#24 - Padmasree Warrior on Designing Autonomous Vehicles - With Anu Hariharan at the Female Founders Conference

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, this is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Padmasree Warrior and Anu Hariharan. Padmasree is the CEO of NEO, and they design autonomous vehicles, and Anu is a partner at YC Continuity. This conversation was recorded at our fourth annual Female Founders Conference, which took place here in San Francisco this June.
All right, here we go.

**Anu Hariharan** (0:22)
Next, you're going to meet Padmasree Warrior. Forbes calls her the queen of electric car business.
Padmasree is the CEO of NIO, and also the chief development officer. NIO designs smart autonomous vehicles. And prior to this, Padmasree held C-level positions at Cisco, as well as Motorola, and is on the board of Microsoft and Spotify. Thank you for being here.
Thank you very much. So, I think the first question that a lot of them really have is, you've spent more than two decades in really successful scaled companies. Why NIO?

**Padmasree Warrior** (1:07)
So, yeah, that's right. For over two decades, I worked. I started my career actually as an engineer. I'm an engineer. I started in the semiconductor industry as a line engineer, working in fabs, and eventually worked my way up to become the chief technology officer for Motorola Semiconductor business, then eventually the whole company, and then moved to Cisco in 2008, and I was CTO first, and then CSO, and then eventually CTO and CSO.
And I left Cisco about a year and a half ago. I left in September of 2015 When I left, I didn't know what I was going to do, but I knew that what I didn't want to do, I knew I didn't want to do the same job twice. In other words, I didn't want to go as into another large tech company in a C-level position, because I felt like I have done that in two very large companies. I this time wanted to go somewhere where I could impact a whole industry and change a whole industry. So I was kind of thinking I wanted to start my own company, either in the education vertical or in the transportation vertical. Both I felt were industries that have by and large been stagnant and have always had technology on the periphery, never central to the industry.
And then I joined NEO. We work on building autonomous electric vehicles, but the focus is really on how we would all spend our time when we're not driving anymore. So the focus is really about how do we improve people's, how do we give people time back from driving and freeing you from the chores of driving. So we focus a lot on user experience.
So it's a fascinating time to be really in this industry and rethink everything.

**Anu Hariharan** (2:56)
Yeah, and I remember one of the things we had discussed before. You said that even though the industry, the car seems like something that men purchase, you said actually the consumer buying decision in most many cases is done by women.
So how do you bring that in the product design or as you think about the evolution of the car, even under Neo, like how do you think about building a team around that?

**Padmasree Warrior** (3:21)
Yeah, so when I started in this role, I didn't know anything about building cars. I obviously was a consumer and not really a car guy, but I think of it as a consumer product. So we spent about six months doing a lot of user research. You know, what do people buy vehicles for? What do they look for? And it's interesting, actually, in the United States, more than 50% of the buyers for vehicles are women.
And many of the women that we interviewed said that even when they go to a dealership today and they go with their spouse or boyfriend and that person says, this is my wife or my partner is actually buying a car, in the dealership, the sale is actually made to the man. And they ignore the woman. They talk to the guys and they tell them about all the features that they think the men like.
And so that was one interesting find. And the second thing we found was women always struggle because they're sold minivans and they label soccer moms and ignore the professional side of what a woman want. And many of us work and have families. And so many people told us, I don't want to drive a vehicle that kind of pigeonholes me in the soccer mom image. I want something that is also beautiful in the vehicle and it's got space inside for my children or for my bags or whatever. So their needs were not being met in the product category. And this is the largest buying power in the country today for vehicles. So it was sort of like interesting to think how one of the most aspirational consumer product completely ignores more than half the population and more than half the demographic that's actually consuming that product. So we are taking a lot of these factors into our design criteria as we look at it. Obviously, you never build a product for a particular gender, but it's more for the utility and what people are looking for.