Humanoid Robot Revolution: Oliver Mitchell’s Investment Perspective

Anthony Codispoti : Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codispoti and today’s guest is Oliver Mitchell. He is a partner at FF Venture Capital, a firm recognized for its early stage investments across AI, robotics, and other emerging technologies. Their mission is to partner with innovative founders who aim to shape the future and build market moving businesses. Now Oliver has extensive experience in venture capital and technology entrepreneurship. He was previously the founder of Autonomy Ventures focusing on robotics and automation solutions for various industries. He’s also led several successful angel investments including two IPOs and a unicorn now valued at $20 billion and he holds an impressive 14 patents.

Beyond that he founded RobotGalaxy and is an author of an upcoming book called A Startup Field Guide in the Age of Robotics and AI which draws from interviews with luminaries in the automation space and offers insights on taking an idea from its kernel stage all the way to an IPO. Now before we get into all that good stuff today’s episode is brought to you by my company Add Back Benefits Agency where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our innovative programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies contact us today at addbackbenefits.com. All right back to our guest today the partner of FF Venture Capital Oliver Mitchell thanks for making the time to share your story today.

Oliver Mitchell : Thank you Anthony I really appreciate you taking the time to listen to me and hopefully we have a great discussion today.

Anthony Codispoti : I’m looking forward to it. So Oliver today you’re a VC with a portfolio that includes IPOs, a unicorn now valued at over 20 billion and companies deploying humanoid robots and shipbuilding and industrial construction which we’ll get to more in a bit. But before we get into sort of the world of AI automation defense tech I want to go back a little bit earlier kind of beginning of your career. You actually had started on the agency side of things Cursion Bomb, Bond and Partners. What were you learning back then that would become helpful in your current work at FF Venture Capital?

Oliver Mitchell : Absolutely that’s a great question and it you know takes me back a little bit of time and a lot of things have changed since then but I graduated from Arizona State University, had a great experience in Tempe, Arizona actually what people don’t know is that ASU we were building the Mars rover around the time that I graduated during the Clinton administration they found the meteorite from Mars which looked like there was some water inside of it and a lot of money was deployed in building a robot and ASU was one of the universities that was selected in building that. Were you involved in that?

Anthony Codispoti : I was not. You’re kind of around all that excitement that was going on.

Oliver Mitchell : I was around all that excitement I observed I had friends you know on the engineering team I was a you know a liberal art student who was studying history of intellectual movements in the 19th century but in the backdrop of that there were people building for the 21st century and so that was really exciting. And being a liberal arts major in college you know I didn’t really hone in on what I wanted to do right away I came from an entrepreneurial family but I’m first generation American my parents were Holocaust survivors my father went into the restaurant business and so I knew I wanted to do something entrepreneurial and I had the opportunity to intern at really the most innovative young agency at the time Kershman and Bond and you know I joined their internship program it was a great program and at the end of August I was like you know I really want to continue here and they’re like well we only have one job available receptionists I was like I’ll take it I’ll take it right away and actually and back then being a receptionist mean like the phone was like like as big as your my wingspan you know I would like a hundred different extensions and you mess up many times and transferring calls and stuff like that but you actually learn the most about the agency because everyone’s walking in and out you’re seeing you know all the new pitches you know all the CEOs and getting them water you know from the Bisco to Snapple to to Motion on Hennessey and and you’re and you really are the pulse of the agency because you are they’re the first ambassador they see and so you know we represented Snapple in the early days and of course you know at being a receptionist the only thing we could drink up front was Snapple and you know it really I gave it all I could and it was a lot of fun I ended up getting an account role which meant that I was a doormat because in a creative agency you’re pulled between you know the creatives the the art directors and the copywriters and the the client and you’re the one sort of trying to act as diplomat to try to fuse these two perspectives together to get the best product and it really was a lesson in team building that I take with me and I really had great times you know you don’t they don’t do this anymore but every Friday we had drinks trolley and it uh come by and there’s a little big party until somebody got really drunk and you know started making a pass at a client so that so they took drinks trolley off campus and so forth like that but it was a lot of fun really great culture and I was frustrated because I was working for somebody working for somebody and I knew I really wanted to be an entrepreneur so I left the agency world taking all that branding experience more important taking all that team building and cultural experience and went into merchant banking I did a lot of deals uh I did some SPACs uh explain

Anthony Codispoti : what merchant banking is for

Oliver Mitchell : merchant banking so there’s investment banking which you know is very expensive high-end banks you know whether they’re bringing companies public whether they’re doing large mergers and acquisition and uh and then there’s you know venture which is which is deploying capital within the private markets in a very early stage and merchant banking is going for that middle market companies that that have revenue have EBIT and you’re looking at opportunities where you can have the closest path to liquidity and so you know we worked with Kelsstrom found about some Israeli um uh jet and you know Air Force pilots and we sold Pratt Winney jet engine parts and we took that public uh then via a SPAC we were one of the first people to do SPACs and then we we did bogey telecommunications we did moda guzzi we did a number of companies and then I ended up you know researching an opportunity that came out which was to take ATMs outside of bank branches and charge uh you know a surcharge for that and I said there’s a business here there’s new legislation that came out of congress enabling us to actually own ATMs being that we’re not banks and place them outside of bank branches and so we we created americash myself and two other partners and we built that up within 32 months to a national network and I had upsells of marketing there we had company we had you know Simon malls we had federated department stores and we eventually sold that to American Express

Anthony Codispoti : so I got a backup here because I feel like we skipped over something you went from being a receptionist to an account rep and in your words kind of a lowly account rep right you were sort of the doormat not

Oliver Mitchell : a not not a lowly kind I was account management it was not account man I was account management so that means I I work with a client and I try to take the clients um um everything about the client’s brand and try to crystallize it within a creative brief and then work with the creatives to try to translate that into whether that’s broadcast TV commercials print you know pop you know gorilla marketing and and sometimes the creative creatives overreach and they get really passionate about it and sometimes they take a really long time and we bought ad spots and so forth like that and so it’s a lot of managing a lot of balls in the air and to do that you know you’re not you know you’re not the one doing the creative so you’re not getting the pad of the back and you’re trying to make the client happy when they’re very when sometimes they get frustrated with the process and stuff like that like this is not what one or logo has to be bigger you know however how is it going to roll out and so you’re trying to balance all that together and and within the agency there’s the account team which manages the client exactly that there is there’s traffic which actually shuttles the creative around the agency for approvals and making sure everything stays on track so account teams work very closely with traffic traffic tends to be very frenetic personalities because they’re all they’re never at the desk they’re always running around and especially you know back then when when things were um less digitized and then there uh then there’s the creative teams uh which are you know account directors and copywriters and of course there’s media which is buying all the media

Anthony Codispoti : but how did we get from here to to merchant banking this feels like a big leap or was it just an opportunity that kind of

Oliver Mitchell : felt it was not it is an opportunity that fell into my lap and and uh you know just like I grabbed the receptionist opportunity I I grabbed this opportunity and so from a matter after we sold americash you know it took us 32 months to build up a national network and we sold to american express and it was a very good um outcome uh I had the startup bug in me and I created my own startup then um which was um you know this was the internet 1.0 I created actually a a a aggregator of arts and humanities and parks and recreation activities uh called destination boulevard and then I ended up I ended up incubating that within another startup that was more well funded called screen media that was backed by another ad guy called Jay shyat who was a legend shyate day um in in the world and uh a mentor of mine and then I ended up joining um the executive team of a company that Jay founded called interactive called then softcom which later became interactive video technologies and similar to what we did in the atm business and bring them outside of bank branches we were taking video and bringing it to the internet and we were in the first ones to do that and we worked with HBO on a new uh hit show that they thought they had called the sopranos um creating telewebbing applications we work with showtime we work with e online for the academy awards home shopping network with joe montana hawking footballs and we became you know this platform for publishing video uh for broadcasters online um and grew that and uh you know uh to a sizable organization and I had funding from intel sun microsystems allen company tutor private equity you know it was the very much so uh a a company of the internet bubble um we had sales but our funding was definitely a head of uh of what um of what we were projecting and um you know two vignettes from those days is like I remember going to um one of our investors and I had a whole roll-up strategy uh for acquiring all the encoding shops which were taking analog content and digitizing it to mpeg and uh I was like this could be a great way for us to front load you know all the content out there and we could like do a roll-up strategy and so you know relying on my my m &a merchant banking experience and stuff like that and I like this is great it’s great we could raise then you know 200 million dollars which was a big number in um in 2000 and uh and uh they’re like what do you need well they they’re like what do you need uh I’m like wow it’s gonna take me a time to you know do a full diligence here come up with a whole spreadsheet come up a whole platform everything like that no no no no no we could raise 200 million just on a powerpoint and and you knew something was broken there and the other you know story there is I used to say that the happiest and saddest day um of the internet back then was when the company moved into their new office space and so we went from like you know in like a rooting building which is like you know where we had on um 35 wall we had like a 200 people like stacked into four rooms you couldn’t even move chairs you know when you went out to the bathroom you hit somebody this way you hit somebody that way and then we moved into 30 000 square feet where like the uh engineers were riding bicycles and they skateboards around and and then I brought in Bear Stearns you know back then Bear Stearns it’s no longer around but as our bankers um and I was really close for them and um living New York so you can hear the sounds outside and um that um uh they were like what’s going on here like what happens to your office before what are you doing with all this money and uh this is not good optics I was like well I’m not in charge of like let me say the real estate I’m in charge of like you know the you know the uh the marketing and and the fine-hensing and and so like you know it was like you know one of those those times you know like you know where the you know people felt like the need to you know go out and and like where the goal Rolex to everything they’re going and just creating bad optics you know for their shareholders and for the for the industries and so uh the bubble burst and from there I’m giving you the long uh overview here but I went into uh um uh a family office I went into my own management consultancy which fell into a family office I was part of with the Hermes family and I

Anthony Codispoti : try to really see a pattern here like Oliver Mitchell likes to swing big yeah we’re not talking about little side projects here it’s like you go you go all in and so then what happened with the family office

Oliver Mitchell : so I went to the family office and and uh they were partnered with the Hermes family the French atelier and we um had both you know software holdings as well as real estate holdings and I managed a very pretty big like 500 million dollar portfolio there and it went from another bubble where they required a building on you know on Fifth Avenue and put down 5 equity on the deal on a 300 million dollar note and of course the backer then was Lehman brothers and so and so from there I um really started iterated I was at a young family and I created my own another startup called Robot Galaxy uh which was like Build a Bear for Boys where kids get to build their own robots with eight characters and from there you can create a thousand different variations we had a complicated story so there was a whole narrative and kids came in and they chose their core and their flexors and their extenders which are the parts and they put in a fuel cell so the kids the robot would say their name and nickname and then from the comp book they would birth the robot by launching into the seventh ring of Saturn and we had in it we had stores where there was an eight foot you know uh ring of Saturn and you know like it would light up and everyone in the store would count down you know three two one little Billy launching sounds like fun buzz to to the seventh ring of Saturn and and uh the kid would wet his pants you know when he saw his robot come to life and it was it was an amazing thing and we had a really good run and and we had some good backing and um yeah and we had stores here on the east coast

Anthony Codispoti : and then we would eventually happen to that company

Oliver Mitchell : uh twice for us well you were gonna ask like lessons learned you know the company and we can return to it I ended up having to the company you know went into headwinds of 2008 financial crisis and a $40 robot without a movie uh became very hard to sustain and and you know we had our own stores we had shipping shops in Toys Russ and here in Times Square and opposite you know Darth Vader so if you got $40 and you know it’s Christmas what are you gonna spend on the robot that no one knows or Darth Vader who has you know a whole you know uh library but

Anthony Codispoti : just to get those partnerships with the Toys R Us that has to be a process in and of itself like they must have seen something there that they saw oh

Oliver Mitchell : absolutely absolutely and we had you know uh some very good discussions um you know near the end regarding acquisitions and stuff like that yeah it is I mean we we were we had a really good brand um you know we had a great media coverage we were on the Today Show we were Rachel Ray you know seven minutes on Rachel Ray turns into $50,000 instantly you know you know uh Roller Torrent Today Show as on the Big Idea with Danny Deutsch you know our our our stores looks like a fuselage and they change colors and it was beautifully designed by the late Richie Altoona who was all that interactive retail really an amazing um person and and and brain there and our characters were really great and we had a robust comic story that was published by IDW who published Transformers and we were shopping around we just did it back-assward we were shopping you know we should have started with a movie and before

Anthony Codispoti : I was gonna ask if you had it to do over again would you have started with a movie or would you have tried to partner with an existing brand and say let’s layer this idea on top of you know the existing IP for a you know a Darth Vader or something else

Oliver Mitchell : it’s very funny so so my I would have so the first gut answer is yeah I would have started with the media and we had opportunities within the media um and I don’t want to say names in such a public forum but we um we actually near the end had an opportunity with a big media company to create a whole uh children’s sort of um series and and everything like that uh and then that media company got acquired and so they acquired and you know go forward with with the with the content uh we also had an opportunity from a large media company that owns lots of characters um and they were trying to uh attract more boys to their properties and we were a great brand and we were a very big brand uh in the sense that um we were a toy company we were um we had we had an interactive so the phase two of what we did is that um our fuel cell had a USB that you plugged into the computer and there was a multiplayer virtual world and so as kids played games they got new downloads to a robot new eye colors new raised from the con book and they their status raised from cadet to commander so we had this interactive component and so we had a media component we had an interactive component we were we had a hard goods component and then we were next to the big ferris wheel that’s no longer there in Times Square twice Russell the media property had a theme park you know uh we we also touched on that and so we became too horizontal where too many parties had to approve our acquisition there um and and it became a little bit of a thief to them but um but their whole thing was uh they actually had their own characters and they were thinking about like build your own character from our library and so that was actually an interesting thing i i think you know a lot of lessons learned there and i guess we’re jumping to the last question you know here but is um you know one is it’s uh one is you know the in the consumer space the power of marketing you know beyond like such a great idea is so critical and you know we we thought we can launch it initially with retail you know masses of assets passing your store with great location great appealing retail and we did and we had a great uh i mean when we opened up you know we did about $500 a square foot in Toys R Us Times Square in a smaller location we did about 1500 a square foot birthday parties became a destination business for us but it really like when it when times became tough it was not sustainable because people you know had to decide whether they’re going to spend their money on you know food, heating oil, $40 at Walmart you know it could be you know that air cover so that that’s really critical um i also think you know plastics you know hard goods is really tough you know and retail is really tough because you need so much firms of inventory there and uh and with tooling and plastics it’s very tough you know we did some creative things coming up with new colors new patterns for the robots but it becomes very tough and so you got to really when looking at this now for startups that i advise you know you got to look at the whole cycle of the business and you got to see you know where are the areas of optimization so you know to your question could you do a build up and using the same core for everybody and so forth like that to bring down your costs increase your margins

Anthony Codispoti : so as somebody who had had you know a lot of success leading up to this um now you you have this great idea you got some momentum and then you just hit a brick wall you know the economic downturn and the whole thing starts to you know just fall apart around you have to imagine that is it’s one thing to sit here and say like yeah that was hard but sort of behind the scenes like gump wrenchingly hard right there’s a lot of money in it there’s a lot of people who were counting on this and it was a great idea that was working and now all of a sudden it’s like oh now what do i do what happened

Oliver Mitchell : yeah and i was the one of the bigger investors in there but i think more importantly like i was in charge of 200 families you know and i always say this as an investor you know like so many bc’s you know come from goldman come from deloitte but don’t have payroll experience and don’t lay awake thinking about all those people that rely on you to feed their families so yeah i mean you know the people that invest in me their lives are not going to be substantially changed you know i’m saying they’re accredited investors but those people that lost their job they’re gonna it’s it’s a big deal you know especially senior people you know um and so so that that’s what kept me awake at night um but i you know you pivot you persevere you know it’s it’s fourth quarter time and you know we were talking about basketball before and it’s really you know uh i didn’t you know get depressive about it i i said okay this is you know this is we didn’t plan for this let’s pause all the leases that we were gonna sign you know we’re gonna um and let’s um you know let’s slow down the inventory let’s think about how we can you know create newness without investing in new tooling because tooling’s really expensive you know let’s now go through the m &a route and and we did uh you know with that media company which was the first opportunity they approached us um through relationships um you know uh at the same time we were shopping a movie you know we went to every studio you know we we started the network there you know outside you know of our media network within within you know um retail and the virtual virtual gaming space you know we went we’d go to you know every week we’d go in um to la in the valley there and we’d go from studio to studio we get networked into this producer and that producer and we’d get some really good traction and we’d pitch a movie we’d get a show runner and so um when the m &a opportunity with the media big media company came by you know they made me sign an an an nda that like put my children up for barter if i broke it and so like we had to pause everything and and so one thing you know uh being now on the investor side is like big companies can be very disruptive to small companies and so like everything became paused like every deal was like is this good for this company this big media company that that’s looking to acquire us where’s this bad and they were not interested in investing they they like we’re not good investors we just acquire and like you know is this is this good you know you know do we need to like re you know negotiate our writers do we need to renegotiate the ip do we need to you know and so like so much goes so much brain power goes into that and i would say you know we didn’t have we had somebody who got us into you know who had a relationship with the cfo but we didn’t hire an outside advisor and so i think you know it would have been better if we had an outside advisor and my a little big lesson learned there is you know the value of a banker like that to be that third party who can have discussions that you can have with that acquiring entity where there’d be awkwardness you know i’m saying

Anthony Codispoti : oh kind of removes sort of the emotional aspect of it because they’re

Oliver Mitchell : not the emotional but just like you know like just there’s like awkward things where where they you know it’s more comfortable for them to speak in third party about about how the acquisition would work and so forth like that and this went on for five months and yeah and and so i always advise people today to get a banker involved you know spend the money it’s a big number but spend the money and something like that and then you know after that that fell through that was devastating you know anthony that was like we like you know had our whole mindset on that and they ended up acquiring a bigger company that had more media properties to address you know what they were looking for and we’re like okay let’s go back to the showrunners let’s go back let’s sell let’s into a tv studio you know let’s go back you know sell it in new york sell it to the exacts there now let’s go put the hollywood sell it into the producers there now let’s go here and we went back and forth with it with it with this big media property about merchandising rights about all the stuff you know about the new show this is exactly what they want the showrunner and everything like that and we sold it in and then you know they they got acquired and and their acquires like we’re pausing all new production and so we’re like oh shit now what do we do so like okay private equity let’s get a private equity and we sold it into private equity somebody doing a roll up within the toy space but then i was just like you know what this is a really bad deal because while i might do okay the people that came in early they’re gonna be they’re they’re gonna be like squashed and because the company is still continuing in the private equity they can’t even take down the tax right off it’s actually a really bad deal so i ended up you know rather than doing like sort of a digdandy sale i ended up just shuttering the business and and having and having to tell those 200 families you know like we’re closing up and everything like that

Anthony Codispoti : so wait walk me through that a little bit more i want to understand this little grand you know what i mean about the investing what i what i really want to get to is ff venture capital and the work in robotics that you’re doing with some of your core codes but i just want to understand the decision making process to shutting it down versus getting something for it

Oliver Mitchell : well we were just not ordering new inventory and our inventory became out of whack and the right flexor which is an arm would be the motorized one the left one would be the this one mechanical one and so the right one sold faster than the left ones and like our product like it was getting it was getting kind of ugly and just like it didn’t reflect well in the brand and you know we were like you know um you know we we we sold into like department stores you know for for holiday you know our keychains we had a great keychain gift pack and and and our um uh and our big robots would sell in tube we were in all the catalogs and but it just became very tough and um the brand was it was sort of on life support um and um you know at a certain point the retail stores just were not you know the payroll which is killing us because in a mall store you have to be open when the malls are open and monday through like thursday it’s dead it’s just mall walkers you know so like it was just a killer um and so you know and it wasn’t just us like at that time period like people were just dying and so it we did the right thing it was to just shutter shut down yeah we took it as far as we could we went through three different acquisition opportunities you know we we got really close to the target but at a certain point you got a fishing cup bait and just like you know you’re throwing you know good money after bad year and it’s time for everyone to move on

Anthony Codispoti : okay so speaking and moving on let’s move

Oliver Mitchell : on ourselves so so so i did i i’ll tell you the story of like how i became a you know getting into robotics you know it’s a good segue because around that time uh people were so a year before that um you know blogging became really hot and people were like you know you got improved your your your profile online oliver uh and i was always known as the robot guy in new york like people would be like hey there’s oliver he’s the robot guy you got robot galaxy he’s robot guy come here robot guy and like he in the investment community and everything like that and so i was the robot guy then this guy toy robots at the moment toy robots but i was the dance nevertheless i was the robot guy right um and and there’s a lot of similarities between manufacturing toys and actually big robots you know a lot of the microprocessors that are toys or like we’re in big electronics two years earlier and something like that but um so uh somebody who was sort of a friend of the company’s like you got to like improve your your profile you know and out there it’ll help you know the m &a stuff and everything like that we’re gonna create a blog for you okay i’m like that’s cool that’s cool okay we created a blog we’re calling it robot rabbi knowing that i’m jewish and everything like that i’m like okay but i’m not really a rabbi uh but it’s cool robot rabbi don’t you love it and they had um and the logo was like almost like if you look at robot rabbi.com it’s small now but it’s it’s like these rrs it looks like a chesidic jew and and and i was like okay so what am i going to do with a moniker robot rabbi i can’t really be like stale and flexors today that’s like kind of boring and then i was just like i can’t really write about myself i don’t really have you know that much material why don’t i look at the real robot you know rabbi is a teacher ultimately you know uh you know and so i’ll be like okay i’ll teach about real robots and so i started to like look at the robots and uh and i started to say like what is this societal implication uh it’s sort of like morphed into like what’s the business going on here you know like and and somehow i struck a nerve with the industry i’d be like what’s the value proposition here how is it going to get high utility reliability and payback for customers and so i met you know a lot of great people and people would come to me and like you know and they’d be like can you speak about this i’d be like yeah sure i’ll speak about that and then the speaking engagement screw and i would speak at ces and south by about you know the robotics business and this was 2000 started in 2011 and so and then kiva got bought in 2012 so it started to get a little bit of you know of interest there and then i started to meet these really great founders and so you know and and i still like uh was an investor and you mentioned angel uh investing i was a member of new york angels and then i organized my own um investment vehicle called the tommy ventures it was not really marketing solutions it was investing in in in startups and so i built up a portfolio i had a a bunch of investments and over a period of six years i had eight of them that exited you know uh three uh acted really well uh two went public one of them being exo-bionics which is exoskeleton for paraplegics another one an israeli medtech device called novacure uh which went public uh and one time was worth about 16 billion and then it um it trades today market caps around between two to three billion and the other one which was an ai company in adtech called triple lift um which is not uh not worth 20 billion it’s worth it got sold for 1.4 billion and so i built up a really great portfolio of companies and i looked at the robotic space and i became really well known for for these early investments and i became known for my articles and then i would publish every week now it’s more like once a month and um all those you know you know got into you know some of those more audacious articles that i’ve published are in the book and and i’ll talk about the book later but it led to to the book the the blog posting and so after that you know track record uh two friends approached me john frankle and alex cats and like hey listen do you you know would you like to join us and really help us open up deep tech and uh so you know uh they’re a generalist in new york fund they were found in 2008 you know back when the mark went down they they they were optimistic about it investing in and they leaned into it. They’re one of the first people rebuilding the tech ecosystem after 2008.

And I was like, yeah, this is amazing. And so we made investments like Plus One Robotics, I’m wearing right now, that’s in the logistics space, e-commerce logistics. We made investment in Borrow, which is in agriculture, about towing, things around orchards and vineyards, and really turning them into Amazon fulfillment centers with autonomous vehicles. Also, Civ Robotics, where I sit on the board of, which takes construction tech and making it autonomous for solar farms out there.

Anthony Codispoti : Can we go into a little bit more detail on one or more of these companies? Because you’re sort of giving a high level of people, wait, wait, I wanna hear more about that. Let pick one yourself. I don’t know, the autonomous warehouse setup, which company was that?

Oliver Mitchell : Well, that’s Plus One. Why don’t you speak about Civ Robotics? Because I think that’s a really great one because they pivoted and everything like that. So I’ve been investing in Israel for quite some time.

Anthony Codispoti : And why Israel? Just because of the Jewish heritage or there’s something else at play?

Oliver Mitchell : Well, it’s both, it’s both. One of the strong affinity my parents were very involved in the early days of this state, I just found a letter from Moshe Diane, who was the former Defense Minister during the Six-Day War to my father and so forth like that, and Teddy Cogge, the former mayor, who was some, and so my parents were very involved in the early days there. But Israel, I would say, has one of the best tech ecosystems in the world. For foreign countries, listing on the NASDAQ, it is, you know, just, it’s like number two, it has over 250 Israeli publicly traded companies on the NASDAQ.

Anthony Codispoti : Why? Why Israel? It’s a small country. Like why does it have such a big impact in tech?

Oliver Mitchell : So, there’s a few reasons for it. One is Israel is very much so an entrepreneurial society. It has an immigrant society, since the founding of the state, you had Holocaust survivors that came, you had the Sabras who were living there, you know, continuously for thousands of years, and you had people coming in from, you know, in the early days of the state, 800,000 people, refugees that came in through the Arab countries when they were kicked out. And so you have this immigrant society when the Russian, after the Iron Curtain fell, all these Russian Jews, you know, over two million of them came to Israel, you know, and you still have that today from France, from the US.

And so immigrants are naturally entrepreneurial, they leave their born networks and they’re recreating themselves, you know? That’s number one. Number two is everyone is conscripted into the army. And the army takes very young people. And actually the Israeli army works almost opposite than the US army, which has a huge hierarchy. The Israeli army, everything is at the, is at the sort of the foot soldiers level. And so you’ll have an 18 year old in charge of like 200 people. And so, you know, that you do have ranks, but I mean, there’s so much there and they have a lot of responsibility.

And this is before they’re going to college. And what happens in Israel is that in the US, you know, kids go into high school that thinking about college and they all want to go to good college in Israel, kids all want to go to the great units because certain units produce really great startups. And so, especially the cyber and the intelligence units, the largest unit in the army is unit 8,200, which is the intelligence unit.

And so Israel’s a small country with lots of enemies around it and it has to operate smarter than just big weapons. And so, already in high school, teams are forming because the army is giving aptitude tests of who has a propensity for this high level of physics, mathematics, of coding. And so people are grouped, you know, starting like say sophomore year of high school. And by the time they graduate, they usually go to what’s called Mishina, which is like a gap year program, which is pre your army. So whatever army unit you’re going to go into, there’s a Mishina there that’s preparing you before you go into that unit. And so I think of it like ROTC in a sense, right? And so, I actually have a son who wants to do like Navy ROTC. And so like, you know, he’s going to college and doing ROTC on this free time. And so this is like, they’re doing that not just half day, they’re doing that all day long. And so these teams are forming their high school post-high school and then now they’re in the army. High stakes, high stress, and huge bonds are forming. And so out of A200 Shmona, Atayem, Tapeo, which is a special sort of physics unit that crosses over different divisions, you have the Shin Bet, which is like the FBI, but for domestic terrorism in Israel, then you have the Masad, which is international.

You have Sarmaqal and these high units produce these amazing teams. And so when people are done with their service, after depending if they’re going to be an officer, three, five years, they’re like, okay, what are we going to do now? Well, I love you guys.

Anthony Codispoti : Let’s start a startup and let’s go back to the- There’s a lot of kinship and there’s a lot of knowledge. And knowledge, because they can get any- They’re not capable from a young age.

Oliver Mitchell : Right, and they’re not scared of failure, right? That immigrant flood, they’re not scared of failure. In the US, there’s so much built up. You’re going to Harvard, you got to do this. You can’t fail in Israel.

Okay, I fail. Okay, I’ll do another startup. And so they’ll, so they go into it and the people that they actually raise capital from, they’re all alumni from the unit. They’re working on funds, they’re doing this. And so, and this is something that I’m exploring right now is how to leverage that in a fund and so forth like that to get to those deals.

I’ll give you an example. A company, the defense tech space, Hela, founded by a loan drawer who comes from like the Shembet and Hamutal who comes, who ran Palantir in Israel and also came into Shembet. They founded a defense tech software company called Kella. Within six months, they raised $100 million from Sequoia, Lux and Incutail.

Incutail is the fund of the intelligence agencies in the US. And so, all that knowledge base, all those teams, the ability to recruit from all those units, you know, great startups. And so, I’ve always had good relationships in Israel. And so, I was approached by the Technion, which is like Israel’s MIT, about a company called Siv, then Siv Drone. They were, bless you, they were out of the drive accelerator, which is an accelerator up in Haifa. And they were taking drones to do surveying for construction. They were two civil engineers that worked in construction, new construction, and I really liked them.

I thought what they were doing really had merit. I was like, listen, you know, next time in New York, let’s get together and we got together. And I was like, there’s an accelerator just four hours, you know, north of here called Genius New York that, and it’s the largest accelerator for uncrewed systems in the US. You should really go there and it’ll be a launch pad for you to enter the US market.

And if you’re, you know, too really well there, you can get between a half a million and a million dollars. And they won the prize there. And I introduced it to FF in 2019. We invested, then sort of in a pre-seed rounds and then we led the seed round and brought in other investors.

And, you know, we just, they actually, they pivoted. Every when I go through, I interviewed Tommy Shorn in my book, you know, when they were doing their customer discovery, I was like, yeah, I love drones. I love drones.

This is a great idea. I love drones. And then they went out to the market and like, and they’re like, okay, we got the drone and they had this beautiful drone. It was like, it must’ve been like seven feet wingspan, you know, quadcopters, and it actually did autonomous staking and everything like that, you know, and it connected to the cloud. So if your plans changed, the drones flight path, which was amazing, then they went to the customers like, okay, we got the drone, we got the drone. They’re like, yeah, I said I love drones. I never said I was going to buy a drone.

And so they’re like, what we really need is a terrestrial robot that can go and it doesn’t have to stake. We can have just one guy, you know, we got to get all these teams together. You need 16 guys.

It takes three months to book them. You know, it really holds up our development, especially in solar. You know, if you can do this and create a robot that can mark all the places and do, you know, that can be 10 times faster, half the cost, you know, more accurate, we’ll buy that. And they’re like, okay, okay. So they went back, they were in Israel and they created that robot.

They’re like, okay, we got the robot. And now they’re killing it. They’re based in SF now. You know, their sales were phenomenal. They just had the best corridor expanding internationally in Australia, in the UAE, in Saudi Arabia, in Europe. What does this robot look like?

Anthony Codispoti : Like from a physical perspective, does it look like a human or is it like, you

Oliver Mitchell : know, it looks like a box with four wheels. Sometimes those wheels are actually not round. They’re like lunar wheels, depending on the surface, you know, it’s going, so the robot used is just a RPK GPS to figure out all the coordinates. It’s usually the first thing, you know, before a solar farm is built. And so it doesn’t need to have vision on it. So it’s just, it’s about a five foot box with wheels. And as a- Explain RPK GPS.

Anthony Codispoti : You know, you have those guys with the tripods and they’re marking everything and everything like that, you know, so it’s doing it digitally. And so it puts a laser or it does spray paint, depending on what the customer wants.

And then there’s a guy following you just, so rather than, you know, a 16 guy, you got one guy with a hammer and a flag and you just following along it. And it goes all day long. And so, you know, it can do, you know, hundreds of thousands of points within weeks that would normally take months. And it’s half the cost and 10 times faster and more accurate because humans can stay.

Anthony Codispoti : And so is the plan with this company to introduce more use cases for the robot or this is a big enough use case on its own. It’s just get it to more people doing what it does.

Oliver Mitchell : So about 70% of the business is in solar, but you know, there’s data centers that they can do. Everything in horizontal construction. So like roads and so forth like that, they also have a, so CivDots the main product, they have CivDot Mini for Striping Roads.

But now they’re gonna come out with CivMove, which is gonna be an autonomous material mover. And that will have vision. That’ll be an active construction site with people around it. And it can autonomously move, you know, the piles and

Anthony Codispoti : the- Like how big will this be? What will the size of the payload?

Oliver Mitchell : It can be pretty big thinking of it like a skid steer, an autonomous skid steer. Yeah, so, you know, like thinking of it like, you know, skid steer is like a forklift in a warehouse. And so, yeah, and it’s moving very heavy. The piles are very heavy.

The solar cells very heavy, but it’s really, you know, moving things around the construction site. And, you know, this isn’t, you know, going back to that customer discovery, this is something that customers ask them to build. It’s not something that they’re just brainstorming. And a customer says like, if you build this, for every CivDot we buy, we’re gonna buy six to eight of these. And so, you know, there’s real high demand from their customers for this. And so that’s what they’re on track with.

They just closed their series A. You know, they brought in some great investors. And the investor that I brought in in the previous investment rounds with FF, who co-led with us, Alley Corp, led this round. And so I’m very happy that we’re getting, you know, the cap table, you know, you wanna build a, construct the right cap table that can see a company through multiple cycles.

Anthony Codispoti : So when most people think robots, they think like Terminator, they think like a humanoid form robot. And what you just described is obviously a very different format, very functional and useful. Are you involved with any startups that are sort of making the more, you know, rosy from Jetson style, kind of human type form of robot?

Oliver Mitchell : Yes, I am. So, I mean, most, so, most of the robots out there are very, that we’ve invested in at FF are very utilitarian, right? Vision systems to help co-bots with, you know, wire harnessing for cars and picking, been picking, you know, on manufacturing or vision systems around co-bots for logistics. We have drones that are doing deliveries of fast food, you know, but then outside of FF, I am an advisor to Prasanna AI. And Prasanna AI is founded by Nick Radford, Jerry Pratt and Jida.

And they all came, you know, Nick and Jerry were at NASA. And they built really the humanoid robotics lab. And they built Robonaut and Robonaut 2. They didn’t just build Robonaut 2, they launched Robonaut 2 to the ISS. And then they built Valkyrie. After that, Jida and Nick founded a company called Houston Mechatronics, which later became Nauticus, which was taking almost like transformer like robots, which is an autonomous, you know, robot to go undersea, which is even more complicated than space, because in space you don’t have to worry about things living on your robots.

And down in sea, undersea, that had arms that came out and for, whether for cables, for oil and gas, you know, for conservation. And they built that company from Nick’s living room all the way to taking it public. And about last year, Nick was sharing with me his idea for a humanoid company. And we were talking about talking about it. It was like, you know, there’s Optimus and there’s Figure out there and, you know.

Anthony Codispoti : Optimus from Elon Musk.

Oliver Mitchell : Tesla, right? And Optimus, I was like, is the most well suited for the home, right? They already sell consumer cars. They already have a financing arm for consumer cars. If you go to a Tesla showroom, there’s always an Optimus, you know, a static Optimus there, you know, for eye candy. And I’m like, you know, they potentially could launch, you know, a robot in the home. The home’s most complicated environment. Every home is different, toys, mess, whatever you, but they potentially could launch it and finance it in such a way that it costs as much as like a housekeeper or a nanny, right? And they could lose money on it, you know, just to get that data, just to get in the home, sort of like an Alexa device, right? And then there’s like Figure and Aptronic, which is going to light manufacturing now.

Figure wants to go into the home. And Jerry was formerly at Figure. He was the founding CTO there.

And, you know, and he lives in Florida. He has a humanoid’s lab there for really looking at the cutting edge of humanoid’s there. And so, but no one’s really addressing, you know, in the world of robots, there’s dull, dirty, and dangerous, right? We spoke about dull, you know, bin picking, really tedious dull jobs. Dirty, civil robotics working in a, in the Mojave Desert, 120 degree heat, really like dirty work, right? Construction, but dangerous.

Like, who’s doing that? And I’m like, guys, you guys are the only ones that’s launched a robot to space, the most dangerous environment there is. And so, and leveraging the hardware that they built, they’ve licensed it from GM and NASA, because that was a partnership to the old robot. And so they actually have the best hand out there, the most dexterous hand out there.

And they’re going into dangerous jobs. And the first customer, which was announced is Hyundai HD and Hyundai Robotics and Vazzle for shipbuilding. Shipbuilding. Shipbuilding, and so well- Like big giant boats.

Like giant boats, right? And China leads shipbuilding. At one period of time, we led shipbuilding. In the Navy Yards, just across the East River, we were building one to two ships a week there, in World War II. The USS Missouri was built in Brooklyn. And it was the can-do shipyard, that was what it was called. Now last year, the US built all of five ships.

Not so great. How many did China build? 300. Oh my gosh.

Yeah. But the second most builder of ships is Korea. South Korea is a big ally of ours. And so, and Hyundai actually, besides making cars, makes ships. And a really dangerous and hard job is welding these steel hulls together.

A guy has to go with a welder, hunched over. And you can’t put these on a conveyor belt. These are heavy. He’s hunched over, climbing over each of these hulls, bringing them together and welding them. And this is a great job for a humanoid, right?

Why can’t that guy now have a fleet of humanoids at his disposal that he can control? How many years can somebody be hunched over with a welder, like the light where his eyes starts to go, his back starts to hurt? It’s a dangerous job.

The toll that it takes on a human being. And then if you take that to construction, right? You take someone who in a mall who’s just doing drilling like this up in the ceiling. That’s hurting the shoulder. The workers’ complications on that is humongous. You take a loading dock.

The amount of pressure that puts on the lower back. You take, now you go into mining, right? Hole mining, how much fumes can someone breathe? How many rocks fall on somebody before they go to a doctor and they get oxygen and get addicted to oxygen in West Virginia?

There’s no, it’s by no chance that Purdue, a farmer, chose the coal mining centers to introduce oxy to get people addicted to it. And so these are great jobs for humanoids. These are horrible jobs for humans.

Anthony Codispoti : Are the humanoids ready for this kind of work? Like is the technology there?

Oliver Mitchell : Yeah, so two things. One is to finish it. So if everyone else is building a Toyota Prius of humanoids, Prasanna AI is building the F-150 humanoid. The tough humanoid. Yeah, the tough humanoid. And they’re doing it, they were just on Fox and Friends because Trump’s big thing is bringing back shipbuilding to America. And long-term, Trump just in a big, beautiful build, that’s what he calls it. They just allocate $34 billion for shipbuilding in America or make that possible.

They better make a phone call to Houston, to Prasanna. So now, yes, the technology’s ready for you. The technology’s here.

There’s two things that have been instrumental. The, first of all, they have the technology. They’ve done it on the space station.

Now they’re bringing it down to earth. Number one. Number two is we have a lot more processors and actuators at a smaller scale that enable the mechanical aspects to be done more efficiently and less expensively. And number three is we have all this data and all this, and now foundational AI models.

And so now the learning for a humanoid has been shrunk because you could take all the simulation data and now the robot could actually have more knowledge than it’ll actually see in real life. And I have this today with my portfolio company, Cambrian Robotics, which works in smart manufacturing, especially for automotive. And one of their big things is wire harnessing for cables. And wires get kinked. Wires don’t operate like widgets. Wires will go awry, but because they’ve trained it, the robot, using AI.

Anthony Codispoti : And it trains it with like thousands of hours of video of like watching human beings do it?

Oliver Mitchell : Watching, yes, and just like, or watching robots do it, what will the robot do when the wire goes awry? It’s all simulation. It’s more the robot, it’s the robot going, so of understanding the path planning. It’s not really, the human doesn’t like think through the path planning, but the robot has to think through the path planning to get that wire

Anthony Codispoti : that’s not- So it’s the timeline error. It did this, it didn’t work. It did this, it didn’t work. Oh, it did that.

Oliver Mitchell : And it has so much more. So now it sees that the wire’s gone awry and it’s mission-driven, it’s deterministic. It’s like, okay, I know what that is. And it goes back on the path, clips it back in, and plugs it back in. And so, and that’s really big. And now that’s possible for a co-bot, which is this one robotic arm. That’s really possible with a bipedal humanoid robot.

Anthony Codispoti : So you mentioned before about how persona, one of the advantages they have is having the most dexterous hands. It has that been an impediment up to this point, and how close is it now to what a human can do?

Oliver Mitchell : Yeah, so that dexterity is sort of the final frontier of robotics, right? And so that is really the key. And, but dexterity has to be within the knowledge base of these foundational AI models.

And they’re gonna be creating their own in addition to using what’s publicly available. So your last question is like, how close is it to a human? Yeah, where are we today in terms of thinking? Yeah, I don’t think it should.

I don’t think, so I think we’re far off. Like so, so a humanoid is somewhat of a Swiss army knife, that you have, it’s versus just a single purpose robot, a humanoid can do many things. And one of the great things about a bipedal humanoid is it can walk like a human. It can go in between things. You don’t have to change the workflow of a factory floor, of a mine, of a construction site. It’s, the world is built for humans, a humanoid has the gate of a human and can go in between things just like a human can. A humanoid can use human tools. So because it’s using a hand and the grasping and something like that. So you don’t have to create new end effectors, new drills that you’re gonna, new appendages.

Anthony Codispoti : It can work within the existing ecosystem.

Oliver Mitchell : Exactly. And so that’s the big opportunity. How we create that library will take time. And it will start with these tasks. And as these tasks grow, you will have a wider library of opportunity. Think of it like an autonomous vehicle.

An autonomous vehicle, it’s been going on now for 20 years and getting all this knowledge data of navigating the road, understanding how humans drive. And humans, there’s a law and then there’s the culture. New Yorkers drive very different than people in LA.

People in Bangalore drive very different than people in New York. So how I stop might not be like the letter of the law, where I go in and so forth. So a robot has to understand and navigate that. And has to understand what a fire truck is, right? A big complaint of Waymo was like the fire, the sirens go off, it can’t hear a siren.

It doesn’t know what to do and so forth like that. But now you go into a Waymo in San Francisco within a geofenced in area, you’re not worried. You feel very comfortable. You actually feel like this is better than Uber. It doesn’t smell.

Sometimes my Uber smells. It’s perfectly the temperature that I like. I don’t have to worry about that guy being cold and me being hot. I can have my music. I can, you know what? I can eat some food back here. No one knows.

If the food upsets my stomach, no one knows about that either. So it’s just like, it’s a better experience. And it knows those streets there. It knows how people drive there. It knows where it needs to go.

It creates that knowledge base. But it has to start within that geofenced in area and then it can expand that territory. Likewise, the human always need to start with these tasks of shipbuilding. Then it can go to construction drilling. Then it can go to these other tasks. It will not, I think it’s far, that’s why the home is sort of like the most complicated.

Anthony Codispoti : I have so many more questions I want to ask about robotics Oliver, but I want to make sure we leave enough time to talk about your book. So we’re going to do this last.

Before we get to that question though. Well, my book is about robotics. Great.

I’m even more excited to hear about it. So if folks want to get in touch with you or follow your story, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Oliver Mitchell : You know, really the best way is Alvar Mitchell on LinkedIn, send me a message, I’ll respond. Terrific.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay, so new book coming out. It’s about robotics and the title is tell us.

Oliver Mitchell : A start of field guide in the age of robots and AI.

Anthony Codispoti : And why write this? What was the inspiration behind it?

Oliver Mitchell : Yeah, so I teach entrepreneurship. I teach an MBA course called entrepreneurship and the management of change. And I’m a big fan of Steve Blank and Eric Rees. Steve Blank and Eric Rees wrote a startup owners manual. It’s a great piece. I teach it in my MBA course. I also teach lots of case studies, different startups out there.

But I found that within the world of robotics and AI, it’s a different animal. So if you were launching a software company, by example, you have so many investors that are interested in that. But if you’re launching a hardware company, that will shrink really fast. The margins and the hardware are different. The business model is in hardware are different.

Hard tech, working in the industry, it can’t fail. People are understanding back in the early days of Windows when you got a blue screen and you got to reboot your computer. People are understanding on that, they’ve been trained on that. But if technology fails within industry and people get hurt or it becomes fatal, that’s it. That autonomous vehicle kills somebody and there’s been instances. No room for error. Right.

And so people have very little patience for that. And so I felt the need that for a different type of book, for people starting with the kernel of their idea with a concept and understanding how to drive their customer discovery and learning from really, experts and industry leaders in the space in taking it all the way through M &A, through IPO and all the paths in between. So it really, I call it a field guide because just like a big backpacker and just like before you go into a new area, you’ll take out the field guide, understand the terrain, understand if you have to forge for food, what to get, what are the supplies you’re gonna need, what’s the weather patterns there and everything like that. And this is likewise a field guide for entrepreneurs.

Anthony Codispoti : And so when is it coming out and where can people find it? Sure.

Oliver Mitchell : It’s coming out on June 18th. If anybody here is gonna be in Boston on June 11th, I’m having a book launch party and we’ll have books there at Mass Robotics on June 11th at 5 p.m. And you can go to the Mass Robotics website to sign up or you can see my LinkedIn post. And there will be Robotics Invest and Robotics Week in Boston around that time as well. But if you’re unable to attend that, you can buy it on Amazon, just type in a starter field guide and agent robots and AI or Oliver Mitchell. Or you can go to Rutledge Press, my publisher’s website as well. And yeah.

Anthony Codispoti : And another little shameless plug for you Oliver, are you looking for more deal flow or are you kind of locked down on the port codes that you’re working with currently?

Oliver Mitchell : That’s a really good question. So always looking at interesting things. Currently our fund is fully deployed. But at the same time, I have a unique position with my firm and so I can do things outside of my firm as well.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay, terrific. Oliver Mitchell, it’s been a fascinating conversation. Like I said, we could have kept talking about Robotics for a long time, so maybe we’ll have you back

Oliver Mitchell : at some point in your, oh sorry, I mean, I guess something else you wanna throw in there. Yeah, I wanted to share, being yet on the book, just tying a bow around everything is that one of the first stories I speak about is Mick Mounce who built Kiva Systems.

Anthony Codispoti : This was the one that was purchased by Amazon moves

Oliver Mitchell : the- For $775 million and it’s still one of the bigger purchases in the robotic space. And it paid for itself within 18 months. They were shipping two billion packages by utilizing this.

And so Mick, he didn’t go and sell it. I’d say I wanna build a robotics company. He saw a problem and he saw that problem during the internet one point, oh days with Webvan. And Webvan was one of the poster childs for overfunding and went public at $800 million and they blew through all this cash and they built these beautiful distribution centers. And Mick was in charge, he was an engineer there and he was in charge of, that these fulfillment centers and he saw that there was nothing addressing this new type of e-commerce because these two distribution center systems couldn’t do pick and pack. They just were about full cardens and e-commerce were just starting. And so he built, he saw this problem and I go through this in great detail.

And after Webvan, after he left Webvan shortly before they went bankrupt, he started to ideate on what later became Kiva Systems and with two other partners. And he’s like, you know what we gotta do? We gotta bring the shelving to the picker. And they reorganized how a warehouse operates. And they actually, not only that, but the Kiva Systems reorganize the shelving based upon the best sellers online as well.

And so they’re on the perimeter and the dogs are on the inside. And so like, you know, it’s just one of many vignettes that I go through in my book of like, how to successfully create a business utilizing these advanced technologies to address real problems in the industry.

Anthony Codispoti : And I think that’s a great place to start when thinking about a new business is what’s a problem to solve? What is a pain point for folks?

Oliver Mitchell : Customer discovery, it’s all about customer discovery.

Anthony Codispoti : Well, Oliver Mitchell, FF Venture Capital, I wanna be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. It’s been fascinating, I appreciate it. My pleasure, Anthony, thank you. Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.