will.i.am & Austin Russell: Mute the hype, amplify the product

0:00Scaling a business in the US can feel like a maze. Each state has its own payroll, benefits, and compliance rules, pulling your focus away from growth, which is why founders use Deal. Deal is the professional employer organization, or PEO, that gives you a dedicated HR expert, plus Fortune 500-level benefits for your team. The National Association of PEOs says businesses can grow twice as fast if they use one. So, if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com. slash MOS and get up to three months free. One of the patterns I've seen over and over and speaking with successful founders is this.

0:40They don't wait for HR problems to show up. They build solid systems early on so their company can grow without tripping over itself. JustWorks is one of those systems. JustWorks is the human resources platform that helps you scale without sacrificing your team's needs. It handles automated payroll, benefits, compliance, even international hiring, so you can scale your team without slowing your momentum. JustWorks secures your hiring systems so they don't cost you time, money, or people, which is how you scale with confidence. JustWorks for your people. I had a stance, right? It was called the B-Boy stance.

1:23Back in the 80s, every artist started off rapping on the corner for their boys. Like, yo, check out these rhymes they just wrote. Some guys would be standing around listening. Their arms folded, looking straight ahead with a certain look and a certain energy. The B-Boy Stance. Cops used to be driving by slow-looking, mean mugging the cops. The B-Boy Stance. That's Damien Earl Mathias, better known as E-Love. E came up in the 80s hip-hop scene, co-producing and performing with LL Cool J on the Def Jam label. You can hear him on their second-ever release, Get Down. Yo, Earl, tell a party people a deal.

2:10Yo, this E ain't no thing can't complain, get cast like a motherfucker. Pastor J! Right, I'm back. He talks how I rap you. But he's got another quieter, early claim to fame. His perfection of the B-boy stance. Bill Stephanie calls me up one day. Bill Stephanie was a Def Jam executive in charge of marketing for the iconic rap group Public Enemy, featuring Chuck D and the legendary hype man Flavor Flav. I said, hey, Chuck, I want to talk to you. I said, okay, sounds real serious. I said, okay. Along with being a legendary emcee, Chuck D held a degree in graphic design. And Chuck had seen a picture of E!

2:50in Rydon magazine, striking a textbook B-boy stance. Chuck wanted that image for his group's new logo. He actually took the picture and he put the bullseye on top of the picture. He said, oh, it lined up perfectly. You might have seen their logo. It's a silhouette of a man in a B-boy pose, behind the crosshairs of a riflescope. We did a deal where they paid me for my likeness. And to this day, it's the number one logo on hip hop. That's not just E's opinion. Complex Magazine rated it number one in their top 50 greatest rap logos. The power of this image can't even be calculated. A silent B-boy on the corner, up against the world.

3:36Which is ironic, since Public Enemy is also famous for having one of the greatest, loudest, most intense, in-your-face hype-man industry. See, Flav is really loud. I'm not really a super loud person, but I get the job done in a different way. Flav's humor, his crowd work, and his, yeah, boy, was Public Enemy's sound. But so was Chuck's intensity and the quiet power of the logo's design. The way Public Enemy approached marketing has lessons for every entrepreneur. There's plenty of power in hype and building buzz and your go-to-market strategy. But sometimes the best thing you can say to get people's attention is nothing.

4:24That's why I believe that to help your business reach epic heights, learn when to keep your voice low so that the product can speak for itself. You got to have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going home. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to, this is totally going to be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. Working out of a three-bedroom apartment. Stuff that just seems absolutely nut balls. Ten years later, we're like, well, that's just how you do it.

4:59We haven't made it just how you do it.

5:04This is Masters of Scale.

5:13I'm Will.i.am. I'm a musician, artist, and a tech entrepreneur, and your guest host for Masters of Scale. And I believe to help your business reach epic heights, learn when to keep your voice low so that your product can speak for itself. I want you to take a second, close your eyes, and imagine you're in the third grade. You've had this stuffed animal, a teddy bear. Your whole entire childhood. You also had this brown Fisher Price cassette deck. And you thought to take this thing apart and shove it in the back of your stuffed animal. And you wanted to show it to your class at Show and Tell. Do you go to class and tell everybody what you've done?

6:06Anyone can talk. Don't you think you're going to ruin the surprise? Or do you let the scuffed animal sing to the class?

6:20Okay, so you probably know we're not just talking about the third grade. When you're thinking about how to get people excited about your business, hype can be your friend, but it can also backfire if it's not authentic. or if you let the hype get ahead of what you can actually deliver, then it's just hype. And you can hyperventilate on hype. The less you speak, you allow whatever it is you dreamt up to speak for you. Hype is also hypothesis. You want to have real solid, and this is how we're going to do it. This is the plan. Here is the strategy. Here is the path to materialization. So I want to talk to you about my friend, Austin Russell, because Austin's approach to unveiling legit work and world-changing technology is all about saying less and letting your product do all the talking.

7:17I think that there's an important part of show, then tell, rather than the other way around. What I want to do is be able to demonstrate and create the technology and then show it off to the world. I think it's actually very important to under-promise and over-deliver. There is a reason why Austin likes to let his tech speak for him. He's a founder and CEO of Luminar Technologies and a trailblazer in LiDAR. That's the light and radar technology that makes autonomous driving possible. His partners include everyone from Volvo to Mercedes. And actually, it was through Mercedes that he and I got to know one another.

8:00And we have another connection, which we talked about in our interview. I just want to say that it's an honor to be kicking off Masters of Skill with someone who I think is a freaking superstar in many ways, but more importantly to a group of people, a community around the world that I've been blessed to be a part of called First Robotics. Yeah, absolutely. And amazing program there, by the way. And awesome to see your involvement in that. If you don't know, First Robotics is a youth robotics competition that I've been involved with for over a decade. And it's a program that Austin came through himself when he was 13 to 14 years of age.

8:43What high school did you go to? This place called St. Margaret's. It was down in Southern California. Actually, you know what, maybe like an hour and a half south of here where we are. So you're a Cali guy. Yeah, yeah. OG Cali. And how old are you now? So I am 28 now. That's another thing about Austin. He started all this very young. He founded Luminar at 17 years old when he was still in high school. He was 25 when the company went public via SPAC. And at this time, it made him the world's youngest self-made billionaire. What a B. Not a million, a billion. So, as you can see, it's hard not to get hyped about Austin's story because it's pretty unbelievable.

9:27I started off at a very early age, you know, always wanting to know the hows and whys things worked, always taking things apart. One story that gets told about him is that he memorized the periodic table of elements at two years old. His fascination with science only grew and blossomed from there. Check this out. He started his first lab at nine years old. By the time I was like 9, 10, 11 years old, I converted my parents' garage into, you know, an electronics lab, you know, and then ultimately in optics and photonics and laser lab. And not because his parents were scientists. My parents have nothing to do with science, technology or physics or anything.

10:05You know, my dad is in commercial real estate and, you know, my mom did some like, you know, modeling and like public speaking stuff. But they would always joke. It's like, oh, you just let Austin do his like black magic in the garage and slip food under the door. You might say that young Austin was deep in stealth mode as he worked on inventions like his own VoIP. You're probably asking, what's VoIP? VoIP is voice over internet phone. He did that at nine. Well, my parents wouldn't give me a cell phone early on, so, you know, I had to figure out some way to do it. I mean, it's actually not like crazy complicated to be able to create a VoIP phone.

10:40What were you doing at nine? I was freaking playing G.I. Joe. I was eating cereal. By the time he was 12, his ambition for the garage lab outpaced the kind of equipment he or his parents could source on their own. That's when he learned that companies like NVIDIA and Intel might be able to sponsor his work. Some of these companies heard about some of the work and research I was doing from some stuff that I had posted and published online. I think there was also a little bit of word of mouth about this crazy kid in Southern California that was innovating some bizarre ideas on laser systems. This cat is like not only building stuff, he's trying to network with the world's greatest freaking tech companies.

11:28Reaching out to Intel like, yo, sponsor me. 12. NVIDIA, sponsor me. 12. What were you doing at 12? I wasn't thinking of freaking contacting Nintendo at 12. I was just playing Super Mario Brothers. I was trying to get moved from Fruit of the Loom boxers to briefs. Check this out. Austin says he doesn't even remember which online forums he posted on. Only that there were places where a few industry insiders were able to find him. So now it was time to turn up the volume a little bit. went to their offices, made a pitch of why I should sponsor my work. Yeah, it definitely got some weird looks. When people realized like some of the research that it was doing, that it was actually done by someone in their early teens.

12:14I guess that kind of happened throughout my whole life. You know, people were thinking you're either absolutely insane or some kind of genius. And people weren't clear which way it would line up at the end of the day. When I hear that story, I'm like, dang, I was 30 when I worked at Intel. This dude was 12. He beat me by like 17 years. That's what I hear. I hear it like being outpaced by a 12-year-old. Kudos. Salute, bro. That's some hustle. You should change your name to Austin Hustle. But his pitch will not work if it's all about hyping himself as this awesome prodigy. His job is to show them his research and let the work do most of the talking.

12:59And that strategy worked. He got his sponsorship in the form of lots of new equipment. I think they probably had to pay me in chips because they probably couldn't, like, child labor laws, they probably couldn't pay me in dollars. As Austin built up his lab and his knowledge, he started honing in on one area of studies, photonics. If it's been a while since you were in the physics lab, photonics is a science of creating, detecting, and manipulating light. We're talking everything from telecommunications to LED to lasers. And it was those lasers that really captured Austin's imagination. When he was 15, his parents introduced him to someone who would influence him to set him off.

13:44Jason Eichenholz. We'd be jokingly called him Kevin Bacon of the photonics industry. He's like, you know, six degrees of separation from like everybody. buddy. Jason got Austin a job at the Beckman Laser Institute at UC Irvine when he was just a teen. It's also where he started quietly formulating his life's mission. As much as he loved research and study, he found he was most interested in photonics and real world applications like how they could make driving safer before he was in his 20s.

14:24When you take a look at vehicle accidents, you know, it's actually by some metrics the largest and most significant cause of fatalities between ages 1 and 44. That's something that is a directly solvable problem that we can do by just not allowing cars and the drivers of cars to smash into the things right in front of them. How do you do that? By building sensors that correct for human vulnerabilities autonomously. And before we get any farther, let's break it down. There are six levels of autonomous driving. They go from zero to five. Zero is total human operated, like not even power steering.

15:04And five is fully automated. No human in the front seat. You might expect that as a teenager with big dreams, Austin would be totally hyped to get to level five. But his actual mission targeted somewhere like level three. There's fundamental problems that have to be solved that aren't just about like a leap to replacing drivers. There's a very clear value proposition of being able to enhance drivers rather than replace drivers. People just dramatically underestimated how difficult it really is to truly replace a driver and how difficult it is to enable autonomous driving-like capabilities. Even with the most advanced camera-based systems out there on the road, you still can barely come even to a safe stop for something right in front of the car, much less, you know, complex scenarios.

15:52Austin's dream wasn't the shiny robo-taxi future. It was building quiet systems that worked in the background, the ones that can save your life without you even noticing. So at 17, and still the age that people are when they go to high school, he founded a company to do it, Luminar Technologies. His co-founder and chief technological officer was his mentor, Jason Eichenholz. Austin was on his way. Now he just needed to quietly drop out of college. And we'll hear that story after the break.

16:36Real leaders don't back down when the stakes are high. They innovate, they push forward, and then they take the stage at the Masters of Scale Summit. Join us in San Francisco, October 7th to 9th, to hear from the CEO of the New York Times, scientists using cutting-edge technology to find cures, the leader of crypto powerhouse Coinbase, a retired four-star general, and many, many more. Apply now at mastersofscale.com slash apply25. That's mastersofscale.com slash apply25. If you're ready to take your startup from idea to impact, then AWS is your launchpad. From data storage to machine learning to secure app hosting, AWS gives you the tech trusted by the world's fastest scaling startups.

17:26And here's the best part. Join AWS Activate today and you could score up to$100 ,000 in AWS credits tailored to your stage and network. Go to aws.amazon.com slash activate and start building. Expanding your business in the US can feel like a maze. Every state has its own payroll, benefits, and compliance rules, which can pull your focus away from growth. That's why founders use Deal. Deal is the professional employer organization, or PEO, that gives you a dedicated HR expert plus Fortune 500 level benefits for your team. The National Association of PEOs says businesses can grow twice as fast if they use one.

18:09So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com slash M-O-S and get up to three months free. We're back with Austin Russell of Luminar Technologies and how to harness the power of quiet. To watch exclusive clips from my interview with Austin, including our chat about the future of generative AI, head to the Masters of Scale YouTube channel. You'll find the link in our show notes. When we left Austin, he had just founded his company, Luminar Technologies, along with his mentor, Jason Eichenholz. Austin himself was just 17 years old and headed to Stanford to study physics. But even from the beginning, his sights weren't on the life of academia or even on graduating.

19:01I was extremely and abundantly confident. Stanford was like the only school that it applied to in the first place. We're going to get the lab set up. They'll be there for however many months or whatever it takes to get a foot in the ground in Silicon Valley. And then, you know, if it takes off as well as they think it can, then we'll run with it and create the business.

19:25Like the music business or fashion or media, entrepreneurship runs on relationships that allow people to connect on a personal level. The more collaborators you know well, the less you have to shout out when it's time to hire people or to finance your next project. You get to keep the conversation low volume and personal. Austin saw that Stanford was a great place to have those low conversations. But then he got a nudge that sped up his timeline for dropping out.

19:58It was actually Peter Thiel that really convinced me to kind of push me over the edge to do it very quickly. Austin ended up winning a Thiel Fellowship worth$100 ,000. These are awarded to students who drop out of college to start a business. This moment in Austin's journey builds on a story that's been hyped in tech media for years. It's a story of a young founder who drops out of school to create Microsoft or Facebook, or on the flip side, Theranos. But according to Austin, the Teal Fellowship wasn't a dramatic launch into the stratosphere. Instead, he put his prize money quietly to work. So I'd get these like bomber houses in, you know, really, really good neighborhoods throughout the Bay Area.

20:44These mansions between 10 to 30 ,000 square feet. I would sublet each of the individual rooms to like other entrepreneurs, hackers, Stanford professors, like whatever it may be. Like we just get like an incredible community of people together. It wasn't long after Austin created a so-called hacker house that a powerful and timely honored scale accelerator quietly kicked in. There's a phenomenon that happens in the underground. It's called word of mouth. No sign on the door, nothing on Google Maps. If you know, you know. And people who knew wanted in. That happens from business, music, fashion, anything on earth.

21:28And it takes skilled people to go from the underground to the surface. And the skills you need on the underground is the power of network and word of mouth. People would pay huge premiums to just be a part of these communities and learn from other people. You know, one guy soldering something in one room, another guy was programming something in another room. Someone fell asleep on the floor working on some project that they were working up all night for a hackathon the next day. You know, it was kind of like a crazy personalities and then like a Stanford professor writing stuff on a whiteboard or like some new theory.

21:59Like it was pretty wild environment. In these houses, people would share ideas, find advocates and sometimes their next co-founder. All without putting on a single ad on a recruiting website. Turns out the ultimate form of due diligence on someone is living with them. As a source for talent, one house tucked away in the hills near Palo Alto stood out, the Portola Valley Hacker House. That was really where a lot of the Luminar folks that I 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 a formerly a tank farm and museum, where it had like the largest private collection of like military vehicles on site.

22:40So it was kind of crazy because you saw these tanks driving around everywhere. And sometimes we would go tank drifting up in the hills, which was kind of fun. Tank drifting, if you're wondering, is pretty much what it sounds like. A driver driving a literal military tank intentionally oversteers until they lose traction, sending the vehicle skidding along the pavement. But when Austin and his team weren't reenacting the Fast and Furious, they were using the massive space to research, test, and build. You had this huge garage area. It was great space because it was like, you know, used to be filled with a bunch of tanks.

23:15So it was like perfect for a vehicle workshop of like integrating these laser systems and technologies. And we would just hack it together all day and all night until we got the technology to work and proved it out. We've talked some about Austin's goals with Luminar, which was to advance autonomous vehicle guidance systems and making driving safer. We set this 100-year goal and vision for the company to have the opportunity to save as many as 100 million lives and 100 trillion hours of people's time over the next 100 years. That's a big, loud goal. But Austin knew no one would believe the hype without the right technology.

23:56So let's get a little bit more detailed about how it would work. Just Lehman's question for the field. What's the difference between LiDAR and camera-based systems fundamentally? The whole point of a LiDAR system is it gives you a 3D view and perspective on the environment. So you're measuring the exact distance down a centimeter level precision of everything going on around you. A camera will give you a 2D view and perspective of generally red, green, and blue colors in the environment. And it's great for the kinds of things that humans see. But when it comes to computers and processing and AI and all that, you know, there's only so much you can do without knowing the true depth information of what is actually out there.

24:42And cameras obviously have limitations on when they work. Yeah, I mean, the majority of accidents happen at night. The whole point of the LiDAR, in addition to being able to get the 3D depth, is that it sees the exact same, whether it's pitch black outside or whether there's bright sunlight shining under the sensor. To be clear, Luminar didn't invent LiDAR systems. They were trying to take them to the next level. And Austin was confident that he had the team to do it. There was just one problem. Frankly, I don't think anyone even was remotely on board. By anyone, Austin's referring to investors that might give him money.

25:26To be fair, you know, it's a little bit crazy of like, you know, you have some like 17-year-old that's going to create some billion-dollar business that's going to beat out, you know, Google and Apple and all of these other automakers to have this new kind of laser system. that's 100x the performance of what's out there today. VCs often describe their job as investing in the founder more than the founder's idea. But to Austin, the prospect of a 17-year-old software engineer with an app is very different than a 17-year-old building complex laser systems that move autonomous vehicles driving through your block on the road.

26:06This was something that was a hardware system and technology that involved laser physics, working from the semiconductor level up, and then also working in the automotive industry altogether, which all those things are very, very hard things, and most venture capitalists will tell you never to do. Whether this mistrust from VCs was real or perceived, either way, Luminar started out by bootstrapping and using the funds coming in from the hacker houses. Austin and his co-founder, Jason, knew that eventually they need real capital to get to scale, and they weren't going to raise it with just a minimum viable product.