Make Your NameIn the City.

These are the words of Shinsaku Takasugi, called the firebrand of late-Edo Japan. They are Smooth's vision and my own guiding principle.

Parking might look like a quiet, boring kind of infrastructure. But it sits everywhere across Japan, is used by hundreds of thousands every day, and has gone decades without any major update. Bring technology into it and the look of the streets changes.

I'm convinced of something on a far larger scale. Over the next ten years, when autonomous driving truly enters society, what will decide a city's competitiveness is whether it has built the infrastructure to accept autonomous vehicles at scale. Parking lots will inevitably evolve from "places to store cars" into "mobility ports."

Smooth is the company that builds the "standard equipment" every port needs. We're not a parking company — we're building the operating system of a city where M2M works: M2M payments, vehicle authentication, automated cashier-less payment, dispatch, and data management. At any parking lot, an autonomous vehicle can safely return and depart in perfect condition, and every payment around it completes automatically without a human in the loop. That's the urban infrastructure we're aiming for.

There are companies all over the world building the cars that move. But few players are building cars' "places to come home to" out of existing infrastructure. That's why doing this now matters. We at Smooth are the ones supporting the autonomous-driving society at the urban layer.

Age and résumé don't matter. Can you think for yourself, act on your own, and find your own version of "interesting" in the world? What matters is whether you can throw yourself into building infrastructure at the dead center of this structural change — that, and that alone.

Connecting people, cars, and cities — building seamless urban experiences. We're waiting for the people who'll dive into this grand challenge with us.