Building a Capital-Efficient, Highly Scalable Smart City IoT Venture: LYT CEO Timothy Menard (Part 1)

You would think deep tech AI / IoT startups take gobs of venture capital to build. Read on to see how Tim has built an incredibly capital-efficient business with massive growth potential using grant money and revenues. Superb company!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from, born, and raised? What kind of background are you from?

Timothy Menard: I was born and raised in Illinois. I was there until I was 19.

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking?

Timothy Menard: I was in first grade when the internet came to our school.

Sramana Mitra: So you’re a digital native so to speak?

Timothy Menard: You can definitely say that.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do for education? How did you move through this industry?

Timothy Menard: I graduated high school in three years and then went to community college for two years where I was discovering what exactly I wanted to do. I definitely knew I enjoyed computers and electronics. I finally went with electrical engineering. I packed everything and wound up going to Alaska where I went to the University of Alaska Anchorage to get my Bachelor’s degree. It was a phenomenal experience. That’s what gave me a place to grow and come across opportunities that I probably wouldn’t have had in other places. I did internships in the Bay Area starting in my junior year. I came out here for two internships. That propelled me into graduate school at the University of Nevada. I then transferred to the University of Alaska Fairbanks to finish. That’s when I started working at Tesla full-time.

Sramana Mitra: What were you doing at Tesla?

Timothy Menard: I worked in vehicle electronics and built entire test systems. I would verify and make sure that whatever we created worked safely. I did a lot of work on vehicle power trains, brakes, and some of the early autonomous systems.

Sramana Mitra: What was going on in your head in the genesis of LYT?

Timothy Menard: The original problem was focused on connected vehicles and ensuring data. There’s this principle that we don’t really speak about now because not a lot of people have cars that have any automation. We focus on the human experience. To craft an autonomous car that has to work in a natively-developed human experience world, we are seeing all the issues of not having something that is not machine-natural. I focus on how we build an ecosystem where machines can move around the world naturally so they don’t have to guess. They too can move around with the same intuition that we people have. That’s where my graduate work started. There’s a lot of stuff that can be known. For a computer to know something, that means that you got to put it into some form of digital format that it can either see or read barcodes or wireless information. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that we could just be putting in the real world that no longer is guessed and checked by the car through the camera but is telling the car, “This is where you’re going. This is what’s happening.” That’s how LYT started. How do you effectively create a barcode for a street sign that can be used throughout the nation?

This segment is part 1 in the series : Building a Capital-Efficient, Highly Scalable Smart City IoT Venture: LYT CEO Timothy Menard
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