Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:00:00 · Boris Sofman
[00:00:00] S0: Over $700,000,000,000 of data centers being built this year, and it's gonna be over 1,000,000,000,000 next year. It's just unbelievable. But when you look at the labor pool, there's a... Kind of this generational transition where people have not been going into construction. And so retirement rate is accelerating. There was already a 500,000 worker shortage just as a baseline. That's being exacerbated with the demand. And some of our partners are telling us they're expecting 50% retirement in the next seven years. And so what we're doing is we're enabling fully autonomous heavy machines starting with construction to enable effectively turning these machines into operator less machines where Bedrock becomes the digital operator and the software services around it and enables general contractors in construction or the miners in quarries and mines and farmers in agriculture to be able to operate these machines.
00:00:51 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:00:51] S1: Welcome to Inspired. I'm Alexa von Tobel. Construction is one of the most dangerous jobs in America. Demand is at an all time high, and the industry is facing a shortage of almost half a million workers with no end in sight. Boris Sofman has spent his entire career building robots that work in the real world. He cofounded Anki, which shipped almost 4,000,000 consumer robots globally. He went on to lead autonomous trucking at Waymo, where he was part of the team that pioneered what is now the world's most advanced driverless vehicle program. And now he's taken everything he's learned across both of those chapters and applied it into machines that literally build our world. Boris is the cofounder and the CEO of Bedrock Robotics, a company that is almost valued at $2,000,000,000 that retrofits existing construction equipment into fully autonomous machines. In this conversation, we're gonna talk about what it actually takes to make heavy machinery driverless on an active and dangerous job site, his fascinating predictions for autonomous vehicles in our cities, why he's more skeptical about humanoids than almost anyone else in the field, and why physical AI may be the most defining technology story of the next decade. Let's dive right in. If you're running a startup, we know things like managing equity and communicating with investors are always top of mind. Carta has built a connected suite of tools that over 40,000 companies use to do just that. Their platform of software and services helps you lay the groundwork so you can focus on building. To learn more or get started, visit carta.com. And with that, let's welcome Boris. Boris, first of all, I'm so excited for this conversation on many fronts, both all of your experience on autonomous trucking and where that's heading and then obviously on autonomous robotics. So just welcome. Thank you so much for coming here today.
00:02:32 · Boris Sofman, Alexa von Tobel
[00:02:32] S0: Pleasure. [00:02:33] S1: I wanna start with the beginning. And before we dive in, I'd I'd love to talk a little bit about kind of how you got here in life. You were born in The Soviet Union, later immigrated to The United States. I would love just to get a sense of, like, a formative moment in your childhood that you feel like launched you to where you are today?
00:02:51 · Boris Sofman
[00:02:51] S0: So I was born in Moscow, like kinda yeah, right in the heart of Soviet Union. My parents have been trying to leave for well over a decade and you just couldn't. That feels like such a foreign concept today. They were finally able to leave in 1989. Was actually one of the earliest families that were allowed to leave. And my dad was actually pretty deeply involved in kind of helping coordinate kind of families of Russian scientists and mathematicians and engineers that through kinda coordination with the US government were kinda negotiated to be able to leave Soviet Union, and I was six years old. And so we moved through a few countries in Europe and ended up in New York, lived in Brooklyn for a bit, and then through my dad's work ended up in Texas, where he was in telecommunications doing large scale optimization, and so I was in the Dallas suburbs for most of my childhood. And so I was always excited about kind of mathematics and engineering, and video games was actually one of the things that got me interested in AI, where I still remember there's a famous video game series, computer game series called Civilization, where you're basically kind of simulating the history of the world and kind of playing Civilization, thinking about research and units and everything. And the complexity was so immense, which was part of the appeal of the game. The AI was okay, but not great at all. And I started to think about how, what are the kind of algorithms that drive the kind of coordination of all these systems? And that actually got me interested in engineering and computer science, which took me to Carnegie Mellon. And it's funny because today, my 11 year old son, got him into civilization and normally parents would be like upset when their kids get into video games and I'm kind of like strangely proud that my son's kind of following in my footsteps.
00:04:38 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:04:38] S1: That's incredible. I love that. I wanna talk a little bit about your time at Waymo, where, again, you really led their autonomous trucking initiative. I could geek out on this just because I'm so fascinated by how that could transform society, safer, all of the things. But can we just get a sense of, like, first of tell us what you did there. Let's start there. And then I wanna talk a little bit about kinda where it's headed. So let's start there.
00:05:05 · Boris Sofman
[00:05:05] S0: It was such a wonderful time. So I was at Waymo for about five years, so I was an executive leading autonomous trucking, but then I was also leading various technology teams that supported kind of all platforms, cars and trucks. And so I was leading a perception team and then various other teams. And so we helped launch the Jaguars into San Francisco. We unified the tech stack to where cars and trucks were as unified as possible in terms of the overall architecture, where you'd have differences in the platform, sensor layouts, you'd have an articulated trailer, but we were using almost every single part of the autonomy stack, which was very powerful. And so we ended up leading both freeway driverless for both cars and trucks. Waymo ended up focusing much more on the car side where there was like a really a pressure to commercialize and accelerate that. And so we actually launched driverless on freeways for the cars at the end of twenty twenty three. But in a lot of ways that was actually the trucking kind of like kind of program, kind of unified into the car platform. And it was a fascinating problem because with trucking you had this like 80,000 pound trucks with an articulated trailer. You had like crippled vehicle dynamics where you know, there's like, so had so little flexibility on acceleration and deceleration because of the mass of these vehicles. You had these interesting challenges that because of that, we had to push the perception range out from a few 100 meters, which is what the car is mostly utilized to close to a thousand meters, you know, using camera and radar to go far beyond LIDAR range. You started to think about these extremely rare long tail kind of challenges that appear so infrequently on a freeway and completely changes the way you do a safety framework. It was just amazing problems.