Tim Mennard on LYT's Traffic Flow Optimization Technology

Tim Menard of LYT - Podcast Transcript

Scott:	Hey. It’s Scott Orn of Kruze Consulting and thanks for joining us on Founders and Friends for another awesome podcast. Let’s give a quick shout out to the Kruze Consulting accounting team. We’re very fortunate. We have a ton of people at Kruze who work on the monthly books for our clients and get them all set up, due diligence ready, rocking every month, answering all the clients’ questions, making all those adjustments, and there’s no better moment, for a founder and for us really, when a founder says, “Hey. I think I’m going to get a term sheet. Are my books ready for diligence?” And we get to say, “Yes, they are. Fire away. Send them over. Give them access.” That is a great feeling. It’s the feeling that lets us know we’ve done a job very well done and nothing is better than watching that cash hit the bank account. So, if you are a venture-backed startup, you’re going out to fundraise, maybe check us out. Check us out at kruzeconsulting.com. We love what we do. At taping here I think we have 575 clients. Clients raise over a billion dollars this year. So, we know what we’re doing and hopefully we can help you be successful in your fundraise. All right. Let’s get to the podcast. Thanks.
Singer:	So, when your troubles are mounting in tax or accounting, you go to Kruze, from Founders and Friends. It’s Kruze Consulting. Founders and Friends with your host, Scotty Orn.
Scott:	Welcome to Founders and Friends podcast with Scott Orn at Kruze Consulting and today my very special guest is Tim Menard of LYT. Welcome, Tim.
Tim:	Hey. Thanks Scott for having me. It’s been a long time in the making and we’re finally here.
Scott:	I love it. Tim and I have been friends for at least five years via, maybe six years, via Kruze. And we’ll tell our story of how we met in a second, but first, can you retrace your career, Tim, and tell us how you had the idea for LYT?
Tim:	Absolutely. In fact, we first met while I was still working at Tesla and was getting everything ready and understanding what that big step looks like to go from employee to employer. But my story starts a lot farther back than the six years ago when the company started back in 2009 actually and a little bit before that where I went to University of Alaska Anchorage. I’m originally from Chicago. And why that information is important is-
Scott:	I didn’t know that. You went to Alaska for university?
Tim:	I lived there for five years. I lived in Anchorage for four, in Fairbanks for one.
Scott:	Wow.
Tim:	To remember what that time was like, the iPhone 3G just came out. Google maps. I drove to Alaska on printed MapQuest papers to put this bag in perspective. That’s the time of year. That’s what transportation was. That’s where we were as a society and technology and phones and I had a Blackberry at the time. And the transition to the iPhone 3G literally was that 2008 fall. So, what happened was, was talking with some people up there that I met and we got on topic of Google Maps and ideas and we were like, “Hey. Wouldn’t it be unique if snow plows were tracked,” because you got the traffic to the best of Google’s ability at the time, but in places where it snows and especially in Anchorage where it’s dark, the roads aren’t plowed with salt or graveled over. This whole concept of like, “Wow. It’d be a lot safer to drive home every day,” because it was a guarantee if it snowed on just the highway drive to work, you’d see 10 flipped cars because-
Scott:	Oh my God.
Tim:	For nine months of the year, the road was paved with like a grader. It was heavy machinery. It was an-
Scott:	Why didn’t they use salt instead? Is it just too much real estate to do salt on or why don’t they use salt?
Tim:	Not environmentally friendly. The-
Scott:	Oh yeah. That makes sense.
Tim:	That was actually one of the first calculations I had to do in an engineering class was if we used this much salt on one lane of road, how quickly would it change the salinity in the rivers and inlet around us?
Scott:	Yeah.
Tim:	And it actually explodes quickly. So yeah. So, they would just literally drive around-
Scott:	Oh my God.
Tim:	Move the snow and put rocks over.
Scott:	Yeah. That’s crazy.
Tim:	So-
Scott:	Yeah. And so, you started thinking about this stuff in undergrad basically.
Tim:	Yeah. So, I took that idea. So, I seriously subscribe to everything happens for reason and right time, right place. So, I was new to the school. The engineering department had brought some new talent in too and one of the professors was from USC, Ph.D, and did their Ph.D in tracking vehicles and using just anything that can be a sensor for traffic insights to optimize traffic. So I approached him and was like, “Hey. You’re doing this for just regular cars. Can we do this for snow plow?” And he’s just like, “That’s an awesome idea. How would you like to work on that with me and I’ve got some grant money and we’ll go to conferences and we’ll do all this stuff.” And so I’m like 19 years old and just got offered a job that paid more than anything I’ve ever done plus had like travel and other stuff and I was like, “Aw. This sounds great.” I couldn’t sign fast enough. So-
Scott:	And on something that’s super cool that you want to work on. Not just like a job, but like a cool job.
Tim:	Exactly. I actually learned how to program for the iPhone through just a book. I didn’t even take a class because that was back when programming for mobile apps didn’t even exist as a class. So, I learned how to book-
Scott:	Oh my God. Yeah. I’m surprised there was even a book to teach people because it was almost like an apprenticeship kind of thing. Like there was no documentation anywhere.
Tim:	Yeah. So, I was early to the market and I was early on working on this. And that was at a time when Waze started. So our claim to fame was we were doing the same thing Wazewas doing, but we were doing it on the academic scale. So we were proving that what Waze was doing was accurate. And so that’s what got me into what’s essentially now known as connected vehicles, intelligent transportation systems.
Scott:	Yep.
Tim:	And that’s how I got founded by Toyota. And the rest is essentially history. I went into the automotive side of electrical engineering and software engineering.
Scott:	So you were at university and you got a job with Toyota or Toyota found you and funded some of your research?
Tim:	So when I presented my first paper in New York City on essentially this app I did for tracking vehicles and snow plows, they immediately were like, “Hey. You want to come to Mountain View, California and have an interview?” And I was just like, “San Francisco Bay. Come to San Francisco. Absolutely.” So, I flew to San Francisco and realized Mountain View is not in San Francisco. It is 50 miles south. So I wound up with three summer internships at Toyota because that was all throughout my undergrad and then started graduate school and wound up going full-time to Tesla after graduate school where I worked on building model SX in the beginnings of Model 3 where I worked on the actual computers that controlled the car and made sure that they were safe and working properly. So I would build systems that mimic the entire car around each unit to make sure it was safe for rollout.
Scott:	Oh wow.
Tim:	So that put me-
Scott:	What year is that? What years were you working at Tesla? Was that like 2013 through ‘15 or something like that or-
Tim:	Super close. I started in 2014, summer 2014, and I left in summer of 2016. So Model S had already been out. So, I started when autopilot and all-wheel drive was just getting released.
Scott:	Wow.
Tim:	And so, because of that, I wound up, with the systems I was doing there, I wound up participating in making sure that lane keeping worked correctly and then I was a part of Summon as well. So, I got to see-
Scott:	Oh, no way.
Tim:	The start of autonomousy in the real world as well.
Scott:	Yeah. Yeah.
Tim:	And also, all the cars were connected on cellular. So, I had just worked on what this other proprietary approach for connected vehicles was. And then using just cellular off the shelf solutions and then also seeing autonomousy and then being back in the Bay and knowing people at Suits and Waymo and you effectively wind up knowing what everybody else is doing in automotives is where that kind of aha moment was like, “Look, cars are going to drive themselves. It’s going to happen. We passed that point,” and this was a tipping point and I was like, “Tesla’s going to make it. It doesn’t matter if I stay here or not,” but what’s going to make it faster is actually now making the roads ready for autonomousy. And so that was the whole original pitch and so I wrote a grant-
Scott:	And creating like a feedback loop, right?
Tim:	Yeah.
Scott:	Like there was kind of a feedback loop. It was like how great the sensors on the cars were, but there was no feedback loop or like second order benefit.
Tim:	Well we took this approach as an industry that cars need all the data. How many times have you heard in media that, “Oh, cars are making terabytes of data a day and we’re going to have all this stuff.” Well the thing was, are we sharing any of that and why not?
Scott:	No.
Tim:	So, that was like the aha was when the company was started, that was the idea let’s say. We still got to get all this other information to cars because we’re changing the focus from being human centric to machine centric. So, we need things that machines are able to communicate naturally with. And guess what? A camera’s not natural, but wireless is. RFID is. That’s what I ultimately will end up doing. I wrote to the federal government, the National Science Foundation, and said, “Hey. I’m from automotive, I see a need, and we’ve got to start getting traffic signs and all this stuff that’s along the road to vehicles wirelessly because that’s the control of our local government and we can’t trust Google and Apple to provide that information.” They went, “Yeah. You’re totally right. That’s amazing.”
Scott:	Yeah.
Tim:	And so-
Scott:	Just take one second. That’s a beautiful thing and that was, when we met probably in 2016, I remember that pitch. It was like the signs will talk to the car basically.
Tim:	Yeah.
Scott:	Like layman terms, right?
Tim:	Yeah.
Scott:	Like that’s what you were saying and I was like I never thought about it and then it made perfect sense as soon as you started talking about it.
Tim:	And it pulls out that little sensor and it’s like that’s it.
Scott:	Yeah. And I don’t think I really ever internalized like the government or the people or the city or country or whatever should own that stuff instead of a Google whatever, like a private company, but you’re totally right. That’s how government can enforce policy, make the policies they want, and that’s actually really simple and beautiful. I really love how you talk about that.
Tim:	And that got figured out by seeing the divide and the frustration these two parties had of state saying, “We have data,” and automotive saying, “Well we have data and we should pay each other for it,” and it’s just like whoa. We’re in an argument on things that could be actually helping people and creating safer roads and allowing the real priority of things to happen, which is public right of way should be controlled by the public and everything else should be able to then fall on it. So, we got the grant, we built the technology, we partnered with the University of California, Irvine where we got to deploy it. And we’re up here in the Bay area. So, then we were able to also get their campus transit to work with us. So, we were able to put, on their buses, we outfitted five buses and I’ve got pictures of this where me and my only other employee are out in parking lots on this truck programming everything and setting it up. Like true startup spirit. And we outfitted five buses and that’s how we collected data five days a week to show that this worked because I was driving down every Monday, one day to Irvine, resetting all the tests and then driving back and-
Scott:	You were driving down there?
Tim:	Yeah. I would do the drive to Irvine on a Monday morning and I would leave here at midnight and come back by like two in the afternoon.
Scott:	Oh my God.
Tim:	Yeah.
Scott:	That’s insane.
Tim:	That-
Scott:	So, the UC Irvine bus system was the first like six buses that were in it and you built the system to ingest all the data and actually interpret it and everything?
Tim:	Yeah. We built the digital street signs. We built what would be a prototype of what would go in your car. So, you know how now most common cars come with a touchscreen and a whole interface.
Scott:	Yeah.
Tim:	We had built out of Raspberry Pi touchscreens a mock up of what this would look like in the car so when we went back to like Ford and Toyota and we were like, “Hey, look it here. This is how these renders.” Like we built the whole solution so that it was-
Scott:	Yeah.
Tim:	We built the sign, we built the reader so if it was a human driver or machine, both could understand, and then we tested it to show that this worked and it did.
Scott:	That’s incredible, man.
Tim:	And-
Scott:	And you did that on a lot of grant money, right? Did you even raise capital at that point or was it just?
Tim:	We had only raised $47,000 from friends and family. And we did that on a $225,000 grant. And that’s exactly how the company started.
Scott:	Yeah.
Tim:	And it was through that relationship of working with the UC system, their Institute of Transportation Engineers, their facilities manager, and their transit that we went up to Sacramento and we presented this to the DMV, the state transportation, all the four agencies and was like, “Hey. What do you think of this because this is what has been tried to be worked on over the last 15 years and here’s like the in between what they’re doing.” It was supposed to be 45 minutes, went two and a half hours and they were just like, “Whoa. You guys are really onto something. But the issue is we have no idea how many street signs we have deployed or where to even start. But you guys are in the right place on how to tackle this.”
Scott:	The government didn’t know how many street signs it has basically.
Tim:	Yeah. They were just like, “This is like right direction thinking, but like we don’t even know how to even get started implementing this.” So, they were-
Scott:	Yeah.
Tim:	So, we had this great discussion as to, “Okay. Well things we’ve done, what we’ve had,” and literally fell right back into pick any off the shelf startup book on how to get back to MVPs and test hypothesis quickly. So, we were riffing with them as to like, “Okay. If we did this, this, and this, then you would support that.” And so, we left with this understanding that there’s an opportunity to take what we did and go down a path where we could set up kind of like AT&T or Verizon, but for cars and transportation because the state and the local governments were not at a level to take that responsibility on. And so-
Scott:	Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tim:	We looked at everything we built and that’s when we realized, “Hey, because of our need to just get data easily, we have built these bus trackers and we had all this now new bus knowledge.” And so, the outcome of the state conversation was, “Hey. We need to look at traffic lights. That’s the biggest thing that needs to communicate. Let’s go back.” And we had always planned to go to traffic lights, but we had, at the time, there was a lot of people competing and like, “We’re going to make traffic lights talk to cars,” and it was the battle of is it camera based?
Scott:	Yeah.
Tim:	Is it a radio? So, we sat that one out and said, “We’re going to do everything else everyone else didn’t focus on.” And that’s when we got tossed back into the ring and we decided, “Okay. We tried to go hardware. We tried to do this. We prove this. We prove that.” And then we found this sliver that was like, “Hey, wait a second. There’s already traffic lights that are connected to a private network. And we can communicate to them that way. So, we can get rid of hardware. We just have to treat this like an outsourced IT problem where we can come in-
Scott:	Oh, interesting.
Tim:	And connect to their traffic lights because we can get the data and we can make updates.
Scott:	Yeah.
Tim:	So now we can be a virtual sensor and that changed the game because we moved-
Scott:	Like the traffic lights become your sensor network basically.
Tim:	Yeah.
Scott:	Like you’re plugging into the traffic lights system. Yeah.
Tim:	So-
Scott:	Is this the San Jose one? Like I remember, you showed me like a, I’m not even sure if it’s a demo or I think it was real time though, you were like, “Check this out,” and it was mapping all the traffic and everything.
Tim:	Yeah.
Scott:	And all the lights in San Jose.
Tim:	It was all real and I can still show you that now.
Scott:	Yeah.
Tim:	That’s what happened. We were able to take our automotive knowledge, our knowledge of IOT, and connect to vehicles and all this stuff and merge into a single thing where we were able to find a path to connect cities in a way where they can exchange information with other agencies or private companies so that we can actually wind up now as the fair playing field as to, “Hey. All these transit agencies, let’s go back to San Jose for a second. There’s 500 buses.” Well those buses are on all the roads we care about. That’s a real source of traffic information.
Scott:	Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Tim:	Actually, we’re able to get the city of Palo Altos traffic light information first. And so, there’s a YouTube video of us out there back when we were still going by our legal name Signwaves because that’s-
Scott:	Yeah.
Tim:	We started Signwaves. Play on signs. It’s amazing that no one actually took the website either for the most used term in a math book. So again, timing and possibility is everything. But Palo Alto worked with us and gave us access to connecting with their 100 traffic lights. So, we were able to, in like three weeks, work with my now current CTO who was contracting on their, come up with a mobile app and a backend that took all the traffic light data in and we created a mapping app that if you were in Palo Alto, you could drive anywhere in Palo Alto and know all the traffic light data so that we could figure out, “Hey. Is there a first mile or a last mile play?” And I was literally, for like several days, just calling Lyft and Uber rides, getting in, going from one side of downtown to the other and asking them, “Hey. Is this information interesting and usable for you? And that’s when we quickly found out no. That business model did not work and these other companies that were playing in that model were not going to make it and we went back to the whiteboard and we were like, “Okay. We got to own-
Scott:	That’s a real fast moment right there.
Tim:	Yeah.
Scott:	Right.
Tim:	And that’s where we found and discovered because we took that app to the Santa Clara Valley transportation authority and we went, “Hey. We’ve got this. This is possible. We know the traffic flight information,” because I was like, “There’s got to be a safety play here. San Francisco, all these places, they have buses and trollies-
Scott:	That’s also like what people … yeah.
Tim:	Are professional drivers and you’re driving 40 foot buses or the articulated buses are 60. So, it’s the same thing as a semi truck. Everybody’s always like, “Oh. How do we not get crashes with these big vehicles?” So, I was like, “Cool. Well if you know the light-
Scott:	Trolley’s got a bunch of people hanging out the side of it. It’s even worse-
Tim:	Oh yeah.
Scott:	In San Francisco with the trolleys. Yeah.
Tim:	So, we got a meeting with the CIO of ETA and came in and we pitched him and he’s just like, “A wealth of information,” and he’s like, “Guys. We did that 10 years ago and our bus drivers hated it. Made them really anxious. They thought that they’d now had new performance requirements that they would get them fired and it was just like, “Oh yeah. That makes a lot of sense.” And also, I’ve always been a huge proponent of taking stuff away from drivers having had a good background and like driver distraction. So, then we were like, “Okay.” That’s when the big aha moment came is too like, “What if we flipped it? We now live in a world,” and this is what LYT operates off of is that we now live in a world where everything’s a known. You have a calendar, I have a calendar, we have phones. It’s very easy now to know what’s happening in the world and what’s going to happen if you have the ability to cobble this together. And we do. But the world is still working on a reactionary basis, which means we just wait until something happens to do something and that’s not effective. It doesn’t work at scale. And that’s where we were like, “Oh. Well if we can start with buses and show that we can adjust how traffic lights work based off these moving vehicles and do some interesting things that the traffic industry already has been doing,” then we now prove back to this entire public sector ecosystem that for the last 15 years you were told this type of technology would exist and it never came up. And now all of the sudden we can take advantage of what industry has actually invested in to bring back at a budget friendly, ultra scalable price and ability and that’s how we wound up being able to start working on this whole pivot of reconnect the traffic lights now, we get real data from the world on what’s going on where and now have the infrastructure back to the same plane that we all live in, like Google and Apple have in their navigation as to we know it’s going to happen. Let’s set the roads up to move what’s going to happen so that we have less traffic because-
Scott:	Yeah.
Tim:	Let’s treat it. We’re sick. It’s congestion.
Scott:	Is a simple example like there’s a major traffic corridor. You just keep the lights green longer. Let that traffic clear instead of keeping it on like the same rotation that it would be on in a normal day when it’s not busy or something like that, right. It’s almost like supply chain theory. You’re trying to clear all the blockages.
Tim:	Yep. And it’s always been very simple minded. Perfect example and I’ll do one for San Francisco and San Jose. So, in San Francisco, we’ve got many roads that are going north south that if you want to get to the Golden Gate, you got one highway, you got the next. Everyway’s got to move through it. So, they’ve tried to set the lights up so that you just flow through. That was the old process. Same thing in San Jose where you’ve got the two major highways and then you’ve got all the neighborhoods between it and so everyone’s either moving to one highway or the other. So, it’s just simple. If I live here and I work there, we’re all going to move and come back. But the challenge is now things have changed and the pace at which a city will update how people use the roads is on the scale of three to 10 years.
Scott:	Yeah. I believe it. I believe it. Yeah.
Tim:	And at a price of 3000 per signal. So, the investment they can make is $3,000 every three to five years at a major intersection to do a traffic study to find out if it’s serving it correctly, which is why me, you, and everyone else are getting frustrated as to, “Why do I keep going from red light to red light to red light?” Because that’s worse than sitting there and waiting for it to just change at all because you’re actively like, “This thing is set to work against me.” And so, we were like, “Okay. This will solve a problem.”
Scott:	But you’re right, man. I used to live in San Francisco. I totally know what you’re talking about in some of those roads. Hey. It’s Scott Orn and we’re going to take a quick break from the podcast to give a shout out to the Kruze tax team. Gosh, it’s so nice to have an in-house tax team. I can’t even tell you. We have some really amazing professionals on team. I think it’s 13 people now and we do everything from your federal and state income tax return, state franchise tax filings, R&D tax credits. Those are pretty popular these days. And guess what? They’re there for you when you go through diligence. A lot of people don’t know this, but you actually go through tax diligence, not just operational kind of financial diligence, but you do go through tax diligence. So, it’s nice to have Vanessa Kruze on the phone with your VCs and with the accounting firm they hire to diligence all your stuff and the law firm they hire to diligence all your stuff. Vanessa knows what she’s doing. She’s done this a million times and it’s not just Vanessa. We have a really great team of tax professionals that will do those calls too. It’s kind of sometimes the difference between getting around close or having it taken another two weeks because something was disorganized and the tax compliance wasn’t done correctly. We hear those horror stories from clients that come to us. So, hey, if you want Kruze’s tax team on your side, we’re here for you. Check us out at kruzeconsulting.com. Thanks. So, you guys basically instead of make the city having to wait like three to 10 years to do the study, you guys can give them data in real time or at regular intervals and they can do the study like the study’s continuous basically.
Tim:	Exactly. So right now, we do this, an example of this because there’s a lot of media going out right now about the city of San Jose who was with the Santa Clara Valley transportation authority. They were the first people to work with us and demonstrate this new philosophy and technology will work. And so we were on 20 lights in the city on its east side and they’re now expanding it to 122 additional lights.
Scott:	That’s amazing. Congrats.
Tim:	Which will mean we’re now in 15% of the city of San Jose.
Scott:	Wow.
Tim:	And that’s what it’s about is that the cars are now the sensors. And what’s really interesting about this is that everybody likes to say AI and machine learning to be hip and trendy and-
Scott:	Yeah.
Tim:	To make sure that they know you’re using technology. But what that does for our customer that’s really interesting is to come back to that traffic study point is that that’s building and learning what’s happening. So, we are retraining these models every week and it’s training on the last two months because patterns change, right?
Scott:	Yeah.
Tim:	Summer, fall, spring, totally different in traffic. So that’s the value of our system on top of just making it work in the first place is that now it’s constantly adjusting and it’s adjusting six times a year.
Scott:	Oh my God. That’s amazing.
Tim:	Which is a huge value add because-
Scott:	Once every three to 10 years.
Tim:	Yeah. And so that’s a huge value add for we don’t even at the moment account for like, “Oh. You’re also getting this like traffic light upgrade package.” Like we account for that in our full license. And so that’s a lot of their value-add ROI is that at three grand the going rate and we’re doing it six times a year, that quickly becomes a nice amount of ROI.
Scott:	Yeah.
Tim:	And then you scale that across. So, if you take what I just said there at three grand, one light, take that over 10 years and 150 traffic lights, that’s $27 million.
Scott:	Wow. Wow, wow, wow. That’s the cost and the city benefit, but like you guys have a great saying, which we were kind of talking about before, but the people aspect of it, right? Like maybe give the audience the company’s mantra.
Tim:	Yeah. We’re after just a very, very simple mission, which is better lives through less traffic. And that’s because we’re right now doing some big major things. So, we focus a lot on transit, but we’ve also been able to take this to emergency services and we’re literally saving lives. We’re a part of emergency response by being able to connect with 911 dispatch systems and where the response vehicles are and improve on something we’ve all experienced because what’s worse than sitting at a red light is sitting at a red light and a fire truck comes up behind you because now you’re panicked, everyone else is panic, the light’s not doing-
Scott:	Can’t get through.
Tim:	Everyone’s freaking out, “Oh God. I’m going to get a ticket. I’m going to get this.”
Scott:	Someone’s having a medical event and they can’t get to the person. It’s terrifying.
Tim:	Oh.
Scott:	I also just think the better lives thing is like you’re definitely like the medical response stuff is unequivocal, but it’s algorithms and data making all of our lives better just by giving us five minutes back a day that we’re not sitting at a traffic light or letting people get home faster or things like that. It’s not perceptible probably, but when you add it up, San Jose’s got to have a million people in the city, right.
Tim:	Yeah.
Scott:	Or two million people or something like that.
Tim:	It’s amazing.
Scott:	You add up that five minutes times a million people and it’s like a lot of time. It’s really amazing what you guys are doing.
Tim:	And research has shown that’s what we’re going after is exactly that is that by setting the stage, going region wide the way that everything’s set up right now, there’s an easy 30 to 40% we can claw back for everyone.
Scott:	Wow.
Tim:	And so that means-
Scott:	That’s crazy. That’s crazy.
Tim:	In the immediate EMS response, if there’s a meet accident, you got the best chance now, but the long-term effects is-
Scott:	Yeah.
Tim:	That’s less emissions, greenhouse gases, all these areas of impact. Think of Fremont. Think of East Palo Alto. These connectors where they’re, especially East Palo Alto, super small community, but anybody from the east side or the peninsula that’s going over Dumbarton Bridge is passing through them. And so, they’re what’s called a community of impact. They’re impacted. So, by moving more people through quicker, everything runs more efficiently.
Scott:	Yeah.
Tim:	It’s cheaper for you, cheaper for me, and then the big picture is the entire economy, with everything going to shipping, Amazon Prime, freight, and now using this platform to have better conversations as to when do we drive and when do we all drive? Because think of the incentives now is I can go to a freight company and be like, “Hey. You’re going to shoot a thousand trucks out at this time? With just that information I can help you get the lights to be set up in your favor and then I can notify nanification to move you and me, the regular person, around or use different roads.” So now we get back to the original concept of why we categorized our roads in the first part as a truck route and a non-truck route is so that-
Scott:	Yeah.
Tim:	We don’t have to build more roads or anything like that because we’ve got tons of infrastructure. We just got resources that need to be used better. And that’s what we’re doing every day, improving it in different places.
Scott:	I love it. I love it. We’ve gone very long here because you have such an awesome story. Actually, and for the audience, because I’ve seen the demo and I saw when Tim got into San Jose, but I haven’t had the update in about a year. So, I’m like really blown away too. It’s really special. Well, we should wrap up because we’re going over.
Tim:	No problem.
Scott:	But can you tell everyone where to find you, how to look you up? I’m sure you’re available to work with other municipalities or other transportation groups. So where do they find you and give the quick LYT pitch one more time real fast.
Tim:	Absolutely. So, you could find us at lyt.ai. L-Y-T.ai. Tons of information out there. You’ll probably see us as well in the media. Some pretty big stuff coming out. As I had mentioned, San Jose expansion. We’re working up in the city of Portland with their transit authority. Very big project that has a ribbon cutting next month. Lots of news going on in that and we’re the technology partner for that. Going to be huge. You can find me directly as well by just going to LinkedIn, looking up Timothy Menard. Feel free to reach out there and then also contact@lyt.ai or tim@lyt.ai. Give us a buzz and the biggest thing to remember for everyone watching this, if you find this exciting and you want to do something about it, the first thing you can do is just notify your community that there’s a new answer to something that we’ve kind of just taken as it’s the way it is. And we don’t have to do that anymore because we all play a part. So best thing you can do is just help tell others.
Scott:	Beautiful. And I also have to say, it’s always exciting for me. I work with tons of entrepreneurs. When the nice guys finish first, you are one of the nicest people I’ve had the pleasure of working with all these years.
Tim:	All right. Thanks Scott.
Scott:	So, if someone’s considering joining LYT, they should definitely take you up on it. You are a great person and a great person to work with. Super smart, super nice, and I think in this podcast you demonstrated how thoughtful you are and all the stuff you want to change and improve is all for the better. Better lives through less traffic really resonates with me. For eight years I commuted from, or nine years, from San Francisco to Menlo Park and back. And I’d love to have 30% of that time back. So, I love what you’re doing, Tim. Congrats.
Tim:	Thanks Scott. Appreciate it. And it’s been great working with you as well over the years.
Scott:	My pleasure man. Pleasure’s all ours. All right, buddy. Catch you later. Thank you so much.
Tim:	Sounds good.
Singer:	So, when your troubles are mounting in tax or accounting, you go to Kruze, from Founders and Friends. It’s Kruze Consulting. Founders and Friends with your host Scotty Orn.

Tim Menard, CEO and Founder of LYT, discusses LYT's connected vehicle and machine learning technologies that optimize traffic flow

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