Working in a Smaller Environment | Dragos Maciuca

And also we have backgrounds from both— we hired both from Silicon Valley and we brought people from Dearborn. Again, if the pendulum swings too much to one side or another, you get in trouble. So if you have too many people from Dearborn, you just bring in— or from the mothership, you bring in their mentality of how they do things for 100 years. And they're not— you're not going to absorb what goes on in Silicon Valley. If you have only people from Silicon Valley, they don't understand the automotive industry. So they don't understand the requirements, they don't understand the culture, so, and they don't have the network. The network is absolutely critical to know how to transfer technologies back into the mothership. So by having these 2 types of people in the same group, again, it's much easier to get technologies from here and transform that back in the mothership. In terms of— oops, wrong direction. Okay. In terms of being integrated in Silicon Valley, we've so far in a year and a half or so, we connected with over 400 startups. So it's absolutely critical for us to leverage the 150 people that we have to bring in technologies that are developed around here. From previous experience, I know that there are many cases where you can be physically in Silicon Valley but not be mentally in Silicon Valley because you don't interact because you're trying to develop everything yourself. Here we have exactly the attitude that we need to interact with all the startups that are around us, grab that technology and use the people that we have to leverage and increase the technology and bring it in-house. We work actively with about 50 of them, so roughly 10% of what we discovered we actually have projects with them, which is not a bad ratio. You start seeing patterns, you start seeing some leaders in certain areas, and you start working with them rather than trying to work with everybody. We've been working with over 20 VCs that help us either identify companies in their portfolio or we recommend companies to them. There's basically been a very nice symbiotic relationship with VCs because we're not competing with each other. At times we might invest together, but it's not a competition, and because of that, it makes the relationship with VCs extremely good. About a dozen incubators throughout the Valley from San Francisco all the way down to San Jose. And we also have Projects, depending on the technology, we have projects that we do locally. So we bring the technology in-house, we leverage the people that we have here, we do a proof of concept, and then if things go well, we try to pass it back to Dearborn. There is this fine balance to maintain that if we send the technology too early when it may not be baked enough, you run into the risk that the antibodies will say no immediately and you get rejected. If you mature it too much, then they don't take ownership over it and they feel that it's not invented there, so they'll block you that way. So the idea is to keep it to the point of proof of concept where you've vetted at least the core technology, but then you can push it through so that they have a say, they can take ownership for it. And then they can even take credit if you want. Because that's the best way to get something in production, by not claiming credit for it. The other way we work is if we find some technology that's interesting for Ford, but we don't have the skills here, we act as a translator, as a cultural translator basically. So we teach the startups how to work with a large OEM. We teach the people back in the mothership how to interact with a startup. I think the biggest cultural difference is that they are used to deal with Tier 1 suppliers, which are also large companies, also bureaucratic. They understand each other. They've done business for the last 20, 30, 40 years. With startups, the biggest thing I have with them is to make sure that they give us feedback, that if they look at some technology, I get an answer in 24 hours or at most 48 hours if they like it or not. Because for a startup, getting a no is a lot better than getting a maybe. They just don't have the time to deal with people who are going to futz around. And just the mentality of not treating them like a normal supplier, because these are 2, 3-person startups that they can't provide to an OEM the way a tier 1 supplier does. And just recently we announced that we're going to expand, so by next year we We lease now these 2 buildings across the street from us and now instead of having just 1 building, we'll have 3 buildings in Palo Alto. So we're going to have the ability to have up to 300 people. So we're definitely expanding our role in Silicon Valley based on what we've developed over the last year and a half or so. Just a sample of the projects that we've done. that we're working on just to get a sense of the type of projects that we work on. One is SYNC 3, which is our infotainment system, which is an integral part of our connectivity. We first put it in Ford Escape in 2007. And that was actually a really good decision. I mean, looking back, I think mostly it was actually luck. In general, most companies, and I've had really big fights at BMW when I was there, is that they try to put the latest technology always in the highest-end model, which for BMW was 7 Series, for us would be Lincolns. The problem with that is that the drivers of those cars are not necessarily the ones who actually enjoy the technology and are not the ones who adopt it first. They are not the ones who really understand how to use it. And you put it in those cars only because of the cost involved. Putting it in a lower-end vehicle, it actually makes a lot more sense because those are the early adopters. Those are the ones who understand the technology. Those are the ones who even accept more bugs than someone who has a Lincoln RS7 series. So putting it in a lower-end vehicle and then growing it from there was actually a really good decision. That's what allowed SYNC to really penetrate well. So right now it's in over 15 million vehicles. We expect it to go into about 50 million vehicles. We have CarPlay and Android Auto in all of them, so you can basically use the infotainment system 3 ways. You can use it with what's built in the vehicle, you can use it with your iPhone, or you can use it with your Android devices. So basically we give users the option to use it any which way they want. More importantly, and I didn't put it here, it's— we have a Smart Device Link, we call it SDL, which is basically open source, an open source API that allows any app to be emulated inside the infotainment system. And basically what that does, it's not really a mirror, so it doesn't simply take the app and mirrors it to your screen because that may not be usable in the vehicle. We have a set of about 15 or 20 templates That we have approved for in-vehicle use because they are safe. They have large buttons. They have clear text. And then through those devices— through those interfaces, you can emulate the controls for your apps. So basically, all an app developer has to do is put in the API into their app, and then you can actually use that and control it in the vehicle. So right now, we have up to, I think, about 50 apps that are controllable from the vehicle, like Pandora, for example, or a bunch of other ones that you can control from the vehicle and if the vehicle has SDL.