Austin Russell is one Dropout of Stanford University who became of the world the youngest self-made billionaire in 2020 in 25 years old when his startup Luminar went public. Luminar creates sensing technology to help cars navigate their surroundings; Volvo, ToyotaAND Mercedes-Benz use the sensors.
Russell, now 29, spoke about Master's degree podcast with Will.i.am on Wednesday about how he got rich at a young age. Russell, who had a father in real estate and a mother who dabbled in modeling and public speaking, says he was 100% self-taught and set up a lab in his parents' garage at age 10 or 11.
“(My parents) always joked, oh, you let Austin do his black magic in the garage and put the food under the door,” Russell said.
He said he always wanted to know how and why things worked and explored that curiosity from a young age.
Russell began focusing on optics and lasers in his home lab at age 13; then, at age 17, he worked at UC Irvine's Beckman Laser Institute. He decided to focus on entrepreneurship, rather than the professorial path, because he wanted to create innovations with immediate real-world impact.
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Russell founded Luminar, where he is also chief executive, at the age of 17 to build sensors that would make driving safer. He finished high school, went to Stanford for a few months, then dropped out after receiving a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship to build his idea for two years.
His goal with Luminar became more ambitious: to save up to 100 million lives and 100 trillion hours over the next 100 years. A April report from reinsurance company Swiss Re shows that progress is being made toward this goal — Luminar's software reduced the severity of car accidents by up to 40%.
“I think the way you ultimately apply and scale yourself has to be through some kind of business and some kind of effort at the end of the day,” he said.
Luminar founder Austin Russell. Photo by Taylor Hill/Getty Images
Russell said he benefited from the wealth of information online, including lectures that would previously have been available only to graduate students. He claims to have once watched four years of lectures on technical subjects he was supposed to know “in less than a month”.
“You can do it,” he said. “Nothing stops you.”
Russell has an estimated net worth 1.6 billion dollarsalthough Luminar's share price has fallen by approx 40% from year to day. Possible causes it may be a very competitive market and a small number of customers driving a large portion of the company's revenue.
He's also no longer the world's youngest self-made billionaire; 27-year-old MIT dropout and co-founder of Scale AI Alexander Wang now holds the title.