Tony Fadell: commitment

Transcript context

…Okay. Maybe one more question before we get to our very exciting lightning round. What are you most excited about these days in terms of, I don't know, gadgets or hardware or technology that's emerging? Is there anything you're like, oh, shit, pay attention? I've been doing this AI plus hardware thing now, not just at Nest, but in many of the startup companies that we funded at Build. And so company like Simbe Robotics, it's Simbe Robotics. We were doing robotics way back, and now it's not a humanoid, but it does inventory of retail stores. And we've been at it, I don't know, eight years now, seven years, and now it's just taking off, and it does have AI, and it has a robotic platform, and it really solves real pain points for the retailers of inventory. And the workers hate doing inventory, counting everything on every shelf, and all that stuff. So it really works, and I love seeing that stuff. We're doing the same thing at Greyparrot with AI and recycling. It's literally figuring out what things should go in this recycling bin versus that and doing it really fast with cameras and all this stuff. And we've been at that for a few years, and we have AI plus textiles. Most textiles have weaving errors, and color errors, and defects, and things like that. And so people still make all of these products, but then they have to incinerate them because they're not perfect at the end because they don't catch the quality problems early enough in the product. And we're doing AI plus cameras to spot all this stuff. And again, another thing. We've been doing AI and drug design now for 10 years at Orionis, and that's taking off. So I'm really interested in not just these frontier models, and this whole other thing is really good AI that you can trust, scoped correctly with this, solving real problems every day as opposed to pipe dream AGI, okay, you can go solve that. I'm going to go and build all these businesses that really matter right now. And we're finally getting traction because people are like what AI and oh, more robotics and now, all of a sudden, we're in vogue, and we've been here really working on our product-market fit, working on our marketing, working on version 3. 0 the device and everything, and people are adopting them. And that's what's wonderful to see. And so I'm excited by all that. We have another one like AI Infusion and doing that, or finally doing tons of software with chemical reactions, and now we have a clean agricultural fuel and oils company that is cleaning up farms all around Central America, and we're almost all atoms plus software in some way. And so it's just nice to be sitting here and knowing that we made these bets a long time ago and we're doing it. Now we're not necessarily... I was early on in Grok, and it was cheap then, and it was like, "Yeah, that's the right way to go." And my friends were in Cerebras, and I got into that, and then it's like, but these are long-term plays, and they're finally coming to fruition, but we did invested in it not when it was hyped, and it's... We were doing it back when unicorns valuations were billions of dollars. Today, if you don't have a $5 billion round raised, you're not anything. did invested in it not when it was hyped, and it's... We were doing it back when unicorns valuations were billions of dollars. Today, if you don't have a $5 billion round raised, you're not anything. It's like, okay, well, that doesn't work from a venture perspective. You never get their venture returns. You can't invest in things when the valuations are already nine digits or 10 digits, and you think you're got a small portfolio that's got like... Uh-uh, that's not the kind of game I want to play. So I'm glad that we are well positioned in all these companies that have real good product-market fit, that came in the right valuations, that we can really help and make big change and deliver painkillers, and we'll let everybody else over there play. So that's what's exciting to me.…

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