Uncapped #32 | Kyle Vogt from The Bot Company

23:00That means every person in every seat has to be the best in the world at this for the company to be successful. And so you end up, you know, passing on a lot of people that are great people, really talented, but they're not, they're not at that specific level we want for that particular role. and I think you know if you're successful in doing that you end up with this there needs to be a name for it but like in the early days of a startup when everyone is like on the same page like maybe just the founders they're all in it 110 they're all usually like brilliant working together they're almost mind melded um and and then you have like insane productivity for some period of time and still you until you get bogged down by the organization growing and adding more functions and you know teams of people and management layers kind of stuff disconnected Do you have a communication issue?

23:41And so you get this drift away from this like pure, like force of energy that is in the beginning stage of a company. And so the reason for trying to have a cap on the size of the company is to keep it so that we're always in that pure high output zone. And you can't get that if you have like too much of a range of people in the company. I really think of it more like a pro sports team. Like you're not going to have, you know, the Lakers. I think you're going to have like LeBron James and a bunch of high school kids on the team. It's like they're all players that are the best in the world so that, you know, when they work together as a team, they can outperform a team that is like a mix of talents.

24:13I was like, if you have like the LeBrons with the high school players, like the LeBrons are like, what are we doing here? Yeah, exactly. They want to stay. They want to go play with the best people in the world against the best people in the world. And that's how you get better and grow. And, you know, people who are people who are the best in the world at what they do typically got there because they have this growth mindset that constantly want to get better. And you know, what better way to do that than to surround yourself with people of different skill sets that are all the best in the world at what they do and sort of absorb from that.

24:38I think so much of what gets hard is as you start getting into like scaling operations and you get into like that side of things, it just gets so hard to keep it really small. You know, like even you think about like, let's say you only had like 10 non-engineering roles. It's like, well, someone's got to run finance. They probably can't do it alone. You've got like, you're going to have all these like physical parts. You're going to have to have buildings for things. So how do you think you'll actually try to keep a limit on that? Like will you partner? Do you go sort of like work with people outsourced?

25:06Or do you actually think that like, you know, maybe with like new AI tooling, you could just go way further with people and it's just sort of like a demand you'll place? Yeah, it's a good question. That's that's part of why I said to be seen. Like this is a great mental model now and it may not. And by the way, I think most of the one of the healthiest changes I feel like I've seen from five years ago is the shift from thinking that like big teams are cool to thinking big teams are lame. Yeah. I mean, things seem to ebb and flow, right? Like I'm taking the extreme position here, but I do think if that has the effect of, you know, causing a small shift in that direction, that's probably net good for the industry and good for these companies.

25:40So it'd be a question for us. Do we partner or outsource things? I think it, you know, keeping the team small also forces you to focus on like, what are our core competencies, the things that we need to do uniquely, because we think we can actually do them better than any other company that we could potentially work with. And, you know, for things like a lot of operations or facilities or buildings. These are things where maybe we have no reason to think we would be the best in the world at this. So we should partner. And a lot of companies like they have lots of funding. They have lots of teams.

26:05Like it's almost like they take on these responsibilities because they can, not necessarily because they should. I feel like one of the most important things, which I think you've obviously shipped in self-driving in a way that like, you know, very few have. But I think in a lot of these sort of more sci-fi areas, it's very easy to not not be in like shipping mindset. And like, I think you did this really well at Cruise, obviously like opening, I was doing this like well before chat GPT. And so you basically probably are in a mindset, I assume of figuring out like how quickly can we ship and like iterate and like that's gotta be the mindset rather than just like hang in a warehouse, building the perfect robot forever.

26:41I think for that, it's starting with the thing you wanna build and then working back to what is the main, what is the constraint? What are the constraints or bottlenecks that we need to be, that we need to make our number one priority because it cannot go faster than, you know, what that one bottleneck or constraint would dictate. And for self-driving, that's a combination of safety, trust, and public acceptance. And so, you know, those are different work streams where basically like, unless those are all green, you don't have a product. It doesn't matter how good the technology is. And there are similar things, you know, for a home robot or really any business.

27:09And so like, you know, mapping out what those are and basically making that the company's top priority, like it, you know, Cruz, for example, see the metrics were the single thing we talked about every week, week over week, over week, making progress towards those. And I think for any company, like what you talk about, what you may design your metrics around kind of sets the tone for the company. And it's got to be aligned with that, you know, whatever the constraints are. What do you think you can do in a home first? Like, what do you think would be the first activity that can really be done well in a home?

27:33And then like, what are the things that you think are close to maybe follow in the, you know, next 12 to 24 months or something? Yeah, I mean, there are hierarchies, I think, of tasks for a home robot. And if you look at, I think, two, like a classic two by two grid, I guess one is maybe the technical complexity of the task, like how hard is it to get a robot to do this successfully? And then the second is like, what is the success rate that is acceptable to a customer of a product like this? And I'll give you an example. If you are, you know, in the easy side of things from the technical capability and also the very forgiving side of things in terms of success rate is probably like picking up your kid's toys.

28:09So I have, you know, two kids, a one-year-old and a seven-year-old. and they're between the two of them are constantly making messes and toys are all over the house running around picking up toys. And so if you have a product that you can buy, you can go to the store, buy this thing, put it in your house, push a button, turn it on. And then when you're gone for the day, all the toys are magically put away by the time you get home. It's like a mind-blowing experience. And let's say it screws up and like two out of the hundred toys are still on the floor when you get home. That's okay. It's still better.

28:35Yeah. So that, so that like, you know, think about nines of reliability for, for engineering, like maybe one nine is fine for that particular task. There are other things like putting a wine glass in a dishwasher where the technical complexity is a little higher in the, the, um, what's hard about that, by the way, is it like the grabbing or is it? Yeah. So if you think about picking up objects, this microphone, which is going to make a noise when I squish it is, uh, is, is compliant. And so if I'm off a little bit on where I grip it or like how much I squeeze it, I'm not going to shatter this microphone into a million pieces for wine glass.

29:07The margin is, is very thin. And so from a dexterity standpoint, it's a little more fragile. Actually, sometimes I think about that's like a good example of a thing where I'm like, it's amazing that people can do certain things like squeeze a wine glass the right amount or like hit, you know, a ball, you know, with a racket or a golf club with the right angle or something like that, or like catch something that's flying while you're moving. Like, it's actually pretty crazy what you can do like mechanically. It is. And the evolution to how we get there is interesting too, because my one-year-old daughter, her hands are like open, closed.

29:35There's nothing in between. She grabs objects. The wine glass is shattered. And at some point along the way, we developed much more nuanced skills and abilities. But So wine glass is another one. The other thing that's challenging is if you're putting a wine glass on a rack and it's a thin stem or something and you bump into something, you might break the stem off. And so not only is it more difficult from a technical standpoint, but if you shatter a wine glass in someone's dishwasher, they're probably not going to be your customer anymore. That's right. And so that's like several nines of reliability.

30:02And so I think that this sort of spectrum of technical difficulty and basically forgivability is going to dictate the types of things you see home robots do first. And I think we'll work our way up towards, you know, I think the holy grail of a home robot, which is like dishes, laundry, end to end, maybe cooking. These things, all of them have like all of these little, it's like a minefield. You do one thing wrong and you ruin the whole process. Like for laundry, if you put the red sock in with the whites, you know, have pink laundry, that's like game over, right? And it's, you know, so there's things like that.

30:34For cooking, it's the same thing. You put too much salt or pepper in there and the dish is ruined. You know, so these are things that I think we'll get to and I think it'll happen pretty quick. But, you know, I think - You think it's like cooking a steak at some point? Yeah, why not? If you think about at the end of the day, you have pick in place and simple manipulation. That's what cooking is. Yeah. They're just like a much higher degree of reliability. And there's other things around food safety and bacteria and other things that come in cooking and temperature sensing and what like that. So it's all doable.

30:59It's just like - Do you think at some point it's like, hey, robot, I'm at work right now. There's a steak in the fridge. Please cook it and clean up everything. By the time, like 15 years from now, that's doable. Less than five. Less than five? Yeah. This stuff is going fast. Again, if you look at the robots you can buy today in the world, like the nice robot vacuums, you may not think that. If you see what's happening behind closed doors at the best robotics companies in the world, you might think that. And if you're the leadership of these companies, the technical leadership, and you kind of know where things are going, you absolutely believe that.

31:30The hand seems really, as we're talking about this, I was sort of like stupidly like, I was like, actually, a hand's pretty good. Like your fingers are like pliable. You have like a lot of degrees of freedom. You have like multiple grip points. Is the hand the optimal thing? The hand is really important to get right because it is the robot's interface to every object that it interacts with. If you make it too simplistic or not enough sensing capabilities or whatever, then you have to have a much, much smarter brain to figure out how to use this primitive tool to accomplish a complicated task. and so the more mechanical complexity or capability that you add to a hand the more sensing ability in theory would require less you know sort of rocket science to figure out how to do a task with that hand the trade of course is the more technology the more degrees of freedom or motors that you pack into a hand the more complicated it becomes which impacts durability and also cost yeah and so there's push and pull there to find that sweet spot where you can basically come up with the simplest hand possible to do the tasks you want to do at the lowest cost while also being able to accomplish everything in a fairly straightforward manner.

32:31But I think in The Limit, you know, there's a lot of, you know, we think by analogy a lot and we have two hands and two arms. And so like a lot of the robots you see today have two hands and two arms. But it is really interesting thought experiment. Like what is the ultimate hand arm thing look like? And I think it was Rodney Brooks who said this the other day, but I actually do kind of think maybe it ends up being some crazy octopus tentacle looking thing in the future that's like very adaptable and can reach into small spaces. Well, I think that, you know, the human hand was, ended up where we are due to probably some impossible to unravel sequence of evolutional pressures, right?

33:03Well, it's like you start down some path and then you do your best, you know, evolution does its best given some somewhat random starting point, I suppose, right? Yeah, so if you could go back like a million years and hit the reset button on human evolution, like maybe something, a new fork would emerge and it would be more tentacle-like or who knows what. But I am skeptical that the way that human hands and arms evolved is the ultimate. and so the challenge will be like can we figure out what that is i have a couple stupid questions about the robot at home one is how strong could it be like is it is a hundred pound robot like it must be ridiculously stronger than a person right i would think uh for a hundred pound robot you could certainly make it uh maybe stronger in some dimensions there are some things that like are sort of soft biological muscles are pretty good at are stronger than like like a physical robot pound for pound kind of thing yeah it's really hard to say i think so i think probably the state-of-the-art Boston Dynamics robot seems like it's on par, if not, you know, more capable than a human.

33:56And if not now, I'm sure the next couple of generations will be. So that's kind of interesting. That's surprising that a soft muscle is stronger than like, I don't know why I would think a robot could be dramatically stronger. Yeah. I've been going down the rabbit hole on this a little bit thinking about like, you know, as, as again, our focus on affordability and cost, like is a electromagnetic gear motor where you've got a magnets and copper winding and a bunch of durable way to generate motion for a robot? And the answer in the short term is probably yes. But I think there are some interesting things happening where we're trying to mimic either some of the chemical processes or electrostatic actuators or other things that are similar in how they work to like a human muscle.

34:34And the benefit there is you can get a higher cycle count, more silent operation, and potentially more power density. Like how much strength can you get into a physical volume than what we have today in gear motors and then potentially much, much beyond what humans have in our muscles. Isn't like hydraulic is pretty strong? Like hydraulic pressure is pretty strong? Hydraulics can be extremely powerful, but they have other trades, typically noisy. The valves and things are pretty expensive, can be harder to control and get high fidelity motion. And so in terms of power density may be good, but there are other trades and the reasons you don't see this on a lot of robots.

35:04That makes sense. Another question I had that's sort of probably off spec, but while we're talking, is this going to be something that would have home security applications as well? Or does that then take you into weird territory that's just not worth going to. Yeah, I think so. I mean, one of the challenges with a with a home robot is this kind of general purpose. And so like, you know, what are people going to use this thing for? And I think it's it's hard if you just have a laundry list of 50 different items that the thing can do and security is one of them. But I do think a lot of people will be out and about and with their home robot at home be like, I wonder if I forgot to turn off the gas on the stove and send the robot over there to just, you know, tell you or even take it on for yourself.

35:42In the same way, you could be like, hey, robot, like, you know, if you see any person in my home or any doors open, like, let me know. Yeah. If you see me getting burglarized, like do something. But I don't know if you will think of it as a security robot so much as like, this is just one of the many responsibilities of my home robot is to keep tabs on my home. Totally. Alerting probably is good. Taking actions, probably not. I hadn't thought about that side of that. You know, that's not really in our... That's good. That makes sense. I'm just thinking because like, you know, in my head, I'm like, okay, if there's this brilliant, capable robot in the house, my guess is you're going to have a lot of people want it to start doing a ridiculous number of things for them.

36:17Yeah. The arc of time. And then you'll have to choose from that set, like what goes in. Yeah, I think so. But for sure, I mean, on the security side, I would hope, though, rather than having like physical deterrence and like, you know, having your home robot turn into a security guard with a baton or something, it's more so that it just becomes unattractive to rob homes or do, you know, break in and enter into a home, maybe in the same way that, you know, a world full of cars where everyone has like that Tesla sentry mode, there's very little incentive to break into cars. It's not worth the risk.

36:48Well, I mean, even like a security system just makes a loud sound and calls the police. I think that's pretty effective. I think it's extremely effective. Yeah. And I think those systems are pretty old and, you know, they're deeply embedded. And but yeah, it's like you may figure out how to disable the alarm and sneak into the house. But if there's a robot, you know, rolling around and then a sirens blaring and all that stuff. I just think it'll be interesting where if this gets in there, my guess is people will start to, I could see a future where people expect a ridiculous amount from these things.

37:15Well, it's touched on something interesting I've thought about is like when you ask people or we ask people, what would you do with a home robot? You know, immediately what comes to mind is like the thing that's most annoying to you today to do in your home. And I think that's good. We want to help with the annoying stuff. What comes up almost like laundry probably? Yeah. Laundry dishes, picking up after my kids, you know, wiping surfaces, cleaning. Like these are the things you would expect. And so we're going to chip away at those things for sure. But what I also like to think about is the things that we don't do because we value our time more than that.

37:43Um, you know, the example is if you've ever gone to like a really nice hotel, you know, the slippers are laid out for you. There's a glass of water on the nightstand, a little chocolate on the pillow, all these like little flourishes. Like, I don't know. I, I think that, you know, robots should not only automate the things that we don't want to do, but also like elevate our standard of living to some degree. Yeah. And so I love the idea that if you can afford a really affordable home robot, we're going to give you a lifestyle that, you know, would otherwise be inaccessible to you. Totally. I mean, that's actually a really interesting point that like a lot of the types of things you're talking about don't require any new inputs.

38:13It's just about taking care of your home in a certain way that's like beyond what you would normally need. But it's like you've got a bunch of towels that are like sitting in the laundry room that are clean. But can you like put those by, you know, the shower and like roll them up nicely? Yeah. And maybe don't need all these things. But the point is like, you know, your time is more valuable than that. It's very scarce. Like humanity's time, I think, is really important. But for a robot that's got 24 hours to sit around in your home and like try to make your life better, what could we come up with for it to do?

38:37What could it come up with to do for you? That's an interesting question. Wow. I'm curious about reflecting on what you've learned from the way self-driving cars played out and how it might matter here. Maybe one interesting sort of case study is, you know, the Tesla versus Waymo approaches. Do you think in any way that how that played out or any learnings there that poured over to like what could, you know, be impactful in the robotics land? Well, it's hard to say that, you know, very different approaches to getting to market, but it does seem like they're both trying to converge at the same thing, which is, you know, self-driving cars everywhere.

39:13I think one thing that was really brilliant about Tesla's approach, they found a way to sell the product essentially before it was fully complete. If we're looking purely at the self-driving side and generate billions of dollars of cash flow, which they could use to bolster their core business, but also continue to invest in R &D to make this self-driving product. Waymo, by comparison, has taken almost a couple of decades at this point, maybe not quite that long, and probably tens of billions of dollars of investment. And the revenue relative to that has been fairly meager compared to that total investment over time, which basically means that the only companies in the world who can do this are the ones with that kind of capital on their balance sheet to basically fund this crazy amount of R &D year over year.

39:56And I think it's no coincidence that the only companies who succeeded in that approach or are on track to succeed in that approach are owned by, you know, Amazon, Google, or, you know, like a major car company. And that was even a struggle for a company like General Motors. And so in the home robot space, I hope we don't repeat that. I hope it doesn't become the case that the only companies that make it are ones that are basically kept alive through billions or tens of billions of dollars from, you know, a corporate benefactor. And instead, we can find clever ways to get to market that, uh, which I guess is why you need to get to market and be selling something along the way to fund all of this.

40:31Well, I think if, if, if your development cycle means you don't get to meaningful revenue for five to 10 years after the company has started, it means you're entirely dependent on either being acquired or the capital markets, you know, being pointed in the right direction. And, you know, historically things tend to cycle back and forth in a five to 10 year timeline, you're getting awfully close to almost guaranteeing that you straddle like a down cycle as well as an up one. And that can be a killer for these companies. We don't need to talk about sort of cruise and GM too much, but I am curious about sort of, you know, I saw you share on cheeky pie about like not wanting to sell.

41:06And I'm just curious, like your mindset about the sense of autonomy and how you think about selling a company since you've been through it, you know, a couple of times and everything. I think, you know, and I said this before, but my conclusion is like, if you are selling a company, it should be because the reason you started the company or the thesis that you had in mind or the thing you wanted to build, something has changed. And maybe like you're no longer interested in it, your life circumstances have changed, whatever. But I think it is a fantasy to believe that you can sell your company, like have your cake and eat it too.

41:35Like sell your company in order to further the mission. And further the mission. I think in theory, this can happen sometimes, but it is so, so rare. It is rare. And I think more likely than not, you'd be disappointed with that outcome. And therefore, like for me, I can't imagine being in a situation where I would trade, you know, the opportunity to build this amazing thing and control it and make sure it happens in the way that I want it to for some kind of partnership or liquidity. So that just doesn't make sense to me, maybe not for everyone. And maybe that's just because I'm so excited about this thing and bringing this new idea of a home robot into the world that like it just wouldn't even cross my mind the thought of like handing over the reins to someone else.

42:07Yeah, you're at a point now where like this type of company is such a forever project. And like you're now able to start a company that's like, you know, it's not it is not some little thing. Like if this works, it's just such an important thing, which also, I guess that probably also drives you to want to sort of hold on to it indefinitely. Yeah, perhaps. But I think I'm not selfish about it. Like if I, you know, I feel like I have an obligation to stay true to, you know, our investors, the employees in the mission. So, you know, even though I certainly want to hold on to this, I'm not treating it like a pet project.

42:37I actually do want to like fulfill this broader vision that we all share. Yeah. Maybe as a final thing to touch on, you did this crazy like marathon around the world experience? What was that? And like, why did you do something that seemed so, you know, hard? Deep in the, in the middle of cruise, I was, I think I was frankly like kind of frustrated that like we were putting in all this energy and sometimes there'd just be periods where the metrics wouldn't always go up into the right. We'd take a regression and then go back and forth. And so, you know, the result wasn't always proportionate to the energy going in.

43:05And for running, for me, at least that was not the case. You put in the time, you get better. Yeah. And so that's very deterministic and satisfying. And so I needed something to balance that. I feel like in my life. And as I do, I went down a rabbit hole reading about like extreme marathons that you can do. I was like sort of an amateur marathon runner and came across the world marathon challenge. It's this thing you can sign up for. They take you to each continent, one continent per day, and you run a marathon on each one. And then like the next day you fly to the next continent. I thought that is insane.

43:32And then in fine print on the website, it's like the world record is like five days and 10 hours by this, this one guy. And then I got the wheels turning. It's like, well, I wonder what the theoretic engineer brain clicks on. I wonder what the fastest theoretical time you could do is if you if you optimize the it's like the traveling salesman part of the continent like yeah where you land optimize for customs in and out and logistics and like really dial it up to 11 and that turned into an 18 month obsession got stuck in my head and i ended up writing some software to find the shortest route between the seven continents that's crazy spending my problem is that i couldn't run a half marathon that's where i would struggle this sort of stubbornness and attachment to this idea meant that part of this was i had to train my body physically to be able to do this.

44:13Because like you're running a marathon and then you're not resting afterwards. Yeah. So the cycle, for example, is, you know, you start in Cape Town so that you fly to Antarctica. You have to start there because the weather is so unprecedented. Oh yeah, the Antarctica one, that's tough. You need like at least a six hour window of decent weather. And you're like looking at the weather forecast when it clears, then you fly in and you land, you run the marathon, you get out because that can throw off the... Where in Antarctica do you do this? On like the most temperate outer part of Antarctica. So it's on the continent, but we're not talking like South Pole.

44:41So it's cold, but it's not like... But it's not snowy? I mean, it's icy and you can't say... It's like barren, all ice. You land the plane on ice, you run on ice. You're running on ice. On ice. It's kind of like crunchy ice. Like there's like a ski slope groomer that did a course down there. And it's like a six mile loop or something. And so it was like running on... It was like trail running. Got it. It's still pretty crazy. That's crazy. Anyways, yeah. So organizing the logistics for the training, training my body and everything, doing it in the end, ended up doing this in about three and a half days which blew the world record aside.

45:12And then after 18 months doing this and finishing it, you know, I got to say like, it was, you ever like finish the last item on your to-do list and it's just like a dopamine hit? You're like, oh, that feels so great. That's what it was. It was like relief. It was like, check the box. Now I can, my tormented brain, which wouldn't let this go for 18 months, can finally relax. Where do you go? Cape Town, Antarctica, South America? Yeah, southern tip of South America and then to Panama City. And then I think to Madrid and then Oman. And you're just like, by the last one, are you just crazy fried?

45:39or were you in shape to just not be, you know, so beaten down? I was pretty fried, pretty fried. Yeah. But it's like, you know, the training I did peaked at doing three marathons within a 24 hour period in three different cities. That was like the stress test for this, if you will. And my coach was like, you know, I was like only three marathons. That's not seven. Like, is that actually the right amount of training? And he said, I promise you when you're doing the really real thing and you have this whole crew of people with you and everything is on the line and the adrenaline going, if you You can do three in 24 hours.

46:10You can do the rest. And he was right. That's wild. That's like the hardest physical task imaginable. You know, mental toughness is important for startups. And I feel like it really helps me quite a bit in that domain. Yeah, totally. All right, Kyle, this was really fun. Thanks for making time for it. Thank you.