Hey, it's Greg

Our guest Edwin Sanchez built VOTIX out of an idea that made no sense to anyone at first. That early failure to find market fit ended up being the thing that forced the company into something far more important. We get into all of it in this episode.

Anything resonate with what you're building or seeing in the field? Hit reply. I get back to every one.

In this week's edition:

I sat down with Edwin Sanchez, founder and CEO of VOTIX, a hardware-agnostic platform built to help organizations coordinate complex autonomous systems through a single unified software layer. That includes drones, ground robots, robotic dogs, boats, and eventually humanoids.

Edwin's path is not a typical founder story. He grew up in Colombia, spent more than 20 years in enterprise IT and digital transformation working alongside companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and Adobe, and landed on the idea for VOTIX while watching a live camera pointed at the Egyptian pyramids. The remote tourism concept was ahead of the market, but customer feedback pushed the company toward industrial, commercial, and public safety applications where the need was real and urgent.

His core argument: great technology alone is never enough. Regulation, public perception, and forces entirely outside a founder's control can shape commercialization timelines more than the product itself.

A few things that stood out:

• VOTIX operates like a conductor for drone ecosystems. It connects different hardware, workflows, data sources, and third-party systems through one platform, so organizations running different drone brands or robotic systems do not need separate software stacks for each.
• Public safety is where the urgency is clearest. One police department reduced emergency response visibility from roughly 15 minutes to about 90 seconds using drone-based response. When budgets are shrinking and cities are growing, that kind of leverage changes how agencies think about staffing.
• VOTIX Situational Rooms is a meaningful product expansion. It brings drones, body cameras, mapping, audio, chat, and other data streams into a single source of truth, moving the platform from operational coordination toward real-time intelligence.
• "Autonomous" is one of the most overhyped terms in the industry. Edwin is direct about this. The gap between what the word implies and what is actually deployed at scale is wider than most founders acknowledge.
• The hardest lesson from building VOTIX. Regulation and public perception shape what is commercially viable far more than the technology. Edwin learned this the hard way, and it changed how he thinks about market timing and founder resilience.

If you are building robotics infrastructure, deploying drone fleets, working in public safety, or trying to understand what it takes to turn emerging hardware into scalable enterprise systems, this one is worth the full listen.

A few active searches that might be relevant to you or someone in your network:

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