CBO & Co-Founder, Innoviz Technologies
Oren Rosenzweig at “Meet the Founder“ by Amiti
Oren Rosenzweig, CBO and Co-founder of Innoviz Technologies Ben Rabinowitz Managing Partner and Founder, Amiti Ventures.
About Oren Rosenzweig
Oren Rosenzweig, co-founder and CBO of Innoviz Technologies, discussed the company’s founding and market strategy in a 2020 podcast series hosted by Amiti Ventures. He said that Innoviz was founded to develop a lighter, more affordable LiDAR sensor for the automotive market, noting that existing LiDARs used for autonomous vehicle development were large and expensive. Rosenzweig stated that the automotive market was a good choice because of its volume and price points, and that Innoviz aimed to unlock the technology for high-volume production. Rosenzweig asserted that Innoviz is “number one in the world in terms of raising money for the lidar and for using that money very efficiently.” He also claimed that for autonomous driving levels three, four, and five, “Innoviz is the only game in town,” attributing this to the strength of the engineering team and the difficulty of manufacturing the product. He advised prospective founders to “just do it” and to choose co-founders and investors who bring diverse perspectives.
Transcript (13 segments)
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Ben Rubinowicz0:07
Hi and welcome to Amity's first podcast. My name is Ben Rubinowicz, I'm the founder and managing partner of Amity. We're a venture capital firm. We invest in seed and A rounds in Israeli tech companies. We love to help founders start their companies and scale up their companies. And really the goal for these podcasts is for future founders or current founders to get to hear from some of the most successful founders in the country. So I'm really excited today to be here with Oren Rosenzweig, co-founder of Innoviz. Four and a half years ago, my phone was ringing and I looked on the caller ID and I smiled and I was really happy to see that it was Oren that was calling me. And you called me and what Oren said was, 'Listen, things are really just going great. I'm at BCG and I really enjoy it.' And BCG of course is one of the best consulting firms in the world with the best clients, surrounded by the best people. And then you and your wife had just settled in Manhattan and you guys were I think excited to spend a couple years enjoying the city. And then at the same time you said that Omer had called you. Omer had been your buddy, a friend of yours from the unit, from Shimon Echad from 81. And also you guys had worked together at Inobit. And he said, 'Oren, let's start a company and maybe if you can come back to Israel and let's go do that.' So you had this dilemma: Manhattan, BCG, or startup in Israel. And maybe just take us through kind of how you assessed it and how you came to the conclusion to do this.
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Oren Rosenzweig1:56
Sure, and first of all thanks for inviting me here. It's always great to be here. So you know, we know each other for a very long time since the time that I was in training with Amity in Chicago, and you always give me great advice. And I think that the thing that really kind of tipped me over to making the decision to go back to Israel and start the company with the three other co-founders was also something that you also said, which is like, you know, given the fact that I always wanted to start a company, timing is really everything, right? And you can't really control the timing. I mean, just having four people being free from whatever they were doing before and having kind of the right idea or the right industry that's kind of ready for being disrupted. And that's something that you know, you can kind of live your life and a long time can pass and you don't come across that opportunity. So even though it was a difficult decision to make, and I think we kind of made the decision, we uprooted the family from Manhattan, I moved back to Tel Aviv, and very happy that we did that. And thanks for the advice.
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Ben Rubinowicz3:06
Sure, sure. So you ended up founding, you know, with three others, Innoviz. And the main product is a LiDAR. So many people may not know what that is, so maybe explain a little bit what is a LiDAR, why is it important, and is it something that's difficult to design and manufacture?
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Oren Rosenzweig3:29
Sure. So LiDAR is a 3D sensor. It uses lasers to shoot pulses of light to the environment, and through the measurement of the time that it passes for that light to bounce off objects, it measures the distance to every point in space. And it's a very important sensor in kind of the overall perception of anything that has to move in space, right? So if you think about like different robots, and in our case our focus is on autonomous vehicles. So for autonomous vehicles to be able to kind of drive autonomously, they need to be able to really understand their environment very well. And for that, the most essential sensor is the LiDAR.
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Ben Rubinowicz4:11
Right, okay. And again, you and the three other guys, so Omer and Amit and Oren Bashkila, so actually you'd all come from the same unit, you'd all come from 81. How did you know, kind of what was so special about that place and how did it prepare you to build such a complex, multi-disciplinary product and also to be leaders and build a great company?
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Oren Rosenzweig4:36
I think what's special about that unit, 81, is really that it's trying to solve very difficult problems like we do in Innoviz, but they do there in a very multidisciplinary world. So I think the different technologies that need to come together, like software, hardware, electro-optics, and everything has to come together very quickly. So a project could be like a year or two years, and it's kind of like taking this blank slate approach, trying to solve like a new problem. And when you think about that, it's very similar to kind of the first years of a startup when you're kind of trying to get your first product, trying to get the product-market fit, etc. So not just the four of us, but really the kind of the founding team, if you look at most of the 20 or 30 people that joined us, the first people that joined us, are also from there. And the other thing I think is really, besides the technology, is the fact that they really work well together.
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Ben Rubinowicz5:33
When you were thinking about, okay, so we're going to start this company, we're going to build a LiDAR, looks like automotive is the right market, how did you validate that market and how did you persuade yourself that this is going to be a big market that you can dedicate, you know, the next five, ten or more years to serving that market?
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Oren Rosenzweig5:50
Because the problem is big, the investment that you need is very big. So you can only really go after something that can give you the return on such a big investment. And there are only very few markets with the volume and the price points that are needed. And at that point in time, I think also automotive was a good choice because they were already using LiDARs for the development of autonomous vehicles. But those LiDARs were just really big, very expensive, and somebody needed to go in there and to be able to unlock this technology and be able to make it from something that's really low volume to something that's very high volume. You need to solve this problem, you need to get the cost down, even get the performance up. And this was true for automotive at the point.
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Ben Rubinowicz6:39
And in terms of market timing, maybe explain a little bit what is level three, level four, and five. And you know, you kind of saw it in 2016, but now that we're in 2020, how do you see those markets developing and why do you think you're hitting the market at the right time with the product?
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Oren Rosenzweig6:56
Level three means that the car can drive itself on the roads, typically highway, with the driver inside, but the driver doesn't need to do anything basically. He can even take the eyes off the road. Still needs to be there to handle specific situations, but basically means that the manufacturer of the car basically takes responsibility for the driving in every sense. There are no cars like that today on their own. I mean, even in the more advanced cars, you always have to keep your eyes on the road. The responsibility is always with the driver, with the person in the car. And then it gets even more kind of complicated with level four, where in certain areas you can just get rid of the person in the car all together basically. And then level five is something that no one really works on today. It's just even more complicated. It's just basically doing the same thing but it can just work anywhere, like anywhere in the world.
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Ben Rubinowicz7:50
Right. So what I like to say when people are asking about it is I say there are other LiDAR companies in the world other than Innoviz, but when you get to level three, level four, or level five, anytime you think you could put a life at risk, then Innoviz is the only game in town. It's not only the only game in town because the strength of the engineering team, but it's also the fact that this is a very expensive product to build and very tough manufacturing. And Innoviz is number one in the world in terms of raising money for the LiDAR and for using that money very efficiently. So that's kind of how I look at it. So and I think just going back to what we were saying before about market timing, the nice thing is like people always say, 'Oh, when are autonomous cars going to happen?' And that's kind of the market timing risk. And I think it's important for people to realize when they're thinking of starting their companies, which what Innoviz has done well is you actually have a way to build a huge business on the path to autonomous driving. And that's really the level three versus level five. Level three is about luxury cars that have semi-autonomous capabilities. And at the same time you got the level five opportunities, which will be more of the Waymos and Ubers and companies like that and enabling that. So when you think about market timing, it's like not just the end game but there's a very nice interim step where Innoviz, where you guys are able to build, you know, potentially a very, very large company. What piece of advice, you know, I think there may be some founders or soon-to-be founders listening to this podcast, what piece of advice or thought or insight that you know you think would be good for them to know as they start their company?
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Oren Rosenzweig9:32
Sure, so I'll give two. But for the ones that are like soon-to-be founders, I'll just say like just do it, okay? It's really, I mean, one of the best decisions that I think I've made. So just go for it. And for the ones that are really just starting, I would say just choosing the right investors, I mean, or just kind of the right group of people. It could be like your co-founders, but it's also like your investors who are going to be with you on the board of the company. And you know, you're going to be together for a very long time. And choosing ones that are like, first of all, like in some cases different than you. I feel that in Innoviz, where I think we've got a very diverse group of people in the founding team, where everyone is bringing something a little bit different to the table. I think that's very valuable.
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Ben Rubinowicz10:22
Okay, thanks. I think that's very good advice. So Oren, thank you so much for coming to our office and doing this interview together. I really appreciate it and excited to continue our journey together. Thank you so much for listening. I hopefully you listened to the end and really appreciate that you did. And we look forward to hopefully seeing you also on our next interview.