Readying Voyage to launch a self-driving car business
I’m both incredibly proud of and humbled by the all-star team we’ve built at Voyage. As we work to unlock the potential of self-driving cars for people who need them, we’re building a business to create advanced mobility technology that serves people at-scale. Our people are remarkable, and today I’m happy to announce new roles for three of them: Nina Qi, Davide Bacchet, and Dizan Vasquez.
Introducing Our First COO
For the past year, Nina Qi has been an absolutely essential key to our early success by building a smart, scalable and responsive business. She’s driven momentum with partners while running a lean, nimble operation from California to Florida. Today I’m deeply honored to announce that Nina is now the COO of Voyage.
Nina steps up into this new role from her previous position as VP of Business Development and Finance. In that role, she built out a complex and comprehensive partner and vendor ecosystem, forging new partnerships and boosting existing relationships with automotive manufacturers and sensor providers, as well as operational partners like Enterprise and Intact. She’s contributed in far too many ways to list, from hiring and people development to fundraising and investor relations.
Nina joined us in October 2018 from Autodesk where she led corporate development efforts in advanced manufacturing, automotive design, and media & entertainment. She previously also led corporate development activities for Uber and EFI. At Uber, she led M&A, investment, and strategic partnership efforts for Uber ATG, Uber Everything, and Uber Freight. She got her start in investment banking, after graduating from Stanford University with dual degrees in Economics and Psychology.
Rising Engineering Leadership
At our heart, we are a technology company. We build technology to serve people with an emphasis on safety, accessibility, and scalability. Davide Bacchet and Dizan Vasquez are two highly regarded engineers at Voyage who have galvanized our distributed engineering team.
Davide Bacchet is stepping up into the role of Vice President, Engineering. Since joining Voyage as Director of Engineering in December 2018, he has demonstrated leadership abilities in channeling the intellectual and creative abilities of our dynamic, distributed engineering team to deliver highly sophisticated self-driving car technology within intense budget, time and quality constraints.
What’s more, Davide inspires and motivates his team with an unflappably optimistic, resilient attitude. Perhaps this is because he’s been living his dream for a long time. He’s spent the last two decades building self-driving car software, systems and simulation environments at places like Tesla, Apple SPG, and NIO. At Voyage, he is able to bring all this knowledge and experience to bear in a focused way that truly delivers on the promise of self-driving cars. And he has fun doing it! As he says in this LinkedIn Top Startups 2019 video about why he loves working at Voyage, “there’s a lot of bleeding-edge technology. This is my playground!”
Dizan Vasquez has also been promoted from Senior Research Engineer to Engineering Manager. In a rapidly changing field where staying on top of the latest technological developments is crucial, Dizan has demonstrated remarkable technical research skills and has mastered the art and science of building predictive technology that anticipates what dynamic objects (e.g. humans, vehicles, animals) are going to do next. He also keeps us chuckling with his excellent sense of humor. He joined Voyage in April 2018 from Apple where he was also a Senior Research Engineer. After getting his PhD in computer vision, computer graphics and robotics, Dizan held leadership positions across development and research from Mexico to Germany.
Growing Voyage
As a startup CEO, I feel a tremendous responsibility to grow a company that delivers on its mission and — at the same time — gives every member of our team the opportunity to find fulfillment in their career. As Voyage grows, our people grow. And it is my privilege to grow and learn alongside all-stars like Nina, Davide, and Dizan. We’re forging new paths into new frontiers, building technology for people, by people, together.
Introducing Our COO and Rising Engineering Leaders was originally published in Voyage on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.