Background: I’m 15 years into building robots, previously at world class defense and R&D organizations. The last seven years I spent founding Southie Autonomy - a robotics AI company that packages for Fortune 50 brands. Now, my sole focus is Luminous. My ambition is to maximize positive impact within the next decade, spending all my time and resources to ensure that our planet’s future is bright, prosperous, and sustainable.

Introduction

We are at the intersection of climate, robotics, and AI. There is a significant interest with these topics at the global level and as a result significant noise in the industry with misinformation, competitors, and bad actors. My hope is by establishing the company culture, we will have a transparent operating system that, if we fully embrace, will drive us through the noise with integrity and empathy.

Our job is to stay true to our DNA and execute with velocity - everything else is secondary and naturally flows from there.

Here you will find Luminous’ culture expressed through our Mission, Vision, and Values. The culture we build and foster defines our identity as a company - how we make decisions and operate every day. We will hire, recognize, reward, and fire based on our core values.

Mission

Luminous’ mission is to rapidly accelerate power generation through autonomy and data.

We are a people centric clean energy company, purpose built with a single goal - ship product that genuinely empowers people and immediately makes impact to the sustainability of our planet.

Vision

Luminous’ vision is to deploy product at a global scale that unlocks scalable renewable energy.

We envision a world where renewable energy is a commodity at every corner of the planet. In the early days, we are focused on the highest value tasks to improve rollout of clean energy, at the limit, to be 10x faster. Longer term, we will aim to improve cost efficiencies and latencies across the entire lifecycle of renewable energy deployment and O&M.

Values

It is very important to understand, we are not a technology company. If you are looking for humanoids, acrobatics, or foundational research, this is not the company for you. There’s plenty of exciting technology companies working on these types of projects with amazingly talented engineers.

Luminous will succeed through empathy - through deep and intimate understanding of the industry vertical and its people our robots empower. And in turn, I believe it’ll help us learn more about ourselves.

Our entire team (C-Suite included) at Luminous will be expected to do site work at some point. Living the intricacies and nuances of the process ultimately enables us to build product that inherently connects to and is readily adopted by the workers. And the feeling of connecting to, seeing, and enabling people to do more fulfilling work with a smile on, is indescribable.

To achieve this, we have to act diligently as a single team, operating under a set of consistent core values below:

01. Never Compromise Quality

We do not believe in shortcuts and we strive to produce only the highest quality deliverables. Our product is not just a robot - it is the Luminous brand, a holistic solution and experience that empowers and amplifies the diligent workers who help realize our built world. The moment we compromise quality, we compromise safety, usability, performance, reliability - and more importantly, our fiduciary commitment to our customers and partners. 

02. Customer driven & empathetic 

We are a customer first company. Customers drive our product and technology. We are empathetic to our end users and we funnel that empathy into unique products and capabilities. We treat our customers as an extension of our team as we’re all pursuing the same goal - a cleaner, greener, more sustainable planet together. 

03. Championship mentality

To be successful, we believe in operating as a team. We believe in each other and we believe in our team. We’re all in the trenches together, collaborating with laser focus, and pushing each other to our highest levels of excellence, realizing our maximum potential. Because together, with the right people and the right culture, we can make a real impact at the global scale. 

Conclusion

I am hopeful this memo will instill the importance of our company’s culture to our current team and attract new teammates that share our beliefs. Luminous is a people first company, and clarity around our culture will empower the team to make decisions that best align with serving our end users,  Luminous’ mission, and our long term success.

We are here to empathetically ship product that impact the world we live in. And if you too share our beliefs and our ambitions, I would love for you to join our mission.

With a strong, unwavering culture, we’ll realize a fantastic future ahead. 
JMW

Jay M. Wong
Founder & CEO