Luminar

“This was something that was a hardware system and technology that evolved the laser physics, working from the semiconductor level up, and then also working on the automotive industry altogether, which all those things are very, very hard things, and most ventu…”

“That was really where a lot of the Luminar folks that I had brought on were living and working out of. It was up on, like, hundreds of acres up in the hills of Portola Valley, where it actually was formerly a tank farm and museum, where it had, like, the large…”

“Historically, LIDARs would only ever be able to see in very low resolution and only out, you know, for many types of hard-to-see objects, only 30, 40 meters at most. You know, here we are showing it at extreme clarity at, like, 250 meters with all the right ch…”

“You know, of course unlike Luminar, you know, it's not necessarily going to be that trillion dollar business, you know, out of this, I think it was more something that I saw as an incredible opportunity for impact.”

“It's this kind of thing where, you know, you have this outcome of where it's, like, very, very clear in your head, like, how we're gonna execute on these programs, how, you know, we'll see Luminar in every car, how, you know, it can be a trillion dollar compan…”

“When they, like, they first reached out, we were actually in stealth mode. This is back in 2016. We didn't even have a website. We, there was no information anywhere.”

“It was actually Peter Thiel that really convinced me to kind of push me over the edge to do it very quickly.”

“In terms of the long term plan as you pointed out, we set this hundred year goal and vision for the company to have an opportunity to save as many as a hundred million lives and a hundred trillion hours of people's time over the next 100 years.”