A personal look at my experience working with Boston Dynamics and the challenges I faced.
Why Most Approaches Fail
Many common approaches to robotics are flawed at the root.
The root cause is usually one of three things:
Copying what big companies do without understanding why they do it. What works for Google doesn't work for a 10-person startup.
Over-engineering the solution when a simple approach would work better. I've seen teams spend six months building something that could have been done in two weeks.
Ignoring the human element. Technology is the easy part. Getting people to actually use it is where the real challenge lives.
The Reality Nobody Talks About
A lot of the advice on robotics rests on assumptions that made sense five years ago. The world has moved on.
The first thing to understand is that the market doesn't care about your roadmap. I've seen this play out across dozens of companies. The pattern is unmistakable.
Many teams spend months on the wrong path before realizing that the data tells a different story than your gut. Once they make the switch, everything changes.
The Counterintuitive Truth
In robotics, the best practitioners often do less, not more.
The lesson: the market doesn't care about your roadmap. It sounds simple. It's incredibly hard to execute.
What I Tell Founders
Before deciding anything about robotics, start with three questions:
What's your timeline? Because the right approach for a company with 6 months of runway is very different from one with 3 years.
What have you already tried? Most founders have tried something. Understanding what didn't work is often more valuable than knowing what might.
Who on your team owns this? If the answer is "everyone" or "no one," that's your first problem to solve.
These questions seem simple but they reveal a lot about where a company actually stands.
This connects to broader themes around humanoid robots, autonomous vehicles, surgical robots that I've been thinking about a lot lately.
The Bottom Line
None of this is rocket science. But it does require intentionality, consistency, and a willingness to learn from mistakes.
If you take one thing from this article, let it be this: start now, start small, and iterate. The founders who win at robotics aren't the ones with the best strategy on paper. They're the ones who execute, learn, and adapt faster than everyone else.
Companies that take robotics seriously tend to pull ahead of the ones that don't.
If you're working on something interesting in this space, I'd love to hear about it. Drop me a line.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q:What was the biggest challenge in this case?
Almost always, the biggest challenge is people and alignment, not technology or strategy. Getting the right team focused on the right problem is harder than any technical challenge I've encountered.
Q:Can these results be replicated?
The specific numbers will vary, but the underlying patterns and principles are transferable. The key is understanding the context behind the results, not just copying the tactics. Every company has unique constraints that shape what works.
Q:What would you do differently looking back?
I'd move faster on the things that were working and cut the things that weren't sooner. Most founders, myself included, hold onto failing strategies too long because of sunk cost. Speed of learning is everything.