The 100K check is great, but there’s multiple ways you can generate 100K income to be able to start a business, the real value is the network. And by the way, for things like the Thiel Fellowship, don’t get me wrong. 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. I don’t know how much it fundamentally changes other than accelerates the exact same thing you’re doing. What did I do the next day? That’s what I’m saying, it’s like the same thing that it was otherwise doing. You got the fellowship, you got the check, what did you do the next day?
But at the same time, I think you just have extreme focus around what you want to do, and continue to solve for it, build for it, learn from all the folks around you and just continue to deliver. It maybe seems like a crazy long shot at the time for that to happen and materialize. 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 1.3 million lives lost on the road every year, to be able to have an opportunity to impact that and make a difference. Listen to Decoder, a show hosted by The Verge’s Nilay Patel about big ideas - and other problems. Subscribe here! And in my case I just had a specific interest around optics and 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.
But it all starts with that innate passion and desire to be able to want to build, to create, to innovate and invent. I think when it comes down to it, there wasn’t any kind of miracle step, so to say, involved in that but rather these were already somewhat ongoing projects, even at the time when I went into Stanford, when I got the Thiel Fellowship, everything was already somewhat in motion. What was the next step? Did you sit down and build a LIDAR sensor? Did you have the components for it? Were you like, “I’ve got to make a laser.” What was the next step? Just that middle part of going from “I’ve got a great idea,” to “This company is actually up and running and functional.” So give me a sense of, at the beginning you were a student at Stanford, you got a Thiel Fellowship from Peter Thiel. I want to talk about act two for a little bit. Now you’re a public company with hundreds of employees and you’re a billionaire. In 2012 you were at Stanford, you had this idea to do LIDAR sensors. One thing that I always get frustrated by in origin stories is no one ever really talks about act two. You have a number of deals to supply LIDAR sensors to major automakers. So, Luminar, it’s a company that makes LIDAR sensors. It’s just a lot of things coming together for you there. You are, as far as the last thing I read, the youngest self-made billionaire in America, your company just went public in a SPAC. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.Īustin Russell, you’re the founder and CEO of Luminar.
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