| The Brightest-Shining Leader in Life After Silicon  Dear Daily Prophecy Reader,
The lights are on for Luminar! One of my favorite literary tightrope-dancing activities — keeping the adrenalin pumping — is to write books introducing companies before they go public or industries before they sweep the world. Sometimes, as with Micron (MU), the thematic company in my Spirit of Enterprise (1984) — which also now has a market cap of $80 billion — I hit the bullseye. Sometimes, as with Foveon in The Silicon Eye, it doesn’t work out. But that book was mostly about Carver Mead and his entrepreneurial Caltech students. And about his launch of Synaptics (SYNA), with Federico Faggin, which still is thriving with its touchpads and biosensors for smartphones. In Wealth and Poverty (1980), citing the “promethean promise” of such companies as Intel, Texas Instruments, and National Semiconductor, I wrote of: “The callow geniuses of the semiconductor and microprocessor revolution… turning the world’s most common matter, the substance of sand, into an incomparable resource of mind: a silicon chip the size of a fly [that] extends the reach of the human brain incomparably further than oil, steel and machines had multiplied man’s muscle… transforming the world of work and forging at last the long predicted age of computers…” Well, 40 years later, they are still at it. Combining the themes of Microcosm (1989) and Telecosm (2000) is my book of 2018, Life After Google. It devoted two chapters to Peter Thiel’s “fellows,” lured out of college to start companies, and his venture firm 1517 (I’m a founding partner). The leading entrepreneur in the chapter was Austin Russell of Luminar corporation who began his optics innovations at the age of 12 in Newport Beach, CA, and incorporated Luminar at age 17 to provide imager “eyes” for self-driving cars. New digital infrastructure to replace our entire global financial system? Big News for Luminar “Russell resolved to start from scratch and build entirely new integrated systems with each least fifty-fold more resolution and tenfold more range than the prevailing standard…To Russell, nothing matters but performance. There is no long run demand for a system that kills people. Aim at low cost, and you will not achieve sufficient performance to have an enduring business. After a sufficient system is devised, demand will foster economies of scale and learning curves that bring the price down in time.” You may have read about Russell and Luminar last week in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, or other publications heralding its blockbuster public offering that came out at $3.4 billion valuation and ended the day at close to $10 billion. Luminar has received a landmark design win from the global ADAS (advanced driver-assistance systems) leader Mobileye of Israel to supply lidar for Mobileye’s Autonomous Vehicle (AV) Series solution. In addition, Mobileye will collaborate with Luminar to use its lidar for the first generation of its level-4 Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) pilot and driverless fleet in key markets around the world — including Israel, United Arab Emirates, France, and South Korea. Level 4 mobility is part of a set of guidelines determined by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) to describe the differing level of autonomy in driverless cars. There are five levels, with level 1 being the most basic of driver assisted options, such as backup warning signals, and level 5, full-autonomy, the most advanced. Level 1 has been around for years and level 2 is becoming commonplace. Level 4, as targeted by Mobileye’s first-generation MaaS system, includes hands-off driving for long periods of time. Mobileye was bought by Intel about five years ago for around $15.3 billion. The Intel subsidiary is one of the world’s largest suppliers of camera-based sensors used by most top automakers in their advanced driver assistance systems. Luminar has been collaborating with Mobileye for over a year. In addition, Luminar is also working on a number of other, unannounced, major next-generation autonomous robo-taxi programs, with particular focus on those closer to series production. | 
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