Date and Time: Wednesday, July 12, 2023: 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM
Bruce Botsford
Senior Staff Service & Maintenance Delivery Manager, Aurora Innovation
Presentation Description
Speaker Biography
I started my career on the Business Planning and Supply Chain teams at Coca-Cola while living in Shanghai, China. After a few years, I left to pursue an MBA at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management focusing on Operations. Following graduate school, I moved to the Bay Area to work in Apple’s Product Operations group, primarily working on iPhone New Product Introduction.
Over the years, I helped ramp up production for iPhone 7, 8, XS, XS Max, and XR ahead of each product launch, and I was blown away by the ability to scale a product from nothing to mass production in such a short period of time. Watching an idea move from paper to a physical product is incredible and I get energized working on things I can see being used out in the world. This idea has stayed with me throughout my career and was one of my motivations to join Aurora.
At Apple, I also learned to be motivated by the challenge of simplicity, as the most simple things are often the most complex problems to design and build around. The movement of goods may seem simple—people rarely think about how their package was delivered—but it is an incredibly complex industry. Driving might seem simple—we do it every day without much thought—but teaching a computer to drive is incredibly hard. Aurora is tackling both of these problems at the same time, and that’s a really exciting thing to be part of.
