A First Look at TIER IV North America
Our series TIER IV PEOPLE shines a light on the people and teams whose unique experiences, backgrounds, and stories bring our mission to life.
Whenever there’s a major headline about autonomous vehicles, it sparks a debate and statements can spiral into a cacophony of clickbait and buzzwords. Which is why for any company in this ecosystem it is imperative to have a leader and team who are committed to changing the way the public at large views autonomy.
This is where Christian John, (better known to his TIER IV peers as CJ) comes in. TIER IV has made the move to expand into the North American market, and CJ more than qualifies to be trusted with this task. Prior to joining TIER IV, CJ was the General Manager of the Automotive Telematics Business at Intel Corporation, responsible for automotive grade LTE/5G products addressing the global Connect Car market.
What is your current role at TIER IV and AWF?
I’m the president of TIER IV North America, in that role I’m largely responsible for business operations in North America. From a mission perspective, TIER IV North America (NA) is responsible for business development and expansion of the opportunities for TIER IV products and solutions in the region. In addition to North America, we also cover Europe as part of the scope that we’re focused on. As for the Autoware Foundation (AWF), I am the chair of the strategic planning committee, that’s the group of members that is responsible for the growth of the ecosystem. So we do a lot of work around member development, promotion of Autoware and the Autoware Foundation. Other strategic initiatives we work on include how to bring Autoware into university education programs and trying to engage the broader community to work with the open source project.
Why did you join TIER IV?
When I was working at Intel, I was running the automotive business unit at Intel and for one reason or anotherーIntel exited the market. So then my choices became to try and find something at Intel more in the traditional PC space, which wasn’t interesting for me. I really wanted to stay more in the automotive market. I was doing a lot of work in connective car technologies, that is LTE/5G cellular connectivity to cars. We started to work a lot on integrating with autonomous driving as part of the connected car. That kind of sparked my interest in autonomy, I started looking for opportunities to make a move in that direction. Luckily I had previously lived in Japan for 3 years, so I had developed relationships with some of the key people at TIER IV and it worked out quite well for me to join the team. It really was exactly what I was looking to do as far as staying in the market segment and trying to move in this new direction to focus on autonomy.
You came to Japan for the first time for your previous job, how was that experience?
Oh, it was terrible.
My first professional experience in Japan was when I was much younger, I didn’t understand anything about the working culture. I made every single mistake you could possibly make. When I was working with my Japanese colleagues it ended up coming across very arrogant and thinking that I knew everything so when I received feedback from my boss on my first trip back it was along the lines of:
“…They hated you and they don’t think they can work with you,” and I think that was them being nice about it.
So, I took it upon myself to learn more about Japanese culture and how it was to work in other companies in Japan. I ended up turning that whole engagement around when I was going to Japan every six weeks to meet with that previous team face-to-face. We were on the phone constantly, and we ended up launching that project on time and very successfully. In the end the Japanese company I was working for told me, the only reason that the project was a success was because of me. Which was a huge transition from “they hated me” to someone they trusted to work with them. For me, that was definitely the foundational experience for my career working in Japan and the relationships that I developed. It was one of the reasons later that Intel sent me to come live in Japan, since I had that great foundation of experience. It was one of those events in your life that puts you on a trajectory, and if I hadn’t lived in Japan, I don’t know that I would have had the great opportunity to join TIER IV.
What was TIER IV like when you joined?
Honestly, it was a challenging situation since I joined right when Covid struck. So for the first year and a half I was basically fully remote, I didn’t get to meet anyone face-to-face. It was harder for me to get integrated with TIER IV since at that time the company had been highly focused on the Japanese market, there was also the challenge with the language barrier. So being 100% remote on top of trying to integrate into a foreign company was a bit of an interesting proposition. For me, it was a lot about trying to build those relationships and connect with everyone so I could further understand the culture of the company and what was going on. I spent a lot of time at the beginning trying to get myself involved with the AWF activities, as I found that realm to be a bit easier for me. Since the AWF is already a global ecosystem of companies who are doing all of their work in English, and there are already a number of companies in North America who are involved. So at the start, about 80% of what I was focused on was the development and evolution of the AWF. It was only within the last year when Japan started to open up that I could start to go and become more deeply integrated with the team in Japan from a product solutions roadmap perspective. Things have shifted a little bit now with looking to scale and forge business globally with the opportunities in North America.
When you were finishing your studies, did you ever think you would work in the industry of autonomous driving?
Nope, I took a sharp right-turn (ha) if you will.
My background was predominantly computer chips, silicon and working in the cellular communications sector, which is a completely different technology and market. For me, it’s one of those rewarding things that making the switch gave me, the opportunities to learn and do something new. The AWF, the open technology ecosystem — was completely different to anything I had been working on previously. At first I was a little hesitant about the idea of taking on this new and huge responsibility but now I would not trade that for anything. It’s the most rewarding experience I’ve had thus far in getting to represent TIER IV and developing the relationships with the broader community.
Could you describe working at TIER IV in one word?
To me the one word that really exemplifies TIER IV is collaborative.
Of course there are so many words you could apply: innovation, disruption, etc. However the fundamental premise of what we’re doing as a company and with the open source community, requires us to collaborate with a broad set of companies. I have to say, never in my past careers have I ever seen a company that is so engaged, deeply, with so many partners and players in the ecosystem to do something that is so complicated. From that perspective, I think TIER IV is very nimble as far as how we engage the ecosystem partners and establish collaborative working relationships with these companies. To the point where these companies come back and say “Look, the work we did with you (TIER IV) was very positive, we want to continue working with you.” I haven’t experienced something quite like that before in my career. For a Japanese company to do that is quite impressive as well. So the collaborative “core” of the company is what is making TIER IV successful.
What is the current status of TIER IV NA?
Well, right now it’s me!
We have one other person who is on leave, and a new member has just joined our team. So it’s still a very small team, as I said the focus has been around driving the AWF, the ecosystem, the development and the awareness of Autoware. In doing that I’m also, of course, promoting TIER IV as a major player in the Autoware ecosystem. Now that TIER IV is maturing as a company, our products and solutions are maturing to the point where we can start to look at scaling them into new opportunities outside of Japan. TIER IV NA is shifting towards looking for opportunities, partnerships, and customers so we can develop future business for TIER IV. I would say in the next 2–3 years we’re looking mainly at helping the company grow globally.
What are the current challenges facing TIER IV NA?
Well, staffing obviously.
Growing a company while doing all these different things with the AWF is always a challenge. Finding the right mix of time across all these different efforts.
One of the future challenges I foresee for TIER IV NA is that many companies here still have the mentality of having to “do it yourself”. It’s that typical kind of start-up mentality, so bringing in an open-source platform and a value proposition which is built around partnerships is a little bit challenging to sell to a lot of the other companies we have here. I think we’re starting to make headway from that perspective, because the things I see happening in the market such as with Argo AI, where these companies that after investing so much say “that’s it, we can’t invest any further”. I sense a transition in the market with these companies having to do things differently and use different business and partnership models to develop autonomous technology and bring it to market. So the timing is right that, now, having the resources and capabilities to really execute on the opportunities that are starting to emerge in North America. As a small team having to deal with this broad set of opportunities in this space, that’s the biggest challenge so far.
How would you describe the mission statement of TIER IV NA?
It’s like I said, we will work to continue to develop the AWF ecosystem because that’s so fundamental to the success of TIER IV.
TIER IV is built on the open-source project being successful and to continue to evolve and scale across many different markets and different operating conditions. TIER IV basically used that core capability in our products, so very much like the Red Hat and Linux kind of business model. To commercialize you still need to invest in a lot of capabilities around open source, and that’s TIER IV’s business model. We offer reference designs, tools and solutions that are built around open source. So, continuing to ensure the growth of the ecosystem and the maturity and the innovation in Autoware is one of the key things that TIER IV NA has seen as our mission through the work with the Autoware Foundation. With the growth of TIER IV’s revenue and business within the different product categories that we’ve defined, we continue to research the market for mobility as a service, buses, shuttle platforms or cargo logistics and handling. These are segments of the market that I think are ready to start growing within the next 2–3 years and our mission is to find the opportunities and the partnerships for TIER IV to scale into those market opportunities. The fact that the core team is still based in Japan, I don’t see us building out a big team of engineers and developers in North America, not in the next two years. So again it is kind of up to the North America team to find the right partnerships and customer opportunities that fit with our business model and the products that we have now, that are ready to start ramping up commercially in the next two years.
What would you say separates TIER IV from other organizations who might be investing in the prospect of autonomous driving?
The fundamental difference is around the idea of disrupting the way that autonomous technology is developed. How we’re leveraging an open ecosystem and the advancement of the technology isn’t being controlled by one company. Many companies have the ability to work with Autoware to integrate their particular technologies and solutions in order to optimize their products independently. If they choose, they’re able to come back to the community to integrate their solutions. This approach is something very unique, this system does not exist anywhere else in the autonomous industry right now. This idea of an open, collaborative business model for something as complicated as autonomous driving.
With the idea of making intelligent vehicles more available and affordable, what would you say to those who are hesitant about the idea of “autonomous cars”?
What I try to emphasize is that it’s still early in the development of the technology, we still have a long way to go before the industry really achieves the vision that was already put in place by companies like Waymo, Cruise and Zoox about this wholly autonomous infrastructure with fleets of vehicles everywhere. Incrementally, there are services and applications for simpler Operational Design Domains that can be enabled along the way that will bring benefits to society, and that are less complex and are much easier to ensure the safety of operation. Through these types of deployments we will continually analyze and improve the technology, ultimately achieving the vision of a fully autonomous world, in dense urban environments, in rural environments or wherever you are, to find services and applications enabled through autonomous vehicles. It’s not something where you have to achieve “full autonomy” right away as there are plenty of services and applications that can benefit people now.
In a single word or phrase, what kind of people does TIER IV employ?
Here’s where I would say, innovative is the key word. You have to have a certain level of innovation in your DNA to get involved with something as disruptive as this. To change the way the industry is developing this technology or to tackle unique problems with an equally unique solution — that’s something that I see across the board with the people that I work with. They bring new, innovative ways of thinking into the discussion.
What can someone expect to see when they look at TIER IV as a team?
A team of professionals that work well together to address a very complicated problem. Everyone has their unique set of responsibilities in this overall development and it really requires us to be working together collaboratively internally, as well as with all of our external partners. Having that certain level of high quality professionalism to be able to engage to find solutions is something I personally see in everyone here.
Who would be an ideal candidate for TIER IV?
Someone who wants to take on a significant challenge by being in the center of and disrupting this industry. Being excited about developing this technology, but also knowing that being patient is a part of bringing all of this together. You need to be committed to this kind of project with the idea that this might take 5–10 years. We’re trying to drive a major shift in this industry so being dedicated to our goal is really important.
How will autonomous vehicles benefit our society in the future?
The vision is that through autonomy we will be able to, over the course of time, reduce vehicle fatalities and accidents on the roads. For me, one of the biggest impacts we can have is with improving the efficiency of our vehicular infrastructure and the impact that will have on the environment. The green aspect of this technology is probably one of the most important improvements that can be made for society around the world. Reducing carbon emissions, streamlining transportation and actually making it safer and faster to get to where you need to be. All of these, and more are going to be huge societal benefits.
How do you see the future of TIER IV?
I see TIER IV being recognised as a leader of innovation and disruption in the market. Success for us is having our technology and products being used by customers not only in Japan but in other countries in Asia, North America, and across the world, creating opportunities for our employees to get engaged in and experience new markets. These opportunities create more chances for myself and other members of the team to engage this ecosystem we created. To me, the biggest success would be for TIER IV to be recognised as the leader in this shift in the industry and to drive this change in the autonomous ecosystem.
Do you have a message for future candidates and current members of TIER IV?
For current members, I’m so proud to be a part of this organization and to have the chance to work with all of you. This is such an incredible group of people, the relationships I’ve had the chance to establish within the company are truly the best I’ve ever had in my professional career. To new candidates, you’re joining a group of people that is nothing short of a pleasure to work with. Working together in such a challenging and fulfilling opportunity is such a rewarding career experience.
TIER IV is looking for candidates who are highly motivated and share our vision of “The Art of Open Source, Reimagine Intelligent Vehicles.”
Contact
For press, community and speaking requests, contact pr@tier4.jp.
For business opportunities and partnership, contact sales@tier4.jp.
Social Media
Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube
More