Building Hard Tech in Hard Markets: Kyle Vogt on Cruise, Twitch, and The Bot Company
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Hi, listeners, and welcome back to No Priors. Today, we're joined by Kyle Vogt, a serial entrepreneur who has helped build some of the most influential tech companies. He co-founded Twitch, shaping live streaming. Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company acquired by GM for a billion dollars. And now, Kyle has launched The Bot Company, a startup focused on building consumer robots.

Kyle, welcome to KnowPriors. Awesome. Let's get going. Obviously, you've done a variety of different things over time, everything from co-founding Twitch, you started Cruise, you're now working on a new startup. Can you tell us a little bit more about your Cruise experience? Because I think that whole era was incredibly formative for everything that's happening today in AI.

And we'd just love to get your perspective on why Start Cruise when you did, how that all evolved, and then how that's informing what you're doing now. Sure, yeah, we can go back to the beginning. This is 2013. And back then, you know, there wasn't really self-driving car, you know, technology like there was today. There was just Google working on, you know, their self-driving car project. And rumor had it where they had spent like $100 million and they had the world's best engineers. And so going after something like that was a little bit crazy. And, you know, even after having worked on Twitch, you know,

You'd think that'd be enough credibility that as a repeat founder, I could go back and raise money. But it turned out even that was like kind of a crazy enough idea and Twitch hadn't been acquired yet that I had a hard time. I had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to raise money. I think I pitched like 120 investors over the course of probably a couple of years to raise all the money we needed. But our thesis back then was very simple. We were going to start

By finding, you know, instead of going directly after what Google was doing with, you know, self-driving cars, they were trying to make the ultimate self-driving car, I think, as a moonshot. We took an approach of what's the lean startup approach of this? Can you build something that has the minimum quantum of utility that is maybe a lower cost or easier to execute so you can get to market more quickly and move from there? And so we started with a retrofit system where we would take

a regular car, put some sensors on it, a computer in the back and get it to drive. And we got that working pretty quickly, kind of like an early version of Tesla full self-driving. I think that was for just one car model too, right? That was like a BMW or something in the time. That is the challenge with a retrofit business. It's like without the blessing of the car makers, you have to kind of reverse engineer protocols and figure out how to attach motors to steering wheels. So it wasn't necessarily sustainable, but we were still going to try to figure that out.

I'd say that peaked around the time we went to YC Demo Day and Sam Altwell was in the car actually, and we turned it on and rode it to Demo Day. And we took that product for about a year and a half and then realized that we had done enough technically that maybe we didn't have to do this lean startup approach. Maybe we could just go straight after the big fish, which would be building robo-taxis. And around that time, Uber and Lyft had sort of risen in popularity and now we're becoming these household names

And like, you know, talk of going public and all this kind of stuff. And they had this big hole in their unit economics, which is paying the drivers. And so suddenly there was like a strong market pull for self-driving technology, whereas before I had been seen as just kind of a cool sci-fi thing. And so we were able to raise some money from Spark Capital and go straight into that.

Within a year of that, I think we were acquired by GM. We had working prototypes driving around San Francisco, obeying traffic lights, changing lanes, going from point A to point B with an iPhone app back in 2015. That's pretty amazing. How do you think about the different approaches that people are taking today? So there's Tesla on one side with a very specific approach, kind of moving everything to things that are a bit more camera-centric, but training on sort of a richer set of

sensors and approaches. There's sort of the Waymo approach, which is much heavier on the hardware side in terms of what's actually in the vehicle.

both seem to be doing very interesting things. One is robo-taxis, one is kind of still building mainly cars. How do you think about the different approaches, both from a business model perspective, but also from a technology perspective? To be fair, Elon nailed it from a business model perspective. He's been making billions of dollars of profit while developing self-driving cars, whereas everyone else has been burning billions of dollars to try to get to basically the same point. I think in the end, when you start with custom vehicles with lots of sensors, really expensive, and you make it work in a constrained environment,

And Tesla starts with unconstrained environment, low cost sensors, but it doesn't quite work without a driver. They're all trying to get to the same spot in the end, which is low cost, works everywhere, you know, commodity sensors. Different paths to get there. I think Elon won that hands down. What do you think of the criticism that you can't get there? You can't get to full self-driving from like mostly self-driving? That statement,

is almost certainly wrong given a long enough time span. Again, going back to what Elon's approach was, he doesn't have to like finish by a certain date or run out of money. He's like making money along the way. And so, you know, I think the only risk is that, you know, customers get fed up and sort of rage quit his program, but they're getting something they like along the way, Tesla full self-driving. So I think that's the right approach. But in 2013, for sure, in 2015, even 2018,

it really wasn't viable to have a full driverless car that just used cameras and low-cost sensors. It just wasn't. The technology was not there. I think now, if you take a fresh look at where we are today with large language models and generative models and other things, that sort of class of technology applied to the classical challenges of perception for autonomous driving, even motion planning for autonomous driving, completely changed the game in terms of the magnitude of compute that you need, the expense of that,

And I think now from cameras, as long as you have sufficient redundancy and low light sensitivity and some robustness there, you can extract from a single camera image, not even stereo, you can get beautiful depth data, really accurate, and those models are getting better every day. And so if you're making a bet on the right technical approach in 2025,

It does not involve a bunch of expensive LiDARs or exotic sensors. It involves the most commodity sort of high-volume, readily available sensors you can get, and probably just several more of them than you would find on a typical driver assistance system. So I think that's the path from here on out. Is there anything else you think is lacking from a technology perspective, either in terms of hardware or just scaling models? Or as you know better than anyone, everybody started moving towards end-to-end deep learning over the last year.

year or two, and that's really made a big difference. But is it just scaling that up or is something else lacking? End approach will be an end-to-end type model. I mean, it's sort of hard to put it in a bucket of end-to-end or smaller models because there's such a spectrum in between and everything I've seen is a mix and match of various technologies. If I look at the limiting factors, at least on the hardware side, at least previously, it's been hard to get high performance compute in an automotive, high temperature range, safety critical environment.

And so, you know, Cruise made custom chips. I'm sure Waymo makes custom chips. And sort of piecing together things from the supply chain to solve that is a little challenging. And so there is room for more high-performance compute automotive silicon. And I've seen some things happening in that space as well.

That's one. And then I'd say the other piece, you know, most robo-taxi deployments I've seen rely on some form of remote assistance. And so there's a question of like how you get reliable connectivity to a vehicle from anywhere. Using multiple cell networks like what Cruise has done and Waymo, I'm sure others, works provided you have cell phone coverage. I think the missing...

piece, maybe Starlink or something similar where you can have always-on connectivity between Starlink and maybe a cell phone and some other fallback. I think that really opens up the opportunity in the number of places you can deploy robo-taxis. Whereas before, it's sort of an open question what you do if you're driving down Highway 1 in California and there's no cell coverage there. Should you still have an AV on that road given if there's an issue or you're

a customer needs some help, you literally can't get in touch with them. In retrospect, was there a right year to start a self-driving car company? You were so ahead of the ball on this. It takes a long time to spin up automotive pipeline and everything. So probably circa 2020 or so would be the right time to get started. And then around now, I think you'd be having a combination of hardware and software that's mature enough. If you have a

a nimble enough engineering team that's able to adopt new technologies when they pop up and quickly pull them into the pipeline. You're actually well positioned even if you started a while ago and your tech stack was based on some older technologies. If you have all the infrastructure in place for validation and testing and training models and deploying on public roads with test drivers, I think you can go a lot faster even if you have to sort of rip out and change some of your tech stack to adapt with the times.

One thing I've heard two opposing viewpoints on is the autonomous vehicle market in China. And one point of view is, well, it's not that real and it's mainly tele-op and it's a little bit more sizzled and steak. And then the other opposing view is, well, actually they've advanced dramatically, really rapidly. There's fewer safety constraints. So you can do more, try more, et cetera. And that models and approaches there are at least a parody with the leading contenders in the Western world.

Uh, which of those two views do you subscribe to or how do you think that market will evolve? From what I've seen so far, and I, I don't have, you know, a lot of inside information just from what I've seen videos online and other thing. Um, it does still seem like there's a lot of teleoperation. Like I think even, even someone like Tesla may start off with like a one-to-one ratio of remote operators to vehicles. Cruise and Waymo probably started off pretty close to that. Uh,

and then I think over time move to a smaller ratio. And so I think in the interim, to get the deployment numbers up, to get more experience, to accelerate data collection, people are brute forcing it, which means there's probably a lot of remote operation. I actually think that's fine because it doesn't take much. Once you get to like 50% remote assistance or even 25%, at 25% remote assistance, you've already reduced the labor costs 75%. And so you're almost already at the diminishing returns point. And it sounds on one hand,

kind of crazy to say like, oh, if there's a thousand AVs out there, there may be 250 people monitoring them. But that's actually not crazy from a cost, from a unit economic standpoint, it actually makes a ton of sense. And a ratio of one to four is like,

I think with today's technology over time, you could get to 20 to one or 50 to one, but you know, you're just talking single digit points of margin at that point. The real benefit is just going, you know, anywhere less than one full human in a car makes the economics of this really good. And I think, you know, puts you on a pathway towards, you know, better safety for the vehicles because they're primarily driven by a robot that has great reflexes and is going to avoid situations, but then also lower cost to consumers over time. You did amazing work on Cruise.

And then you decided to start another company, which I always think is a really brave endeavor because anybody who's been through multiple startups knows how painful and terrible it is.

Could you tell us a little bit more about the impetus behind the bot company and what you were doing there? Yeah, well, we talked about this a little bit when I was making that decision, what to do next. And I did some soul searching and determined that I'm just a builder. I like building things and sitting on the sidelines or helping other entrepreneurs or doing something else, I think would be fun, but not quite scratching that same itch. I'm 39. I feel like I got at least one more startup in the tank. So the question became of like what to do. And I look back on my career. This is my, I guess,

depending on how you count like third major startup. And the first one was Twitch and Justin.TV, and that was straight out of college. And that was just doing anything, doing a startup and trying to make it work was the priority. And that ended up being video games and entertainment. The second time around for Cruise, after doing entertainment, I decided I wanna focus on impact. So like what's something where we can use technology to meaningfully improve people's lives? Self-driving cars, they save lives, they give you tons of time back. That was like squarely in the impact category.

Third time around, I definitely care about impact, but also fun. So it's like working with people I like on problems I like, really challenging technical problems and building amazing products. And so we're building home robots. And the impact side of that is...

One of those things that's hidden in plain sight, there's only 24 hours in a day. And if you're sleeping for eight hours, working for eight to 10, there's precious few hours left that are actually your time. And people spend a surprising amount of that remaining time doing like

essentially unskilled labor, acting like robots every day, like making the bed, doing the dishes, folding the laundry, like picking up toys after your kids. These are not things that make us human. These are actually things that detract from our humanity. And they're the perfect criteria for that reason to be automated by machines. And I think, you know, when you describe that to people like, oh, you don't have to do all those things anymore. There's a machine that could do this for you. It clicks instantly. People are like, that is so obvious.

to the point where I think, you know, in five years, maybe 10 years, it will seem as insane to have like a house without multiple home robots as it would be to have a house without a sink or like a laundry machine or like a toilet. Like these are going to be like critical things that, you know, if you can afford them and we want to make them really affordable are just going to seem like extremely common sense to like, why wouldn't I want to have the time in my home be my time, not

you know, consumed by these chores. I just thought that analogy was really interesting because we never really think about plumbing as a technology and it is. And to your point, up until reasonably recently, you know, most of human history, we had no running water. You'd like walk down a hill with a bucket and you'd bring it into the house and

I actually think that's a fascinating analogy because nobody really talks about some of these things that actually are technology is technology and the degree to which we now just take it all for granted. Yeah. So plumbing and electricity were sort of turn of the century things. And then I'd say in the 1950s and 60s, there was a resurgence, but around

like home appliances. And there's some great advertisements from the 50s and 60s. If you look back, it's like, so this is 1950s time, but it's like, you know, the housewife standing in the kitchen and there's the microwave and the dishwasher and all these like new appliances that like make it so they have more time and they can do more and be more productive. The last time we had like a surge of excitement and progress, like in our own homes, you know, in like 50, 70 years. So I think it's time to revisit that and

Going back to the robotics side, like actually pulling this off, it's basically been the dream for people working on robots since the dawn of robotics to build a robot that can like go to the fridge and get you a beer or something like that. You know, you sit on the couch. It's like the dream for nerds working on robots. And that's like obviously a tiny subset of what you'd want a household robot to do. But that's really hard. And like, why is it so hard to just have a robot like open a fridge, get a drink and bring it to you?

And the reality is it's similar to self-driving cars in some regard where it's a very unstructured environment. Like every home is different. Everybody organizes their home in a different way. The layout is different. The objects in the home are different. How they live in their home is different.

And so having a robot that sort of lives in this unstructured environment, it's like the polar opposite of a factory assembly line where everything is rigid and repetitive and precise. In a home, it's like sloppy and changes every day. And so using classical approaches where you have computer vision and you're trying to like reconstruct 3D objects or fit to a map would make this like a really, really challenging and computationally intensive problem.

Moving to more modern techniques like end-to-end learning or imitation learning, even reinforcement learning. Now, if you can teleoperate a robot and demonstrate how to do something or collect data from humans in some way or from internet videos, you can kind of imbue a robot with a sense of common sense and ability to make sense of these unstructured environments. And on top of that, you can talk to the robot in natural language using your voice, which

rather than typing into an app or on a keyboard. So I think, you know, you asked when the time is to start a robotics or self-driving company, maybe that was 2020. I think for home robots, it feels a little bit early. So like now is definitely the time in my view. How much of what you did or that people have learned at places like Cruise or Waymo or others is also useful in the context of home robots? In other words, what sorts of things overlap

And then what things are just completely different or new? Because people would often talk about driving environments as similarly chaotic and messy. And, you know, the canonical example is always like the kid chasing the ball across the road suddenly or things like that. Is it...

even more difficult in the home? Is it less? Is it more structured? I'm still a bit curious about the analogies that could be pulled there, if any. To start with, the big difference between the two is that for a driverless robo-taxi, you basically have no product until it achieves

superhuman safety performance, whatever you establish that is like just slightly better than humans or 10 times better. I think most driverless cars that are on the road today fall somewhere in that category. And to get there means there's no MVP. There's no launching with something that's partially useful. It's like you have to reach that human safety performance. And on public roads, it's hard to constrain the environment to the point where, you

You know, you make the problem much easier. You can operate at night or in sparsely populated areas. But the reality is, just like you said, at any moment, anywhere, the kid could dart out in front of that vehicle. And so you need like a high number of nines of reliability to have any sort of product

I think in the home and most consumer applications and even most industrial applications, safety is still critically important. But the bar that you need to reach or the functionality that you need to reach or the constraints you can put on the system enable you to launch a product much more quickly. And so I think that's one big difference. On this topic, how do you imagine deployment to work? You're obviously like, hey, Tesla had the right path here. Is there a Tesla analogy where you make billions along the way? Yeah.

It's not obvious. Are there constraints you can put around it where you have tele-op, right? Or just a couple tasks or a more constrained environment in the messiness of a home? There's a number of ways to attack that. Approaches I've seen are like you sell a really high-priced robot today, like a humanoid or something resembling a human that's fully tele-opped. And you just tell someone this is going to cost, I don't know, something crazy like $50,000 and $1,000 a month. But it's the first robot you can buy that will do stuff in your house.

I think that's one approach to try to make money along the way. I think your market size is pretty small doing that, but that's a viable approach. And the other side would be to sell robots that don't fulfill the promise of a household robot that does all your chores, but do little bits of useful things. I just saw at CES this year, they have little iRobot Roomba type things that have a tiny little hand that could come out and pick up a sock that's in the way. And so these are incremental approaches to sell products and get data and hopefully learn about what it would take

or train models or try things to be able to work up that ladder, I guess, to the Holy Grail, which would be like a robot that takes the place of your butler and your housekeeper and just about anything else that you would ever want if you could have an infinite staff of people or robots doing things in your home. I guess we'll run the analogy to self-driving. If you look at what happened from a market structure perspective there, there were originally dozens of startups that raised collectively billions of dollars

And one could argue that the end winners of the things that actually somehow worked in the market were two incumbents, Tesla and Waymo, Cruise slash GM, and then maybe to a secondary extent, applied to tuition, which is building more general software for cars and things like that. And then most of that market kind of didn't end up

with the outcomes one would have hoped for. Do you think there's going to be a similar sort of shakeout here in robotics? And do you think there will be incumbent bias? Do you think there's a lot of room for startups? How do you think about how that market will evolve? I think for sure, both in AI generally, like, you know, just pure software companies. And then also, I think the next wave is starting on robotics. There will be like that bubble effect. And this is just like kind of how the Silicon Valley ecosystem and venture capital market works.

You know, there's either a couple of big rounds that get everyone excited and then other investors start throwing money into the same space because they see the markups happening quickly. And that following effect kind of floods the market. And when there's a lot of investors talking about funding these companies, more people kind of drop out of their PhD programs or quit their job to start a company. And I think the majority of those companies, I would say, are like low quality in that

they're a founder that's like half into it or a founding team that's like half into it and half hedging going back to work or whatever, or maybe they're hoping it's a get rich quick thing or they're just the wrong, you know, like founder market fit or founder product fit isn't there, even though they're smart technically. I saw this in the self-driving wave, like people who are really brilliant academically, but have the wrong mentality, not a product centric mentality. They will leave their academic program because they want to commercialize their research, which to me is like a huge red flag because that means you are

You're saying, I'm not going to be flexible on how I solve the problem. I'm going to force my solution into the square peg into the round hole. And I think that can be very problematic for a startup when you're constantly wrong and need to adapt to whatever you see. So most of those companies will be low quality. And as a result, we'll say that the bubble popped and there's a huge wipeout in the industry, inevitably, whether it's robotics or AI. But I think really what it was is there was a handful of good companies that were started during that time and before and

those companies, it's just fine. I don't think they'll be affected by the collapse. It's just all the noise and sort of the follow-on and sort of the hype and mania that follow us that sort of gives the impression that these things are collapsing or not viable when in reality, I think there are a handful of companies doing really good work. I don't know if they're necessarily...

limited to the incumbents, but that is possible, especially in hardware. It's really hard. But, you know, there were companies like Aurora and Zoox that one of them went public and one of them is acquired by Amazon and so has the resources to keep going. Cruise fell into that category. So these were not incumbents. These were companies that were started from scratch during the beginning of that self-driving car cycle and are enduring and hopefully do well. Thanks for that overview and explanation of what happened in the industry. I mean, you had a great point in terms of Zoox and others also being part of the things that...

either had an exit or worked in different ways over time or continue to be built against. One other thing that a lot of people do in the context of robotics, and you can see this maybe even being accentuated more in the context of a home robot, is they ascribe personality or they project personhood.

onto these machines. Is that something that you think is worth leaning into? Is it something that's worth avoiding? Like the anthropomorphization, I can never say that word, the humanization of these devices? Like, how do you think about that as somebody who's actually building things that will be in the home with consumers and, you know, may get interpreted in different ways by the customer? You know, to start with the analogy in the self-driving car industry was interesting because we named our cars, every car had a name and people would personify it when it came up. And, you know,

A car in itself doesn't look like a creature. It looks like a car or something that you drive. But once it starts moving on its own, your brain plays some tricks on you and starts treating it like it's an entity or a creature of some kind. And so you can try to pretend that that doesn't exist. And then you have this weird cognitive dissonance where you're saying it's a machine, but it seems like it has its own consciousness or life force in some way. Or you can lean into it and acknowledge that and find a way to integrate it

in the right way. The challenge, I think, with anthropomorphism, like I said that word, right? You're just showing off now. Yeah, seriously. That was the hard part of the bot company. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but too much anthropomorphism can, see, I screwed up there, can imply like a set of human-like behaviors that

that don't exist in that product. And I think Rodney Brooks wrote an essay about this, basically saying with robots in particular, the appearance of them sets the expectation for what that product will do. And so if you make something that looks exactly like a human, and in fact, the more human-like you make it, the higher the expectations I think the average person will have for that machine. They'll say, it looks like me, it walks like me, it has a face and talks like me. So it must be capable of doing all the things that I can do.

And today, 2025, I think it would be a leap of faith for any company to sell a humanoid robot or something like that and imply that it can do all of these things because we're still, I think, many years out from that, at least from meeting those expectations.

And so I think that there's a lot of thought that can go into the design of a robot, the form of a robot and other things to try to match the expectations that you have for a robot when you see it to what it can actually do or even go the other direction instead of over promising by showing a humanoid. Maybe you can do something in the other direction and surprise people with how much it can do. And that's kind of how I think about it personally. I'd like to surprise and delight customers rather than set them up for disappointment.

Maybe on this front of just consumer acceptance and expectations, are there like lessons that transfer from self-driving to home robots? One thing I saw in self-driving, which I guess you could say it's intuitive, but it was still very striking, was that most people on the whole were very skeptical of self-driving cars. Like it was like 75, 80% of people are like, I've never, you know,

you know, I'm never going to trust one of those things. That dropped like dropped to like 20 or 30 percent after one ride. Amazing. And so it's one of those things where it's like you just simply do not believe it. The more transformative and the more science fiction that technology feels, the higher the skepticism will be for that kind of thing. And so I think anytime you're doing something new, whether it's self-driving or a home robot, which let's be honest, that sounds like sci-fi. I'd love to have that. But like, you know,

can this be real is the question. And I think there will be a barrier. There'll always be skepticism and people say this is impossible or it's never going to scale or whatever it is. Maybe the introduction with any new technology. What I would say looking back is the most powerful thing to overcome that, which is people using the product, like people using the product and telling other people about the product and saying, no, no, no, I wrote in this thing or I tried this thing and it's real. You got to try it. And so I think leaning into too much sort of classical marketing and trying to like

tell people like what this thing will do or how what its specs are and all that is very different than like hearing from someone you trust that i have this thing in my home one of your most intimate spaces um and it's working and it's like and i love it and so that's that's kind of how i think about it for something like this where it's just hard to go straight at people who are skeptical and just don't believe that a sci-fi thing can exist and try to convince them through any other medium other than just trying it themselves

What's the timeline for that? Like you mentioned in passing, like a pretty important claim that said like maybe 5, 10, 20 years until everyone who can afford them expects robots in the house.

like they expect home appliances. Like what changes that timeline between the five to 20 year span or whatever it ends up being? Well, I'm at my office. So it's basically when I get off this podcast and go back to work. Okay, so we should let you go is what you're saying. Yeah, no, no, no, not at all. No, it's, I think to me, and I felt this way in 2013 when I started Cruise, it seems like the basic building blocks are there. I can point to all the challenges for a low cost home robot and low cost is important to me because I want a lot of people to have this.

I can point to all the technical challenges that at least today that I think we're gonna face. And I can point to a technology we've either built, you know, the last year or some research that came out or like a product or like a chip that's coming in the pipeline, whatever it is. I can see, you know, from where I sit today, the path to put these things together and assemble a great product and a great product experience.

And so I think it comes down to like execution, how quickly and how well those things are put together. And then the big question, which you always face in something like this is what are the unknown unknowns? Like, what can I sit here today and just simply not see because we haven't put enough robots in homes and haven't tried this out. And I think there could be like something, some new discovery that happens. Maybe it turns out that

you know, people are not happy with a home robot unless it does X or whenever a robot does this other thing, it, you know, it makes people never want to use it again. And so we're kind of early in our own journey to figure out what those things are. And as far as I've seen, there's no one else really doing this. And so it's a big, the cloud of uncertainty is, there's a lot of it in front of us. And that's why I can't be more specific on the timeline. You know, it could be like, it could be like one year or it could be like 20 years. And so, you know, the best way to figure that out is just

charge forward and try to discover it as quickly as possible. All of those are really exciting as timelines. We talked about Chinese, Avi. How do you think about manufacturing and supply chain given competition with China and like Chinese robotics companies? Yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking about that. There is this sentiment in robotics or I'd say in the hardware company space that I would say the sentiment that I've heard is almost like you shouldn't even try. Yeah. Because if you're just making a widget,

You'll make it using US engineering, which is $100,000 plus a year for an engineer. You're going to go to US-based machine shops and US-based tooling, all this kind of stuff. And it's going to be slower. You're not going to iterate as fast or you're going to pay more for it. And the quality may or may not be as good. So don't even try. And I think...

It is possible to be a global company today and have a manufacturing footprint in another country, use contract manufacturers, tap into existing supply bases. It takes more work, and you have to be willing to travel and go pound the ground and make these connections and get access to these things. But it's not impossible. I think probably for a US-based company, you're going to have a hard time competing on pure engineering services. And so if that's all you've got, if you're just doing mechanical engineering and cranking out products...

you're gonna have a hard time on the margin side and have to build a brand instead in order to create that margin. I think when you get into more complex machines, and I saw this with self-driving, I think even though they may be doing a lot of teleoperation and other things there, I do think that China is still years behind the best US companies for self-driving. And it's been my experience that anytime you have a sufficiently complicated technical problem on the software side where you can't just copy it by measuring something and then recreating it in CAD,

or it has to do with taste, like the product experience is more than just like a light switch where you flip it on and off, then it becomes a little bit harder to quickly copy that and commoditize it. You know, even if you're a fast follower, if you are aggressive enough as a company and can maintain a lead and keep innovating and keep building new products, I think there's room to be a hardware company in the U.S., you know, provided that

you take steps to ensure that if your cost is higher than a potential Chinese competitor or somewhere in Asia, it's not that much higher to the point where you can win on the merits of your product and brand and other things.

But in a place like, you know, for home robots and other things, this is like the Wild West. There's no established stuff to copy. You know, we've got to build a lot of stuff ourselves. And I think it'll be interesting to see how this plays out too, especially if these end up being like connected devices and they're constantly getting new software updates with better models on them or whatever it is.

I can see a bunch of angles in which these companies are very durable, whether it's us or another one. You've already been through the ringer once on the regulatory front with AV. If you could wave a magic wand, we just call Trump right now. What do you think is the right policy approach to make sure we have a competitive domestic robotics industry, if that's relevant? First of all, I mean, I think there should be tons of regulation on AV. It reminds me what's happening in the AV space and sort of

Companies like Cruise got wiped out. Companies like Waymo are expanding, I think, much more slowly than they should based on the merits and the safety of their technology. And it reminds me of when the first airlines were formed in the U.S.,

And there was no FAA. There was no regulation. If you had basically any kind of plane crash, you would get sued out of existence and you just wiped out. And many of the first airlines are no longer in existence because of this. And so the FAA was created because, you know, the government decided that actually we should have airlines. And if they keep going out of business, no one's going to start an airline anymore. And so the FAA, Monitor Airplane Manufacturers and Airlines,

make sure they meet safety criteria, and in exchange, give them reasonable protections and limits on liability so they can actually operate in a society like the U.S.

That hasn't happened for self-driving cars. And so I think the only, today, the only companies that stand a chance are the ones where they can afford to take on that liability because they're a giant tech company that makes money in other places. Otherwise, it's very bleak. So I would recommend that for AVs. And for home robots, I think a similar thing is true. There are no regulations right now on cybersecurity, for example. You can have a Chinese-manufactured robot in your home with cameras and a microphone running and sending that data

Who knows where? And in fact, many of us do. And that's not regulated. That's not inspected by any government agency. And I think that's a major concern. On the safety side, I would love to see that too. There's lots of best practices from the industrial robot industry. They're not a great fit for home robots. There's lots of good best practices for other consumer products. But particularly home robots is a bit of a vacuum. And I think that generally regulation is a very, very good thing for industry.

companies operating in environments like this, especially ones that are unpredictable. It encourages discussion of best practices. It encourages oversight. All of these things lead to better outcomes for, I think, both companies and for consumers. So in terms of regulation, even though I think Trump administration is anti-regulation, it's like a necessary enabler to get these industries going, as odd as that sounds. Seems like there's some circumstances where you're pointing a clear regulatory framework helps a lot. Like for the crypto community during the Biden administration,

And a lot of what they wanted from the SEC was just guidance in terms of what to do. And then everybody's going to go do it. And it was that ambiguity that really hurt. The argument I've heard around drones in particular is due to the FAA, the U.S. is now behind on the drone side. And China was really able to get a leg up. If you look at everything from drone shows to just what DJI drones can do, it's sort of very low cost and they're being used for military and other applications in Ukraine and other places.

Yeah. And so there are the argument as well that FAA over-regulated drones and airspace and that kind of prevented the U.S. market from evolving down a proper route. So I'm a little bit curious how you think about that balance between, you know, too much and too little regulation and how that may apply to...

the robotics world, given what's happened in drones. Yeah, it's a good point. I mean, I agree. I would love to see more transportation innovation generally. But aviation, like electric takeoff and landing airplanes, there were tons of startups in that space. And they've all kind of like sort of fizzled out, it seems like, or bumped into these like FAA certification challenges. And as far as I understand, there's still no pathway, even today, to make a

pilotless plane of any kind. There's like baby steps that we're taking, but I would love to see these sort of two track approaches where you have a very mature track for existing industries and technologies like passenger airlines today. And then an innovation track where basically you're almost encouraged. I mean, there's grants or other programs to like spur innovation in this category. And then maybe a phased release process to go from like a working prototype to

you know, being regulated, but being able to operate at scale. Like, I think it would be okay for us to sit down and say, here's what we expect to see at each level of maturity. And then provided you demonstrate to us that you meet that level of maturity, we'll progressively open up, you know, the regulations or the areas that you can operate. And this is like a standard thing. This is like,

what we did in self-driving cars, but also like even new airplanes, like the boom supersonic jet that just made history. They started off with like a low and slow flight and then like as they saw the data checkout ratcheted up until they hit supersonic. And so I think regulations are there to prevent irresponsible people from going zero to supersonic

But there are plenty of responsible people willing to sort of take the stepped approach, provided that there is a pathway to do so. And so I think that's the right balance of having regulation versus, you know, over-regulation versus none at all is having these like phased approaches. What's the number one thing that you do differently given the cruise journey besides like, I guess, have more fun, don't sell it to GM? Yeah, I learned a lot. You know, big companies that have their, have their,

you know, core business in another domain doing an acquisition that's not in that domain, selling cars to people who buy pickup trucks and SUVs in the Midwest versus robo taxis and urban environments. These are not compatible things. And when push comes to shove, they're going to pick that one over the other. And we got completely decimated by GM's like lack of, you know, priority and then completely abandoning cruise. So I guess lessons learned plenty. First is I'm never going to sell another company again, ever.

And so like, you know, maybe it will IPO or something like that, but there'll never be an acquisition in my life again. The reality is like, if I'm working on something today, I'm working on it because I think it's important and I care about it. And the day you sell the company is the day that you have to let that go. And so, you know, if I'm, by definition, if this is something I care about, I'm not going to let it go. The second thing is like team size. I, along with many other people, I think who started companies around the same time, fell victim to the Silicon Valley dogma of traditional engineering management for Silicon Valley companies. And so that's like,

hire the VPs first, and then they hire the directors, and then they hire the senior managers who hire the managers. And there can't be a ratio of more than eight to one for fan outs. And you do performance review cycles and all these things that creates bureaucracy and structure, creates like communication gaps between the people actually doing the work and the people making the decisions. And so the solution, of course, is just to keep

Keep companies very small, like have fewer employees, make every seat count, get the absolute best person in every role, in every seat, and just never grow the company to be so large that it sort of like crumbles under all the structure and bureaucracy and politics that seep in. These are natural things that happen to large groups of people when they are organized together in companies. Traditionally, that would mean you have to limp the scope of what you want to do. If you want to keep your company small, you have to have small ambitions. Like it needs a large company to do large things. I think now that is not true.

I think with coding assistance that it continued to get better, things like deep research, like I found that nearly every job function can be partially automated. And I think that trend is going to continue. And as someone who spends like a lot of time programming, I felt my ability to take on things where I would have had to hire a team of people or like a specialist in iOS development or a specialist in like, you know, low level rust programming for motor drivers, uh,

If you have a couple of good engineers, they can adapt and do all those things when sitting next to an LLM and some good coding tools. So I think it actually is viable to do what I want to do, which is like lesson learned. I'm going to keep the company small to build like a company that has grand ambitions, but a very tiny team. And that's what we're going to try to do. It's pretty amazing. I think you've had a really amazing career arc overall, right? You've taken on three high risk, complex companies back to back with little downtime in between and

You've run seven marathons and seven continents in three and a half days. Where does your drive and stamina come from? Is there a supplement we should all be taking? Is there like some Brian Johnson style, like we should inject ourselves with young blood? Like what's the deal? I haven't tried that. If you do that, let me know how it goes. I have a problem, which is that once I get an idea in my head, it just like burns a hole in my brain. I cannot...

I cannot sleep. I cannot do anything. I can't focus until I like, you know, see this idea through and this, for whatever reason, it doesn't happen. It's not like, you know, 20 ideas a day. It's like, I'll get this idea that, Hey, the stars aligned. This thing should happen. Now's the time I need to go for it. Um,

And then once I'm on that track, I just cannot let go until it's done. And so I think I just latch onto these problems and have this like sense of delayed gratification where I want to work on it for a long time and get the results. But that's also really satisfying to me. The notion of like putting in a ton of effort, building something really complicated and hard, sort of taking on these really difficult challenges and making a little bit of progress each day. Um,

that is motivating to me. And so, you know, you could say starting these companies and high risk and things is difficult and it's hard and it's hard and it is, but I enjoy every day. And so I can't imagine doing anything else. That's awesome. I think that's what makes Silicon Valley so great. So thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me.

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