Omoju Miller, a self-described futurist (someone who studies the future’s possibilities), enjoys picturing tomorrow. As a Nigerian woman who settled in the Bay Area, she’s already torn down historical barriers to work as a software engineer in Silicon Valley, a white man’s world. But in envisioning a new society, Miller isn’t thinking only of contemporary struggles; she’s pondering what humanity will need next. Take one of her projects: Hiphopathy, where she’s using machine learning to parse rappers’ metaphorical language, in the hopes of teaching a computer to think conceptually, developing, in the process, a form of artificial intelligence.
Recently, NationSwell spoke with Miller about true visionaries that inspire her and the lessons we can all take away from their avant-garde thinking.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
I would say it’s learning how to listen and learning how to not do things for people. A good leader is somebody that enables others to rise to their own challenges. In leadership, it’s so easy sometimes to just want to jump in and do the work yourself because you can do it a lot faster. But a good leader does not do that. A good leader is a teacher who supports you as you stumble and figure it out for yourself.
What’s on your nightstand?
The book I just read — well, it’s not on my proverbial nightstand, it’s on my computer — it’s a series of essays by Tim Urban on [the website] Wait But Why? unpacking Elon Musk and his companies. Why did he found Tesla, Solar City, SpaceX? Why does he do what he does? Why did he come from South Africa, move to Canada, then to the United States? How can one man actually think he can be that intelligent that he can create a technology that will move us to Mars so that he can given humanity a chance to exist? The hypothesis is that at some point in time, something is going to happen to Earth that is going to make it impossible for humans to survive. Just like how the dinosaurs went extinct. And the only way you can prevent that happening is if the human species became multi-planetary. And there’s this man on Earth right now who believes he can capitalize enough people and resources to take humanity to multi-planetary existence. That is crazy! That is futurism to the max.
What’s your favorite movie of all-time?
One of the reasons I actually came to Berkeley, Calif., and the Bay Area specifically was because of George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola and the rest of them. I’m a big Star Wars fan and also a big Coppola fan, and I wanted to live in a place close to Skywalker Ranch. I wanted to breathe the same air as the people who gave Hollywood the finger and decided they could tell their own stories and were willing to mortgage their homes and everything to tell their fantastical stories. I can’t say that Star Wars is one of my favorite movies, because it’s not. I think it may be the Godfather series. It’s such a great story, and it’s also very beautiful. It’s a story of people who live life to the fullest. Micheal Corleone needn’t have to be the Godfather. He could have remained what he wanted to be, but the pull of family was so strong. I also love the movies of Spike Lee, and it’s been great watching those over the years because the stories he tells are so different. It’s just wonderful that he’s such a consummate artist.
What do you wish someone had told you when you first became a software engineer?
The first thing I want to tell myself is make sure that you own your own path. Don’t settle for just a job, no matter how fabulous it is. Don’t settle for it, because you have the capacity to invent the future. And [you] cannot invent the future when you’re wasting your time.
What inspires you?
My belief in self- transcendence. At first, I thought I was going to have a normal life: white picket fence and all that kind of stuff. And I want to have that, but the question is, what’s next? When you get to that point, you don’t care about things anymore because you literally don’t care about material things. You are beginning to push your mind and what you can invent and what you can do. And with every little bit I was able to attain, it was like, Can I dream bigger? Can I dream bigger? I think that for the last six or seven years, I’ve gotten to the point where I truly believe I can solve the problems I put my mind to. I’m convinced I can do that. That is enough to make you wake up every day and go do it.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
I would say finishing my Ph.D., because I wasn’t sure I was going to do it. Not because it was difficult or it was hard, no, that’s not the issue at all. It was because there were so many other distractions, there were so many other jobs that I could have taken that would pay a lot more money than staying in school and prioritizing finishing a Ph.D. So sticking it out and finishing it required so much will, because I was giving up so much money every couple of months to keep on doing it. I’m very happy about that.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Tag: Tesla
This Engineer Co-Founded Tesla. Here’s His Next Electric Idea
The automobile industry is a tough business to break into: huge capital outlay and byzantine government regulations have kept three American companies — Ford, General Motors and Chrysler — on top for almost a century. It isn’t easy for a startup to disrupt this scene, but if there’s one man who can pull it off, it’s probably Ian Wright.
One of the co-founders of Tesla Motors, the all-electric car manufacturer whose stock price has jumped 1,040 percent since 2011, Wright has a new vehicular venture in mind targeting the opposite end of the spectrum: electric trucks. His Bay Area company, Wrightspeed, is installing range-extended electric powertrains (the generators that electric vehicles run on) in medium- and heavy-duty trucks for companies like the Ratto Group, Sonoma and Marin counties’ waste hauler, and shipping giant FedEx. Wright admits, it’s far from glamorous — literally, about as far as you can get from luxury sedans — but he believes electrifying commercial fleets will have greater benefits for the environment than capturing a share of the personal car market will.
Up to now, Wright, a soft-spoken, unassuming engineer, has always sat in the passenger seat: a vice president, not chief; Tesla’s “car guy,” (the person who knows the ins and outs of high-performance vehicles) not a visionary. But years of tinkering and observing have all led to this moment. Despite the fact that Wright dresses in crisp, white button-downs and slacks at his San Jose, Calif., office today, you can tell he’s spent countless hours hunched over an engine, his hands greased and black. He’s able to rattle off the horsepower, torque and miles per gallon for various models — knowledge only an experienced collector would memorize — with a familiarity that demonstrates his keen sense of where his company can carve out a niche.
“I’ve always wanted to run my own business,” Wright tells NationSwell. “This is really the first time that I’ve come up with a business plan that I thought was really good. I was a co-founder at Tesla, but it wasn’t my idea. I helped them get the company funding, but it wasn’t my idea. I’ve been at startups and big companies alike. It’s all experience that led me to this.”
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Raised in rural New Zealand, Wright always scored top marks in math and science classes, leading to jobs in the electronics industry post-college. He got his start as an audio engineer for radio stations and recording studios in Sydney, Australia. In 1993, he moved to California, where took a job at Network Equipment Technologies, a communications equipment company, building networking switches for ATM machines. He transferred to Cisco Systems in 1998 to design switches and routers, just as Wi-Fi hit the market. But it was a stint at Altamar Networks, a company that went out of business, that made Wright into an entrepreneur, eager to start something from the ground-up.
Almost by chance, the opportunity to shift his career to electric vehicles arrived at his doorstep in Woodside, Calif. — or next door, really, via his neighbor Martin Eberhard, another Tesla co-founder. Over beers at a party, Wright recalls Eberhard mentioning that he and a buddy were thinking of building a high-performance electric sports car. Wright, a hobbyist who collected and raced sports cars, responded, “I think you’re crazy.”
Wright stuck with his plans for an electronics startup, but the two neighbors met regularly to rehearse and refine their sales pitches for Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists, speeches that gradually began to win Wright’s attention. When Eberhard pulled up in a hand-built electric sports car, Wright hopped in for a test ride. Four seconds later, when the car sped from zero to 60, “I could certainly see how you could make something new and interesting with electric drive,” he says.
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In 2003, Eberhard hired Wright as Tesla’s third employee, serving as the first vice president of vehicle development — essentially the guy who set the roadster’s design in motion. It was a natural fit, not only because of Wright’s love of fast cars, but his electronics background. As electric vehicles began popping up on city streets, the latest technology was no longer being developed by automakers in Detroit, but by engineers in Silicon Valley advancing batteries and electronics.
In March 2004, it was Wright (along with Eberhard) who made a two-hour pitch that convinced Elon Musk to finance Tesla’s nascent business plans. But after spending a little over a year setting up key partnerships, Wright left the company on good terms. “Tesla was all about doing everything they could to make sure everybody’s driving an electric car. And I’m not really a true believer unfortunately,” he recalls. “They cost so much, and the idea that people were just going to pay for them because they should … to be green or something, I never really caught that.”
Still enamored with sleek and sexy speedsters, Wright focused his efforts at the eponymous Wrightspeed on constructing the X1, an electric race car that would be unmatched, even by gasoline-powered combustion engines. (When it debuted in 2005, the X1 was undisputedly the fastest “street legal” electric car; worldwide, it clocked the second fastest acceleration time for any car, behind the $1.25 million, 16-cylinder Bugatti Veyron, which gets 10 miles per gallon.) But when VC firms failed to buy into the idea, Wright realized he needed to temporarily shelve speed and get back to the economics. As innovative as the technology was, he needed a place to apply it.
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Wright scoured the marketplace for buyers who’d also turn a profit from owning an electric vehicle. The technology isn’t cheap, he says, so customers need to save enough fuel to make the investment worthwhile. Take a Prius, for example. The hybrid gets 50 miles per gallon, meaning the average owner won’t use more than 300 gallons of gasoline a year, even less for a city-dweller. With gas priced at $3 a gallon, the most a driver could save is $900 a year, too small an amount to make the upgrade to full electric power worthwhile.
Same goes for the ubiquitous Toyota Camry. At 28 miles per gallon, electric technology could save a motorist $1,600 a year, but that’s still not enough for a car maker to cover costs, let alone turn a profit. In fact, you’ve got to pass SUVs, pickup trucks, vans and box trucks before arriving at the sweet spot of medium- and heavy-duty trucks: vehicles that consume just enough fuel to make the numbers work. Buyers pay more up front, sure, but they’ll reap benefits on the back end with significant gas savings. Each consumes an average of 14,000 gallons of fuel a year, Wright says, costing about $42,000 annually. As a whole, America’s medium-duty fleets burn $22 billion in fuel each year.
Wrightspeed’s range-extended electric powertrains (more on that technology in a bit) save medium-size trucks fuel in three ways. First, they plug into the grid to charge a lithium iron phosphate battery (at a cost of $0.11 per kilowatt-hour), giving the vehicle at least 30 miles of energy. Second, regenerative braking captures the energy of the truck’s motion each time it slows and converts it to stored energy in the battery, significantly extending its range. Third, when the battery is drained, a traditional internal combustion known as a range extender engine kicks in. (It may sound like the hybrid trucks from XL Hybrids — a model Wright believes is “a dead end” — but there’s a key difference. Unlike in a hybrid where the gas engine takes over, these vehicles run solely through the electric motor: the range extender fuels the battery, not the truck directly.) With the extender installed, the truck’s range is unlimited.
All these features work particularly well for garbage trucks since they’re only traveling short distances to landfills and braking to a hard stop every couple of yards, which continually refuels the battery. Wrightspeed estimates that each refuse truck fitted with their electric powertrains would save $35,000 a year in gas and $20,000 in maintenance costs. That’s a payback within just three to five years. And the best news for residents? No more belching exhaust and no more clunky engines roaring into alleys at 5 a.m. The electric version is clean and practically silent.
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When looking back on early experiments with the X1, Wright sometimes wonders why he didn’t instantly see commercial fleets as a prime opportunity. “It’s hard to explain in hindsight,” he says. “I think like everybody else, you tend to scale up from what you know, and at Tesla, we were focused on high-performance cars with high-power motors. It takes an extra moment to realize that means you can do pickup trucks or FedEx trucks.”
Long gone are the days of thinking that electric batteries are just for roadsters. Wrightspeed booked two big orders from FedEx after corporate VPs took turns driving the electric vehicles. (“They all had these big grins on their faces,” Wright remembers.) And that seems to be just the beginning. This summer, the company will be relocating its headquarters to Alameda Point, Calif., across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco where Wright and 25 engineers will have a much larger facility to scale up production. “We’ve got a backlog of orders,” Wright says. If Wrightspeed can tap into just one-tenth of the market for the country’s 110,000 garbage trucks, the company could generate $2 billion revenue.
Does Wright ever wish he hadn’t left Tesla? “No, I don’t think so,” he says. “What we’re doing here is a hell of a lot of fun, and I think it has the potential to save a lot more fuel and emissions.” There is one regret, though: “I kind of wish I had held onto my stock a bit longer.”
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This Innovative Car Company Makes Employing Veterans Part of Its Mission
Remember how Tesla recently made headlines when its founder Elon Musk announced his plan to share the design for Superchargers, the quick recharging stations for its electric cars, with other auto makers? Well, Tesla is back in the news with another forward-thinking plan: To hire more veterans as they expand their product lines and workforce.
Arnnon Geshuri, Tesla’s vice president of human resources, told Dana Hull of San Jose Mercury News, “We want to be known throughout the veteran community as a great place to work. Veterans are a great source of talent for Tesla, and we’re going after it.”
Tesla already does an exceptional job of hiring vets: Of its 6,000 current employees, 300 are veterans. Ted Daywalt, president and CEO of the job board VetJobs told Hull, “[Tesla has] a good reputation. They hire veterans who can talk to other veterans. There is a language in the military, and having someone who can speak the lingo is important.”
While some employers have difficulty understanding that military skills can translate into a civilian jobs, Tesla seeks veterans for their technical and mechanical expertise and their ability to work as a part of a team. Veterans employed in Tesla’s human resources department know just what jobs soldiers would be a natural fit for.
Monthly, the company hosts meetings for its veteran employees to talk and suggest ways to improve operations, and it’s more than understanding when employees who are on active military duty need to deploy. Jason Deming, a vehicle test technician for Tesla who is also a member of the Air National Guard said, “HR was phenomenal with my deployment. I can serve my country and save lives but also work on the forefront of technology.”
Greg Reichow, Tesla’s vice president of production, told Hull that the vet-friendly approach aligns perfectly with the company’s goals. “At Tesla we’re not just building cars. We’re trying to transform transportation,” he said. “[Veterans] also know how to lead teams, focus teams and function on teams, and they have incredible integrity and discipline.”
If only other companies would follow Tesla’s lead, the jobless rate amongst veterans could certainly reach the same (lower) level as non-veteran unemployment.
MORE: Here’s A New Website Bringing Unemployed Veterans and Understaffed Tech Companies Together
What Is the Battery of the Future Made Of?
From powering pacemakers to kids’ toys and everything in between, we rely on batteries every day.
But with lithium — the material we use to make batteries — becoming a less viable resource, how are we going to power our gadgets?
Turns out, there’s an alternative energy source that grows quite abundantly: Algae.
Sounds like a crazy idea, right?
Not to Adam Freeman and his team at alGAS in California.
Algae, which forms in large blooms on the water’s surface, can be harmful to fish living below, but it has huge potential in the battery-powered world. The prototype creator says that his algae battery is powerful enough to run anything — even a Tesla!
Not only would an algae battery be incredibly versatile, but it could also charge in a fraction of the time that current, lithium batteries do. Turns out, the incredibly thin fibers found in algae are much more conducive for ions to flow through, making charge time as quick as eleven seconds, according to Tech Crunch.
While this innovation is certainly eco-friendly and time efficient, it is also cost efficient: the lithium imported for batteries not just nonrenewable, but it has to be shipped from China — making batteries more costly.
Although still in testing phases, Freeman says he would be able to make a functioning battery prototype with $1,500 more in funding; $5,000 more and an algae-powered battery it could be ready for mass production.
Between Freeman’s work and this experiment that transformed algae into crude oil, this water plant is on track to become a significant part of America’s renewable energy landscape.
DON’T MISS: The Top 5 Ways to Fight Global Warming
Tesla’s Brilliant — and Generous — Move to Help Save the Planet
In a world where patents protect everything from Apple’s rounded corners to Amazon’s white backgrounds, Tesla Motors founder and CEO Elon Musk is doing something completely unprecedented: Releasing his electric car patents for all.
This means if other automakers want to make e-cars, they can use Tesla’s technology to do so.
We just told you about the tech visionary’s offer to share the technology behind his Superchargers — the fast-charging, plug-in stations for his company’s electric vehicles — with the competition.
MORE: Is Tesla’s New Idea the Foundation for an American E-Car Infrastructure?
And now, in a blog post titled “All Our Patent Are Belong To You” (shout-out to the Zero Wing nerds!), Musk wrote that Tesla’s wall of patents have literally been removed from the lobby of its Palo Alto headquarters “in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.”
He adds that his company will not “initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.”
Why would Musk do such a thing? In one word: Sustainability.
As the eco-conscious entrepreneur writes, there are 100 million new cars on the road per year, but it’s “impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis.”
You see, with all the hype about electric cars over the years (and a slow uptick of sales), it still hasn’t become mainstream to own one. We know plug-ins are much more environmentally friendly than typical gasoline-chugging, smog-emitting vehicles, but e-cars can be expensive and niche. (Tesla’s 2014 Model S costs about $70,000 but they’re working on a cheaper $30,000 model).
ALSO: Driving an E-Car: Not Good Just for the Planet’s Health, but Your Health, Too
Additionally, with the current production rate of e-cars being less than one percent of total vehicles made, car companies aren’t making nearly enough zero-emission vehicles for the market. Even the well-intentioned car buyer could argue, “Where do I even buy one of these things?”
So by freeing Tesla’s intellectual property, Musk is also freeing up the competition by allowing other car makers to improve and expand the e-car market.
“The mission of the company is to accelerate the widespread adoption of electric cars,” explained Tesla spokesperson Simon Sproule. “If Tesla acts as the catalyst for other manufacturers … that will have been achieved.”
DON’T MISS: What the Demise of Car Ownership Means for the Planet