Building a Capital-Efficient, Highly Scalable Smart City IoT Venture: LYT CEO Timothy Menard (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Was there a customer that you had in mind?

Timothy Menard: All sides – automotive and the communities they drove in.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get the company off the ground?

Timothy Menard: I applied for a Federal Small Business Research and Innovation grant. The company started on a quarter-million grant. I was able to use a portion of that and partner with the University of California – Irvine to have a road system and students of all classifications work on this digitalization concept.

Sramana Mitra: It was you and a bunch of professors and students from the University of California at Irvine?

Timothy Menard: And one other employee.

Sramana Mitra: Once you had a use case and proof of concept, what was the next step?

Timothy Menard: In the next step, we took the proof of concept and findings and went to the state of California. We went and met with DMV and the Department of Transportation. What was supposed to be 45 minutes ended up being a 2.5-hour discussion of all the challenges that have come up over the years. We have come up so far into the future in trying to solve these big things that there was such a way out.

That’s the defining moment in how the company pivoted from giving more information to the cars to cars actually having too much information. What would fix this street is if cars give that information back to the system that controls them. That’s how we wound up pivoting. We also got out of hardware and switched to software by recognizing that there’s already so much established infrastructure.

Data is everywhere. The part that was missing was some sort of diplomatic, non-biased information exchanger that can then build on top of this raw data insights for both parties that actually improve the goals of each one of these separate industries.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down. Pick a use case.

Timothy Menard: We had been working with the university’s public transit. We built our own tracking devices for public transit and learned about the entire transit ecosystem. What we were able to do is take all this information from buses and be able to learn how they move around throughout the day and use that information to adjust traffic lights.

Because of that, we wound up calling the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority. Originally, we were coming to them with, “Would your drivers want to know if they were about to run red lights?” That’s a huge offense. Professional drivers and regular drivers are totally different. We came in and they told us everything they’ve done.

They said, “We did this 10 years ago. This was the outcome. The drivers still won’t accept this. The city of San Jose wants to prioritize its buses. Instead of telling the driver that they’re getting a red light, you could extend the light to make it safer.” We had a champion that knew all the problems and what had been done before and had another stakeholder to solve their new challenges. We were there at the right time with a new way of connecting things.

They got us immediately in front of the city. Before we knew it, we wound up with a continuation of our grant to pivot to work on this problem. That’s how we got our pilot in the city of San Jose. We wound up on 20 intersections and using real bus data. We were now switching the paradigm that the traffic industry has always been working in. That radiated out. It showed fit. We were able to take that to firetrucks, ambulances, and light rail.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building a Capital-Efficient, Highly Scalable Smart City IoT Venture: LYT CEO Timothy Menard
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