literally or metaphorically? Oh no, literally literally something
Speaker 1: blew up in the trunk of your car or something.
Speaker 1: Or tell me tell me about something blowing up. That's
Speaker 1: what I wanted. Yeah, well, I mean you used to
Speaker 1: have it where you know, the office shelf receivers, you know,
Speaker 1: before we building our own custom receivers, they would end up,
Speaker 1: you know, they couldn't handle the amount of the energy
Speaker 1: from the laser pulse and they would just fry themselves,
Speaker 1: you know, so it would be it would be stuff
Speaker 1: like that. Um, talk about problem and talk about trying
Speaker 1: to do a you know, a demo ten years ago.
Speaker 1: There two of what you're of, what you're putting together,
Speaker 1: and then next thing, you know, your your your receivers pride.
Speaker 1: So that's that's smoking smoke coming out of the trunk. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly why why did Chip let the smoke out? You know? Yeah,
Speaker 1: stay inside? It was like a mad scientist lab that
Speaker 1: we had there, you know, I mean it was it
Speaker 1: was the real deal. So so okay, how do you
Speaker 1: go from you know, things blowing up in the lab
Speaker 1: to a system that actually works where it's cheap enough
Speaker 1: to put on regular cars. The key was, you know,
Speaker 1: reducing the number of components you know, in the device.
Speaker 1: Normally you require these you know, hundred laser hundred receiver
Speaker 1: arrays you know to build you know, something that has
Speaker 1: any reasonable level performance. You know. Basically found a way
Speaker 1: to be able to do that using only a single
Speaker 1: laser in single receiver as opposed to requiring one hundred
Speaker 1: or hundreds. And that was part of the magic. But
Speaker 1: we had to end up creating the most you know,
Speaker 1: special and powerful, you know, and most sensitive receiver of
Speaker 1: its kind in the world, and these special custom chips
Speaker 1: and a very special laser and all these things to
Speaker 1: make that all possible. Is that the key innovation, for
Speaker 1: lack of a better word, is figuring out how to
Speaker 1: get more range and sensitivity with fewer lasers and receivers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was a key part of the critical innovation and
Speaker 1: secret sauce and other stuff to be able to make
Speaker 1: that happen. Absolutely well, how do you do it? I
Speaker 1: mean presumably everybody else would have used fewer lasers and
Speaker 1: receivers if they could have, Like is it software? Is
Speaker 1: it hardware? Is it? But yeah, I mean we literally
Speaker 1: had to make our own custom chips in our own
Speaker 1: systems there too, to be able to make this possible. Otherwise,
Speaker 1: as you said, everybody else would have done it. It's
Speaker 1: not out So you're not you're not just like monkey
Speaker 1: with the laser. You're you're designing a chip. You're designing
Speaker 1: the semiconductor that's going to go inside of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, yeah, we're crazy like that, Like that's that's
Speaker 1: what we had to do, and there was no other way.
Speaker 1: Everything else would just cost thousands or tens of thousands
Speaker 1: of dollars, and we had to even work at a
Speaker 1: completely different wavelength of light and completely different special materials.
Speaker 1: Those to the existing stuff just wouldn't get you still
Speaker 1: to come on the show and still to come for Luminar.
Speaker 1: How do you build and sell wide our systems at
Speaker 1: scale and make a profit. That's the end of the ads.
Speaker 1: Now we're going back to the show. Is there a
Speaker 1: moment when things and I know it's not binary, but
Speaker 1: is there some moment when it sort of flips from
Speaker 1: basically not working to basically working? One of them? I
Speaker 1: didn't you still see the image online? It was it
Speaker 1: was down Palm Drive here and Stanford exactly exactly, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's Stanford. And are you watching it in real time?
Speaker 1: Is the car like drive on a Palm drive and
Speaker 1: you're looking at the car controlling the system there too,
Speaker 1: I'm looking at it? Yeah, yeah, absolutely, So you're looking
Speaker 1: at it on your laptop. You're basically seeing what the
Speaker 1: system is seeing on your laptop in the car. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I had a monitor rigged up in the car there too,
Speaker 1: so I can actually go go watch and had a keyboard,
Speaker 1: had had a whole set up there too. Then, so
Speaker 1: you're sitting there, you got the thing rigged up, somebody's driving,
Speaker 1: you're looking at the laptop and what so they're driving.
Speaker 1: I'm there, I have a system set up, boot it
Speaker 1: up to go, turn it on and see what the
Speaker 1: output is. And then next thing, you know, you just
Speaker 1: have this just this beautiful image of everything, or and
Speaker 1: I say beautiful in an almost artistic way, because like
Speaker 1: I've just been you know, for ten years and even
Speaker 1: at that time for years, just so deeply embedded in
Speaker 1: the data. I almost like see data, you know, like
Speaker 1: the matrix, like like the matrix exactly. No, that's the thing.
Speaker 1: It literally looks like you're in the matrix. Because you
Speaker 1: can fly around this three D world. It's like totally abstract,
Speaker 1: you know, colorations and perspectives and everything that you could
Speaker 1: never do in the real world. So it actually is
Speaker 1: kind of wild. What do you see in in this instance?
Speaker 1: What do you see? So I'm seeing rows of these
Speaker 1: palm trees here, which I think it turns out, are
Speaker 1: just really really distinctive and really interesting looking in the
Speaker 1: live ar at least because you have these different palm
Speaker 1: fronts that then all become incredibly distinctive where you can
Speaker 1: just see even all like the texture and the detail
Speaker 1: of these leaves, where it can zoom and fly through them,
Speaker 1: you know, in three D because you could rerender it
Speaker 1: any angle. That's the part of the software that we had.
Speaker 1: You know that that was just absolutely mind blowing to
Speaker 1: me at the time. And I was like, oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: it's it's it really all came together to work because
Speaker 1: you don't know, right, you know, I mean, you you
Speaker 1: try this stuff over and over and over and over
Speaker 1: and over again until you can get like you can
Speaker 1: get it to be in a really good place. So
Speaker 1: not only are the pump chase beautiful, but your your
Speaker 1: thing is working, your system is working. Yeah, exactly, Like
Speaker 1: I always had these tears of joy, and I was
Speaker 1: like looking out of you know, because it's picking up
Speaker 1: stuff so far off, because it's you can see so
Speaker 1: small away. It's picking up stuff one hundreds of meters away,
Speaker 1: centimeter level precision detail. I mean, not to mention the
Speaker 1: whole thing's actually working in the first place. You know,
Speaker 1: it's it's um because the tech all came together and
Speaker 1: that there's stuff like that that that just makes all
Speaker 1: that different let's talk about kind of where you are
Speaker 1: right now in terms of what vehicles you're in and
Speaker 1: going into, and also where you've gotten the cost to
Speaker 1: and sort of what you still need to do that
Speaker 1: you haven't done yet. The overall goal of what we
Speaker 1: have from a big picture standpoint is to move. It
Speaker 1: is to build and enable the uncrashable car. So to say,
Speaker 1: you know something that where we can eliminate vehicle accidents
Speaker 1: and make any thing of the past, And is there
Speaker 1: I mean, do you have like a well one hundred
Speaker 1: year vision when you say the uncrashable car, do you
Speaker 1: have a year in your mind when it'll be possible
Speaker 1: to build the uncrashable car? Well, that's why I said
Speaker 1: the hundred year vision. But no, no, no, But but
Speaker 1: I think lifting already from a system that's there today
Speaker 1: much less for the future, could already start preventing massive
Speaker 1: amounts of accidents. Tell me about what what sort of
Speaker 1: the frontier for you? Clearly you've made this thing work,
Speaker 1: carmakers are starting to buy it. What haven't you figured out? Yet?
Speaker 1: What are you working on now that you still haven't solved?
Speaker 1: Execution scale? You know, continuing to evolve and mature of
Speaker 1: the business, you know, building software layers on top of
Speaker 1: the hardware. How is the how is the unit economics?
Speaker 1: The unit economics seem like they could be hard. You're
Speaker 1: not the only company selling lighter There are other big companies,
Speaker 1: like you know, there's a hard Wares is a famously
Speaker 1: hard business, partly for that reason, Like is that hard?
Speaker 1: That part's less hard? Actually? Um, I think that's something
Speaker 1: when you have a fundamentally differentiated and value technology there too,
Speaker 1: that just is distinctive. The only thing that actually matters
Speaker 1: is how you can successfully execute and how you can
Speaker 1: be able to build this up. Because right now, what's
Speaker 1: the percentage of cars out there that are that are
Speaker 1: currently lighter equipped or going to be lighter equipped? I
Speaker 1: mean in the immediate it's still like, you know, less
Speaker 1: than a percent, you know of the overall market. Like
Speaker 1: this I was going to get your market opportunity, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's like, yeah, it rounds to zero, you know.
Speaker 1: So that that's the thing is that you know when
Speaker 1: you when it comes in with this whole next wave,
Speaker 1: you know there's that trillion dollars of opportunity, you know
Speaker 1: that you have ahead to do it. It's actually, I mean,
Speaker 1: is it is it hard to be profitable? Like, is
Speaker 1: it hard to get the profitable? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean but here's the thing, here's the thing right now,
Speaker 1: it's a game of survival ever everything. I mean, you're
Speaker 1: you're you're familiar with the macroeconomic environment and everything for
Speaker 1: like growth technology companies there too. You can't raise money,
Speaker 1: you know, you're basically ninety percent of companies out there
Speaker 1: are totally screwed, you know, because there's no opportunity to
Speaker 1: be able to actually deliver on you know, a real
Speaker 1: product towards the real industry with real revenue and real
Speaker 1: capabilities or any real order book. Luminar is losing money, right,
Speaker 1: Luminar is not breaking even, No, we're not. We're not
Speaker 1: profitable overall as a company on a unit economics basis obviously,
Speaker 1: you know, for for the contracts of the stuff that
Speaker 1: we have signed up for that that is you know, uh,
Speaker 1: generating real money there too for us. But is it profitable?
Speaker 1: Are the unit economics profitable? I mean, obviously it's generating
Speaker 1: revenue yeah yeah, yeah for the production absolutely yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: so um yeah no no, And that's important of course,
Speaker 1: because you know it we lose money on every linear
Speaker 1: but we make it up in volume. Yeah, you make
Speaker 1: it up in volume. Yeah, exactly, exactly, Which, just to
Speaker 1: be clear, that is the strategy of like a lot
Speaker 1: of these growth companies and technology of these A lighter
Speaker 1: companies and av companies and everything is just obviously that's
Speaker 1: sustainable only for so long as long as you can
Speaker 1: have venture money funding it. Yeah, when the venture money
Speaker 1: isn't there, So when you're going to be profitable in theory,
Speaker 1: if you know, if you said, hell or high water,
Speaker 1: we're going to become profitable this year, you can you
Speaker 1: could find I con find a way to do that.
Speaker 1: It wouldn't be the right move for the business, but
Speaker 1: you know, there's also ways that you can love her.
Speaker 1: You mean, basically, stop stop spending money on R and
Speaker 1: D essentially and just make and sell the thing that
Speaker 1: you already know how to make and sell. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I could stop all investments for our future exactly, you know,
Speaker 1: but but that would be dumb as well. So you know,
Speaker 1: we've been in a good position, but it's it's just
Speaker 1: to be clear, it is not easy, Like this stuff
Speaker 1: is really freaking hard. In a minute, the lightning round,
Speaker 1: including the finer points of dropping out of college and
Speaker 1: how to hack both hardware and, maybe more impressively, the
Speaker 1: Bay Area real estate market. Now let's get back to
Speaker 1: the show. I want to finish. I appreciate your time.
Speaker 1: Almost done. I want to finish with Lightning round A
Speaker 1: bunch of quick questions. Absolutely, what's the most useful thing
Speaker 1: you learned in your twelve weeks of college? That it's
Speaker 1: not for me? Good? Who should drop out of college?
Speaker 1: Anybody that wants to build a great business and not
Speaker 1: being massive amounts of student debt. Okay, it's a ringing
Speaker 1: endorsement of dropping out. I like it's it's it's a
Speaker 1: spicy take, absolutely, and it's not for everyone. It's it's not,
Speaker 1: but but the reality is is that it is for
Speaker 1: a lot of people, and I think that's something that
Speaker 1: needs to be a more celebrated path. Who's your favorite inventor? Oh?
Speaker 1: Probably maybe Isaac Newton. Uh it's interesting to think about
Speaker 1: him as an inventor, Like, well, in your mind, what
Speaker 1: did he invent? Calculus? Yes? Sorry, the field of optics?
Speaker 1: You know from optics? Yea, optics and of course, uh
Speaker 1: I read that when you were a kid and your
Speaker 1: parents wouldn't let you have a have a cell phone.
Speaker 1: You hacked your Nintendo Wei to make it a phone?
Speaker 1: First of all, is that true? And second of all,
Speaker 1: if so, do you still hack stuff around the house now?
Speaker 1: So source it's it's partially true. It was my Nintendo DS,
Speaker 1: so that's that's all it is true. I did also
Speaker 1: hacking Nintendo, but as a difference, yes, DS makes more sense. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah exactly. Then a guy actually care about has a
Speaker 1: has a microphone at a speaker, had you know a
Speaker 1: void capabilities there too, so you know it always do
Speaker 1: fun stuff like that. Any example of a big or
Speaker 1: small hack in your adult life, actually talk about hacks.
Speaker 1: There was literally something like a content called like a
Speaker 1: hacker house, you know that you'd have that you were,
Speaker 1: you'd have a bunch of entrepreneurs. Let me the same
Speaker 1: plant watch Silicon Valley. Yes exactly. So when when I
Speaker 1: first came to Silicon Valley, I actually ran a number
Speaker 1: of hacker houses there too, which was talk about a hack.
Speaker 1: You know, no one would fund my business or do
Speaker 1: I have anything to do with this early on because
Speaker 1: they're like what the heck? You know, like that sounds
Speaker 1: crazy and all this stuff. So I actually ended up
Speaker 1: self funding it by renting out a bunch of these
Speaker 1: crazy mansions, you know, take out debt to go do that,
Speaker 1: and then would sublet each of the individual rooms to
Speaker 1: other entrepreneurs, you know, for thousands of dollars per month um,
Speaker 1: you know, to be able to actually then generate revenue,
Speaker 1: generate income that it would would fund towards the business.
Speaker 1: Is that the way you funded Luminar at the beginning?
Speaker 1: That was a huge part of it. Yeah, yeah, that
Speaker 1: was that was that was That was it. Austin Russell
Speaker 1: is the co founder and CEO of Luminar. Today's episode
Speaker 1: was produced by Edith Russelo, edited by Robert Smith and
Speaker 1: Sarah Nis, and engineered by Amanda k. Walk. I'm Jacob Goldstein.
Speaker 1: I am not on TikTok, but I am on Twitter
Speaker 1: at Jacob Goldstein. You can also email us at problem
Speaker 1: at Pushkin dot fm. We'll be back next week with
Speaker 1: another episode of the show.