ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Ali Kashani is the co-founder and CEO of Serve Robotics, and he has done what almost no one in Robotics has: put robots on real streets in dozens of cities and made people love them. He is the youngest Iranian-born CEO on the Nasdaq, the youngest CEO of any robotics company on the exchange, growing revenue around 600 percent year over year and scaling from 100 robots to thousands in a single year.
We also get into the part most founders never put on a slide. Between spinning out of Uber and ringing the Nasdaq bell, Serve hit its last payroll ten times. Two of those times Ali made payroll out of his own mortgage.
Ali was born in Iran and left at 17. He did his robotics PhD at the University of British Columbia on fusing LiDAR and cameras, started an energy hardware company that nearly died and then sold
I co-hosted this one with a friend of the pod Brendan, Managing Director of AI and Partner at Human Agency.
Our News Letter : https://substack.com/@seondnewsletter
Ali Kashani Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/in/alikashani
Ardalan Javadi : https://www.linkedin.com/in/ardalanjam1369/
00:00:00 The youngest Iranian-born CEO on the Nasdaq
00:01:19 Why a public company beats a private one
00:02:47 The path to Serve: a robotics PhD and LiDAR
00:04:14 Fired, broke, and one step at a time
00:07:20 The dead company that came back
00:08:31 DARPA 2005 and the contrarian bet on LiDAR
00:12:45 Designing a robot people would forgive
00:16:04 Principle before perception
00:18:45 Building the ecosystem: NVIDIA, Magna, Uber
00:23:56 Dots versus lines, and "Exit Path"
00:26:24 Turning customer concentration into a feature
00:29:38 The real unit economics of a delivery
00:31:48 Picking cities and rolling out robots
00:33:17 The case for optimism on AI and jobs
00:37:49 Sidewalks versus streets
00:41:18 The IPO and the numbers
‘00:42:23 Ten last payrolls and the Kashani loan
00:46:10 Two days before Christmas: the call to Jensen
00:48:50 From bankruptcy lawyers to the bell in three months
00:49:11 The coming valley and the humanoid hype
00:50:50 Where the value is in physical AI
00:53:24 Why narrow robots beat humanoids, for now
00:55:00 Don't follow trends
00:57:44 Uncertainty is the job
01:00:59 Startups as entropy reduction engines
01:02:31 Touraj, Noosheen & Pejman
01:04:39 His hope for Iran
References :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge
https://bothsidesofthetable.com/invest-in-lines-not-dots-611f36491d73
https://www.therobotreport.com/four-ways-to-make-ai-products-that-people-will-love/
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