“We've been investing in robotics for almost 15 years. Up until a year and a half or two years ago, everything we invested in robotics was an absolute abject failure. Not even partial failure. Because we never had a moment where robots learn things the way humans do.”
Newcomer Pod · Startups & Venture · November 2026
Context
Asked which part of robotics will actually produce venture returns, the Felicis founder says what changed is that robots can now learn by observing, after more than a decade of failed bets.
Transcript
…that people don't even imagine how cool it's going to be in terms of just like we're going to cure so much disease. And like one of the only ways it's going to be possible though is that AI is also going to change the testing environment and how we basically verify that these things actually work.
…capital business. We're going to talk in a second about building a fund. You need to make returns off these investments. Like even if you say, okay, robotics, clearly there's something there. What's your analysis of what part of robotics is going to actually generate a huge return to investors?
So the one thing that I will say, we've been investing in robotics for almost 15 years. Up until a year and a half ago or two years ago, everything we invested in robotics was an absolute abject failure. Like not even partial failure, like abject failure. Because what happened is we never had a moment where robots learn things the way humans do. You know, like you can't just basically program a robot only to take a step or to lift the glass and all of that. And more importantly, like we, you know, learn things by looking, observing, whatever. There is some way that our brain has evolved to essentially pick things up really fast. And you see like the babies, like it's amazing how they learn. For the first time, we have a way of making that happen in robotics. So it's infinitely scalable. So this is a very important moment. The reason why I'm calling that out is it's easy to say something is hyped or exciting, but the more interesting question is why? Why and why now? And so that's a really important reason. And then the next thing is when you think…
multiple robot builders, like if they're sort of competitors, but you think the market is large enough, can you invest in multiple companies?
So what we try to do is we are not a fan of investing in competing companies, at least at the moment of investment. So this is the reason why I've articulated what I just did. So instead, what we do is, look, we know that this wave is going to be. How many different ways can we play it? Right?…
If you were giving advice to these emergent founders, I mean, there's such different categories, seeds, not even seed. Like now we're throwing the spotlight on them. I know it's hard to give advice across sort of a bunch of different types of companies, but what would be a piece of advice you'd…
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