My favorite conferences are small and carefully curated, with room to talk through real problems. Thank you to Jay for inviting me to Dirty Jobs.
I hosted the Bill of Materials huddle, essentially a panel where the whole room gets to participate. It was right up my alley, and harder to moderate than I expected. I had prepared plenty of questions. We ran out of time because people had so much to share and ask for help with.
Below are some of my notes from the half day conference, hosted at the beautiful Golden Gate Club at the Presidio.
1. Who babysits the robot?
Dyna’s Lindon Gao framed deployment around throughput, quality and autonomy. What stuck with me is their experience deploying robots for napkin folding. What trips up the customer was that someone still has to move the inputs and outputs, ie feeding the fresh pile of napkins and moving the napkin pile out of the robot’s way.
In his framing, the industry is chasing the 99%, but actually 99% is just the starting line. Customers then need the right quality, speed and level of human intervention. Getting robots to work productively means reducing as much as possible the human work required for the robot to succeed at its assigned task.
2. The BOM conversation kept returning to manufacturing
It turns out lots of insights surface when you put component suppliers, PhDs from CMU, ex-Tesla engineers, robotics founders and deep tech investors in a room.
Gear manufacturing drew a lot of discussion. Participants talked about the difficulty of combining high torque with low inertia, then got into grinding, hobbing and heat treatment. We also talked about sourcing the equipment behind those processes, including furnaces, coating and surface treatment.
Buying the machines leaves a hiring problem. Participants described difficulty finding experienced operators and having to train new graduates from scratch. That really stood out to me as a lot of conversations have been around component manufacturing, but reshoring manufacturing also needs a plan for developing the people who will run it. If you know anyone working on this area, I’d love to chat.
The advice on specifications was practical. A useful tip is, instead of bringing a dream (often unrealistic) list of specs to an actuator supplier, start with the problem they’re trying to solve and use an off-the-shelf component before building something custom. That echoes with my conversation with Eric Pan at Seeed studio. When starting a buyer-supplier conversation, explain what the machine needs to do, then work backward to the component.
Supplier responsiveness was part of the sourcing discussion. One contrast that stood out to me is quick exchanges with Chinese suppliers over WeChat, including on a Saturday, vs. the difficulty getting responses from US suppliers (“90% don’t reply”). The China anecdote is true from my personal experience of sourcing parts from China. In general people are willing to respond to work messages over the weekends. Responsiveness matters to a small team trying to keep development moving. Policy changes also came up as a source of uncertainty over where to invest.
Wire harnesses and power deserve more attention. Both came up when we moved beyond actuators. The audience had specific requests for wire-harness recommendations and linear-actuator leads. If you have a supplier to recommend, I’d love to hear which applications and requirements they can support.
Side note, I counted at least 4 domestic actuator companies in the room, including Conifer and Bimotal. That is an encouraging sign for US robotics teams looking for domestic options.
3. A good pilot needs a path to a purchase order
Rhoda founder Jagdeep Singh’s advice was to be selective about proofs of concept and establish a route to commercial deployment. He said there’s no shortage of demand when it comes to PoCs. Corporate curiosity about physical AI can fill a startup’s calendar. He recommended robotics startups be mindful of who they partner with, ask early who can approve the purchase, what success means and who owns the rollout.
4. What sets a robotics startup apart
The deployment huddle discussed a crucial questions. As models become easier to access and distill, where does a robotics company build durable differentiation? Product experience, distribution, cost efficiency and speed were all part of the discussion. The most difficult part in building a sustaining robotics company may not be the hardware, but the interaction between the machine and human workflow.