think different

Today, no one in right mind can deny the impact of Tesla & Elon.

@elonmusk @Tesla

.@WalterIsaacson says Steve Jobs would be appalled by agentic AI.

"[Steve Jobs] says the goal is to connect human creativity to the processing power of our machines."

"What we're doing now with agentic AI is where I worry."

"When I start using agents that try to do things t of my control, Steve Jobs would be appalled by that."

"It doesn't connect human creativity to the product. It doesn't have the music that makes our hearts sing, as Steve said, with the iPod."

"These people aren't stepping back and saying, 'Why are we making this?' The answer should be to help humanity."

"That was Steve's lodestar."

After 9 years. 16K+ family homes. 500M sqft inside real homes covered, we know home robots are being built in wrong order.

So we built Matic the way nature grows a child.

Finally, sharing our vision:
1.⁠ ⁠Why robots get stuck at the demo
2.⁠ ⁠Why labs can't ship robots
3.⁠ es, not hands
4.⁠ ⁠The 99.999% rule in robotics
5.⁠ ⁠Where Matic is going next

1. Why most robots get stuck at demos

Robot demos look brilliant in a room arranged around its limitations: familiar lighting, predictable furniture, nothing troublesome on the floor.

A family’s home makes no such accommodations. There are cables, toys, shifting rugs and, occasionally, dog poop. Yes, humanoids will need to avoid that too.

Repeating a task under familiar conditions of uncluttered floors is not the same as handling an unfamiliar home with all its chaos.

2. Why labs can't ship robots

SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) is how a robot maps its surroundings and locates itself within them. Ask most academics and they'll tell you it's a solved problem.

But real homes are the most chaotic spaces that exist.

There are glass doors that look like open doorways, mirrors, stairs, rugs, charging cables, and Legos placed all around.

So ask yourself: if indoor mapping and navigation is "solved," where are the robots? Why aren't airports, hotels and grocery stores full of them?

Calling it “solved” misses the question families actually care about: can I leave this thing alone and trust it?

3. Why we started with eyes, not hands

Nature doesn't give birth to a fully working human. We took our cue from how nature develops humans: capabilities built on one another.
Children learn to see before they learn to grab, and to grab before they learn to plan and handle the unexpected.

Perception comes first. Manipulation follows. More complex responsibilities come after that. At every stage, the robot must earn the next job by doing its current one well enough.

Before asking a robot to pick up a sock, we wanted it to understand where it was, where the sock was, and how to reach it.

Most of the industry started at the top, with humanoids. We started at the bottom, with a robot whose job is to see and move through a home precisely with 1cm accuracy in any lighting condition.

Floor cleaning gave that foundation an immediately useful job. It forced us to confront navigation, clutter, privacy and everyday reliability before reaching for more complex chores.

The floor cleaner isn’t a detour from our larger ambition. It is how we’re building toward it.

4. The 99.999% rule in robotics

At 90%, one in ten decisions is wrong, and a robot makes thousands in a single clean. That's the robot that bumps, gets lost, and falls down the stairs.

Every extra nine is a new mountain. The failures get rarer, harder to find, and exponentially harder to fix. They barely even happen until they happen in your home.

Matic's visual SLAM runs at 99.999% in 16K+ homes. We’re the ONLY unsupervised home robot at scale with pure vision-only full autonomy. If you ask us, the gap between 80% and 99.999% is where our 9 years of engineering went.

We close that gap inside real homes. When Matic handles something imperfectly, it saves a short clip and keeps it on the device. It only leaves if the family chooses to share it. If they do, it gets labeled, fed back into the model, and every Matic gets smarter, including theirs.

Families control what leaves their homes. We do the work of making the product better.

Better robots earn trust > trust brings more homes > and more homes teach the robot more.

5. Where Matic is going next

Phase one was perception and it's nearly done. Matic has covered 500 million square feet, 400K miles in thousands of real lived-in homes.
Now phase two is going to be about manipulation. And our idea is to build a robot that doesn't just move through your home, but acts in it to eliminate even more chores.

Each step must be useful today, not justified by something we promise tomorrow. The evolution of Matic is the revolution.

The goal isn’t to put the most impressive humanoid in your living room.

It’s giving your family time and energy back through robots that earn your trust, protect your privacy, and help without becoming another responsibility.

More time for each other. Less work getting in the way.

That’s Matic.
Get yours today at maticrobots.com

BREAKING: Pod 6 is live.

The sixth generation of our intelligent sleep system, redesigned for every kind of bed.

✅ The new Hub is small enough to fit under your bed frame
✅ More powerful than ever
✅ With 9x more sensors for enhanced accuracy
✅ In new Solo sizes, at our et

This is our most significant hardware launch to date, and our most accessible.

Available now at eightsleep.com

Truly a legend. One of my favorite early interactions with him was at a Zappos board meeting when we were presenting our new core values. He listened carefully, ripped out a half sheet of paper from his notepad, and scribbled with a fountain pen: Profit = POWER. He slipped the paper across the table right before leaving the meeting. Mic drop.

That led to our lesser known core value #8, which was the only one that ensured Zappos was a competitive and successful business: Doing More with Less. Without a successful business, no one would write or read about Zappos.

Thank you for the wisdom, Michael, then and always.

When we started Loyal there was no FDA pathway for a any lifespan extension drug.

Today the FDA accepted our third one!

LOY-003, our daily pill for helping large dogs live longer (and healthier) lives, has earned RXE efficacy approval.

in an interview with Michael Moritz, Steve Jobs talking about taste, product building at Apple and aesthetics

Hold jam sessions, not jury trials.

@ThriveCapital's @milesgrimshaw rejects the investment committee as a jury trial where one person presents, and everyone else looks for guilt.

“The best version of investment team conversations… is like being in the music studio making music together.”

We’re proud to announce Swish III, a $250M early fund, bringing Swish Ventures to $800M in total AUM.

I started this firm to spend my career supporting the artists who build and shape the future.
The technology shift underway is unlike anything we’ve seen. We plan to stay true stments a year, real concentration and partnership.

Grateful to the founders we get to work with, who inspire so much of how we work, and to our LPs for walking this path with us.

We are more locked in than ever.

Omri

Jimmy Iovine, Cofounder of Beats and Interscope Records, says social media has trained people to care too much about what other people think to the point where they outsource their own judgement.

“What do they think of my post? What do they think of my orange juice? Who cares!”
cery store and ask everybody what they think?”

He says you still need enough empathy to understand other people and other disciplines, you ultimately gotta "run your own race."

Here's my Doug Leone story from early in my career…

I was maybe a year into my first job, working at an endowment. We were looking at investing in Sequoia's new hedge fund and ended up meeting the two PMs of the fund in NYC, I think at the Yale Club. It was me (the most junior of analysts), my boss, my boss's boss, the two Sequoia PMs, and a third guy from Sequoia. I covered public markets for that first year and didn't really know much about Sequoia.

About halfway through the meeting the third guy from Sequoia gets a phone call, answers it, has a full conversation for a few minutes before jumping right back into our meeting without missing a beat. I'm thinking - who the hell does this guy think he is? Does he know how big our checks are?

I was pretty surprised my boss's boss didn't say anything so afterwards in the cab ride we were debriefing and I say to them something like "can you believe that guy, who does he think he is?" and my boss gave me a look I'll never forget.

That's how I first realized I had just met Doug Leone.

Firm > Fund

come for the actionable insights on building your company’s customer-facing org, stay for the attention you get on the subway when this baby catches the light

always worth taking a shot to reach out!

a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz on why Amazon's cheapest furniture and Apple's most expensive doorknobs are the same decision:

Two companies. Opposite spending habits. Same underlying logic.

Start with Amazon, which Ben describes as having "one of the strongest cultures in the "[Amazon] has this thing about frugality, and they said it so hard, like in the old days when you got to Amazon, you got a desk that was made out of a door and some 2x4s. Like, we can't even afford desks. Like, that's how cheap we are."

That wasn't cheapness for its own sake. It was strategy made physical.

@bhorowitz explains that the door-desk "really went with their strategy of being the low price, basically the low cost provider always."

The furniture existed to make an external promise credible internally:

"The promise to their customers was you go to Amazon, you don't have to price check because we're going to be the lowest cost."

Now the opposite end of the spectrum.

"Contrast that with Apple. They just built like a $5 billion campus and I don't know what the doorknobs cost, but they're probably thousands of dollars."

Same decision, different answer. Ben's explanation:

"They're all about high design, beautiful products, these kinds of things. They're never going to have a cultural value of frugality. It wouldn't make sense for them."

A frugal Apple would be a contradiction. An extravagant Amazon would be a broken promise.

Both companies are behaving rationally, because both are spending in the direction of what they sell.

Ben makes the trade-off explicit:

"Apple's products are a lot more beautiful than Amazon's products. And Amazon's products are a lot cheaper. And so, which one do you want?"

That question is the entire lesson. You don't get both. Pick one, then build the culture that makes it true.

"Your culture has to support your business strategy. And that's why every culture isn't right for every company."

His conclusion:

"It's not a good culture or a bad culture. It's a cohesive culture that achieves the goal that you want."

Love hearing @travisk call out loud what we all know. VC’s dont make or build companies but many can kill them. I used to tell investors I kept control to protect them from themselves. So many founders play the game and pretend their VC and its brand makes a difference. Can anyone remember who backed Meta or Google or Apple? Who cares! Do you think Steve Jobs needed a VC to help him build or market the Iphone?

RT @rauchg: I’m interesting in finding and funding the next Disney.

True to its original values, focused on the American spirit. Merit, f…