The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
01:00:10 · Vidit Agarwal
[01:00:10] S0: Totally. And then you don't digress. Totally totally... And I think also just the the gender side. Right? It'd be great to see a female founder killing it in that space. Right? I think that's something a lot of people talk about is there's a lot of male energy in that space. I think you're coming that path as well. I want to come to the fundraise aspect, then we can move to Rapidify Sprint to finish up. The fundraising one is so interesting, because you've had so many, so many changes over time, right? And I think things now seem to be on the right path. And I believe there's further announcements around the corner in good ways. Maybe again, to connect it to The US side, I like to think and other people think that really opened up the possibilities is you moving to San Francisco, raising from Forerunner, getting that capital, but also getting that support. Do you agree with that view?
01:01:03 · Grace Brown
[01:01:03] S1: I agree. I agree from, yes, from a utility perspective and capital and resource perspective, it has unlocked a lot. But similar to the Vogue competition, the biggest unlock for me was less the resources that it came with and more the people. And not the people as in their network, but the people and how they shape my worldview and my belief in what I'm doing. And we mentioned this before we have the call, but, like, Yuri, who led our round, she's one of the first individuals who I had met who, from a... From just very few conversations, understood how grand and significant our vision is. I think I get caught... I get... Particularly in the early days of Andromeda, I caught in debates and conversations at a much lower altitude than really what Andromeda is. On the surface, you know, people understandably assume we're this robot for aged care and, you know, what... They think about the term of aged care. They think about this application, this vertical. By the way, I think this market in itself is gonna be massive, like, just on its own. But then if you really get to the core of, like I said, why are we building this company? Why are we creating Abi? You see it across, like, Gen Alpha, Gen z. People want technology that doesn't come with all the distraction and the noise. Some people are so anti tech now that they actually wanna remove the technology entirely from their lives because it's distracting. It's taking away from the humanness. Whereas Abi from day one has been created as not technology that comes with all the other crap, but something that can actually be more whimsical, a bit more joyful, and create that utopia that, you know, technology was always there for. It can really go two ways. Right? Everyone's so scared of this dystopian science fiction future where robots are gonna have this revolution and dehumanize us all because science fiction is what shared that with us. But it doesn't have to be that way. And I think to the point before, a lot of the players in this space are feeding into this stereotype. And Abi and a lot of our motivations has been an attempt at showing people, you know, a different future for what technology could be and the role that it plays in our lives. And that is... That might sound a little bit nebulous to some people, but that has been the driver from us from day one, like creating an Abi to...
01:03:23 · Grace Brown, Vidit Agarwal
Creating something that could keep us company and fill a void that otherwise might be left empty. And Yuri got that just from two conversations with her. And so I think having someone else be able to feel like... Yeah. Like you said, like, you have to be delusionally confident in where you're going, But at least having someone validate that delusion makes you feel... I don't know. It just makes... It... It's like a spring. It makes you go so much faster. [01:03:51] S0: Yeah. It's so interesting. Right? Because if you recap your journey, in my words, is early on, you were fighting for to be in the room metaphorically, you were trying to raise a bit of money, you were trying to get it out the door, you're trying to find a team. Whereas now it feels like you've gone from almost survival mode to scaling mode, right, where you've got the capital, you seem to have got the team. Yes, you're still early in many ways, but you also have some runs under your belt. [01:04:20] S1: Mhmm. [01:04:21] S0: Is that how it feels in your head? Like, you've moved from survival mode to scaling mode now?
01:04:26 · Grace Brown
[01:04:26] S1: Even when you were describing that, I was like, interesting outside perspective. We're definitely beyond the survival mode of the first two years, but I don't know. I feel like as founders, maybe you always feel like you're in survival mode. Earlier this year, I was saying to one of my friends, I was like, at this point in time, I thought I'd be out of the dog years. And they looked at me and they were like, Grace, like, the dog years are, like, within you. You know? Because, yeah, that feeling, that paranoia, that panic, that, you know, it's still there and it still feels like survival mode. That's actually been a lot of my incentive for reading all the philosophy that I've read recently because I'm like, I'm just in this state. And one, I don't think it's sustainable or particularly... I don't wanna say it's unhealthy, but it's not always pleasant. But I've just been in this state of we can't stop. We can't let go, this this intense urgency. And even like you said, with the runs under the belt, it doesn't ease any of that. Maybe sometimes there are moments, like brief moments where I'm like, we got past that one, but but it doesn't go away. And last week, I was sitting on my couch, you know, as you alluded to, where we're closing a funding round at this moment. And I was sitting in my couch a week ago just sinking into it, thinking about, oh my god. This journey is going to be so long and so arduous. And because I've met now with so many founders and CEOs who are many years ahead of me and I'm hearing their challenges, I'm like, god. We have such a long fucking journey to go through, and it's not what I signed up for. I don't know if I'd changed my mind, but, like, it's... Yeah. So it's it's... I don't know if I'd say I'm out of survival mode, but it doesn't feel like it even if we objectively may or may not be.
01:06:14 · Vidit Agarwal
[01:06:14] S0: I completely hear you and I'm nodding furiously because one of the chats me and my wife have, I met her just starting my company and I've been doing it for almost seven years now full time. She used to say to me that at the start you were paranoid and now you're still paranoid. It's in different ways. It's exactly what you said at the start, I was starting the company with my own life savings, I had no brand, no profile, nothing to lose, when now it's like, there's a lot to lose. And that creates a level of paranoia where it's like there's expectations and there's reputation and there's feedback. And someone said it to me really well the other day, we were looking at when I said the other day, a couple of months ago, we were looking at launching a new product. And I reached out to a few people for their opinions. And one of them said to me, they said, Vidit, you seem to be looking for a safe landing here. Did you do that early on when you were launching new things? I said, No, I just launched it because I believed in it. And they're like, Well, maybe that's why it worked, was now you're looking for the world to approve it before you put it out there. And this person actually said to me, he said, As you get more successful, you should have more risk appetite. And I said, That is funny, like it's easy for you to say that, but I also have more to lose internally and externally where there's more paranoia. And you see this in big companies, right? Why do small companies innovate things more than big companies? Because big companies, not that my company is big in terms of Google or anything, is there's a lot more downside risk, right? Whereas a small company has less of that, so they come in and eat the big company's lunch metaphorically. You see this all the time in life, like you've seen this for decades and centuries where this has happened every five, ten years. It's something I often think about is exactly what he said that story we tell ourselves and kind of also why you and I are founders, right? Like I always say it's because I got a huge chip in my shoulder. And that chip in the shoulder only gets bigger in some ways, it never really disappears. So, no, it's a long answer to your comment, but I... Not an answer. Long, like, reflection to your comment, but I agree. Yeah.
01:08:14 · Grace Brown, Vidit Agarwal
[01:08:14] S1: And this actually reminds me of one thing that currently makes no sense to me, and maybe it will in two months. Maybe it will by the time this comes out, and I'll be like, you know... But, like, I've been thinking recently, what am I so scared of? Like, why am I paranoid? What am I scared of losing? What... Let's say the worst thing happened. Like, what what is it that that's... That I'm so fearful of? And when I look around at other robotics companies that are my peers that I've shut down, like, I'm like, okay. Maybe is it losing the company and the company having to go under, which I've seen more commonly in San Francisco. And then what happens to the founders is, like, they they end up just becoming, like, robotics engineers at Google DeepMind or OpenAI or somewhere, and they pay... They're paid, like, 1 to $2,000,000. And to me, it's nothing wrong with that path at all, but I'm like... To me, it's like, objectively on paper, that actually sounds like a much better path than the founder path. If you think about it, you're paid, like, a 1 to $2,000,000 salary. You're far less stressed. Like, these founders that I know, they're not stressed like they were when they were running their companies. But to me, it's like, I don't want that. I want this. I don't know why, even though objectively, this might not even seem [01:09:15] S0: Yeah.