00:35:06 · Martin Casado, Josh Gruenstein
[00:35:06] S3: If I'm listening to this and I have a warehouse Yes. And I want to get a robot, do I just go to the website and put in my email? Does this work? [00:35:17] S0: You can go to our website, you can put an email at you. We actually have cool pricing calculators where you can put in some operational data about how your warehouse or factory runs today. And you can get an estimate of, hey, with an initial deployment of Tutor robots, we could be saving a $100,000 a year, a million dollars a year, a $100,000,000 a year. And that's not like, okay, this is a road map over five years of custom engineering. It's like, no, you could save that a million dollars a year two months from today without putting capex down. [00:35:45] S3: And have you found that there is demand for... I mean, it's just such a sci fi thing. Is there demand out there? [00:35:52] S0: There is so much demand. And it's not even demand for robots, because again, people don't know that the shape of a robot exists, that it works, or that it So could do this it's ultimately, you know, we have this framework of the value of a robot is you take how much work a robot can do, and you divide it by its cost. And that's it. Everything else is commentary. And so, if we're able to compete in these highly liquid labor markets that exist across American physical economy, and we can offer something that delivers greater equivalent capability to lower cost, the market for that is the whole market. Right? It's all physical work done.
00:35:52 · Josh Gruenstein, Martin Casado
[00:35:52] S0: There is so much demand. And it's not even demand for robots, because again, people don't know that the shape of a robot exists, that it works, or that it So could do this it's ultimately, you know, we have this framework of the value of a robot is you take how much work a robot can do, and you divide it by its cost. And that's it. Everything else is commentary. And so, if we're able to compete in these highly liquid labor markets that exist across American physical economy, and we can offer something that delivers greater equivalent capability to lower cost, the market for that is the whole market. Right? It's all physical work done. [00:36:29] S3: And just one quick wonky question on this, which is how much when you say cost do you mean amortizing the upfront cost versus the ongoing cost to operate it? [00:36:38] S0: It's both, which is very interesting and different. Traditionally, we've thought about robotics as ROI. Big CapEx expense and then ten years to make it back. And now it's actually like no, more and more of the cost is going into ongoing inference teleoperation. [00:36:54] S3: But does that also include maintenance and break fix and all of that stuff? And then what is the dominant cost, or are they roughly equal? [00:37:02] S0: We drive down all of them over time. [00:37:04] S3: No. No. I'm just saying, from from your standpoint, when you, like, pencil out your COGS, how much of is it the upfront cost versus the ongoing? [00:37:11] S0: Yeah. It is more ongoing at this point, and that's surprising Interesting. To
00:37:11 · Josh Gruenstein, Martin Casado, Raghu Raghuram
[00:37:11] S0: Yeah. It is more ongoing at this point, and that's surprising Interesting. To [00:37:14] S3: Oh, wow. Yeah. Not surprising to me. Mean, you're really competing with like, something that you feed rice to, and it's very, very efficient, Like, the human bodies. [00:37:23] S0: Yeah. [00:37:24] S1: So when you get colored thieves, customers, is it because Black Friday or something's coming up and they need a bunch of units done in a really short time? Or is this actually now part of their actual labor planning cycle? [00:37:41] S0: No, it's strategic. Right? These businesses, I think, are faced with a really hard choice, which is they know the age of their workforce. They know that demand is ramping up due to all these secular trends, and the cost basis of fulfilling that work is going up. And they're like, how does our business pencil out? Because, you know, these are not software businesses that have these, you know, huge gross margins that you can you can play with and can compress a little bit, and it's like, it's fine. It's like, no. The business either works or it doesn't. And so, I think our customers are ultimately looking for a long term partner that can do the robots. Right? If one of our customers is manufacturing deodorant, they're doing the deodorant. Right? And they're gonna be operational experts in deodorants, or operational experts in crayons, or whatever the thing they manufacture is, and they need a partner who's the expert on robots.
00:37:41 · Josh Gruenstein, Raghu Raghuram
[00:37:41] S0: No, it's strategic. Right? These businesses, I think, are faced with a really hard choice, which is they know the age of their workforce. They know that demand is ramping up due to all these secular trends, and the cost basis of fulfilling that work is going up. And they're like, how does our business pencil out? Because, you know, these are not software businesses that have these, you know, huge gross margins that you can you can play with and can compress a little bit, and it's like, it's fine. It's like, no. The business either works or it doesn't. And so, I think our customers are ultimately looking for a long term partner that can do the robots. Right? If one of our customers is manufacturing deodorant, they're doing the deodorant. Right? And they're gonna be operational experts in deodorants, or operational experts in crayons, or whatever the thing they manufacture is, and they need a partner who's the expert on robots. [00:38:34] S1: I had a question on the nature of factories, I mean, you can ship a robot to anybody, anytime, not today because of your shortages, but at some point in the future, right? And if your robots become more and more general purpose over time, what does it mean for where factories are located and how people organize around these factories, and you do these one town factories, one one factory town, whatever the expression is. Yeah. A lot of that fundamentally changes now, right?
00:39:05 · Josh Gruenstein, Martin Casado
[00:39:05] S0: Yeah. I think a lot changes, right? There's a lot of geopolitics in this. I think one big thing is this is going to be a great equalizer between The United States and other Yep. Excuse me. Other countries, like China, invested in the previous regime of industrial automation. And in some ways, made them very successful, and in other ways, I think, in hindsight, that might end up being an enormous mistake. Because in The United States, we just discussed, we're doing this greenfield builds of automating our industrial capacity using generally capable robots. In China, they're gonna have to tear down. We're not going to have to do that in The United States in the same way. I think another thing that's going to shift, which is going to be really interesting, is we're just going to have way more factories in the same way that we have way more businesses, because the cloud and all of the software tooling let people build new businesses. Anybody will be able to start a business in the physical world. Anybody will be able to scale a business in the physical world if we kind of have this infinite flexible labor substrate. [00:40:02] S3: You brought up China. We actually published a report on the supply chain in robotics, and it seemed to be that China was so central to it. So can you talk a little bit about your dependency on it, and then how that evolves over time, and how much of it there is there risk in China to the supply chain?
00:40:02 · Martin Casado, Josh Gruenstein
[00:40:02] S3: You brought up China. We actually published a report on the supply chain in robotics, and it seemed to be that China was so central to it. So can you talk a little bit about your dependency on it, and then how that evolves over time, and how much of it there is there risk in China to the supply chain? [00:40:22] S0: Yeah. I think ultimately, no matter what anybody says, today in 2026, we have a highly interconnected, interdependent global supply chain, and this is one of many examples of this. And I think both US companies and Chinese companies are thinking very hard about what does the long term strategy of this look like, and it's Chinese companies investing in The United States, it's United States companies investing in China, and ultimately everybody trying to build their industrial capacity. [00:40:49] S3: Yeah. I've I've noticed that, you know, you've gotten, as far as I can tell, you've verticalized more. Is that right? Like, you're taking more in house? And do you continue... Or do you plan to continue to do so?