Building Hard Tech in Hard Markets: Kyle Vogt on Cruise, Twitch, and The Bot Company
02/20/25 • 38 min
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Kyle Vogt joins Sarah and Elad on this week’s episode of No Priors. A serial entrepreneur, Kyle co-founded Twitch, transforming live streaming, and later Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company acquired by GM for $1 billion. Now he’s taking on AI-powered home robotics with The Bot Company. In this episode, Kyle shares his journey building transformative tech companies, the challenges of scaling autonomous systems, and why he believes home robots are the next frontier. They also discuss the parallels between AVs and robotics, overcoming consumer skepticism, US vs. China manufacturing, and the policies needed to foster a competitive robotics industry.
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Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @KVogt
Show Notes:
0:00 Introduction
0:29 Founding Cruise
3:12 Tesla vs. Waymo approach
4:44 Scaling autonomous vehicles
10:03 The Bot Company
16:35 Deploying robots in the home
17:56 Parallels between robots and AV markets
20:51 Personifying robots and overcoming consumer skepticism
25:00 Timeline on consumer robots
26:47 Chinese vs. US manufacturing
29:15 Fostering a competitive domestic robotics industry
34:00 Lessons from Cruise & personal philosophies
Kyle Vogt joins Sarah and Elad on this week’s episode of No Priors. A serial entrepreneur, Kyle co-founded Twitch, transforming live streaming, and later Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company acquired by GM for $1 billion. Now he’s taking on AI-powered home robotics with The Bot Company. In this episode, Kyle shares his journey building transformative tech companies, the challenges of scaling autonomous systems, and why he believes home robots are the next frontier. They also discuss the parallels between AVs and robotics, overcoming consumer skepticism, US vs. China manufacturing, and the policies needed to foster a competitive robotics industry.
Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected]
Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @KVogt
Show Notes:
0:00 Introduction
0:29 Founding Cruise
3:12 Tesla vs. Waymo approach
4:44 Scaling autonomous vehicles
10:03 The Bot Company
16:35 Deploying robots in the home
17:56 Parallels between robots and AV markets
20:51 Personifying robots and overcoming consumer skepticism
25:00 Timeline on consumer robots
26:47 Chinese vs. US manufacturing
29:15 Fostering a competitive domestic robotics industry
34:00 Lessons from Cruise & personal philosophies
Previous Episode
How Harvey AI is Changing the Legal Industry with Winston Weinberg
This week on No Priors, Sarah sits down with Harvey cofounder and CEO Winston Weinberg. Harvey is one of the leading application layer AI companies, building domain-specific AI for law firms, professional service providers, and the Fortune 500. They are already working with companies like Bridgewater, KKR, PWC, and O’Melveny with over $500M in funding from OpenAI, Sequoia, Kleiner, GV and Elad and Sarah. In this episode, Sarah and Winston cover AI product strategy, the future of professional services, company values, keeping up with research, and the law industry of the future.
Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected]
Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @WinstonWeinberg
Show Notes:
0:00 Introduction
2:39 Harvey’s founding story
3:46 Capability improvement
6:39 Building teams around AI capabilities
9:17 End to end task completion
12:37 Beginning with large industry leaders
17:21 Working with users skeptical of automation
20:40 Being a lawyer today and in the future
26:02 Adapting product for other domains
26:58 Hiring philosophy at Harvey
30:39 Lessons and mistakes as a founder
32:53 Personal drive
40:21 Advice to other founders
44:35 Prediction for next ChatGPT moment
Next Episode
Virtual Cell Models, Tahoe-100 and Data for AI-in-Bio with Vevo Therapeutics and the Arc Institute
On this week’s episode of No Priors, Sarah Guo is joined by leading members of the teams at Vevo Therapeutics and the Arc Institute – Nima Alidoust, CEO/Co-Founder at Vevo Therapeutics; Johnny Yu, CSO/Co-Founder at Vevo Therapeutics; Patrick Hsu, CEO/Co-Founder at Arc Institute; Dave Burke, CTO at Arc Institute; and Hani Goodarzi, Core Investigator at Arc Institute. Predicting protein structure (AlphaFold 3, Chai-1, Evo 2) was a big AI/biology breakthrough. The next big leap is modeling entire human cells—how they behave in disease, or how they respond to new therapeutics. The same way LLMs needed enormous text corpora to become truly powerful, Virtual Cell Models need massive, high-quality cellular datasets to train on. In this episode, the teams discuss the groundbreaking release of the Tahoe-100M single cell dataset, Arc Atlas, and how these advancements could transform drug discovery.
Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected]
Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @Nalidoust | @IAmJohnnyYu | @PDHsh | @Davey_Burke | @Genophoria
Show Notes:
0:00 Introduction
1:40 Significance of Tahoe-100M dataset
4:22 Where we are with virtual cell models and protein language models
10:26 Significance of perturbational data
17:39 Challenges and innovations in data collection
24:42 Open sourcing and community collaboration
33:51 Predictive ability and importance of virtual cell models
35:27 Drug discovery and virtual cell models
44:27 Platform vs. single hypothesis companies
46:05 Rise of Chinese biotechs
51:36 AI in drug discovery
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