The Youngest Billionaire Who Is Changing Automotive Industry
Self-Driving Vehicles, a market that currently sits at $54 billion. It is said that in the coming 2 decades all car manufacturers would be focusing on self-driving vehicles. With companies all around the world working on autonomous vehicles, one company is helping them achieve it a lot quicker with their Lidar solution. A company whose founder is known as the youngest billionaire, Austin Russell.
Austin was born on PI day, a number that helps understand the universe. His parents saw signs of genius in him from a very young age, they were amazed when the 2 years old boy started uttering the periodic table.
One day Austin requested his parents for a cell phone, but for one reason or the other, they did not want to buy one, possibly because Austin was still in his single digits. He took it upon himself to learn to program, and by the time he was 10, he had programmed his Nintendo DS to turn it into a cellphone. By 13, his curiosity for computers helped him build supercomputers, hardware and something that could potentially change the automotive industry, a laser. This was all done in a lab that he had built himself in his parent’s garage. Even though his parents knew his capability, they still wanted him to complete his studies.
Keeping up with school work, Austin managed to file his first patent at 13 for an underground water recycling system for gardening. Young Austin was obsessed with learning independently, he did not need a university or a college to learn. In his high school days, he researched self-driving cars, his area of interest was one company in particular, Velodyne. After watching a DARPA Grand Challenge where a driverless car completed a lap, Russell knew Velodyne was onto something.
Velodyne at the time were leaders in the autonomous industry, their invention of a 3d lidar was a revolution.
A Lidar is a method for determining ranges by targeting an object with a laser and measuring the time for the reflected light to return to the receiver. They are used to create a 3D map of an environment in real time so that it could enable self-driving cars to identify and navigate around obstacles.
This invention had a huge impact on Russel, he told himself that if he could build a system with lidar that could not only assist drivers but also help save lives in a self-driving vehicle he could make a huge impact on the automotive industry. So at 14, he went on a mission to find a cheaper solution that could be used by automakers.
By the time he was 17, he had already developed his first version of the lidar sensor. By now he was also accepted to Stanford University, but because he was passionate about lasers, he couldn’t continue his studies and dropped out in his first year. His parents were skeptical of his decision, but knowing he already had a lab and a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship, they were willing to support their child. Even though things were in motion before he joined Stanford the business got its real start after he dropped out of college.
The first version was built but could not be used in the practical world. Austin knew to build a workable system he had to spend 100% of the time with his team just on the product, rather than the business side of things. Building a workable prototype took over 2000 attempts.
It took Austin over 2000 attempts to build a lidar system that could be used in the real world.
When asked why his Lidar system was different from mounting cameras and radars on cars he said,
“In general, there are two different types of systems. If you want a car that works great as an assisted driving system, that requires constant human input, and maybe follows a couple lanes on a road, you don’t need lidar at all for that. You can do something very well with just cameras and radar. But the challenge comes down to solving that last 1 percent of all these different edge cases”
Currently, Luminar works with automakers including Volvo, and his competitors are slowly rising, such as Velodyne and Aeva.
“It’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears, a lot of all-nighters,” — Russell
Russell often works 100 hours a week. Luminar went public on Nasdaq in Dec 2020, making Austin Russell the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at age 25,
“the feeling of becoming a billionaire on paper is absolutely incredible and totally surreal” — Russell
Where the company would go is yet to be seen but Austin’s hard work definitely deserves attention and it is a story from which, we could learn. It all started out with passion and a desire to build, to create, to innovate, and to invent.
