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Austin Russell is a Stanford University dropout who turned the world’s youngest self-made billionaire in 2020 on the age of 25 when his startup Luminar went public. Luminar creates sensing expertise to assist vehicles navigate their environment; Volvo, Toyota, and Mercedes-Benz use the sensors.
Russell, now 29, spoke on the Masters of Scale podcast with Will.i.am on Wednesday about how he received wealthy at an early age. Russell, who had a father in actual property and a mom who did some modeling and public talking, says he was 100% self-taught and created a lab in his mum or dad’s storage on the age of 10 or 11.
“[My parents] would at all times joke, oh you simply let Austin do his black magic within the storage and slip meals beneath the door,” Russell mentioned.
He mentioned he at all times needed to know the way and why issues labored, and explored that curiosity from a younger age.
Russell started specializing in optics and lasers in his residence lab at 13; then, at 17 years outdated, he labored at UC Irvine’s Beckman Laser Institute. He determined to deal with entrepreneurship, as an alternative of the tenured professor route, as a result of he needed to create improvements with rapid real-world affect.
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Russell based Luminar, the place he is additionally the chief govt, at age 17 to construct sensors that may make driving safer. He graduated highschool, went to Stanford for a couple of months, then dropped out after receiving a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship to construct his concept over two years.
His aim with Luminar turned extra formidable: to avoid wasting as many as 100 million lives and 100 trillion hours over the subsequent 100 years. An April report from reinsurance firm Swiss Re exhibits that progress in direction of that aim is being made — Luminar’s software program lowered automotive accident severity by as a lot as 40%.
“I believe the best way that you simply finally apply and scale your self must be via some type of enterprise and a few type of endeavor on the finish of the day,” he mentioned.
Luminar founder Austin Russell. Photograph by Taylor Hill/Getty Photos
Russell mentioned he benefitted from the wealth of data on-line, together with lectures that beforehand would’ve been obtainable solely to graduate college students. He claims to have as soon as watched 4 years’ value of lectures on the technical topics he wanted to know “in lower than a month.”
“You are able to do it,” he mentioned. “There’s nothing stopping you.”
Russell has an estimated web value of $1.6 billion, although Luminar’s inventory value has dropped by about 40% year-to-date. Possible causes could possibly be a extremely aggressive market and a small variety of clients that drive a big chunk of the corporate’s income.
He is additionally now not the world’s youngest self-made billionaire; 27-year-old MIT dropout and Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang now holds the title.
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