I joined Luminar in 2016 as the company’s 15th daily active user in Slack. I’d been given a broad mandate: “I don’t want to limit you,” the CEO had told me. At the time I joined, we had an engineering team in Florida designing the opto-mechanical system, but in Silicon Valley, it was just Austin (the CEO), his operations lead, and me.
I moved into the hacker house—a 10,000 sq. ft. compound in Portola Valley that we initially shared with 20 other entrepreneurs, creatives, and characters—and there I poured my life into anything and everything I could do for Luminar. That summer, I created all the materials we used for our seed round, for which we raised $35 million, a record in Silicon Valley at the time.
After that, they said, “hey, don’t leave”—so I left Stanford instead, and helped grow the company from 15 to 250 employees. My technical background let me pursue technical details, my performing arts background helped me communicate, and my can-do attitude + my willingness to put in 80 hours a week earned me important work and rewarding challenges. I eventually carved out a role at the intersection of engineering, business, and operations.
Having a front row seat to this period of face-melting growth taught me a lot in a short amount of time. I got a crash course in startup-building—from VC fundraising and business development to production engineering and publishing patents. I got the chance to learn from whip-smart people, who came from backgrounds as diverse as computer vision and recruiting. Austin demonstrated what it was like to be a visionary leader, an inspiring mentor, and a great friend.
I was equally fortunate to learn some things to avoid. I watched our culture change dramatically as our pace of hiring outstripped our ability to teach new people our ways (it didn’t help that we hadn’t decided who we wanted to be beforehand). I saw how letting free-loaders coast could demoralize a team. And I was frustrated every time I came up against someone who took pleasure in saying “no” instead of “let’s figure out how.”
A year and a half later, with the company reaching new heights at a $1 billion valuation, I realized that we would need people with automotive manufacturing experience to take the company to the next level. So I helped recruit and onboard new people to lead the teams I’d helped start, and I went back to school.
At the end of the day, building a successful startup is incredibly hard and rewarding. At Luminar, I learned more, worked harder, earned more responsibility, and worked on way cooler things than I would have done anywhere else at that point in my life. Ultimately, Luminar gave me the foundation to found my own startup.
In 2020, Luminar went public via a SPAC. As of January 2022, the company has production agreements to support self-driving capabilities for Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, and the majority of the world’s auto makers. It is worth more than $6 billion.