The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
00:25:49 · Grace Brown
[00:25:49] S1: Yeah. I started building Abi during during the pandemic. So Abi and the business are quite different. To me, they're almost different stories. And so when people... Actually, I'm sure other founders must have this as well. When people ask me when did it start, it's actually so hard to answer that question. I come up with an answer, I usually talk about the date the business was incorporated and, you know, the journey that we went on. But Abi started in COVID, and everything leading up to Abi also... Like, to me, that's all the start. Like, the start was, to your point, like, the experiences that you have when you're really young, the fascination that I had with, you know, math and science. And, you know, through my adolescent years, I knew I wanted to build something. I did not as an engineer build, but I knew I wanted to create something in this world that was really significant and greater than myself and greater than, like, just anything. I don't know how to quite describe it. But I read in a book or listened to a podcast recently where it said, actually, everyone is born with that fire, but the difference between the people who, you know, do go on to do do go on to greatness and the people who don't is that fire, they never let it die. Whereas some people go through experiences and just kinda let it die. But yeah, so for me, I always knew I wanted to build something significant. And so, yeah, the starting point is a little bit nebulous to answer if I'm gonna be very specific about when it started.
00:27:08 · Vidit Agarwal, Grace Brown
[00:27:08] S0: Because I because I also have heard the story about during COVID, you were in Melbourne in Australia, I believe, living in student accommodation. And there was a sense of, like, looking for a companion. And apparently, that's also Abi's origin story. Is there a trick to that? [00:27:25] S1: Yeah. No. That's entirely true. I was in my student accommodation at the time. I hadn't had any any meaningful social interaction for many months. I'd FaceTimed my friends, called my friends, but the lockdowns are really restrictive. And so... Yeah. And this was when I really loved skateboarding, actually. So I also had lots of tools around me that I'd used to build my electric skateboard, but I'd also hacked around at different projects... Other projects. And... Yeah. And I guess I just... It was after watching just completely consuming all these Disney Pixar movies that I was like, oh, I really wish one of these characters were, like, alive and real and next to me. And that's when I sort of just had the idea to build Abi. She wasn't named Abi at the time, but I just wanted to build myself a robot that could keep me company.
00:27:25 · Grace Brown, Vidit Agarwal
[00:27:25] S1: Yeah. No. That's entirely true. I was in my student accommodation at the time. I hadn't had any any meaningful social interaction for many months. I'd FaceTimed my friends, called my friends, but the lockdowns are really restrictive. And so... Yeah. And this was when I really loved skateboarding, actually. So I also had lots of tools around me that I'd used to build my electric skateboard, but I'd also hacked around at different projects... Other projects. And... Yeah. And I guess I just... It was after watching just completely consuming all these Disney Pixar movies that I was like, oh, I really wish one of these characters were, like, alive and real and next to me. And that's when I sort of just had the idea to build Abi. She wasn't named Abi at the time, but I just wanted to build myself a robot that could keep me company. [00:28:11] S0: You make it sound so easy, like building things, like particularly physical things. I don't think they're that easy. They're literally nuts and bolts, and, like, we we talk about building software, which is sitting in a bedroom, and now with AI, it's a lot easier. How did you go about building that first iteration, particularly during COVID where most of us couldn't travel very far, And you couldn't access things and you couldn't buy things and order things in the way you can now again? How... Well, tell me about the first iteration of the... I guess, can I call it a robot? Is that the best description?
00:28:41 · Grace Brown
[00:28:41] S1: Yeah. She's a robot. Yeah. Yeah. She was three d printed. Many parts of her today are still three d printed. And I think, like, going back to the projects that I'd worked on in high school, I think I always described that being an engineer is the closest thing to real life magic because you can just go from raw materials and resources to then creating something that you had imagined. That's why it was such a light... Not even a light bulb moment, but just like a really enlightening moment for me to realize, if you can just go down to first principles and think about how can you create the thing that you... What is it that you want and what is required, like the materials and the resources? Anyways, to me, that was that was... So so I guess starting Abi was... It wasn't too... As an engineer, it's... It wasn't too complex of a project at the start. I did say I looked around at the humanoid robotics industry and I was looking for open source projects, And there were very few open source humanoid projects. There were a lot of open source, like, wheeled robot projects, quadrupeds, hexapods, drones, but not many humanoid projects. There was one that I found online called the poppy humanoid, and I went through... I three d printed numerous parts of The Poppy Humanoid and used that as a bit of a base to inspire me in terms of how to build Abi. But because there was so few resources on building a humanoid robot, I also, you know, almost arrogantly assumed, like, I will be that resource. I'll go build this humanoid robot and open source it to the community and let everyone have access to it and build on top of it. But, obviously, we deviated from that course when we started Andromeda. So I don't know if that answers your question. That was very long winded.
00:30:15 · Vidit Agarwal
[00:30:15] S0: It does. And and please stop saying did that answer a question because it does. I think you're doing a great job. So you don't need to... You don't need microwavl. Is... So so a couple of questions there. One is I would love to connect that to the company and how that led to the origins of the company and putting a business around it. But before that, how much did the robot cost? Are we talking this is really expensive to get off the ground, or was it really straightforward to get started?
00:30:40 · Grace Brown
[00:30:40] S1: It was. It... Robotics is not, yeah, is not really an affordable hobby, particularly as an engineering student or any student. So I had to... I think as most engineering students are, you're very scrappy with your first few projects. You reuse hardware and electronic components from other projects to build new ones. And I was looking at different ways to fund Abi. I'd gone around to different university professors and applied for university grants, but we weren't quite... Yeah. We weren't very successful in that. It was very helpful, that whole exercise, though. That helped set me up for Andromeda because you had to learn how to create a story around what you're building and really communicate that and sell that to someone who wasn't doing it themselves. But it was when I came across Vogue, they had a... Some sort of competition for women entrepreneurs. This was also the first domino that started Andromeda. And if you pitched a business idea to a panel of judges, then... And if you won, Vogue would fund $10,000 towards your idea. And I did not think we were gonna have really much of a chance at all. And I also thought it was a little bit airy fairy. What is Vogue doing backing tech? I thought probably definitely a misjudgment there. But we applied for it. We sent in a video, and then we were invited to do a pitch. And off the back of that, we actually won the competition, which was exhilarating for me at the time to have someone really believe in what we were building. And that was also the first amount of money that I... External money that I ever got towards Abi. And, yeah, that that was the first domino that started everything.