For those that don’t have a product that is fully developed, I think it can have an effect on the timelines that people were thinking about as well as in general on the development cycle. The reason its been less detrimental to us is that we are very specifically focused on execution at this stage. If you don’t have that ability to have quick feedback and kind of a more innovative mentality and problem-solving mentality, that could be a huge challenge towards successfully realizing a vision. Russell: In the earlier stages of the business, I think this could be catastrophic. MarketWatch: What pitfalls are you seeing from remote work? It’s not just a binary “all on” or “all off” thing and that’s what we have been learning. There are times when you can form small in-person pods of people to be able to work with and quarantine together. You want to make sure you don’t lose that element of creativity -from those personal interactions. It’s definitely different but when it comes down to it, you have to work even closer with your leadership team. What has changed of course is being remote, we have probably a majority of our workforce remote. Our timelines haven’t changed, our deliverables haven’t changed. Russell: At the most fundamental level it remains unchanged. MarketWatch: How has your management style changed during the pandemic? Therese Poletti’s Tech Tales (May 2019): Critics call Tesla’s Elon Musk ‘irresponsible’ for casting doubt on need for lidar sensors in self-driving cars While Tesla CEO Elon Musk has called Lidar "a fool's errand," many experts believe it's a necessary safety component for self-driving cars. Light-detection and ranging, or Lidar, sensors create 3-D maps of the world around autonomous vehicles. You can get a nice paper published in Nature Science or wherever but if you want to actually see it proliferate throughout world and have it make a difference, that’s where going all in on it from a company side made sense. It kind of sticks in this academia cycle. It’s something that I was really surprised to see despite the importance and significance that it was going to dictate over the course of the next couple of decades how few people were in the photonics world. Most of the time the kind of research that goes on, it doesn’t actually find its way into the real world. Russell: I saw it as a new frontier for the way industry was evolving. I’ve always thought of things differently I was building supercomputer systems when I was 9, 10, 11 years old. It became clear these $100,000 roof rack setups of giant spinning systems and other things were not ever going to make their way into production vehicles much less meet the required performance and safety specifications. Russell: What particularly focused me on Lidar (laser technology) and specifically Lidar for autonomous vehicles was just the massive societal as well as economic impact that you can have. MarketWatch: You started Luminar as a teenager. I still work closely hands-on with the team, as we get through things. We’ve been able to meet all of them, but no question it’s been an intense process. There are still timelines and deliverables that we have to hit. Russell: You can’t let it pause everything that’s going on with the actual company. MarketWatch: What has the COVID situation been like for you and your company? In an interview with MarketWatch, Russell talked about remote work, why Elon Musk is wrong about autonomous vehicles and what it’s like to be a billionaire.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |