Palafox: Autonomous vehicle companies will not outsource synthetic data to startups
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 9:37
Pablo Palafox, co-founder of HappyRobot, discusses why his initial startup building synthetic training data for computer vision models failed.
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“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.”
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Palafox: HappyRobot pivoted away from computer vision on YC Demo Day
“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 labe…”
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“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,…”