Merge Now Episode 11: Jason Stinson of Renovo on Selling the Picks and Shovels of the Autonomous Gold Rush

A co-founder of an autonomous drive technology services company explains how self-driving car developers are professionalizing their processes.
www.thedrive.com

Would you be surprised to learn that a number of autonomous vehicle development programs offload data from their test vehicles by physically pulling out a hard drive and shipping it by snail mail to a cloud services provider? When Jason Stinson, the co-founder of the AV ecosystem company Renovo, told me this was common enough for his company to offer a more advanced data offloading system from their in-house tool kit as a product, I was certainly blown away. As the venture capital community’s appetite for massive investments in AV developers wanes, companies that were floating on easily-raised cash are going to have to turn their science experiments into something more closely resembling actual business operations and companies like Renovo are helping them professionalize. On this week’s Merge Now, Stinson shares Renovo’s unique perspective as partner to countless companies in the autonomous drive space to shed light on this fascinating transition.

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Edward Niedermeyer

Senior Editor, Mobility Technology

The former Editor-in-Chief of The Truth About Cars, Ed has contributed to BloombergView, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other outlets. He co-hosts The Autonocast, one of the most-followed podcasts on autonomous and advanced mobility tech. His book "Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors" will be published by BenBella Books in 2019.