The Pomp Podcast - The Biggest Money-Making Opportunity Since Bitcoin? | Andrew Kang

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

Andrew Kang is a veteran crypto investor and the CEO of RoboStrategy, a publicly traded closed-end fund focused on the robotics industry (Nasdaq: BOT). In this conversation, we break down why Andrew shifted his capital from crypto to humanoid robots, why he believes the market rivals human labor itself. We also discuss the US vs. China robotics race, job displacement, and and how RoboStrategy is giving everyday investors access to venture-scale returns.=========================RoboStrategy Advisors is an investment adviser focused on robotics, physical AI, and emerging technologies.This discussion is provided for information and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer to buy or sell any security.Any opinions expressed are those of the speaker as of the recording date and are subject to change. Forward-looking statements and opinions are based on current expectations and assumptions and are subject to change without notice. Any references to prior investment experience, portfolio companies, or investment outcomes relate to activities conducted outside of RoboStrategy and are provided solely for background and informational purposes. Any referenced gains, returns, or investment outcomes may be unrealized and are not indicative of future results. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal. References to companies, technologies, or investments are illustrative only and should not be interpreted as investment recommendations.=========================Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates the buying and selling of your preferred crypto strategies. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com and start your automated trading strategy for free. No catch. No hidden fees. Just smarter trading.

100,000 robots for $50,000 each. That's around $5 billion of revenue. Now, okay, what if I sell a million robots? That's $50 billion. You're getting to almost the scale of some of the biggest companies in the world. A million robots is really nothing, right? Because Amazon has millions of workers and Walmart has millions of workers. And what if I sell tens of millions? Okay, that is now $500 billion. And so you can see there's a really clear path, trillions of dollars of revenue, and that would imply tens of trillions of dollars of market cap. And that doesn't even consider stuff like Jevons Paradox where... What's going on, guys? Today, we have a very important conversation with Andrew Kang. Andrew is one of the best investors in the crypto world,

but the last couple of years, he has spent a majority of his time focused on the robotics industry. Today, he serves as the CEO of RoboStrategy, a publicly traded closed-end fund specifically focused just on investing in the robotics industry. In this conversation, we talk about how big the market is, why traditional venture capitalists haven't been interested in it, why Andrew thinks that this is a place that his capital can compound over a long period of time, how he personally built the conviction to actually invest a large sum of money

into these companies, and then why he chose to use a public vehicle to go and invest in these companies. This conversation, I think, is one that you guys will look back for years and years to come. I highly suggest that you pay attention. I think that Andrew is a very special investor,

but I also think the strategy and the industry that he's going after is something that people don't yet understand, but something that I'm personally very convicted in. And I think that there's a lot of opportunity here. Here's my conversation with Andrew Kang. Andrew, you're one of the best crypto investors in the world. You've had an incredible track record over the years, but now you're spending a lot more time on humanoid robots and robotics in general. Why the shift in attention and capital to a market that maybe most people don't understand that well yet? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of reasons.

We're finally going to have robots, right? It was always, you know, this big dream in sci-fi. You'd see robots that were shaped like humans doing everything a human could do. And we're finally getting to the point where that is possible. It's not a 50-year thing. It's not a 20-year thing. This is probably more so like a three- to five-year thing, right, where you start to see humanoids in everyday life.

Now, when you think about these humanoid robots, I always go to there's different ways that people envision these fitting into our lives. There is like humanoids that are in factories. There is videos, whether they're AI generated or real, of demos where they're doing things in our homes. Then there is the like maybe Jetson style, like they're like walking down the street, walking your dog or doing stuff in society. What is your vision for how humanoid robots are going to actually fit into kind of our future? So I think almost all of the above is possible in the future. You're going to have humanoids act the same way and participate in jobs the same way that humans do. Some of them, they might be focused on a specific job. They might be a service worker at a restaurant. Some of them, they might be working a specific factory job. Some of them might be your personal assistant at home. right i think the beauty of humanoids is that they're adaptable to the everyday world right they can go up and down the same buildings that we do they can use the same tools that we can do

and they in general are just very multi-purpose and very adaptive right and that's that's the difference between a humanoid robot and say a more application specific robot and i think that's why you see you know uh you see the prevalence of similar concepts or similar items in everyday life like your your smartphone for example right it's very general purpose i can play music on it i can use it as a map to navigate the world i can call people with it and in the same way a humanoid has such great multi-purpose functionality that it makes sense that it can permeate so many different aspects of of life in general so when you think about the total addressable market like what do you think it looks like for humanoids yeah i think to understand that

you have to look at what is the total market for human labor it's something like 50 of gdp it's you know some people put it at 40 trillion dollars 60 trillion dollars seems like a massive number right um the way that i would think about it is a humanoid can do everything that a human can do in the future right but it doesn't need to rest it doesn't need to take breaks doesn't need to go on vacation it's not going to quit on you so you don't need to hire and you know retrain somebody else a lot of these like jobs in factories they suck and there's really high turnover and that is a really high overhead cost to having physical, you know, labor. And you don't have any of that with robots, right?

And so one robot could theoretically perform the function of maybe three humans, right? Assuming it's able to work multiple shifts. And so if we take that perspective of, well, you know, robots are going to replace most of physical labor, then you can also maybe do a bottoms-up analysis where you say, hey, look one robot fifty thousand dollars uh how does that compare to a human uh well a human i have to pay you know every single year uh robot that's a one-time fee maybe you have to pay a little bit for electricity maybe you have to pay a little bit for maintenance and but when i look at it from a per hour basis right and i expect this robot to last multiple years that math gets you down to

around two dollars per hour and in america you know you see the all-in cost of you know your average worker and you know their bonuses their insurance and everything else associated with it you know you get to something like 35 40 and so it's it's a no-brainer in terms of the cost structure um but even if you compare it to you know low-income countries like india or the philippines or indonesia honestly it's hard to be two dollars an hour there as well especially with all the benefits that you know we discussed um and then so i think you can come to an understanding that look it's gonna be a lot of robots we sell billions of cell phones every single year we sell hundreds of millions of pcs and and cars right and so probably sell a similar

amount of of robots and so but like what if we just sell a hundred thousand robots for fifty thousand dollars each that's around five billion dollars of revenue i mean you you're making that much revenue you're already i would say like a hundred billion dollar plus business potentially um assuming your margins are good um and now okay what if i sell a million robots that's 50 billion dollars it's you know you're getting to almost the scale of some of the biggest companies in the world. What if I sell, but a million robots is really nothing, right? Because Amazon has millions of workers and Walmart has millions of workers. And what if I sell tens of millions? Okay, that is now 500 billion. And so you can see there's a really clear path in terms

of like how we can potentially achieve trillions of dollars of revenue. And that would imply tens of trillions of dollars of market cap. And that doesn't even consider stuff like Jevons Paradox, where you're lowering the cost of labor of the product, you're actually increasing the market size, right? Because now things that were too expensive to do before are now economical, they might make sense. And so that top-down type of sizing is, I think, really puts it into perspective.

If you look at something like Apple, right? People would have thought you were crazy if you told them in 2006 that this would be a $3 trillion company today. Because before the iPhone came out, It was like, what, a $50 billion company? And that $3 trillion would have been bigger than most of the big companies combined back then. And so I think people really underappreciate the amount of value creation that can happen with really transformative technological jumps.

Now, there's a lot of people who I would say are kind of Monday morning quarterbacks, right? Or they'll sit and they'll say, oh, I think humanoid robots are going to be big. And they do nothing about it. You have taken an immense amount of personal capital over the last couple of years and you have put it into some of the leading private companies in the humanoid and robotic space. And when I say, you know, immense amount of personal capital, I think some of the investment sizes are eight figure personal checks that you wrote into these companies. And so just talk about, to get that level of conviction, is it, this is for sure going to happen? Is there some level of asymmetry? Like, what was the thing that convinced you, okay, these humanoid robots are actually going to be here and they're going to be as pervasive as you're saying? Yeah, it's interesting because when I first started investing in humanoids and robotics in general, it was definitely not consensus. I found out about figure AI around 2023, late 2023, and I had no experience investing in this space. And so I thought it was really exciting because Chachi PTA had just come out and it was clear that the path of AI development was going to dramatically accelerate.

And so not only were we going to get digital AGI, but we were going to get physical AGI. And the intelligence portion was always the bottleneck to making robots work. And that was going to be solved. And so with that in mind, I went out to a bunch of my traditional VC network and I asked them, hey, what do you think about this company? All of them told me not to invest. and i think a lot of the reason came down to the fact that the robotics industry historically has not produced a lot of winners a lot of big venture scale outcomes there's a lot of challenges with

developing robotics the hardware iteration cycle is very long it's very expensive and even after getting them to work the deployment can still be very messy and expensive um i think what a lot of investors failed to appreciate was that the development of physical intelligence was going to change all of that right and so the more i kind of dug into this investment the more i kind of realize how underappreciated it was because i try i you know i didn't even invest in directly at first i invested through four spvs uh and so when you're getting all these spvs thrown at you right you're getting access to a deal which is supposedly supposed to be a really great deal it you think oh wow am i getting ripped off right like why am i so why yeah why why am i getting so

much access why are the top vcs in the world not picking this up and the more i dug into it the more i realized it was more so people you know had certain industries that they were comfortable investing with certain theses and deviating from that is it can be very uncomfortable you have to take a lot of risk but there was no i don't think there was any question that there's product market fit for humanoid robots once these actually work. It was just a question of when are these actually going to work? And is this a team? Is this the right founder to make it happen? And so the more I dug into it, the more I actually wanted to increase my initial investment from a million to 5 million, eventually to around 19 million. And at the time I had not even spoken to Brett,

the founder. I had spoken to some people on his leadership team, and I had spoken to a lot of other investors in the round. But I think doing all the research and understanding the background of Brett, the team he had assembled, which were some of the most world-class roboticists, understood that this was one of the teams that was very likely going to make it happen. Let's talk a little bit more about Figure.ai. So you wrote a $19 million check initially, you know, kind of a collection of different investments. What was it about them that they're doing differently, right? I've seen the demos online. I think a lot of people have seen those now. I've talked to Brett before. But what is the thing that you think they either do

uniquely well or the thing that you think will continue to be a moat for them as they go to build this business? There's so many things. I mean, I think the first is the caliber of the team that Brett assembled. You know, there were a few other humanoid robotics companies that have been around for longer than a figure by the time that they were incorporated. But their rate of iteration and their speed of execution was completely unmatched in terms of what I was seeing in terms of progress month after month, quarter after quarter. If you look at, if you just think about the challenge that's in front of you in terms of how do I solve general purpose robotics, right? It's one of the most difficult challenges in the world. You need PhDs in

computer vision. You need PhDs in robot behavior. You have PhDs in hand engineering. I don't think there's even a PhD for that, but you need experts in hand engineering. You need experts in developing fleet orchestration software. And so you have all of these different special fields that there are maybe only a hundred of people that are really competent in these specific fields. And you need all of them within one company. And to do that is a huge challenge. And so you need a founder that can do that and to raise the billions of dollars of capital that you need to make that company a success. And so Brett was really one of the only few founders I had found at the time that was able to do that. I had looked at the other humanoid companies in the space and outside of

Tesla, nothing was really comparable. What's interesting to me is humanoid robots seem to be very similar to the drone industry where there's a ton of experimentation, maybe even speculation at the earliest stages of the technology. There are a couple of companies that are able to get some sort of innovative breakthrough, but then those companies really struggle to commercialize the innovation that they've done. So you either have kind of very technical teams that are able to work on the hardware and software of a drone, but then they have a hard time actually building a business around it. What I think is happening in humanoid robots is we are now starting to see teams that not only are good at the technology, but they also

have a track record and experience of actually building a business as well. Is that your experience in terms of why maybe now is the moment, why these are actual companies, not just kind of cool Boston dynamic robot demos or something? Technical experience is important. Yeah. Don't get me wrong. But I think sometimes investors can over-index on maybe like a PhD or professor type of talent, which I think is instrumental to have on the team. But if you look at Brett's background, for example, his first company, veteri it was a company focused basically on recruitment right and so he understood and built the skill set of how do i find and attract the best talent in the world and the second company

archer which he took public i think it's still around you know five to ten billion dollars as he took a public in a spec a few years ago i mean he was innovating a whole new type of complex machinery that really hadn't existed before commercially and that type of skill set to create, you know, almost like a stepwise change in, you know, what machines can do is really unique in America. I think you see that in some other parts of the world, but America has outsourced a lot of their hardware design and their manufacturing, right, to places like China. And, you know, you look at some of the biggest hardware companies in America, like Apple, right? Like the phone, iPhone, it's getting better, but only very

marginally year over year. It's not a really big change in terms of this is like a completely new invention. Now you mentioned China, obviously anyone paying attention to this space has seen incredible demos and videos coming from China. I have seen half marathons run. I think they had a robot Olympics where they were doing all kinds of different events. China is known to be very good at building hardware. As you mentioned, they have a great supply chain. They've somewhat become the manufacturer of the world in many people's eyes. Why do you think the United States or any American company can beat China at this game? Yeah. Oh man, the US versus China robotics topic, I think we can talk about for a while, right? Look, China is undoubtedly undefeated in

manufacturing. And I think they will continue to be. But I would evaluate robotics companies on three competencies. One is their ability to execute on high-rate manufacturing. Second one is their hardware design. And the third one is their AI capabilities, right? And we already covered manufacturing. I would say China is very strong at.

There are some companies like Tesla and figure that are getting very strong at that in America. And when it comes to hardware design, you have, you know, I would say figure and Tesla at the top in America. And in China, you have, I would say, you know, maybe like 100 plus different companies. And they're all in various degrees of, I would say, excellence in terms of how good their hardware is. If you look at Unitary, for example, their hardware is great for research and for entertainment purposes.

You see them doing backflips. You see them dancing. but you can't take that same G1 robot and put it in a factory and have it lift 30 pound payloads, right? It's going to fall apart. And so it's not like, but it's also not like Unitree can't design robots

that are more durable. It's just not the market that they've decided to pursue it at first. That being said, the AI piece is I think what is underappreciated that the US is ahead on. terms of physical intelligence. The top physical AI labs in America, I think, have some meaningful edge over the leading Chinese labs. And without the robot brain, right, the robot's pretty useless.

And so, you know, if that trend continues, then maybe we do see some dependency from the Chinese companies on US physical intelligence. I think what is also underappreciated is that The amount of technology that's developed is not always one-to-one with the amount of value that's created. And so you can have really amazing robot technology come out of China. You can have that industry flourish. And it doesn't always mean that results in the biggest market cap or the biggest win for shareholders. And you've seen the same dynamic play out for cars, EVs, and for cell phones. China makes amazing cell phones and they make amazing electric vehicles. If you look at BYD, I think a lot of people have a lot of great things to say about their cars. They sell

more cars than Tesla, but their market cap is 1 10th, 1 20th of Tesla. And their margins are significantly lower. And that's an issue across all Chinese, I would say, hardware companies in general is that they play in an ultra competitive landscape. And that is partially kind of encouraged by the government, right? They're putting out these subsidies and they're giving support to these companies and they want a wide field of these players to exist. But the end result of that, I would say, is more so to benefit society and the consumers within the nation rather than the companies themselves. Obviously, the companies have to be successful. They have to grow economic value. At the same time, it doesn't mean that they're going to be as big as, say, the biggest

American companies, right? Like Apple is the biggest phone company in America, even though Huawei and Xiaomi make great phones. What's interesting to me is there's not only the capital markets that you participate in, but there's also the regulatory environment that you participate in. And it seems to me like in the United States, there is a very big conversation happening around, you know, self-driving cars or other forms of robotics and autonomy. And we obviously see lots of people yelling and screaming about data centers. And it just feels like there's a lot of scrutiny. And I would even argue that maybe society is fractured a little bit on is this stuff good? Is this stuff bad? Whether it's in software or hardware form. I don't see a lot

of that conversation coming out of China. I don't live in China though. So I don't know kind of what the temperature is, if you will, in the local communities or in society in general. But what I do think is really interesting is the success of the companies in America is almost despite all of that debate, all of that scrutiny. And it feels like the Chinese companies were getting immense amount of subsidies and lots of help from the government. And the reason I kind of paint this picture of, you know, two different maybe relationships between the public and private sector is I do wonder if the American companies benefit in the

long run from having to do the hard thing versus having the Chinese companies, if there is subsidies, like I've heard rumors that the Chinese government is actually subsidizing people to buy the humanoid robots. So, Hey, if you want a factory full of humanoid robots, we'll give you some money to subsidize. I don't know if that's true or not. Maybe you have some insight into it, but it does feel like maybe in the U S there's less government support and therefore the companies have to be able to actually innovate and actually be successful in the free market much more than a Chinese company? Would you say that's true? I would say there's some truth to it, but I would say government support would not, you know, it would not be negative for the industry. I would

say it's very positive for the industry. And I think we should have more government support. And there are also a lot of initiatives being pushed by lawmakers and lobbyists to create more support for the industry. The interesting thing about what's happening in China is that, yes, there's a little bit of what you described in terms of companies forming JVs with local governments and them establishing, say, a center to do robotics research, collect training data. And that center might also be a big purchaser of robots from one of the companies that had helped establish that JV. And so there's a little bit of circularity going on. I wouldn't say that is misleading in terms of their sales because those robots are being

sold for a good purpose, right? They're sold for collecting training data. I think there's a question around how useful is that training data and how effective are they at collecting it. But I think more importantly, it's just when you have say a hundred players competing against each other, you're going to squeeze down margins. You're going to have a bunch of IP transfer as well in an environment like China. And so there's going to be a lot of innovation at one company, but then it might quickly leak out to all the other companies, right? From talent flowing back and forth so much. Whereas if you only have a few companies in America and maybe they're geographically separated, you're going to have less of that. An important point I also want to

bring up, since you mentioned regulation, is that there's, I think, been very obviously a big push to re-industrialize America, to bring back manufacturing for us to be independent on our own supply chains to build things in America generally. And to do that, we need our own domestic robotics industry. It can't rely on other nations. And if you've seen what happened with EVs, right, we don't really have Chinese EVs in America. Why is that? Well, the reason is because, well, one, Biden put 100% tax on Chinese EVs during his administration. And then two, the FTC also outlawed, you know, vehicles from certain countries that have, you know, software from those countries and they have telecommunications devices, right? From those

countries. Think about what are robots? Well, they're things that can see and hear everything in the world and they're filled with telecommunication devices. And so I have a hard time seeing the American government allowing, you know, robots from other nations be the dominant player in America. And there are certain bills that are trying to be passed right now that are centered around this, right, that are explicitly banning robots from certain countries from at first being purchased by federally funded organizations. But, you know, there's this concept that that will expand more broadly to, you know, everyday life. How much of those bills are targeting, we want to encourage domestic manufacturing and

and help American companies versus they are explicitly saying there's a security concern from X, Y, Z nation internationally. And that's what we're doing, right? Because those are related, but maybe two different things. It's one thing if you say, hey, we just want our companies to flourish. That's kind of what tariffs are, a very protectionist type approach. It's another thing if maybe the US government's relationship with Huawei, where they explicitly said, we believe that there are security concerns that we want to target this. How do you look at the regulation that's getting put forward in the legislation? I think both are important things

that legislators currently care about. I mean, you saw it with TikTok, right? I mean, that originally being from a Chinese-related parent was a really big deal. And the U.S. government didn't want certain governments to have that sort of power or potential surveillance capability. And so they made them give it up.

And so that is 100% going to be a big concern is this national security risk. If you have robots, not just in the Pentagon, but in people's homes or important businesses, it's a risk. um and so the other part you asked about was around uh encouraging and incentivizing the current domestic industry right there's a lot of ways to do it uh you know you can invest in the companies themselves like the government has done with intel you can give them loans at variable very favorable terms you can uh establish uh more prevalent education programs for people to get involved in robot-related trade or manufacturing-related trade. And I think all of these are really important. I would say we should be as aggressive as possible because in terms of policy, we are lagging a little bit behind. But I think we're going to

get there very soon. What do you think the U.S. government can do to encourage more success in the humanoid robot space? I think they should just be directly investing in some of these robotics companies. I mean, the reason why we started RoboStrategy was because we felt like, one, there is a need to invest billions of dollars of capital into the most important robotics companies of the future. And two, there was an opportunity to do so as well. And the thing is, we've never had companies or venture capital firms with the experience to do this. And so it's a completely new underwriting game for them. They have to step out of their comfort zone. They have to get comfortable with all the execution risk, with all the dilution risk

of potential, you know, future CapEx build-outs. And it's something that if the U.S. government doesn't step in, it could take an elongated amount of time for the industry to develop as fast as it should. Let's talk about general purpose versus specialized kind of applications. And in my opinion, if we look at software AI, we're seeing this play out now, right? There are the general purpose models, the language labs, they are spending immense amount of resources to go and really have one model that can do a lot of different things. I don't think there's anybody in the world who is denying that they are having success. At the same time, there are very smart, very capable, very well-funded people who are saying, well, we actually think that there's a

huge opportunity for specialized workflows using AI. My general take on the software side is that both are going to have a place and both will be successful depending on what the end use case is. When I look at the robotics space, I'm nowhere near as kind of down the rabbit hole as you are, but I know of companies like Physical Intelligence, which maybe is a little bit more specialized application compared to a figure or Apptronic or a 1X that are much more focused on, you know, kind of general application. One or the other wins, they both will be successful. How do you look at general versus specialized yeah i think this is a dynamic that has played out in a lot of different areas of history right if we look at our phone we talked about this earlier they replace

your gps your mp3 player uh you know your recording devices etc um but those devices still exist to some extent right you know the watch industry is still a thing even though you can tell time on your phone uh and another parallel i like to look at is the the gpu versus the asic industry both are massive both i would say are in the trillions of dollars but i think some people they kind of go to this line of thinking where they believe that in a perfect world everything should be specialized for a specific purpose and i i don't think that's the case and you you can look at these previous examples they kind of um you come come to that similar understanding. But the thing with having something general purpose is that while it might

not be the most efficient from one certain metric, it is something that needs to be made at an incredible scale. And so you have these massive unit economics that are working in your favor that you wouldn't have for something that you're producing for one specific application. And that means I can produce something maybe at 80% cheaper cost than I would otherwise. And that is something that I think is really underappreciated. I think there will still be specialized robots. I think we'll have specialized robots for welding. For example, we invest in path robotics. There are going to be specialized robots for home construction in different areas. And so there's an area for both of these. And I think they're both going to be humongous markets that we're going to

play. And I think it really depends on the context, which robot makes sense. Let's talk about the training data that goes into actually creating these. I think a lot of folks have seen some of the demo videos where a human is doing something and then the humanoid is essentially mirroring that action. We've also seen there's a startup here in New York City that now is offering to come and clean your home for free, but they want to wear cameras and basically collect all of that training data while they're cleaning your home so you get a free home cleaning they get the data they'll then use that how do you look at the training data and where this is going to come it's possible to go back to the last question because i think there's a good there's an

important point which is the world is never static which is why general purpose devices are so useful like gpus right algorithms change all the time asics you have to develop a completely new asic for it, but the GPU is still going to be useful. And the same thing is with anything that involves human labor. If I'm working in a factory, I might have to produce a completely different type of product next year, right? And that involves a different manufacturing process. And sometimes I can use the same machines, but the reason why humans are still used in factory environments today, even though a lot of the labor is repetitive, is that humans can adjust for different workflows. And the world's always going to be changing, right? We're always going to have

different environments, different objects that we have to interact with, and different situations. And so you need something that is maximally adaptable. And that looks like a humanoid, or maybe something that is similar to a humanoid. Maybe it's stationary. Maybe it's just a fixed general purpose arm, a co-bought industrial arm, or a wheeled humanoid, right? But something that is flexible and can do multiple different tasks. Hello, everyone. Sorry to interrupt this conversation, but I wanted to tell you about CFO Sylvia.

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obviously seen examples where humans are standing in front of a humanoid, they do some task, the humanoid then mirrors it. We also have seen though, there's a recent company in New York City that now is offering to come clean your apartment for free. But in exchange for you getting a free apartment cleaning they wear cameras and they collect live data and then they basically are using that for training data is this just going to become like a global scavenger hunt for whoever can find the best training data or do you think that there will be more specific we are trying to create data for these humanoids yeah i mean this data topic is is really interesting because there used to be this kind of whole train of thought where people were comparing it to lms right and

lms were trained on this corpus of internet um the entire corpus of internet history um and people right made the comparison that hey like we don't have this equivalent for robotics and we have to recreate all that from scratch and it's going to take a lot of time it's going to take a lot of labor and i think some recent development developments in the model world have changed my thinking on this. One is the models that have basically started to use video generation models as a backbone, like sometimes also called world models. And these models are basically just trained on internet video data for the most part, right? Think about, you know, Sora or Wan, for example, it's one of the best Chinese open source video models.

um while these aren't the same type of data you would get from you know someone putting a camera on your head and cleaning your room this is also really important data to train a model that has an understanding of of the world right it has an understanding of physics is an understanding of you know fluid dynamics so if i tip this glass over right like how does the water move and how objects interact with each other. And we have a lot of that data on the internet and that has been shown to be really, really useful as a backbone for robot foundation models.

And so that doesn't mean necessarily that that's the only data that we need and we don't need anything else. We still need a lot of environment-specific data. We need, I would say, data that doesn't exist on the internet of people doing certain tasks or in certain environments that are not usually recorded, right? So if I'm producing like a book in a factory, there's not really much video of that on the internet. And so some of that data is going to need to be collected. I think there's

a question around what is the scale that needs to be collected? I think it's hard to say, but it's a lot less, I think, than what people would have previously thought. Now, when I think of these humanoid robots, it seems like there's already somewhat of a Trojan horse in this many large companies, right? If I look at a Tesla car being built, they don't look like humanoid robots, but it is pretty much a robotic assembly line. And that's how those cars get created. If I look at Amazon, Amazon has about 1.5 million humans that they employ, but they report that they have 750,000 robots at the company. And my guess is that there's going to be more robots than humans at some point in the future. The videos that I've seen online, I don't

see any humanoid robots walking around yet. I see a lot of robots that are autonomously moving things within their different warehouses and doing different tasks. But then if we go to like self-driving cars, again, it seems like there's a rise of what I would consider a version of a robot not a humanoid robot and so is this a thing where robots end up being kind of the trojan horse it pushes through people start to adopt this technology and then actually humanoids are the last but biggest market or how do you see the relationship between you know non-humanoid robots versus the actual humanoids themselves i think look um designing a robot to do a specific task I think one specific is going to be a lot easier than training a robot to do 50 different tasks.

And the humanoid robot, you would expect to be able to do a lot of different tasks to kind of fulfill its kind of desired purpose. And so from that perspective, yes, I think you're going to see some more adoption of these application specific robots a little bit earlier than for humanoids. But I think the development of humanoids, it's exponential. Will humanoids be making other humanoids? And so it legitimately is exponential? That is happening in the very near future, I think. Multiple companies have hinted at that before. Tesla has hinted at that before.

I think they've shown some videos of optimists organizing battery pieces within their facility. uh you know figures hinted at it before uh aptronic has talked about that before with their partnership with with jaybel um and so that's gonna be part of it right it's the kind of like the the recursiveness of it is you with ai or with lms right you have the the ai's being able to help with ai research and here you have the robots able to help with robot development And then you also have, right, the latest models, Opus 4.8, being able to help with robot AI training as well. Let's talk about these humanoids in someone's everyday life. You know, one of the things that I continue to say is I personally believe humanoids are going to be cleaning in your home.

They're going to walk your dog. They may even watch your children one day. You know, I have young children. Finding a babysitter sometimes is hard, right? Maybe I wouldn't be comfortable if they were awake, but if they're asleep or something, right? Like, but just talk about, like, what do you expect the average person in, I don't know, 10 years, their interaction with these to be? And how much are we going to trust them to replace tasks that maybe today we would only allow another human to do? Yeah. I mean, this kind of goes back to also some of the debate around telop, right?

Somebody controlling a robot from, say, you know, a remote place versus fully autonomous. For those that don't know, teleoperation is essentially there is the true autonomy where the robot has computational power on it, actual device. It's moving throughout the world. There's nobody who can externally control it or tell it to do certain things. Teleoperation is the opposite, right? It's almost like a remote controlled robot that somebody else is controlling. Right, right. Maybe somebody has, you know, an exoskeleton of a humanoid and they're moving around in, you know, some remote work center and then they're controlling the robot. And there are, that is happening in some use cases as a way for people to kind of bootstrap adoption or gather training data. And the issue with having that in your home though, right, is you have somebody that can see and hear everything that's going on. You kind of lose your your personal space and so i i'm a little bit skeptical of that approach for the home first

the teleoperation the teleoperation approach for the home which there are some companies um that are kind of leaning on it a little bit more um but for when these things become autonomous i think it's going to be similar to you know how people interact with uh these chat these chat ai apps today with chat gpt and claude it's right like a lot of people tell them their personal information, some things they wouldn't even tell their significant friends. And so I think people will eventually have that type of relationship with their robots as well. I do think it's interesting for like a child to grow up in a home where there's a robot that they depend on for certain things. You know, it does enter this world where what is the relationship

between man and machine starts to get blurred a little bit more than not. And I know because I have friends who will tell me that their kids sit and talk to the Alexa and just talk, you know, talk and Alexa will answer. And it's kind of, you know, a proxy for a human. And maybe it's not the, you know, most intelligent conversation or something where the, the Alexa is actually able to replace the human conversation, but for a young child, you know, it does what it needs to do. And so you could easily see humanoid doing the same thing and, you know, kind of the physical realm. Right. Yeah. And in some way, maybe they do it better than a human, right. Because, You know, they're trained to be, to, you know, engaging, right. To, uh, understand us and to say things that we enjoy hearing. So, yeah.

Now, let's talk a little bit in terms of these companies. We obviously have talked about Figure AI. I think that's probably the largest private company. Many people have probably heard of the company if they don't already know it to some degree of familiarity. Tesla is another company. They're in the public market. They have both the self-driving cars and they have the humanoid robots that they're going

after. My external view seems that really what they are trying to do is build these AI models, machine learning, and just help robots see or think. And whether that's a self-driving car or the humanoid robot, that is kind of the pitch of that business. What do you think about Tesla? And do you think that they can win the market? I think undoubtedly Tesla is going to be a big winner in humanoids. I mean, I would never bet against Elon. I just think he's just, he's a winner. At the same time, you know, you look at the Optimist program. I think they have hit a few speed bumps over the past one or two years uh things aren't going as fast as expected but

you know that this is a really hard problem to solve um and i would say on the ai side um they haven't shown as much as some of the other companies i think they'll be able to get there because elon is going to be able to do it but for example for figure right they showed this demo of the robot sorting packages for, what was it? At first it was eight hours and then they extended it to multiple robots to work something like nine days straight. That is, I would say, a really impressive feat

of their autonomous capabilities that very few other companies have shown. And knowing Elon, if he's got something great to show, I think he'd show it, right? And so I think because we haven't seen that yet, maybe they're not there yet. On the other hand, no one's going to beat him in manufacturing in America. And on the hardware design side, I think the taste and style is going to be really

important outside of your functional requirements. And he's going to be able to sell a premium product based on that. And there are some, I think, issues with the hand, not issues, but i would say need for a redesign or the hand is super complex one of the most complex parts of the robot and you need to make sure that even though you have a lot of really small components that they can withstand wear and tear for years and years and years and that they can be very precise because everything you're doing with the hand is very very precise and so you know i think they're still going through design to really perfect that um whereas maybe some companies are a little bit ahead, some are a little bit behind, but that's kind of how I would characterize

Tesla at the moment. What's interesting to me is I've always talked about humans have an advantage over the robots for now, which is these five fingers. You know, it is the one thing that every single company I've talked with that are building these humanoid robots, it's the hardest part in many of the review. And to a human, it's natural. You know, you just pick something up, you don't even think about it. And so what, at what point do you think that humans should start to worry about maybe the negative impact of this? Do you think there's a negative impact on jobs or the roles that humans will do in the employment sense?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think some tech CEOs might sugarcoat this a little bit and, you know, they might relate it back to the history, right? This is what we kind of constantly hear as a talking point that, hey, look, every time in human history where we had this big technological revolution that put people out of jobs, there was always something new that kind of came about, right?

I think the difference here is that previously, you just had to move up the cognitive stack. You had to do something that involved more thinking or more planning that, you know, whatever had replaced you wasn't able to do. And now with AI basically replacing the complete cognitive ability and physical ability of a human, there's no place to kind of expand out to, right? I don't think there's going to be a certain task that you can say, hey, look, a human can do this, but a robot won't be able to do. And I think from that point of view, we need something like universal basic income. I think there's going to be a lot of people out of jobs, which is unfortunate, but there's also nothing we can do to stop technology. And so we're going to need safety nets from governments around the world to deal with this. And is your thought process that if humans are going to get displaced by humanoid robots, that UBI or something like that is the solution?

It's hard to say what's the optimal solution, but it's one of the best solutions. I think that people have come up with so far. Do you think that it is more likely software AI or hardware AI replaces human workers? Well, I think you look at the makeup of, you know, white collar work versus blue collar work, right? It's, you know, for people like you and me, maybe we're in these bubbles and we think, okay, it's mostly white collar jobs, but there's this huge swath in a group of people that are doing more physical labor jobs.

um i would say that's that's that's probably bigger than white collar jobs um especially in other parts of the world um and and so i think it's it's going to be huge for both it's it's you know i don't think it's important to say which one's going to be bigger it's just going to destroy a lot of jobs what i find very interesting is uh we're seeing on the software side people are starting to now write maybe their technical documentation and have it optimized so that AI agents can read it, not just humans, where you see other aspects where people are actually building, whether it's their products or, you know, checkout flows or whatever, so that agents are able to interface with it easily.

In the physical world, we do not yet see people changing anything because of humanoid robots. My guess is that that will actually happen, though. And so if we think of a factory right now, it's pretty much there's a human factory and then there's some that have robotics. Yeah. Do humans and robots work together? do we get like a human you know facility and then there's an entirely different robotic facility how do you think about the physical world really conforming and changing and evolving

because of the rise of human and robots yeah so i mean we've had robots working alongside humans for decades um some of them you might not really think about as robots because you're so used to them right like coffee machines for example um other ones that look a little bit more like robots um they're essentially right called cobots they're just large industrial arms that are a little bit smaller and they're programmed in a way that is safe to work around humans and that has existed for i would say 20 years or so um and these exist across a lot of factories in the world but the issue is that the adoption hasn't been high right because um yeah i mean if you look at just all the amount of robots that are installed on an annual basis right now it's around 500 000

globally and a big chunk of that is is in china um and a very small fraction of that is in america even though we still do have a lot of you know factories and places where people are doing physical labor in america it's just the issue with programming a robot um creating the environment around it and making sure that it's working reliably right you know around the clock for the entire year is really, really expensive. Oftentimes, it's more expensive than the cost of the robot itself. But when we make these robots smart,

that cost of deployment goes down dramatically. And these robots become a lot more economical and they make a lot more sense in a lot of different places in the world. Let's talk about what you're doing. In the space we talked earlier, you've made some very large personal investments, but you recently announced

that now you are taking those personal investments, You're contributing them into a closed-end publicly traded fund called RoboStrategy. Talk a little bit as to why step out of the shadows to some degree and go down this path of operating this entity. Yeah, I just want to clear up that I've contributed some of my investments in robotics. I think it's something around 15% to 20% of my figure AI exposure and some fraction of my Aptronic exposure, but my exposure outside of the fund is currently more than the exposure from the NAV basis inside the fund. But I don't hope that to be the case, right? I hope

I grow this as big as I can. And one of the reasons why I went down this path, I could have continued to just invest privately, was because when I went down this journey in the beginning, two or three years ago, I saw that the venture space just wasn't appreciating the industry and that there was not only going to be a really big need for more capital allocators to step in, but it was an opportunity to do it at really big scale. And so you saw what happened with OpenAI and Anthropic, right? Is these companies just went completely nuts over the period of a few years. And I think you're going to have that same vertical takeoff happen for robotics as well. You're going to be able to put tens of billions of dollars to work

in a very high risk adjusted manner, right? If you had just put all your money into the top few AI companies a few years ago, you would have outperformed the best seed funds in the world. um and so this is a very i think special opportunity in time and you know we're going to have the figure or we're going to have the anthropic in the open ai for robotics as well and i think the only way to be able to reach that scale is to do it through the public capital markets and you know we had never raised um capital in the private markets before for you know an actively managed fund you know we've kind of kicked the idea around a little bit but and you know like maybe after some effort we could get you know one or two billion dollars maybe a little bit

more if we tried really hard um but i think the opportunity in in the public markets is i would say in terms of demand for robotics exposure high quality robotics exposure it's probably on the scale right now of tens of billions, very soon, hundreds of billions, and in the future, trillions, right? And there's no place for all that capital to get exposure. And so, you know, we, over the past few years, have been talking about our views on markets, our views on, you know, this industry. And we were bombarded with people that were asking us, how do we get exposure to this space? What stocks and what companies should we be looking at? And there was no answer except for Tesla. And so we thought, why not create this vehicle, right? Not only for people

to get exposure, but for us to be able to scale this into what I would consider potentially one of the biggest investors, robotics investors in the world, but also potentially one of the biggest VC funds in the world. VC funds have traditionally not been public. There was a very brief history of them being public in, I would say like the 1960s. There were some issues with it, but then for the most part it just went all private and then you had these companies right that before they went public at a few billion dollars now they wait until they're a trillion dollar plus tens of billions of dollars in revenue to go public and all that value creation right is going to in the hands of a few venture capital funds their lps and you know their network which is really smart

small part of the world but there's right the public capital markets which is much much bigger and it has interest, right? It wants to participate in this value creation and ride along an investment journey. And so why not take investment fund public? And so I think this model, if we're able to execute on it correctly, we could kind of reshape the whole paradigm

of venture capital investing as well. I think you're going to see other venture funds that are going public. There are a few funds that went public earlier this year, But I think, and they've done well in terms of demand, right? They're all trading at premiums to NAV. The difference is I don't think a lot of them have really zoned in and figured out this model of how do I take that demand and put it back into the vehicle in a way that's accretive for shareholders and to compound that over time and then continue to reinvest in the best companies in the world and do it on an active basis, right? Because if I want to put billions of dollars to work, I need to have a relationship with the founder. I need to have underwritten the deal that I'm comfortable putting that amount of capital to work. I need to have, you know, been with this company and following it for many, many years already.

And, you know, I want to, I also need to be somebody that these founders want on the cap table as well. Not just me, you know, the entire team that we've built at RoboStrategy. And so that is something that we're doing a little bit differently from some of the other publicly traded venture funds that have launched. And, you know, you might see some people try to copy in the future. Now let's talk about, as you have this vehicle, let's go to the maybe atomic unit, the most important thing, which is the decisions that you are making, which companies are you allocating to.

What I find very interesting about your team is you obviously are a great investor. You've got a track record over time of investing in some of these innovative type industries, but you've assembled, I don't know, one of the top robotics teams in the world in order to actually go underwrite this stuff. Talk a little bit about the team and what you guys do from a diligence standpoint when you guys are actually evaluating whether you're going to invest in a company or not. Yeah. So, look, to, I think, make the best investment decisions in robotics, you need experience. And I can try to get as smart on the industry, you know, as I can. And I think I've done a pretty decent job at it. You know, reading, you know, multitudes of research papers, talking to people across the industry obsessively for the past two years. Um, but it doesn't replace decades of real industry experience, which is something that I think other venture capital funds, they might have in their specific domains, but

I don't, I haven't really talked to anybody else that has that in the robotic space so far. Uh, and they need to understand what are the pitfalls, right? That these companies can go through. What are, uh, you know, some key areas that they need to operate, uh, to be successful. and who is the right talent? Are these people that they've brought onto the team actually legitimate?

Are they going to contribute to this company being a big success? And so with that understanding, I went out and I found Scott Walter, who is an incredible talent. He's a little bit of a mini celebrity in the robotic space with the content that he posts on X and YouTube.

And almost every major humanoid CEO knows knows scott uh has a lot of respect and some of his the content he posts online has even informed some of the mechanical science of um some of the top players in the space and you know he he founded two roboters companies he sold the last one to kuka he sold both of them last one he sold to kuka and uh you know 40 years experience is more than you know some people have there on their entire team. His background is in, what is it, robot offline programming, humanoid mechanical design, manufacturing simulation. So these are all incredibly tangential fields of expertise. I also have Jack Pearson on the team, who was also a founder operator himself with a decade

of experience in the industry. And both of them have this kind of unique combination of both technical and commercial competency. And founders find that really useful as well. And we're trying to structure the platform in a way that we believe we can provide value to the founders that we work with as well. And so that is something that we're going to continue to do. We're going to continue to recruit more robotics veterans so they can help with supply chain, with design of their robots for recruiting, validating the right people, et cetera. Now, let's talk about the actual entity itself. A lot of people don't know this,

but closed-end publicly traded funds have some pros and cons, I think, compared to other vehicles. And so one of the examples I've always used is Bill Ackman. He has a closed-end publicly traded fund in Europe. And most people see he made $18 billion, but majority of the capital is actually in the closed-end publicly traded fund.

Now, in the United States, you cannot charge carry. Whereas with a traditional private venture capital fund, you know, if you were just a regular VC, you would say, hey, I'm charging, you know, two and 20%, 2% management fee, 20% carry, an LP gives you the money, you go and you invest. And when you sell positions, you're taking 20% of the profits. It's a pretty big number, right? Right. In the publicly traded closed-end funds, you can only charge a management fee. And so there is no carry there, but it's also permanent capital. And so I think it changes the incentives. It changes the way that people think in terms of time horizon. Talk just a little bit as to why you chose the actual closed-end publicly traded fund versus maybe doing this in some other format. I mean, there are only a few other formats that would work, right? One is we raise capital privately that wouldn't get us to the scale that you know we we want to get at

um there is and that would i think just almost be just as hard uh whereas you know kind of like our competencies actually come a lot from from marketing uh all of our team members have their own it's a you know large or at least have a meaningful presence on on social media and kind of understand how to generate more attention and awareness which is really important for a closed-end fund structure because you're attracting capital from the public capital markets. And then the other option, right, is an ETF. But with the ETF, now you can actually have private assets in ETF, but I think they restrict it to around 15%, right? And so we're dealing with illiquid securities, right? And so the only way it really works is in this closed-end fund structure.

Now, what we've seen happen with many of these closed-end funds is when you put private investments that are good, high quality assets, people want access, right? If you think about in the early days of Bitcoin, people wanted to buy Bitcoin in the public market. They couldn't do that. And so the Bitcoin trust traded at a premium. This is a story as old as time. Talk a little bit as to the premium of which you guys trade at today is sometimes three, 400% above NAV. What does that allow you to do? What is kind of the plan here? Yeah. So I think a lot of people look at the premium and they get afraid, right? Because there is a risk, which is the premium could compress. But at the same time, the premium could expand. I think what's important for us is that there's this aspect of premium crystallization, which I think is not very well understood, which means that I can issue shares and I can do it in a way that is actually accretive to shareholders.

And so, for example, right, if I have, you know, $100 of robotics equity in my vehicle, and it's trading at a 3x NAV, and I issue 10% new shares, right? Now my fund size goes to $130. I issue one new share, and so there's some dilution. But taking that into account on a per share basis, my per share value actually goes up 18%, right? So net of the share issuance, you're actually accreting value. And if you do this over and over and over, right, that can compound and that can build over time. And that's what we've seen with structures like MicroStrategy and MetaPlanet where they did this at really large scale. I think MicroStrategy, their NAV per share went from around $2 to $4, depending on how you account it, to, the price is pretty volatile, but around $150 NAV per share. There's around maybe $30 of that that comes from preferred equity, and so some credit, but there's around like 120 left over that just purely comes from the premium crystallization compounded over and over and over again over time. And some people think, they look at the structure and they think, oh no, Michael Saylor, he just levered up, bought a bunch of Bitcoin. It went

up and that's where the value for MicroTree actually came from. If you look at their average Bitcoin acquisition cost, it's around 75,000. It's like right where we are. I think it's actually now above where we are, right? Bitcoin is like, what, 71,000 today? And so they've actually lost money on their Bitcoin holdings. And so that is negative to the NAV per share. But their NAV per share is still much, much higher from when they first started because of the accretive nature of share issuance at a multiple. um and this type of structure is is actually people think it's foreign but it's not very

different than say the private to public company role model where you see companies like i don't know if you're familiar with transdime right big aerospace supplier or constellation software waste management a bunch of these guys yeah right like they they have a company where they have earnings that trade at maybe a 15 to 40x multiple. And then they find private companies that trade maybe at, say, a 3 to 8x multiple. They acquire them maybe with their own cash flow, maybe with equity issuance, maybe with debt. But that cash flow and that enterprise value, it's immediately re-rated to whatever the earnings multiple is on the public market cash flows. And then they do this over and over and over. And so if you actually look at the growth of a company like Constellation

software over time, only around 10% to 20% of that growth has come from the actual underlying business growth that's organic. And the other 80%, 90% comes from basically M&A. It's them taking advantage of, I would say not taking advantage, that's the wrong word, but them selling assets, getting cost of capital at public equity prices, and then being able to acquire businesses' assets at private market prices, which are different, which I think is a little bit difficult for people to comprehend, right? Because they think, hey, this is the value of a company. This was like the last round price, and this is what it should be valued at. But value differs, right? Depending on who are the set of market participants that are valuing that

asset. And so one thing I like to compare it to is like, if you just took a factory worker or a tech worker from China and put them in America, they have the same skills that they'd be paid four times more, right? If, you know, we took this building in Manhattan right now and we said, hey, look, only people within a 10 mile radius are allowed to buy this. The price would be much different than the price of, say, you let everybody in the world be a potential buyer for this asset. And so I think that is some of the complication that people have to think about when they're thinking about public versus private marks and what the premium means. Because with private valuations, you're working with a very small constrained set of market participants with

public markets. It's much, much larger. And oftentimes there's different valuations. If I was to describe someone what you're doing, I think, you know, a friend texted me. I would basically say RoboStrategy is a publicly traded venture fund that's focused on investing in the best humanoid companies and related private companies. The idea is that it's permanent capital and they can continue to recycle this into the best businesses over time. When it trades at a premium, they will then be able to take that premium, monetize it, raise more capital and deploy that back into the private markets. And over time, they should be able to compound capital by specifically focusing on capital market strategy and humanoid robot industry. Is that like a fair way to describe this or would you change anything? Yeah, I'd say it's relatively fair. Only relatively. We're focused on more than just humanoids, right? I mean, our North Star is investment returns within the robotic space. And so that includes other robotics companies that are not building humanoids. One example is Standard Bots, right? Another example is Dyna Robotics went through their own portfolio. I mean, they're building both hardware that look like real humanoids, and they're also really, they're one of the best reachers that are building the robot brain. and so and there's all this stuff within the supply chain as well i think most of the value is going to accrue to the end of the supply chain but there are definitely a lot of circumstances

where there's going to be some big companies that are producing components i mean if you look at actuators for example right they make up around 30 to 50 percent of the bomb cost of a humanoid and that space really hasn't significantly involved for 50 years so there's a lot of area for innovation in certain areas. And, you know, we're keenly looking at pretty much everything that is tangential to the space to understand where we can make the best investments. You mentioned standard bombs. What do they do? So they make, they make cobots, they make industrial arms. They're also building, you know, a semi-wheeled humanoid right now. I would say they're really the premier and only

reasonably sized industrial arm manufacturer in america and that is incredibly important if we think it's a big priority for america to re-industrialize right and so evan is actually around new york um they have what i would say one of the most freshest takes on developing um robot arm technology because you know there's a lot of robot arms have been around for a long time right uh you know you have finuc uh you have yaskawa you have all these big robot arm guys but i would say they're stuck in this old school of traditional robot programming which looks very different from ai native robots of the future right and so some of the hardware needs a little bit look different uh maybe you need to have more torque sensing ability um maybe um um you know uh

you have the programming interface not be so, I guess, complicated. And it could be as simple as, say, I talk to the robot, I tell it what I wanted to do, and it's able to do it. And so, you know, Standard Bots, I think that is going to be an incredible company. Should have them on. Let's talk about Apptronic. I've talked with the team there before.

I think it's one of the larger holdings in the fund that you have. What is maybe their differentiator or why are you excited about that business? Yeah, I mean, if you look at Aptronic, it's one of the longest standing humanoid companies out there. They're OGs. They've been at this for, you know, nine plus years. And a lot of the more innovative actuator technology came from, you know, some of the researchers that were part of the founding team or currently work at Aptronic. They actually were contracted to create some of the prototypes for some of the leading humanoid companies that everyone knows about today. And, you know, then they decided, hey, look, this is going to be such a great opportunity. We have all this experience.

Why don't we just build a humanoid and commercialize it ourselves? And so, if you look at their depth of experience, and also the CEO leadership, I think Jeff just recently hired the previous CPO of Waymo, some top executives from Amazon and some other big places. And we talked about this before, right? Manufacturing and hardware are some of the two kind of competencies that we evaluate. And there are a few other robotics companies, even after we've invested in these companies two years later, that have come out and have, I think, been able to give the impression that they'll be able to actually commercialize millions of robots that actually work, that they're not going to break after six hours of work, that they're going to be able to carry what they say they're supposed to be able to carry. um and you know they also have a partnership with google deep mind which i think is really special right because you know the building the robot brain is going to be an incredible tough incredibly tough and deep mind is um they have one of the deepest experience experiences in robot learning out of you know any company out there let's talk about some of the misconceptions maybe or the

critiques of of what you guys are doing um you know if i was to play devil's advocate one of things i've seen people talk about online is like uh you're just using the public as exit liquidity you're taking some of your shares you're putting it into this fund uh you're hoping that they bid it up and then you're just going to sell out of it and you know we're the dummies if we go and we buy this i think it's just a very short-term minded um view set i mean to do what we did in terms of um you know building building the team that we have and building the relationships with the founders and just getting really smart on the space i mean it was an incredible amount of work and to make, you know, a few hundred million dollars

to take a company and then immediately sell your shares. I mean, there's a lot easier ways to make a few hundred million dollars, right? And the opportunity that we're looking at here is to potentially create one of the largest venture capital funds in the world, right? And to reshape how venture capital operates as a whole. Like that's what we're trying to do.

And so that criticism, it just, yeah, it's hard it's it's it's it's it's it's hard to understand i mean there are so many ways that you you can do it right you could put your shares under like a different entity that is not associated with your name at all um you could lock up all the other investors which you know we didn't do everybody was basically you know completely unlocked on on the first day and the reason why we did it was because we saw all these other you know ipos or companies projects going public And we saw what they did, which is they locked up 90% of their shares, right? And what happens is it artificially inflates the price because price is a function of the supply and demand.

But the issue is that supply has to come on the market someday, right? And it could be six months. It could be two years. And because people know that supply is going to increase by 10 times, they don't really want to buy. And when people start unlocking, then they start selling. And then the share price kind of goes like this. And it's just impossible to kind of create any momentum at all. And you're never going to be able to get over this fear of, you know, extra shares entering the market.

And so what we did was like, why don't we just do the opposite of that, right? Like just rip off the Band-Aid on the first day, unlock all the shares. And, you know, I would say most of the shares are held with the team, right? Like that is public. And, you know, you'll be able to see if we move them or not. there is maybe this fraction of shares that are held with private market investors. And while we believe a lot of them are long-term aligned with us, maybe there are some that believe that the moment a company goes public, that's the moment that you take profit. And they're free to do so

on the first day or the first week, but either way, that's out of the way if they've done that, right and so that was something that we did very differently i would say from other companies just kind of understanding from our understanding of the public capital markets the last thing i've seen is uh what makes you think you're a good robot investor what makes you think that you're good at can i add a little bit something yeah i mean i just also want to add that i have no intention of selling my shares i don't have any plans to um if we don't like a company within the portfolio. I mean, we do a lot of diligence. We do a lot of work to make sure that the investments that we make are really sound. But if the founder changes over, there's some board

dispute or whatever, and there's a leadership change, and we're not on board with that, then we also have the ability to sell our position as well. Hopefully we don't. Hopefully we just hold these companies forever. And that's what our permanent capital model allows us to do. but we can always just change out exposure from one company to another one that we like better i don't need to sell my shares ever right because of that and because i mean i want to invest in robotics i do it in the vehicle that's it's it's a it's a beautiful structure that uh that makes sense to me um one other critique that i've seen is uh people say well what do you know about investing in robotics you know what makes me think that you're a great investor

i mean i think we're one of the few investors that have a track record of investing in robotics um and this is outside the fun where you know we've generated uh mid nine figures of uh unrealized returns um and you know have made those bets earlier than a lot of people were excited to make those bets i think now it's becoming a little bit more excited acceptable and there's people getting excited about the industry um but it's it's just pure obsession You know, I'm here to win. And to do it, it just means, look, I don't have a social life. Like, I'm reading robotics research papers, listening to, like, robotics research podcasts. Shout out to RoboPapers. And, you know, talking with different companies and founders and trying to understand the industry in as holistic of a way as possible. and I'm, we're bringing on team members that think similarly, right? You know, they're not here for a paycheck. They really care and they understand the industry and we have a really high bar for,

for talent as well. One of the things I find interesting is, you know, when you buy a public stock, you're hiring that management team to take care of your capital. When you buy a closed end publicly traded fund, you're doing the same thing, right? And so in a weird way, people who allocate capital, they are hiring you and your team to go find the best robotics deals. And if they don't like what you're doing, they can always sell as well, right? It's kind of this weird dynamic that you don't get in a private market. I'm an LP in plenty of funds. I allocate my money to them. I kind of get to choose what to do with my money when they give it back to me. And that might be 10, 12 years, right? And the public market's a little bit different. Yeah. I mean,

that's the beauty of our structure is that this is liquid and so you know that also might be a reason for you know any premium that we get as well right when assets are more liquid they're more accessible to people people have the option to trade in and out of them and there's there's value associated with that um and you know i hope people believe in our story and i hope they want to buy and hold and take a very long-term view on what we're doing because that's how we're operating. Makes sense to me. Where can we send people to find more about you or find out more about RoboStrategy? We have our X account at RoboStrategy, my X account and our website and Edgar filings as well. All right, well, Andrew, thank you so much for taking the time to do this.

I think that you guys are really onto something interesting here. It's a massive market opportunity, and I think that you have a very unique approach to it. I personally am a big fan of the closed-end publicly traded funds, and so I'm excited to see what you guys do in the next couple of months. Yeah, I appreciate you having me.