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JG Josh Gruenstein On a16z Podcast

“Anything you ever bought that came in a box, a human had to put that in a box, which is a crazy revelation for most people. Even iPhones: you'd assume a robot is putting that packaging together. No, it's a person, even at the highest level of scale.”

a16z Podcast · Startups & Venture · November 2026

“Anything you ever bought that came in a box, a human had to put that in a box, which is a crazy revelation for most people. Even iPhones: you'd assume a robot is putting that packaging together. No, it's a person, even at the highest level of scale.” — Josh Gruenstein, a16z Podcast

Context

Asked to describe the factory and logistics work Tutor's robots do, Gruenstein says people imagine highly automated 'How It's Made' factories, which are only the top sliver. Most facilities still rely on people doing manual work.

Transcript

a16z Podcast Around 17:53 into the episode
Josh Gruenstein

Yeah. So most people have this mental picture of what sort of the industrial base or manufacturing logistics look in the United States, which comes from the TV show How It's Made. I don't know if either of you have seen this.

Speaker 4

Of course, of course, yeah.

Josh Gruenstein

And you see these like Rube Goldbergian machines of levers, and it's like, yeah, you don't see any humans in those pictures, right? It's somebody built a machine that is the factory. And that does exist. And if it exists, they probably filmed it and put it on how it's made, right? Because that's the top 0.01% of American Factories logistics. And so what's below that? And you walk into these million square foot facilities and you see a bunch of people standing around on conveyor belts or holding tables doing things by hand. And it's kind of shocking for anybody who doesn't come from this industry and community. And so you look at a robot like Cassie and it's like, you know, a huge amount of work, which is backbreaking work that's really hard to hire for. There's a three-month turnover where your average age of the worker doing that work is 55 years old and about to retire. And it's like, okay, we could use a Cassie to do that backbreaking work. And similarly, Sunny is like basically anything you ever bought that came in a box, a…

Speaker 4

Then to his question, which is so like you have like the single arm with the sucker, you've got the two-armed humanoid.

Josh Gruenstein

Yeah, what can't they do?

Speaker 4

Yeah, what can't they do and where do you go from there? Yeah.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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