- Padmashree Warrior is the CEO of NIO, a company that designs smart autonomous vehicles
- She has held C-level positions at Cisco and Motorola, and is on the board of Microsoft and Spotify
- Padmashree wanted to start her own company in the education or transportation industry to impact and change the whole industry
- NIO focuses on building autonomous electric vehicles and improving user experience
- Women make up more than 50% of vehicle buyers in the US, but are often ignored and not catered to by car dealerships
- NIO aims to have a level 4 self-driving car by 2020, with the option for manual driving to overcome regulation barriers
- The future of self-driving cars will require mature and reliable technology, cost reduction, and a shift in human behavior
- Padmashree emphasizes the importance of hiring the right people and maintaining a high bar for talent in a company's early stages
- Diversity in the hiring process is crucial to prevent the creation of microcultures within the organization.

- The speaker asks interviewees about the toughest thing they have faced in life and how they overcame it to test their character.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of culture and taking breaks in the workplace to prevent burnout.
- The company has a unique structure with separate entities in China and the US, requiring clear roles and coordination.
- The speaker discusses the challenges and lack of progress for women in the engineering field.
- The speaker shares personal experiences of feeling the need to conform to a male-dominated work environment and encourages authenticity.
- The speaker advises organizations to be aware of issues within their company and prioritize addressing them.

- The CEO of a company with 350 employees emphasizes an open policy and encourages employees to come talk to him about any issues or complaints.
- He believes it is important for the CEO to take personal accountability for everything that happens in the company.
- He mentions the importance of addressing and following up on all complaints, regardless of their size.
- He acknowledges the competition for talent in their industry and highlights the importance of the company's mission and culture in attracting employees.

- Padmashree Warrior is the CEO of NIO, a company designing smart autonomous vehicles
- NIO focuses on building autonomous electric vehicles and improving user experience
- NIO aims to have a level 4 self-driving car by 2020, with the option for manual driving
- The future of self-driving cars requires mature technology, cost reduction, and a shift in human behavior
- Padmashree emphasizes hiring the right people and maintaining a high bar for talent
- Diversity in hiring is crucial to prevent microcultures within the organization
- The speaker discusses challenges and lack of progress for women in engineering
- The company has separate entities in China and the US, requiring clear roles and coordination
- The speaker encourages authenticity and addressing issues within the company
- The CEO emphasizes an open policy and personal accountability for everything that happens in the company
- The company's mission and culture are important in attracting employees.

Padmasree Warrior is the CEO of NIO.

 Anu Hariharan is a Partner at YC Continuity.

Next, you're going to meet Padmashree Warrior.

Forbes calls her the queen of electric car business.

Padmashree is the CEO of NIO and also the chief development officer.

And prior to this, Padmashree held C-level positions at Cisco as well as Motorola and is on the board of Microsoft and Spotify.

So, I think the first, you know, question that a lot of them really have is you've spent more than 2 decades in really successful scaled companies.

For over 2 decades, I started my career, actually, as 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.

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 into another large tech company in a C-level position, because I felt like I had done that in 2 very large companies.

I this time wanted to go somewhere where I could impact the whole industry and change

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 the NIO, 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 it's a fascinating time to be really in this industry and rethink everything.

And I remember 1 of the things we had discussed before.

You said that even though the car seems like something that men purchase, you said actually the consumer buying decision in many cases is done by women.

So how do you bring that in the product design or as you think about, you know, the evolution of the car, even under NIO, like how do you think about building a team around that?

Yeah, so when I started in this role, I didn't know anything about building cars.

Obviously, I was a consumer and not really a car guy, but I love, I love, I think of it as a consumer product.

So we spent about 6 months doing a lot of user research.

You know, what do people buy vehicles 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, my wife or my partner is actually buying the 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 the second thing we found was women always struggle because they're sold minivans and they're labelled soccer moms and, you know, ignore the professional side of what a

and so many people told us, I don't want to drive a vehicle that kind of pigeon-holes 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 a 1 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.

So I think that's that was a big eye-opener for me.

I think you have to either choose between a beautiful car, but it's very compact and has no space, or something that's giant and looks ugly.

And what is your vision for self-driving?

And what are the things that you're trying to do?

Yeah, so I think that's a big eye-opener for me.

think self-driving is headed, and what is your vision for NIO?

So we are targeting to have what is known in the industry as a level 4 self-driving car by 2020, meaning that the vehicle will be fully capable of driving itself, but we are building our car with the steering and pedals and so to allow you to drive if you want to drive it.

And we think that actually allows us to overcome any regulation barriers that might get in the way, because there is a human in the loop when you are driving.

I think fully autonomous level 5 vehicles are probably further away, maybe 2025, maybe even 2030, expectations vary.

I think to me, there are 3 axes that have to all come together.

1 is the technology has to be matured and developed and be reliable and safe.

The second is the cost of the technology has to come down, and it will come down over time.

LiDARs and radars and sensors have to come down, and the compute platform is very powerful in this vehicle.

And a third is actually human behavior itself, right?

Like my generation, A lot of people, we grew up where we were

to drive, and you have to take a driver's license test, and you pass the test, and you hold the wheel, and you're taught how to hold the wheel.

There will be a generation coming now who will bypass that.

So there will be a transition period, just as we went in the mobile internet space.

And so iPhone is now celebrating its 10th year, right?

No, so before iPhone, when I worked at Motorola, phones were very different.

And we didn't expect something like a phone to look like a smartphone back then.

Similarly, I think cars in the future will be very, very different.

So all of these 3 things, I think, will intersect, and the future will be very exciting for all of us.

Imagine I work in San Jose, my company is there, and I was coming up here, imagine if I could just sit back and do whatever I wanted to do, take a nap on my way back, you know, instead of worrying about traffic and driving.

I've seen the video of your product, which is very exciting.

Now, you've built, you know, you've been at successful companies, but you've also built them at scale.

And you've talked a lot about how great teams are what makes a company great.

So, what tactical advice do you have for founders here in terms of their first 10 or those first 50 hires?

Because you've stressed a lot about how that is really important and how you build a company culture that you

I think it's much harder, by the way, to start a company than to be in a big company and lead a big company in the following ways.

When I started at Neo, I was employee number 16.

There were 15 people that were kind of already there.

But I think I only had like 1 engineering person and we had 2 trailers in a parking lot in San Jose and you basically are starting from nothing in a vision.

And I think so to me tactically the first 10 first 10 hires, 20 hires, 50 hires, 100 hires are very very important.

In my company I personally interviewed the first 150 people that we hired and made offers to, because the first 100 people hire the next 1,000 people.

And if you want to scale the company, each of them will hire 10 people, so Your bar has to continue to remain very,

I think you really have to be very selective and look for the right kind of talent, but also the right kind of a fit.

And the second thing that I watch out for, and this I realized as we were scaling, now we're about 350 people in the company.

1 of the other things that happens is as you scale the organisation, you go from, like, 100 people to 300 people at that stage, you're not hiring any more, your leaders are hiring.

The tendency would be for them to bring people they know, right?

So you create these islands of microculture which you don't want to have.

So in my company, we have a rule that every hire has to have a diverse panel that hires the people.

So diverse in terms of the gender, it can be all non-male panel or an all-female panel that interviews, does the interviewing, but also people that are from the hiring group, but also people from outside the group that can ask people different questions.

So obviously you ask, in our case, we look for a lot of specific technical skills, so you test them for those technical skills.

But people from finance or corp dev also interview them to ask them general questions.

So we look for technical depth, behavioral leadership skills.

And So you ask them things like, in your life, what's the toughest thing you faced and how did you overcome that?

May not really have direct relevance to the role, because 1 of the things we believe is a person's true character is tested when they're faced with a very traumatic situation.

So we ask things like that and then we make decisions.

So that's the second very tactical advice that I would give.

Because we actually learned it by the hard way.

We were doing it, and we found we were creating micro-cultures where people were hiring from the place they came from.

And so soon we had like this group, that group, and these little islands which all stuck together.

And then the other thing I would say is culture is extremely important.

So in my company, 1 Wednesday a month, and we pick Wednesday because it happens to be the middle of the week.

We take time out, 4 to 6 o'clock in the afternoon.

The whole company comes, and we do some fun activity.

It's Not just to have fun, but the intent behind that is to institutionalize the fact that it's okay to take a break.

We have to take care of ourselves when we do this, and we do this as a whole company.

We all take a break together, And we're under very tight pressure right now.

And the second reason we do it is allows people from different functions to come together.

So you don't become siloed in the company.

And so the intent is that, but we obviously don't do it, we don't state that.

We do some fun activity and team activity.

That's 1 simple way you can build something fun in the culture.

It actually gets fairly competitive We have people rotating to host team time and so everybody comes up with their own team.

It's a treasure hunt It's kind of something goofy 1 day we built toy cars and We race them to see which car goes.

So vehicle engineering team in my company was very competitive and they won.

Actually, the software team won the race, which was interesting.

So I think we do things like this, that I think it's very important as you scale the company, you're focusing

quite a distributed team, geographically.

So, how do you make sure that they are all sort of aligned with a shared purpose?

Our company also has a very different model.

And if we figure this out, I think there will be a case study, I was telling Anu, that will be taught in business school someday.

The thesis is this, we feel like the 2 biggest markets are China and US for vehicles.

And each 1 is going through a major transformation.

In China, It's a big movement from internal combustion to EVs, now the largest EV market in the world.

And the US, we're rapidly adopting autonomy and self-driving cars.

So when we started the company, we said, okay, how do we create a company structure that can win in both markets.

Essentially there's a China company and a US company, and we share very capital intensive things like manufacturing and supply chain and design studio, the car design studio.

Now 1 of the complex things is to manage, you know, the requirements that we develop technology for the company in China, they support us for manufacturing, how do we keep everybody coordinated?

So it again goes back to culture and values, We describe values for the company, 4 very simple values.

We say it's vision, it's action, it's care and honesty.

we go back, and the way that's interpreted in China is very different than here,

And then we make sure roles are very clear, which team is doing what, and that we're not stepping on each other's toes.

It's sort of an experiment in its own way.

I also want to go back and sort of trace your career path because that's something which is really fascinating.

So you did your engineering from IIT Delhi in chemical engineering and then went to Cornell.

How did you make the decision from that to go to Motorola?

Yeah, so I'm a chemical engineer, my academic background is in chemical engineering, my master's degree was doing materials and so when I was actually when I came to the US from India as a graduate student, I came on a student visa.

My goal that time, I thought I wanted to be a professor.

I was gonna do my PhD and go back to India and teach.

And then it was quite accidental that I ended up working for Motorola.

I actually, I don't know if you know, Cornell is in upstate New York, and I left a snowstorm and came to interview with Motorola back then in Arizona, you know, bright sunshine, and I said, God, and I was from India back then, I wasn't used to snow and stuff, I said, okay, whatever job they give me, I'm moving here.

And I'm gonna take a break from my PhD, and I thought I'd work for a year and go back, and I never did.

Because I really found working and creating concrete products was to me actually much more interesting.

So as I said, I started as a line engineer and worked my way up to become the chief technology officer.

But back then Motorola was a very diverse company, so I got to do many different jobs.

So every 2, 3 years almost I was doing something very different.

I started in manufacturing then went into technology transfer and then research and eventually became CTO.

So you and then did you come to Silicon Valley for Cisco?

So you've been an engineer in the late 1980s.

You've been in the Valley now for a while.

Has anything changed being a woman engineer?

I think in the technical area, there's still, the ratios are very, very, it's roughly the same.

I think when I went to school, it was about 14% in engineering, and now it's about the same.

So in some ways, it hasn't changed at all.

If you just look at the numbers in the last 20 years, it's still very difficult, I think, for women in technical field.

And I've been an engineer pretty much my whole career.

I just moved to different roles in engineering.

I just spoke at Microsoft with their women engineers.

And I think, you know, roughly the numbers are the same across multiple companies.

So if you just look at that, you feel like, okay, nothing's really changed.

The fact that now we are speaking up more is, I think, that has changed.

I think in the past probably we would not have said all the things we are saying and calling out and I think that's great.

I think we shouldn't let anybody, no matter what level they are in any company, get away with things that sometimes they think they have a license to get away with.

I think in just the last year, we've read and we've all followed all of the stories that have been coming out, and they're not stories, they're reality, actually.

Which is shocking in some ways, and you think like, wow.

But in other ways, you feel like we knew this was happening.

Now we're acknowledging this is happening, and now we're calling it out and holding people accountable.

Now we need to say, how do we stop these things from happening in the first place, right?

And as a woman engineer, you've talked about this before, how did you, you know, did you feel you had to behave like a man sometimes or change your style of work?

When I started, I was, I think, there are probably very few engineers in factories, in semiconductor factories, I started as a factory engineer.

We were actually told to dress a particular way, we couldn't wear any color, we were told to wear, I think it was

And again, I came from India, I grew up with a lot of color, it was very alien for me to be that way, but I forced myself to do it, because I thought, oh my gosh, I had to do this, Otherwise I won't get a job or I won't be recognized for the work I do.

And after a few months of that, I stopped.

I said, I can't be who I'm not really as a person.

And now I always talk about how women should be women first Whatever it is that makes you comfortable You should dress the way you want to dress and then you know, let your work define you I mean in my company actually we do this at team time 1 of the things men and women do this by the way all of us do this as a human being, when we introduce ourselves, notice this, we all introduce ourselves with a job title and say hi I'm Padma Shrivorya, I'm CEO for Neo.

So when we hire new employees, when we do our team time, we introduce all our new hires, and we have them come up and say some fun fact about themselves.

I love cooking, I have a two-year-old, or I play the guitar, I love rock climbing, I have a motorcycle that I love to ride on, whatever it is, right?

No, why don't we say that about ourselves?

And we have to give ourselves permission to be authentic in who we are.

So that's something that I encourage everyone to do, both men and women.

And given all the recent events, what tactical advice would you have for companies to sort of address this?

What can organizations, even founders here, what can they do from day 1 to make sure?

Yeah, firstly, I think have your pulse on the organization.

It's not an excuse to say I didn't know this was happening.

It's obviously impossible to keep track of everything.

And when someone raises an issue, make it a priority.

Make it, you know, we in my company, now we're 350 people, you know, I have a complete open policy.

And when they talk to me, it's not that, I just don't ignore it.

You know, if they're complaining about something, we try to do something, you know, we fix it.

If we can't fix it, we have to go back and say, we can't fix it.

I think it's very important, if you're the founder and CEO, you have personal accountability for everything that happens in your company, and you have to take accountability for that.

APPLAUSE And I think it's important to have a follow-up, right?

We have, you know, there'll be lots of complaints like, oh, the cafeteria is too cold today, or the food came late.

Some things are small, some things are more serious, but you have to pay attention to all of them.

And I think actually, I feel like we compete for talent, right, in the space we are in, it's very difficult to find the right kind of talent.

A lot of people come to work for our company for the mission, for the culture.

Well thank you so much for taking the time today and for sharing these insights.

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Padmasree Warrior on Designing Autonomous Vehicles - With Anu Hariharan at FFC