An autonomous-vehicle founder explains how his company is moving from research to production cars, guided by a 100-year vision to save 100 million lives and reclaim 100 trillion hours from road travel. He argues that a clear, inspiring mission attracts talent, sustains motivation through setbacks, and helps startups compete against established players.
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Basically, for the first time, I think we're seeing this transformation in the autonomous vehicle space from all R&D into actual real production cars, and we're effectively spearheading that. And again, the important part is that it's not just about the self-driving part. It's also about the safety part. And the holistic mission there is— and we can talk at some point about some of the longer-term vision— but the mission there is to be able to dramatically improve collision avoidance capabilities on vehicles, which, you know, sometimes people take for granted. But the reality is, is that the problem has never been worse, where more and more people, more and more cars are getting into more and more accidents, even despite all the technology advancements that have happened on vehicles over the past couple of decades. So that's what we're really looking to be able to turn around and solve. One of the leading causes of death globally and suffering. So it's an important part of it as well.
And you articulate that in a vision statement. I want you to share what your vision statement is, and can you share how early on in the journey you crystallized that vision statement and what recommendations you have to other founders in terms of how important it is to articulate a vision and when they should put focused attention on that?
Yeah, absolutely. And I would say the most recent iteration of this, and this is from, you know, coming from a few years ago, basically we have this 100-year vision for what's laid out, and the 100-year vision is to save as many as 100 million lives and 100 trillion hours of people's time not on the road over the next 100 years. And every single thing that we do as a company all adds back up towards that vision. And I think it's just really important of, you're going to have amazing days as an entrepreneur, you're going to have horrible days that you wish you didn't exist. And you're going to have to go always back to that holistic mission and meaning for not just yourself, but that whole team around what are we actually doing? What's inspiring in terms of the greater purpose around what we're building and why it's there? And I think the more inspiring of a holistic mission that you can have, the better talent that you're going to be able to attract, the more impact you're going to have. And I think just frankly, there's going to be just a lot more satisfaction with everything that you do. But it doesn't always have to start out So grandiose, it can even just be as, you know, I mean, the first part is just make the best LiDAR, make the best technology. You know, you can have, I mean, even that in itself was ambitious enough because you said we're basically competing with like, you know, the Googles and Apples and every major automaker and every major tier one and other folks there. But then, you know, at some point you just have to keep building and building and building on top of that. Until you can kind of have this bigger picture holistic mission that everything can roll up under and everything that you do. And I think identifying that as early on as possible, whatever that may be, is absolutely critical to the success of a new company that's looking to get great talent and up against incumbents that just don't have that same kind of direction.
