Julian: Thank you so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have Ben Heller, the Chief Technology Officer at Driver Technologies and co-founder. Ben is working on Driver, which is a hardware free mobile app that allows users to video record their trip while receiving innovative computer vision and telematics based audio alerts when they're at risk of hitting a.

Motorcycle, pedestrian or cyclist, or if they're falling asleep at the wheel or becoming distracted behind the wheel as well. Ben, thank you so much for joining the show. I'm really excited to hear about what you're working on and what are the different kind of decisions you've had to make kind of along the process, especially as a technology guy, I always like to dive into.

What it really takes to build these, these intelligent platforms and applications that we sometimes take for granted. But you know, there's such intricacies about you, the way the technology works and affects us, that I think sometimes we just don't know. And so it'll be, it'll be awesome to dive into that.

So before we get into all that fun stuff, what were you doing before you started Driver?  

Ben: Yeah. Thanks for asking. So I, I've enjoyed a career for about 15 years in a variety of spaces that gave me exposure to everything, the entire stack. I started off in the agency side, which is a great way to cut your teeth if you wanna learn how to do something, work for an agency.

It's not a relaxing lifestyle, but through the process of just saying yes to all these different. You know, you learn a little bit about database development, web development, app development was dipping in and out of a lot of different startups, helping them build their MVPs and actually seeing over and over again what it took to get going in that very first step of the process.

Went from there and became kind of enamored with that 20 to do my own startup. So in 2011, I co-founded a medical care coordination company called Curator. Got to actually. Really at the ground level there, help actually bring on the CTO who's still there, moving the company forward, ducked back out into the agency world, back into software again.

Worked as director of software for a company called Arcos Golf, which was a connected hardware play in the golf space. Doing kind of machine learning to understand how to advise people really how they should. Play the sport and educate themselves on how to best do that. And most recently I was principal engineer at a company called Plex tv, which started off as a home media kind of media movie, TV, music streaming company that's now in kind of the ad supported space with a lot of these folks that you might see embedded on your tv, like two B and Pluto.

So I've kind of alternated between software management, product side and actual hardcore engineering.  

Julian: What's your favorite part of the process?  

Ben: Oh boy. You know, honestly I love feeling like I can build as fast as I can think. So I'm a big fan of prototyping. I love prototyping driven development because I want to see in a 360 degree way how the whole thing is gonna work.

Even if parts of it are mocked, even if it's totally slim, having that whole vision encapsulated as something that you can then play with is the best way to learn where the weak spots are, what's worth investing in and what you should just set aside for another project that feels kind of out scope.

Julian: Yeah. Well, at your current company or even the companies that you've been a part of and, and worked on your other, When you talk about this prototyping concept, is it you, you kind of create a whole version of whether it's a piece of technology or software and then ship it out collect feedback, and then iterate into a new version?

Or are you testing and, and doing all the subsequent updates along the way? Is it, is it one or the other, or does it incorporate kind of both? .  

Ben: It's really both. I mean, you wanna prototype internally. You want to be able to kind of see and touch and feel the thing, because ultimately internal meetings, if you're just talking about a concept, it doesn't go nearly as far as being able to play with it and touch it and actually utilize it.

So internally, we have a whole section of our app. Called Driver Labs where we test out these brand new features that's, you know, really, really cutting edge. There's compromises piece of it might not be ready for prime time, but it lets us see, you know, where we can go with the product and then we give users access to that so we can have people driving with our app, interacting with these new features.

And it lets us really engage deeply with, okay, what's the next thing that we're gonna build in a very data driven.  

Julian: Yeah. What you, you mentioned having such a, a, I think, just such a wealth of experience in the agency realm, building MVPs, building versions of products, and dipping your toes into so many parts of the development process.

What, what does it take, You said you, you learned about what it takes to build and get an application off the ground. What are some things that we might not know or consider when you know, you know, taking up an application? I think a lot of people.  

Ben: You know, I think a lot of times when you're looking at a brand new mm-hmm. , a brand new product. People are trying to insert themselves into a piece of the process where there isn't currently a pain point.

You have an idea. You think that you can maybe participate in some part of a flow that already exists and say, Hey, I'm gonna be an intermediary. In this process. And the most important thing in prototyping initial product development is understanding a pain point that someone or hopefully yourself feels really, really deeply.

Because nothing can compel a product forward, like frustration driven development. You should feel frustrated, and if you feel frustrated, that's a sign of success because now you have a problem that you're highly motivated to be able to solve. And so in the case of. We understood the frustrations of driving with a hardware dash cam and setting that up and not being able to get the video up to the cloud and having to pull out a SIM card and load it onto your computer and try to email to somebody.

There was just so much frustration in the current ecosystem that we were able to come in and provide a solution to a real problem, not an imagined problem, and, and that to me is really the most important piece of that initial ideation process.  

Julian: Yeah, I mean, you, so many founders have told me before, which is when you focus on the problem and something that people are actually, you know, rather than building something that you think people will use or you have a, you know, highly a hypothesis, it doesn't work until people are actually actively using it and you're seeing the feedback you're getting and, and then iterating on ways to make it that much more honed into the problem that you're trying to solve.

What inspired the conception of, of driver application you were in? So, Different, you know industries working on different types of technology before. What about this problem? What got you excited and what inspired the idea to you know, build something that was gonna help people? With, you know, I, I would say driver safety.

I mean, it, it also helped in, I'm sure with like litigation processes that people do get into an accident and making sure that they're, you know, less affected by it. What was the inspiration behind the idea?  

Ben: Yeah, absolutely. So I have to give our, our CEO Rashid the the credit for this one. He was, you know, working actually at a VC firm.

He was kind of helping fund startups and was really seeing it from the other side of the fence. And he started understanding that a lot of what we were hearing about. The future of autonomous cars and car safety was this big bluff. Nobody was gonna actually deliver this. And this was back in around 2016 when right.

Elon Musk was going on Twitter saying, Hey, we're gonna have self-driving cars in, you know, two years, five years. He saw right through it. And the idea was, well, even when this comes, it's gonna be available to wealthy people in wealthy markets. You know, in and around San Francisco, New York City. Very US centric.

So he started asking himself the question like, How can we democratize car safety? How can we actually put it in the hands of everyone globally? And the answer is that even in developing nations, a lot of people have access to. Android phones and you know, in the US it happens to be more iOS centric, but even so, cell phones are just ubiquitous.

And so if you can take the technology that we have on us every day and then use that to join it with this, you know, legacy hardware, effectively dumb cars, you know, the sitting in the back of your parents' minivan, there wasn't any place to plug in your phone. But if you have a phone, you can mount it and you can.

That car into something that's incredibly powerful, incredibly intelligent, and actually gives you actionable information about how to drive safer right there in that moment for everybody, whether you're on, you know, a five lane highway or a dirt road. And so that was really his vision. And, you know, I had the, the honor to be able to kind of brainstorm and talk to him about that throughout that whole process while I was still working as an engineer at other companies.

Yeah. And you know, when I, I saw that he was so, To this mission driven concept of actually improving car safety for everyone. Amidst the chaos of a pandemic I'd started a new family. I, I just couldn't, I couldn't say no to the idea that maybe someday, you know, my son wouldn't have to learn how to drive.

And so that's really the inspiration for, for Driver and the ecosystem that we've built around car safety and accountability.  

Julian: That's in, That's incredible. And, and I love how you've kind of taken, you know, a prehistoric technology like, you know, a, a car that runs on gasoline nowadays, right? And, and a technology that is, So I, I think it's it's hand in hand with everyone's personal experience, which is their mobile device.

And, and now we, we've, I think everybody can mount their phone there. There's so many qualities to what you're doing that really incorporates what I, what I like to think is like low barriers to entry. In terms of using this product, which is incredible. And it's hard for a lot of companies to do because it doesn't, you don't have to add another piece of hardware to your, you know, your, your life.

What does, how does the app work? Like if, if I'm a driver and I want to, you know, start, you know, recording my, my whether I'm an Uber driver, whether I'm a regular driver in a, you know, in like a place like San Francisco, which I'm. We all know how, how terrible the traffic is, or right now I'm in Los Angeles and it's even worse, which I didn't think it was possible.

But how do, how do I access the app? What are the, the steps to getting onboarded and then what are the benefits that I receive when I'm using the application?  

Ben: Yeah. Yeah, so I mean, you nailed it in terms of being low barrier to entry, that's what we really focus on. So, you know, we're, we're lucky to be the highest rated, most reviewed kind of top search result for dash cam in the iOS app store.

So people find us organically, you can go search for it. The app gets downloaded, it's on your phone, you open it and you're ready to drive. That's it. You don't have to create an account, you don't have to do anything, and it's just right there, a big red record button. You put your phone, you mount it in the car.

For me, before I had this app, I was already driving with my phone mounted because I used it for mapping. I used it for music, and so there was zero behavioral change as a consumer, and now I just put the same phone up in the same place. It's always. And it records all of my drives. And in the process of doing that, we're providing a lot of value.

You know, in the first, just most baseline aspect, it's accountability, right? What if something happens? What if I need to prove that I wasn't at fault in an accident? What if something crazy happens and I just wanna show my friends? You know, so record everything that's happening around you just in case.

Yeah. And it gives me that level of comfort as I'm driving. Secondarily there's real time safety, so if I'm distracted or drowsy, I'm gonna get an audio alert that's actually gonna wake me up and help me with. Safety as I'm operating the vehicle. Yeah. Same with forward collision alerts. We're rolling out kind of our next generation of forward collision alerts that includes more nuanced behaviors like understanding tailgating, for example.

Yeah. And then on top of that, there's kind of this education component of, if I can look at all my drives after the fact, see where there was heartbreaking or heart acceleration, harsh turning near miss. And actually get kind of a, what we call a driver score that lets me know relative to other drivers or the best I could possibly drive, you know, where am I at, how do I improve that over time?

And, and all of that really kind of comes. Right out of the box with the product. We, we've put certain features behind what we now call driver premium, which is a subscription tier, which is either the stuff that is, you know, brand spanking new and we're just kind of rolling it out and wanna work with a really core group of users, or it's things that have a little bit more cost in terms of development time and operation for us that, you know, we wanna make sure that we have covered from a, a business perspective, but we found.

People who use the app, they love it. They're really, really excited about being more and more invested in kind of this driving ecosystem and wanting to have, you know, cloud storage indefinitely for all of your videos. Just in case six months later someone comes and says, Hey, there was an issue here. Well, yeah, you've got proof.

So that's that. We've really found it's, it's hasn't been a hard product. Explain why it's valuable, because driving is for most people the most dangerous activity that we engage in. Yeah. On a regular basis. So yeah,

Julian: I love, I love that it's, it's a product that, Yeah. You don't have to convince anyone of Its, you know, impact both positively and, and also just, I think it, it's it's almost necessary nowadays with, with that how many variables everyone deals with.

I think even after c. Number of accidents skyrocketed through the roof because people were out of practice. And then, you know, those are safety concerns. One thing that you said really fascinated me about the intelligence of the application. And if you could speak a little bit about how the technology works and maybe either from a high level or even from from a low level standpoint is how it, it is intelligent.

You know, whether it's measuring distance from another car or how does it know that you are falling asleep or you're drowsy? Is it measuring your you know, you being within a certain lane? Or is it, is it looking back at you also looking out and seeing your behavior changes? What's behind that technology?

It's so, it's so fascinating. It seems almost too good to be true and in a lot of ways because because I think a lot of people think about you know, Kind of more intelligent cars, like say for a Tesla, right? It's got a lot of different sensors that allow kind of radar to, to measure distances and, and uses, you know, less, I guess, more sophisticated technology than you would think is in, in a cell.

But here you're, you're letting, you're telling us that, you know, it actually does everything that those cars are doing and also focuses on your safety. So yeah, we'd love to learn more about the technology around that.  

Ben: Awesome. Yeah, you know, I like to tell people that what we. Everything up to the point where we're sending instructions back to the car.

And so in order to do that, you have to have a really holistic understanding of what is good driving behavior, what's bad driving behavior and how do we identify it. We're really fortunate in being a software company that we inherit the potential of all of the hardware that we run. And everything that we do is designed to be adaptive to that.

So you're gonna get great safety features. If you're on a hundred dollars Android phone, you're gonna get those same great safety features if you're on the newest iPhone. But they might just run at a slightly different frame rate. And so that's actually how we're able to put a lot of really sophisticated technology and computer vision models in every app that we ship is we understand the capabilities of the device and scale them to that.

So we're looking at every camera that we can have access to. Not every phone gives us access to interior and exterior cameras at the same time. And it is up to the user to decide whether they want to turn those features on and off. There might be privacy reasons why they don't want to have us engage with the interior camera at all, and we always wanna respect that.

So right from the very beginning, we give everyone who downloads their app kind of full range of choice in terms of what they activate, where their camera's pointing, and whether those safety features are on or off. We wanna make. At a baseline level, we're never distracting the driver. Right. That's our mission.

Yeah. And so we want to provide, you know, a full, full control for what's best for you. But let's say you wanted to go for it, you turn everything on and you just want the full, the full feature set. So in that case, we're recording exterior, optionally recording. I. Even if we decide we don't wanna record interior, we can still use the interior camera.

And what we do is we actually take a full facial mesh and we understand head tilt, head direction, and where your eyes are actually focused and whether they're open or closed. And so falling asleep is easy to detect. If you're reaching for something in the backseat for a prolonged period of time, we can detect that as well.

We can also draw. It's comparisons between what's happening in the interior of the vehicle and what's happening in the exterior of the vehicle. So for example, if we know that there's a pedestrian in your lane, because we're running vision models that classify objects and we're also running segmentation models that have areas for drivable, non-drivable and different lanes, then we can say there's a pedestrian in your lane at a certain.

And we know that you don't see that pedestrian because we know that you're not looking outside your windshield. And we know that due to the sensors on the phone, we've got an accelerometer, we've got gyroscope, we've got GPS locations that you're not breaking. That's a really clear indicator that you don't see that person, and we need to alert you and say, Hey, there's a person in the lane.

Yeah, please break. And we do that through an audible beep. But if we know that you're paying attention and we see that you're slowing down, Then that means that you're doing what you need to be doing anyways. We shouldn't bother you and we're not gonna alert in that case. And so we really have everything firing on all cylinders in terms of running computer vision models on both interior and exterior camera feeds, if that's what the experience that you're looking for in the vehicle at the same time that we're recording.

Julian: Was this technology around, say, you know, Five years ago, or, or is a lot of this newer technology that's being implemented and, and being kind of iterated on day in day and, and it seems like such cutting edge you know, information that you're mapping together to give an overall kind of experience, but also, you know to collect the data in, in, in the physical world.

And then to interpret it and give your yeah, give your use or that information. Is this all new data or is this all new technology? Excuse me. Or, It's just something that has been around that, it just hasn't been cleverly I guess puzzled together or, or quilted together.  

Ben: Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say that we're doing anything that hasn't been attempted before, but it's a little bit of a right place, right time, and so much as the hardware is now able to support a lot of the functionality that previously, you know, you would see issues with overheating.

For devices that were left on a hot dashboard. We've also, in part, solved some of the challenges that previous people in this space have kind of hit and then abandoned going down this line with software. So we actually developed our own hardware dash mount that not only has a heat sink, but also a cooling fan in it.

Wow. That will allow us to run the phone a little. Than it would be in just a kind of traditional mount. And so yeah, we've taken some creative solutions to be able to really invest in this approach and because of that, we're able to keep this very low barrier to entry aspect to the platform. Yeah, that I think lives up to the original vision of helping democratize car safety.

If we were to go to something that was a fancy hardware device that was bespoke, we'd be really drifting away from that vision so that, that's given us the clarity. To decide to solve some of the hard problems in this space that others haven't really gotten.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. I, I, it's interesting, it seems like companies kind of fork into, in a few different directions.

One, they'll go into a direction where they do add more sophisticated hardware and, and kind of create kind of a new alternative future based on, you know, updated new technology. Or they, they kind of maintain their vision of keeping their core value, of keeping their technology accessible. And you know, Optimally, easy to onboard and, and integrate into, you know, your day to day life, which is fascinating that you've been able to do that in so many different ways. And that the only piece of hardware really is just to support you know, the, the, the cooling of your device, which is incredible. You mentioned something about, you know, having.

The ability to store all this information into a driver cloud that lets you kind of go through a ca catalog of, of different drives that you've been on is what is done with that information. I'm always curious about, you know, data and, you know, now days we're always sensitive to what our data is, you know, it being used for doing.

What's your philosophy behind storing data using data and, and are you offering it to different, you know, parties to get more information or, Kind of share information to make you know, other businesses have more success. I'm, I'm always curious about kind of where data is used, stored and, and you know, if you're giving access for, for some benefit or not.

Ben: Yeah, absolutely. So first and foremost, you know, our driver cloud solution is for the person who's driving with the app. Yeah. We realize pretty quickly when you're recording HD video, you're gonna fill up your phone pretty quick. And if you need to have a long trail of. Of videos for accountability reasons.

Say you're a rideshare driver, you don't know if a report's gonna be filed a day after a drive or weeks or even months. You need to have a permanent repository for that. So we want to have a home for all of the data for our drivers so that they can keep their phones nice and slim and still functioning and not stocked with days and days of of dash cam footage.

So we have an auto delete feature. That allows videos to be uploaded to the cloud and then removed from the local device, and you know, with absolute certainty that everything is stored there remotely. We realize in this space, right, we're collecting. Pretty sensitive information potentially, whether that's outside the vehicle or inside the vehicle.

And so we wanted to bake a notion of privacy and data access right into kind of the fundamental fabric of how we do this. And so we've built a system where you control who has access and why to your data. Yeah. Whether that's your family or it's your boss, or maybe your insurer. So by default you can say, Alright.

I have a family org, and this is my wife, myself, my two children. And when you create that organization, you can say, Here's what I have access to. I'm not gonna see what's happening outside your car all the time, but I am gonna get your locations, for example. And the person who's giving permission actually has to agree to those terms and say, I, I allow the person who's my org administrator to have access to my location.

And so through a combination of. Variability in terms of data access and then transparency. You can allow people to create a platform where you share exactly what you want to, who you want, and at the point at which you want to revoke that you can do so. So we allow even public share links. For example, let's say you got in an accident and you wanna send a report to the police or to your insurer, you can just create a share link that lets you send that to that person.

And when you're no longer wanting to give them access to the drive and all of the drive details, you can just revoke that share link. And so those are the types of features that we're trying to bake into the platform. Yeah. We also use the platform for just understanding driving behavior more. In order to provide the kind of alerts that we do on the edge, we have to know, okay, you know, what does driving look like in a good and worst case scenario?

Yeah. And so the types of studies that we do, and when we work with industry partners is something like, All right, we wanna look at the average latency. Between the brake lights of the car in front of us activating and that the time it takes for a human driver in a tailing vehicle to hit the brakes. So in order to do that study, we don't need to know anything about you or who you are or where you are, and we don't even need to see what's happening in the rest of the scene.

We just need to know that brake lights activated from metadata. Yeah. And we need to know the deceleration. And so we do try to understand driving behavior data, but we do it in a way that's very, very sensitive to just the context in which we need to study something very particular. Incredible.

Julian: Incredible. Tell us a little bit about shifting away from technology, which I can just ask loads of questions for forever on how it works. It's so fascinating you know, technology once you really get into the weeds of it, but shifting away from. Tell us a little bit about the traction. How many users are, are using your application what are the positive results that you've seen in terms of driver safety and any other kind of measurables that you're really proud of as a company that, that have you know, seen a lot of growth and success.

Give us some numbers that, that are, that really excite you and, and continue to push you every day.  

Ben: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, we've seen hundreds of thousands of downloads. We have tens of thousands of monthly active users. What I love to see is people who use the app every day who aren't professional drivers.

That makes me really excited when someone who's a commuter, you know, is saying, I, I use your app every morning and I use your app every evening. And, you know, it's actually saved me from potentially. Having to pay out on an insurance claim where somebody was pointing a finger at me and I was able to hold up the app and say, You know what, here's what actually happened.

That, that makes me proud to do what we do. And we can actually say we're helping people on a daily basis. Whether that's, you know, because you're a professional driver, just something's happened to happen on the road and we were able to. That's what we're here for. And as a mission driven company, my ultimate goal is to be able to have a stat on our website that is number of collisions avoided because of driver.

And I think we know we're, we're pretty close to having a notion of that to understand the number of times that our collision alert system has gone off, a driver's taken corrective action. And we can say, All right, if, if maybe we hadn't alerted something could have happened. That's kind of where I want to go in terms of, Yeah, feeling like we're making people safer on the roads and so the stats for number of active users and downloads and number of reviews are all wonderful, but what really matters is life saved.

And yeah, I think as a company that's our, that's our priority.  

Julian: Yeah, you, you mentioned something to me I think it was in the form that you filled out as, you know, things, things that make your company unique. And one of 'em was about, you know, being a mission driven company and, and creating this culture around you know, what that mission is.

Tell us a little bit about not only the culture, but you know, how you maintain, you know, a strong culture in a remote working environment. I think, you know, it's easy to do with camaraderie, work events and, and you know, brainstorming sessions. But I think it's difficult to find the balance between, you know, letting your employees, you know, get, get the work done that they, they want to and, and they can kinda have their own lives.

But also creating this cohesive I guess organism really, that, that functions towards one direction and one goal and, and is accountable for the different you know, responsibilities that they have. Tell us a little bit about how you've been able to do that at. .  

Ben: Sure. So the promise I make to every engineer when they start working here is that they'll have the opportunity to write the best code of their entire careers at driver.

And that's a, that's a tall order, but I think so far we've, we've lived up to it. I mean, This. We do this through a combination of allowing people to solve a completely unique challenge. It's something that you can't look up on Stack Overflow, right? And in order to do that, you need to be given the time to go both really deep in your field of choice and also really broad across the whole range of technologies that we work with.

Chances are, if you spent your whole career in DevOps, you don't know a lot about computer vision, or if you're a machine learning expert, maybe you want to go learn some elixir on the server. We try to foster a whole community around just being very trusting, being very open with our own education and having appreciation for yeah, what the other people on the team do every day.

And you know, that's kinda had a lot of trickle down effects in terms of how we structure our onboarding. We only do contract to hire so that everybody has an opportunity to meet anyone new, coming onto the team bidirectionally so that there's a really, really great fit in terms of you know, cultural fit and the technologies that they wanna work with.

We don't have a product org or project managers, so a lot of our product decisions are all done from a bottom up approach. It's very as much as possible egalitarian in terms of decisions being made by the people who are gonna be writing the code and interacting with customers. And so this is, this is how the team's begun to kind of shape up and through a lot of these different interactions and decisions.

It means that, you know, we have a. I think pretty strong relationship that can get you through the ups and downs of being a startup, as you well know, right? It's not all smooth.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. No, it, it's not, it's definitely you know, a function of the team that really allows you to, you know, go through those challenges or even shift responsibilities when you feel like you, you've been doing either the same thing or what you've been doing maybe hasn't given you the results you wanted to, you know, it's that, those micro changes that allow you to, to grow not only as individual, but also as a company.

What are some of the biggest challenges that driver faces today?  

Ben: Yeah, I mean, it's a . There's a lot of challenges, but I would say the biggest challenge is that you know, the industry is moving at a remarkable rate and by the industry, I just mean automotive, generally speaking, but there's a lot of different pieces to this, right?

We're slowly making cars that drive the. How do we ensure those cars? How do we get them on the road? How do we get past all the regulatory challenges of being able to do this safely? Yeah. And in a way that, you know, operates with all the systems that we've built so far. Yeah. You know, what does the next generation of kind of these OEM.

Platforms look like for people to build software that integrates with the cars themselves. Understanding how all of these different tendrils within the space are moving forward and at what rates and where to situate our company. In the middle of that Yeah. Is really interesting. Cause we touched a lot of the edges and probably the biggest risk is that, The industry moves so quickly, it moves past the need for a mobile app like ours, which is fundamentally a kind of transitional product that connects the old world with the new world.

And for us, knowing how and when to embed ourselves in that new world. So part of the way that we've kind of ensured ourselves against that future is, you know, we build our app effectively as an s. And it's a, a layer of code wrapping core functionality that could actually be embedded in infotainment systems and vehicles themselves.

So, you know, I'd love to see a future where we actually power the vehicles and can, at the same time, if you don't have a vehicle with those capabilities, still let you mount your phone and still stay true to that original vision of running on as many technologies as possible to give everyone access to that.

So it's kind of stretching in both direct. But that's also the biggest risk for us. Yeah.  

Julian: Yeah. What you know, if everything goes well, what's the long term vision for a driver?  

Ben: You know, this is really fanciful, but I'll, I'll, I'll just go for it. You know, I'd love to see a future where I sit down in an autonomous vehicle and I plug in my phone.

And that phone has on it a profile of my entire history of driving as an individual and understands how I drove and lets me actually drive in a car that's driving itself. In a way that I would've driven it. I love that concept and it's actually not so crazy based on just understanding all the little nuances of how it would tend to navigate certain types of roads and situations.

So I'd love to be able to usher in a future where having a car that drives me feels just as natural as me driving  

Julian: myself. I love that. It reminds me of the movie iRobot when Will Smith's character takes over the car and then he, you know, they're all, they're all automated and they're moving at such a high rate.

But also it's like this, it is actually this interesting relationship between the car and the person and this use of technology that's, Very unique to, to the individuals. So yeah, that just flashed that scene when he takes over the car in the highway and, and is kind sick of, sick of it driving itself.

But yeah. It's so fascinating. I know we're close to time here and I always like to ask this question, one for selfish research, but also for my audience as well to, to gain some gems of knowledge. What are some whether it's books or people who have influenced you the most, either you know, in your past and while you're growing in your career or currently?

That inspired you as, as you move forward and, and build driver?  

Ben: Yeah. Boy, I, I was a liberal arts major, so this is a pretty dangerous question to ask. With little time remaining. We can do a whole, whole episode on this one, but you know, I can tell you what I'm, you know, reading right now what's sitting on my coffee table downstairs, which is it's a 20th century economist e Schumacher.

He has a book called Small Is Beautiful, which is basically about how to. Without actually scaling and succumbing to the fallacy of bigger is. And so what does growth mean if you're not measuring growth by the definition of more? And you know, I think about that a lot in terms of growing a company.

How many people do we need to execute on our vision? What is our vision? Yeah. And having that clarity and continuously asking that question. And then sort of similar to that, I've been really intrigued by a paper on something called Digital sufficiency. There's a European academic called Tillman Sumar.

I apologize if I'm not pronouncing his name correctly. I think he's German. But it's on a similar theme of trying to get at the core of how we can build technology with the smallest possible footprint and environmental impact. You know, and that's, that's maybe surprising I guess, given that we're talking about big data and driving, but that's actually makes it all that more important, which is that big data and driving are not things you think of as being economical and sustainable.

And I think part of the reason that I actually really believe in Driver is because I believe that our team can help usher in a future. In both of those respects that is safer and more sustainable. So tackling tricky problems head on, I guess is the topic of my reading material right now.  

Julian: I love, That's beautiful, man.

I, I really appreciate you kind of diving into not only your background and experience and what led you to Driver, but what innovative things you're working on and how drivers kind of creating a future that that benefits and, and really like directly benefits its user, which, you know, it's tricky with a lot of technology cuz I think there's a.

Input that the user has to do to, to then get the outcome they need. And it's like, you know, it's like, you know, one step back, two step forward versus, I think, you know, what, what you're working on is, is really just moving forward in, in a really positive direction, which is so exciting to see. And I definitely am gonna download the app.

Now. I'm a little afraid my, I'm a little afraid of my driver rating because I'm, I'm big through shuffling to playlists, so that might, that might take me down a few notches, but excited to see the, the te. Last little bit before we end here is where can we support driver? Where can we find you?

Give us your plugs, your, your LinkedIns, your website, your Twitters, Where can we be a part of the vision and, and you know, get to know more about the technology and what you're working on?  

Ben: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'd say the best place is our brand new website. We just just launched it and we've got a bunch of new pages coming soon.

It goes into really everything we're doing as a company from how to keep you safe to kind of the science of driving. So this drivertechnologies.org, check us out. That'll link you out to all of the other stuff that we're doing.  

Julian: Incredible. Well, Ben, thank you being on the show. I really hope you enjoyed yourself and we'll definitely have to have a version two of the episode.

You know, in the near future, I'm, I'm close to hitting a hundred episodes, so after that I think there's, there's a core amount of people and I would love for you to be on in that court to, to you know, touch base again and, and talk about some more cool things and that you're working on and technology as a state.

But Ben, I hope, again, I hope you enjoyed yourself and thank you for being on the.  

Ben: I love that. Thank you so much. You're asking all the right questions and I think what you do in here is super valuable, so thank you so much for having me.  

Julian: Awesome.