Jason Walker returns to discuss the philosophical and practical dilemmas of robotics, automation, and the labor shortage.

 
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Audience Note: Shortly after filming this interview with Jason, Waypoint Robotics was acquired by Locus Robotics; and Jason Walker is now leading Locus’ efforts to develop new market opportunities following the sale. Feel free to read more about the acquisition on the Locus Robotics website.
Danny:

– Hello and thank you for joining me today on the IndustrialSage Executive Series. I am joined today by Jason Walker who is the CEO and co-founder of Waypoint Robotics. Jason, thank you so much for joining me today.

Jason:

– Yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Danny:

– Well I’m excited to chat with you again. I know we spoke, I don’t know, probably two years ago maybe under our—we’ve spoken many times at ProMat and then at MODEX. This is what, 2019, 2020, maybe even in 2018 as well. I can’t remember. So it’s been a minute. And then you’ve been on the show as well, but under the sales and marketing banner. But we’ve never had you on the Executive Series, so I’m excited to ask you some questions we’ve never asked before. So this will be fun and exciting.

Jason:

– I’m looking forward to it. I did zero preparation, so I always do best in such.

Danny:

– Perfect. No, we like that, honestly because you get real answers. I don’t want scripted, canned stuff. Yeah, we want the real deal. So we’re just having a conversation. For those who are unfamiliar with Waypoint, tell me a little bit about, what do you guys do?

Jason:

– We make autonomous mobile robots primarily for manufacturers, so small to mid-size enterprise which is, in the USA, about 90% of the economy. And the thing that’s—well there’s a bunch of unique things about Waypoint robots. But the thing that I think is the most interesting, overarching, unique thing is that we have intensely focused on ease of use. Our vision is that we can ship a robot to a customer, and the shipping and receiving clerk who unpacks that box can be the person who sets it up and gets it going and uses it on a day-to-day basis without any training. Kind of like when you buy an iPhone, it doesn’t come with an instruction book. It’s just so intuitive to set up that it guides you through it. That’s our vision, and that’s what we shoot for, and it’s what guides us through our process. That is something that I think is a big differentiator because of the accessibility it creates.

Danny:

– Yeah, absolutely. You’re definitely seeing—AMRs are huge right now, obviously. Moving into automation is a really big piece. And we’re going to talk a little bit more about that, but before we get there, what I want to do, this is the part of the show where I like to learn more about my guests. I want to learn more about Jason. So tell me, how did you start your career? Obviously CEO and co-founder of Waypoint Robotics, but take me back. Where and how did that start, even before the idea?

Jason:

– Well it’s kind of hysterical in hindsight. I got into robotics as a fallback. My Twitter handle is @iamrobotmechanic. And I’ve been some kind of mechanic my whole life, it seems. Right before I went back to college I was a racecar mechanic, and I figured I would go right back into racing as soon as I got out. And I was cherry-picking classes throughout college that would be relevant in racing. There’s no degree in racing, and it turned out that most of these classes fell under the robotics umbrella. But along the way I started building autonomous mobile robots, and I really got bit by that bug. When you bring a robot to life and teach it how to think and see it make decisions, that is something that you want more of. In my naivete, I thought, well if this racing thing doesn’t work out, I can always fall back on robotics. I’ve been fortunate to be at the right place at the right time for this nascent new industry that’s coming our way. So yeah, I had a really cool job that didn’t have anything to do with robotics right out of college and learned some incredibly valuable lessons that I’ve been able to apply to building companies and brands. Yeah, started working at iRobot, met my co-founder of Waypoint at iRobot. Co-founded a drone company with Helen Greiner after we both left iRobot and then was able to get reconnected with Patrick, my co-founder here at Waypoint to start this company. Yeah, now we’re here.

Danny:

– That’s really cool. That’s pretty interesting. Okay, so you wanted to go be a racecar mechanic, not a driver. So you wanted to work on engines and build them and all that good stuff. Is that correct?

Jason:

– Well I always wanted to be a driver, but the next best thing–– if you can’t gather up the millions and millions of dollars you need to be a driver–– is to be a mechanic. I was a mechanic before college, and I kept asking all the gurus around the shop and track, how do you know how to set the car up? How do you know this and that, And the answer was always, go back to college. Eventually that’s—I was always going to go back to college anyway. I just never got around to it for a few years. But then once I had a purpose and a reason, a specific thing I wanted, it was a lot easier to go back. My intention was that, once I got out of college, I’d be able to be a racecar engineer instead of a mechanic. Difference is probably inconsequential. You’re still turning wrenches and getting dirty and hanging out at the track.

Danny:

– It’s true. It’s a different kind of race, right?

Jason:

– Yeah.

Danny:

– I think that’s super interesting.

Jason:

– Maybe you get to sit in the trailer in the air conditioning for a few hours.

Danny:

– Yeah, exactly. So what type of racing did you want to—I’m just fascinated by this. I think it’s pretty cool.

Jason:

– Well I always have loved open-wheel racing, which is IndyCars, Formula 1. Yeah, so all the cars without fenders, basically. When I was a kid a friend of the family was a racecar driver, and he started out racing MGs and Austin-Healey Sprite, all these little, tiny racecars. Over time he graduated and ended up racing Formula Atlantic which is the very top end of the amateur class. When I was a teenager, I had the opportunity to learn how to be a racecar mechanic from Scott. That was a really lucky break. Most people never get to stand next to a Formula Atlantic, let alone have somebody teach you how to work on it.

Danny:

– Yeah, no kidding. From a racecar mechanic to a robotics tycoon, we’ll just say that. That’s very, very interesting. Obviously it’s a big influence. I was very curious about, it’s got to be something in your childhood that made you—we found that. So you go through, you said you went in to go to college. You wanted to learn more about this, and then you stumbled, I guess, across robotics. You’re like, wow, this is kind of interesting. This is kind of cool. What was the thing that really made you say, hmm, I think I’m going to stick with this a little bit more? What was that?

Jason:

– Well let’s see. At the university I went to, at Kansas State University, there’s this robotics competition that they have that coincides with open house in the spring. And there’s usually two or three different types of competitions within the overall competition. My partner Russ and I, it was just the two of us. You design, build from scratch, autonomous mobile robot, program it, et cetera. This was—dating myself severely, which is fine; who cares? Now you can go buy everything for tens of dollars that took us a semester to build from scratch. Building the sensors—and the rest of the teams had at least four, up to eight people that we were competing against. And it was just the two of us, and we ended up sweeping the whole competition, and so that was a huge victory. And the reason we were successful was because we did everything differently. We didn’t follow any guidance. There was a sumo wrestling portion of the competition, and part of the sumo competition is that each robot has a beacon, and then the other robot has a sensor to be able to look for the other robot. That’s how the robots find each other. I thought to myself, well that’s dumb. Why do I have to wait around to see that beacon if I can see the robot? And so my strategy was to look for the robot and attack the robot irrespective of where the beacon was. And so while other competitors were trying to find the beacon, scanning around for it, I was actually looking for the physical robot and attacking it immediately, and I was pushing them out of the ring before they even got turned around. That was an example where, if you read the guidance for how to approach this competition and how to set up your sensors—

Danny:

– That was not the right approach.

Jason:

– Well, I mean, it was the approach, and it was one where—

Danny:

– I mean, it was—

Jason:

– Yeah, because everybody was led in that direction, everything became very homogenized. And that left room for some rebels to come in and blow them all away.

Danny:

– That’s super interesting.

Jason:

– Yeah, and sensors—so the guidance told you how to build a whole bunch of sensors. And I give a lot of credit to my buddy Russ who found this different way of using the same sensors. There was a way to crack open the case of one of the receivers and modify the circuit board and cut traces. And you could turn a digital sensor into an analog sensor, and that was a game-changer because everybody else was using analog sensors that didn’t have any encoding in them, and they would get blinded by sunlight. Because ours was an encoded digital sensor that we had converted to analog, we could get the analog capability but the robustness of an encoded signal. That superior sensing capability made all the difference in all factors of the competition because when the sun went through the sky, it came through the windows differently, and if you were trying to navigate a maze, all the robots got blinded. They couldn’t see where they were, and we didn’t have that problem.

Danny:

– That’s fantastic. A whole new meaning to “blinded by the light”. I get it.

Jason:

– It’s a very real, current problem.

Danny:

– Interesting. Stupid question, but did you ever compete in Battle Bots?

Jason:

– No. I don’t think Battle Bots existed at the time. I’m not sure.

Danny:

– We need to bring Battle Bots back.

Jason:

– I think it’s back. Yeah, it’s back with a vengeance. The robots are getting more and more awesome.

Danny:

– I’m going to have to check that out. I just remember from years ago, and then—yeah. I don’t know.

Jason:

– Well, and I haven’t had cable for, like, a decade, so I’m not up on it either.

Danny:

– That’s the thing. I don’t think I’ve ever had cable. It’s all YouTube TV or whatever, which even that hasn’t been around that long. That’s pretty cool. Let’s talk about this then. I’m curious. At what point did you decide, hey, let’s go start Waypoint Robotics? And why did you make that decision, and a third question in that one question is, just explain to me the moment when you crystallized it in your head and you said, I’m going to do this, and you took that action.

Jason:

– Let’s see. For the last 25 years or so, there’s only been two robots that anybody had ever said, I want you to make this robot. One was a lawnmower, and the other one was a pooper scooper robot. I’m only admitting that second one now because somebody’s finally attempted it. By the time 2015 rolled around, Waypoint was a great company with a great team and money in the bank. I had just closed a deal with Motorola Solutions that included funding, and I was getting antsy. I had a great job with a great company, and it wasn’t so much of a startup anymore. That, combined with the fact that the FAA was taking forever to open up the skies, and I just felt like there was no end in sight. I got frustrated waiting around for maybe the government to—

Danny:

– This is with the drone company. You were saying you were working with drones or UAVs or whatever, yeah.

Jason:

– Exactly. So yeah, it was just—I wanted the exhilaration and the growth and the expansion of a startup again. The nothing-to-something part of the journey is gigantic. It kind of tapers off until you get into the hockey stick at which point it is a different kind of explosion. I was at a point where what I was doing, it was a cool product. It was a great team, great technology, great company. And I just felt like we didn’t have the freedom to operate because of regulations. And still at that point nobody had tried to make the pooper scooper robot, so I thought, well I’ll go start doing my homework on that and seeing if there is any interest from investors. As I was going through that process, just by dumb luck I crossed paths with my co-founder Patrick. When we started CyPhy Works, I tried to hire Patrick immediately. He wanted to live and work in New Hampshire, so I wasn’t able to lure him to our startup. But always wanted to work together again.

So by dumb luck we crossed paths via email in 2015 while I was researching this other project. And long story short, he was like, I got a proposition for you. He had spun out of Segway to create a company called Stanley Innovation to build fully autonomous, fully integrated bespoke mobile robots and was doing it for—these are one-off robots for the elite labs on earth. Through that work, the vector really fell out of the, as a concept. People wanted to have a small, omnidirectional, industrial-grade mobile robot that was fully autonomous, fully integrated. As a lab robot, it was—I always said it was a Ferrari with no door handle and no steering wheel. It was a good product. It was a great team. As much as anything, just working with Patrick and the team was a huge part of why I went that way. But it was an opportunity to do another start-up with interesting technology, with a killer team, and without having to go gather up all of those resources from zero because there was a lot of things already in place. It was a great opportunity.

I don’t know if this is part two or three of your question, but the next step was, how do we go to market with this technology? One of the things that I think a lot of folks in the robotics community wrestle with is, how do you reconcile your personal concerns, beliefs, social conscience with the work you do? I think that if you build weapons for the government or if you build robots, I was spending a lot of time asking myself and I always have throughout my life. Is the thing I’m doing something I feel like I should be doing? Am I proud of this? Will I regret it, et cetera? I was really trying to figure out, are robots going to be good for the world or not? I can’t stop myself. There’s easier ways to make a living. Robotics is really hard. But for those of us who do it, we’re just compelled to do it, and we can’t stop ourselves because it’s fulfilling in a really weird and wonderful way. I really needed to reconcile my philosophical questions about it. And at the same time I was looking at the market, and I was looking at the products that were out there and their capabilities. I was trying to figure out what was missing.

It all suddenly came together when I realized that the robots we have are, there’s a handful of tasks that are valuable enough where you can make a robot that can do those tasks for a price that, the lines intersect. You can have an ROI as a user of the robot. Those tasks, it means there’s a very limited number of applications that they have to be set up by experts—this is in 2015. So it’s like the robots were barely good enough. They needed a lot of help from people to do a limited number of tasks. The people who could use automation the most, the small to mid-size manufacturers, the mom-and-pop machine shops, the technology was least accessible to those people because it was so expensive to set up and because their work changes constantly. They had to be able to change the setup of the robot constantly. You have a robot that needs a lot of hand-holding from an expert. Then it’s cost-prohibitive to hire an expert on staff or a contract for them to come in. And so you really need to do it yourself. Putting it all together, the thing that made sense was, if the robots need people to make them work, and if the people need robots—because this was, I think, kind of the beginning of the labor crisis. I think this is something people still don’t get in the mainstream world. It’s all we talk about in manufacturing, distribution robotics. Our customers, as long as we’ve been running Waypoint, have come to us and said, we cannot hire enough people. It doesn’t matter how much we pay. It doesn’t matter what we do. We can’t even get them to show up.

Danny:

– Especially now, that’s been a huge challenge over the last several months, for sure. But even before the pandemic.

Jason:

– Yeah, and it’s even worse now. So the labor shortage, the people who are doing that work, they really need automation to help them do it. The companies that they’re working for or within, those companies are losing a ton of critical opportunities because they can’t meet demand. They’re saying no to customers, and you can’t do that when you’re a small business. You’ve got to get that opportunity while it’s there. And so the people need robots. The small to mid-size enterprises need robots to be competitive with, if you’re an independent 3PL you need robots to be competitive with Amazon and Shopify. There was a need for the robots, and the robots needed people. There was also a need to have those two things be able to go together with the people you already have, not with an expert or taking your people and sending them to community college for two years. And so it all came together, and that’s where the ease-of-use thing came from. It’s like, okay, we’ve got this robot that, from a technological point of view, is a Ferrari, but it’s completely inaccessible to anybody but a paid team.

Danny:

– It’s got to be deployable, easily deployable.

Jason:

– Deployable by the people you have. Then it all made sense. If my robots are not displacing people, if they’re not taking work from people but instead they’re a tool that those people use to secure their own place in the future of the industry and the company and help their employer become more fiscally sound because they can capture more opportunity and growth then ultimately that creates more jobs. So you need people to fill them. It all worked together, and if instead of displacing workers, we’re in a position to engage with those workers and say, okay, you were pushing a cart for the last two years. Now you can use this robot to do that for you, and you can focus on the other 50 things that your company needs done that’s more interesting and more valuable. That was how I was able to, by considering the workforce and what’s in it for them in terms of them being a user of robot, in terms of them being a human being with value and skills and dignity and understanding their part of a bigger economy, they’re a part of a company that’s part of an industry that’s part of an economy, all of that came together when we decided to make our robots as easy and intuitive to use as an iPod or an iPhone.

Danny:

– That makes a lot of sense. I like the value prop. Hey, make it easy, like you said deployable by the people that you have versus, you said having to have this huge, arduous setup and training and all kinds of things. It’s interesting when you were talking about, in 2015 or 2016 when you were looking at the UAVs and drones, I remember we were looking to deploy those, that’s when you can start getting stuff on the market fairly cheaply. Before that it was really expensive, and then you were mentioning the FAA was just like, they didn’t know what to do. I remember hearing in Europe, a lot of the regulations were, they were actually doing stuff versus saying, no, you have to—whatever. I remember they had some ridiculous stuff where you actually had to have a real pilot’s license for a while before they had what was the triple three exemption and all this stuff. I remember a real big concern about Europe being, they’re going to outpace us on this because they’re already innovating. They’re going into ag. They’re going into all these different industries. Anyways, I think it was a very interesting time period with that.

Jason:

– Yeah, and for us it was even weirder because we were making a tethered drone that could stay in the air indefinitely.

Danny:

– Tethered, interesting, okay, yeah. So you have power.

Jason:

– There again, the ease of use. The use case here was that literally anybody could open this thing up and the user experience was so straightforward that you didn’t have to be an expert. You just set the altitude and hit go, and it would climb up and stay there. There is no piloting, and the technology it takes, whether you’re talking about Waypoint AMRs or CyPhy Works tethered drones, the technology it takes to abstract all of that highly technical controls and autopilot in the case of the UAVs or navigating and localizing in the AMRs. To make it simple is really complicated, and it’s really tough. That’s where all the value is. That’s where the gold is buried. But yeah, when you’re talking about frustration, it’s like okay, you can launch this with one button. It stays up there forever. It’s on a string, so it can’t fly away.

Danny:

– Safety.

Jason:

– We literally have it on a leash, and you’re still going to make us get a sport pilot license? Come on.

Danny:

– That’s really crazy.

Jason:

– On the other hand, everybody on the team including myself, we were all extremely appreciative of the intent of the FAA. We have very safe skies in the USA and always have. None of us want to risk that. The FAA was given a huge task and no resources. It’s like, figure out how to make this new technology just as safe as everything else has always been, and here’s zero dollars to go get it done. By the way, two years. They were between a rock and a hard place.

Danny:

– No, I certainly get it. As an actual pilot myself, I totally get that. There was a lot of stuff going on, a lot of concerns about, you got yahoos who—it’s great technology, but you’re taking this thing, and you’re going 2000 feet up in the air or 5000 feet up, and you have something that gets sucked up in a jet engine. Good thing they have two. Or go into a windshield or something. You have some serious problems. I know the probability is low, but still, a little scary. Anyways, but we were talking about some industry challenges where I want to get into a little bit. You mentioned a big thing, a big, huge challenge that is going on right now. It was pre-Covid as well, and it’s labor. I like how you talked about some of the concerns you were wrestling with in terms of, with what I’m doing here, what is that going to do to labor? I like how you answered that and addressed that. We hear that a good bit, they’re here to assist. It’s not like Terminator coming in, and they’re going to take all of our jobs and start killing us or whatever. Maybe down the road once we start getting some more technology.

Jason:

– A long way.

Danny:

– A long way away from that. What other challenges beyond that are you seeing for your customers right now in the industry that could be specific to Covid and just other things maybe going forward?

Jason:

– I think the top three are just labor. There’s this positive feedback of, there’s reduced labor to get done the work they already had to do, and then there’s increased demand for a lot of the industries that are using AMRs. Fulfillment, logistics, and manufacturing have all just seen this massive uptick at a time, it’s like more demand, less labor. And so it’s just been intense to try to figure out how to navigate that. I think that there were many, many companies. Certainly we were talking to a bunch of them who, their plans got so disrupted by the pandemic that, they knew they needed to be looking at AMRs and various types of automation. For a lot of them, their plans just got decimated. As they’ve been coming back from the pandemic, then they’ve been wanting to accelerate that.

So it’s been good for the industry, but for the customers the need and the compressed timeline, they don’t have the luxury of figuring it out on their own time because they can’t function without getting enough people in. If you look at what Amazon did, if you start now and go backwards and think about, they were incredibly lucky to have made all those smart decisions. They saw very early on that automation was how that was going to go and bought a company to address that need. Even they are struggling to find enough people to get things delivered, and I can’t imagine what it would’ve looked like if they didn’t already have their own robotics company working on their behalf. For anybody who wasn’t lucky enough to have it in motion before the pandemic, I think that it’s even harder now to try to get it.

Danny:

– That’s a really interesting point that you bring up, how Amazon had that in place already before. I guess if we phrase it and we look at it this way, what if whenever they started, and I don’t know when they started pushing into that, but it was certainly eight years ago, six, maybe somewhere around there. Imagine if the pandemic had happened 20 years ago, 10 years ago. It was interesting seeing the whole shift and the whole pivot. With another interview we did, I think they gave us some numbers saying that they saw, their last year alone, there was a 40% increase in online sales and ecomm with fulfillment. That is a massive increase, and when you look at all the supply chain involved for that, all the way from raw goods to finished goods and everything that happens in between there, we’re talking about a massive, massive, massive lift. And oh, by the way, with labor, we were talking about this whole thing. What would’ve happened? And I have never thought about that until you brought that point up, and I thought, we would’ve been—things would’ve looked a whole lot different.

Jason:

– Well think about how freaked out people were about toilet paper and canned goods. Yeah, I think it would’ve looked a lot more like the movie Contagion where everything just went off the rails. We were able, most of the USA, most of the world, were able to get the things they needed to stay alive, and they didn’t have to go fight in the street for toilet paper. They could order it and have somebody else fight on their behalf which doesn’t happen. It just goes through a huge warehouse. But if we didn’t have access to all of these on-demand fulfillment, whether you’re talking about Grubhub or DoorDash or Amazon or FedEx, all of these services, these businesses, these resources that make it possible for people to live their whole life and not really have to leave the house if they don’t want to and have everything come to them, other than some post-apocalypse movie, I can’t imagine what it would’ve looked like because you really would’ve had to go out into the streets and try to find this stuff.

Danny:

– Yeah, that is super interesting. I haven’t thought about that at all. Imagine if this was 20 years, 15 years, whatever, beforehand—it’s interesting and kind of scary. Good point; we had these systems, and I guess the ability to be able to absorb this massive demand and this increase otherwise. It’s interesting; I remember the first time going into a warehouse that was automated. This was a long time ago, and they were picking, got the shopping carts out there. Literally it looked like a giant Walmart or whatever. Somebody’s picking a part, and the fulfillment was super slow. When they brought in an automated solution, just the speed at which they were able to fulfill was crazy. It’s interesting thinking, man, there’s no way. That would’ve been crazy. And so I guess to the flip of that is just seeing—I think demand now, the forecast of demand is that it’s just going—It’s like a hockey stick. Right now a lot of the conversations are hey, for this upcoming holiday, make sure you have all of your orders and everything in a good bit ahead of time because you got boats that are sitting out in port that can’t get in. Goods can’t get off.

Jason:

– Stuck sideways in a canal.

Danny:

– Anyways, so Jason, one of the things I wanted to ask you about is, recently—this was back in I believe July—we released a story on IndustrialSage talking about the interoperability standards that Mass Robotics was involved in. You were one of the organizations involved with it. Could you maybe tell us a little bit about what that is and why that’s such a big deal to the industry?

Jason:

– Yeah, the AMR interoperability standard that Mass Robotics pulled together with the collaboration of almost every robotics company out there, it was an amazing community collaborative effort. I think it’s going to be incredibly important and incredibly valuable to the customers. The things I’ve talked about before about how difficult it is to do a task with a robot and the technology, the cost of it to accomplish that task, that means that now and for a long time you’re going to have a bunch of single-ish use robots meaning that they’re a robot that’s really good at one thing or two things. Waypoint robots are amazing, but they don’t have forks. We’re not going to go scoop up a pallet. Likewise, the tuggers aren’t going to slide sideways and go up next to a piece of equipment like we are.

Everybody’s tackling a different piece of the market which means there’s going to be heterogeneous fleet in facilities. To solve all the problems you’re going to need a lot of different robots from a lot of different companies, and this interoperability standard is, I think, a critical, key thing to be able to pave that way for all the robotics companies and all the customers because I think it’s really hard to—there’s a natural inclination to pull back on making a decision to see who the big winners are going to be. There’s not going to be one big winner. There’s going to be a bunch of companies solving a bunch of different problems. In this interoperability standard, everybody has to contribute to moving the entire industry forward, and it gives customers a chance to buy robots and know that they’re going to be able to work with each other and work with other systems going forward. So we’re excited about it. We’re really glad to be a part of it. Our robots will have that standard included in them. I’m just really proud of the community for doing it, and I think it’s going to be so good for the industry.

Danny:

– Well I was super excited to hear about that. I was waiting for somebody to release or do something there because it certainly is a big challenge in the industry when you have so many different technologies, different robotics companies, and I think sometimes people tend to think, oh, well I already have this robot or that one or whatever. The reality of it is, as great as they are, you have a very specific use case or set of use cases for it. It’s not uncommon to have a whole fleet of different AMRs from different companies. The ability just for them to be able to—it kind of goes back to the core of what you were talking about is being able to help to deploy this easily and quickly with people that you have there if everyone’s building this on a standard platform, then you can have a little bit more of that plug-and-play capability. I know it’s a little bit more complicated than that, but in general terms, it’s a lot easier than trying to connect all of these disparate systems.

Jason:

– Yeah, absolutely right.

Danny:

– My last question, I like to ask people on this, and that is obviously with all the changes going on with Covid, and even before that, what are you doing as a leader of your organization to really stay at the top of your game?

Jason:

– The top of my game?

Danny:

– Top of your game.

Jason:

– Let’s see. I think—man, I don’t know. We were talking about it earlier; it’s been a weird summer so far. I’m kind of knocked out of my natural rhythm in a bunch of ways. I think that trying to find a way to connect with friends and family after having not been able to for a year, I think that’s been something that has just been really good for everybody to reconnect with humanity. We hosted an engagement party for family friends who are getting married soon. All of the timing of that happened so that we could have a nice, outdoor party and it was just like an explosion of joy that nobody had been able to experience for a year. That was great. I don’t know; balance for me is, I have a very, very, very long duty cycle on balance. I’ll work really hard for many years and then take a year off, kind of get recentered. I don’t know if I’m in robotics because I’m like that or if I’m like that because I’m in robotics, but it is such a long haul.

It takes a special kind of crazy to do robotics because it takes so long. It takes so many resources. You have to have a capacity for delayed gratification that is unlike probably basic scientists are the—and not basic in the teenage terms—the scientists who do basic research, that’s probably the best thing I can think of that’s comparable where you just keep grinding. You have a vision, and you know it’s way out there. You know it’s going to take years to get to it, not months. You have to learn to celebrate the small accomplishments, and then you have to remember to celebrate the huge accomplishments. Sometimes we have a product or a feature, a capability that’s been on our roadmap forever, and then all of a sudden we get it done; we get it deployed. We get great feedback from customers. Maybe we’re talking about it in our team meeting. It hit me. It’s like, wait a minute guys. Do you realize the first time we talked about this was 2017, and we’ve been either working on it a little bit or waiting to do it, and now we’ve done it? And it’s as amazing as we thought it was. It’s like, let’s take a moment and high-five each other. That lasts about 10 seconds, and then you’re back to the next goal.

Danny:

– You’re moving onto the next thing. You’re playing the long game, I think is what you’re saying. You’ve got to be in the long game. It’s funny that you mention about the celebrating piece. This is the second time I’ve heard that today. Talking with another executive, they talked about that being a big part of imparting some wisdom on other leaders and leadership is really celebrating those small victories, but making sure that you do that. I think a lot of people are guilty, present company included, in doing that. Hey, we did this. This was amazing. Okay, great, alright, boom. Now we’ve got to go to the next thing. It’s important to do that. And I love your answer about the whole, even now, especially after the last year being able to reconnect, just having that face-to-face, real in-person interaction. Unfortunately Zoom can’t do it for you as well as in person, and it’s important.

Jason:

– Yeah, and I’ve got to tell you. One of the things that, when you’re at a startup, especially a robotics startup where everything is so challenging, you work so hard, and you toil in silence. Nobody sees what you’re doing, and then one of the things that has always been really valuable about trade shows is that it’s an opportunity for your team to go out and see the look on customers’ faces when you tell them what you’ve done. For those of us who are on the phone with customers all the time, you realize how important that feature, that function, that capability is, and you know what it means to them, and you can anticipate the value of it. But for the rest of the team who are just grinding and they don’t get that constant feedback from customers about the importance in the work they’re doing, when you go to a tradeshow and you work so hard to do your day job, and then you work so hard to get to the show and really put on—you want to share your latest, best news. You want to have everything look as good as it can. You want to put on a good show. And that takes so much energy. And then the show starts, and you’re exhausted from all the prep. And you’ve got to have more energy to give to the people who show up to your booth. The thing that’s amazing is after all of that, you end up more energized at the end of the day. You might be physically tired, but you can see it on your teammates’ faces that it’s like, wow.

Danny:

– It’s validating.

Jason:

– We’re doing something special.

Danny:

– We’re doing cool stuff.

Jason:

– Then you bring it home, and it motivates you to keep walking that long walk in developing these products that take forever. I have really noticed the absence of that loop closure, of that ability for our team to directly interact with the market, with the customers, with the people who need this stuff and really first-hand see the look on their face when it lights up and they think, oh, you solved that problem. You did that. I can deploy it how fast? That’s something that—we’re packing up for a tradeshow. We’ll see how good it goes. Yeah, it’s—I don’t know, man. That’s tough. Trying to recreate that is difficult, and I’m sure I don’t do as good a job as I’d like to, but I try to remember that that feedback of enthusiasm is really important and try to communicate it to the team. There’s no substitute for the customers doing it with non-verbal communication. They can’t hide their excitement.

Danny:

– You’re right. Yeah, well hopefully that will be resolved here shortly. I hope to see you at MODEX 2022.

Jason:

– We’re planning on it.

Danny:

– I almost said 2020, but no, 2022 in Atlanta. That would be great. Jason, listen, I just really appreciate the time that you’ve spent with us today really sharing your story and your insights and how you started Waypoint, how it came to be and just your thoughts on the industry and where it’s going and challenges and all this good stuff. I really appreciate it. So for those who might want to learn more about you guys, they can go to waypointrobotics.com; is that correct?

Jason:

– That’s exactly right. And we are @waypointrobo on all the social stuff.

Danny:

– Perfect. Alright, well excellent. Well everyone, you can go to the website or go check them out on social. Jason, thank you so much again for your time.

Jason:

– Thank you. It’s great to be here. Always is.

Danny:

– Awesome. Alright, well that wraps today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series interview with Jason Walker who is the CEO and co-founder of Waypoint Robotics. If you would like to learn more about them, you can go to waypointrobotics.com or check them out on their social channels. We’ll have the links in the show notes below. Listen, if you’re not subscribed to the Executive Series, I highly recommend you go do that. How can you do that, you ask? Well, you can go to IndustrialSage.com, and you can subscribe there. And you want to do that because if you’re not, you’re missing out on all this great content like this interview that we just did here with Jason Walker with Waypoint and many others. So that’s all I’ve got for you today. Thank you so much for watching or listening. I’ll be back next week with another episode on IndustrialSage.

 

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