Paul Lam, Bot Auto Chief Strategy Officer on Autonomous Trucking

**Grace Gong** (0:03)
We are live. Hi, Paul. Welcome to Venture with Grace.

**Paul Lam** (0:06)
Hi, Grace. Thank you very much for having me here.

**Grace Gong** (0:09)
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I want to start with, obviously, right now you're working in one of the hottest industry in Silicon Valley right now, but I want to start with like, so since you started your career in corporate strategy investment banking and now you're the CFO and Chief Strategy Officer of Bot Auto, what were some core lessons that you've learned early on your career shaping into who you are today?

**Paul Lam** (1:08)
Well, great question. Thank you very much, Grace. I started my career as a sales trader, like doing all the coffee runs for the traders on the floor. And then I thought this is not the job for me, so I moved on to investment banking and focusing on infrastructure. Back then, it was energy, transportation, everything, boring as hell as you know.
But one biggest lessons that I've learned from my previous job was, look, no job is the same, but also no jobs are different, right? Ultimately, you're really living on a planet, like trying to use your both hands and your feet, like create value and to make the world better one. So when I was working on all these transportation deals and mega deals, I asked myself a question in 2015, like, look, we had all these amazing technologies in the Silicon Valley, and we were trying to use it on the Internet, like making people buy faster, making people spend faster, make people eat faster, right? It's all social platform, e-commerce platform, door dash, right? It's all about instant gratification and getting people to consume faster. And I was like, okay, I'm in a boring sector. Oh my God, why am I here? Shouldn't I change to the TMT team? And then back then, I just asked myself, okay, is there anything that I can change myself without changing the context? Like, I want to do this. Now, clearly infrastructure is a boring sector, but is there ways where we can use AI, data, better technologies, material sciences to make energy better, to make transportation better? Is this now the time for us not to think about like consume faster, but how do we transport, if not teleporting, transport faster, getting energy cheaper? So that was really the how moment and I started, okay, maybe I shouldn't change material, like every job has a place and a stage for you. If you understand your mission, your value, your purpose. So that was the time I told myself, okay, 2016, I gave myself a Google post. Here's my proposition.
I want to bring infrastructure to technologies or vice versa. I want to bring technologies to infrastructure. And the hypothesis on the proposition is very simple. Can we use all the amazing technologies that we have had seen, at least in my lifetime, for 20 years, into infrastructure, being energy transport, make it 100 times better?
And then the rest is history, right? Like since 2016 until today, 2026, the last decade was always on that. I've done investment banking, went to the World Bank, invested in a couple of climate tech technology firms. I moved to Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, setting up the 1 billion fund of funds, investing in a lot of GPs, venture funds, who focuses on that. Finally, make my turn into the corporate, becoming an operator myself, bringing autonomous driving to trucking space.
That's always been on that line. To summarize, I think the learning or the experience that I have is you got to understand the superlative mission statement of yourself, and then try to fit it in to what you do.
And I think that's probably the biggest lessons that I've learned, and stick to it, because obviously in the early days, people don't understand what the heck you were talking about, right? Like AI with energy, what the hell is that? And today, nobody question that not only AI requires energy, but AI can also help the energy sector to become better with responsive demand system and all these crazy things, AI algorithm that you can actually use.