Austin Russell and Luminar Technologies

Autonomous vehicles will most definitely have a space in our society in the rear future. I didn’t quite believe how close we were until I went home for thanksgiving break this mid-November. When my parents came to pick me up, they were in a rental Volkswagen, and I realized just how much autonomy modern cars have. As we hopped on the freeway, my father pressed a button on the steering wheel, and the car was driving itself down the road. It was keeping the correct distance from the car in front of, and behind it, maintaining speed, and keeping itself in the lane. While this car isn’t fully autonomous (the driver had to keep their hands on the wheel at all times) It goes to show just how close we are to that stage. Helping to bring us to that final destination of full autonomy is Austin Russell, the founder of Luminar technologies: A company devoted to making the LiDAR sensors for autonomous vehicles.

Austin started Luminar as a side project when he was 17 and still in high school. He had created interesting contraptions before like a groundwater recycling system, but at this point, he was working on something new. Austin was creating a brand-new kind of computer vision sensor that used a spinning set of lasers to precisely and accurately map out its surroundings down to a few centimeters. Austin worked on this device for years up until he began attending Stanford University. During his brief time there in 2013 (he barely completed a single semester), Austin perfected his device to a point where it worked well enough to go public and caught the interest of the Thiel Fellowship. The organization granted him $100,000 to continue innovating and fleshing out his invention, and that’s what he ended up doing. Shortly after receiving the funding, Austin patented his new invention, dubbing it the LiDAR sensor.

Following the true launch of his product, many companies were amazed about its potential, especially for its usefulness in application such as self-driving cars, where immediate views of the world around a constantly moving object were required. Investors and other companies quickly hopped aboard, funding Luminar for their innovation, and turning Austin into one of the first Billionaires under 30 years old.

While Austin is no longer the CEO of Luminar, He still helped to pioneer the modern autonomous vehicle landscape, and we’re sure to see more of his work appearing all over the world as autonomous vehicles become more common, and legal. Austin is a perfect example of 0-1 innovation due to his innovative idea which lead to the creation of a brand-new type of sensor which revolutionized how we build autonomous vehicles.