meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
The Times Tech Podcast

Lightship's Ben Parker: "Electrifying a beige industry"

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9654 Ratings

🗓️ 12 August 2022

⏱️ 48 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Ben Parker, co-founder and chief executive of Lightship, to talk about electrifying the recreational vehicle industry (3:30), starting out in electric racing (6:00), getting a job at Tesla (7:40), the food truck problem (12:30), leaving Tesla (19:25), starting Lightship (25:25), rethinking design from the ground up (31:00), the pickup truck tipping point (33:00), raising $23m (36:20), lessons from Tesla (39:00), and why RV’s are beige (43:50).

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Yo, technology.

0:02.9

What is it all about?

0:04.5

I remember sitting at my dinky little, like $60 Amazon desk that I had put up because

0:09.6

they didn't have, of course, nobody at home office or a lot of people didn't at that point.

0:13.4

And I was like, all right, this is it.

0:16.3

I guess, I guess this is the call and said, all right, you know, there's not that much to lose, I guess.

0:22.1

Better do it.

0:23.0

And so I called him back and said, yeah.

0:24.6

Because saying yes would also mean you'd basically be quitting Tesla and then it's kind of departing to this whole new thing.

0:31.5

Yeah.

0:31.9

I knew I was putting a fork, you know, in the road in my kind of life and career at that point and has to hold my breath to do it.

0:52.2

Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, a weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and inside the minds of the top people in tech this week.

0:59.2

We are talking, of course, about camper vans.

1:03.8

Or as they're called out in these parts, RVs, recreational vehicles.

1:08.1

Why are we talking about RVs, you ask? Well, because lots of people have them,

1:14.2

apparently one in ten Americans has an RV. Who knew? And the thing is, they have not really

1:19.7

come very far technologically in decades. If you look at like a Winnebago or something, it looks

1:24.8

not too dissimilar from what a Winnebago looked like 30 years ago.

1:28.5

And as we all know, the electric car revolution is kind of washing through the whole auto industry

1:33.8

except for RVs. So this week's guest saw that, that it was just crying out to be electrified

1:41.3

and saw, hmm, maybe I should start a company. So that's what he did.

1:45.3

His name is Ben Parker.

...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Will Morley, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Will Morley and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.