Marc Raibert: evaluation

Transcript context

…You mentioned about building teams and robotics teams and so on. How do you find great engineers? How do you hire great engineers? Well, it’s a chicken and egg. If you have an environment where interesting engineering is going on, then engineers want to work there. And I think it took a long time to develop that at Boston Dynamics. In fact, when we started, although I had the experience of building things in the leg lab, both at CMU and at MIT, we weren’t that sophisticated an engineering thing compared to what Boston Dynamics is now, but it was our ambition to do that. And Sarcos was another robot company, so I always thought of us as being this much on the computing side, and this much on the hardware side, and they were this. And then over the years, I think we achieved the same or better levels of engineering. Meanwhile, Sarcos got acquired and then they went through all changes and I don’t know exactly what their current status is. So it took many years, is part of the answer. I think you got to find people who love it. In the early days, we paid a little less so we only got people who were doing it because they really loved it. We also hired people who might not have professional degrees, people who were building bicycles and building kayaks. We have some people who come from the maker world, and that’s really important for the work we do, to have that be part of the mix. Whatever that is. Whatever the magic ingredient that makes a great builder, maker. That’s the big part of it.…

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