Sources with Alex Heath
00:19:42 · Tony Zhao, Ellis Hamburger, Alex Heath
[00:19:42] S0: Yeah, Like, it's a fun journey. [00:19:45] S1: Yeah. Well, I feel like you netted out with something kind of perfect. I mean, my favorite brands and taglines are always subverting something unexpected. And Sunday is like the day of the week people hate the most. And I think there are a lot of people who would say, oh, we wanna avoid the negativity. And it's like, well, not if you're gonna solve it, you know? And I think it worked out well. I mean, was that the intention behind the name? [00:20:14] S0: You think about, like, laundry and you think about, like, Monday. Right? And it's it's actually bad if you are worried about Monday while at the same time you need to do all your chores. So, yeah, I think our goal is to give the Sundays back to people, so they can they can actually enjoy it just like Saturday. [00:20:32] S1: At fuckmonday.com. We're preempting with sunday.com. [00:20:36] S2: Tony, was was Ellis's idea Saturday, or what did he contribute? Was... Did he have you on Friday at one point? [00:20:44] S0: Well, Ellis has been really helpful. I think we... We've been talking to each other, like, way before we are, even planning to be out of stealth. Right? Remember I we were having this early conversation about how we should position ourselves as a company, what kind of vibes, like, our brand should have, and why we should not be building another Terminator robot and try to put it in people's homes. I think we align very well on this on this front.
00:20:44 · Tony Zhao, Ellis Hamburger
[00:20:44] S0: Well, Ellis has been really helpful. I think we... We've been talking to each other, like, way before we are, even planning to be out of stealth. Right? Remember I we were having this early conversation about how we should position ourselves as a company, what kind of vibes, like, our brand should have, and why we should not be building another Terminator robot and try to put it in people's homes. I think we align very well on this on this front. [00:21:08] S1: Yeah. We were talking about helpers, not Terminators. But, I mean, that was honestly just, like, full trust at that point because Tony had no robot and no brand at that point. And I was just like, if it's gonna look like a helper, then, yeah, let's let's do that. And I feel like it it turned out to be so cute. And I've been playing so many, like, Nintendo games with my four year old. I've come to realize that, like, iconic oval shaped Kirby eye shape that you're kind of borrowing from a little bit or, like, the eyes on all of... I mean, Nintendo puts those eyes on everything, whether in Mario Wonder it's like a pipe or a star or anything else. How did arrive at that? Who who designed the the face?
00:21:51 · Tony Zhao
[00:21:51] S0: Yeah. So we we have an industrial designer in house that did, like, all the designs. But I I think the funny thing here is, like, it almost feels, slightly controversial that now the robot has a face because most of the human robots actually does not have a face. If I saw the g one unitary robot, it's it's hollow. There's nothing. Or it's like a fake... Like a black mask. Right? So I think we're we're almost doing the obvious thing that, like, if there's going to be robots everywhere, then you talk to them. They should have a face so that you can actually make eye contact. And... But, again, like, you know, all the great work coming from Shai, our industrial designer, and he kind of, like, I saw the evolution of this whole design kind of starting from the hand, from the gloves that we're making that we probably should talk, like, a lot more about in this podcast as well. But kind of seeing it... Kind of design style propagated to the arms, which are also, like, kind of rectangular and and smooth, and to the to the body and eventually the face and and the hats.
00:22:56 · Ellis Hamburger, Tony Zhao, Alex Heath
[00:22:56] S1: The other thing that jumped out at me from our collab, which feels like a million years ago at this point, was that your emphasis on time, I think was a little different than a lot of folks in tech. I mean, I don't wanna like throw anybody under the bus, but it's like, I've just worked with so many AI productivity apps that talk about saving you time. And for the most part, when you're at work saving time, you're just gonna do more work, right? Whereas when you're saving time at home, it's almost like, oh, I could just go do something else now. It's like almost a completely different paradigm that tech isn't usually touching with that proposition. [00:23:34] S0: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of the thing that actually people don't want to do. Nobody want to do their chores. And, yeah, I think they are just... It would be kind of ridiculous if the doctors, Autumn, I'm a journalist or, like, scientists are replaced by AIs, and we are left with all the chores. It just doesn't make sense. [00:23:59] S2: Hey. Hey. Hey. Journalist replaced by AI. Oh god. [00:24:04] S1: Alex, you're gonna be you're gonna be stuck doing laundry. That's gonna be your full time profession. It's gonna be a subscription service. [00:24:11] S2: My wife makes me do laundry, so it's, you know, it's nothing new. I'll happily do it. It's fine.
00:24:11 · Alex Heath, Ellis Hamburger, Tony Zhao
[00:24:11] S2: My wife makes me do laundry, so it's, you know, it's nothing new. I'll happily do it. It's fine. [00:24:17] S1: Yeah. Speaking of laundry, my very first job was at Urban Outfitters. I don't know if either of you know this, but I was scolded early on for not folding shirts well enough. And I will just like take that insecurity to my grave and like I go so fucking hard folding my shirts now. Like I started learning to fold with a board. I don't know if you guys even know that there is a folding board. [00:24:42] S2: Wait. You you do that? You actually fold with a board? [00:24:45] S1: No. I'm good enough now. I'm a 10 x folder now. But like, I I mean, I was wondering, like, Tony, is there a specific folding methodology that you are adopting? Are there any haters for this methodology? It's kind of weirdly controversial depending on where you are in the world, how you fold your shirts. [00:25:04] S0: Yeah. I think folding is... I think relatively people agree on what is a good fold looking like. It doesn't like Well, [00:25:11] S1: you haven't worn it Urban Outfitters, but go ahead. But
00:25:11 · Ellis Hamburger, Tony Zhao
[00:25:11] S1: you haven't worn it Urban Outfitters, but go ahead. But [00:25:14] S0: I I think the the place you have the most amount of attention is how, like, dishwasher should be loaded, Essentially, like, especially when there are, like, a a ton of dishes. Right? But I think when we we actually need to design these tasks when we teach the robot, it's not just like, hey. We got a lot of people, collect data, whatever you want it to be, and then we just put the... Whatever the end result is and... Into the robot. That's not what we do. And it's actually a a big trade off between whether the specific way we fold is easy to learn for the robot and whether on the product side is actually something people want. And at the same time, it shouldn't be, like like, ridiculously difficult that it might take, like, infinite data to to learn. And I think we see that commonly that when we make all these decisions about a robot, it always tends to be, like, three or four categories of things that we need to jointly consider. And, like, even how we fold the t shirt was, like, a big part of it. [00:26:17] S1: I know there's drama around the dishwasher methodology as you cited. I actually, I found a meme online that I see go around every so often. It was from Twitter. This person said, in every partnership, there is a person who stacks the dishwasher like a Scandinavian architect, that's me. And the other person who stacks the dishwasher like a raccoon on meth. I would apologize to my wife, but she's not listening.