Mark Wheeler | DeepMap
MARK WHEELER
Co-Founder & CTO of DeepMap, a company that is accelerating safe autonomy by providing the world's best autonomous mapping and localization solutions.
What Is DeepMap? Tell Us About What You Do And What Your Mission Is.
James Wu and I founded DeepMap in 2016. We both had extensive backgrounds in mapping from Google, Apple, and other leading companies. We built DeepMap because we realized there will be a revolution in mapping technology and a tremendous gap in the market for maps to support the looming autonomous vehicle industry. In the past, maps were made for human drivers and navigators. In the self-driving era, machines require a different type of map and a different type of service model. This is a huge challenge for the autonomous vehicle industry. We are focused on solving it. Self-driving cars using our service will know precisely where they are on the road, what’s coming around the corner, when and where they are allowed to make turns, and how conditions might have changed since the last time they drove this stretch of road — and all with extreme efficiency and low cost.
What Is Your Background? What Led You To Starting Your Own Company, And How Did You End Up In This Space.
I grew up in Waveland, Mississippi. My dad was an aerospace engineer who also had an interest in entrepreneurship, and he taught me a lot. He was involved in NASA’s Apollo Program and had set a high bar in terms of what he achieved in his career. I got interested in computers pretty much when personal computing first began; I was lucky in terms of my age and the timing of when that happened, I caught onto that when it was really beginning.
I did my undergraduate degree at Tulane University in New Orleans, which was a wonderful experience. During my junior year I attended Cambridge University in England, which was amazing. At Cambridge, we were encouraged to explore a lot of areas, and I started learning about artificial intelligence and computer vision.
I continued that path of study at Tulane, and ended up going to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh for graduate school in their computer vision group, which is pretty much the top place in the world for that. I studied with some of the real pioneers in computer vision. We had an amazing lab. The Carnegie Mellon group that I was part of at the time was about 80 people, bigger than most grad schools. We had our hands on technology way before anyone else, learning how to build and use sensors. We had an autonomous vehicle in our lab that was one of the first of its kind. I rode in it going 75 mph with no one driving, back in 1991. Carnegie Mellon’s approach was very hands-on and practical, very forward-looking and far-looking, so it was a great experience.
After graduating, I wasn’t super interested in pure research. I like working on bleeding-edge things that solved real problems. I started out in Cupertino, California at Apple, working on a technology called QuickTime VR. And that was another bleeding-edge technology that was maybe ten years ahead of its time. Most people now know Street View and Google Maps, but the QuickTime VR group invented all of that. Until the technology showed up in Google Maps, it wasn’t widely used.
I was at Apple when Steve Jobs took over, which was an exciting, crazy time. A little while after that, I got an odd request to come see something in Orinda, next to Berkeley; a guy I hadn’t heard of had founded a startup, Cyra Technologies, that was doing something fairly crazy, and he contacted me out of the blue. I ended up going to work for them and staying for ten years. And that is where we created the first high-precision LiDAR so we could digitize practically anything. Leica Geosystems (a Swiss company) bought us a few years later.
And working at that company was a very cutting-edge, great experience. But after ten years, I got recruited to Google, and worked on Google Maps. I had met my DeepMap Co-Founder, James Wu, while at Leica - I had tried to hire him, and then he eventually went to Google and we both ended up on the Maps team. James became a tech lead for a part of a large project I was leading at the time.
At Google, I learned everything there is about mapping, I was involved in all kinds of aspects of it, including large-scale cloud computing. After almost ten years of that, James showed up to have lunch with me one day. He told me about this idea for a mapping engine for autonomous vehicles. I thought it was a great idea. He asked me to quit Google and do it with him, and it was too good of an opportunity to pass up. We both quit shortly after and started DeepMap.
What Have Been Both Your Favorite And Least-liked Parts Of Your Entrepreneurial Journey? What Have Been Your Most Challenging And Most Exciting Moments For You And The Company?
My favorite aspect of entrepreneurship is all the milestones and successes that we’ve had over the years. When you’re creating something from scratch, especially like what we’re working on now which is very challenging, it’s rewarding to see what you can accomplish.
Another thing I didn’t expect as much but was surprised by - I worked with some really great people at Google. Some of them joined us here at DeepMap. But I didn’t fully realize just how talented, productive and creative these people were until they were here at our startup. Because in a startup, there is much more opportunity to show what you can do. And in some ways, you’re very constrained at the bigger companies. It was surprising not that they’re great, but that they’re five times better than what I thought.
There’s a cultural shift in going from a large incumbent to a smaller startup. At a big company, you might have to convince 100 people to go forward with something. At a small startup, you can set the direction and move quickly.
The biggest challenges of entrepreneurship, for me, are the business challenges. In some cases, we’re working with companies that are bureaucratic and conservative; to say they move slowly is being diplomatic.
Sometimes there is a lot of churn and turnover within these companies; you might build up a great relationship with someone at a company and be almost ready to sign a deal, then that person emails you and says they moved to a different company. This has happened a lot. It might be more common in the autonomous vehicle industry, with companies poaching people left and right, but it makes it hard to create that continuity over time. Having said that, our customers are great to work with and bring a lot of complementary experience to the table. Automotive product development is very complex. Our customers are the technology leaders and early adopters and we learn a lot by partnering with them.
Also, no matter how good your idea is, it can be hard to convince other people of the idea’s value and that you can deliver on it. So it’s this constant process of having these conversations where you might talk to 100 people and maybe five of them will be ready to go forward. There are lots of efforts there, and on some level it can feel tedious because it feels at times that you’re having the same conversations over and over.
What Was The Fundraising Process Like For You? Tell Us About Your Investors And How You Use The Money You’ve Raised.
It’s challenging. Even once you raise the money, now you have to deliver. You owe the investors something, you have to operate under certain constraints. The bright side is: you get to keep building and growing and trying to achieve the mission. The investors tend to be experienced in various aspects of the business and help us a lot with navigating through building a business since they have typically successfully done that sometimes several times in their careers. There might be some differences of opinion, it’s that constant back-and-forth. We have been super fortunate to work with a great team of investors and technical advisors, who have collaborated with us from the beginning.
I went to Carnegie Mellon, and there are so many innovative people there, but there’s not an entrepreneurial culture there - not to say that there’s no entrepreneurism, but it’s night and day between the Bay Area and Pittsburgh, and really most other places, even a city like Boston with lots of great universities. There’s a different mentality in the Bay Area, and you don’t know it until you’re in it. I realized it when I was in my first startup. Having all the investors and startup veterans here is a big deal.
My first attempt at entrepreneurship kind of fell flat, and it soured me a little bit. In grad school, I created what I believed to be the first fantasy sports site. I tried to get funding for it, and talked to some people in Pittsburgh who didn’t see any value in what I was building.
In our current space, autonomous vehicles (AVs), this industry has a lot of attention on it, and investors are looking for opportunities. VCs are eager to put money into this space - it’s a greenfield space with a lot of innovation happening quickly.
My goals are practical - to get things out into the world that work. Often there are constraints on how that can be achieved, especially at different timeframes. We have very strong people on the business and sales side. I’ve always tried to be very sensitive to who the ultimate customers are and what they need - something I see as critical for being a successful entrepreneur.
Tell Us About Some Of The Obstacles You Face In Your Industry On A Regular Basis (Can Be Regulatory Or Operational). How Do You Think These Might Change Over The Next 5-10 Years?
There are technological obstacles in terms of getting the technology into large-scale availability. Things have to be improved on the sensor side and the compute side. And then there’s the question of how to get the technology working to the necessary safety level.
There are lots of challenges specific to autonomous vehicles. The good news is: DeepMap’s products are able to support different autonomous vehicle applications. In the near term, a lot of companies are starting to focus on not only fully-autonomous vehicles, but Advanced Driving Assistance Systems (ADAS), which is also known as “Level 2.”
Looking ahead to the next 5-10 years: once the business is established and starting to roll out, the economic benefits will push the rollout and it will grow quite quickly. For example, if you look at the robo-taxi space, or trucking space, or delivery space, there are lots of different players who are starting to put more and more vehicles into operation in the next few years. And in the Level 2 ADAS space, every car company is working on this; they will roll out new capabilities in 2022, 2023, 2024 - these capabilities are just going to grow. Eventually it will get to nearly Level 4 autonomy, and the adoption will grow along with the convenience and added safety.
A fully autonomous car will not just suddenly be available overnight - the autonomy capabilities will grow gradually. But for robo-taxis for certain confined areas, and trucks for certain routes, the technology is ready.
Anything Exciting That Will Be Launching Soon at DeepMap?
We’re launching a product called DeepMap RoadMemory, which is an open mapping service that greatly accelerates automakers’ ability to deploy digital maps at scale leveraging their own production fleets. It automatically builds maps using “crowdsourced” perception data from everyday production cars on the road. This helps combine the vast scale, low latency, and low unit economics of a crowdsourced approach to data collection with DeepMap’s gold standard mapping technology. DeepMap RoadMemory also enables localization, as well as change detection and map update at scale.
It’s a product designed to build a level of high-definition (HD) map out of consumer vehicles that are equipped with cameras. What makes this so exciting is that it’s adding another solution to our bag of solutions for AV that addresses some issues in the near-term as far as map coverage and map freshness. Our vision is that when RoadMemory is combined with our High-Definition Reference (HDR) product, it will provide a future-proof solution for maps for AVs. As maps grow in coverage and quality, the companies relying on our map will be able to grow their capabilities alongside that.
How Do You Think Your Industry (Or The World In General) Will Change Post-COVID?
As for COVID’s effects upon the transportation industry, it depends on whether COVID dies out. If COVID doesn’t fully go away, people might continue to be reluctant to use mass transit. If post-COVID doesn’t happen, that will be a big change; if the disease continues being prevalent, that would be the worst case.
But if we can get past the pandemic and get into some kind of post-COVID “New Normal”, I think this autonomous vehicle industry will mostly get back to normal. Lots of companies in this space I think will try to get back to working in offices. I don’t think it’s going to be a massive change for our specific industry.
Run Us Through A Typical Day In The Life.
I’ve been working from home during the pandemic, but I don’t think WFH will last forever. At DeepMap, we’ll be working from the office as soon as the local public health authorities allow it.
I don’t wake up super early, I’m not a 4 a.m. person. I generally am up by 7 a.m. or so, then start my day by going through communications, checking the bug reports, design documents, technical discussions on slack, etc.
I don’t drink coffee, I only drink water. I was told “never touch caffeine again” by a doctor during my first startup, which was harsh! But I was drinking too much caffeine in those earlier years... and it wasn’t a good idea.
Generally when we are in the office, I am one of the first people into the office in the morning. And those first couple of hours was when I got the most work done. As soon as everyone else rolls in, especially when you’re leading large teams, you get no time to think. You’re constantly barraged by requests.
I’ve always prioritized everybody else above my time. I’d rather see the people on my team get what they need from me and keep moving than worry about interrupting me. It was similar at Google. I would try to provide as quick of a turnaround on things as possible, regardless of what’s going on.
I’ve never been big on blocking out chunks of time and I’m not particularly regimented or methodical about how I structure my day. If something is supercritical and I need six hours to do it, I will block that out. I’m in communication with lots of people throughout the day and I can context-switch fairly rapidly. In general, I have a lot of balls in the air but I’ve gotten used to managing that.
What Are The Top Qualities or Skills You Believe Entrepreneurs Need In Order To Be Successful? Also, What Advice Do You Have For Entrepreneurs Who Are Just Starting Out?
I think entrepreneurs need three qualities to be successful:
1. Ability to get things done. If you’re not good at getting things done you should probably stay out of entrepreneurship!
2. You have to be very resourceful and determined. Lots of people will tell you “No thank you,” or “That’s a stupid idea” or “Get a real job!”
3. You have to be able to convince people to follow you. Joining a startup is not a laughing matter. If you want to be successful, you have to convince people who are generally already successful to give up their current gig and come do the thing that you’re working on. Then you have to convince people to fund you. Funding and following, it’s a similar concept.
When it comes to advice, this is what I would give: join a startup first before you start your own. Try to learn from what you see going well there and not going well there. See what’s really involved in running a startup. Work at a couple other companies too. Make sure everyone loves to work with you. That matters, because if people don’t love to work with you, they’re not going to leave their nice-paying job to come work with you at a startup.
It’s all about relationships. Sometimes people can follow each other from one opportunity to the next. If you don’t have a good network of people who would love to work with you, you’re going to have a tough time. Investors can help attract talent to your startup, but it doesn’t work as well if you have to rely on investors to recruit talent. If you’re going to choose between a person you haven’t worked with before and someone you have, there’s a risk with someone you haven’t worked with.
Tell Us A Story Of Something That Happened To You, Something You Heard, Or Something You Saw, That Either Made You Laugh Or Taught You An Important Lesson.
I saw a news story recently from Oakland, California - a man was arrested for riding in the back seat of his “autonomous” Tesla car. This is a real challenge for the AV space - the technology has got to be finetuned for safety, and companies like Tesla need to keep communicating to customers and the public about what is the right way to use this technology.
This is an example of where the marketing side of the technology can sometimes confuse the public. Tesla’s been using the phrase “Full Self-Driving” for something that is actually, at the moment, a “driver assistance” feature.
This is an example of where the concept being pushed in the public conversation about autonomous vehicles is actually not helping the industry as a whole. It has the potential to hurt the industry, hurt public perception, put pressure on regulators to make things more restrictive, and hold some things back from being developed more quickly.
I am happy to see organizations like PAVE, which is a coalition of industry, nonprofits, and academics. Their goal is to open up a public conversation about AVs). They try to raise public awareness of what is on the roads today and what is possible for the future.
If You Can Have A One-Hour Meeting With Someone Famous Who Is Alive, Who Would It Be?
I would really love to meet Tony Baxter, who was one of the most influential “Imagineers” for Disney. He created a lot of the most famous attractions at Disney parks, and I’ve been interested in Imagineering for a long time. Imagineering has a lot to do with combining technology and design and artistry, storytelling, all of these things that are very interesting to me. If I could’ve been an Imagineer, that would’ve been pretty cool.
If I could meet Tony, it would be fun to talk about challenges they had and solutions they developed. I’ve met a few Imagineers in the past. From talking to a few of the old-timers, I learned how they invented so much out of nothing. Everyone in software talks about agile processes as the new way of doing software, but then if you talk to the original Imagineers, they were doing back in the 1950s. So much of what we’re doing today as engineers was not “new” to them. I met one of the Imagineers, Bob Gurr, who designed most of the ride vehicles for Disney, and invited him to give a talk at Google. It was quite popular and super interesting.
What Is Your Favorite Quote And Why Does It Resonate With You?
“Do or do not, there is no try.” - Yoda
I like this attitude and I try to use it in my everyday work. I’m not a fanatic, but I like Star Wars. One of my former co-workers went to work for Industrial Light & Magic and got to be an extra Jedi in one of the movies, and I’ve always felt a connection to those movies.
“It’s like deja vu all over again.” - Yogi Berra
I like the Yogi Berra quote because it’s true. So many of these problems we deal with in work, really are fundamentally the same. There are not a lot of “new” problems. The Imagineering guys dealt with a lot of the same problems back in the 1950s. Sometimes, my team comes across problems that we were working on in grad school in the early 90s.
What Does Success Mean To You?
Success to me means getting things out in the world that do something useful. That was one of the reasons why I left research out of grad school. I was more interested in getting things created for use in the real world, not academia.
I was always interested in technology, and in grad school I was exposed to a lot. It was all very cool, but sometimes I felt there was a disconnect as far as how the technology was getting out into the real world. Carnegie Mellon is one of the best at connecting technology to the real world, especially in the robotics and computer science department, which is one of the best at working on real world problems. But I wanted to get even closer to real world problem-solving.
Mark Wheeler’s Favorites Stack:
Books:
1. Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon - written in 1930, this is a book of science fiction about humanity’s history, from dawn of man til the lights go out on them, spanning billions of years. But the author predicted a lot of future trends and conflicts; this book predicted World War II and anticipated so many of the technologies that we have today. It’s a crazy book! It really was fun to read.
2. Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon - written in 1937, this is another one that is just so crazy in terms of scope, it’s about all intelligent life in the universe and it’s way out there.
3. Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby - I’m an Arsenal (a London soccer team) fan, so that book was right up my alley. It’s a memoir of Nick Hornby’s life as a lifelong soccer fan in North London, all the memories and moments of watching games and the effects on his life along the way from following the team. I was in England back in 1987-1988, it was a really interesting time in England as far as things going on with soccer fan violence, and the book also discusses that issue.
Health & Fitness:
1. I play soccer, which is good for fitness (except I get injured a lot). A few years ago I got headed in the head and shattered my face. That was not good. I kick around with my twin 16 year old sons as often as we can...they’re much better than me.
2. I saw that Tom Brady is selling some new exercise routine; I figure if he’s still dominating at his age, it’s worth trying.
3. I have a drum kit connected to the Rock Band video game, so I can rock out to various songs. That’s a good outlet and good exercise. I’m not very good but it’s fun.
Newsletters & Podcasts:
1. I use Feedly. It’s a news aggregator that is kind of a new version of Google Reader, and it does a very good job of presenting different articles from newspapers and bloggers that you care to follow. It makes it easy to go through hundreds of articles per day and find the things that are most interesting and relevant. I do that, and in the AV space I keep track of pretty much every article. I really follow the AV industry news closely.
2. I’m not a big podcast listener. I’d rather see the transcript and blaze through it. I don’t always process information as well in an audio format. I will check out a podcast if the guest is particularly relevant to the AV industry.
3. As far as industry-specific thought leaders that I pay attention to...Brad Templeton is an industry thought leader, He has a deep view of what’s going on in the AV industry and is good at assessing and articulating the issues. Ed Niedermeyer of PAVE is another one. He is the author of “Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors,” which is a great book.
Upcoming Vacation Spots:
1. Somewhere in Scandinavia, maybe Norway. It’s unclear as to how soon Europe might reopen to tourists.
2. This summer, we might do Maui. It’s a little closer to home, it’s easier, we can stay in the U.S.
3. Tokyo is one of our favorite vacations, and Paris is high on our list.
