Accelerated with Vitaly Golomb

On this episode, we covered a different kind of autonomous vehicle as I spoke with William Santana Li, Chairman & CEO of Knightscope.

Knightscope makes indoor and outdoor autonomous security robots that have been preventing crimes in the real world for over six years. The company just went public on NASDAQ through a Regulation A listing. Before founding Knighscope, William founded a series of mobility companies raising over $300 million in venture capital. He began his career at Ford, where in a decade, he climbed from an Internship in electronics to becoming a Director on the M&A team.

We spoke about being an unemployable entrepreneur; his thoughts on where we are with autonomy and why baby steps are the way to go; his mission to make the US a safer country; crowdfunding; the future of robotics, and much more...

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On this episode, I had an interview with Asaf Weisbrot, Head of Automotive at Nasdaq-listed Otonomo. Otonomo is a provider of a pioneering vehicle data platform and marketplace, and is positioned at the epicenter of the data revolution in the automotive and mobility space. Otonomo vehicle data is being utilized by businesses, fleets, and smart cities for a wide variety of use cases, including, fleet management, insurance, emergency services, mapping, EV management, parking, and many others.

Prior to joining Otonomo, Asaf built a two decade career in global sales and strategic alliance roles at F5, Ceedo, Flash Networks, and others. We spoke about how data is collected from your car and how it is used by insurance companies and others; the secrets of odometers; micro weather; edge computing versus cloud processing in the near future of autonomous driving; and much more... 

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On this episode, I spoke with Dr. Cetin Mericli, co-founder and CEO of Locomation a Pittsburg-based startup building autonomous trucks. Previously, he was Special Faculty and Commercialisation Specialist at the National Robotics Engineering Center, at Carnegie Mellon University, where he led the Machine Learning and Perception group.

In the past, he has been involved with many urban and offroad autonomous and semi-autonomous commercial and defense driving applications and his research has been published in over 40 publications on a range of topics in machine learning, computer vision, and robotics.

We spoke about soccer playing robots; why not all problems are worth solving; we did not talk about secret autonomous military projects, or did we? We did speak about when we might finally have full self-driving vehicles; how autonomous trucks will affect driving jobs; why engineers don’t think about the trolley problem; how to be happy; and much more….

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On this episode, I had a conversation with Mark Frohnmayer, Founder and CEO of Arcimoto makers of (FUVs) Fun Utility Vehicles and fleet solutions for emergency services and last mile delivery. Their company is based in Oregon.

Mark graduated from UC Berkeley in 1996 with a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. After 11 years leading advanced technology projects in the game development industry and the sale of his first startup, GarageGames, he turned his energy toward solving the worldwide problem of sustainable transportation. As CEO of Arcimoto, he has led the team from concept and startup in 2007 through Nasdaq-listed Reg A IPO. Mark also founded the Equal Vote Coalition in 2014 and he remains connected to gaming as the Executive Producer of Marble It Up.

We spoke about growing up with legos; what games can teach us about people; why Mark built Arcimoto for himself first; the perils of automotive manufacturing and homologating; their place on autonomy; the Cambrian explosion of mobility, and much more... 

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On this episode I spoke with Clare Jones, the Chief Commercial Officer of What3Words - the world’s first addressing system designed for voice that is used in 170 countries and is being adopted by governments all around the world as an official addressing system. Previously, Clare was involved in the development and growth of social enterprises and in impact investment. She was also featured in the 2019 Forbes 30 under 30 list for technology.

We spoke about her upbringing in a UK village which had no addresses and how it brought her to What3Words; how navigation is becoming much more precise with the help of the service; the lives it has saved in emergency situations; and much more... 

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On this episode I had a conversation with Marc Ausman, the co-founder and CEO of Airflow.aero, which is building an aerial logistics network for same-day e-commerce using electric Short Take Off and Landing aircraft.

He was Chief Strategist on the Airbus Vahana eVTOL program an early employee at Eclipse Aviation that brought to market the world’s first very light jet. Marc was also a Board member at the Experimental Aircraft Association and served with the U.S. Navy as a Naval Flight Officer on board the P-3 Orion.

Marc and I spoke about his transition from military aviation to business, the complexities of creating and certifying new aircraft, the eVTOL market, drones, what he is excited about in the near future of aviation, and much more...   

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On this special bonus episode I switched chairs with Brandon Bartneck, the host of the podcast that is coincidentally called "Future of Mobility" just like this season of "Accelerated". Brandon has interviewed numerous leaders in mobility on his podcast and we decided to post our conversation on both of our shows. Brandon and I covered a lot of ground on the current state of electric, autonomous, shared, and connected mobility. Usually I do the interviewing, but today you’ll hear some of my views.

Brandon’s mission is to help develop a safer and more sustainable future. He does this through his work at FEV as well as the podcast he hosts. Brandon leads marketing activities in North America and helps drive the push into new application sectors and new technology areas. FEV is a global engineering partner for the development of sustainable mobility and energy solutions, supporting vehicle development from concept through production. This includes intelligent software development, propulsion system development, and full vehicle engineering. Brandon leads marketing activities in North America and helps drive the push into new application sectors and new technology areas. 

"The Future of Mobility" podcast is a weekly interview-style series highlighting the people and technology helping to develop and implement safe, sustainable, and equitable mobility solutions. Guests include leaders throughout the mobility sector.

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On this episode I spoke with Robert Falck, the co-founder and CEO of Einride. Based in Sweden, Einride is the first fully electric, totally autonomous transport vehicle to operate on a public road in the world. With remote monitoring and operation capability, operators can oversee and control the Pod on-demand, with no need for a human driver onboard. Their electric trucks already count Oatly, Coca-Cola, Lidl, and Electrolux as customers. In May, the company announced its $110 million Series B as it gets ready to launch in the US. Robert talked about what he learned at the start of his career at Volvo trucks; raising money by drinking a lot of beer in the early days; how Einride became the first heavy truck to race at Goodwood and their record on the infamous Top Gear track; what it’s like to work with your spouse; and much more...

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A very special episode with Mate, the 33 year old Croatian founder and CEO of his namesake, high performance EV company Rimac – maker of the world’s fastest production car. In July, Rimac and Porsche, announced that the 112 year old legendary Bugatti brand will be in a new joint venture with Mate as CEO.

I met Mate in 2012, shortly after he started the company. We worked closely on the company's successful Series B financing in 2017. On this episode, we reconnected for a revealing conversation about the difficult years the young team went through getting the company off the ground, Rimac’s unique spin on autonomy, Mate’s view on SPACs, building 100-year companies, and much more...

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This bonus episode of Accelerated Podcast is a rebroadcast of a live East meets West event I moderated earlier in August. It was put on by DIGITIMES Asia and Anchor Taiwan. 

Asia Venturing is a series of monthly roundtables with roadmaps to the future focusing on the hype v.s. the reality of Asia's supply chain-boosted innovation ecosystem, jointly powered by DIGITIMES and Anchor Taiwan. They bring together leading industry luminaries, corporate strategists, experienced investors and entrepreneurs to expand your network and redefine the possibilities of cross-border opportunities.

I interviewed my friend and a friend of the podcast, Monika Mikac, the CBO of QEV Tech and member of the founding team at Rimac Automobili, maker of the now officially quickest production car in the world #Nevera.

The other guest is none other than automotive industry pioneer, Jack Cheng. He spent over 19 years at Ford, where he became Vice President of its China operations, and then served as Chairman and CEO of Magneti Marelli Asia Pacific and Chairman of Fiat and Fiat Finance China. He left to Co-Found NIO and then XPT, the provider of advanced technology components and solutions which are the “brain, heart, and soul” of NIO vehicles. In September of 2018, NIO began trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Today, it has a Market Cap of $74B. In January of this year, Foxconn was able to convince Jack to come back to Taiwan to head up its MIH alliance, an open EV ecosystem that promotes collaboration in the mobility industry. 

We covered a lot of ground on EV, autonomy, manufacturing supply chains, and much more... 

Asia Venturing video replay: https://youtu.be/YZGOqiGwAQ4

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