![]() I think it was Peter Thiel and crew with the Fellowship Program that convinced me to go all the way in asap, given that the time is right. Yeah, I only lasted about six months before - I mean, I always kind of knew that I wanted to go all-in on a company. That was a helpful springboard into the Stanford Applied Physics School there. They saw a lot of the great work that I was doing. Fortunately, I did have a time instead of going to some of my later years of high school, I ended up going to a place called the Beckman Laser Institute for a bit. I think when you get deep into the whole applied physics domain, and even especially with optics, and photonics, and laser systems, that’s where there’s a lot of new ground to be had, and that’s where I went all-in on, early on.Īlejandro : What happened? You got into Stanford, and the initial plan didn’t pan out as expected.Īustin Russell : Yeah. Surrounding that, there are larger defined fields. They have larger degree programs on a huge number of colleges out there. When you talk about fields like electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, and those kinds of things, they’re relatively established. I saw that as a new frontier of how we apply physics into the real world to solve problems in new dimensions. That also led me to get into optics and photonics specifically. ![]() Ultimately, though, I realized that all the hardware is limited by the physics that it runs on effectively, and got into the whole applied physics domain of how do we make all these new systems work in the real world. That’s limited by the electrical work, and I got into electrical engineering and other aspects of that. I got into the hardware side, computer systems, everything. I realized all the software is just limited by the hardware that it runs on. I started out working when I was young, working on some software stuff in the software domain. ![]() It’s important to me whenever I think about working on something, what is the end impact that it has? When you think about the big picture in society as a whole in industry. I know there’s a lot of great work that goes on in the world - theoretical physics and systems and other things. Really, the whole applied physics domain, you can say I always had an interest in seeing things applied into the real world. That was the initial plan to do at Stanford.Īustin Russell : Yeah. Yeah, it was definitely a good one.Īlejandro : What got you into applied physics because I believe that this is what you went after. Mom did a number of things, public speaking, and other things in a prior life. They definitely weren’t familiar with the kind of things I was working on coming from where my dad is on the commercial real estate side. It was great to have parents that were supportive of it. I built a bit of software up to that point, too. I ended up converting my parent’s garage into an optics and electrics lab back when I was 11, 12 to be able to execute on some of these projects, and programs, and other things. With that, it was a big inspiration from when I was like two years old and up, I memorized the periodic table, and always I was interested in the whole science-technology realm. But, yeah, it was definitely interesting in a non-traditional upbringing, so to say, or educational background where - always had an innate desire from Day One of understanding and wanting to know how things worked, why they worked, the way they worked. We’re not quite the taxing of Silicon Valley where I am now - well we also have our office in Florida, too. It was great being in a nice environment in SoCal, growing up. Austin, how was life growing up there?Īustin Russell : It was good. Great to be here.Īlejandro : So originally from Orange County. And without further ado, Austin Russell, from Luminar Technologies, welcome to the show today.Īustin Russell : Thank you. We’re going to learn a lot about self-driving cars - a lot about building things. So today we have a guest whose background is really unbelievable. Hello everyone, and welcome to the DealMakers show. * * * FULL TRANSCRIPTION OF THE INTERVIEW:Īlejandro : Alrighty.
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