Episode Summary

Adrian Macneil grew up packing kiwifruit in rural New Zealand, now he’s building the core infrastructure powering the future of robotics. After leading engineering teams at Cruise and Coinbase, Adrian co-founded Foxglove, a developer platform used by robotics companies worldwide, from autonomous tractors to warehouse bots.

In this episode, Adrian shares how Foxglove emerged from an internal Cruise demo, why robotics is finally having its “PC moment,” and what it really takes to build a startup that lasts. We cover:

• How Cruise helped pioneer self-driving cars (and what went wrong post-acquisition)

• Why developer tools are the missing layer holding robotics back

• Lessons from Coinbase, Cruise, and scaling teams from 30 to 1,200

• The case for Kiwi founders to leave New Zealand, at least for a while

• What robotics startups can learn from the rise of SaaS

• The value of building boring robots that just move rice

We also dive into Adrian’s early days hacking e-commerce in Thailand, how government jobs don’t prepare you for startups, and why he believes the robotics industry will 100x in the next decade.

Time Stamps

03:30 When an internal tool became a startup idea

07:42 Cruise vs GM: Startup chaos inside a legacy giant

12:47 Foxglove’s customer base: From tractors to warehouses

16:15 Why Foxglove won’t build robots — and what they’re building instead

21:54 The “1980s PC” moment for robotics

27:41 If not Foxglove — what robotics startup would Adrian build?

30:15 From kiwifruit packhouses to automation inspiration

36:35 Why ambitious builders still need to go to Silicon Valley

41:36 The 10-year mindset needed to build a real company

47:50 How the Kiwi diaspora can supercharge the next generation

Resources

🧠 Adrian Macneil’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrianmacneil/

🛠️ Foxglove – Developer tools for robotics: https://foxglove.dev

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Adrian, it’s a pleasure to have you on the diaspora.nz podcast. We’re fortunately, we’re in New Zealand. You’re actually, we are

in New Zealand. Yeah. Coming live and

direct from

Cambridge.

Yeah. The first ever diaspora episode recorded from from hometown nz for me. Excited. Have you, you are building developer tools for robotics, for visualizing data for people building robotic applications.

That’s awesome. I can’t wait to talk more about it. Tell me about the moment that you realized this was possible though.

Before start. I’d been doing Fox 12, about four years now. I was at. Cruise Automation, which was the subsidiary of General Motors building, self-driving cars there. And we did every, every Friday there were demos.

Basically the team would get together and show off cool things that had been built during the week. And one of our, one of our tools that we had built at, at Cruise specifically, was a sort of visual debugging tool. You know, a couple years in, it was one of these Friday demos. And we’re, and we’re sitting there and the guys are demoing some features and I’m like, this thing is way too good to be an internal tool, right?

Like this is just one, one of the specifically internal tools that we built. This thing is, getting out of hand was way too good to be an internal tool. Like I think there’s something here. This, this could be a company so. That was kind of the genesis of, of, of the idea that eventually became Fox Glove.

Brilliant. I realize such a strong connection. What was the process of, of then, like the realization of leaving your, your role there when and, and were you allowed to bring team members with you or sort of building a team from scratch? What was the, the, I’ve gotta take the leap to build this independently moment.

Yeah. I mean, there was probably still another year or two before that ultimately became a, a company, but I always had the, I was always planning to go into a startup. After cruise. You know, I spent five years at Cruise and I knew that the next thing that I would do would be a startup. I was thinking about what that was going to be.

I always was really interested in developer tools, especially, I’ve always been someone that believes in building the machine that builds the machine. Yeah. And so as, as I was kind of coming to the, the end of my time at Cruise there and thinking, you know, how would we actually build this out? As it had happened, the team that was working on this, I wasn’t directly working on this project.

It was one of the teams that was reporting to me, but that team had already open sourced some of their core, uh, some of the core things that they had built there. So we had access to some of the source code and, and things that had been kind of explicitly released by crews. And then as far as the team goes, I think the early.

First four or five people at Fox Club all came from Cruise, but they had all already left. I think they had either, you know, either left a, a year or two ago, or one of them maybe had left like a, a month ago maybe. But, and in general in California and. You cannot, like, sort of non-compete agreements are, are illegal or unenforceable.

So companies can’t prevent you from specifically hiring people that have worked for a competitor or something like that in the past. They can prevent you from soliciting. So they can say, oh, you, you sign a non-solicit agreement. You can’t actively come after employees that work at your former employer for, you know, a year or something generally.

Yeah.

But it’s perfectly fine if they leave or if they reach out to you or, you know, there’s a lot of kind of gray area of. It’s totally fine if they reach out to me. So

it’s a fa, I mean, that’d be a fascinating thread to pull maybe later or another day. But the, the innovation that’s enabled by just the freer movement of, of labor and skills and people among ideas and companies, it’s almost like a more competitive market for talent.

Right?

Right. Yeah. The entire Bay Area is built on top of people leaving companies and starting their own. I mean, this was the founding, literally the founding of Silicon Valley, right. Was like, you know, these guys that, whatever it was, Shockly, semiconductor, the traitor eight, right? Yeah, exactly. They leave, they started coming and.

Of those guys, you know, a bunch of, you know, some of ’em go after start Intel and a bunch of these other companies and that, that got the whole thing going. So Fox

five was 2021. It was, uh, not that long ago on the calendar, but it was a long time ago in AI development and in sort of what’s happened at the pace of, of development in this industry.

Pre-chat amputee. Yeah, that’s a, a almost a b, BC and, and AC type of thing. If you think about. The, the fundamental assumptions that you made when you started the company, how much of what you believed then to be true? Did you, did you validate or invalidate or how has it, how has it evolved since then? And maybe tell us about exactly what you’re doing as well.

’cause that would, that would help.

Yeah. Yeah. So broadly, you can think of what we’re building as a developer platform for robotics. Um, and when we started that. Four years ago, that was a pretty, that was a pitch that was not sort of super common, I guess. I went to a lot of investors in 2021 and pitched them on, you know, we wanna build developer tools for robotics and developer tools for the robotics industry.

David Booth 04:30

the interest rates are zero, right? And the VC dollars are flowing thick and fast.

And so it was, you know, it was easy to get started with a seed round in 2021, but there was definitely not, uh, anywhere near as much interest in the, the big thing besides, you know, obviously the huge thing that’s changed in the last four or five years is, is chat, PT and LMS and generative ai.

That obviously happened, but the other thing that has happened in parallel, especially over the last one to two years, has been a huge uptick in interest in robotics, manufacturing, reshoring, and so you could see these things coming five years ago, it was obvious, at least for me, leaving crews. I left Cruz with this really strong conviction that, that there’s huge potential for robotics and autonomy in the world.

But, but it happened, right? We got to a point where we can drive cars around in, in, in San Francisco with no one in the front seat, which is insane. And then I sit there thinking, and especially maybe this is part of, part of coming from New Zealand, right? But you just think about like. All of the jobs and all of the things that could be automated that are way easier than driving around San Francisco, right?

You’re like, why don’t we have self-driving tractors yet? Why don’t we have self-driving home laws? Why don’t we have self-driving forklifts? And like, I, I think, you know, maybe that’s sort of growing up in New Zealand and working in qit pack houses and working on orchards and having seen some of this, you think back and you think, wow, why, why haven’t we automated this stuff yet?

So I think I had very strong conviction, uh, at that, that 0.4 or five years ago about the potential for fraud. Autonomy because I had seen what was possible because I say, Hey, we can drive around San Francisco in a self-driving car with no one in the front seat. This is crazy. But I also very strongly felt that the industry was being held back by lack of off the shelf tooling, off the shelf infrastructure.

That was, that was part of the reason for Fox gov. I, I knew from cruise that. 80% of the software engineers at crews are not building the algorithms that are driving, right? 80% of them are building all the infrastructure, the data infrastructure, and the fleet infrastructure and the, you know, how do you, how do you learn from all of this data that you’re gathering and figure out the incidents and building the simulation and building the verification and validation.

And so this huge kind of bottom of the iceberg that it takes to get self drive car on the road. And that was only possible because crews raised billions and billions of dollars. We hired literally like thousands of people. We had at least a thousand software engineering. Like you know, the software engineer was at least a thousand people when I left and then got quiet in the gm.

And you were there through the GM

era as well.

Uh, GM actually acquired Cruise very early on, so I joined, um, sort of weeks after that in 2016. So, GM acquired Cruise when the team was about 30 people. I joined, uh, my co-founder of Foxwell was there prior to that position. That’s how I knew the company. But they, they got acquired in 2016 with a very small team, but GM just started pumping a ton of money into, uh, super bullish on self-driving technology.

Tripling and everyone’s showing up. Kind of, it’d be a fascinating

example of a company that’s gone through that hyperscale era after the acquisition. Most cases that’s, you do that and then you get acquired after you’re big. Um, I’d be really curious. I mean, there’s so many different ways to take this conversation right now.

We’re gonna do this first and then we’ll get back to general Robotics and we’re gonna go back into the, the Kiwi Fruit Pack houses in the early days as well. But, but just while we’re on the topic, um. Did it feel like being inside of a startup, inside of gm, was there like a corporate shell that had to be broken or was it, you know, purely independent?

Oh yeah. The early days were crazy, especially at first. So yeah, first of all, yeah, it’s very unusual for, I. Acquisitions to be successful and mean Cruise ultimately was not successful, that GM just decided to kill it a few months ago. Finally, you know, it sold into,

was, was it not successful due to internal factors or the innovation or the rate of pace, or, or was it external factors?

I mean, they, um, there was an incident on the road in San Francisco. There was a few regulatory problems.

I mean, it’s, it’s ultimately because G’s not the right vehicle to do this, right? It’s just like you have a very traditional, very risk averse, very procedurally oriented. You have a company that’s, you know, a hundred years old and has dialed themselves into producing cars that scale and optimizing things and optimizing supply chain and bringing together a lot of components.

Uh, most car companies, uh, at least in, in the west, and companies like gm, RA company full of project managers, right? They’re not actually kind of building really many or any of the components themselves. They’re sourcing a whole lot of components, integrating them, building a final product. Um, so they have very long development cycles.

Very kind of waterfall development and, and ultimately they are, are very risk averse. And so I think there were always forces from very early on in GM at Cruise. You know, like I said, I joined just post acquisition, but we are a tiny company. GM has whatever, a hundred thousand employees or whatever Cruise has 30.

They show up and they’re like, all right, we’re gonna roll out, you know, windows laptops to everybody and you’re gonna be on the GM firewall and you know, you are not allowed to use AWS like, we don’t believe in the cloud coming. We’ve got a data center that works perfectly well. So, you know, the early days there was.

Yeah, there was a lot of forces from GM that were like, okay, great. We acquired these guys. We’re gonna absorb them into the mothership. To our credit, Mary Barra, the gm, CEO, was super. Sort of, uh, you know, gave us a lot of shelfer and so early cruise and, you know, it took a lot of sort of, I think fighting by the cruise leadership and things as well.

But, um, crews managed to, to make ourselves independent, you know, came to a bit of a showdown, but ultimately it was like, yeah, leave cruise alone. They can do all their own HR and hiring and it, and they can use AWS and just let them do their thing. Um, and so. Once we got past that stage, um, we actually had relatively little interact, like most of the crews team had very relatively little interaction with tm.

We had a lot of freedom, um, to work, but as it came to later on and when crews started running into, you know, real, uh. Sort of scaling challenges and they had things like the accident. Um, you know, that’s when it all comes crashing down. Right? And it’s like there’s people in GM that just can’t take that level of, of brand risk and you know, to put it charitably, like they’ve got a hundred year old, very established brand, they can’t have you going around like sort of ruining that with a, with sort of a moving quickly

attitude to get to set up a, a little segue back, back out of the weeds.

‘cause this is fascinating, but. I’m curious if you’d say autonomous driving is like a, a form of specialized applied robotics, and then you say, well, general robotics would be automating anything. And then what your, one of your insights was like, well, actually we can take some of the lessons learned, the technology built within this one form of specialized robotics to others.

So really curious about the other emergence. So putting self-driving aside the other emergent forms of robotics or automation that you are, that you’ve first seen like the most adoption within and that you are most excited about. In the

future, I think coming out of crews had mostly a gut, a gut feel that this had to happen, right?

Of, uh, it wasn’t something, you know, a few data points. I could look around and see a few startups, but I didn’t have a lot of connections outside of the AV industry. I talked to a lot of people about other AV companies. Autonomous vehicle companies and generally figured out that we were all building the same thing.

You know, go to talk to Tesla and go to Weill and Zoox and Aurora, and I was like, oh, you guys built that tool as well. Oh you, you know, we all invented the same sort of stack that it took to build autonomy and it all ended up looking quite similar. And I had sort of, I would say, a strong gut feeling that the stack that we had built was generally applicable to autonomy.

Anytime you’ve got sort of senses and actuation, you’ve got, you know, something out there in the real world that needs to take in a bunch of data and make some autonomous decisions. It’s not getting sent back to the cloud and happening there. And then those autonomous decisions are gonna have actions that are important.

And so. I would say when I, you know, I first started, it was more of a gut feel that, hey, we built the self-driving car, but we would need this exact same stack if we were building a self-driving lawn mower or a self-driving forklift or something. Right. Or a self-driving tractor like. And, and also a lot of robots in industrial settings.

So like warehouse logistics, manufacturing, where you’ve got manipulation type problems, you’ve got robot arms and things. Yeah. It, it all still comes down to like, hey, there’s a bunch of sensors, figure some things out, make some actions happen locally. And so yeah, it was general sense that that would’ve passed.

So was there a first customer or

was there like, what’s the. Uh, one of your customers today that you, you could tell us about, that you’re most excited about?

We have customers across self-driving, handful of self-driving companies, but I wouldn’t say that’s like a majority or anything. There’s the, there are self-driving companies followed by agriculture, robotics companies, so people doing things like tractor autonomy, but also, uh, autonomous sprayers and things like that.

So John Deer are leaning in really heavily on this. They have a subsidiary that does a lot of sort of r and d around autonomy, around automating sprayers, automating tractors, things like this. There are a lot of in indoor, like warehouse and logistics type things. So there’s a lot of people building robots to move packages around warehouses.

And there’s also a lot of like, um, package sorting, pallet unloading, loading, uh, truck unloading loading, which are interesting problems ‘cause you’ve gotta sort of stack a bunch of arbitrary sized boxes on a pallet. Are you seeing more,

maybe the answer’s all the above, but are you seeing more people who are using your tools for their own purposes?

Like, I’m Amazon and I want to do better package loading, unloading, or separately, is it like vertical specific robotics companies who are building these things? I. And then another extension of that was like, why not do some of this yourself? Like, could you ever go into the business of developing a self-driving forklift and marketing and retailing that product and servicing the customer?

And what’s stopping you from, or how do you think about those strategic paths? So

yeah, good question. Most of our customers are not building it. Fold themselves. I would say John Deer is an example of that. They’re building it for themselves. But, and you know, we do have like Amazon shop, they’re building a lot of the, but bulk of our customers are people building robots that they are going to either sell or, or lease to, to end customers.

So the question of like. Well, Fox Club is so good at robotics. Why don’t you guys just like go build self-driving forklifts or something? I guess, you know, our position in the market is, is as a platform play, right? Like we wanna build horizontal tools and infrastructure. And most you think about, my analogy is, is if you wanna build a SaaS startup today, right?

You don’t take on a lot of. Kind of r and d risk, right? So like most SaaS business, most vertical SaaS businesses today from a technology perspective are gluing together a bunch of off the shelf components and like focusing on product market fit. And that’s a good thing, right? You want most, most startups, a bunch of people can get together in a garage and they can like, you know, glue some glue, some existing off the shelf.

Open source stuff together, commercial stuff together. They can do their hosting on a bunch of commercial off the shelf platforms. They can do their, you know, infrastructure and their observability and they grow a bunch of open source frameworks, glue it all together and like focus on product market fit, focus on go to market, figure out like, what are you building, who are you selling it to?

And how are you, how are you selling to them? Um, that’s, that’s possible in SaaS today, in robotics today, that is not possible. In robotics, it’s the complete opposite. Usually it’s like. Well, if you can make a robot do that, that’d be amazing. Sure. Well, but in an instant, can you make a robot do that? So like most robotic startups today are taking on a massive amount of r and d risk, and the product market fit is like blindingly obvious, or at least it will be if they can make the robot do the thing that, you know, reliably that they, that they promised to.

So, so I guess, you know, bringing it back to Fox, like the entire SaaS industry risks on top of, you know, a whole pyramid of, of. Existing kind of horizontal layers that make that possible for people to go do the vertical things. And so that’s why we’re trying to unlock in robotics is we are trying to make it easier.

And our, our mission is to increase the GDP of robotics. We wanna grow the pie for everyone. We are not going to go and take on, you know, some I. Particular application, we do want to move further up the stack and, you know, make it easier and easier to build autonomy. But we don’t wanna integrate as and, and kind of vertical robotics play a, you know, play a different market.

I, I like, um, you know, bill Gates had a quote about platforms, right? It’s like a good, a good platform, like creates way more value above the platform than it, than it captures itself. Brands. So,

so to, I mean, to apply, you want me to fall directly? You’re building a e-commerce company. You don’t reinvent a storefront.

You use Shopify or like you assess Yeah. You don’t reinvent payments, you use Stripe, you don’t reinvent the database. You use super base something,

right? And 10 years ago that was like, I mean, or 15 years ago, you wanted to build an eCommerce company. Quite often you were just literally writing the eCommerce software yourself, right?

Like wow, good luck. But thing, or at least you’re getting your, you’re installing word person, you’re gluing together some plugs. Now you just gotta Shopify and you don’t have to. And you’re also. Even the, the logistics side of e-commerce store today, you don’t even worry about that, right? There’s a whole kind of like three pls just sorted for you sometimes.

Uh, for software startups specifically, there are services you use when you’re small because it doesn’t make sense to invest in the RD to do those things now. But when you get bigger, you say, great. Like now this is a really. Core part of my business, it makes sense to in-house this, so it’d be like a de platforming risk in the lingo.

Is that true of Foxglove? Like is there a, I mean obviously John Deere’s using it today and Amazon, so there’s, you’ve clearly got really big customers, but is there a world in which, like they use you to accelerate their early development, but then they, maybe there’s a risk to them not owning that part of their stack themselves?

As a role that hasn’t been a problem for us. There is a little bit of divergence and kind of feature requests you get from small, smaller startups versus larger companies. Larger companies generally want something that can be a nice kind of point solution and solve a problem, but that integrates well into their existing very custom stack, whereas startups generally want something that is a little more fully featured and just kind of solves all of the pieces for you.

Um, so there’s a little bit of product tension there, but by and large that rule of people kind of outgrowing a tool. It doesn’t happen, like, as a rule, you don’t see that as much in developer tools. You don’t see Yeah. You know, it’s a, it’s a tool that you use, right? And so you don’t see as many people, you know, if people don’t like, decide they’re gonna build their own GitHub replacement ’cause they got to a certain site, mean Google did, obviously.

But like, apart from Google and Facebook level scale, everyone else just, you know, use GitHub or GitLab. You don’t go and decide at some point that you’ve outgrown your, like, version control system and you need to build, build one from scratch. Um, so it’s, it’s a little more like that. I guess. It’s, it’s easier.

Because developer tools, developer tools are a great entry point into companies that like a great feature because they’re generally not on the critical path at first. Right? And so like that gets your foot on the door. That means that you, you, you can build trust with the company without having to come in and say, Hey, you know, put us on your critical path from day one.

Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. If you, uh, if it’s accurate to then say like, if you wanted to be the Shopify or the stripe of like robotics infrastructure, both of those companies have. A particular piece of what they do, which is really, really hard. Like stripe fraud detection is really, really hard to do yourself.

Is there a piece of what you do today, which you said like, this is, we’re gonna focus our energies on cracking that. ‘cause once we’ve cracked that it makes us that much more defensible or that much more valuable or something else? What, what is that piece?

Yeah, so the core thing for us right now, the biggest part of our, what we do today is, is observability for robotics.

We help people with logging data on robot. We help data, people get data off the robot and Yep. Getting that off a robot is, is a very interesting problem because most robots are operating in factories or field, so they have very little wifi and they’re recording tons of data ‘cause they have multiple cameras and multiple other sensors and so they’re always recording way more data than you could possibly offload.

So selectively offloading interesting pieces, giving that data in the cloud and then using that to go and debug and figure out problems that we have a whole. So multimodal visualization to a whole browser-based visualization tool that lets you go back and look at that snippet and figure out why did the robot fall down the stairs?

Why did we back into this pallet? Why did the self-driving car slam on the brakes? You know, whatever it is, you wanna understand why the robot made that decision. So you want to be able to go back and look frame by frame at what we getting in the cameras, what were we detecting in the scene? What did we decide about this?

And so this whole piece, I would say, uh, you know, the, the core value proposition there. Is not that any of that is rocket science, but it is a piece that, first of all, it takes a long time to build. Like we had teams and teams of people building us at crews and, and other, you know, other big companies like Jesser and, and things also have huge teams dedicated to this.

So to do it well takes more engineers than I. An entire, like many of our customers even have on, on their entire staff. So we can afford to do that ‘cause we can amortize it across a lot of companies. We, we can afford to do that. We can afford to build this. There’s also not skill sets that you quite often see, like a robotics, startup’s gonna go hire a bunch of robotics engineers.

Yeah. Robotics engineers as a role don’t love writing JavaScript and like building like super tight web wise, right? Like it’s just not, not kind of the core competencies.

They’ve got so many problems they’ve gotta solve already. Powertrain, you know, mechanical problem. Yeah,

I know exactly like this is my other thing, right?

Is another reason why we don’t see as much pressure for people to sort of in-house this thing is like. You built a SaaS company today, you hire a few full stack product engineers who can like glue shit together. And then you’ve got a product you can bring to market. You wanna bring your robotics company into market.

You need mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, you need robotics engineers, you know, some ML people. You need ML infrastructure people. You need backend people, you need front, you’ve got some web UI that you can connect to it. And then you also need an operations team because you’ve got, you know, you need to put these things and then you need, you know, go to market.

You need to figure out yourself. So it’s just like. The margins and robotics. There’s so many skills that you need to bring together. And so generally they’re pretty excited to, to offload anything they can.

We’re gonna, we’re gonna cast forward in time. And then I want to go back to the kiwi fruit. So gimme five years in the future, the May, maybe 10 years in the future, like pick a time at which you think the world really realize the potential.

What does that look like? To unpack that further, I say like, how do you think about labor productivity? How do you think about sort of the, the second order effects on society of everything you see now playing out.

Yeah, so where I think we are now is about 1980 PC industry, right? We’re at like, this is my analogy, is we’re at, you know, the late seventies, very early eighties of where PCs, you know, have just gotten to the point that they may be a little bit useful and a few enthusiasts are starting to buy.

I have a, you know, I mean, I guess if a lot of people have robot vacuums in their homes, but besides that. Like, not many people, uh, have general purpose robots in their home. I have like a humanoid and a robot dog, but they’re mostly, you know, remote control. We can’t do that much with them. Kids are terrified of them.

And the way people build software for robots isn’t, is now becoming very different than what it was even a few years ago. So as, as robotics picks up over the next decade, they’re going to get to a point where they’re very broadly useful and then they’re going to become very widely distributed. And so I, you know, my sort of.

Back at the envelope calculation as we probably within 20 years, there’ll be 20 billion robots in the world.

If you listen to, you know, Tesla say every house will have an optimist and that optimist will will be doing the dishes and folding the laundry and looking after the kids, and it’s basically like to what extent is that vision true or, or do you see them being more commercially applied first?

Or where are they showing up? What’s the tip of the, of the wedge?

There are already a lot of robots commercially, I would say, you know, without getting into the pros and cons of the humanoid form factor, like, I think that’s, that’s very interesting. For some tasks, and maybe broadly speaking, like legs versus wheels, right?

There are some tasks that legs are very good for, but legs by and large aren’t that useful in commercial settings and in, in like factories and warehouses because like, show me a warehouse and I’ll show you zero stairs. Like this is just, um, you know, Wes are very good in some environments, but then you get into outdoor environments, maybe legs useful.

But there are a lot of robots commercially around robots. You know, again, this is anything that can kind of sense, think, and act. So anything where this could be a fixed base robot that’s just an arm moving around doing things, which there’s a lot of that already today. Could be a mobile manipulator. So it’s driving around and it can pick up packages or, or put things down.

I think we will start to see over the next five years, robots breaking into homes. But they’re going to start out, not literally, but, you know, figuratively break it. Sorry. Breaking into the home market and literal room. You’re breaking into your hunts. Well, I mean, maybe we’re gonna start to see that, right?

But they’re going to be, it’s not gonna be an optimist in the first, right? Like that, first of all, it’s gonna take people a while to like come to terms with, uh, even a, you know, a five or six foot robot wandering around your house, but also. There are form factors that are probably a lot cheaper to build, like Optimus.

I don’t know what that costs, but it’s, it would be in the, like hundreds of thousands of dollars probably right now. Um, there are much cheaper form factors, but there are, for example, like a Robo Viking cleaners. Um, they already came out with ones at Cess this year that have like just a little arm on the top that can like move Lego out the way and things right.

I can just like kind of get things out of the way while it’s going and doing the vacuuming, so it can’t quite put them away yet. But you can see that form factor scaling up a little bit to the point that maybe you can sort of tell it to put some books back on the shelf and things like that, that we’re, that we’re not that far away.

I mean, technically that is possible today, and so we’re not that far from that being commercialized. I think we’re quite a way away from, so when I say robots and homes, it’s gonna be more like that initially, right? It’s gonna be a while before there’s like. And, uh, and TBD, if anyone actually wants like a four foot humanoid walking around serving them dinner, it’s like a little bit creepy when you see the videos and stuff.

Right. Now.

Is this space that you, you think there is an opportunity for people to build startups, ground up, assemble a team, raise some money, or is it. One that’s gonna be more likely owned by the big guys. So like from from Tesla to Amazon to the, you know, they’ve got the, the budgets, they’ve got the in-house engineering, they’ve got the distribution to get in every home very quickly.

Um, is this, I mean, it’s similar. A lot of trends like ai, you could argue a lot of the value is kind of accrue into the incumbents to the, the big tech companies.

Yes and no, though. I mean, a lot of the, yeah. My vision of the world is much closer to the SaaS industry today. I think vertical robotics is gonna look because just you think of all of these applications and we come back to kiwi fruit and farms and things like this.

There are so many niche applications. And so if we can make it possible for small teams to glue together, and this already happens, we have some customers that are, three people that are are, or one person even that have built their own platform and they’ve built the software and they’re out there doing real things.

So like today, um, the right people can already achieve this. With small teams, we, we wanna make that. Thousand times easier, right? We want, we want there to be tens of thousands of robotics startups that are, uh, and again, I come back to the early PC industry, right? So like early PC industry was very vertically integrated.

You had, you know, the Omega and the Commodore and the Apple two and it was, each one of those came with the software and the hardware and the operating system and the apps all kind of made by the same vendor. Um, and then through the eighties, this like massively commoditized and then you can go and buy a PC and you could get a motherboard and a CPU and, you know, some ISA cards and a case and a screen and you plug all that together and you had a, a Windows operating system and then you had like thousands of people building apps across all of this.

So I expect the robotics industry is gonna commoditize over the next side of 10 years. We’ll get a lot of off the shelf hardware, a lot of off the shelf software that you can use, and we’ll get it to the point where. Tons of vertical companies. So I do think that sure, there will be some, um, some players, especially complicated robots like human aids or something, and it’s probably gonna accrue to a very small number of people that are building them at scale and can afford to, to manufacture that at scale.

But I also think there’s gonna be a massive long tail of people just building like custom robots for, and, you know, starting up a, is there,

is there one, let’s say you, you weren’t building. Fox glove yourself, but Fox Glove exists in its, you know, best form in its future state. Uh, and you are coming along, you’re gonna start a vertical robotics company equivalent of your vertical sa What’s, what’s the vertical that you would start a company in and what’s the product you’d build?

Request for startups.

There are, there are so many areas that are right for disruption. I guess the main kind of advice I would give to myself in this theoretical situation is, is to find things that just sound like ridiculously easy, right? So like the people that are, that are scaling robots today, um, for example, like a MR autonomous mobile robots in warehouses.

There are lots of mobile robot companies that are in the tens of thousands of units shipped, which is like quite big for robotics today. That have robots that literally just like all they can do is drive from A to B and people are loading stuff on in the one end, and then they drive across the way out factory, and then people unload them at the other end.

And like, you know, you think about from an autonomy perspective, that sounds just incredibly simple, but that’s just, that’s just where we are today. Right? And things like autonomous lawnmowers where it’s like, yeah, just follow the path around. Um, and if something’s in the way, like stop or go around it.

But these are just, you know, they’re just, they’re very. Or, you know, people are making, starting to make good money in, uh, autonomous surveillance. So like. You know, and oil and gas and construction and things like send a robot dog out to just go take some photos at some point. But all it does is walks there, takes a photo and walks back or whatever, right?

Like just keep it simple. ’cause the people that are succeeding are the ones, or you know, chef Robotics, actually this guy just sort of fundraising announcement yesterday. You roll this thing up into a food production line where people are packing like, you know, prepackaged lunches and things like this.

And today humans stand there and just spoon full of rice, spoon full of rice, spoon full of rice. And then the next person was like, you know, spoon full of lettuce, spoon full of like, yeah, they, they roll this thing up and, and they’ve got a robot that just all it does all day is spin full of rice. Spoon full of rice.

Like this is a, this is already a hard enough problem to, that you can make a big business doing spoonful of us.

The rise of the cloud kitchens and like Sweet Green and like those folks. The, um, I think one of the most compelling use cases I’ve heard recently, and the, the name is escaping me, I’m sure you know, it, um, is the basically inspection of, of very sensitive, risky areas.

So like the outside of oil and gas fields or the, so like Echo Robotics is doing, I think it’s Echo. Yeah,

yeah. Probably they’re, they’re doing a really good, you know, they do a lot of like inspection of, of oil and gas. I think also. Even kind of inside. ‘cause once you’ve got a big, um, you know, my dad used to work oil and there’s like, you know, you get these big tanks and things that have, once they’ve had petrol on them, humans are not allowed to go in there basically after.

So how do you inspect that after it’s, yeah. So,

so I tell you about a, a vertical use case is kiwi fruit. Let’s talk about it. Um, was that an introduction, the pick and packing in the early days? I understand there is some sort of. Machine vision, uh, inspecting and looking for ripeness and packing and things today.

Take us right back, like where did you grow up? Walk us through what were the inflection points early on that brought you to this

point? I think, I think this idea was always in the back of my head, right? I, I grew up in Buki, which is, you know, obviously Q for capital of New Zealand represent. So high school jobs was exposed to like go work in a packhouse or summer.

It’s like, oh yeah, go do a bit of orchard work.

Nothing like repeatedly packing boxes of kiwi fruit to make someone think about automation. Right.

Well, some of the jobs that I just couldn’t handle, right? I mean, one of the jobs that I did for about two hours and I was like, you know, I did one shift of this and I was like, I know.

Was just. Was grading. Right? So grading at the time. Hopefully they’ve automated it by now. But 20 years ago, grading was watch all the q frick roll by and pick out the ones with blemishes and put them on a different track. ‘cause it’s like, these are gonna be export grade versus domestic or whatever. So it’s just like, just watch them roll by.

And then when there’s a pro, you know, one that’s blemish, like pick that out and stick it on the other track. It’s just like mind numbing, right? You kind of just space out while you’re watching it. Um, but I did spend like several summers through, through university. I spent several summers doing train making.

So train making is basically like, you know, around the clock. Get a bunch of blanks, like the qru boxes just come in, big square pallets of, of flat boxes. Load them into the machine. Yeah. And then quickly run around and like load some more glue into the machine and then quickly run and run on the other side and grab all of the folded boxes because the machine folds the box, but it can’t, you know, it can’t take the blanks off the pallet and it can’t put the folded ones onto the pallet.

And you know, this drop by actually load because they pay you a per box rather than per hour. So you could just work really hard and, and make a lot of money. But, um. You know, I just, in the back of my mind, he, this old time was just like, these are, you know, these, these are kind of mind numbing jobs, right?

Like, there, there are things that you can, you know, that are difficult or dangerous for people to do, or, you know, they’re just, a lot of people have workplace injuries and things doing this kind of stuff. So can, can we get robots to do these, these jobs that are like, difficult, dangerous, or, or boring? And can they ultimately do a better job?

And then people can come at value where people do best, which is, you know, very like lateral thinking and being flexible and things that robots today are still a very long way away from.

I look it up, it’s robotics, plaster, and towering. I do a lot of the specialized stuff. I, I recall, um, and I wish I had the name front of mine again as well, but there’s someone that was looking, doing fish grading on vessels offshore.

It’s like when you’re on an offshore fishing vessel and you’re like, I’ve got a very high grade fish, you can afford to helicopter it to shore or go to sashimi. Whereas if you’ve got a. Standard, whatever it might be, size, length. And they need to automate that. Is

that, um,

it was, it was the automation of grading and it was the, I can’t recall the specifics now, but I’d, I’d say anybody who, who hears it.

And, and if I’m talking about you, gimme a shout. ‘cause I’d love to, I’d love to catch up. You, so you were working in the pack houses, um, also software engineering, and there was a, I’m not sure what the whining path was that took you to the treasury. You’re a software engineer at the New Zealand Treasury?

Yeah, that was my first job. Yeah. So I went to, I went to university at Massey in Palm and then, um, coming outta that I got an internship. I was a bit slack on me. Was that, was that

like a push or apu were you drawn to go work the treasury or was like, oh shit, that’s the only place I can,

oh no, I just had no idea that, you know, the sort of grew up in New Zealand and DePue and these things and just something I have no idea about.

Sort of how big the world is and how to get into it. And so I was always, I mean, I was interested in computers since I was, you know, just three years old or whatever. But I, I had no idea how to, how to, you know, make a career or what that was gonna look like. But I did computer science at Massey and then coming out of there, I was a sort of applied for a few internships as I recall.

I got an internship offer at the Treasury, so I did a summer there and then. If they made me an offer to come back the next year full-time. And so that was kind of one thing led to another. I worked there for a couple years or something. I’m not sure exactly, but after that I, I. Sort of, you know, just government wasn’t for me at the time.

It wasn’t super fast moving or it wasn’t a lot of, sort of a very high ceiling to get to there. So though I

was gonna try to draw a connection between, a couple of years later you wound up at Coinbase, director of Engineering. And is there a, a common thread around like, well, it’s financial, you know, infrastructure, engineering, the thing about the future of treasury management, or is that a bit of a

reach.

So from treasury, I, I, a buddy of mine had a web development company and he was looking for sort of some more help. And so I quit the treasury much to my parents dismay that I was leaving a, a well paying job to go and sort of, uh, just help my friend build websites or whatever. But, but we started building websites and so we was just the two of us and we would just, you know, split the money that we made.

So we would stay up all night, you know, building websites for random local people in. Then one of the websites we ended up building was an e-commerce website. And like I said, back in, you know, whatever, this was in like late two thousands. It was a normal thing to just build your own e-commerce platform while you wanted to have an e-commerce website.

So we coded up this, this e-commerce website platform.

Yeah. That was espresso. Yeah. Yeah.

And so I, I kind of flipped that into a business and started, we, we took kind of the core of that, turned that into a business. And so I, I built this e-commerce software that I was selling to a whole lot of different insight at the time.

I was also. Um, kind of bouncing around, doing a bit of traveling and read four hour work week, and I was like in Thailand and had this kind of e-commerce, uh, website platform of selling it to a bunch of people. And so as a, as part of building this e-commerce platform, um, you know, we’re talking about the, the Shopify example.

As part of building this e-commerce platform, I actually built, I. Integrations, like I personally coded up integrations with probably about like 40 different payment gateways. And so I’d done a lot of stuff with like, I, I, I had had a lot of exposure to how super annoying it was working with payment APIs and how kind of outdated a lot of the payment APIs and things were.

I. Um, and then I also, after that I went to the startup in Sydney called Rooms. And we were doing, it was like a sort of a, a flatmate find their website, um, a long-term Airbnb, but we were trying to manage the payments. And so I also had, was doing some payment management and payment integrations there.

So I came outta that just massively frustrated at how annoying most payment kind of platforms were to work with. And so that was how I, you know, Bitcoin came out and I think I was more, I mean at first, you know, at first outta Bitcoin I was like, oh, that sounds like a scam. But then. Sooner than most. I was kind of like, oh, programmable money.

He’s like, that sounds amazing. Like programmable money is a great idea. Why? Why? It was like, I was more open to that because I had spent so much time, you know, programming money and doing like payment gateway and things, and I realized how annoying the sort of legacy APIs were. So I, I got into, uh, into kind of crypto quite early.

David Booth 36:18

Was that the draw to the states or were you otherwise convinced you needed to be in Silicon Valley? What was the, what was the moment of, of that? I’m curious about lot, uh, you know, I love San Francisco. A lot of the most ambitious, talented people in the world seem to wind up there.

I’m always curious about like how and why that that idea got lodged in their mind.

Yeah, I mean, the analogy I I draw is like, you wanna be a famous actor, like. You wanna be a world famous actor? Do you wanna do that in, you know, Cambridge? Or do you wanna do that in la, right? Like May,

maybe you go to LA for a while, you get famous and come back to Cambridge.

Well, that’s,

that’s the New Zealand dream, right? Um, we’ll talk about that. We need people to curious to be more ambitious than make a few million dollars and move home. But we’ll come back to that. You wanna be, uh, you know, you wanna make, well, a lot of money in finance. So you go to New York or London, right?

Uh, you want to, you know, you wanna be a top musician. There’s maybe a few cities you go to, but. But by and large, if you, if you wanna be a, you know, world famous pop star, good ally. So like, if you wanna, if you want to be at the top of your game, you need to go to the place where all the people at the top of their game are.

And so that was always, um, I think, you know, again, early when I was very early growing up, it wasn’t super obvious, but it became pretty early through college. In my first few years working through, you know, university, my first three years working that. San Francisco is the place to be. If, you know, this is ob it was obviously where all the startup apps were happening.

It’s obviously where other VC capital is, so you want to go to a place where you’re, you’re surrounded by just a whole lot of people that are all super ambitious and burning things. And

of, of course, with a couple of companies like Coinbase and Cruise, you’d have a, you’d have like a, a professional network robustly built around you for, you know, talented people who go on to do cool things.

Yeah, I mean, because I, I wanted to start, um, and like I said, I’ve been doing kind of. Just businesses side hustles and things my whole life. But I wanted to start a, a VC-backed startup. But you don’t, there’s not very few people go straight outta school into building a successful VC-backed company. Um, most people I.

You want to go and see how, how it’s done at the best, right? So you want a front a seat, and this is again, you know why I try to encourage so many ambitious, especially like ambitious Kiwis, I encourage you to, to leave and go to San Francisco, go to the Silicon Valley because you need to see firsthand what it actually takes to build a company like that and what it looks like to be at like a super high growth company.

What the level of intensity is at these companies. I mean, I showed up and you know, at night, I showed up in, in San Francisco, went for my first day. Coinbase and I was like blown away that the HR person was like emailing me on Sunday night, like before the, before my first 10, emailing me on Sunday night being, Hey, you got everything for tomorrow, blah, blah, blah.

And I was like, you’re working right now. This is like, my mind couldn’t comprehend it. People would like work on a Sunday or whatever. Yeah.

Uh, well definitely, um, one of the, one of my favorite bit business advice for people if they do want, you wanna start a company, you’re young. Great. Like. What, what is the highest density of future co-founders?

Where are they now? What is the, if there’s a, a medium to large still scaling quickly, company where the, the types of like high agency, you know, uh, people who you want to be your co-founder in the future. Where are they right now? Go work there.

Yeah, you want, yeah, both, both. You wanna meet a whole lot of people and cohort and, uh, you know, my co-founder and two of the people at Fox Go, we work together at Coinbase and at Cruise.

So we’ve been working together for 10 plus years now. Right. And so you, you meet people that are, have the same sort of state of mind, and then you also get a front row seat to what it takes to really do this.

And you’ve in the meantime also started a family. You moved to North Bay, so you’re kind of following the trajectory of, of growing up in the Bay.

In the Bay as well. What, what are your reflections now? Like do you ever think, oh, you know my kids, I wish they went through school in New Zealand, or do you compare and contrast like different lives you could be having here or there? How do you think about education, raising the family? What are you prioritizing, knowing sort of everything you do about the

future?

I know what it was like in the nineties and early two thousands. Right. And so I think, you know, in some ways it’s, it’s, you know, can kind of reminisce about growing up in New Zealand and running around with bare feet and you know, gonna the beach every day and this kind of stuff. But especially, you know, there’s a lot, America’s a big place too, right?

Like there’s, there’s a lot of places and people don’t realize, but, well, I, maybe they do, but you can go and live in a, in a nice, you know, nice town of the community and be not too, and be a short drive from. San Francisco instead of, instead of what you’re doing here,

I, I sometimes tell people, ‘cause we’re in Cambridge, we’re an hour and a half, maybe two south of Auckland.

I tell people that’s a little bit like living in Napa Valley or sort of the north end of Sonoma and driving into San Francisco day or two a week. Um Right. Which people do.

Yeah, people live up in tile and that’s about four hours driving and

live up there and selectively coming down to the bay. Yeah, no, it’s a, a really interesting one.

Have you kept any ties to, to back home? I mean, I know you’ve.

I mean family and, and, and, you know, friends from school and things here. But, um, but you know, mostly I would say it’s, it’s, maybe I would come back and at some point, but for now, it’s kind of the, you know, the focus is building and San Francisco is the place,

aside from like hop on a plane and, and come to the the Bay Area.

What’s something you’d tell. Ambitious young people back here, or founders back here, or maybe even broaden out to founders who are like thinking about building and hardware and, and robotics broadly.

When I was, yeah, thinking back to myself in my early twenties, I had a lot of energy and enthusiasm and I had no idea what I was doing, and so.

And I had a lot of impatience, I guess, and that can, that can hurt you because, uh, you’d get an, I’d come up with a startup by Darren. I’d go crazy on it for a couple weeks, and then after like two months, it like, you know, hadn’t suddenly kind of blown up. You watch these movies and you watch like social network or whatever.

At least that was the one that you watch back a day and you get all excited about putting a startup and you hack on something for like a month. And then you’re kind of wondering like. Why hasn’t it blown up yet? And then you just get bored and move on to the next thing. And so you don’t, you don’t build up the kind of mental stamina for, oh yeah, you’re gonna need to, like, my thing now is.

Don’t start a company at all, or at least a startup. Let’s say you wanna build a high growth startup, don’t start a a startup unless it is something that you’re ready to work on for 10 years, right? Like, you need to, you need to go into a startup with, this is a thing that I would be excited to work on for 10 years, because if it’s successful, it’s gonna be probably more than that if it’s not successful.

Well, if, if you go in with the attitude of this is gonna be a quick flip, like you’re, you’re probably not gonna, um, you’re probably not gonna make it. You’re just gonna get burned. And I didn’t have that energy kind of earlier in life, so. What I kind of say to founders besides, besides, if you work in tech and you, even if you don’t wanna be a founder, but you work in tech, go, go be at the top of your game.

Like, don’t, at least, even if you wanna come back in a few years, that’s fine, but like, go and see what it actually is like to work at the top of your game in a company. Worst case, you come out with a bunch of money and you can go retire in New Zealand, um, or go do whatever you want in New Zealand. Best case you actually get excited about, you know, being more ambitious and doing something bigger than that, starting your own thing.

But you know, that’s number one. And number two is if you’re gonna start a company. Even if you’re 22 or 23 and wanna start a company, um, I mean, sure by all means have a side hustle on things, but like, if you think that you want to actually build a real business and like that is gonna grow to hundreds of people and, and you know, hundreds of millions of billions of dollars in revenue or whatever, go work at a, go find a. Early stage company that’s high growth and has high potential. And that’s a whole, you know, it’s a little bit of an art to picking them, but, but go get a front row seat and see what it takes, the level of energy and intensity and, um, and learn from the best. Right.

Go, I mean, you know, I just, I. At Coinbase, I was directly reporting to Brian Armstrong. I’m the CEO, right? I was just, and Fredo and the other co-founder there. Great guys. And they’re just, you know, super focused, super intense, super high energy. You see, like what kind of founder it takes to build a company like that that, you know, IP owed for, you know, whatever it was, $80 billion or something.

Yeah, it’s wild. Wild. Jenny. Um. Tell me, uh, my favorite final question is, what can we do to help you? You’re, you know, member of the Kiwi diaspora, I wanna send more Talent your way partnerships. What, what are the things that you would love to have more of in your life that we can help find for you?

I think the, um, you know, it’s only recently that that kind of kiwi networking things have.

Even really become a thing in, in the Bay Area. So it’s, it’s, it’s really cool to see that happening because other, you just make connections that, that you otherwise wouldn’t have. And Americans are really big on like their colleges, right? College networks are kind of a thing. So I almost think about like New Zealand as kind of, I do the same.

It’s like you’ve got the amped alumni

over there, you’ve got the Harvard alumni over there, you’ve got the, the New Zealand alumni over here.

Yeah, let’s do the New Zealand line because it’s, you know, you meet a Kiwi and you’re like, oh, you from, oh, Cambridge. So yeah, I’m just down the road. Oh, cool. Yeah, like you just.

You, you have, you have something in common that Americans, you know, have because they went to Harvard together or whatever. Right. Or Yale or, and whatever it is. Like

I’ve also found there’s a really good filter on it. ‘cause a lot of, not, not always, but a lot of the time, if you are a Kiwi and if you’re in the, in America in a particular, it’s actually quite hard to get a visa.

Yeah,

no, it is. Yeah. So there’s selection bias, right? Like the people that, the people that have like made it from America to to, to the Bay Area, to San Francisco. By and large, I’ve worked quite hard to get there. Like just that the, so you get the selection bias of like, the people that are there are usually pretty high agents and they’re pushing to do things and that’s again, why, you know, I encourage people to do that because it’ll filter out.

I mean, more people should try, but a lot of people will give up ‘cause they can’t bother. It’s just too hard figuring out how to, you know, get a visa to the states and so they give up. But it’s fine. It weeds out the like low agency people and the high agency people. But I think this is huge. Right. I think this because the other part of, of what makes Silicon Valley work.

Is successful startups and successful founders who then go and help the next generation, or even people that haven’t even finished. Um, you know, it’s not even like they had an accident. And so, but a lot of people, as, as soon as they start becoming moderately successful, they start angel investing and advising other people and there’s a lot of like pay it back in the Bay Area.

Right. And that. Is is great because, you know, there’s tons of other founders I know from people that I worked with at Coinbase and people that I worked with at Cruise, and I’m just, you know, people you meet through here and there’s a lot of pay it back and how can we help and, and a lot of, there’s a lot of money that’s just sprayed around because it, it’s, it’s funny money, right?

Like people go and make $5 million here, $10 million there from like small weeks. It’s, or they go and look at Google for a few years and they, you know, make a few million dollars and then they start throwing out like 10 dozen dollar angel checks here and there and advising their friends. And so there’s a lot of money that’s just.

Kind of floating around for early stage, for early, even half-baked early stage ideas. And there’s a lot of advice that comes with that. And so that the intro investor networks get you a lot of help there. And I think like, you know, bringing it back to New Zealand, I think New Zealand specifically could benefit from this, um, both with Kiwis in, in San Francisco that are, you know, even that are starting things in the barrier or that are even just working at other companies in the barrier.

Um, but also back to founders that are in New Zealand. If you want to start something in New Zealand, I still strongly advise people to go work in, in the Bay Area first and come back and just, just get some knowledge about what that actually looks like, because there’s only a, you know, a couple companies and there’s only, there’s fewer companies in New Zealand that you’re gonna be able to get that, that experience from.

But, but I think like all the founders that are in the Bay Area, now that we’re starting to tie these like diaspora networks back together, we could be getting a lot more of the Kiwi founders and things to be enjoying investing and advising. Um, are you Angel

investing yourself?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Although I would say, um, you know, it’s, we’ve gotta figure out some tax vehicle for this.

It’s a pain in the ass, Andrew, investing in New Zealand companies from basically like, you know, owning, owning any, um, international things from, from the states. So if we could figure out some, I. Tax vehicle where you get all the Kiwi founders in San Francisco to invest in, um, in like a US registered LP fund and then that handles all the tax fuckery.

That’d be great.

Yep. I, uh, conveniently have spent a lot of my career thinking about that problem, so we should talk about it more. But, um, if I were to steal your long-winded answer to the, how can you help, it would be like if you’re a Young Kiwi founder, if you’re thinking about. Building something, generally moving to the states.

Think about particularly hardware, robotics. You’d be down to, you know, meat and jam and that’s pretty cool.

Yeah, for sure. I kind of flipped that around into how, into how I can help rather than, but I, there are a lot of Kiwi founders, um, and, and Kiwis in general in the, I have friends. In fact, I think the way we even met was through Hardie.

So there you go. I, I don’t, you know, don’t, everyone don’t jump at once, but like, you know, the Kiwis are gonna be very open and helpful in the same way that it, like, Americans benefit from these college networks. Yeah.

Brilliant. Oh, that’s generous. That’s awesome. We’ll make sure the right people can find you and, um, looking forward to doing this game in a couple years time when we see how this robotics space continues to play out.

Keep trying. It was a lot of fun. Thank you Adrian. Cheers.