Latest / The Inspired Stories Podcast / Humanoid Robot Revolution: Oliver Mitchell’s Investment Perspective

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Humanoid Robot Revolution: Oliver Mitchell’s Investment Perspective · The Inspired Stories Podcast

0:04
Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast,
0:08
where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from
0:11
their successes and be inspired by how they've overcome
0:14
adversity. My name is Anthony Kotaspodi and
0:17
today's guest is Oliver Mitchell.
0:19
He is a partner at FF Venture Capital, a firm recognized for
0:23
its early stage investments across AI, robotics, and other
0:27
emerging technologies. Their mission is to partner with
0:31
innovative founders who aim to shape the future and build
0:34
market moving businesses now. Oliver has extensive experience
0:39
in venture capital and technology entrepreneurship.
0:43
He was previously the founder of Autonomy Ventures, focusing on
0:46
robotics and automation solutions for various
0:49
industries. He's also LED several successful
0:52
Angel investments, including two IPOs and a Unicorn now valued at
0:58
$20 billion, and he holds an impressive 14 patents.
1:03
Beyond that, he founded Robot Galaxy and is an author of an
1:08
upcoming book called A Start Up Field Guide in the Age of
1:12
Robotics and AI, which draws from interviews with the
1:16
luminaries in the automation space and offers insights on
1:20
taking an idea from its kernel stage all the way to an IPO.
1:24
Now before we get into all that good stuff, today's episode is
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1:55
All right, back to our guest today, the partner of FFF
1:58
Venture Capital, Oliver Mitchell.
2:00
Thanks for making the time to Share your story today.
2:04
Thank you, Anthony. I really appreciate you taking
2:07
the time to listen to me and hopefully we have a great
2:11
discussion today. I'm looking forward to it.
2:13
So Oliver, today you're AVC with a portfolio that includes IPOs,
2:20
a Unicorn now valued at over 20 billion, and companies deploying
2:25
humanoid robots and shipbuilding and industrial construction,
2:29
which we'll get to more in a bit.
2:31
But before we get into sort of the world of AI automation,
2:35
defense tech, I want to go back a little bit earlier kind of
2:38
beginning of your career, you actually had started on the
2:42
agency side of things, Kirschenbaum, Bond and partners.
2:47
What were you learning back then that would become helpful in
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your current work at FF Venture Capital?
2:53
Absolutely. The that's a great question And
2:57
you know, takes me back a little bit of time and a lot of things
3:01
have changed since then, but I graduated from Arizona State
3:05
University, had a great experience in Tempe, AZ
3:10
Actually, what people don't know is that ASU, we were building
3:14
the Mars Rover around the time that, that I graduated during
3:18
the Clinton administration. They found the meteorite from
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Mars, which looked like there was some water inside of it.
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And a lot of money was deployed in building a robot.
3:30
And ASU was one of the universities that was selected
3:33
in in building that. And I was not.
3:38
You're kind of around. All that excitement that was
3:40
going on. I was around all that
3:41
excitement. I observed.
3:43
I had friends, you know, on the engineering team.
3:45
I was a, you know, a liberal arts student who was studying
3:49
history of intellectual movements.
3:51
And then in the 19th century. But in the backdrop of that,
3:55
there were people building for the 21st century.
3:59
And so that was really exciting. And being a liberal arts major
4:04
in college, you know, I didn't really hone in what I want to do
4:11
right away. I came from an entrepreneurial
4:13
family, but I'm first generation American.
4:15
My parents were Holocaust flowers.
4:17
My father went into the restaurant business.
4:19
And so I knew I wanted to do something entrepreneurial.
4:21
And I had the opportunity to intern at the really the most
4:25
innovative young agency at the time, Kirchman and Bond.
4:30
And, you know, I joined their internship program.
4:34
It was a great program. And at the end of August, I was
4:38
like, you know, I really want to continue here.
4:40
And they're like, well, we only have one job available,
4:43
receptionist. I was like, I'll take it, I'll
4:45
take it right away. And actually, and back then
4:49
being a receptionist mean like the, the phone was like like as
4:52
big as your my wingspan, you know, with like 100 different
4:55
extensions and you mess up many times in, in transferring calls
4:59
and something like that. But you actually learn the most
5:02
about the agency because everyone's walking in and out.
5:04
You're seeing, you know, all the new pitches, you know, all the
5:08
CEOs and getting them water, you know, from Nabisco to Snapple
5:14
to, to motion on Hennessy and, and you're, and you really are
5:18
the pulse of the agency because you are their the first
5:21
ambassador they see. And so, you know, we represented
5:26
Snapple in the early days and of course, you know, being a
5:30
receptionist, the only thing we could drink upfront was Snapple.
5:33
And you know, it really, I gave it all I could and it was a lot
5:40
of fun. I ended up getting an account
5:43
role, which meant that I was a doormat.
5:46
Because in a creative agency, you're pulled between, you know,
5:50
the creatives, the, the art directors and the copywriters
5:52
and the the client, and you're the one sort of trying to act as
5:58
diplomat to try to fuse these two perspectives together to get
6:01
the best product. And it, it really was a lesson
6:05
in team building that I take with me and I really had great
6:08
times. You know, we don't, they don't
6:10
do this anymore, but every Friday we had drinks trolley and
6:13
come by and it was a little big party until somebody got really
6:16
drunk and, you know, started making a pass at a client.
6:19
So that so they took drinks trolley off off campus and so
6:22
forth like that. But it was a lot of fun, really
6:26
great culture, and I was frustrated because I was working
6:30
for somebody working for somebody, and I knew I really
6:34
wanted to be an entrepreneur. So I left the agency world,
6:37
taking all that branding experience, more important,
6:39
taking all that team building and cultural experience, and
6:43
went into merchant banking. I did a lot of deals.
6:46
I did some SPAC's. What?
6:49
Merchant banking is. Yeah, merchant banking.
6:52
So there's investment banking, which you know, is very
6:56
expensive, high end banks, you know, whether they're bringing
6:59
companies public, whether they're doing large mergers and
7:01
acquisition. And and then there's, you know,
7:05
venture, which is, which is deploying capital within the
7:08
private markets in a very early stage.
7:10
And merchant banking is going for that middle market companies
7:13
that that have revenue have EBIT and you're looking at
7:17
opportunities where you can have the closest path to liquidity.
7:23
And so, you know, we worked with Kelstrom founded by some Israeli
7:30
jet and you know, Air Force pilots and we sold Pratt Winnie
7:36
jet engine parts and we took that public then via a SPAC, we
7:41
were one of the first people to do SPAC's.
7:44
And then we, we did bogging telecommunications, we did Mota
7:48
Guzzi, we did a number of companies.
7:51
And then I ended up, you know, researching an opportunity that
7:57
came out, which was to take ATMs outside of bank branches and
8:00
charge, you know, a surcharge for that.
8:03
And I said, there's a business here.
8:06
There's new legislation that came out of Congress enabling us
8:08
to actually own ATMs, being that we're not banks and place them
8:13
outside of bank branches. And so we we created Marrakech,
8:17
myself and two other partners and we built that up within 32
8:20
months to a national network and I had upsells of marketing
8:25
there. We had company, we had, you
8:27
know, Simon Malls, we had Federated Department Stores, and
8:30
we eventually sold that to American Express.
8:32
So I got to back up here because I feel like we skipped over
8:36
something. You went from being a
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receptionist to an account Rep, and in your words, kind of a
8:41
lowly account Rep, right? You were sort of the doormat.
8:43
Not a not a lowly kind of I I was account management.
8:46
It was not an account man, I was account management.
8:48
So that means I, I work with a client and I try to take the
8:51
clients, everything about the client's brand and try to
8:57
crystallize it within a creative brief and then work with the
9:00
creatives to try to translate that into whether that's
9:04
broadcast TV commercials, print, you know, POP, you know,
9:09
guerrilla marketing and, and sometimes the creative creatives
9:13
overreach and they get really passionate about it and
9:16
sometimes they take a really long time and we bought ad spots
9:20
and so far like that. And so it's a lot of managing a
9:24
lot of balls in there. And to do that, you know, you're
9:28
not, you know, you're not the one doing the creative.
9:30
So you're not getting the pat on the back and you're trying to
9:33
make the client happy when they're very, when sometimes
9:36
they get frustrated with the process and so forth like that.
9:38
They're like, this is not what one our logo has to be bigger.
9:42
You know, how how is it gonna roll out?
9:44
And so you're trying to balance all that together.
9:46
And, and within the agency, there's the account team, which
9:50
manages the client exactly that there is, there's traffic which
9:55
actually shuttles the creative around the agency for approvals
9:59
and making sure everything stays on track.
10:01
So account teams work very closely with traffic.
10:03
Traffic tends to be very frenetic personalities because
10:06
they're, they're never at the desk, They're always running
10:08
around. And especially, you know, back
10:10
then when, when things were less digitized.
10:15
And then there, then there's the creative teams, which are, you
10:20
know, account directors and copywriters.
10:22
And of course there's media, which is buying all the media
10:24
out. But how did we get from here to
10:26
to merchant banking? This feels like a big leap.
10:30
Or is it just an opportunity that kind of?
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Fell it was not it was an opportunity that fell into my
10:33
lap and and you know, just like I grabbed the receptionist
10:37
opportunity. I I grabbed this opportunity and
10:40
so from America after we sold Americash, you know, it took us
10:44
32 months to build up a national network and we sold to American
10:48
Express and it was a very good outcome.
10:52
I had the start up bug in me and I created my own start up then,
10:57
which was, you know, this was the Internet.
10:59
One point OI created actually a a arrogator of arts and
11:04
humanities and Parks and Recreation activities called
11:08
Destination Blvd. And then I ended up I ended up
11:11
incubating that within another start up that was more well
11:14
funded called screen media that was backed by another ad guy
11:17
called Jay Chiat, who was a legend Chiat day in the in the
11:22
world and a mentor of mine. And then I ended up joining the
11:27
executive team of a company that Jay founded called Interactive
11:31
called then Softcom, which later became Interactive Video
11:34
Technologies. And similar to what we did in
11:36
the ATM business and bringing them outside bank branches, we
11:39
were taking video and bringing it to the Internet.
11:42
And we weren't the first ones to do that.
11:44
And we worked with HBO on a new hit show that they thought they
11:47
had called The Sopranos and creating telewebbing
11:51
applications. We worked with Showtime.
11:52
We worked with E online for the Academy Awards, Home Shopping
11:55
Network with Joe Montana Hocking footballs.
11:58
And we became, you know, this platform for publishing video
12:03
for broadcasters online and grew that and, you know, to a
12:10
sizeable organization and had funding from Intel, Sun
12:15
Microsystems, Allen Company to the private equity, you know, it
12:20
was the very much so a a company of the Internet bubble.
12:27
We had sales, but our funding was definitely ahead of of what
12:35
of what we were projecting. And you know 2 vignettes from
12:39
those days is like I remember going to one of our investors
12:45
and I had a whole roll up strategy for acquiring all the
12:49
encoding shops which were taking analog content and digitizing it
12:55
to MPEG. And I was like, this could be a
12:58
great way for us to front load, you know, all the content out
13:02
there and we could like do a roll up strategy.
13:05
And so, you know, relying on my, on my M and a merchant banking
13:09
experience and sort of like that.
13:10
And I'm like, this is great, this is great.
13:11
We could raise then, you know, $200 million, which was a big
13:15
number in, in 2000. And, and I they're like, what do
13:21
you need? Well, they, they're like, what
13:23
do you need? I'm like, wow, it's going to
13:25
take me one time to, you know, do a full diligence here, come
13:29
up with a whole spreadsheet, come up with a whole platform,
13:31
everything like that. No, no, no, no.
13:32
We could raise 200 million just on a PowerPoint and and you knew
13:36
something was broken there. And the other, you know, story
13:40
there is. I used to say that the happiest
13:42
and saddest day of the Internet back then was when the company
13:47
moved into their new office space.
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And so we went from like, you know, in like a rooting
13:52
building, which is like, you know, where we had on 55 wall,
13:57
we had like 100 people like stacked into 4 rooms.
14:02
You couldn't even move chairs. You know, when you went out to
14:04
the bathroom, you hit somebody this way, you hit somebody that
14:07
way. And then we moved into 30,000
14:09
square feet where like the engineers are riding bicycles
14:13
and a skateboard to run. And and then I brought in Bear
14:16
Stearns, you know, back then Bear Stearns, it's no longer
14:20
around, but as our bankers and I was really close for them and I
14:26
live in New York. So you didn't hear the sounds
14:28
outside and that they were like, what's going on here?
14:34
Like what happened to your office before?
14:37
What do you do with all this money?
14:39
And this is not good optics. I was like, well, I'm not
14:43
charged with, like, let me say the real estate, I'm charged
14:46
with like, you know, the, you know, the, the marketing and,
14:51
and, and the financing and, and so like, you know, it, it was
14:55
like, you know, one of those, those times, you know, like, you
14:58
know, where the, you know, people felt like the need to,
15:02
you know, go out and, and like wear the gold Rolex to, to
15:07
everything they're going and just creating bad optics, you
15:09
know, for their shareholders and for the, for the industries.
15:12
And so the bubble burst and from there, I'm giving you a long
15:17
overview here. But I went into a family office.
15:23
I went into my own management consultancy, which fell into a
15:26
family office. I was partnered with the Hermes
15:27
family and I turned around and I.
15:29
Think we see a pattern here? Like Oliver, Mitchell likes to
15:31
swing big. Yeah.
15:33
We're not talking about little side projects here.
15:36
It's like you go, you go all in. And so then what happened with
15:39
the family office? So I went to the family office
15:41
and, and they were partnered with the Hermes family, the
15:44
French atelier. And we had both, you know,
15:48
software holdings as well as real estate holdings.
15:51
And I managed a very pretty big like $500 million portfolio
15:55
there. And it went from another bubble
15:58
where they required a building on, you know, on 5th Ave. and
16:01
put down 5% equity on the deal on a $300 million note.
16:05
And of course, the backer then was Lehman Brothers.
16:07
And so and so from there, I really started to iterate.
16:12
I was at a young family and I created my own, another startup
16:15
called Robot Galaxy, which was like build-a-bear for boys where
16:19
kids get to build their own robots.
16:21
We had eight characters and from there he played 1000 different
16:24
variations. We had a complicated story.
16:26
So there's a whole narrative and kids came in and they chose
16:29
their core and their flexors and their extenders, which are the
16:32
parts and they put in a fuel cell.
16:34
So the kids, the robot would say their name and nickname and then
16:37
from the comic book, they would birth the robot by launching
16:40
into the 7th ring of Saturn. And we had it in it.
16:42
We had stores where there was a 8 foot, you know, ring of Saturn
16:47
and you know, like it would light up and everyone in the
16:50
store would countdown, you know, 321 little Billy launching
16:53
sounds like buzz, buzz to to the 7th ring of Saturn and and the
16:58
kid would wet his pants, you know, when he saw his robot come
17:00
to life. And it was, it was an amazing
17:02
thing. And we had a really good run
17:04
and, and we had some good backing and yeah, and we, we had
17:09
stores here on the East Coast and then we'd have all.
17:11
That happened to that company. Toys for us.
17:14
Well, you're gonna ask like lessons learned, you know, the
17:17
company and we can return to it. I ended up having to the
17:21
company, you know, when it's the headwinds of 2008 financial
17:24
crisis and a $40 robot without a movie became very hard to
17:29
sustain. And and you know, we had our own
17:32
stores, we had we had chip and shops in Toys-R-Us and here in
17:36
Times Square and opposite, you know, Darth Vader.
17:40
So if you got $40 and, you know, it's Christmas, what are you
17:43
going to spend on a robot that no one knows or Darth Vader was,
17:47
you know, a whole, you know, library?
17:50
But just to get those partnerships with the Toys-R-Us
17:54
like that has to be a process in and of itself.
17:56
Like they must have seen something there that.
17:58
They saw oh, absolutely, absolutely.
18:00
And we had, you know, some very good discussions, you know, near
18:06
the end regarding acquisitions and so forth like that.
18:09
Yeah, it is. I mean, we, we were, we had a
18:12
really good brand. You know, we had a great media
18:16
coverage. We're on the Today show.
18:18
We are Rachael Ray, you know, 7 minutes on Rachael Ray turns
18:22
into $50,000 instantly. You know, you know, we're
18:26
rollers weren't the Today show. I was on the big idea with Donny
18:30
Deutsch. You know, our, our, our stores
18:33
looks like a fuselage and they change colors.
18:35
And it was beautifully designed by the late Richie Altoona, who
18:39
was all that interactive retail, really an amazing person and and
18:44
and brain there. And our characters were really
18:47
great. And we had a robust comic story
18:49
that was published by IDW, republished Transformers.
18:51
And we were shopping around. We just did it back.
18:54
As for it, we were shopping, you know, we should have started
18:56
with the movie and. Before I was going to ask if you
18:58
had it to do over again, would you have started with the movie
19:01
or would you have tried to partner with an existing brand
19:05
and say, let's layer this idea on top of, you know, the
19:09
existing IP for a, you know, a Darth Vader or something else?
19:13
It's very funny. So, so my, I would have, so the
19:17
first gut answer is, yeah, I would have started with the
19:20
media and we had opportunities within the media.
19:24
And I don't want to say names in such a public forum, but we, we
19:29
actually near the end had an opportunity with a big media
19:33
company to create a whole children's sort of series and,
19:39
and everything like that. And then that media company got
19:42
acquired. And so they acquired and, you
19:44
know, go forward with the with the content.
19:48
We also had an opportunity from a large media company that owns
19:51
lots of characters and they were trying to attract more boys to
19:57
their properties. And we were a great brand.
19:59
And we were a very big brand in the sense that we were a toy
20:06
company. We were.
20:09
We had we had interactive. So the Phase 2 of what we did is
20:14
that our fuel cell had a USB that you plugged into the
20:18
computer and there was a multiplayer virtual world.
20:21
And so as kids played games, they got new downloads to a
20:24
robot, new eye colors, new phrase from the comic book and
20:26
they their status raised from cadet to commander.
20:29
So we had this interactive component and so we had a media
20:32
component, we had an interactive component.
20:34
We were, we had a hard goods component.
20:36
And then we were next to the big Ferris wheel that that's no
20:39
longer there in Times Square Toys-R-Us.
20:41
So the media property had a theme park.
20:44
You know, we did, we also touch on that.
20:46
And so we became too horizontal where too many parties had to
20:50
approve our acquisition there and it and it, and it became a
20:54
little bit of a thief to them. But, but their whole thing was
20:59
they actually had their own characters and they were
21:01
thinking about like build your own character from our library.
21:06
And so that was actually an interesting thing.
21:07
I, I think, you know, a lot of lessons learned there.
21:11
And I guess we're jumping to the last question, you know, here,
21:15
but is, you know, 1 is it's one is, you know, the in the
21:22
consumer space, the power of marketing, you know, beyond like
21:26
such a great idea is so critical.
21:28
And you know, we, we thought we can launch it initially with
21:32
retail, you know, massive assets passing your store with great
21:36
location, great appealing retail.
21:39
And we did and we had a great, I mean, when we opened up, you
21:43
know, we did about $500 a square foot in Toys-R-Us Times Square
21:48
in a smaller location, we did about 1500 a square foot.
21:51
Birthday parties became a destination business for us.
21:54
But it really like when it when times became tough, it was not
21:58
sustainable because people, you know, had to decide whether
22:02
they're going to spend their money on, you know, food,
22:05
heating oil, $40 at Walmart, you know, could be a month's of
22:08
groceries, you know, for some people.
22:10
And so that so without that marketing, you know, that air
22:15
cover, so that that's really critical.
22:19
I also think, you know, plastics, you know, hard goods
22:22
is really tough, you know, and retail is really tough because
22:24
you need so much burns of inventory there and, and, and
22:29
with tooling and plastics, it's very tough.
22:32
You know, we did some creative things come up with new colors,
22:35
new patterns for the robots, but it becomes very tough.
22:38
And so you got to really when, when looking at this now for
22:41
startups that I advise, you know, you got to look at the
22:43
whole cycle of the business and you got to see, you know, where
22:46
are the areas of optimization. So you know to your question,
22:50
could you do a build up and using the same core for
22:52
everybody and so forth like that to bring down your costs,
22:55
increase your margins? So as somebody who had had, you
22:59
know, a lot of success leading up to this, now you you have
23:03
this great idea and you've got some momentum and then you just
23:05
hit a brick wall, you know, the economic downturn and the whole
23:08
thing starts to, you know, just fall apart around.
23:11
You have to imagine that is, I mean, it's one thing to sit here
23:15
and say like, yeah, that was hard, but sort of behind the
23:18
scenes, like gut wrenchingly hard, right?
23:21
There's a lot of money in it. There's a lot of people who were
23:23
counting on this and it was a great idea that was working.
23:27
And now all the sudden it's like, now what do I do?
23:30
What happens? Yeah.
23:31
And I was the one of the bigger investors in there.
23:33
But I think more importantly, like I was in charge of 200
23:36
families, you know, and I always say this as an investor, you
23:41
know, like so many BCS, you know, come from Goldman, come
23:46
from Deloitte, but don't have payroll experience and don't lay
23:51
awake thinking about all those people that rely on you to feed
23:54
their families. So, yeah, I mean, you know, the
23:57
people that invest in me, their lives are not going to be
24:00
substantially changed. You know, I'm saying they're
24:02
accredited investors, but those people that lost their job,
24:06
they're going to it's, it's a big deal, you know, especially
24:09
senior people, you know, And so, so that, that's what kept me
24:13
awake at night. But I, you know, you pivot, you
24:18
persevere, you know, it's, it's fourth quarter time.
24:21
And, you know, we were talking about basketball before and it,
24:23
it, it's really, you know, I didn't, you know, get depressive
24:28
about it. I, I said, OK, this is, you
24:32
know, this is, we didn't plan for this.
24:34
Let's pause all the leases that we were going to sign.
24:38
You know, we're going to and let's, you know, let's slow down
24:42
the inventory. Let's think about how we can,
24:45
you know, create newness without investing in new tooling because
24:49
tooling is really expensive. You know, let's now go through
24:53
the M and a route. And, and we did, you know, with
24:57
that media company, which was the first opportunity, they
24:59
approached us through relationships, you know, at the
25:06
same time we're shopping a movie, you know, we went to
25:09
every studio, you know, we, we, we started to network there, you
25:13
know, outside, you know, of our media network within, within,
25:17
you know, retail and the virtual virtual gaming space.
25:21
You know, we, we went, we'd go to, you know, every week we'd go
25:24
and to LA and the valley there and we'd go from studio to
25:30
studio. We get networked into this
25:32
producer and that producer and we'd get some really good
25:34
traction And we, we'd pitch a movie, we'd get a showrunner.
25:38
And so when the M&A opportunity with the media big media company
25:42
came by the, you know, they made me sign an, an NDA that like put
25:47
my children up for border if I broke it.
25:49
And so like we had to pause everything.
25:52
And, and so one thing, you know, being now on the investor side
25:56
is like big companies can be very disruptive to small
25:59
companies. And so like everything became
26:01
paused. Like every deal was like, is
26:03
this good for this company, this big media company that that's
26:06
looking to acquire us or is this bad?
26:08
And then we're not interested in investing.
26:10
They they like, we're not good investors.
26:12
We just acquire and like, you know, is this, is this good?
26:17
You know, you know, do we need to like re, you know, negotiate
26:21
our writers? Do we need renegotiate the IP?
26:25
Do we need to, you know, and so like so much goes on, so much
26:28
brainpower goes into that. And I would say, you know, we
26:31
didn't have, we had somebody who got us into, you know, who had a
26:35
relationship with the CFO, but we didn't hire an outside
26:38
advisor. And so I think, you know, it
26:40
would have been better if we had an outside advisor.
26:42
And my a big lesson learned there is, you know the value of
26:45
a banker like that to be that third party who can have
26:48
discussions that you can't have with that acquiring entity where
26:52
there be awkwardness. You know what I'm saying?
26:55
Kind of remove sort of the emotional aspect of it because
26:58
they're. Not the emotional, but just
26:59
like, you know, like just there's like awkward things
27:02
where where they, you know, it's more comfortable for them to
27:05
speak in 3rd party about, about how the acquisition would work
27:08
and so forth like that. And this went on for five
27:10
months. And yeah.
27:11
And and so I always advise people today to get a banker
27:15
involved, you know, spend the money.
27:17
It's a big number, but spend the money and something like that.
27:20
And then, you know, after that, that fell through.
27:23
That was devastating. You know, Anthony, that was
27:25
like, we like, you know, had our whole mindset on that.
27:30
And they ended up acquiring a bigger company that had more
27:33
media properties to address, you know, what they were looking
27:36
for. And we're like, OK, let's go
27:38
back to the showrunners. Let's go back.
27:40
Let's let's sell this into ATV Studio.
27:44
You know, let's go back, you know, sell it in New York, sell
27:47
it to the exacts there. Now let's go put to Hollywood,
27:49
sell it into the producers there.
27:51
Now let's go here. And we went back and forth with
27:54
it, with it, with this big media property about merchandising
27:57
rights, about all this stuff, you know, about the new show.
28:00
This is exactly what they want, the showrunner and everything
28:03
like that. And we sold it in and then, you
28:05
know, they, they got acquired and, and their acquires, like
28:10
we're pausing all new production.
28:11
And so we're like, oh shit, now what do we do?
28:13
So they're like, OK, private equity, let's go to private
28:16
equity. And we sold into private equity
28:18
somebody doing a roll up within the toy space.
28:21
But then I was just like, you know what, this is a really bad
28:25
deal because while I might do, OK, the people that came in
28:29
early, they're going to be, they're, they're going to be
28:32
like squashed. And because the company is still
28:35
continuing in the private equity, they can't even take
28:37
down the tax write off. It's actually a really bad deal.
28:41
So I ended up, you know, rather than doing like sort of a
28:44
dignity sale, I end up just shuttering the business and, and
28:47
having to, and having to tell those 200 families, you know,
28:50
like we're closing up and everything like that.
28:53
So wait, walk me through that a little bit more.
28:54
I want to understand this sort of.
28:55
Grand You don't want to hear about the investing.
28:59
What I what I really want to get to is FF Venture Capital and the
29:03
work in robotics that you're doing with some of your port
29:05
codes. But I just want to understand
29:07
the the decision making process to shutting it down versus
29:10
getting something for it. Well, we were just not ordering
29:13
new inventory and our inventory became out of whack.
29:16
And the right flexor, which is an arm would be the motorized
29:19
one, the left one would be the one more mechanical 1.
29:23
And so the right ones sold faster than the left ones.
29:26
And like our products, like it was getting, it was getting kind
29:29
of ugly and just like it didn't reflect well on the brand.
29:32
And you know, we were like, you know, you know, we, we, we sold
29:39
into like department stores, you know, for, for holiday, you
29:43
know, our key chains, we had a great key chain gift pack and,
29:46
and, and our, and our big robots would sell and tube.
29:52
We were in all the catalogues and, but it just became very
29:56
tough. And the brand it was, it was
30:01
sort of on life support. And you know, at a certain point
30:08
the retail stores just were not, you know, the payroll was just
30:11
killing us because in a mall store, you have to be open when
30:14
the malls are open. And Monday through like
30:18
Thursday, it's dead. It's just mall walkers, you
30:21
know, So like it's just a killer.
30:24
And so, you know, and it wasn't just thoughts like at that time
30:28
period, like people were just dying.
30:29
And so it we did the right thing was to just shutter the cup.
30:34
Yeah, we took it as far as we could.
30:37
We went through three different acquisition opportunities.
30:40
You know, we, we got really close to the target.
30:42
But at a certain point you got a fishing cup, bait and just like,
30:46
you know, you're throwing, you know, good money after bad year.
30:49
And it's time for everyone to move on.
30:51
OK, so Speaking of moving on, let's move on.
30:53
So, so, so, so, so I did. I'll tell you the story of like
30:57
how I became, you know, getting into robotics.
31:00
You know, it's a good segue because around that time, people
31:04
were so a year before that, you know, blogging became really hot
31:09
and people were like, you know, you got to improve your, your,
31:11
your profile online. Oliver and I was always known as
31:15
the robot guy in New York. Like people be like, hey,
31:18
there's Oliver. He's the robot guy.
31:19
He got robot Galaxy, he's robot guy, come here, robot guy.
31:22
And like he in the investment community and everything like
31:25
that. And so I was a robot guy, then
31:27
this guy toy. Robots at the moment.
31:30
Toy robots, but I was nevertheless, I was the robot
31:33
guy, right? And, and there's a lot of
31:37
similarities between manufacturing toys and actually
31:39
big robots, you know, a lot of the microprocessors that they're
31:42
in toys or like we're in big electronics two years earlier
31:47
and something like that. But so somebody who was sort of
31:54
a friend of the companies, like you got to like improve your,
31:57
your profile, you know, and out there it'll, it'll help, you
32:00
know, with the M and a stuff and everything like that.
32:02
We're going to create a blog for you.
32:04
OK, I'm like, that's cool, that's cool.
32:06
OK, we created a blog. We're calling it robot Rabbi,
32:08
knowing that I'm Jewish and everything like that.
32:10
I'm like, OK, but I'm not really a rabbi, but it's cool.
32:15
Robot rabbi. Don't you love it?
32:16
And, and they had, and the logo was like, almost like if you
32:20
could look at robotrabbi.com, it's small now, but it's, it's
32:24
like, these are ours. It looks like a Hasidic Jew.
32:26
And, and, and I was like, OK, So what am I gonna do with a
32:29
moniker Robot Rabbi? I can't really be like sailing
32:32
flexors today. That's like, kind of boring.
32:35
And then I was just like, can't really write about myself.
32:38
I don't really have, you know, that much material.
32:40
Why don't I look at the real robot?
32:43
You know, Rabbi is a teacher ultimately, you know, you know,
32:47
the, and so I'll be like, OK, I'll teach about real robots.
32:52
And so I started to like, look at the robots and, and I started
32:56
to say, like, what is the societal implication now?
32:58
It's sort of like morphed into like, what's the business going
33:01
on here? You know, like, and, and somehow
33:03
I struck a nerve with the industry.
33:05
I'd be like, what's the value proposition here?
33:07
How is it going to get high utility liability and payback
33:10
for customers? And so I met, you know, a lot of
33:12
great people and people would come to me and like, you know,
33:16
and they'd be like, can you speak about this?
33:17
And I'd be like, yeah, sure, I'll speak about that.
33:19
And then the the speaking engagement screw and I would
33:20
speak at CES in South by about, you know, the robotics business.
33:24
And this was 2000, started in 2011.
33:27
And so, and then Kiva got bought in 2012.
33:30
So it's starting to get a little bit of a, you know, of interest
33:33
there. And then I started to meet these
33:34
really great founders. And then so, you know, and, and
33:37
I still like was an investor and you mentioned Angel investing.
33:43
I was a member of New York Angels and then I organized my
33:45
own investment vehicle called the Tommy Ventures.
33:48
It was not really marketing solutions.
33:49
It was investing in, in, in, in startups.
33:53
And so I built up a portfolio. I had a a bunch of investments
33:57
and over a period of six years I had eight of them that exited,
34:04
you know, three I did really well.
34:08
Two went public, one of them being exobionics, which is the
34:12
exoskeleton for paraplegics. Another one in Israeli Med tech
34:16
device called Nova Cure which went public and one time was
34:21
worth about 16 billion and then it it trades today market caps
34:27
around between 2 to 3 billion. And the other one, which was an
34:31
AI company in AD tech called Triple Lift, which is not not
34:35
worth 20 billion, it's worth it got sold for 1.4 billion.
34:39
And so I built up a really great portfolio of companies and I
34:42
looked at the robotics base and I became really well known for,
34:46
for these early investments. And I became known for my
34:48
articles and then I would publish every week.
34:50
Now it's more like once a month and all those, you know, you
34:55
know, got into, you know, some of those more audacious articles
34:59
that I've published are in the book and, and I'll talk about
35:02
the book later, but it led to, to the book, the, the blog
35:05
posting. And so after that, you know,
35:09
track record, 2 friends approached me, John Frankel and
35:13
Alex Katz and like, Hey, listen, do you, you know, would you like
35:16
to join us and really help U.S. Open up deep tech?
35:18
And so, you know, there are generalists New York fund, they
35:23
were found in 2008, you know, back when the mark went down,
35:26
they, they, they were optimistic about investing in and they
35:29
leaned into it. You know, they're one of the
35:31
first people rebuilding the tech ecosystem, you know, after 2008.
35:36
And I was like, yeah, this is amazing.
35:38
And so, you know, we made investments like plus one
35:40
robotics, you know, the I'm wearing right now, you know,
35:44
that's in the logistics space, e-commerce logistics.
35:49
We made investment in borough, which is in agriculture towing,
35:53
yeah, things around around orchards and vineyards, you
35:57
know, and really turning them into Amazon fulfillment centers,
36:00
you know, with autonomous vehicles.
36:03
Also civil robotics where I sit on the board of which takes, you
36:07
know, construction tech and making it autonomous for solar
36:10
farms. So can can we go?
36:12
Can we go into a little bit more detail on one or more of these
36:15
companies because and you're sort of giving a a high level
36:18
and people wait, wait, wait. I want I want to hear more about
36:20
that. Let pick pick one yourself that
36:24
I don't know the autonomous warehouse set up, which company
36:28
was. That well, that's plus one.
36:29
Why don't you speak about SIB Robotics?
36:31
Because I think that's a really great one because they pivoted
36:33
and everything like that. So I've been investing in Israel
36:36
for quite some time. And why is that gonna?
36:39
Just because of the Jewish heritage or there's something
36:41
else at play? Well, it's both.
36:45
It's both one of the strong affinity.
36:48
My parents were very involved in the early days of the state.
36:51
Just found a letter from Moshe Diane, who was the former
36:53
defense minister during the Six day war to my father and so
36:57
forth like that. And Teddy Cog, the former mayor
36:59
of Jerusalem. And, and so my parents were very
37:02
involved in the early days there.
37:03
And but Israel, I would say, has one of the best hack ecosystems
37:07
in the world for foreign countries listing on the on the
37:14
NASDAQ. It is, you know, just it's like
37:20
#2 it has over 250 Israeli publicly traded companies on the
37:25
NASDAQ. Why?
37:26
Why Israel is this small country?
37:28
Like why? Why does it have such a big
37:29
impact in tech? So, so there's a few reasons for
37:36
it. One is Israel is very much so an
37:38
entrepreneurial society. It has an immigrant society
37:41
with, you know, since the founding of the state.
37:43
You know, you had Holocaust survivors that that came, you
37:46
had the Sabras who were living there, you know, continuously
37:51
for for thousands of years. And you had people coming in
37:55
front, you know, in the early days of the city, 800,000
37:58
people, the refugees that came in through the Arab countries
38:01
when they were kicked out. And so you have this immigrant
38:03
society. When the Russian, after the Iron
38:08
Curtain fell, all these Russian Jews, you know, over 2 million
38:12
of them came to Israel, you know, and you still have that
38:14
today from France, from the US. And so immigrants are, they are
38:19
naturally entrepreneurial. They leave their they're born
38:22
networks and they're recreating themselves.
38:24
You know, that's number one. Number 2 is everyone is
38:28
conscripted into the army and the the army takes very young
38:34
people. And actually the Israeli army
38:38
works almost opposite than the US Army, which has a huge
38:41
hierarchy. The Israeli army, everything is
38:44
at the is, is at the sort of the foot soldiers level.
38:50
And so you'll have an 18 year old in charge of like 200
38:52
people. And, and so you know that you do
38:57
have ranks, but I mean, they, there's so much there and they
39:02
have a lot of responsibility. And this is before they're going
39:05
to college. And what happens in Israel is
39:08
that in the US, you know, kids going to high school, they're
39:11
thinking about college and they all want to go to good College
39:13
in Israel. Kids all want to go to the great
39:16
units because and, and certain units produce really great
39:20
startups. And so especially the cyber and
39:25
the intelligence units. The largest unit in the army is
39:27
unit 8200, which is the intelligence unit.
39:30
And so Israel's a small country with lots of enemies around it
39:34
and it has to operate smarter than just big weapons.
39:37
And so and so the already in high school teams are forming
39:44
because the Army is giving aptitude tests of who has a
39:48
propensity for this high level of physics, mathematics, of
39:54
coding. And so people are grouped, you
39:56
know, starting like say sophomore year of high school.
39:59
And by the time they graduate, they usually go to what's called
40:02
Machina, which is like a gap year program, which is pre your
40:06
Army. So whatever Army unit you're
40:08
going to go into, there's a machina there that's preparing
40:10
you before you go into that unit and sort of.
40:13
They like ROTC in a sense, right?
40:15
And so I actually have a son who wants to do like Navy ROTC.
40:19
And so like, you know, he's going to college and doing ROTC
40:22
on his free time. And so this is like they're
40:24
doing that not just half day, they're doing that all day long.
40:28
And so these teams are forming their high school posts, posts
40:32
and then that they're now they're in the Army, high
40:34
stakes, high stress and, and, and huge bonds are forming.
40:39
And so out of a 200 Shimona Tayam Tapio, which is a, a
40:44
special sort of physics unit that crosses over different
40:50
divisions, you have the Shin Bet, which is like the FBI, but
40:55
for, for domestic terrorism in Israel.
40:58
Then you have the Mossad, which is international, you, you have
41:02
started my call and, and these high units produce these
41:05
amazing, you know, teams. And so when some, when people
41:09
are done, you know, with their service, after, you know,
41:14
depending if they're going to be an officer 3 five years, they're
41:16
like, OK, what are we going to do now?
41:18
Well, you know, I love you guys. Let's start a startup and let's
41:22
go back. To the kinship and and there's a
41:24
lot of. Knowledge.
41:26
And not knowledge cause. And they know how to get.
41:29
An advanced level from a young age.
41:31
Right and they've right and they're not scared of failure,
41:34
right, That immigrant flood, they're not scared of failure.
41:37
You know, in the US, there's so much built up.
41:39
You're going to Harvard, you gotta do this.
41:40
You can't fail in in Israel. OK, I failed.
41:44
OK, I'll do another start up, you know, and so like they'll,
41:48
you know, so, so they go into it and, and, and, and they, the
41:53
people that they actually, you know, raise capital from,
41:58
they're all alumni from the unit.
41:59
They're working on funds, they're doing this.
42:01
And so, and this is something that I'm exploring right now is
42:05
how to leverage that in a, in a, in a funds and so forth like
42:09
that. If to, to get to those deals.
42:11
I'll give you an example. The company, the defense tech
42:14
space Hella founded by a loan drawer who who comes from like
42:21
the shin bed and Hamutao who comes who ran Palantir in Israel
42:26
and and also came to the shin bed.
42:28
You know, they founded a defense tech software company called
42:31
Kella. Within six months, they raised
42:34
$100 million from Sequoia Lux and in Q Tel in Q Tel is the, is
42:41
the, is the fund of the, of the intelligence agencies in the US.
42:46
And so you know, all that knowledge base, all those teams,
42:50
the ability to recruit from all the, you know, the, the, those
42:52
units, you know, great, great startups.
42:56
And so I've always had good relationships in Israel.
42:58
And so I was approached by the Technion, which is like Israel's
43:02
MIT about a company called SIV, then SIV drone.
43:09
They were, bless you. They, they were out of the, the
43:13
Dr. accelerator, which is an accelerator up in Haifa.
43:18
And they were taking drones to do surveying for construction.
43:23
They were two civil engineers that worked in construction, new
43:26
construction and I really like them.
43:29
I thought what they were doing really hand me and I was like,
43:31
listen, you know next time in New York let's get together and
43:34
we got together and I was like there's an accelerator just 4
43:39
hours, you know, north of here called Genius New York.
43:41
That and it's the largest accelerator for uncruised
43:44
systems in the US. You should really go there and
43:47
it'll be a launchpad for you to enter the US market.
43:50
And if you're, you know, do really well there, you can get
43:54
between a half a million and $1,000,000.
43:57
And they won the, the prize there.
43:59
And I introduced it to FF in 2019.
44:04
We invested then sort of in a pre seed rounds and then and
44:09
then we and then we led the C round and and brought in other
44:12
investors and you know, we just they actually they pivoted every
44:20
day I go through. I interviewed Tommy Shorten in
44:22
my book, you know, when they were doing their customer
44:25
discovery, I was like, yeah, I love drones, I love drones.
44:29
This is a great idea. I love drones.
44:30
And then they went out to the market and like and they're
44:33
like, okay, we got the drone and they had this beautiful drone.
44:35
It was like it must be like 7 feet wingspan, you know, at
44:39
quadcopters and it actually did autonomous staking and and
44:42
everything like that, you know, and it connected to the cloud.
44:45
So if your plans changed the drones flight path, which it was
44:49
amazing, then they went to the customers like, OK, we got the
44:53
drone, we got the drone. They're like, yeah, I I said I
44:56
love drones. I never said I was going to buy
44:57
a drone. And and and so they're like,
45:01
what we really need is a terrestrial robot that can go
45:05
and it doesn't have to stake. We can have just one guy.
45:08
You know, we got to get all these teams together.
45:10
You need 16 guys. It takes three months for it to
45:13
book them. You know, it really holds up our
45:15
development, especially in solar.
45:18
You know, if you can do this and create a robot that can mark all
45:21
the places and do you know that can be 10 times faster, half the
45:25
cost, you know, more accurate, we'll buy that.
45:30
And they're like, OK, OK, so they went back, they were in
45:33
Israel and they created that robot.
45:35
They're like, OK, we got the robot and now they're killing
45:37
it. They're based in SF now.
45:40
You know, their sales were phenomenal.
45:42
They just had the best quarter. They're expanding
45:44
internationally in Australia, in the UAE, in the in, in Saudi
45:49
Arabia. What does this?
45:50
Robot look like. Like from a physical.
45:53
Perspective. Does it look like a human or is
45:55
it like? No, it looks like a box with
45:57
with four wheels. Sometimes those wheels are
45:59
actually not round. They're like lunar wheels
46:01
depending on the surface you know that's going.
46:04
So the the robot uses just RP kg PS: to figure out all the
46:09
coordinates. It's usually the first thing you
46:12
know before a solar farm is is built.
46:15
And so it doesn't need to have vision on it.
46:18
So it's just that it's about a 5 foot box with wheels and as a.
46:25
Arcade GPS. It's, you know, you have those
46:29
guys with the tripods and they're marking everything and
46:32
everything like that, you know, so, so it's doing it digitally
46:36
and so it puts a laser or does spray spray paint depending on
46:40
what what the customer wants. And then there's a guy following
46:43
just so rather than, you know, 16 guys, you got one guy with a
46:46
hammer and, and, and a flag and, and he just following along it
46:50
and it goes all day long. And so, you know, it can do, you
46:54
know, hundreds of thousands of points within weeks that would
46:57
normally take months. And it's half the cost and 10
47:01
times faster and more accurate because.
47:04
So is the plan with this company to introduce more use cases for
47:08
the robot or this is a big enough use case on its own, it's
47:11
just get it to more? People doing what it says so so
47:14
about 70% of the business is solar, but you know, there's
47:17
data centers that they can do everything in horizontal
47:21
construction. So like like loads and so forth
47:24
like that. They also have a so sieve dots
47:27
and main product. They have sieve dot mini for
47:29
striking roads. But now they, they're going to
47:31
come out with sieve move, which is going to be an autonomous
47:35
material mover. And that will have vision that
47:39
will be an active construction site with people around it and
47:43
it can autonomously move, you know, the, the piles and this
47:47
and the and the like. How big will this be?
47:50
What will the pay the size of the payload?
47:53
It can be pretty big. Think of it like a skid steer,
47:55
an autonomous skid steer. Yeah.
47:57
So you know, like, like, think of it like, you know, skid
48:00
steers like a like a forklift in, in a warehouse.
48:03
And, and so, yeah, and it's moving very heavy.
48:06
The piles are very heavy, the the solar cells very heavy.
48:09
But it's really, you know, moving things around the
48:12
construction side. And, you know, this isn't, you
48:15
know, going back to that customer discovery, This is
48:18
something their customers ask them to build.
48:20
It's not something that they're just brainstorming and A and a
48:23
customer says like if you build, if you build this for every sib
48:26
dot we buy, we're going to buy 6 to 8 of these.
48:29
And so, you know, there's real high demand from their customers
48:32
for this. And so that's what they're on
48:34
track with. They just closed their Series A,
48:36
you know, they, they brought in some great investors and the
48:42
investor that I brought in the previous investment rounds with
48:46
FF who Co LED with us, Ali Corp LED this round.
48:50
And so I'm very happy that we're getting, you know, the cap
48:52
table. You know you want to build a
48:54
construct the right cap table that can see a company through
48:57
multiple cycles. So when most people think
48:59
robots, they think like Terminator, they think like a
49:02
humanoid form robot. And what you just described is
49:06
obviously a very different format, very functional and
49:09
useful. Are you involved with any
49:12
start-ups that are sort of making the more, you know, rosy
49:15
from Jetson style kind of human type form of robot?
49:20
Yes, I am. So I mean most so most of the
49:27
robots out there are very that we've invested in at FF are very
49:34
utilitarian right vision systems to help cobots with you know,
49:40
wire harnessing for cars and picking been picking you know on
49:45
on manufacturing or vision systems around cobots for the
49:50
logistics. We have drones that are doing
49:54
deliveries of fast food, you know, but then outside of FSI am
50:03
an advisor to Persona AI and Persona AI is founded by Nick
50:08
Radford, Jerry Pratt and Jeter and, and they, they all can't,
50:16
you know, Nick and Jerry were at NASA and they, they built really
50:25
the, the humanoid robotics lab and they built Robonaut and
50:30
Robonaut 2. They didn't just build Robonaut
50:31
2. They launched Robonaut 2 to the
50:33
ISS and then they built Valkyrie.
50:38
After that, Jeeta and, and Nick founded a company called Houston
50:43
Mechatronics, which later became Nauticus, which was taking
50:47
almost like Transformer, like robots, which is an autonomous,
50:51
you know, robot to go undersea, which is even more complicated
50:55
than space, because in space you don't have to worry about things
50:57
living on your robots and, and, and down in sea undersea that
51:01
had arms that came out and for whether for cables for oil and
51:06
gas, you know, for, for conservation.
51:09
And they built that company from Nick's living room all the way
51:12
to taking it public. And well, last year, Nick was
51:18
sharing with me his idea for a humanoid company.
51:20
And we were talking about, talking about.
51:22
I was like, you know, there's optimists and there's figure out
51:26
there and you know. Elon Musk.
51:31
Tesla, right? And Optimus, I was like, is the
51:33
most well suited for the home, right?
51:35
They already sell consumer cars. They already have a financing
51:38
arm for consumer cars. If you go to a Tesla showroom,
51:41
there's always an optimist, you know, a static optimist there,
51:44
you know, for eye candy and, and I'm like, you know, they
51:50
potentially could launch, you know, a robot in the home.
51:54
The home is most complicated environment.
51:55
Every home is different toys, mess, what have you.
52:00
But they potentially could launch it and, and, and finance
52:03
it in such a way that it costs as much as like a housekeeper or
52:06
a nanny, right? And they could lose money on it,
52:10
you know, just to get that data, just to get it in the home, sort
52:12
of like an Alexa device, right. And then there's like Figure and
52:17
Aptronic, which is going into light manufacturing now Figure
52:20
wants to go into the home. And Jerry was formerly at
52:24
Figure. He was the, the founding CTO
52:27
there. And, you know, and he, and he
52:31
lives in Florida. He has a humanoids lab there,
52:35
really looking at the cutting edge of humanoids there.
52:38
And and so, but no one's really addressing, you know, in, in the
52:44
world of robots, there's dull, dirty and dangerous, right?
52:49
We spoke about dull, you know, bin picking, really tedious dull
52:52
jobs, dirty civil robotics, working in a in the Mojave
52:57
Desert, 120° heat, really like dirty work, right?
53:02
Construction, but dangerous. Like who's doing that?
53:06
And I'm like, guys, you guys are the only ones that's launched a
53:11
robot to space, the most dangerous environment there is.
53:15
And so, and leveraging the hardware that they built,
53:19
they've licensed it from GM and, and NASA, because that was a
53:23
partnership to the Robonaut. And so they actually have the,
53:26
the best hand out there, the most extras hand out there and
53:31
they're going into dangerous jobs.
53:33
And the first customer which was announced is, is Hyundai HD and
53:38
Hyundai Robotics and VASSAL for shipbuilding and shipbuilding
53:45
and so like big giant. Boats.
53:47
Like giant boats, right. And and China leads shipbuilding
53:54
at one period of time. We LED shipbuilding in the Navy
53:57
yards just, you know, across the, the East River, you know,
54:02
we were building 1 to 2 ships a week there.
54:04
You know, in in World War 2, you know, the USS Missouri was built
54:08
in Brooklyn and you know, it was the can do shipyard.
54:13
That was what it was called. Now last year the US built all
54:17
of five ships. Not so great.
54:21
How many did China build? 300.
54:24
Oh my gosh. Yeah, so, but the second most
54:28
builder of ships is Korea. South Korea is a big ally of
54:31
ours. And so, and Hyundai actually,
54:35
besides making cars, make ships, and a really dangerous and hard
54:42
job is welding these steel hulls together.
54:45
A guy has to go with a welder hunched over, and you can't put
54:49
these on a conveyor belt. These are heavy.
54:52
He's hunched over, climbing over each of these halls, bring them
54:56
together and welding them. And this is a great job for a
55:00
humanoid, right? Why can't that guy now have a
55:03
fleet of humanoids at his disposal that he can control?
55:07
You know, how, how many years can someone be hunched over with
55:10
a welder? Like the light where his eyes
55:14
starts to go, the his back starts to hurt.
55:17
It's not like it's it's a dangerous job.
55:19
You know, the toll that it takes on a human being.
55:21
And then if you take that to construction, right, you know,
55:24
you take someone who who in a mall is just doing drilling like
55:27
this up in the ceiling, that's hurting the shoulder that the
55:30
the workers compensation on that is humongous.
55:32
You know, you take a loading dock, you know, the amount of,
55:35
you know, pressure that puts on the lower back.
55:38
You take it. Now you go into mining, right,
55:41
coal mining. How much fumes can someone
55:44
breathe? How many rocks fall on somebody
55:47
before they go to a doctor and they get oxy and they get
55:49
addicted to oxy in West Virginia?
55:51
There's no, there's, you know, the, it's by no chance that
55:58
Purdue, a pharma chose, you know, the, the coal mining
56:02
centers to introduce Oxy to get people addicted to it, you know,
56:06
and so like, these are great jobs for humanoids.
56:10
These are horrible jobs for humans.
56:12
And so are the. Humanoids ready for this kind of
56:15
work? Like is is the technology there?
56:18
Yeah. So two things.
56:20
One is to finish it. So if everyone else is building
56:23
like a Toyota Prius of humanoids, Persona AI is
56:29
building the F-150 humanoids, The tough humanoid.
56:32
Yeah, the tough humanoid. And they're doing it, You know,
56:36
they were just on Fox and friends because Trump's big
56:38
thing is bringing back shipbuilding to America.
56:41
And the and long term, they're, you know, the Trump just in the
56:44
big beautiful build. That's what he calls it.
56:47
You know, they just allocate $34 billion for shipbuilding in
56:51
America or make that possible. You better make a phone call to,
56:55
to Houston to persona, you know, So now, yes, the technology's
57:00
ready for it. The technology's here.
57:03
You know, there's two things that that, that have been
57:05
instrumental. The, you know, first of all,
57:09
they have the technology, they've done it on the space
57:11
station. Now they're bringing it down to
57:12
earth #1 #2 is we have a lot more processors and, and, and,
57:20
and actuators and, and at a smaller scale, you know, that
57:25
that it enable the mechanical aspects to be done more
57:28
efficiently and less expensively.
57:31
And #3 is we, we have all this data and all this and now
57:36
foundational AI models. And so now the learning for a
57:40
humanoid has been shrunk because you could take all the
57:43
simulation data and and now the the robot could actually have
57:48
more knowledge than it'll actually see in real life.
57:51
And I have this today with, with My Portfolio company, Cambrian
57:53
Robotics, which works in smart manufacturing, especially for
57:58
automotive. And one of their big things is,
58:00
is wire harnessing for cables. And wires get kinked.
58:04
Wires don't operate like widgets.
58:07
Wires you know will go awry, but because they've trained it, the
58:12
robot you know using AI. Trains it with like thousands of
58:17
hours of video of like watching human beings do it.
58:20
Watching yes, and, and and just like or watching robots do it.
58:24
What, what, what, what will the robot do when the wire goes
58:27
awry? It's all assimilation.
58:29
It's more the robot. It's it's not, it's the robot
58:33
going it is so of understanding the path planning.
58:37
It's not really. The human doesn't like think
58:39
through the path planning, but the robot has to think through
58:41
the path planning to get that that wire.
58:44
That's not. Trial and error.
58:45
It did this, It didn't work. It did this.
58:46
It didn't work. Oh, it did.
58:47
That and it it, it has so much more.
58:50
So now it sees that the wire's gone awry and it's mission
58:54
driven. It's deterministic.
58:56
It's like, OK, I know what that is.
58:58
And it goes back in, back on the path, puts it, clips it back in
59:02
and plugs it back in. And so, and that's really big.
59:06
And now, now that's if that's possible for a cobot, which is
59:09
this one robotic arm that's really possible with a bipedal
59:13
humanoid robot. So you mentioned before about
59:18
how a persona, one of the advantages they have is having
59:21
the most dexterous, dexterous hands.
59:24
It has that been an impediment up to this point?
59:27
And how close is it now to what a human can do?
59:33
Yeah, so that that that had that dexterity is sort of the final
59:38
frontier of robotics, right. And so that that is really the
59:42
the key, you know, and, and, but Dexterity has to be within the
59:49
knowledge base of these foundational AI models.
59:53
And and and and they're and they're going to be creating
59:55
their own in addition to using what's publicly available.
1:00:04
So your last question is like, how close is it to a human?
1:00:09
Yeah, where are we today in? Terms.
1:00:11
Yeah, I don't, I don't think it should.
1:00:13
I don't think so. I think we're far like so so so
1:00:19
so a humanoid is somewhat of a Swiss Army knife, right.
1:00:25
That you, you know, it's first versus just a a single purpose
1:00:31
robot, right? A humanoid can do many things.
1:00:34
It can. And one of the great things
1:00:35
about a bipedal with humanoid is it can it can walk like a human.
1:00:39
It can go in between things. You don't have to change the
1:00:41
workflow of a factory floor of a mine of a construction site.
1:00:45
It's you know, the world is built for humans.
1:00:48
A humanoid as the gate of a human and can go in between
1:00:52
things just like a human can. A humanoid, you know, can use
1:00:57
human tools. So because it's using a hand and
1:01:01
the grasping and and and so forth like that.
1:01:04
So you don't have to create new end effectors, new drills that
1:01:06
it that that you're going to new appendages.
1:01:08
Within the existing ecosystem. Yeah, exactly.
1:01:11
And so that's the big opportunity.
1:01:15
How we create that library will take time, you know, and it will
1:01:20
start in, you know, with these tasks.
1:01:24
And as these tasks grow, you will have a wider library of
1:01:28
opportunity. Think of it like an autonomous
1:01:30
vehicle. You know, an autonomous vehicle.
1:01:34
It's been going on now for 20 years and getting all this
1:01:37
knowledge, data of, of navigating, you know, the road,
1:01:42
understanding how humans drive and humans, you know, there's a
1:01:45
law. And then like, there's like the
1:01:47
culture. New Yorkers drive very different
1:01:51
and people in LA, you know, people in Bangalore drive very
1:01:55
different than people in New York.
1:01:57
So, so like, you know, how I stop might not be like the
1:02:02
letter of the law, you know, where I go into and so forth.
1:02:06
So a robot has to understand and navigate that and has to
1:02:09
understand what a fire truck is, right?
1:02:10
A big complaint of Waymo was like the the fire, the the
1:02:14
sirens go off. It can't hear a siren doesn't
1:02:16
know what to do and sober like that.
1:02:19
But now you drive, you go into a way MO in San Francisco within a
1:02:23
Geo fenced in area. You're not worried.
1:02:27
You feel very comfortable. You actually feel like this is
1:02:29
better than an Uber. You know, it doesn't smell.
1:02:31
Sometimes my Uber smells. It's it's perfectly the
1:02:35
temperature that I like. I don't have to worry about that
1:02:37
guy being cold and me being hot. I can have my music.
1:02:41
I can you know what I can eat some food back here.
1:02:44
No one knows, you know, like if the food upsets my stomach, no
1:02:49
one knows about that either, you know, so, so so like you know,
1:02:52
so it's just like it's a better experience and it knows those
1:02:56
streets there, it knows how people drive there.
1:02:58
It knows where it needs to go. It creates that knowledge base,
1:03:02
but it has to start within that Geo fenced in area and then it
1:03:05
can expand that territory. Likewise, the humanoids need to
1:03:08
start with these tasks of shipbuilding.
1:03:11
Then if you go to, you know, construction drilling, then it
1:03:14
can go to, you know, to these other tests.
1:03:17
It will not. I think it's far.
1:03:19
That's why the home is sort of like the most complicated.
1:03:23
I have so many more questions I want to ask about robotics,
1:03:26
Oliver, but I want to make sure we leave enough time to talk
1:03:28
about your books, so we're going to do this last before we get to
1:03:32
that question. Though well, my books is about
1:03:34
robotics. Great.
1:03:36
And I'm even more excited to hear.
1:03:38
About it. So if folks want to get in touch
1:03:41
with you or follow your story, what's the best way for them to
1:03:43
do that? You know, really the best way is
1:03:48
Oliver Mitchell on LinkedIn. Send me a message, I'll respond.
1:03:53
Terrific. OK, so new book coming out.
1:03:56
It's about robotics and the title is Tell Us.
1:04:01
A starter field guide in the age of robots and AI.
1:04:05
And why write this? What was the inspiration behind
1:04:07
it? Yeah, so I teach
1:04:09
entrepreneurship. I teach an MBA course called
1:04:11
Entrepreneurship in the Management of Change.
1:04:14
And I'm a big fan of Steve Blank and Eric Reese.
1:04:18
Steve Blank and Eric Reese wrote a startup owner's manual.
1:04:23
It's a great piece. I teach it in in my MBA course.
1:04:29
I also teach lots of case studies, different start-ups out
1:04:32
there, but I found that within the world of of robotics and AI,
1:04:37
it's a different animal. So if you were launching a
1:04:40
software company, you know, by example, you have so many
1:04:44
investors that are interested in that.
1:04:46
But if you're launching a hardware company that will
1:04:48
shrinks really fast. The margins and the hardware are
1:04:51
different. The business models and the
1:04:53
hardware are different. You know, hard tech, you know,
1:04:58
working in the industry, she said can't fail.
1:05:01
You know, when when people are understanding, you know, back in
1:05:06
the early days of Windows when you got a blue screen and you
1:05:08
got to reboot your computer, people are understanding on
1:05:10
that. They've been trained on that.
1:05:12
But if a technology, you know, fails within industry and people
1:05:19
get hurt or it becomes fatal, that's it.
1:05:24
You know, that autonomous vehicle kills somebody and
1:05:28
there's been instances, right? And so people have very little
1:05:32
patience for that, you know, And so it, it's, so I, I felt the
1:05:36
need that for a different type of book for people, you know,
1:05:42
starting with the kernel of their idea, with the concept and
1:05:45
understanding how to, you know, drive their customer discovery
1:05:49
and learning from really the experts and industry leaders in
1:05:53
the space and taking it all the way through M&A, through IPO
1:05:59
and, and all the paths in between.
1:06:02
So, so it really, you know, I called it a field guide because
1:06:09
just like I'm a big backpacker and just like before you go in
1:06:13
to a new area, you'll take out the field guide, understand the
1:06:16
terrain, understand if you have to, you know, forage for food,
1:06:21
what to get, what are the supplies you're going to need,
1:06:23
what's the weather patterns there, you know, and everything
1:06:26
like that. And this is likewise a field
1:06:28
guide for entrepreneurs. And so when is it coming out and
1:06:32
where can people find it? Sure.
1:06:35
It's coming out on June 18th. If anybody here is going to be
1:06:42
in Boston on June 11th, I'm having a book launch party and
1:06:46
we'll have books there at Mass Robotics on June 11th at 5:00
1:06:51
PM. And you can go to the Mass
1:06:52
Robotics website to sign up, or you can see my LinkedIn post.
1:06:58
And there would be Robotics Invest and Robotics Week in
1:07:01
Boston around that time as well. But if you're unable to attend
1:07:05
that, you could buy it on Amazon.
1:07:06
Just type in a startup field guide in the Age of Robots in AI
1:07:10
or Oliver Mitchell. Or you can go to Rutledge Press,
1:07:15
my publishers website as well. And yeah.
1:07:20
And another little shameless plug for you, Oliver, are you
1:07:23
looking for more deal flow or are you kind of locked down on
1:07:27
the port Cos that you're working with currently?
1:07:31
That's, that's a really good question.
1:07:35
So always looking at interesting things.
1:07:38
Currently our fund is fully deployed, but at the same time I
1:07:45
have a unique position with my firm and so I I can do things
1:07:50
outside my firm as well. OK, terrific.
1:07:53
Oliver Mitchell. It's been a fascinating
1:07:54
conversation. Like I said, we could have kept
1:07:56
talking about robotics for a long time, so maybe we'll have
1:07:58
you back at some point. Then you're.
1:08:00
Yeah, I guess. Something else you want to throw
1:08:01
in? There.
1:08:01
Yeah. I wanted to share a vignette on
1:08:03
the book, you know, just tying a bow around everything.
1:08:06
Is that one of the first stories I speak about is Mick Mounts who
1:08:11
built Kiva Systems and and he didn't this was the one.
1:08:15
That's purchased by Amazon moves the.
1:08:17
For $775,000,000 and it's still one of the bigger purchases in
1:08:21
the robotic space and it paid for itself within 18 months.
1:08:26
You know, they were shipping 2 billion packages by by utilizing
1:08:30
this. And so you know, so Mick, he
1:08:34
didn't you know, go and say I want to build a robotics
1:08:37
company. He he saw a problem and he saw
1:08:40
that problem during the Internet one point O days with Webvan and
1:08:45
Webvan was one of the the poster Childs for over funding and and
1:08:52
it went public at $800 million. And and they blew through all
1:08:56
this cash and they built these beautiful distribution centers.
1:09:00
And Mick was in charge. He was an engineer there and he
1:09:03
was in charge of, you know, that the, you know, these fulfillment
1:09:06
centers and we saw that there was nothing addressing this new
1:09:09
type of e-commerce because these distribution center systems put
1:09:14
into pick and pack. They they just were about full
1:09:17
cartoons and and e-commerce were just starting.
1:09:20
And so he built he saw this problem and I go through this in
1:09:25
great detail. And after Webvan, after he left
1:09:30
Webvan shortly before they went bankrupt, he, he started to, you
1:09:34
know, ideate on what later became Kiva Systems and with two
1:09:39
other partners. And he's like, you know what we
1:09:42
got to do? We got to bring the shelving to
1:09:43
the picker and they reorganized how a warehouse operates.
1:09:49
And they actually, not only that, but the, the Kiva Systems
1:09:54
reorganize the shelving based upon the best sellers online as
1:09:58
well. And so they're on the perimeter
1:10:02
and the dogs are on the inside. And so like, you know, it's just
1:10:05
that one of many vignettes that I go through in my book of like
1:10:10
how to successfully create a, a business utilizing these
1:10:15
advanced technologies to address real problems in the industry.
1:10:19
And I think that's a great place to start when thinking about a
1:10:22
new business is what's a problem to solve what what is a pain
1:10:26
point for folks? Customer discovery.
1:10:29
It's all about customer discovery.
1:10:32
Well, Oliver Mitchell, FF Venture Capital, I want to be
1:10:35
the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your
1:10:38
story with us today. It's been fascinating.
1:10:40
Appreciate it. My pleasure, Anthony.
1:10:42
Thank you. Folks, that's a wrap on another
1:10:44
episode of the Inspired Stories podcast.
1:10:46
Thanks for learning with us today.