Russell: I funded early Luminar by running Atherton hacker houses
Austin Russell · Austin Russell (with will.i.am): From dropout to billionaire | Masters of Scale · Jul 16, 2024 · at 19:24
Luminar Technologies founder Austin Russell describes bootstrapping his early hardware and laser research after venture capitalists initially declined to fund the business.
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“So what I would do is I would rent out these large houses you know, first off in, in Atherton, not too far from the Stanford campus and like created what's called like a hacker house and then basically sublet all the individual rooms to other entrepreneurs, you know, that would that would live and work out of there and kind of build that community, duplicated this model to be able to generate profits to initially build up the business and, you know, live for free at the same time.”
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