RightHand Robotics: Vince Martinelli

IndustrialSage

Hear from Vince Martinelli of RightHand Robotics about his career journey, from coffeeshop management to startups and warehouse robotics.

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Danny:

– Hello and welcome to the IndustrialSage Executive Series. I’m joined by Vince Martinelli who is the head of product and marketing for RightHand Robotics. Vince, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series.

Vince:

– Yes, thank you Danny. Nice to talk to you.

Danny:

– Well I’m excited to jump into this conversation. I don’t think that we’ve had you on the show before. I know that we were talking about it a little bit before how I think we did a quick interview at MODEX in 2020, and I think you guys were part of that. That was fantastic. But first time on the Executive Series, so we’re excited.

Vince:

– Yes, thank you.

Danny:

– Before we jump into learning about you which is one of my favorite parts, if you could give me just a high-level on RightHand Robotics, who you guys are, what you guys do.

Vince:

– Yeah, so RightHand Robotics builds what we call a data-driven, intelligent picking platform for predictable order fulfillment. Now let me break that down just a little simpler, everyday language. Simply, it’s a configurable autonomous picking machine, and it can move individual products in a warehouse such as from an inventory tote. It might be coming from an ASRS-type system like AutoStore into an outbound order or a box. At that junction between the inventory storage system and picking the products flowing out of the building, the robot can move items. One thing that’s cool about that is an ecomm facility may have 50,000, 100,000, a million different products. Enabling a robot to pick and handle all those different things reliably is the secret sauce of what we do.

Danny:

– Wow, that’s awesome. It’s fantastic and super needed, obviously right now with ecomm growing exponentially, solving the big labor challenges, all kinds of stuff that I’m sure we’re going to get into. But before we do that, I want to—this is the part of the show where we get to learn more about you, and really this is one of my favorite parts. Tell me, how did you start your career journey? How did you get into this space? Were you always in robotics, in product or marketing? Tell me how things started.

Vince:

– Yeah, so coming out of college, my background’s in materials science, really semiconductor physics and so on. I got out of MIT, and I go into a semiconductor industry for different things. I learned a lot about designing of complex processor systems. Flash-forward another, I don’t know, key moment years later—well first off, I switched from R&D side of the world to business side and product and sales and some marketing and all these things when I joined Corning and got into the fiber optics business. Again, my interest there was more about the material science of the glass and how you make these things, and it was all cool. To cross over and work there, I kind of grudgingly took a job on the business side.

Danny:

– Oh, you went to the dark side.

Vince:

– Yeah, on the dark side, exactly. That’s the phrase. Found out I really liked it because there’s a part of communicating to people how that technology works and what you can do with it that I found I had some ability to take these complex things, talk to the PhD guys in the research lab, translate it into ideas and things that customers could gravitate to. There I worked on new products, so one thing that’s been consistent throughout my whole career is I’m always working on new products. While fiber optics was used for telecomm, we did things like work with a partner company to build a fiber optic gyroscope that was used in car navigation systems. So again, you never heard of that.

Danny:

– Wow, very cool.

Vince:

– 25, 30 years ago you could buy a Nissan car, one of the high-end models in Japan, and it had a fiber optic gyroscope as part of the navigation system with the fiber coming from Corning in the States here. That was really a cool application that was a lot of fun. We spent a lot of time looking for new market segments where fiber optics would be useful. Eventually that led me into some optical networking systems work and so on. The next big step was, I joined a start-up.

So early in my career I was with big companies. This seems like a very logical step coming out of school, nice, steady career path. I meet a guy—we’ll talk about an influence that I had. I meet a guy on a flight, and we start talking about his company. It turns out they were potentially a customer of ours, but they were a start-up. I eventually joined there, but I learned a lot about networking and systems there. Now I know about how to design processor things, and I know a lot about networks. Years later when I start getting into retail and warehouses and fulfillment centers, all these things kind of come together. These are just networks and processors of a different scale and type. I probably spent, now, the better part of 25, 30 years just working on networks and processors and designs. It’s really fun.

Danny:

– That’s awesome. That’s pretty exciting and very interesting career path and challenge, going from materials sciences and then going over to product design, development, marketing, sales, all of that. I think that was pretty interesting about using fiber optics for a gyroscope for navigation. That’s interesting.

Vince:

– Yeah, and one other part—again, just to layer it in here, somewhere on that path—actually one other side bar is, after the optical networking company—I was with the company, we had an IPO, things went great, and I thought, “Wow, I’m going to go chill for a while.” I traveled, got married, and I opened a coffee shop. You might not have had that in my bio, but for a while I had a coffee shop near the beach north of San Diego, and that was exciting. I learned some capacity planning and supply chain issues and things from that business. It was there, the other thing I learned is a coffee shop, at least ours, was 365 days a year, and I could be there from 12 hours to 20 hours a day.

Somewhere along the way my wife encouraged me to consider a new career path other than the coffee shop, and I bumped into a friend around that time who let me know about this company called Kiva Systems. A mutual friend of ours had founded the company, and I said, “Wow, I remember. I played baseball with a guy,” so anyways I reach out to Mick over at Kiva and scrambled, and I got a job there, joined when they had one customer. It was about 35 people. No one had dreamed of putting robots in warehouses really at that time. It seemed kind of crazy, so I took a chance with them. That turned out pretty well over time. So that’s a major crossover point. I went from coffee shop to warehouse robots in one jump.

Danny:

– That’s pretty awesome. What happened to the coffee shop? Did you sell it, close it down?

Vince:

– I sold it, and then eventually—the one positive outcome of that is, now I can make a really good cappuccino, and I’ve got a fall back plan if all this start-up stuff ever fails. I can be employed somewhere.

Danny:

– Hey, there you go. I love it. So you’ve got definitely an entrepreneurial gene or something in there for that. Was that something that came from family? Was it your parents or family members, they have businesses or anything like that?

Vince:

– Now that you mention it, if I think back when I made the decision to leave Corning and go to a start-up, this company called Sycamore Networks—I have an older brother, and he was part of Cisco Systems in the early days. In fact, he turned them down. He had a chance to join before their IPO, thought it was too risky and crazy. But he joined soon after, so before Cisco Systems became the giant networking company everybody knows, he joined when they were about 300 people or so. Anyways, when I was looking at that decision myself, he said, “Well, there’s no guarantees. Big company or small, there’s really no guarantees,” and he could explain to me in the early years of Cisco, there were good days and bad days and strong quarters, and there was always the concern that it may all fail at some point. You never know. But anyways, he encouraged me to take the leap there, and I think that made a difference. Again, I’m not necessarily saying either of us were entrepreneurial from the get-go, but when faced with the opportunity, maybe we have a little higher risk tolerance than most people, I guess.

Danny:

– Well I think that’s for sure. That certainly is a very common theme, and you have to. You have to have that. I’m curious; how has that—I think that that experience probably, there’s a lot that that has helped to influence the second part of your career as you’re moving in that risk-taking or that ability to see new things or other things that others might not. Is that something that you see now?

Vince:

– Yes, in fact it’s dawned on me in the last few years that I’m sort of an angel investor. I invest with my time at these companies. This will be my fourth start-up. The first three have two successful exits and one that we didn’t quite get there. You’re really betting with your heart, your soul, and your blood, sweat, and tears. I try to be pretty careful about which things I join and participate in. I think, again, the Kiva experience—of course, we got bought by Amazon. I worked at Amazon for a while. We actually helped redesign their template fulfillment center with Kiva as the engine, the picking engine in the middle. That was a great experience, nothing but favorable things from my point of view and my time at Amazon.

Then you look at RightHand, and you say, “Oh, wow, this is another level of, could the robots make the item?” That first move, recently I did a talk somewhere, and I said, “The first mile, delivery, starts with getting the inventory out of the tote and moving.” Today the default is, you throw armies of people at it. It’s a boring job. It’s not a fun job. You stand there all day. You and I wouldn’t want to do that for too long, just stand there and move things, move the box all day. You can automate it. I don’t know; I guess sometimes from being on the inside of that industry and so on, I look at when I was looking a few years back for the next exciting challenge, and I got introduced to RightHand. I thought okay, this is coming up to an inflection point, and it’s a great time to get involved.

Danny:

– That’s awesome. Let’s talk about, you teased it and mentioned it there a little bit, but a big influence, somebody who’s had a big impact on your career. I know there’s probably a ton. I know for a fact there is a ton. If we could just boil it down to one person, and it doesn’t mean that this is the best one or the top one or whatever, but what comes to mind?

Vince:

– I’m going to name a guy. He’d be surprised if he ever listens to this. I may encourage him to, but anyways, Wade Rubenstein, great guy. I met Wade on a flight. We sat next to each other. I had gone to a trade show, again, in the networking space. It was called SUPERCOMM; some people may recall that one. Big show, and anyways the mission on that show was to sign up a particular customer for a contract and this and that. That kind of went sideways, so now I was flying home and thinking, “How are we going to explain this when we get in the office the next day?” The big deal didn’t look like it was going to happen.

I sit down next to this guy Wade, and he had something with him that said SUPERCOMM, and I had a bag of literature and trinkets and stuff. We get to talking a bit, and I realize, oh wow, he’s at a company that could be a customer. They were a start-up. They were a couple of months old. As we talked—I learned later that he had seen me give a presentation somewhere and that he was already thinking that they needed someone with some of my background in fiber optics and stuff for their business. Anyways, within a few months, it turns out from that flight, from sitting next to him quite by accident, he reaches out. I get a job offer. I have to make that decision. Do I leave Corning, the really secure, well-known company at the top of that industry for this tiny start-up, 30-odd people.

Again, I’ll throw one other name in there, Desh Deshpande who is a serial entrepreneur, who was one of the cofounders of Sycamore. It gave me some confidence. I met Desh and looked at his background and said, “Okay, this guy who always emphasizes dream big, think big and has gone on to a wonderful life and career of philanthropy,” past Sycamore and all. But anyways, with Wade, we hit it off, and we’re still friends to this day. It was really a changing point for me. He gave me the confidence to join the start-up, and then one of the things there was his focus on, if we need to do something, let’s do it right now.

I’ll give you an example. We would get a resume in over the internet at the time; someone would submit their resume for a job we posted. This one guy, Jeff Lowe, Jeff sends in his resume. Wade comes over to my office, says, “The resumes hit two minutes ago.” He says, “This guy looks great. We should call him.” I said, “Really, we’re going to call him now? Doesn’t HR get involved? What happened?” “We’re calling him now.” We get on the phone, and we call him. He’s shocked because he just hit send five minutes ago, and we’re on the phone. He’s out on the west coast somewhere. We say, “Jeff, fly out for an interview next week; let’s get this going.” Within two or three weeks, he’s on board. Hey, if there’s challenges ahead, there’s white space on the calendar, let’s get it done and move fast. Wade was like, “If it’s worth doing, let’s do it right now, and let’s do it right, and let’s get moving.” Again, Corning was a really well-run company, all kinds of great things. But boy, that spirit was different. That was a shot in the arm for me.

Danny:

– That’s awesome. Great story on how you met and just that anecdote in terms of, let’s move now. I love that. That embodies that start-up spirit, and let’s go. What are we waiting around here for? Let’s move, and that flexibility you’re able to do that.

Vince:

– If we have time for one more, I’ll share another one. Recently we crossed paths, and he had a buddy with him. We shared the same story. 10:00 one night he calls me up and says, “Vince, any chance you can cover a meeting for me tomorrow? You’ve got to travel.” I was like, “Well Wade, tomorrow, really?” He says yeah, he had been traveling 100% of the time. He says, “My wife, she’s—I can’t travel tomorrow. I need you to help me out.” “Okay, where’s the meeting?” “It’s in Sweden.” So if I didn’t mention, our company was in Boston. I’m like, “Sweden, tomorrow.” He says, “Well the meeting isn’t tomorrow; you just have to fly out tomorrow.” “Okay, great.”

So I meet him at the office mid-day. My flight’s at 5:00; we meet at 1:00. And I say, “Well what’s the topic of the meeting?” It turns out it was something that I didn’t know anything about. He briefed me for 30 minutes on it, and I’m going to meet the CTO of this company and resolve some critical issues. As I’m getting ready to leave, Wade says, “Oh, by the way—” he reaches to his bookshelf, grabs a book. He says, “Here’s a book on the topic; you can read it on the flight.” On the overnight flight I read the book. The meeting went well. We got the contract; everything turned out okay. Again, that was the spirit of the start-up we were in at the time.

Danny:

– I love it. That’s your consulting right there. Hey we got a—I don’t know what this is. I’m going to figure it out. We’re going to learn, and we’re going to go. That’s awesome. That’s a great story. I love that. Let’s pivot a little bit towards, talk about some of the industry challenges, things that are going on right now. Obviously I know we talked about labor. Supply chain’s a big thing right now. Certainly you were talking about the challenges of, from a picking standpoint that it’s so repetitive, but the reality of it is, what kind of a job is that? Now where we’ve got such a labor issue right now, I imagine that you guys are just, it must be crazy for you. Are a lot of companies saying, “Oh, my gosh, we need to solve this problem,” and they come to you?

Vince:

– Yeah, so let’s see. That’s absolutely true. I think, and again even before Covid, ecommerce, online shopping and so on was growing at 15 to 20% a year everywhere in the world. So eventually this puts pressure on—and again why does it put pressure on labor? I think no one ever thought about how they shopped. And again, if I said to people, “What’s the difference between shopping online versus going to the store?” Okay, there’s a few differences, but one of the big ones is, when you shop at the store, you provide some labor for free. You walk around, and you—

Danny:

– You’re the picker.

Vince:

– Yeah, you’re the picker. You’re the last mile delivery. Sometimes you’re the pack person too. You do all those tasks, and it’s somewhat efficient because if you go to the grocery store, you buy 50 items at a time or 20 or 50 or whatever, so your time trade-off, maybe it all makes sense to you. But when you order online a couple things happen. One is you start ordering things one or two at a time. Now you’ve exported that labor; you’ve outsourced it to somebody else, the labor that we used to provide for free. So that’s got to be accommodated somewhere.

But distribution centers that feed products to stores mostly move items by the pallet or by the case. There’s some each-picking, break pack for certain goods or certain products, but it is the lower percentage of the overall volume of goods moved. Retailers all of a sudden have had this shift, and it’s been—again, I had the viewpoint from Kiva, Amazon, now RightHand. Over this last 15 years or so, people are having to deal with shipping ecommerce orders is entirely different from shipping goods to stores. It just flips things upside down. At 90-something percent, almost everything is by the individual product. Nobody buys a case, typically, online. And you buy them one item at a time, two items at a time. I’ll get 57 shipments to me over the next few months where I might’ve made two trips to the store before.

I did a talk at that MODEX in 2020 where I said, “What if you projected this forward 10 years?” And you say, “Oh, my goodness, that labor content of picking things one at a time in the warehouse is going to skyrocket. There’s no way to find enough people. In fact, in the ridiculous endpoint of that, you would order it, and then you’d have to drive to the local fulfillment center to pick it yourself. That is shopping.

Danny:

– Wait a minute; that sounds strangely familiar.

Vince:

– Well there’s a point where—because the question I was trying to answer there is there a point where ecomm plateaus because you can’t just physically fill and deliver the orders? I’m sure other people looked at that at some of the bigger retailers and said, “Oh goodness, we’ve got to automate more than we were,” because even with conveyors and ASRS systems and a lot of these things, they automate chunks of the store, move, and sort in the warehouse but not really end-to-end.

This is where, again, coming from telecomm, we built networking systems where you can pick up your phone, it goes to a cell tower to a back hall network to the main network across the world, all the way to someone else’s in milliseconds, and you’re connected. The grid’s network has got delays and buffers and storage and things, but even within the building which is sort of like a motherboard to a machine if you will, there is a lot of inefficiency between zones. If you can automate the interconnections in the building, it just sort of reduces friction, reduces cost, makes it simpler to fulfill the orders.

Then again, I think for people who are doing that job today, we haven’t yet solved the automated delivery side of things. You can go from being a picker to a delivery driver. It might be a better career, better job. There’s all kinds of opportunities there. This is like switchboard operators switching to other jobs 50 years ago or something. The picker at the ASRS port maybe is just a temporary job patch for the last 20 years or so, just an artifact that you couldn’t automate it end-to-end at the time. Anyways, I think there’s a lot of opportunity and change there, mostly for the good, I think.

Danny:

– Yeah, absolutely. I agree, and I think it’s exciting. It’s interesting. Obviously things were—you mentioned at MODEX, this was pre-pandemic, sort of, I guess. It was right before everything went nuts. Obviously things were—what do they say? The puck was going that direction anyways, but then obviously it really accelerated. I think it’s fascinating as technology increases and it creates that ability. I remember some of these delivery services that were rolling out, or trying to roll out in the ’99 dot com era, and then even beyond that. It was so exciting at that point. Oh wow, one day, this is cool. Then it was just too early. The technology I think was too expensive at that point. The internet just wasn’t as prevalent. It just wasn’t the right time, but what I think was crazy, oh, just wait a few more years, and wow.

Vince:

– When you listen to—and I listen to some business podcasts and things. After companies are big and they’ve succeeded, it’s easy to say, “Oh yeah, we knew all along how things were going to play out.” But most of the guys, when they’re really pressed, and there is this one particular podcast that I listen to sometimes. When they ask the person, was it hard work? Was it brilliant intuition? Was it luck? Was it timing? It usually comes back to luck and timing, for start-ups anyway. You’re not driving the whole world. You’re not driving the trends or whatever. Hopefully you’re at the right place at the right time and then reacting and iterating and evolving. It’s never going to be quite perfect, and you’ve got to be ready to adjust. Yeah, same thing for us and, again, Covid.

On the challenging side for us, we went from a company where everybody went into the office every day and worked to 90% remote, and now we hire people in other parts of the country or other parts of the world to work for us directly which we probably wouldn’t have done before. Some of our projects where we would have had engineers on-site, we have projects in Japan. Travel gets closed off, you can’t go there. Now we’ve got to train the customers and the partners that we have to do things that only our engineers would have been doing before. We had to accelerate that which pulled it in by a year or two from what we would have done otherwise. To keep the business going we turned a lot of things inside out and upside down, and here we are. We’re on the other side and still in a position to play to win.

Danny:

– Yeah, that’s awesome, and it’s exciting. I think you’re right about the luck and timing, but then pivoting, innovating, that continuous improvement piece. Speaking of pivoting for a second, I’m curious. As you are doing marketing—head of marketing and product—I’m curious. I’d love to talk a little bit about marketing for a second. One of the things that we constantly hear and I think that everyone is curious, trying to figure out, go-to-market strategies, where do we put the investments? What do we do? What is working, and what isn’t? We’re in such this environment that has been so consistently inconsistent, I think, over the last two years in particular.

Let’s take trade shows for example. It seemed like summer of last year they were really starting to open up a lot more, a lot of stuff in the fall, and then as winter came, Omicron, everything just really nosedived. Early Q1 I know hearing about NRF was super low. CES was super low. We’ve got, as we’re coming out of this stuff, I feel like my general sense—if I looked at my little crystal ball, but it only goes about six months out. I feel like hey, things are opening up. Trade shows are going to be back, whatever. But I’m curious. What are your thoughts on that, and how have you guys been handling this whole—feel like you’re learning to drive a stick shift for the first time. First gear, second gear, you know.

Vince:

– I think again on our marketing side we always have a bit of a portfolio of investments. We got digital and social media, website, these things. We’ve got events, trade shows, things like this conversation. I think for a start-up, one of the things in the early stages—and when we onboard new employees at our company and I do a training on marketing for people, I say, “Hey, we can’t presume anybody’s ever heard of us or knows what we do.” We’ve got to get out there and evangelize that and keep that out there.

In the earliest days of our company, if you’re familiar with the crossing the chasm model of technology adoption, well the innovators and early adopters are looking for people like us. Inbound marketing works pretty well because people are seeking out that next new thing. They want to be the first ones to use it. Now as we just raised some funding, we completed a Series C, and we’re on a new growth trajectory. So now we’re looking at things like account-based marketing which is the buzzword for, how do you really target the right guys in the right industry, right company, who are likely to be your qualified customers and again, maybe haven’t gotten comfortable yet or know enough about your company to pull the trigger and reach out to you, so can you start to take that to them a bit.

Then the trade shows, we’re cautious about, we don’t have all our eggs in that basket. We went to NRF recently, and actually I think the other thing about our business model, we have two paths to market. One is selling direct to the end customer, the end retailer. But many of those firms work with system integrators, so we’ve been developing a partner program and channels program where we’ve been designed in with the system integrator, and when they sell the automation suite for the whole building, it will include some robots, our RightPick system from RightHand. At these shows we are meeting end customers but also integrator partners and companies to work with, so there’s value to that.

Again, we’re playing on two or three levels and thinking about how to place our bets. There’s no one—you and I talked briefly earlier. There’s not one, single solution here. There’s not one-size-fits-all, so where you’re at in the market adoption curve, scale of your company, resources you have, it’s wise to not load up 100% on any one channel. The trade shows are important I think too, by the way, because we also see media there, analysts there, and other people, so back on that brand recognition and the awareness that we’re out there with something useful. This is a chance for us to get that message out, and we hope there’s enough customers there to really generate some pull from them as well.

Danny:

– Yeah, absolutely, I appreciate that. It’s good. Like you said, you’ve got to have that diverse portfolio, especially in a world that’s constantly changing. Let’s be honest too, the marketing and sales world too has been shifting especially when you look at all the MarTech and everything that’s been going on. It’s exciting. One of the things—congratulations on Series C. That’s exciting. And I should’ve asked this beforehand but totally did not. How long has RightHand been around? When was the founding of the company?

Vince:

– Yeah, 2015 was the official founding date, so about seven years now. We are right around 85 people or so, and again I think as we look forward, one of the big things on our plate this year is, we’re going to probably double headcount size, give or take. Recruiting, finding the right people, there’s all kinds of… It’s been—what’s the right word? Exciting for me to see in the last several months in particular the kind of quality of people we’re able to find and recruit. It’s a real competitive market out there.

Danny:

– Oh, yeah.

Vince:

– We have an interesting technical problem to solve. We have a really good culture of the company, and it’s really exciting the kind of level of folks we’re getting and finding. And then again, opening up our recruiting where some jobs don’t have to be in the building every day. We have people living all over. This is a new challenge by the way too. If you said, “As a competitive edge, how do you manage a team of 100 or 200 people when a good chunk of them never visit the office or see at once every three or six months?” They’re not even in clusters. An older model would’ve been, oh yeah, after we’ve got an office in this city, make people go every day. But no, this is everybody working like I am today from a room in their house somewhere. How do you keep that cohesiveness and interaction? This is something—we’re not the only guys trying to figure that out, but we’re actively and energetically putting time and thought into that to make it as good as we can. So far it’s pretty encouraging.

Danny:

– That’s awesome. That’s exciting. What I’ve heard too from other companies as well as you were mentioning earlier, the whole work from home now opened up to, well we probably wouldn’t have done that, but then now we have this diverse talent pool that we can draw from because of that. I don’t have to look at just these geographies to be able to hire new talent. We can go beyond that. It possibly opens up to more capabilities than what we had initially thought. The trade-off being, as you mentioned, that obviously is a big challenge to how do you instill culture? How do you—you mentioned cohesiveness. I think it’s lots of pros and—I still think they’re pros. It’s just, they’re opportunities versus challenges. How do you make that adjustment? I think that’s interesting. What would you say—2015 you guys started. There’s a lot of other robotics companies out there. We’re just seeing lots of activity, lots of VC money, lots of stuff going on. Relative to your competitors, what is your real strong competitive advantage? Where is your points of differentiation?

Vince:

– We talked a lot about the fact that we provide a picking machine. Again, at one end of the spectrum there’s folks who provide some aspects of the software so the vision system can work, but then you need other partners to pull it together into a machine, and then it still needs to be integrated to other things in the warehouse. We think our business model where we’re bringing a vision, the gripper, the AI intelligence, all together in one package, in one module, we think that’s a differentiator for many people. In the early days we didn’t talk about it as much, about our gripper. It doesn’t look like my hand, but I have to do that when I say gripper.

Danny:

– That makes sense. I like the visual.

Vince:

– The genesis of our company comes from a group of researchers, our founders, who were working on robotic grasping and manipulation in their PhDs and post-docs. The worked on a DARPA challenge and won this challenge of designing a gripper that is really good at doing complex tasks, so picking things up and so on. When they started the company, actually we would sell—when I joined in 2017 we were still selling kind of a research-grade gripper to academic institutions. This picking and warehouses is the main thrust, and so we sidelined that other business there.

For a few years we didn’t want to get confused and have people think we only sell grippers because we weren’t a gripper business. We kind of downplayed on the marketing side and said, “I don’t want to talk about grippers all the time because then people pigeonhole us.” Now as we look ahead, we’re like, oh, no, our gripper, which has a suction cup like every gripper out there has to singulate and pull items up. But then we have some flexible, compliant fingers that really help stabilize items so you can move fast. You don’t drop things; You don’t fling them, with have sensing integrated into the grippers, so there’s a lot in our gripper technology. Again, over the years I’ve been with the company, other picking companies and other people have approached us and said, “Hey, can we license the gripper? Can we buy the gripper?” It’s like, “Well no, that’s ours.” An indication that, oh, we might have something special there.

Danny:

– That is, yeah.

Vince:

– Sometimes competitors want to buy it or license it from us. Then I think it depends on the competitor, but we just have a single-minded focus. This is the only line of business for us. There are large companies and traditional system integrators who will start up a robotics activity. They hire really bright guys, capable people and so on, but you mentioned the funding. We’ve raised 90-something million dollars, so if you want to build a really great, autonomous picking system which is as different from a factory robot as an autonomous vehicle is to a traditional car—it’s a whole different thing—if you want to do that, you’re not going to do it with three guys in the lab somewhere, even if your company’s got 10,000 people.

It’s how many can you apply to this problem, solving it and doing it well and productizing it? We’ve got our, closing in on 100 people. That’s all we do. So I think that focus, it depends on which competitors and who you’re talking about in the landscape, but the kind of solution we’re providing, the fact that it’s designed to work and play well with integrators, the gripper, these are some of the advantages we’ve invested in, but then because we see that they’re differentiating us with the end customers and partners in the market.

Danny:

– Excellent, sounds good to me. Very interesting. I love when you were talking about with the grippers, too. You say, hey, I think we’ve got something here if we’ve got competitors wanting to license it or buy it or what have you. I think it’s great. Like I said, congratulations on the closing of the Series C. Sounds like that’s going to go a lot into R&D to continue to grow and to solve these challenges like you mentioned productizing stuff.

Vince:

– Engineering and recruiting, don’t forget recruiting.

Danny:

– Oh yeah, a lot of recruiting. So if anyone’s out there who’s interested and want to say, hey, listen, interested in an opportunity. We might know a company that’d be interested.

Vince:

– Yes, thanks.

Danny:

– Excellent. Vince, listen, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. We have covered a wide spectrum of topics over probably 40 minutes or so. I personally really enjoyed it. I loved hearing your story, your background. I loved hearing about the airplane story—two airplane stories that you gave us, one how you met Wade initially, and then the second airplane story on how you had to read a book and school up on whatever topic that was. Came in victorious. Closed the deal.

Vince:

– Yeah, it was gigabit ethernet. Talk about a book that’s tough to read on an overnight flight, it was everything you needed to know from an engineering standpoint about gigabit ethernet standards.

Danny:

– Okay, that sounds—yeah, very good.

Vince:

– I made it through, cover to cover.

Danny:

– That’s awesome. Well we talked about that; we talked about industry challenges. We talked about you guys, your competitive advantage. We talked about a lot of things. I think we’ve got a lot of information here, and thank you again for your time. I’ll put out there, anyone who is interested, like I said who is watching or listening, if they want to learn more about you guys, they can go to righthandrobotics.com. Sounds like you guys got a lot of things going on. Thank you for your time.

Vince:

– Yeah, thank you very much, Danny. I really appreciate it. This was fun.

Danny:

– Alright, well that’s a wrap for today. We covered a lot. I especially loved hearing Vince’s story and the fact that he owned a coffee shop and very clearly has an entrepreneurial spirit having worked with so many start-ups over the course of his career. I loved hearing that RightHand Robotics story, what their value proposition is, how they’re differentiating themselves in the market. It’s exciting to see as we continue to see more innovations and solutions in the industrial space to address labor and supply chain issues, and I’m excited to see what the future holds there.

Well that’s all I’ve got for you today. Thank you so much for watching or listening. Listen, if you’re not subscribed on the series, you need to make sure that you jump on that today. If you’re not on IndustrialSage watching there, maybe you’re listening on the podcast. Go to IndustrialSage.com; you can subscribe because you’re missing out on great content like this. You don’t want to miss out anymore, so get on that email list. We’ll send you an alert when this comes in. So that’s all I’ve got for you today. Thank you so much. I’ll be back next week with another episode on IndustrialSage.

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