automotive-technology
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Michael Hopkins Knows Every Brand Promise Eventually Meets a Real Person
The VINCUE chief marketing officer has spent his career moving between software systems and human experiences. His useful obsession is making sure the promise survives the handoff.
Grayson Leverenz Learned Scale Backwards - Then Built a Better Way Forward
She went from managing a $14 million brand budget to helping a startup grow with paid media below 1% of revenue. Now the former Spiffy CMO is teaching lean teams how to make strategy and execution share a desk.
Keri Cohen Knows the Most Valuable Data Still Sounds Like a Human Voice
The former Food & Wine producer moved from test-kitchen video to automotive communication intelligence. Her through line is not cars or cuisine - it is making complicated work legible, useful and human.
Ken Dec Has Spent 40 Years Turning Technical Products Into Stories People Trust
The fractional CMO at TruVideo built his career where brand, demand and sales meet. His durable lesson is disarmingly simple: serve the customer, tell the truth well, and make marketing prove its value.
Harini Ganesan Is Designing the Org Chart Behind the Software-Defined Car
Cars can update overnight. The organizations building them cannot. Harini Ganesan has spent two decades learning how hardware, software and people move together - and why the slow conversation is often the quickest route forward.
Paul Li Wants to Turn the Car Into Two Pieces
After two decades inside the auto industry, the U POWER founder is betting that the next useful car company will help other brands build - and leave the badge to them.
Peter Yorke
Peter Yorke is the CEO and co-founder of Voyomotive, a San Francisco connected-car company whose VOYO device turns an ordinary car's OBD-II port into a smartphone-controlled second brain. A native Californian who has worn the hats of scientist, venture capitalist, and serial entrepreneur, Yorke built a platform that locks doors by proximity, reads manufacturer fault codes, logs trips, and crowdsources road-hazard alerts. VOYO swept the 2015 SEMA show awards and exhibited as one of the most advanced after-market connected-car systems at CES 2016.
Austin Russell
Austin Russell founded Luminar Technologies at 16, built lidar hardware in his parents' garage, dropped out of Stanford after three months on a Thiel Fellowship, and briefly became the world's youngest self-made billionaire at 25 when Luminar went public in December 2020. His company's 1550nm lidar sensors were integrated into production vehicles from Volvo and Mercedes-Benz, representing a rare case of autonomous vehicle hardware reaching mass-market cars. After a highly publicized attempt to acquire Forbes magazine fell through in 2023, Russell resigned as Luminar's CEO in May 2025 following a board ethics inquiry, and the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2025.
Maxwell Zhou
Maxwell Zhou (周光) is the founder and CEO of DeepRoute.ai, a Shenzhen-based autonomous driving company he built from a 2019 conviction that AI could prevent traffic deaths. A Tsinghua-trained physicist turned AI PhD, Zhou led sensor fusion breakthroughs at Baidu and co-founded Roadstar.ai before pivoting to build what is now one of China's fastest-scaling third-party ADAS providers - deploying its end-to-end intelligent driving platform across 300,000+ vehicles and accumulating 1.3 billion kilometers of real-world data with over $500M in total funding.
Sameer Misson
Sameer Misson is the co-founder and CEO of Gluon Solutions, Inc., a Livermore, California-based enterprise software company building IoT, AI, and cloud platforms for the automotive and fuel ecosystem. Under his leadership, Gluon has developed Petromo (fuel station and convenience store management), Gluon Auto (vehicle and fleet monitoring), and EZ Lister (auto parts catalog and fitment tools), collectively serving 100+ businesses. A serial entrepreneur with roots in his family's automotive parts business (Mission Trading Company / MTC Parts), Misson also holds a J.D. from Golden Gate University and studied computer science at UC Berkeley, combining legal, business, and technical expertise in his work across IoT, blockchain, and SaaS.