The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
00:42:00 · Vidit Agarwal
[00:42:00] S0: It so it sounds like she's got... She as an Abi has got the emotional intelligence. Like, this is a big top top of your conversation at the moment, right, is will AI ever have... Not that Abi is the traditional AI. I think yours is a bit more sophisticated than the AI we're using as consumers. But the topic of will AI ever have the emotional intelligence and the ability to read bias and to read cues in the way humans do. Touch on that for a moment, like, how have you incorporated that into the robots?
00:42:33 · Grace Brown
[00:42:33] S1: Well, that's exactly our bread and butter, and that's the part of the robotic stack and infrastructure that we build... That we're aiming to be really world class at. A lot of companies and a lot of the industry today naturally are focusing on physical intelligence, so things that can do manipulation, navigation, the dexterity, all of these mechanical applications for these robotics platforms. And there's gonna be a massive market for all of this. But as physical intelligence becomes more commoditized, what actually becomes more valuable is social intelligence. And I think a lot of the founders or developers in these spaces think that they're gonna build a robot that can functionally complete a task, and they have almost very little consideration of how this robot is going to interact with the people that it's sharing spaces with. As soon as you take a robot out of an industrial or warehouse setting, it's going to be in an environment... Any environment with a person is so unpredictable. We are one of the most complex systems that exists in nature and life. And so for a robot to be able to interact with us effectively, things like reading our body language, looking at our gaze direction, understanding previous interactions, and pulling on things from memories, all of these things, and there's many more, changes the context of an interaction that you have. And we, as people, do that very subconsciously. There is no part of the robotics stack that people are building that bring in that we call the social operating system. And that's the part of Abi that I actually believe is going to be incredibly valuable for Andromeda and for the entire robotics ecosystem in the future. So there's lots of founders. There's actually... I'd say the whole industry believes... Really believes that robots are gonna be part of everyday life and in every single environment that you can think of. We debate on the timing of that. Some people say it's two years away, particularly if they're raising, like, a billion dollars or something. Other people say it's more than a decade away. But regardless, I think we're all in consensus that robots are gonna be a very significant part of human life, and we're going to coexist with them. But I think each of these robots will need some equivalent of the infrastructure that is within Abi today, like that social operating system.
00:44:42 · Vidit Agarwal
[00:44:42] S0: Well, to connect it back to our earlier conversation on China, I've been told, like, in China, there's companies that have built robots that do cooking and cleaning and can fold clothes and a lot of that stuff, which I know in The US is a big focus where it's getting a lot of funding, where it's still at trial stage. But in China, it seems to still... It it seems to be... Have been adopted in industry. Right?
00:45:03 · Grace Brown
[00:45:03] S1: Yeah. I... The interesting thing about robotics that I think some people also forget is, like, the culture of the nation or the country and the developers also get built into the products that you build. And China's definitely years ahead of most Western societies in terms of hardware development. Their manufacturing IP and skill sets is far beyond pretty much every country, like the quality, the reliability, the speed. So they are building a lot of hardware products much faster, much cheaper than you can get done anywhere else. So it's a huge advantage. But particularly when it comes to the social infrastructure and the social intelligence layer, it does need to be... Like, it it... The culture of where you're building it does need to be considered in that stack because people value... Like, how we read... Even if you think about driving, how you would drive on the roads in Australia, there are differences to how you would drive on the roads in America. Or even driving in San Francisco and New York is a very different dynamic. We have these people have these, like, social understandings of what's appropriate, when to turn, when to speed, and it's different country to country. And that's even more that's even more significant and true when it comes to interacting with people. So I also say all the time, a lot of the values of founders, of teams, and developers, the values that they have and their worldviews actually get translated into the products that they build. And that's why I say it's also a really... Like, you almost have to think about what do these teams value because the products... The values that they have get translated into the products that they build, and the products that you ship become the world that you create. And so it is... While it's exciting and it's a lot of fun and it's a massive opportunity, I always say it's also a responsibility to do it right.
00:46:46 · Vidit Agarwal, Grace Brown
[00:46:46] S0: Totally. And I think this is a very topical area that is being... There's a bit of light being shined on it, Is how does this go? I think even with a lot of the AI LMs that are being talked about is they're being shaped by our biases and our judgments and our restrictions as humans. So they actually become replicas of us. So that'll be really interesting. Two areas I thought we could touch on is one, I'm really fascinated to talk about your growth journey as the CEO and building the company. Think that that is something people say you've reflected a lot on. And I think you've invested time in building people around you, not building, but finding people around you that can help you with that. And two is the fundraising part. I think you've had a fascinating journey on the fundraising side. Where do you want to start? The CEO growth or fundraising? [00:47:34] S1: Let's start with the CEO growth. What are your questions there?
00:47:34 · Grace Brown, Vidit Agarwal
[00:47:34] S1: Let's start with the CEO growth. What are your questions there? [00:47:38] S0: Okay. Well, that is such a... There's so much we could cover and I feel like that could be an interview in itself. But maybe a broader question is how do you reflect on scaling the company because your company is not a traditional company in that you can sit behind a laptop and vibe code and ship all around the world, right? You've got hardware, as we just talked about. You've also moved from Australia to San Francisco. Maybe that maybe that can be... Because I feel that's an inflection point for you. Curious if you agree. Like, how do you think the... What did you have to unlearn when you left Australia and moved to San Francisco as co founder and CEO of your company?