Five years ago, Austin Russell knocked on doors in Orlando to ask homeowners if he could buy their house.
The CEO of Orlando-based Luminar Technologies Inc. wanted a home as close as possible to the autonomous vehicle sensor firm’s east Orlando facility. However, there were no available homes nearby, Russell told Orlando Inno. “I actually went door-to-door knocking, asking if people would want to sell their home for a small mark-up. I actually got a couple of takers.”
Russell bought a home just to have a place to sleep when he wasn’t working. That investment into the Orlando housing market cost roughly $150,000, but Russell’s investment in the region has grown tremendously since. The business Russell founded 10 years ago has turned into a publicly traded company with 750 employees, including 400 in Orlando.
In the meantime, the 26-year-old Russell, who resides in Orlando and has property in Southern California, became the youngest American billionaire, according to a 2021 Forbes list. Russell is investing a chunk of his newfound wealth back into Central Florida with a $70 million contribution to Orlando-based nonprofit Central Florida Foundation, which was announced Dec. 27.
This gift has the potential to be “transformational” for the region, Central Florida Foundation President and CEO Mark Brewer told Orlando Inno. “We’re at a point where people who have been successful here are putting money back into the community… There are a lot of Austin Russell's in Silicon Valley, but not a lot here.”
In addition to the benefits the money will generate when deployed by the Central Florida Foundation, Russell’s donation and his purchase of a new metro Orlando home in the second half of last year show a strong commitment to the Central Florida region.
Here, Russell talks with Orlando Inno about the influence he and his donation can make in Central Florida and more:
Was the potential to make a difference through philanthropy on your mind when you started Luminar? Luminar’s industry is one of those spaces that has a very high barrier to entry and very hard to be able to get into successfully, but once you're in, you can create an incredible amount of value. I would say, in terms of ultimately creating value in other ways beyond bringing it to the local economy, like what we're talking about here, I think that was something I had in the back of my head when we were building it out.
Why did you want to deploy this money in Orlando? Cities in California, like Silicon Valley's or L.A., there's tens of billions of dollars going into them… It's actually only in the tens of millions of dollars, from the preliminary data that we're looking at, that have been invested into the overall Orlando economy from a philanthropic perspective over the past decade or two. That's where I think we can continue to exponentially grow that if we are able to apply the level of philanthropic donations it would take to be able to really unleash the full potential of Central Florida, more specifically Orlando.
Why did you choose to work with the Central Florida Foundation? My team personally did an assessment of a number of different community foundations in terms of different criteria of the work they've done, the impact they've had, but the most important and most relevant thing of all was the locality of it and the level of impact that can be had specifically with regards to Orlando. That's not to say you couldn't have that impact independently with a different foundation or even creating my own, separate from any community foundation. The reality is the folks at the Central Florida Foundation know Orlando better than anyone, and the needs and what it can take to be able to have a massive impact.
Do you have any ideas on how the money will be used? There's a lot being outlined right now and holistic planning, and we're going through those phases right now in terms of basically your highest impact opportunities and, particularly, things where they're not necessarily getting either as much attention or attention in the right ways. I don't have anything specific on that front to discuss yet, but I'm always open to great ideas and this is going to be part of a multi-year process.
A lot of cities across the U.S. are vying to become the next big tech hubs. How does Orlando stack up? A lot of people have been trying to focus on emulating Silicon Valley and all the details there. The reality is, there are certain parts you want to take with you, and certain parts you want to leave behind… Orlando has an opportunity to be a major hub at both a local and global scale for technology. At the same time, it's less about any kind of comparative race but more about where we are today versus the relative opportunity to where we can go. From that standpoint, Orlando has possibly the biggest opportunity out of any U.S. city I'm aware of.
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