No Priors Ep. 102 | With The Bot Company CEO Kyle Vogt

(music plays) Hi, listeners, and welcome back to No Priors. Today, we're joined by Kyle Vogt, a serial entrepreneur who has helped build some of the most influential tech companies. He co-founded Twitch, shaping live streaming, Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company acquired by GM for a billion dollars, and now Kyle has launched The Bot Company, a startup focused on building consumer robots. Kyle, welcome to No Priors.

Awesome. Let's get going.

Obviously, you've done a variety of different things over time. Everything from co-founding Twitch, you started Cruise, you're now working on a new startup. Can you tell us a little bit more about your Cruise experience? Because I think that whole era was incredibly formative for everything that's happening today in AI, and would just love to get your perspective on why you started Cruise when you did, how that all evolved, and then how that's informing what you're doing now.

Sure, yeah. We can go back, uh, to the beginning. This is 2013. And back then, you know, there, there wasn't really self-driving car, you know, technology like there was today. There was just Google working on, um, you know, their self-driving car project. And rumor had it where they had spent like $100 million and had the world's best engineers. And so going after something like that was a little bit crazy. And, you know, even after having worked on Twitch, you'd think there'd be enough credibility that as a repeat founder, I could go back and raise money, but it turned out even that was, like, kind of a crazy enough idea, and Twitch hadn't been acquired yet, that I had a hard time. I had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to, to raise money. I think I pitched to, like, 120 investors, um, you know, over the course of probably a couple of years to, to raise all the money we needed. Um, but our thesis back then was, was very simple. We are gonna start by finding... Y- you know, instead of going directly after what Google was doing with, you know, self-driving cars, they were trying to make the ultimate self-driving car, I think as a moonshot. We took an approach of, "What's the lean startup approach of this? Can you build something that has the minimum quantum of utility that is maybe a lower cost or easier to, uh, execute so you can get to market more quickly and, and move from there?" And so we started with an, a retrofit system where we would take, you know, a regular car, put some sensors on it, a computer in the back, and get it to drive, and we got that working pretty quickly. You know, kinda like an early version of Tesla full self-driving.

I think that was for just one car model too, right? That was, like, a BMW or something in the time.

That is the challenge with the retrofit business. I- it's like without the blessing of, of the carmakers, you have to kinda reverse engineer protocols and figure out how to attach motors to steering wheels. So it wasn't necessarily sustainable, but we were still gonna, you know, try to figure that out. And I'd say that peaked, you know, around the time when we, we went to YC Demo Day and, uh, Sam Altman was in the car actually and we, we rode to, you know, turned it on and, and rode it to Demo Day. And, uh, we took that product for about a year and a half, and then realized that we had done enough technically that maybe we didn't have to do this lean startup approach. Maybe we had just go straight after, um, the big fish, which would built, be building robotaxis. And around that time, Uber and Lyft had sort of risen in popularity and now were becoming these household names and, like, y- you know, talk of going public and all this kind of stuff, and they had this big hole in their unit economics, which is paying the drivers. And so suddenly, there was, like, a strong mark- market pull for self-driving technology, whereas before it had been seen as just kind of a cool sci-fi thing. And so we were able to raise some money from Spark Capital and go straight into that. Within a year of that, I think we were acquired by, uh, GM. You know, we had working prototypes driving around San Francisco, obeying traffic lights, changing lanes, you know, going from point A to point B with an iPhone app, you know, back in, uh, 2015.