The Demo Was Never the Hard Part: David Mindell on What It Takes to Deploy

The Demo Was Never the Hard Part: David Mindell on What It Takes to Deploy

Brad turns the tables on his former MIT professor, David Mindell. David is a historian, deep-ocean robotics pioneer, founder of Humatics, and now an investor in industrial transformation through his firm Unless. They trace the thread from James Watt’s steam engine to robots two miles deep in the ocean to the warehouse floor: why the demo is never the hard part, why industrial transformation runs on “human time” and takes about 30 years, why the real automation problem is too few robots rather than too many, and why — from Thinking Machines to OpenAI — there’s no technology story that isn’t a human story.

No Such Thing as a Purely Technical Decision: Scarlett Koller From MIT to Mars to Mithril

Brad reconnects with Scarlett Koller, who he first met as an MIT sophomore for Amazon’s original Prime Air intern cohort, back when drone delivery was a “60 Minutes” segment, not a product. She’s since delivered on SpaceX Crew Dragon, NASA Perseverance, and Amazon Kuiper, and now runs Mithril , a deep tech startup reshaping space sensing. They trade stories on why NASA’s shuttle veterans cared so much about a simple handle, why people are harder to engineer than radiation, and how an antenna the size of a volleyball court, controlled to the thickness of a sheet of paper, could keep us from losing low Earth orbit.

The Most Expensive Introduction Ever Made: Ross Fubini and Anduril's Origin Story

Brad reconnects with Ross Fubini, the two met as Netscape interns when being a nerd wasn't cool. Ross went on to accidentally make the most valuable introduction in Silicon Valley history, connecting Palantir's first employees, then built XYZ Venture Capital around the network that followed. They trade notes on what the browser wars actually teach us about the AI wars, why only 40 people in America know how to sell tech to the Pentagon, and whether OpenAI ends up like Netscape: world-changing, then gone.

The Global Software Market Is Just Too Small: Bilal Zuberi on Physical AI's Moment

Brad Porter sits down with Bilal Zuberi: MIT PhD, former Lux Capital GP, and the investor behind Applied Intuition, the most profitable physical AI company you've probably never heard of. They dig into why the smartest money is leaving mega-funds, what separates visionary founders from execution founders, and why the entire enterprise software market is smaller than most people think. Bilal makes the case that AI's real impact isn't in chatbots, it's in a physical world that's stayed dumb for decades.

Is The World Really Built for Humans? Unlocking AI’s Potential with Alfred Lin

Everyone says humanoid robots will win because the world was built for humans. But was it? Sequoia Capital partner Alfred Lin joins Cobot CEO Brad Porter for a conversation spanning their shared history, from the Zappos deal that almost convinced Amazon robots would never work, to why Alfred's father's journey from farmer to bank president is the best case for AI optimism. They dig into why the best robot form factor might not have hands at all, what the "ChatGPT moment" for robotics already is, and why every technology wave demands a combination of new hardware and software that we haven't yet seen on the consumer side for AI. Sign up for exclusive insights from leaders in Physical AI and Robotics: https://cobot-deployed.com/RSS2 [https://cobot-deployed.com/RSS2]