“It's crazy, but putting a bunch of hard drives in a backpack and getting on a plane turns out the bandwidth of that is pretty hard to beat compared to the internet.”
The Generalist · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Mario Gabriele asked what unscalable things the team did early on to get robot training data flowing. Florence, who builds general-purpose robot models, confirms that flying data around by hand was one of them, especially from places without good fiber.
Transcript
…training infrastructure and how you fold all these things together and how you think about deployment, et cetera, like you can have efficiency gains that are easily 10, maybe even 100, maybe even 1,000 X relative to somebody who's just buying expensive stuff and seeing what happens with the robot.
…you have to really do the sort of classic YC thing of do things that don't scale, of lugging suitcases full of hard drives and digging trenches for fiber and all of these sorts of things. Can you talk me through a little bit of what were the craziest things you had to do to get that up and running?
Those are a couple of great examples. I mean, it's crazy, but like putting a bunch of hard drives in a backpack and getting on a plane turns out the bandwidth of that is pretty hard to beat compared to the internet.
Wow.
Especially when you don't have good fiber lines in remote places of the world. We've also, I think we've shared a little bit about this publicly. We have built like entire custom server machines that just simultaneously upload data from huge numbers of memory cards. Like, you know, basically, I…
And as you think about the data collection piece today, you know, some of this I'm sure is maybe, you know, not for public ears, but to the extent that you can share, like what does that operation look like? Like, what are you trying to run on a weekly, monthly basis? Is that sort of a portfolio of…
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