Y Combinator Startup Podcast - #24 - Padmasree Warrior on Designing Autonomous Vehicles - With Anu Hariharan at the Female Founders Conference

Episode Date: August 9, 2017

Padmasree Warrior is the CEO of NIO.Anu Hariharan is a Partner at YC Continuity.

Hey, this is Craig Cannon and you're listening to Y Combinators podcast. Today's episode is with Padmasri Warrior and Anu Hariharan. Padmastri is the CEO of Neo and they design autonomous vehicles. And Anu's a partner at YC continuity. This conversation was recorded at our fourth annual female founders conference, which took place here in San Francisco this June. All right, here we go. Next, you're going to meet Padmashri Warrior.

Forbes calls her the queen of electric car business. Padmashri is the CEO of Neo and also the chief development officer. Neo designs smart autonomous vehicles. And prior to this, Padmashri held sea level positions at Cisco as well as Motrola and is on the board of Microsoft and Spotify. Thank you for being here. So I think the first question that a lot of them really have is you've spent more than two decades in really successful skills.

killed companies. Why neal? So yeah, that's right. For over two decades, I worked, I started my career actually as an engineer. I'm an engineer. I started in the semiconductor industry as a line engineer working in fabs

and eventually worked my way up to become the chief technology officer for Motorola semiconductor business, then eventually the whole company, and then moved to Cisco in 2008. And I was at CTO first and then CSA. and then eventually CTO and CSO.

And I left, and Cisco about a year and a half ago, I left in September of 2015. When I left, I didn't know what I was going to do, but I knew that what I didn't want to do, I knew I didn't want to do the same job twice. In other words, I didn't want to go into another large tech company in a C-level position because I felt like I have done that

into very large companies. I this time wanted to go somewhere where I could impact a whole industry and change a whole industry. So I was kind of thinking I wanted to start my own company, either in the education vertical or in the transportation vertical. Both I felt were industries that have by and large been stagnant and have always had technology on the periphery, never central to the industry. And then I joined a Neo. We work on building autonomous electric vehicles. The focus is really on how we would all spend our time when we're not driving anymore. So the focus is really about how do we improve people's, how do we give people time back

from driving and freeing you from the chores of driving. So we focus a lot of user experience. So it's a fascinating time to be really in this industry and rethink everything. Yeah. And I remember one of the things we had discussed before, you said that even though the industry, you know, the car seems like something that men purchase. You said actually the consumer buying decision in most many cases is done by women. So how do you bring that in the product design or as you think about, you know, the evolution of the car, even under Neo?

Like, how do you think about building a team around that? Yeah, so when I started in this role, I didn't know anything about building cars. You know, obviously I was a consumer and not really a car guy, but I love, I think of it. of it as a consumer product. So we spent about six months doing a lot of user research. You know, what do people buy vehicles for? What do they look for? And it's interesting, actually, in the United States,

more than 50% of the buyers for vehicles are women. And many of the women that we interviewed said that even when they go to a dealership today and they go with their spouse or boyfriend and that person says, my wife or my partner is actually buying the car in the dealership. the sale is actually made to the man. And they ignore the woman, they talk to the guys, and they tell them about all the features that they think the men like.

And so that was one interesting find. And the second thing we found was women always struggle because they're sold minivans and labeled soccer moms and ignore the professional side of what a woman want. And many of us work and have families. And so many people told us, I don't want to be a...

I don't want to drive a vehicle that kind of pigeonholes me in the sucker mom image. I want something that is also beautiful in the vehicle and has got space inside for my children or for my bags or whatever. So their needs of not being met in the product category, and this is the largest buying power in the country today for vehicles. So it was sort of like interesting to think how one of the most aspirational consumer product completely ignores more than half the population. and more than half the demographic that's actually consuming that product. So we are taking a lot of these factors into our design criteria as we look at it. Obviously, you never build a product for a particular gender, but it's more for the utility and what people are looking for.

So I think that was a big eye-opener for me. And it's very true. I think you have to either choose between a beautiful car, but it's very compact and has no space or something that's giant and looks ugly. There isn't anything that's in between. Yeah. So where do you think self-driving is headed,

and what is your vision for Neo? So we are targeting to have what is known in the industry as a level for self-driving car by 2020, meaning that the vehicle will be fully capable of driving itself, but we are building our car with the steering and pedals, and so to allow you to drive if you want to drive it. And we think that actually allows us to overcome any regulation barriers

that might get in the way, because there is a human in the loop when you are driving. I think fully autonomous level five vehicles are probably further away, maybe 2025, maybe even 2030, expectations vary. I think the technology will be there. I think to me there are three axes that have to all come together. One is the technology has to be matured and developed and be reliable and safe. The second is the cost of the technology has to come down,

and it will come down over time. LIDARs and sensors have to come down. and the compute platform is very powerful in this vehicle. And the third is actually human behavior itself, right? Like my generation, a lot of people, we grew up where we were taught a particular way to drive and you have to take a driver's license test and you pass a test and you hold the wheel and you're taught how to hold the wheel. There will be a generation coming now, right, who will bypass that.

They don't need to drive. And so there will be a transition period just as we went in the mobile internet space. and so iPhone is now celebrating its 10th year, right? So before iPhone, when I worked at Morolla phones were very different and we didn't expect something like a phone to look like a smartphone back then. Similarly, I think cars in the future will be very, very different. So all these three things I think will intersect and the future will be very exciting for all of us.

Imagine I work in San Jose. My company is there and I was coming up here. Imagine if I could just sit back and do whatever I wanted to do, take a nap on my way back, you know, instead of worrying about traffic and driving. I've seen the video of your product, which is very exciting. I can't wait for the car. Yeah. Now, you've built, you know, you've been at successful companies, but you've also built them at scale. And you've talked a lot about how great teens are what makes a company great. So what tactical advice do you have for founders here in terms of their first 10 or those first

50 hires because you've stressed a lot about how that is really important in how you build a company culture that you also treasure. Yeah, I think when you're a founder of a company, there are, I think it's much harder, by the way, to start a company than to be in a big company and lead

a big company in the following ways. When I started at Neo, I was employee number 16, there were 15 people that were kind of already there. But I think I only had one engineering person and we had two trailers in a parking lot. in San Jose and you basically are starting from nothing in a vision and I think so to me tactically

the first 10 hires 20 hires 50 hires 100 hires are very very important in my company i personally interviewed the first 150 people that we hired and made offers to because the first 100 people hire the next thousand people and if you want to scale the company right each of them will hire 10 people and so your bar has to continue to remain very very high and So my advisors as a founder really pay attention to the people that you're bringing in. I think the previous speaker talked about it. I love the way she said it. It's better to have a hole in the organization than an asshole.

So I think it's like very, very true. I think you really have to be very selective and look for the right kind of talent, but also the right kind of a fit. The second thing that I watch out for, and this I realized as we were scaling, now we're about 350 people in the company. You know, one of the other things that happens is as you scale the organization, you go from like 100 people to 300 people at that stage. You're not hiring anymore. Your leaders are hiring.

And the tendency would be for them to bring people they know, right? And so you create these islands of microculture, which you don't want to have. So in my company, we have a rule that every hire has to have a diverse panel that hires the people. So diverse in terms of the gender, it can be an all-male panel, or a diverse. an all-female panel that interviews, does the interviewing, but also people that are from the hiring group, but also people from outside the group, that can ask people different questions.

So obviously, you ask, you know, in our case, we look for a lot of specific technical skills. You know, so you test them for those technical skills, but people from finance or corporate dev also interview them to ask them general questions. So we look for technical depth, behavioral leadership skills. And so you ask them things like, in your life, what's the toughest thing you faced and how did you overcome that?

It may not really have direct relevance to the role because one of the things we believe is the person's true character is tested when they're faced with their very traumatic situation. So how did you overcome that? So we ask things like that and then we make decisions. So that's the second very tactical advice that I would give because we actually learned it by the way the hard way.

We were doing it and we found we were creating microcultures where people were hiring from the place they came from. And so soon we had like this group, that group and these little islands which we're all stuck together. And then the other thing I would say is culture is extremely important. And it starts from the very beginning. So in my company, one Wednesday a month, and we pick Wednesday because it happens to be the middle of the week, we take time out four to six o'clock in the afternoon.

We call it team time. And we go to our cafeteria. The whole company comes and we do some fun activity. And, you know, it's not just to have fun, but the industry. intent behind that is to institutionalize the fact that it's okay to take a break. We don't want people to burn out. Everybody works hard. We have to take care of ourselves when we do this, and we do this as a whole company. We all take a break together, and we're under very tight pressure right now. We're shipping the car. It's going into production, so people, teams are under a lot of pressure.

So we still do this, and we still do two hours, you know, and it's legitimate, take a break. And the second reason we do it is allows people from different functions to come together. So you don't become siloed in the company. And so the intent is that, but we obviously don't do it. We don't state that. We do some fun activity and team activity. So that's one simple way you can build something fun in the culture. People look forward to it.

It actually gets fairly competitive. We have people rotating to host team time. And so everybody comes up with their own theme. Sometimes it's a competition. It's a treasure hunt. It's kind of something goofy. One day we built toy cars and we lace them to see which car goes. So vehicle engineering team in my company was very competitive

and actually the software team won the race, which was interesting. So I think we do things like this that I think it's very important as you scale the company, you're focusing on the right things. And you also have quite a distributed team, geographically. So how do you make sure that they are all sort of aligned

with a shared purpose or shared mission? Yeah, this is interesting. Our company also has a very different model. We are what we call a global startup. up and if we figure this out, I think there will be a case study I was telling Anu that will be taught in business school someday. And the thesis is this. We feel like the two biggest markets are China and US for vehicles.

And each one is going through a major transformation. In China, it's a big movement from internal combustion to EV. It's now the largest EV market in the world. And the US, we are rapidly adopting autonomy and self-driving cars. So when we started the company, we said, okay, how do we create a company structure that can win in both markets. Today it's very difficult to do that. So we started two companies.

Essentially, there's China company and a U.S. company, and we share very capital-intensive things like manufacturing and supply chain and design studio, the car design studio. It has pluses and minuses, right? One of the complex things is to manage the requirements that we develop technology for the company in China. They support us for manufacturing. How do we keep everybody coordinate?

So again, goes back to culture and values. We describe values for the company. For very simple values, we say it's vision, it's action, its care, and honesty. And so we go back, and the way that's interpreted in China is very different in here, obviously, but we go back to that. And then we make sure roles are very clear, which team is doing what, and that we're not stepping on each other's choice. So we'll see how it works.

It's sort of an experiment in its own way. Yeah. I also want to go back and sort of trace your career part because that's something which is really fascinating. So you did your engineering from IIT Delhi in chemical engineering and then went to Cornell. How did you make the decision from that to go to Motorola? Yeah, so I'm a chemical engineer. My academic background is in chemical engineering. My master's degree was doing materials.

And so when I was actually, when I came to the U.S. from India as a graduate student, I came on a student visa. My goal that time, I thought I wanted to be a professor. I was going to do my PhD and go back to India and teach. And then it was quite accidental that I ended up working for Motorola. It's a very funny story. I actually, I don't know if you know, Cornell is in upstate New York, and I left a snowstorm and came to interview with Motorola back then in Arizona,

bright sunshine. And I said, God, and I was from India back then. I wasn't used to snow and stuff. I said, okay, whatever job they give me, I'm moving here. I'm going to take a break from my PhD, and I thought I'd work for a year and go back, and I never did. Because I really found working and creating concrete products was to me actually much more interesting.

So as I started as a line engineer and worked my way up to become the chief technology office. You stayed there for 23 years? Yeah, I stayed there for 23 years. But back then, Morolla was a very diverse company, so I got to do many different jobs. So every two, three years almost I was doing something very different. I started in manufacturing, then went into technology transfer, and then research, and eventually became CTO.

Got it. So you, and then did you come to Silicon Valley for Cisco? Right. So I moved to Silicon Valley in 2008. I moved to become the CTO for Cisco. Got it. So you've been an engineer in the late 1980s. You've been in the valley now for a while.

Has anything changed being a woman engineer? So there are very few women engineers. I'd love to see more women engineers. I think in the technical areas, there's still, the ratios are roughly the same. I think when I went to school, it was about 14% in engineering, and now it's about the same.

So in some ways, it hasn't changed any at all. You know, if you just look at the numbers in the last 20 years. It's still very difficult, I think, for women in technical field. And I've been an engineer pretty much my whole career. I just moved to different roles in engineering. I just spoke at Microsoft with their women engineers. And I think roughly the numbers are the same across multiple companies.

So if you just look at that, you feel like, okay, nothing's really changed. The fact that now we are speaking up more is, I think, that has changed. I think in the past probably we would not have said all the things we are saying and calling out. And I think that's great. We should continue to do more of that. I think we shouldn't let anybody at no matter what level they are in any company get away with things that sometimes they think they have a license to get away with. That I'm very proud of.

I think in just the last year, we've read and we've all followed all of the stories that have been coming out. Not stories, they're reality, actually. Right, which is shocking in some ways, and you think like, wow. But in other ways, you feel like we knew this was happening. Now we're acknowledging this is happening, and now calling it out and holding people accountable. I think that's a great step forward. Now we need to say how do we stop these things from happening in the first place, right? Yeah.

And as a woman engineer, you've talked about this before. How did you, you know, did you feel you had to behave like a man sometimes or change your style of work? Absolutely. When I started, I was, I think there were probably very few engineers in factories and semiconductor factories. I started as a factory engineer. We were actually told to dress a particular way.

We couldn't wear any color. told to wear. I think it was totally time to wear gray and try to blend in. And see the shoes. And again, I came from India. I grew up with a lot of color. It was very alien for me to be that way.

But I forced myself to do it because I thought like, oh my gosh, I had to do this. Otherwise, I won't get a job or I won't be recognized for the work I do. But it made me very uncomfortable. And, you know, after a few months of that, I stopped I said, I can't be who I'm not really as a person.

And now I always talk about how women should be women first. Whatever it is that makes you comfortable, you should dress the way you want to dress, and then let your work define you. I mean, in my company, actually, we do this at team time. One of the things men and women do this, by the way, all of us do this as human being, when we introduce ourselves, notice this, we all introduce ourselves with a job title. And say, hi, I'm Padmishri Warrior, I'm CEO for Neo. We never say who we are as a person.

So when we hire new employees, when we do our team time, we introduce all our new hires, and we have them come up and say some fun fact about themselves. I love cooking. I have a two-year-old or I play the guitar. I love rock climbing. I have a motorcycle that I love to ride on, whatever it is, right? No, why don't we say that about ourselves? And, you know, we have to give ourselves permission to be authentic in who we are.

So that's something that I encourage everyone to do, both women and women. And given all the recent events, what tactical advice would you have for companies to sort of address this? You know, what can organizations, even founders here, what can they do from day one to make sure? Yeah, firstly, I think have your pulse on the organization. It's not an excuse to say I didn't know this was happening. It's obviously impossible to keep track of everything. And when someone raises an issue, make it a priority. Make it, you know, we, in my company, now we're 350 people.

You know, I have a complete open policy. People come talk to me, and when they talk to me, it's not that I just don't ignore it. You know, if they're complaining about something, we try to do something. You know, we fix it. If we can't fix it, we have to go back and say we can't fix it. I think it's very important if you're the founder and CEO, you have personal accountability for everything that happens in your company, and you have to take accountability for that.

Thank you. And I think it's important to have a follow-up, right? There'll be lots of complaints like, oh, the cafeteria is too cold today, or the food came late. Some things are small, some things are more serious, but you have to pay attention to all of them. So I think don't minimize that.

And I think actually I feel like we compete for talent, right in the space we are in, it's very difficult to find the right kind of talent. A lot of people come to work for our company for the mission for their culture. I think it is definitely a factor. Well, thank you so much for taking the time today and for sharing these insights. Thank you so much. Thanks for having them. Okay, thanks for listening.

So as always, please subscribe and rate the show. And if you want to check out the transcript or watch the video, you can check out blog. dot ycombinator.com. All right. See you next time.