The Exchanges

Q faced with the same challenges. And most often it's selling to a customer base that really has got no prior tech knowledge Doesn't really want to speak to you and doesn't really believe that any of your products work or can do what they say they do. How do you think about this kind of customer education process that's so inherent within these industries and really look to overcome it?

A I think it's a fantastic question about the audience and the buyers in the legacy industry, and the reality is, is that they are not digital natives. They are not tech-first thinkers, but they know their business extremely well, and they understand the levers they can pull in order to Grow top line and bottom line. And from our perspective, we're looking for entrepreneurs who understand what's technically possible, but also understand how to meet the market where it is. I think a great example of this is an investment we made in a company called extreme trucking. So they built a robotically digitally articulated wings to create active aerodynamics for long haul trucks. I mean, this is an industry that has not evolved in years. But when you show them a five percent fuel savings they quite simply say I don't care I am willing to adopt technology if it's a clear ROI. So I think that anyone going out to sell into businesses has to understand they need to start from a point of a clear, concise ROI, and then they get to employ what we call the Trojan horse mentality. And this is our key element to investing in B to B and enterprise. The Trojan horse idea is you bring something into the customer that has a clear ROI, but once they've adopted it, Then you can start upselling them or taking advantage of the data you're collecting from being inside of that company or that industry. Anoth…

AI assessment note: “start from a point of a clear, concise ROI”

Q of kind of every industry there, though, and how it needs to kind of innovate and transition, I love your description of a space that you love, and it's that old and boring industries are the most exciting to build startups in. So how can I not start with that? What do you mean by old and boring, and what are the most exciting elements about building companies in them?

A Yeah, so when we think about the old and boring industries, we're actually thinking about really, really old industries. We're thinking about agriculture, mining, construction, supply chain, logistics, It's manufacturing, And these are industries that are trillions of dollars in size, but the impact they've received from the technology world has been primarily in the back office, new ERP systems, new CRM systems. They are using software to change their behind the scenes workflow, whether it's buying or selling. But the reality is, is out there in the field, the amount of automation they've received has been quite minimal. And that is because we didn't have the ability to make really, really smart decisions out there in the field. So what I believe is happening today is that all of these legacy industries are starting to realize that there is an opportunity for them to bring automation out into the field and change the industry as a whole. So a great example is we're invested in a company called Tortuga, and Tortuga builds automated harvesting robots for the agricultural industry. That's a world in which There's been a little bit of automation because John Deere has made bigger and better tractors, but the ability to make hyper intelligent decisions about which strawberries to pick or which fruits are ready for sale is a very interesting decision because you can either make it p…

AI assessment note: “We're thinking about agriculture, mining, construction, supply chain, logistics, It's manufacturing”

Q cars, and really start on one of your favorite topics being the autonomous systems element, because when we chatted before, you said to me something that, in complete honesty, entirely confused me. So the peace dividends of the autonomous car wars would generate more value outside of transportation. So if we kind of break that sentence down, help me out here, Avidan, what do you mean by the peace dividends?

A Yeah, so the peace to advance concept is anytime there's a war, there are oftentimes things that are benefiting the societies that were in war, out of war, after the war is complete, or even during the war. So a lot of our industrial supply chain around metals and manufacturing were built around World War I and World War II. So that analogy is then drawn to things that are not as terrible and ominous as actual war, but just deep competition. So Chris Anderson popularized this idea of Uh, so Chris Anderson is the CEO of three D robotics, and he basically went and started discussing why is it possible for drones to exist today? All the technology existed before, but because of the smartphone wars, the war between Apple and Samsung and Google and Nokia and Blackberry, a lot of the components that you find in a Everyone was trying to get a low-cost camera, low-cost accelerometers, low-cost Bluetooth chips and Wi-Fi chips, and what that led to was a very robust supply chain to get all of the components, and people started putting those components together to create other products. You know, one might say that Nest is a perfect example of the same exact thing. Low-cost screens, low-cost touchscreens, low-cost, all of these components that the smartphone companies forced a supply chain to lower their costs on Allowed us to build all sorts of interesting IOT and connected products.

AI assessment note: “anytime there's a war, there are oftentimes things that are benefiting the societies”

Q for you, in terms of the business model of the future for these kind of hardware products, does that mean that your excitement lies in kind of the margins that can be made on the services post buying the initial product? Or is there still room and leverage for real margin to be made on the hardware itself? And where do you kind of personally get excited by that element?

A Yeah, so we won't invest in something that relies just on margin alone. From our perspective, that's not a venture scalable business. And by the way, it is a Great business for many people to build a product that they simply sell for a profitable margin and move on to sell the next thing. What gets us more excited is the ability to stack on recurring revenue or other forms of entrenchment in the business. So whether that is the razor razor blade model of selling a product and then selling disposable items or add-ons, the services model, similar to drop cam or ring, selling you video storage for your product, or The holy grail being building a platform, right? So one of our companies is a company called particle particle is the largest professional IOT development platform in the world. And basically what that is built is a huge engineering ecosystem, building applications and services on top of their firmware and IOT distribution and platform. DJI is another great example. They've become the de facto drone platform. So it's not just about buying the drone. It's about applications that run on top of the drone. That being said, We see companies all the time that are great margin businesses, and we often turn to them and just ask the question of why venture? Because the reality is there's so many physical products out there in the world that are just quite simply not that venture …

AI assessment note: “What gets us more excited is the ability to stack on recurring revenue”

Q Okay. So I'm flying to SF. I need a book for the flight. What should I be reading and why?

A So I'm going to give a little bit of an oldie and a goodie. Uh, so Daniel Pink wrote a book called drive, which is subtitled the surprising truth about what motivates us. And from my perspective, this changed everything about how I worked with technical teams at the end of the day. It's not about money. It's not about just quote unquote winning, but it's a lot about autonomy, mastery, and purpose. And this is how we at Root Ventures motivate ourselves, but we also help motivate our, understand the motivations of the founders in our portfolio, because so many of them are built around purpose, built around mastery of a very complex problem, and want the autonomy, knowing that VCs are the coaches and not the quarterbacks. And so, from our perspective, Drive really encompasses a lot of how we think about the market and how our teams are operating.

AI assessment note: “Daniel Pink wrote a book called drive”

Q of kind of every industry there, though, and how it needs to kind of innovate and transition, I love your description of a space that you love, and it's that old and boring industries are the most exciting to build startups in. So how can I not start with that? What do you mean by old and boring, and what are the most exciting elements about building companies in them?

A Yeah, so when we think about the old and boring industries, we're actually thinking about really, really old industries. We're thinking about agriculture, mining, construction, supply chain, logistics, It's manufacturing, And these are industries that are trillions of dollars in size, but the impact they've received from the technology world has been primarily in the back office, new ERP systems, new CRM systems. They are using software to change their behind the scenes workflow, whether it's buying or selling. But the reality is, is out there in the field, the amount of automation they've received has been quite minimal. And that is because we didn't have the ability to make really, really smart decisions out there in the field. So what I believe is happening today is that all of these legacy industries are starting to realize that there is an opportunity for them to bring automation out into the field and change the industry as a whole. So a great example is we're invested in a company called Tortuga, and Tortuga builds automated harvesting robots for the agricultural industry. That's a world in which There's been a little bit of automation because John Deere has made bigger and better tractors, but the ability to make hyper intelligent decisions about which strawberries to pick or which fruits are ready for sale is a very interesting decision because you can either make it p…

AI assessment note: “We're thinking about agriculture, mining, construction, supply chain, logistics”

Q cars, and really start on one of your favorite topics being the autonomous systems element, because when we chatted before, you said to me something that, in complete honesty, entirely confused me. So the peace dividends of the autonomous car wars would generate more value outside of transportation. So if we kind of break that sentence down, help me out here, Avidan, what do you mean by the peace dividends?

A Yeah, so the peace to advance concept is anytime there's a war, there are oftentimes things that are benefiting the societies that were in war, out of war, after the war is complete, or even during the war. So a lot of our industrial supply chain around metals and manufacturing were built around World War I and World War II. So that analogy is then drawn to things that are not as terrible and ominous as actual war, but just deep competition. So Chris Anderson popularized this idea of Uh, so Chris Anderson is the CEO of three D robotics, and he basically went and started discussing why is it possible for drones to exist today? All the technology existed before, but because of the smartphone wars, the war between Apple and Samsung and Google and Nokia and Blackberry, a lot of the components that you find in a Everyone was trying to get a low-cost camera, low-cost accelerometers, low-cost Bluetooth chips and Wi-Fi chips, and what that led to was a very robust supply chain to get all of the components, and people started putting those components together to create other products. You know, one might say that Nest is a perfect example of the same exact thing. Low-cost screens, low-cost touchscreens, low-cost, all of these components that the smartphone companies forced a supply chain to lower their costs on Allowed us to build all sorts of interesting IOT and connected products.

AI assessment note: “peace to advance concept is anytime there's a war, there are oftentimes things that are benefiting”

Q for you, in terms of the business model of the future for these kind of hardware products, does that mean that your excitement lies in kind of the margins that can be made on the services post buying the initial product? Or is there still room and leverage for real margin to be made on the hardware itself? And where do you kind of personally get excited by that element?

A Yeah, so we won't invest in something that relies just on margin alone. From our perspective, that's not a venture scalable business. And by the way, it is a Great business for many people to build a product that they simply sell for a profitable margin and move on to sell the next thing. What gets us more excited is the ability to stack on recurring revenue or other forms of entrenchment in the business. So whether that is the razor razor blade model of selling a product and then selling disposable items or add-ons, the services model, similar to drop cam or ring, selling you video storage for your product, or The holy grail being building a platform, right? So one of our companies is a company called particle particle is the largest professional IOT development platform in the world. And basically what that is built is a huge engineering ecosystem, building applications and services on top of their firmware and IOT distribution and platform. DJI is another great example. They've become the de facto drone platform. So it's not just about buying the drone. It's about applications that run on top of the drone. That being said, We see companies all the time that are great margin businesses, and we often turn to them and just ask the question of why venture? Because the reality is there's so many physical products out there in the world that are just quite simply not that venture …

AI assessment note: “we won't invest in something that relies just on margin alone.”

Q faced with the same challenges. And most often it's selling to a customer base that really has got no prior tech knowledge Doesn't really want to speak to you and doesn't really believe that any of your products work or can do what they say they do. How do you think about this kind of customer education process that's so inherent within these industries and really look to overcome it?

A I think it's a fantastic question about the audience and the buyers in the legacy industry, and the reality is, is that they are not digital natives. They are not tech-first thinkers, but they know their business extremely well, and they understand the levers they can pull in order to Grow top line and bottom line. And from our perspective, we're looking for entrepreneurs who understand what's technically possible, but also understand how to meet the market where it is. I think a great example of this is an investment we made in a company called extreme trucking. So they built a robotically digitally articulated wings to create active aerodynamics for long haul trucks. I mean, this is an industry that has not evolved in years. But when you show them a five percent fuel savings they quite simply say I don't care I am willing to adopt technology if it's a clear ROI. So I think that anyone going out to sell into businesses has to understand they need to start from a point of a clear, concise ROI, and then they get to employ what we call the Trojan horse mentality. And this is our key element to investing in B to B and enterprise. The Trojan horse idea is you bring something into the customer that has a clear ROI, but once they've adopted it, Then you can start upselling them or taking advantage of the data you're collecting from being inside of that company or that industry. Anoth…

AI assessment note: “start from a point of a clear, concise ROI, and then they get to employ”

Q Can I jump in and ask, in terms of kind of the commoditization of hardware there, does that not just lead to kind of a race to the bottom in terms of margins and pricing when it is so established and available, so to speak?

A Absolutely. The commoditization of these components is the ultimate benefit to entrepreneurs, because any entrepreneur who's coming in and saying, I'm going to create the next Wi-Fi chip, We are always asking that question of, well, what happens when this becomes a commodity component? Because no matter what, if someone's simply thinking about it as a line item on their bill of materials, they're simply looking at it as the utility it provides during manufacturing. What we think is more interesting is the fact that all of these things are benefiting from connectivity. So the drones are all wifi connected or cellular connected nest is obviously wifi connected with multiple radios. And when you're connected, you now have the opportunity to sell services. You get to interconnect your componentry to the internet. So think, for example, about a low-cost sensor is sitting out in the field. Now it has unlimited free connectivity into the cloud. The cloud now has extreme amounts of compute, and with that computation, you can now take information coming from the end node or from the edge, connect it to all of the other sources of information out there in the world, and make the most intelligent decision possible or provide a service to the end node so that your nest Is doing the ultimate decision making about when to turn your thermostat on and off based on knowing not only the weather …

AI assessment note: “that is not about the commodity component, but instead the ongoing services provided.”

Q Avidan, when you look at the founders that you've backed in these kind of more traditional industries, are there commonalities in their backgrounds, be it kind of existing experience in those Spaces, be it parents who've worked in those spaces. I instantly think to Dan at Convoy who kind of always had parents who worked in logistics. Is there commonalities or are they kind of completely fresh to these industries?

A It's really interesting that you ask that because we were looking recently at our CEOs and what we end up finding is that the more common trait amongst them is a hunger to learn and a hunger to solve big problems. The reality is, is that when you're investing in big, heavy industry, B to B, it's really difficult to have customer empathy. The reality is, is consumer internet has a ton of investment interest and a ton of entrepreneurial interest because it's really simple to see yourself using the Snapchat app. So you would invent it for your own purposes. Now, the reality is, is that if you're investing in things like mining rare earth materials, the likelihood we're going to meet a spectacular entrepreneur or engineer will It's a fresh mind approaching the problem and understanding. Investing in understanding the space. So I think a great example of that is a company we just most recently invested in called Dusty Robotics. And Tessa Lau was the CTO of a robotics company called Savio. And she had spent years and years and years in the robotics industry and was going through a renovation of her house. And while she knew very little about the construction industry, she saw the inefficiencies going on in construction and And dedicated a full year of customer research to the problem to discover that she wanted to build a construction focused robotics company and had a extremely deep…

AI assessment note: “what we would say is it's not a prerequisite.”

Q Okay. So I'm flying to SF. I need a book for the flight. What should I be reading and why?

A So I'm going to give a little bit of an oldie and a goodie. Uh, so Daniel Pink wrote a book called drive, which is subtitled the surprising truth about what motivates us. And from my perspective, this changed everything about how I worked with technical teams at the end of the day. It's not about money. It's not about just quote unquote winning, but it's a lot about autonomy, mastery, and purpose. And this is how we at Root Ventures motivate ourselves, but we also help motivate our, understand the motivations of the founders in our portfolio, because so many of them are built around purpose, built around mastery of a very complex problem, and want the autonomy, knowing that VCs are the coaches and not the quarterbacks. And so, from our perspective, Drive really encompasses a lot of how we think about the market and how our teams are operating.

AI assessment note: “Daniel Pink wrote a book called drive, which is subtitled”

Q Can I jump in and ask, in terms of kind of the commoditization of hardware there, does that not just lead to kind of a race to the bottom in terms of margins and pricing when it is so established and available, so to speak?

A Absolutely. The commoditization of these components is the ultimate benefit to entrepreneurs, because any entrepreneur who's coming in and saying, I'm going to create the next Wi-Fi chip, We are always asking that question of, well, what happens when this becomes a commodity component? Because no matter what, if someone's simply thinking about it as a line item on their bill of materials, they're simply looking at it as the utility it provides during manufacturing. What we think is more interesting is the fact that all of these things are benefiting from connectivity. So the drones are all wifi connected or cellular connected nest is obviously wifi connected with multiple radios. And when you're connected, you now have the opportunity to sell services. You get to interconnect your componentry to the internet. So think, for example, about a low-cost sensor is sitting out in the field. Now it has unlimited free connectivity into the cloud. The cloud now has extreme amounts of compute, and with that computation, you can now take information coming from the end node or from the edge, connect it to all of the other sources of information out there in the world, and make the most intelligent decision possible or provide a service to the end node so that your nest Is doing the ultimate decision making about when to turn your thermostat on and off based on knowing not only the weather …

AI assessment note: “So many people are able to charge a premium for that ongoing service.”

Q Do you know I've done 10,000 hours on the 20 minute VC now? Fun fact. Wow. I know, I know, I tried to use it in an LP meeting to claim mastery, but it didn't quite work well. But anyway, tell me, what's your biggest strength and weakness, Avedan?

A So, I would say they're both the same thing. I am a loud mouth, And I say exactly what I'm thinking. And a lot of people love that. They love the frankness, the direct bluntness. And for some people, they just would prefer I not be such a aggressive with my, with my thoughts. I think Strong opinions loosely held, and when I put out an opinion, I'm actually looking for somebody to tell me why I'm wrong, and explain to me why they're so confident in the other side of it, and it's a pretty aggressive personality to have, but I've been told, just be who you are, and for better or for worse, I'm one of six kids, and we had to hold our own at, uh, at Friday night dinner.

AI assessment note: “they're both the same thing. I am a loud mouth”

Q I'm sorry, I'm too interested again. In terms of kind of venture scalable or backable, in terms of differentiating between whether they are or they're not, Is it purely that kind of upsell component on kind of software services ahead of purchase that makes one kind of venture scalable and backable, or are there other elements where you see and go, absolutely, this has the potential for a venture return?

A Yeah, there are absolutely pieces of hardware or physical products out there that can get to venture scale without the post-purchase revenue, but most of them rely on being a very, very heavily branded consumer experience, and the harsh reality is that everybody on our team, all four investment partners, Are engineers by background and training. And so our empathy lies often with the business unit and our empathy lies often with engineers. So we're more often going to be investing in developer tools over a very fancy branded new consumer AR sunglasses. I mean, no offense to Snap, but I, that's not the area that we look at more often. And we know that there's venture returns hidden in there. It's just not an area we spend a lot of time focusing on.

AI assessment note: “there are absolutely pieces of hardware or physical products out there that can get to venture scale”

Q Not at all, but I'd love to get started with a little on you. So tell me, Avidan, we both love coffee. That's a mutual thing we have to start off with. And clearly we both love VC. So tell me, how did you make your way into the wonderful world of venture and come to found Root?

A Well, thank you very much, Harry. I appreciate you taking the call this morning. I am well caffeinated, but I would tell you that you have been my driving buddy to Palo Alto more times than you know. I've thrown your podcast on two X fast forwards. You're the 12 minute VC to me, but it's been awesome having your show and, uh, and really just, you know, what you've documented for the world of venture. My path to venture is not exactly the straight and narrow path. I started out as an engineer working in the nineties and 2000. I was working on cable modems at excited home, which was a big collapse in the first.com boom. I worked On voiceover IP handsets while doing my research at Columbia University, studying computer science and embedded systems. I even worked on fax to email gateways at a company called eFax or J two down in Los Angeles. But after the crash in 2001, 2002, I ended up sort of falling backwards into the investment world, not the traditional venture world, but the much more old school private equity style investment world from the tech side. So I was head of it for a small investment firm down in Los Angeles. And I would say I was very lucky to be in the right place at the right time. And we grew from two hundred million under management to over thirty five billion under management during the eight years I was there. And I rose from being the head of it to the CTO.…

AI assessment note: “My path to venture is not exactly the straight and narrow path.”

Q Not at all, but I'd love to get started with a little on you. So tell me, Avidan, we both love coffee. That's a mutual thing we have to start off with. And clearly we both love VC. So tell me, how did you make your way into the wonderful world of venture and come to found Root?

A Well, thank you very much, Harry. I appreciate you taking the call this morning. I am well caffeinated, but I would tell you that you have been my driving buddy to Palo Alto more times than you know. I've thrown your podcast on two X fast forwards. You're the 12 minute VC to me, but it's been awesome having your show and, uh, and really just, you know, what you've documented for the world of venture. My path to venture is not exactly the straight and narrow path. I started out as an engineer working in the nineties and 2000. I was working on cable modems at excited home, which was a big collapse in the first.com boom. I worked On voiceover IP handsets while doing my research at Columbia University, studying computer science and embedded systems. I even worked on fax to email gateways at a company called eFax or J two down in Los Angeles. But after the crash in 2001, 2002, I ended up sort of falling backwards into the investment world, not the traditional venture world, but the much more old school private equity style investment world from the tech side. So I was head of it for a small investment firm down in Los Angeles. And I would say I was very lucky to be in the right place at the right time. And we grew from two hundred million under management to over thirty five billion under management during the eight years I was there. And I rose from being the head of it to the CTO.…

AI assessment note: “I ended up sort of falling backwards into the investment world”

Q I'm sorry, I'm too interested again. In terms of kind of venture scalable or backable, in terms of differentiating between whether they are or they're not, Is it purely that kind of upsell component on kind of software services ahead of purchase that makes one kind of venture scalable and backable, or are there other elements where you see and go, absolutely, this has the potential for a venture return?

A Yeah, there are absolutely pieces of hardware or physical products out there that can get to venture scale without the post-purchase revenue, but most of them rely on being a very, very heavily branded consumer experience, and the harsh reality is that everybody on our team, all four investment partners, Are engineers by background and training. And so our empathy lies often with the business unit and our empathy lies often with engineers. So we're more often going to be investing in developer tools over a very fancy branded new consumer AR sunglasses. I mean, no offense to Snap, but I, that's not the area that we look at more often. And we know that there's venture returns hidden in there. It's just not an area we spend a lot of time focusing on.

AI assessment note: “there are absolutely pieces of hardware or physical products out there that can get to venture scale”

Q Avidan, when you look at the founders that you've backed in these kind of more traditional industries, are there commonalities in their backgrounds, be it kind of existing experience in those Spaces, be it parents who've worked in those spaces. I instantly think to Dan at Convoy who kind of always had parents who worked in logistics. Is there commonalities or are they kind of completely fresh to these industries?

A It's really interesting that you ask that because we were looking recently at our CEOs and what we end up finding is that the more common trait amongst them is a hunger to learn and a hunger to solve big problems. The reality is, is that when you're investing in big, heavy industry, B to B, it's really difficult to have customer empathy. The reality is, is consumer internet has a ton of investment interest and a ton of entrepreneurial interest because it's really simple to see yourself using the Snapchat app. So you would invent it for your own purposes. Now, the reality is, is that if you're investing in things like mining rare earth materials, the likelihood we're going to meet a spectacular entrepreneur or engineer will It's a fresh mind approaching the problem and understanding. Investing in understanding the space. So I think a great example of that is a company we just most recently invested in called Dusty Robotics. And Tessa Lau was the CTO of a robotics company called Savio. And she had spent years and years and years in the robotics industry and was going through a renovation of her house. And while she knew very little about the construction industry, she saw the inefficiencies going on in construction and And dedicated a full year of customer research to the problem to discover that she wanted to build a construction focused robotics company and had a extremely deep…

AI assessment note: “more common trait amongst them is a hunger to learn”

Q A huge congratulations on that. But there was a really distinct sentence in there, which said that you're not just kind of hardware focused. It's kind of hard tech focused and kind of differentiating between that. I'm really interested because we spoke about kind of software and hardware there. How does your investor mentality and kind of a hat differ when investing between hardware and software? Is there a distinction?

A Yeah. So we look at our hardware investments as actually software companies at their core. The definition of These companies is often that the software is the differentiator, but we also make a lot of investments purely in software companies. Now, that being said, many of those software companies are only viable today because of that example of the piece dividends of the autonomous car war. So a great example is a lot of investment has been made in GPUs, ultra high speed processors that are able to do multi-point graphics processing. So they're very prevalent in video games and Bitcoin mining and And specifically in the world of autonomous vehicles of taking in lots of data and making really intelligent decisions. Those GPUs have also made it possible for people to have extreme levels of compute on their desktop. So we invested in a company called Entopology, which builds software for mechanical engineers that are able to generate super complex structures for manufacturing that are function-based rather than form-based. And that's only possible today because you Designers have GPUs built into their desktops. Now, it could have worked years ago, but it would have taken hours, if not days, for you to see the results of your computational structures. Now, with a GPU in every box, we're able to run that code directly on the GPU and create a real-time experience, meaning the enginee…

AI assessment note: “we look at our hardware investments as actually software companies at their core.”

Q A huge congratulations on that. But there was a really distinct sentence in there, which said that you're not just kind of hardware focused. It's kind of hard tech focused and kind of differentiating between that. I'm really interested because we spoke about kind of software and hardware there. How does your investor mentality and kind of a hat differ when investing between hardware and software? Is there a distinction?

A Yeah. So we look at our hardware investments as actually software companies at their core. The definition of These companies is often that the software is the differentiator, but we also make a lot of investments purely in software companies. Now, that being said, many of those software companies are only viable today because of that example of the piece dividends of the autonomous car war. So a great example is a lot of investment has been made in GPUs, ultra high speed processors that are able to do multi-point graphics processing. So they're very prevalent in video games and Bitcoin mining and And specifically in the world of autonomous vehicles of taking in lots of data and making really intelligent decisions. Those GPUs have also made it possible for people to have extreme levels of compute on their desktop. So we invested in a company called Entopology, which builds software for mechanical engineers that are able to generate super complex structures for manufacturing that are function-based rather than form-based. And that's only possible today because you Designers have GPUs built into their desktops. Now, it could have worked years ago, but it would have taken hours, if not days, for you to see the results of your computational structures. Now, with a GPU in every box, we're able to run that code directly on the GPU and create a real-time experience, meaning the enginee…

AI assessment note: “So we look at our hardware investments as actually software companies at their core.”

Q and being maybe contrarian, one thought that comes to mind is there's market timing risks there. How do you think about market timing? Is that fair of me to surmise that there is market timing risk when inserting fundamentally new and never seen before elements like robotics into agriculture, shipping, and traditional industries? Is that fair to say there's serious market timing risk, and how do you think about it?

A So we think about market timing risk a little bit differently. We think about market timing risk as to why now? What about today makes it the perfect Technical founders in hard tech and people focused on complex software problems, complex physical computing problems. And we believe that the timing today comes from the fact that a lot of people before us have paved the way. So we think that big companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft have built out fantastic engineering manager programs. So all of these people who have had spectacular experience building solutions are now building teams to build those solutions. Which is a great path by which they become CEOs or CTOs or founders of entrepreneurial organizations because they understand all the things around recruiting and motivation and sales and marketing and a lot of the building blocks that makes them a technical CEO. And I think the next piece is that a lot of the engineering schools have been cultivating their entrepreneurial studies programs. And so what we've found is that a lot of the best engineering schools are now turning out people with amazing foundational engineering skills But a hunger to build a company, not just build a point solution. And from our perspective, the timing as to why is it today that we're going to see more masters and PhD engineering degrees at the CEO helm of companies than MBAs is beca…

AI assessment note: “So we think about market timing risk a little bit differently.”

Q and being maybe contrarian, one thought that comes to mind is there's market timing risks there. How do you think about market timing? Is that fair of me to surmise that there is market timing risk when inserting fundamentally new and never seen before elements like robotics into agriculture, shipping, and traditional industries? Is that fair to say there's serious market timing risk, and how do you think about it?

A So we think about market timing risk a little bit differently. We think about market timing risk as to why now? What about today makes it the perfect Technical founders in hard tech and people focused on complex software problems, complex physical computing problems. And we believe that the timing today comes from the fact that a lot of people before us have paved the way. So we think that big companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft have built out fantastic engineering manager programs. So all of these people who have had spectacular experience building solutions are now building teams to build those solutions. Which is a great path by which they become CEOs or CTOs or founders of entrepreneurial organizations because they understand all the things around recruiting and motivation and sales and marketing and a lot of the building blocks that makes them a technical CEO. And I think the next piece is that a lot of the engineering schools have been cultivating their entrepreneurial studies programs. And so what we've found is that a lot of the best engineering schools are now turning out people with amazing foundational engineering skills But a hunger to build a company, not just build a point solution. And from our perspective, the timing as to why is it today that we're going to see more masters and PhD engineering degrees at the CEO helm of companies than MBAs is beca…

AI assessment note: “So we think about market timing risk a little bit differently.”