LV

Luc Vincent

CTO at Hayden AI

Jackson, Wyoming

Overview

Work Experience

  • Chief Product & Technology Officer

    2023 - 2024

    Building the next generation of high definition mobile mapping and digital twin technology to power cities and businesses

  • VP Engineering & Product Group Lead, AI

    2021 - 2023

    Part of the Reality Labs organization, which grew out of the Oculus acquisition and is building Meta’s future products, including Augmented Reality (AR) glasses, Virtual Reality (VR) headsets, and the Metaverse. • Lead one of Meta's AI Innovation Centers, focused on AR. Team includes a mix of AI Scientists, ML Engineers, Software Engineers and Product Managers. • Team mission is to build State-of-the-Art AI-powered experiences to connect and empower users of our AR products. While this is very forward-looking, some of our tech is already deployed in Meta products, in particular the Meta-powered Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses. • Key technical building blocks include speech recognition, natural language processing, conversational AI / LLMs, visual search, multimodal learning, foundation models, contextual AI, generative AI and cognitive AI.

  • Independent Board Member

    2021 - 2022

    Delimobil is an innovative carshare company operating in a dozen Russian cities, including Moscow. Its service is such that users can pick up and drop off vehicles anywhere (unlike Zipcar, where designated spots are required). It is like a rideshare service where the user has to drive the car. Another way to think about it: it is the car equivalent of a dockless e-scooter rental service like Bird. Delimobil is the largest and fastest growing carshare company in Russia. I was brought on the board to help the company with its expansion strategy, participate in the audit committee, and help plan and execute an IPO on the NYSE. The IPO was inches away from happening in Nov 2021, but we ultimately decided to postpone it. A few months after that, with the events happening in Ukraine, I had no choice but to resign from the board.

  • President, Level 5 Autonomous Driving Division

    2021 - 2021

    Lyft Level 5's acquisition by Toyota Woven Planet, which I helped drive, was announced in April 2021 and closed in July 2021. To date, it remains one of the only profitable M&A transactions in the Autonomous Driving space. After close, I remained onboard long enough to ensure a smooth transition and structure the Level 5 team (all functions) for success in their new environment.

  • Executive VP, Autonomous Driving

    2018 - 2021

    Member of the Lyft executive leadership team, along with the rest of the C-suite. Participated in all aspects of running the company, including in particular preparation & execution of Lyft’s 2019 IPO. My core role was to lead the Autonomous Driving Division, Lyft Level 5 (aka, “L5”). We structured it as a standalone division, with a longer runway and all technical functions reporting to me. • Grew team to 300 employees in first 18 months, and soon thereafter to ~400 (including software, machine learning, infra, hardware, PM, TPM, operations & more). • Managed exponential growth while keeping hiring bar high, delivering on increasingly ambitious objectives, keeping team motivated, and reporting back to the board and CEO regularly. • Opened L5 Munich office, to tap into the strong automotive engineering local talent. • Led acquisition of London-based Blue Vision Labs, which brought unique talent and HD mapping technology to L5. • Championed novel AI-first approach to autonomy, leveraging data captured from the Lyft service at large. • Built rigorous approach to tracking and improving performance, with granular metrics going well beyond “Miles per Interventions” (aka, MPI). • Reported and published DMV-required AV miles and intervention metrics, showing significant YoY improvements, on track to catch up to industry leaders. • Helped drive innovative tech partnership with Magna. • Successfully launched Autonomous Driving pilots of increasing scope in 2018 and 2019, demonstrating how L5-powered self-driving vehicles would operate as part of a hybrid Lyft service. In 2020, COVID wreaked havoc with Lyft’s core business. Building AV technology in-house was no longer viable without a partner. As a result of this change in strategy, I helped architect and drive the acquisition of L5 by Toyota Woven Planet for $550M, which closed in July 2021, a very successful exit.

  • Vice President Of Engineering

    2017 - 2018

    Led the Marketplace & Mapping organization, whose mission is to build the core supply and demand matching algorithms and the real-time systems (microservices) that power the Lyft rideshare service. This included: real-time location services for passengers and drivers, routing, supply/demand matching, pricing, predicted and real-time traffic, event prediction and detection, multimodal navigation, crowdsourcing, mapping, etc. • Deployed new real-time location services for drivers and passengers, resulting in significant improvements to Marketplace efficiency metrics. • Negotiated with high-profile mapping and routing technology providers, helping land a solid roadmap, including a plan to build the technology in-house. Working with Lyft founders, got board approval and initial funding to build an in-house Autonomous Driving division, which we decided to call Lyft Level 5. As founder of this division, I led our efforts to: • Secure a great facility in Palo Alto • Leverage my network to hire an all-star founding team • Hire the first 100 employees in about 6 months • Build the initial technology roadmap • Get to the first end-to-end self-driving demonstration - in the Lyft Level 5 parking lot - in about 4 months. Also contributed to articulating Lyft's dual AV strategy, leveraging 1st-party tech (Lyft Level 5) and integration of 3rd-party supply via Lyft's "Open Platform". This approach paid off as we were able to launch partnerships with Waymo and Motional, which started operating their AVs on the Lyft platform at significant scale.

  • Senior Director, Engineering

    2012 - 2017

    Led globally distributed Geo Imagery org, including hundreds of engineers, PMs, ops managers, TPMs, and other functions, plus a much larger number of temps and vendors. Org was headquartered in Mountain View, CA, but included teams in Boulder, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo, Beijing, Paris, Zurich and Munich. Team Mission: 1. Efficiently capture petabytes of imagery around in the world, from cars (Street View), boats, planes, satellites, web crawls, power users, etc; 2. Organize pixels: geo-reference, align, stitch, blend, orthorectify, 3D-reconstruct, recognize objects, index geographically & by content, and more; 3. Use imagery and derived semantics to power a range of Google platforms, data quality efforts, end-user products (eg, Google Maps & Google Earth) and emerging initiatives. Some notable accomplishments: • Scaled Street View to 75+ countries. • Led Google’s efforts to leverage deep learning & AI to create high quality map and local data globally, from imagery and other sources. • Bootstrapped and scaled efforts to capture high-res aerial oblique imagery and create 3D models of the world’s top metro areas. Our efforts far outpaced the competition in both coverage and quality. • Successfully integrated Skybox Imaging ($500M acquisition) in 2014; team built outstanding tech stack, successfully launched 5 sub-meter resolution satellites and was on track to launch many more, before Google decided to exit that business. • Led multiple camera-centric hardware efforts from initial R&D through production & deployment at scale. • Responsible for several apps and consumer products, including Google Earth, Street View App and more, across Web, Android & iOS platforms. • Led efforts to define, build and scale a Geo platform business, in collaboration with Cloud team. • Built and scaled internal AI data platform tools (eg, annotations tools); helped scale reCAPTCHA by several orders of magnitude and turn it into a critical data labeling tool for Google.

  • Director, Engineering

    2008 - 2012

    Lead Mountain View, CA, and Zurich-based engineering team responsible for scaling Google Street View into a critically important Google product, globally. Street View was recognized as the fastest growing product at Google in 2008, and has continued to grow strongly ever since. In addition, took Google’s aerial imagery acquisition efforts from their “garage phase” to meaningful scale by applying the same disciplined engineering approach used for Street View; merged projects/teams related to camera hardware, onboard software, field support, leading to significantly improved engineering velocity, operational efficiency and ultimately, fast growing geographic coverage. Continued to drive innovation in a number of areas: eg, introduced VR-like “Smart Navigation” in Street View by leveraging extracted 3D data; bootstrapped efforts to recognize objects in imagery at scale, to refine understanding of the physical world. Engineering sponsor for a string of Google acquisitions. In particular, I co-led the acquisition of reCAPTCHA and I have played a key role in growing it into a highly successful Google product.

  • Uber Tech Lead / Engineering Manager

    2004 - 2008

    One of my key achievements was to start Google Street View from scratch, successfully launch the product in May 2007, and quickly turn it into an iconic Google success story. I also led several aspects of Google Books, including efforts to scale indexing capabilities to dozens of new languages. In addition, I played a key role in “resurrecting” the Tesseract OCR package, open sourcing it, and leading its eventual transformation into one of the world’s best OCR engines.

  • VP, Document Imaging

    2003 - 2004

    Responsible for all aspects of the LizardTech document imaging product line, including, marketing, strategy, product management, partnerships, etc. • Overhauled document imaging strategy following Company's acquisition by Celartem Technology. • Led aggressive product development efforts to support new strategy with key features and product improvements. In particular, drove design and implementation of new watermarking and document rights management (DRM) capabilities. • Focused LTI's marketing efforts on high-leverage activities, including a rebooted web site, regular newsletters and webinars, targeted interviews and selected trade shows. • Negotiated partnerships with scanner vendors, content management providers and other technology partners, in a bid to enhance the company's distribution channels and to increase end-user exposure to the DjVu technology and brand.

  • Chief Scientist

    2001 - 2003

    Shared time between technical activities, product development, and business development, all in service of the DjVu document imaging product line. • Chief company-wide technical resource on document imaging. • Led efforts to expand scope of product line to all electronic documents (vs. scanned documents only) • Embedded with product management team to support all aspects of document imaging product line: feature sets, UX, platforms, competitive analysis, schedule, pricing, licensing, documentation, packaging, distribution, etc. • Relentlessly evangelized DjVu technology via conference presentations, publications, and the creation of compelling DjVu content. • Identified and helped close deals with several strategic partners.

  • Director, Applied Research

    2000 - 2001

    Led Applied Research team focused on the DjVu document compression technology (acquired from AT&T Labs in 2000). Also remained active individual contributor. • Responsible for large portions of the company's core imaging technology. • Championed and led new R&D initiatives focused on growing scope of product line and size of addressable market. • Key contributor to company strategy and critical business development initiatives. • Articulated rationale for opening a large percentage of the DjVu code base. Contributed to success of open-source release in 2001.

  • Manager, Imaging Components, Advanced Systems Development Lab

    1999 - 2000

    Joined new lab during its formation stage, the Advanced Systems Development Lab (ASD). Its mission was twofold: (1) help Xerox realize the value of PARC research through effective technology transfer; (2) bring Xerox business group needs and perspective back to PARC to help steer the research. • Led a team of 8 researchers and developers. • Supported ASD's mission by building robust imaging software components. • Collaborated with several PARC teams and coordinated efforts with geographically distributed Xerox business groups. • Led development and deployment of DataGlyph technology (high density, high reliability, visually pleasing 2D barcodes) in a range of Xerox solutions. • Managed development and productization of a technology known internally as DigiPaper. Core of technology is a “visually lossless” scanned document representation based on multi-layer segmentation, coupled with wavelet-based and token-based compression schemes. Released DigiPaper 1.0 in May 2000, for use in web-based legal document repositories.

  • Director, Advanced Development, ScanSoft

    1997 - 1999

  • Director, Software Development, Software Solutions Division

    1996 - 1997

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