Reinvent, Don’t Retrofit: A Map for Founders Who Want to Create Radical Step Change
Celebrating our journey of reinvention with Zoox and its partnership with Amazon
Reinvention leads to step changes for humanity. Light bulbs, internal-combustion engines, aircraft, radios, integrated circuits, vaccines, and antibiotics revolutionized industries and in most cases were the basis of iconic companies. These are the types of leaps founders are taking as they envision a radically different future. They are the kind we partner with at Lux. Disrupting the establishment and breaking through barriers accelerate us towards a better future. Taking the human out of the driver’s seat is a step change we expect in our lifetimes, and we are proud to have been part of Zoox’s journey reinventing mobility.
In 2015, we met a small team working in a half-complete firehouse with the audacious ambition to reinvent the car from scratch. Their goal was to offer a robo-taxi service and their philosophy was to bring every aspect of mobility — ranging from perception algorithms to vehicle manufacturing — to the logistics of maintaining a robotic fleet. They wanted to do this under one roof, a roof that had yet to be built.
Choosing the Uncharted Path
“We need to know if you believe in our vision,” stated Zoox cofounder Tim Kentley-Klay, “This is not for the faint of heart.” I had cold-called Tim after having been given the heads up from a journalist working on a story on the company. He told us that the former Stanford DARPA Grand Challenge team lead was teaming up with an Australian designer to build a robo-taxi service from scratch. Being an auto enthusiast, engineer, an alum of GM and having spent time talking to Kyle Vogt at Cruise on his retrofit approach, I was immediately intrigued.
Having seen the inner workings of an automotive behemoth, my partners and I at Lux knew that car companies were less equipped to offer a robo-taxi service, just as their stagecoach-building predecessors were less equipped to build production lines. Henry Ford didn’t design the Model T as a retrofitted stagecoach. In fact, Ford succeeded by staying as far away from stagecoaches as possible, unlike his contemporaries. He reimagined the car from scratch with the intent of mass-manufacturing and making it affordable for the worker who assembled it.
Automated mobility requires reinvention. Upon our visit with the Zoox team, it was clear that reinvention was an understatement. They gave a whole new meaning to invention. They had considered absolutely every facet of the mobility problem: one team was building custom rolling data centers using state-of-the-art GPUs that would serve as the robot brains. Having funded Nervana (later acquired by Intel) the year before, we anticipated these computers becoming powerful enough to perform the immense compute necessary to safely pilot a vehicle. Another team was using game engines to build a virtual environment in which the AI could be tested in infinite configurations and a multiple of real time, creating a virtual environment that would prepare the AI for real-world testing.
The Lux Menlo Park team convinced our New York team members to fly in to see the magic in person. We were in awe of the brilliant engineers, the simulations, the cinematic presentation of their vision of our robo-taxi future. The visit culminated with a ride aboard an autonomous bi-directional vehicle. From there, Lux led a Seed financing, and have been proud partners with Zoox on their fascinating journey of reinvention.
Pushing Even Their Own Boundaries
It takes a special team to completely re-imagine an experience and product that hasn’t radically changed in a century. Zoox’s efforts at reinvention did not stop in its early days with computers, software, and simulators. It was only the beginning.
The team went on a prowl to hire the best researchers for sensors, manufacturing techniques, user interfaces, and fleet operations, just to name a few. In late 2015, we introduced Zoox to a lidar startup, which it then acquired to arm itself with its own 3D sensors. It built a team that applied the best-in-class techniques from automotive and aerospace manufacturing to build a production line for its robots. Zoox took the best lessons from ride-sharing, coupled with novel techniques to quick-charge electric vehicles, to make its service efficient and practical.
Knowing When to Take a Co-Pilot
The automotive companies and Tier 1s came knocking, but none were let through the door. Zoox was fiercely committed to its independence so that its vision could remain intact and unburdened by today’s status quo. The company maintained a tenacity to reinvent the car from scratch — to make it safer, more desirable, and accessible than any other mode of transport. Zoox also aimed to create a transportation business built on robots. In contrast, other autonomous car companies were busy retrofitting conventional vehicles with century-old designs that surrounded the driver. Car companies were left with no choice but to flock to the retrofitters, and yet Zoox maintained its independence.
At Lux, we observed the challenges Zoox faced as it reinvented mobility, and funded more companies that would accelerate it. We funded Mythic, which performs AI inference in the analog domain, like our brains, at a fraction of the physical and power footprint of conventional GPUs and ASICs, putting more computer horsepower into the robots. We were founding investors in Aeva, which collapses radar, lidar, and imaging at short and long range into a single sensor so the robots can “see” their environments the way we do. We also backed Applied Intuition, which builds powerful simulators that will further accelerate AI development for all autonomous machines.
As the Zoox team grew to nearly 1,000 scientists, engineers, craftsmen, technicians, designers, artists, policymakers, and safety experts, a need evolved for a new type of leadership for this multidisciplinary team. This is when Aicha Evans joined the leadership team. Having been a senior executive at Intel — a pioneer of Silicon Valley invention — she brought the leadership techniques and institutional knowledge to enable Zoox to evolve it into a durable organization and the kernel of an iconic company.
Charging Up for the Future
As Zoox grew, so did its ambitions to further reinvent. The team sought to answer questions like: how will items, as well as people move? What is the best way to recreate mobility from the ground up, to deliver packages everywhere, quickly and cheaply?
For this great ambition to come to fruition, we realized that Zoox needed a partner with whom Zoox could remain independent, yet benefit from that partner’s vast financial resources and distribution.
Enter Amazon, with whom we are proud and delighted to be partnering on Zoox’s continued journey of reinvention. This morning, Amazon announced its intent to acquire Zoox — the company’s outsized vision and extraordinary technical capabilities resonated with one of the fastest-moving and most innovative companies on Earth. And while it’s never an easy decision to exit from an independent path, we have great confidence Zoox will have the capital and firepower to make a true dent in the world.
If you are a founder who is ready to embark on this type of radical journey of reinvention, you can reach me @farshchi and my Partners @Lux_Capital!
