The Idea: In 2012, Tim Kentley-Klay was running an animation studio in Melbourne, Australia. He had zero background in cars, AI, or engineering. Then he read a blog post about Google's self-driving car project and had an epiphany: this wasn't just about lane-keeping on highways - this was the beginning of the robotics age. While everyone else was retrofitting existing cars with sensors, Tim sketched something different: a purpose-built robotaxi with no steering wheel, no pedals, and the ability to drive in either direction. Friends thought he was crazy. He moved to Silicon Valley anyway, befriended one of Google's self-driving engineers, and through him met Jesse Levinson - a Stanford PhD student researching autonomous vehicles (and son of Apple's chairman). In 2014, they founded a company named after a marine organism that thrives on renewable energy. This was the beginning of Zoox.

The Execution:

• 2014: Tim and Jesse incorporated Zoox with a radical vision - build the entire vehicle from scratch rather than retrofit existing cars.
• 2015: Closed a $40M seed round while still in stealth mode, attracting early believers like Blackbird Ventures and DFJ.
• 2016: Emerged from stealth with a $250M Series A at a $1.55B valuation - one of the largest for a pre-revenue, pre-product company.
• 2018: Raised $500M Series B at a $3.2B valuation, led by Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes. Had filed 125 patents and hired 500 people. Then the board abruptly fired Tim as CEO.
• 2020: Amazon acquired Zoox for $1.3B, giving it the resources to finish what Tim started.
• 2025: Zoox launched its robotaxi service in Las Vegas, then San Francisco - the first purpose-built autonomous vehicle to carry public passengers on American streets.

The Lesson: Sometimes the best founders come from completely outside an industry. Tim saw self-driving cars as robotics, not automotive - a perspective that let him design something fundamentally different from what car companies were building. He got pushed off the mountain he built, but the vision he sketched in Melbourne is now picking up passengers on the Vegas Strip.