How to Earn a Seat at the Grown-Up’s Table
Five lessons I learned from bringing new technologies to the world’s biggest companies
The story of my career actually began over 70 years ago, when my grandfather started as a patent lawyer at Ford in the 1950s, Detroit’s glory days. In the 1980s, my father went to work for Alpha Romeo and Dolorean — yes that Dolorean of Back to the Future fame, in the days when the coupe was king. Not surprisingly, when I went off to college to major in philosophy in the early 2000s, and then started working at Google, my grandfather was certain that our family’s automotive legacy had come to a screeching halt. Little did he know that I, too, would find my own path in the automotive industry.
When I was working at Google in California and immersed in the new digital information economy, Eran Shir was working seven thousand miles away in Israel as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Aleph. While exploring key trends in connectivity, artificial intelligence and mesh network fields, Eran and Nexar co-founder Bruno Fernando-Ruiz recognized a ground-breaking opportunity to revolutionize the world of vehicle networking. And so Nexar’s story began. By developing and deploying a lightweight, inexpensive, over-the-top vehicle-to-vehicle communication network utilizing simple yet intelligent dashcams, Nexar could deliver critical driving safety features to every driver on the road. With car accidents claiming over 1.3 million lives globally each year, it has become more important than ever to equip every car with intelligent safety features, and Nexar would make a massive impact with a scalable new technology.
After eight years of leading media sales teams at Google, and consulting for Fortune 500 global executives at top media agencies, retailers and auto brands like Ford and Nissan on digital strategy, I was ready for a change. I wanted to work at a startup and make a big impact, so I recently joined Nexar as it entered its fifth year of work.
Driven by the increasing interest in consumer dash cams, Nexar has developed a massive driver network to deploy its technology. With over 70 million miles of driving per month and 2.1 trillion images in our Neural Library, we are building powerful, lightweight neural networks to digitize and index the real-time state of the road. By running computer vision algorithms on a user’s smartphone, Nexar’s technology recognizes critical roadside events and sends alerts to vehicles nearby in a matter of seconds. In this way, Nexar is realizing its vision of achieving safety through vehicle networking.
Global automakers had been following Nexar’s progress for years, regularly coming into the office during scouting trips to Israel. As they knew, Nexar was innovating in key automotive domains like connectivity and networking, but the company had yet to break into the complex world of the top automotive companies. It simply was not clear how these automakers could deploy Nexar’s technology within their own businesses.
After meeting Eran and Bruno and seeing Nexar’s technology stack, I knew I had found the perfect opportunity to follow in my father and grandfather’s footsteps on my next adventure. I was thrilled to help Nexar earn a seat at the table and begin working with some of the biggest and most influential automotive companies in the world.
Bringing new technologies to auto manufacturers is one of the most challenging and rewarding opportunities for any tech company. Cars are a big deal, and car makers are an even bigger deal. The auto industry has experienced some headwinds of late, but the reality is that this sector has been, and will continue to be, one of the most influential in the modern age. There are over 1.4 billion vehicles on the road today, manufactured by a few dozen automakers, and car sales continue to rise throughout the world. These vehicles are a part of the very fabric of our societies, shaping the way people live, work, explore, and connect. Automobiles will undoubtedly continue to maintain their critical place within our lives for the foreseeable future.
Working at a high tech startup, it’s worth taking a step back to appreciate the complexities of not just these companies but also their products. The world of automotive manufacturing involves an incredibly intricate piece of hardware, with the average product planning cycle of a new vehicle being three to five years. YEARS. This is not a three-week sprint, and not a P0 vs. P1 vs. P2 debate. This is a product with over 30,000 parts made by over 600 different suppliers, and at Nexar, we wanted a chance to join the ranks of the best of the best.
So, what does it take to earn a seat at the grown-up’s table in the automotive industry? How can you make meaningful inroads with these types of customers?
1. Have a healthy respect for how successful your clients have been and continue to be.
I was fortunate enough to learn this lesson very early in my career. During my first sales pitch for Google to a senior executive at one of the Big Three automakers in Detroit, I went into the meeting armed with data to show how critical our technology was for the continued success of the auto industry. I outlined the dire trends my client’s business was facing: the erosion of brand loyalty, millennials’ greater interest in smartphones than in cars, and a lower sales outlook than previous years. My data-packed story was airtight and ominous, leaving him with a massive dilemma: unless he bought my product, he would go bankrupt. I was sure that I had this in the bag.
He was kind enough to let me complete my presentation, then looked me straight in the eye and said, “Little girl, I’ve been selling cars since before you were born. I’ll continue to sell plenty of cars for a very long time to come.” While I didn’t necessarily appreciate being called “little girl,” this experience taught me a critical lesson that I carry with me to this day: my new technology was not going to upend a 100-year-old industry overnight. And without a healthy respect for my client’s business and acumen, I wasn’t going to get very far in the sales process.
2. Articulate your value in the context of the larger business challenges your clients are facing.
When I began my career working in media sales at Google, I realized there was a greater power for automakers in Google’s search technology than just advertising ROI. The rapidly growing digital information economy meant that automakers were experiencing a massive paradigm shift: while they had once operated in a world of information asymmetry, they now had to work in a world of information parity. Their customers now knew just as much as their car dealers, thanks to the smartphones (aka super computers) in their back pockets. This presented a serious business challenge: the need for information transparency.
Recommending that my clients spend more money on Google ads wasn’t the solution. When I explained how our technology could help them deliver a great customer experience during this existential shift in the balance of power of information, I found my clients eager to find ways to work together in a more strategic and meaningful way. I was no longer merely a media salesperson. Rather, I became a trusted advisor in the digital transformation of their organizations.
3. Spend 80% of your time learning about your client’s business and 20% of your time learning about your product.
There are plenty of people at your company who spend 100% of their time thinking about making a great product. And you absolutely need sufficient technical fluency to earn credibility with your client. That said, if you don’t understand the very detailed ins and outs of their business, you will never bring them a solution they’ll adopt.
How do you do this? Read BOOKS! Over the years, I’ve read dozens of books on the automotive industry, on everything from the Toyota Kaizen method for optimized operations, to Bob Lutz’s diatribe about the bean counters at GM and how Ford managed to weather the 2008 financial crisis without a bailout. The result? My clients took me seriously, even though I was decades younger than them and had never worked in Detroit.
4. Infuse a true passion for your client’s business into your product teams.
At Nexar we have a weekly company All Hands meeting every Thursday called NLM: the Nexar Learning Meeting. This is called a learning meeting for a reason, and as such I make sure to use the time to educate and excite our engineers about automotive companies. I avoid basic status updates on my accounts, and instead take the time to outline the technical intricacies and business complexities of my clients.
I share detailed customer feedback, ground it in industry research, and always make sure to contextualize the business needs in the customer experience. More than anything, I try to get our teams to feel the same level of passion for the automotive industry that I do, so that they feel a sense of pride in our ability to capture the attention of such influential companies.
5. “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
Every day at Nexar I am doing what I am most passionate about: bringing innovative and impactful new technology to the world’s biggest automakers. My teammates and clients can feel that passion for two reasons. First, cars actually mean something to me: personal freedom of movement, a chance to access better jobs and neighborhoods, and the sheer wonder of performing 2,000 complex mental tasks every second of driving. Helping clients also means something to me: I think about how to help them meet their goals each and every day.
I had no idea this would be my career calling when I was 18 and trying to pick a major at UCLA, and yet here I am. And the Balingit automotive tradition lives on.
