Palafox: HappyRobot pivoted away from computer vision on YC Demo Day
Pablo Palafox · 1st time founder completely pivots after YC—then grows 30x in a year to $2.2M ARR. | Pablo Palafo... · PMF Show · Jan 30, 2025 · at 37:20
Pablo Palafox is the co-founder of HappyRobot. He describes dropping their initial computer vision product right at Y Combinator Demo Day.
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“On demo day, I literally slag Diana, like Diana, we're pivoting. Like demo day, like we have the slides prepared, the presentation prepared, and like we're pivoting, like away completely from this computer vision platform thing that we've built, this auto labeling thing.”
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More from Pablo Palafox
Palafox: Autonomous vehicle companies will not outsource synthetic data to startups
“Like there's just not enough enterprises that need that. And the ones that actually need it, it's so core. Like think think like Cruz or like Waymo. It's core to them. Like they're not gonna like outsource that to like a shitty startup.”
Palafox: The computer vision market has slowed due to limited company demand
“There's the computer vision space is, like, tricky, not to say that it's not going to be, like, there's not going to be built, big businesses built around it, but, like, it's kind of come to, like, a small end for now. Realistically, there's just, like, less c…”
Palafox: Moving to San Francisco gives founders a crucial fundraising aura
“I think that speaks to the fact that being in NSF where the value is It does pay off. It does give you that aura. So as much as it is hard to get a visa and everything, I highly recommend folks to obviously try to get here somehow.”
Palafox: Deep system integration is the real moat for vertical AI
“The integration, as you're saying, that's the real like mode, like being able to like fully connect to a customer. They trust you. You're their provider now. Boom. Like you have a customer for life almost.”
Palafox: HappyRobot grew from $0 to $2.2M ARR in 2024
“We're at zero dollars of revenue in January, 24. Today we're at 2.2 million a year over.”
Palafox: HappyRobot reached $50K ARR before pivoting away
“We continue like getting some traction and we got to a point where like we had like a 50 K in ARR, like something that obviously is like hard, but also like in retrospect, like stupid, like it is like, we were feeling so proud, like people are actually paying,…”