Seval Oz ‘79 discusses self-driving cars at TEDxNapaValley in 2014. Photo Credit: Robert McClenahan
Driving Innovation Seval Oz ‘79 takes the wheel as CEO of self-driving transportation company By Kathy Warner, Director of Alumni Programs
If you look on page 72 of the 1979 Tower Hill School yearbook, you will see a young woman staring and smiling back at you. What you can’t tell from the picture of Seval Fatma “Mimi” Oz, Class of ‘79, is that the ocean and sand surrounding her is not
Seval Oz—1979 Yearbook
the Atlantic or even the Pacific—but the Mediterranean. The picture says a lot about Seval’s life while she was a THS student and her life following graduation. Her family and her family’s connection to their home in Turkey have always been a constant influence on this very independent-minded woman, who is currently the CEO of Continental Intelligent Transportation Systems and the former head of business
development for Google’s self-driving car program at Google X. While a student, Seval was an example of all things Tower Hill as she played basketball with teammate Wiz Montaigne Applegate ‘79, took part in cheerleading and thrived academically. She worked hard as a student and remembers teachers like Mr. Baetjer, Mr. Stetson and Mr. Pierson, who always encouraged her and told her she could do anything. She was interested in math and chemistry, as well as American History. Her family and her teachers told her to challenge herself and chart her course in life. She was not content to follow in the medical paths led by her father and older brother, Mehmet Oz ‘78. Seval studied economics and political science at Wellesley College and MIT and earned a Master of Business Administration degree from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1985. She has always been an independent thinker and passionately believes in the importance of women in technology. Women in STEM inspire and motivate people to build and use technology that will positively impact the world in a different way, she said. If anything, a woman’s viewpoint is different from a man’s perspective. Always interested in the future, Seval remembers enjoying Star Trek, The Jetsons and Lost in Space on TV because, in
addition to being entertaining, those shows taught us that we should expect change in the future. The programs encouraged us to imagine how we could impact this change directly by creating our own future. Seval created the award-winning video starring Steve Mahan, a man 95 percent blind and head of the Santa Clara Valley Blind Center who “drove” a self-driving car, which has over 7 million views on YouTube. Continental opened a division that will merge computing with cars. CNET reports, and Seval agrees, that self-driving cars will dominate the roads by 2020. “Can I challenge myself?” is a question Seval believes we should ask ourselves. “Is my goal so challenging that failure is imminent and I need to prepare to recover and pivot around failure fast?” Years of competitive sports on championship teams taught her to pivot fast and find another, perhaps a more clever, way to score. She remembers one of her quotes from her yearbook page that she still lives by: “It’s so nice to be insane, no one asks you to explain.” She is a talented and courageous woman who believes in and is passionate about “the clever car,” and she is confident that her previous work at Google X and her current leadership at Continental will jumpstart the technology for self-driving cars for future generations sooner than we might think. Tower Hill Bulletin
Fall 2015
11