Lauri Väin Email and Phone Number

Building something new across Spain and Finland

LP in multiple early-stage tech funds in New Nordics and Europe more broadly. A partnership of a small number of early Skype employees. Occasionally expanding investments to new funds.

* earned a FAA single-engined airplane pilot's license in USA* built a 100m2 multidisciplinary personal workshop* travel

Scale and market sophistication (reorganization to a vertical organization, focus on scaling and launches):* built thousands of robots and built a manufacturing strategy to scale to tens of thousands annually* scaled through the hardest parts of Covid supply chain issues without missing a single quarterly manufacturing target despite scaling beyond original forecasts to expand global footprint - expanded the re-engineering and sourcing taskforce to 14 people (from 1 before), led redesigning of 32 of our 34 electronics boards, 11 of them twice and 6 of them three times to get around supply bottlenecks* built countless dashboards to drive reliability and robot operational performance* initiated key engineering programs around bespoke radars, motors, and other sensors* deployment of key fleet-wide upgrades to bring new key innovations to the entire fleet* part of the core management team, occasional board observer depending on need, participated in the Series A-C stage investment processes on topics relevant to my areas across engineering, manufacturing, IP, cybersecurity, etc* led diversification of the supply chain and simplification of in-house assembly operations by shifting certain operations to partners while maintaining speed to introduce product improvements, in-house parts being handled went from 800 to 350* co-authored strategy documents for rollout to the organization and as input to investment banking firms* spun out servicing to be a fully operational discipline/team within local operations teams with servicing manuals, debugging tools, supply chain, and escalation paths to central resources* hired an excellent senior VP of Manufacturing and Supply Chain to scale up manufacturing further

* headhunted actively, did 3000 hours of interviews, and hired 250 people* established 18 technical teams across autonomy (localization, drive, perception, cognition, computer vision, annotation, and safety analysis), hardware (electronics/embedded, mechanics, infrastructure), cloud (operational tooling, merchant services, consumer applications, cloud infrastructure, orchestration), data platform and science, servicing/deployment, manufacturing, testing/release* took temporary business ownership of the Milton Keynes Starship grocery operation for one year to grow order volume by 450% and revenue by over 500% (across local team, marketing, account management, fleet operations, merchandising, pricing, etc)* drove a project for robust low-latency robot and operational panel (the backoffice eventually grew to 800 pages across many fields)* built out a patent portfolio that's among the largest for global robotics companies (110 patents, 49 patent families, 8 countries) and is the biggest in Estonia* built/led the creation of data-based fleet outlier detection to improve our 150,000 road crossings per day* prototyped infrastructure systems (manual and automated robot battery charging, handling of payloads)* servicing and unit economics cost reduction improvements by double-digit percentages per year* built out a 10,000m2 private test ground, enabled the development of a test lab and EMI test lab visits* part of the core management team, board observer, tens of millions in budget responsibilities across engineering, manufacturing, and servicing* managed strategic vendor relationships in the supply chain, collaborations on co-designs* built a pragmatic in-house manufacturing team of 35 people* led multiple programs of fleet-wide upgrades* collaborated with government affairs colleagues on expanding Starship-like robot legislation to 20 US states and 7 countries* established multiple BOM cost programs while increasing robot performance and capabilities

* co-designed the robot and injection molding architecture/specification* led the service-ready robot initiative with a modular 20-subassembly architecture (self-reporting unique serial ID's, software versions, etc upon each startup) and central cloud systems to support it* helped launch key pilots and partnerships to validate the robot service (London, Hamburg, etc)* led the program from Starship's side to integrate with Daimler's Robovan concept* secured Functional Safety TüV certification on the path to robotics legislation in multiple countries* hired first 10 people to the "On-street robot handler test team", spun it off to become the COO's initial operations team* hired exceptional key technical contributors to seed the organization* drove a model of frequent twice-daily gradual releases with the fleet updating automatically and continuously based on milestones met for a particular release (across many tens of components across the robot, cloud, and infrastructure)* built the employee option allocation framework for the first 10+100 employees and co-authored the first budgets* part of the three-person core management team* introduced radars, new low-light imaging, and other sensors* participated in strategic deals to get permissions to operate from cities and companies (numerous smaller deployments in addition to the Daimler co-development), established a data privacy model, and enabled certifications* pitched Starship on investor meetings* hired the first product management roles (later spun off into a separate product organization after we hired a VP of Product)* diversified and structured how we do technical hiring across a broader team with hiring guides and a process* ... lived with robots in my hotel rooms during demo/investment tours and hands-on soldered electronics and fixed body panels in the early months to help robots recover from flight mishaps

An engineering pilgrimage: * 3,000km solo six-week snowmobiling trip throughout Scandinavia* 44,000km ten-month solo roadtrip with an Ariel Atom 500kg/300hp car across two continents (visiting engineering history locations, geeking out on CNC machines and in welding classes, saying 'hi' to friends en route and enjoying the very best driving roads in Europe and North America)* multi-month travel itinerary to engineering locations and technical conferences

Selected one of NASA's Centennial Challenges as an interesting off hours project. The team expanded to 13 engineers, machinists and designers and built a serious swarming rover contender from scratch for the Sample Return Challenge inside of 5 months. Team Kuukulgur became one of the top 3 teams on the first year of participation (the competition had been running for several years). Interesting challenge in both complexity as well as the constraints of not being allowed to use sensors that presume a GPS system, an atmosphere or a planetary geomagnetic field. Mainly solved the localization, navigation, environmental constraints and object recognition problems using cameras and other optical sensors.Several roles, but primarily specialised in working with the visual design team, composite shell engineering and manufacturing, designing the best possible gripping mechanism for given conditions and later rewrote the obstacle avoidance system. More info at https://www.facebook.com/TeamKuukulgur.

Continuation of the previous Skype role within Microsoft - product management of the User Management domain.Took on the role of merging Skype and Microsoft identities, address books, phasing out Microsoft Messenger in favour of Skype, browser based calling and auth schemes in Outlook.com, deep integration into Windows and XBOX. Part of the Skype-Microsoft core integration team from the first meeting after the acquisition. Continued the transformation drive from P2P to the cloud in parallel.Roaming role across Prague, Tallinn, Redmond, London and Palo Alto.

After architecting a redesign of the technical portfolio of the entire Core Technology Group and re-grouping them into vertical product teams (from previous horizontal technology teams), I was asked to product manage the Identity and Contacts area. Starting with 200 of the most sensitive and highly trafficked systems and essentially no team, we transformed the area into a platform product offering. Grew the team from myself, three engineers and an engineering manager. Over the first three years we hired and scaled to a set of teams with 45 people. Managed a total investment of about $5M annually across people, server infrastructure and related direct costs. The key initiative was transforming Skype's P2P architecture first to a server-assisted and then fully native cloud based architecture to work in the new condition of battery-constrained mobile devices. Roles: * Principal Program Manager, Identity and Contacts, Skype, Microsoft (October 2011 onwards) * Product Manager, Identity and Contacts, Core Technology Group, Skype (September 2011 onwards) * Interim Product Manager, Identity and Contacts, Core Technology Group, Skype (March - August 2011)

Focus on payments systems that are now processing over a billion Euros per year with tens of payment method aggregators, hundreds of payment methods, a long and complex product catalogue, deep integrations, PCI and SOX compliance, affiliate and transactional email systems, user self service and backoffice systems. In the solution architecture capacity, I expanded the my field from web and payments to also cover call rating and billing, marketing and knowledge bases, mailing, transactional notification and affiliate marketing systems - solutioning, integrating and replacement evaluation. Acted as the technical and analytical authority in vendor selection for major areas of business support infrastructure (biggest deals of around $10M for a total of $20M-25M over the years). As Silver Lake bought Skype, I moved to be the Core Technology Group architect responsible for cross-domain core integration solutions, major initiatives in core technology transformation, Facebook integration stakeholder from CTG and Asian partner integrations.Roles: * Senior architect, Core Technology Group (2011 onwards) * Solution architect, business infrastructure (2009-2010) * Web architect (2006-2008)

Built a wide variety of solutions: * fraud systems to combat attacks that posed an existential threat to Skype * participated in major design and refactoring of order and payment systems, which have since processed several billion euros without fundamental changes in the core model; it has stood up to the test of time exceptionally well and has extended to hundreds of payment methods * integrated numerous payment providers * designed and implemented secure web services for third parties to resell Skype services * small and medium businesses group management tool (Skype for Business)

BackgroundAustralian Search and Rescue UAV competition to spur the development of unmanned aerial vehicles. A "grand challenge" type competition with a AU$50,000 prize purse where competing teams worked to automatically detect a stranded hiker in a 8km2 area to deliver a 0.5kg medical payload. The challenge led to many developments in ArduPilot and other projects by competitors in the challenge. Team Goto RescueDiscovered the challenge and assembled a team. Focused on composite engineering (5.8m wingspan, vacuum-infused composites with carbon fiber and fiberglass on a foam core, 100cc motor with a significant amount of onboard compute), project management, systems engineering, and electronics/some aspects of mechanics. As a team we worked out of a dedicated 400m2 workshop, flew off-the-shelf small RC planes as tests, built multiple large airframes, conducted flight preparation campaigns of subassemblies on top of cars to test control and mechanical systems, built a hardware-in-the-loop simulator, custom autopilot (it was the era when open source autopilots were barely getting good enough), built airframes, had parafoilers fly our imaging hardware to capture test corpus images, built a partial computer vision based target detection, did runway taxiing tests, and low altitude runway hops. The challenge was eventually completed about 8 years after the competition was established and many requirements were relaxed.

Non-profit organization, volunteer in software development team. Developed the volunteer registration database and management APIs that enabled one of the biggest civic movements and mobilized 4% of the entire population to clean up the country. Since then the movement has expanded to over 110 countries and well over ten million people as part of the Let's Do It! World organization. Also made smaller software contributions elsewhere in the same initiative.

See Skype. The company later spun off the Skype project into a separate company and took over the employees.

Ran a freelancing and subcontracting business. Cultivated permanent relationships and delivered a wide range of different solutions to customers in USA, Estonia, Finland, UK and South Africa. Primarily web and database technologies. Around 80 smaller projects, 30 medium sized projects and 15 major projects (incl information management systems of various kinds, major industrial equipment repair process support, US lesson plan development and planning, car rental and support systems, combined web/WAP portals and information streaming and a variety of others).

Joined as permanent staff after having contributed through Tharapita Ltd. ELC was an unconventional startup in a traditional business and bet heavily on information technology development. It had 50-60 staff at peak, including a small dev and design team. Built the following systems: * major loghouse industry focus CRM * production planning system * streamlined "requirements to cost calculation" applicationThe company overstretched and did not live up to its high expectations. It was eventually restructured into several traditional businesses in 2005.

Responsibilities: * internal and marketing tools * local implementation of the corporate Intervowen TeamSite project * contributed to the very first MMS and WAP proof of concepts and showcases