Austin Oehlerking
Austin Oehlerking is Co-Founder and CEO at Boxbot, a company based in Oakland, CA that is building the future of last-mile logistics. [He is hiring!]
“Our thesis with Boxbot is that the first scalable application of self driving technology will be the delivery of things, not people.”
Looking back on your childhood, were there any signs that you’d grow up to be an entrepreneur?
My dad had a very successful career in enterprise software sales, but every quarter he went through hell trying to hit arbitrary sales targets that usually depended on one big deal coming through. I could see the stress this caused, and he always encouraged me to start a business and control my own destiny. Also, neither of my parents went to college, having come from blue-collar Chicago in the 70’s. So, when I fell in love with science and engineering, they were thrilled to send me to the best school I could get into, which ended up being MIT. I always looked for ways to combine engineering with business, starting off with simple things like designing websites in high school. At MIT in 2004, entrepreneurship was not yet in vogue like it is today — the most popular path was taking a job at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey after school. So, along with a group of close friends, I founded a club called ThinkBIG (Business and Investing Group) to connect students who were working on startup ideas. The next year I cofounded SharpEdge Studios to create a video game that was like a massively multiplayer version of asteroids.
What lessons did you take away from that first company?
First, market timing is critical. We were trying to combine multiple new concepts into one game on a difficult platform (PC) — including microtransactions, an extensive virtual economy, casual gaming, and more. In hindsight, mobile would have been the perfect platform, and indeed several huge mobile gaming companies were started a few years later using similar ideas. But that platform was not available in 2005, so we should have adapted our product rather than trying to force everything to work at the time and drowning in complexity.
Second, all of the co-founders need to have the same commitment level, preferably all-in. This is especially difficult for student-led startups since every founder starts out as part-time. SharpEdge had 5 co-founders, which was definitely too many. We decided to split the equity on a rolling basis every month by looking at how much each of us had contributed over that period. The unintended consequence was that we wasted a large amount of our already limited time arguing about equity instead of building the product. This taught me that working through difficult conversations and decisions early on pays off quickly.
Tell me about your current company, Boxbot.
The other half of my time at MIT was spent at the Field Intelligence Lab building robots and electric vehicles. After that, I ended up leading engineering teams at two EV companies for several years — Arcimoto and Tesla. From these experiences, I knew that I wanted to build a company in the autonomous vehicle space. I ended up cofounding Boxbot in 2016 with Mark Godwin, who has an amazing background, including a Berkeley PhD focused on model predictive control and over 15 years of intense experiences like competing in the 2009 DARPA Urban Grand Challenge.
Our thesis with Boxbot is that the first scalable application of self driving technology will be the delivery of things, not people. When you are delivering physical goods, you can restrict the problem set in several ways that allow you to run a compelling, profitable business and learn rapidly before needing to perfect every function of the autonomous system. Starting off at what’s referred to as Level 4 autonomy is part of the solution, but there are other critical aspects as well. I can’t go into all of the details of what we’re doing yet, but I’ll say that we’re taking a unique approach compared to most of what we’ve seen out there so far. We’re nearly two years in with about 20 extremely talented teammates, and it has been an amazing experience so far.
Insight you have about the space that most people don’t appreciate?
I think many people are afraid that automation and autonomous vehicles will eliminate millions of jobs in the coming years, but I disagree. Especially in the case of supply chain technology, there are so many tasks that humans are way better at than any cost-effective robot could be in the short term. The labor force is also highly strained with the rapidly expanding home delivery market, so I believe that for this generation of workers, automation will be an augmentation tool that will only be used to drive higher productivity rather than eliminate jobs.
In the Bay Area, reasonable people disagree as to the value of higher education, Master’s Degrees in particular. You have both a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA. Worth it?
Yes! But I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it in every situation. I looked at grad school in a couple of ways. First, in the case of the Master’s in Engineering, it was an opportunity to improve on my skillset gaps that I discovered while building electric vehicles at Arcimoto. In the day-to-day of a startup, it was hard to find time to learn much of the theory that I knew would be useful. I returned to MIT and focused on key subject matter areas like power electronics and microcontroller programming where I was lacking.
Second, I found that while balancing a full-time job, my intent was always to be crafting startup MVP’s on the side, but the reality was that I was always too burnt out by the end of the day to do so. After several years at Tesla, I realized that the only way to break this cycle was to quit or go back to grad school. I decided on the MBA program at HBS with the sole intention of figuring out a business to start in those two years.
A lot of people in the Bay Area would say you don’t need a structured program like HBS and that you’ll learn more by starting a company immediately. I totally agree with that if you’ve already found an idea you’re passionate about and that you could see yourself working on for a decade or more. In my case, I knew that I would benefit from taking some time off to think more broadly about my goals and ideas. I figured that surrounding myself with really smart and ambitious people during that process couldn’t hurt, and in fact it’s been extraordinarily helpful.
