READ OLD BOOKS

“Most companies in the Bay Area are more hobby projects than they are earnest, serious businesses. We wouldn't build a company this way if just making money was the only outcome we wanted. Our relationship to the ecosystem has always been different; we have actively sought that limelight only recently to help with recruiting numbers.”

“The best books to read are the old books. So over 25 years, over 50 years because time has filtered all the kind of noise and you really get a lot of signal in you. Just pick the really good ones because what you read does impact your view of the world. And you want to read diverse books that are not just kind of what your friends are telling you to read.”

“It’s becoming a little bit less important now to be, let's say, a specialist software engineer in a given field because the AI tools, they can turn you into a specialist much more quickly. But you need to be an expert in the AI tool use itself. And that is a real skill. And so we test for this hard now. We're looking for people who are just really, really good at using the AI tools.”

“Physical AI is very different. The companies are different. The geographies and regulatory environments are different. The machines are different. The cultures are different. And so the diffusion is actually way, way slower. So, time becomes a much more important thing. Staying power becomes important.”

“Without a doubt, our customers look at the fact that we've been around for nearly 10 years, our crazy claim to fame that we've never spent the money we've ever raised. We're not using our capital to pay payroll and things like that. For a customer who wants to have this long-term relationship, that's really confidence-inspiring.”

“Transformers that were originally successful for large language models started to have an impact on self-driving technology and robotics. There were breakthroughs in end-to-end deep learning, where you can now take lots of data and you can train these models to actually control these systems in a way that wasn't possible before. That was the moment when we actually decided to really enter the self-driving space ourselves.”

“The Secretary of the Army visited our headquarters and asked if we could do something with an ISV and a Humvee. In 10 days, we had a very small team retrofit our vehicle operating system and our self-driving system onto the vehicles. We showed them a video of these infantry squad vehicles driving autonomously out in a test environment, and then they shipped it off to an army test facility.”

“We are very well known in our industry. I think we're more well known in construction and mining in Asia than maybe some bar in the mission. But that directly correlates to where we're going to make money. We opened also in India and UK offices last year. Australia could be one of those countries where we're doing driverless trucks and we're doing a bunch of different ports.”