It is both surreal and awesome in the literal sense of the word for us to be a part of this story and to see this growth over the last seven years.
Luminar spac series#
Luminar’s list of customers includes 50 major players in the automotive industry, including the lidar industry’s largest production series deal with Volvo to provide units to their fleet of cars in 2022 and beyond. Now the world knows Austin wasn’t crazy - he was crazy awesome. When they weren’t working on the 1.0 version of their lidar sensor, they built electric surfboards and gocarts for fun. This company started in a nondescript warehouse in Irvine, California with a bunch of physics geeks who liked to build things with lasers. Michael in a Luminar electric gocart, circa 2015. By the end of his two years in the program he was ready to start getting Luminar fully underway. But what we did know was that Austin had the attributes of the types of young people we wanted to back: hyper-fluency in a technical field, zeal in getting started on his work, and enough social-emotional intelligence to lead a team, hire employees, and work with investors. And truth be told, we couldn’t tell at first. Austin still hadn’t decided what university he might go to or whether he would pursue the more unschooled route of the Thiel Fellowship.Īfter he applied, while assessing him for a fellowship, we wondered if Austin’s ideas were crazy or crazy awesome. It still seems like only yesterday that we were sitting at a coffee shop inside the Infinite Corridor on MIT’s campus, when Danielle turned to Michael and said, “Hey, that’s Austin and his mom!” They were taking a self-guided tour of the campus. Some things are a long time in the making, but in some sense it’s hard for those early beginnings to fade away for us. It will mark the first company to go public for 1517 and the first Thiel Fellow to do so as well. Luminar is going public via a SPAC which involves a merger, but by the end of this year, they will be listed on NASDAQ with the stock ticker symbol LAZR. This is a tremendous win for the company, 1517, and for all of us working to build new paths outside traditional forms of education. 1517 had some great news break today: one of our companies, Luminar Technologies, announced it is going public at a $3.4 billion valuation.
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