No nerves at the pitch

In his first media interview since that pitch three years ago, Kentley-Klay tells us he wasn’t nervous because he was so passionate about the subject. It has dominated his life and his dreams since 2012. “I just wanted to make sure that I was communicating clearly,” he says.

To that end, he explained that Zoox was going to produce the robot, revolutionising personal mobility in the process. Not just that, it was going to control every level of the process from design to manufacture and consumer interface, and do it all within five years. In the words of the Valley, Zoox was a “pure play” – which is to say a single mission start-up. And it was “fully stacked”, meaning vertically integrated. It was almost ludicrous in its ambition. The presentation finished. There was much exchanging of glances from the five DFJ partners. Someone started to ask a question, but Kentley-Klay and Levinson had to rush away. They’d arranged a meeting at Stanford’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, where they hoped to convince the director to let Zoox use the car park as a test track.

The time scale outlined by Kentley-Klay involved beating many (or perhaps all) of the established players. That meant Google, which had almost unlimited funds, as well as the major car makers who were already spending billions in what was becoming the biggest tech race on the planet. Insiders knew that Apple, even richer than Google, had started work on autonomous vehicles. There were well-funded Chinese players spooling up too.

Just two hours later, DFJ asked Kentley-Klay and Levinson to come straight back. Since that moment, when DFJ committed $US2.5 million, Zoox’s fortunes have snowballed. It has poached top autonomous mobility experts from Google, Apple, Uber and Tesla. In 2015 it raised $US40 million in seed capital. Last year it raised a further $US250 million in a Series A funding round, possibly the biggest Series A in Silicon Valley history (and more than Tesla’s much-hyped IPO, which raised $US226 million in 2010). It gives Zoox an implied value of $US1.55 billion, making it a unicorn: an unlisted company worth more than a billion dollars.

The original Zoox concept vehicle designed by Tim Kentley-Klay. The exterior of the Zoox launch vehicle will be different from this, although the DNA of the vehicle, regarding the symmetry, bi-directionality and social seating, remains true. Photograph: Shaughn and John

The Valley’s tech press now suggests another year of recruiting, researching and testing has put the value in the $US3-$US4 billion range. That would make Kentley-Klay – with an estimated 30 per cent – something even rarer than a unicorn: an Australian tech billionaire. But until now, Zoox has been in stealth mode, avoiding the scrutiny of competitors and issuing a firm “no comment” whenever its activities and ambitions are reported in The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Bloomberg and other media outlets. That changed in September when the company opened every door but one to The Australian Financial Review Magazine.

Ordering a "robot" car


San Francisco, on a busy Friday morning. I’m in the northern central business district to join a test program undertaken every day from the company’s city facilities. I order a “robot” using a Zoox-owned smartphone with the company’s beta app. There are a whole lot of unique features on what could be a very clever app, though most aren’t yet working because the vehicle is merely a test mule. It’s a Toyota SUV filled with computers and screens – and a safety driver and a technician.

The exterior is festooned with cameras and sensors. From the back seat I watch a screen showing the world the way the vehicle sees it. Cars, trucks, pedestrians and solid objects are colour-coded, while labels identify how each is being monitored (this includes radar, camera and lidar, or light detection and ranging). Soon the Toyota is moving through the busy streets, the woman at the wheel keeping her fingertips just in touch for security. Progress is slow but smooth and perhaps 90 per cent of the journey is autonomous. We cover several city blocks then encounter a “corner case”. A car is double-parked in the lane we need to be in, so we are forced to complete another block. The solution is still a work in progress; in the meantime we turn left, we turn right, we stop, we start, we hold our line through a long corner with unclear markings, apparently with accuracy measured in millimetres. This trip demonstrates more autonomy than other systems I’ve experienced on public roads, but is still a long way short of emission-free, driver-free, hassle-free mobility.

On this front, Zoox is about halfway through its five-year program, and still planning a 2020 launch for a fleet of on-demand robotic vehicles. Soon Kentley-Klay and I are heading down the eight-lane Highway 280 in a Tesla Model X. We are about to inspect three more of the company’s five facilities. I am going to meet some of its 300-plus employees (60 with PhDs), and visit Stanford’s SLAC research facility. There, on the same fateful day DFJ gave Kentley-Klay and Levinson everything they asked for, the SLAC people told Zoox it could use their car park as a test track. The university has since invested in the company.

Another view of the original Zoox concept vehicle. Zoox

Kentley-Klay is softly spoken, and almost always speaking: quickly, enthusiastically and with often dazzling clarity about a wide range of transport issues. He has a deep, clear voice and is too new to California to have any traces of an American accent. En route to Zoox headquarters in the Valley’s Menlo Park, we are in the fast lane with Tesla’s controversial Autopilot on. Kentley-Klay, in black T-shirt, gesticulates as he talks, regularly grabbing back the wheel because the system requires it. His robot, he insists, will not be a retrofitted car requiring human intervention. It will be a compact, fully autonomous four-seater capable of 75 miles per hour (121 km/h) that “day in day out, gets people who live and work in cities and tourists around, in a magical way”.

“I think creativity is not understood in society,” he says. “I think it’s an idea that is sort of containerised into a very narrow area of museums and the arts. But creative activity is really the business of going outside norms to find something of value. And that means doing something different.” When Kentley-Klay talks he pauses rhythmically, perhaps where others might say “um” or “you know”.

“Zoox is unapologetically about change and creative activity. We’re brute-forcing from the ground up an advanced mobility experience, in our view unlike the world has ever experienced before, with no legacy, no incremental steps.”

Changing the world


Somehow Kentley-Klay has managed to convince a lot of clever people his company can make such an unlikely thing happen. How did he entice the production director of Ferrari’s F1 team, Corrado Lanzone, to pack up his family and leave Italy? How did he bring on board Dr Mark Rosekind, former head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and Obama’s road-safety guru? Heidi Roizen, one of the five DFJ partners sitting at the board table at the original pitch meeting, when asked about the company’s improbable success, says Kentley-Klay and Levinson laid out a road map of the future that was extraordinary. “They walked out of the room and we all looked around. It was one of those moments … when you think, ‘I’ve just seen someone who can change the world.’”

Zoox CEO Tim Kentley-Klay: “Zoox is unapologetically about change and creative activity. We’re brute-forcing from the ground up an advanced mobility experience.“ Shaughn and John

After its initial commitment of $US2.5 million, DFJ put more into Zoox’s Series A funding round than it has for any other company before or since, including Tesla. “We’re looking for fundamental disruptions in major markets,” Roizen says, “and from the very beginning, Zoox was that, and incredibly compelling. Tim has … an incredible sense of design and user experience, incredible drive, an amazing ability to communicate and sway people.”

She believes if everything goes right, Zoox will be a business worth hundreds of billions. That said, she also acknowledges DFJ is about high risk/high reward, and half their investments don’t return their capital.

The potential is certainly mind-boggling. Morgan Stanley claims the global “ground-based mobility” market is worth $US10 trillion a year. It (and others) predict autonomous driving will transform not just motoring but the entire economy. Yet building a self-driving car is not rocket science – it’s harder. In space there are no wayward dogs, drunks or smartphone-distracted pedestrians. And beyond our atmosphere the margins for error are so much larger. Brandon Pearce should know. He worked for Elon Musk’s SpaceX then joined Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. He now works for Zoox, he says, because he wants a bigger challenge.

“It was interesting enough working on rockets,” says Pearce, a moustachioed Californian forty-something who talks as quickly and precisely as you’d imagine a rocket scientist would. “Even though they’re hard, it’s a solved problem. With autonomous vehicles, we don’t actually know what the solution is yet. We think we’re on the right path, but nobody’s done it, so actually getting to be involved in something where we get to blaze the trail was really exciting for me.”

A “point cloud” from LiDAR sensors (Light Detection and Ranging) on a Zoox vehicle that generates a 3D map of its surroundings.

Daimler, Apple, Google spend up big


Daimler, the parent of Mercedes-Benz, spent €7.6 billion on research and development last year and has pooled its autonomous knowledge with Bosch (which spends about €7 billion per annum) to push even harder on self-driving. Yet at September’s Frankfurt Motor show, senior executives were less confident than two years ago, when a 2020 launch for a so-called Level 5 (fully autonomous) consumer car still seemed possible. They are now talking about the mid-2020s.

Others too may be less upbeat. Apple and Google (through its recently renamed Waymo division) now seem more likely to sell systems to existing car makers than build whole cars. Lyft is setting up joint ventures. Uber is battling an array of other, self-inflicted, problems. For the tech giants there are reported concerns about spiralling costs, legal liability and of moving so dramatically from their core businesses. Equally, everyone is terrified of being left behind, of being the new Kodak. Vast sums are being spent across a range of industries, and the idea that Zoox can do everything inhouse, and by 2020, will be seen by some as absurd.

So what do we know about this man who is taking on the autonomous world? For a start, he was just Tim Kentley in his earlier incarnations, though he prefers not to talk about that now. He admits getting his start in design and business at Camberwell Grammar School in Year 10 by forging student IDs at $20 a throw. He studied for a bachelor of communication design at Swinburne University in Melbourne (“One of the highlight performers of a very bright year,” remembers his honours year lecturer, Associate Professor Stephen Huxley. “Always seeking out the new and different … never satisfied with your standard solution.”) While studying, Kentley-Klay read voraciously on every subject that captured his interest. Once, on a beachside holiday with mates, he spent the four days indoors devouring Wikipedia. Yet he is not a copybook nerd. He is tall and solid with a love of kite surfing and a dry sense of humour (he refers to the Sand Hill Road VCs as “the ATM”).

In 2003 he formed XYZ Studios. It has won more than 60 awards, mainly for advertising animation. In interviews from those days he described himself as shy. Fittingly, he then largely disappeared from the web. Kentley-Klay now says that XYZ and two sister companies were set up to fund outside creative endeavours, though he wasn’t sure what they would be. In 2012 he read about Google’s self-driving car and became obsessed with autonomous mobility. Since then, he says, he has been living not so much in our dimension, but in the autonomous future of his imagination.

Some thought he was crazy

From the start he sketched versions of his robot, and the world in which he believed it would move. He had little concern for what others were predicting, and spoke about his radical ideas to anyone who would listen. Some thought he was crazy. The main problem, as Kentley-Klay saw it, was that he was alone and at the wrong end of the world. He paid $US10,000 to rent a booth at the 2013 Los Angeles Motor Show, taking his renderings with him, hoping to meet like-minded people, maybe attract some media. He certainly achieved the last point: Jason Torchinsky wrote in the erratic but widely read US car blog Jalopnik that Zoox “sounds like vaporware horseshit”. Torchinsky speculated on possible motivations: “Collect investment capital and then disappear? Some sort of money laundering? Human trafficking of people in fake fiberglass car bodies? I have no idea.”

Kentley-Klay took with him to LA fellow Melburnian Michael Harrison-Ford, then a professional poker player (the one he met at Crown Casino), and now Zoox’s chief of staff. Harrison-Ford says that despite the Jalopnik review, the program Kentley-Klay outlined in 2013 has progressed “like a ramp”. “Every step along the way, especially with respect to bringing people into the business, bringing money into the business, selling this vision, and I don’t mean selling it in a way where it’s snake oil salesman, I mean it’s a fully fleshed-out vision … he sells it in a way that’s absolutely compelling and he paints that picture of how it rolls out.”

On my tour across Zoox’s facilities I saw rooms full of engineers working on tyres, suspension, motors and airbag deployment. I met chief safety innovation officer Dr Mark Rosekind, who used to work for President Obama and who tells me 94 per cent of accidents are caused by humans, and the technology Zoox is developing – along with certain vehicle attributes – will “allow for an entirely new level of safety”.


I drive around the SLAC campus in VH1, the first of several Mad Max-style electric buggies built to test the developing software and hardware (and the “social seating”) of the eventual robot. These test buggies all have the prefix VH, a sly reference to Jalopnik’s “vaporware horseshit”. They also have steering wheels for safety and when these will disappear is not clear. The one place off limits to us is the design studio, where a full-size model of the final vehicle is under wraps. Apparently, it’s quite different from the rendering taken to the LA Motor Show – and very few people even within Zoox have seen it.

Another brand in the automous vehicle race: Renault's Symbioz concept, 2017 Krisztian Bocsi

Co-driver Jesse Levinson

If Kentley-Klay’s big idea drives the company, the chief executive’s yin has found its yang in chief technology officer Jesse Levinson. Levinson is shorter and slighter, and seems much younger than his 34 years. In 2007, he was one of the computer scientists in the Stanford team that secured the $US1 million second prize in the DARPA Urban Challenge. This required a car to drive 96 kilometres autonomously through a simulated city course set up on a Californian Air Force base. The team leader, Sebastian Thrun, supervised Levinson’s PhD and set up Google’s self-driving car project. In 2014 Levinson was wrapping up his postdoc research and could have joined Google. Yet he was far more interested in the technical and theoretical side than the practical – until he met Kentley-Klay. It took just 60 minutes for a person with no technical background to win over someone who had been researching autonomy for nearly a decade.

“This was somebody who had thought more deeply about the problem, not so much from a technology perspective, but from a ‘What could you do with this technology?’ perspective,” says Levinson. “It wasn’t that Tim came up with some self-driving algorithm that solved the problem from a technical perspective. He did not do that, although he had a fairly strong understanding of the technology components, especially for somebody who wasn’t trained in the field, because he had spent a lot of time reading and educating himself.

“I think he brought something to the table that other companies had just totally missed. It didn’t take me very long to get tremendously excited … even though it was a bit out there. I was pretty quickly convinced that the future of transportation in cities was largely going to resemble something like what Tim described.”

An example of how Kentley-Klay encourages staff to make the same mindshift: Zoox has a car tin rather than a swear tin. Anyone who fails to use the term “robot” puts in a dollar.

Off-the-wall ideas


Levinson says Kentley-Klay “has far more ideas than almost anybody I’ve ever met”. Levinson’s abilities, according to others, include challenging Kentley-Klay’s more off-the-wall ideas, and evaluating which can be brought to fruition in the timescale they are working on. Before ramping up its investment, DFJ’s due diligence included the studying of “team risk”. If the CEO and CTO broke up due to musical differences, or anything else, Zoox might be in trouble.

“We found an incredible dynamic between the two of them,” says DFJ’s Heidi Roizen, a former Apple vice-president, “a very similar pattern to Jobs and Wozniak, or Bill Gates and Paul Allen, or Sergey and Larry, or David and Jerry at Yahoo … There are a lot of founding teams where you have two people [with] very complementary skills.”

Having built up such a strong team in a highly competitive market, Zoox could likely turn an immediate profit by engineering an “acqui-hire” (a Silicon Valley term for when a business is bought primarily for its staff). The founders insist they are not interested. “We didn’t found it to flip it,” says Kentley-Klay. “We founded it to found the future. For us, the reward is not zeros in a bank account, it’s seeing the way people move on this planet enhanced in a profound way, and the joy coming out of that.”

Kentley-Klay’s claim to have little interest in money is supported when we meet at his place on a Saturday afternoon. He lives on his own in a Stanford University residential precinct. His “house” looks like a converted garage with a loft bed. It’s pleasant, looking out onto a bushy residential block. The elderly couple from whom he subleases supplied the furniture and make him meals.

The Mercedes-Benz F 015 Luxury in Motion concept, 2015. Daimler AG - Global Communicatio

He has a girlfriend and ducks off to festivals (most recently Burning Man in the Nevada desert), so it’s not a monastic, hairshirt existence. But nor is it typical for a billionaire-in-the-making in status-conscious Silicon Valley. He and Levinson pay themselves $US130,000 a year each, which Kentley-Klay says is the minimum recompense his E3 visa allows a CEO.

Why name it Zoox?

As we drink tea at a wonky outdoor table in the light-dappled garden, Kentley-Klay speaks into my recorder for 90 minutes, answering questions in a slower, more considered style than when at the wheel of the Tesla. The transcript reveals sentences that are unusually rounded and complete. A simple question about the name Zoox leads to this:


“Robotics is this wonderful multi-billion-year analogue, a sort of five orders of magnitude analogue to what happened on this planet around 3.5 billion years ago, which is that we went from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cellular life and those cells developed a process called photosynthesis. So a zoox is actually a unicellular micro-organism that’s about 3 billion years old, thats primary energy input is photons from the sun, through photosynthesis, and it has a tail and it can swim through the water.

"And so I like this metaphor of a renewably based life form that had locomotion. And so that’s what I really want to do with Zoox: create renewably based mobility. And when you look at what that life form does on this planet, it creates symbiotic relationships. It’s a symbiont. So it’s co-operative and the output of that co-operation, in the case of Australia, is the Great Barrier Reef. They form coral reefs. And those coral reefs underwater, that is the greatest concentration of biodiversity known on this planet.

"When you look at our cities, if you go sort of through 3.5 aeons and up five orders of magnitude to our scale, we see now cities that the United Nations forecasts, in 2050, 75 per cent of this world’s population will be living in: megacity-like environments. To make that scale, to make that awesome, I think we need shared, on demand, zero emission, autonomous mobility, that’s renewably based. And so Zoox is really an exploration into how we make that real.”

Did he just say that?

There are other “gee, did he just say that?” moments. When asked how big the business could eventually be: “Investors want to invest in blue sky. I think Zoox, for me, is actually gold sky. I think this company’s destiny is on this planet, but then off it, with advanced robotics and we’re talking about exoplanets and stars and its full realisation.”

Is he talking about joining Elon Musk on Mars? “I like the moon. I think the moon’s cool. It’s got frozen water and it’s really hot during the day and cold during the night, so you can do work [there], and it’s close. It’s got 11 per cent pure titanium in the soil. A lot of good things on the moon.” Could he build a fleet there? “I think it’s a good idea.”

The only time he’s rattled is when I ask him about the denim flat cap, without which he is rarely (if ever) sighted. He doesn’t like talking about himself, though I do draw out that he designed the cap and had it made by a San Francisco milliner. He’d much rather talk about the five years Zoox has given itself to build a vehicle, a brand, an experience, the AI and “an entire ecosystem”.

The Rolls-Royce 103EX concept, 2017.


“So we really have two-and-a-half years now, to swing into high acceleration of execution, and mature the company from being a Silicon Valley start-up with graduates that do hero engineering with no documentation into a professionally run engineering organisation that has accountability, process and mission assurance, that can launch such an advanced system in a really safe way. I’m bullish on this team’s ability to deliver.”

Will drunks play with traffic?

In most projections of an autonomous future, things are smooth and ordered. But Kentley-Klay believes a machine that is programmed to stop when a pedestrian walks in front of it could be irresistible to, say, drunks in the middle of the night. They could literally play with the traffic. That’s one reason his robot will travel in either direction. It is in this area of social robotics that the link between autonomy and animation comes up. As he puts it, in this area “having a sense for timing, composition, taste [and] acting” is an advantage.

“I often talk about the car becoming a character,” says Kentley-Klay. “In a very visceral sense we’re actually animating inorganic matter here, to be situationally aware. When you take the driver out of the automobile, that driver, beyond serving the functions of moving the vehicle, performs a social function. For example, at a four-way intersection you often make eye contact to say who goes. Or pedestrians, does the driver see me? If they do, am I going to step out or not?

“The design challenge becomes, given that we don’t have the gaze of the driver, how do we recreate that in a robotic way, that gives us successful mobility? And this is also one of the reasons why we think just having a car magically drive itself down the road actually wouldn’t really work in a fully autonomous mobility system, because it doesn’t have the social graces for those social interactions.

“So consequently, Zoox is developing proprietary technology to solve those things. And the challenge is to ‘act’ the robot in a way that people react to well, that doesn’t feel awkward, or so novel that it leads to undue attention … It can be much more than solving safety and mobility. This is creating a new way that we can interact with other entities in a way that I think can be truly delightful.”

Bonding with a robot

The term “delightful” again reflects how much he is seeing things from the end-user’s perspective. In the same spirit, Kentley-Klay touches on an area I’ve heard no one else deal with in countless hours of discussion with autonomous driving experts: bonding with something you don’t own or tinker with, and that looks the same as all the others.


“People love cars, they love car culture,” he says. “I’ve rebuilt a ’58 Series II short wheelbase Land Rover from the frame up and it’s a very rewarding thing to drive that vehicle, and you form a relationship with it. I think with advanced robotics there’s an opportunity to land a new nature of what that relationship is. If you get that right, it can be really powerful.”

Maintaining or reinventing the relationship between many people and their vehicles could be a key to success. Yet Zoox is tiny compared with Benz, BMW, VW Group, Ford, GM and almost everyone else racing for the big autonomous prize. It has rooms full of software developers whereas they have aircraft hangars. It is testing vehicles in a university carpark, while they have multiple purpose-built test tracks and safety centres on different continents.

Tim Kentley-Klay with Jesse Levinson and team members at the Stanford SLAC research facility.

Kentley-Klay argues that Zoox is not in the same game. Car companies are trying to morph existing products into something else, while also keeping huge factories running, and preserving processes and business models they have built up over the past century or more. He says even the most successful carriage makers didn’t thrive as car makers because the skill set is different – and that could be the situation here. Zoox is not in the car business, he stresses. It is creating “what comes after the car”.

Better than a car

Levinson also points out that it isn’t a zero sum game. “For us to be successful and for us to convince investors to fund us, we don’t have to argue that we are going to be better in all ways than every company in the entire sector … that all other companies are going to fail.

“By taking the technology we’re building and amortising its cost over people paying for it all day long, instead of selling it to one person and having that person use the product 4 per cent of the time, we can create an incredibly successful and profitable and sustainable business doing substantially less volume in terms of number of vehicles than a traditional car company, and I think that is appealing.”

There have been thousands of attempts to launch car companies through the years. Almost all have failed, even without trying to do as much of the job inhouse as Zoox. The all-in approach can look like a weakness, but according to Steve Jurvetson (the J in DFJ, the space collector and also a Tesla board member) it is a strength. He says DFJ had spoken to many “autonomous car” start-ups but most wanted to deal with only a small part of the puzzle. “Yet here there was layer upon layer upon layer. They had thought through the cost of operation … the charging infrastructure … and operational turnaround. They’ve got brilliant solutions on how to get that to market sooner, how to test in a simulator across billions of miles of experience.”


While others are consumed solely with how to make the car autonomous, Jurvetson says, Kentley-Klay and Levinson are dealing with how such a machine would fit into society. “What Tim does remarkably well,” he adds, “is live in the future world that he’s describing.”

Is Zoox so audacious it just might work? Could Tim Kentley-Klay, an outsider who lives in a converted garage, overtake the juggernauts? He is not your central-casting eccentric, obsessive genius, though certainly he is eccentric, he is obsessive and, judged on what he has achieved so far, he could well be a genius. His imagination is vast and his ambition is bigger, perhaps, than that of any other Australian: Kentley-Klay is deadly serious about reinventing the way we interact with the world. The moon may be next.

The AFR Magazine Design issue is out on Friday October 27 inside The Australian Financial Review.

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