Hey, it's Greg

This week's guest has spent twenty years helping buyers get comfortable with technology they've never seen before. At Simbe, part of that work meant figuring out what makes a penguin look friendly, because their robot shares the aisle with shoppers and kids every day.

What she learned about earning trust before asking anyone to change is below.

What's the hardest part of getting a team to adopt new technology: the buyer, the users, or the people in between? Hit reply and I'll share the best ones in a future edition.

In this week's edition:

This week I sat down with Caitlin Allen, SVP of Marketing at Simbe.

Caitlin has spent two decades building markets around disruptive technology, from medical technology and her own startup to Andreessen Horowitz, Lyft, and now retail robotics. One lesson has carried through all of it: great technology alone rarely wins a market. Buyers need to understand why they should change, feel confident acting, and have the internal support to make that change stick.

At Simbe, that means treating Tally as more than an inventory robot. The platform detects what's happening on the shelf, determines what needs attention, directs store teams to act, and confirms the problem was fixed. That shelf data then feeds pricing, replenishment, ecommerce fulfillment, and demand forecasting.

Some of what we covered:

• Why category creation starts with showing buyers the cost of standing still
• The balance between the fear of missing out and the fear of messing up
• Why 60% of products grocers believe are out of stock may actually be somewhere else in the store
• How retailers choose between autonomous robots, fixed cameras, and RFID
• Why one large grocer projected hundreds of millions of dollars in savings from shelf intelligence
• What makes public retail spaces so hard for robots, from spills and shifting displays to kids running down the aisle
• How the team studied what makes a penguin look friendly while designing Tally
• Why change management can matter as much as the technology itself
• Her advice for physical AI founders on investors, early customers, and owning the architecture of the problem

If you're bringing unfamiliar technology into a traditional industry, this one's worth the listen.

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

Sales Key Account Manager, Robotics & Automation | Boston, MA
Industrial automation company. Own strategic accounts from the first conversation through contract, working closely with engineering, product, and operations on custom automation solutions. Hybrid with one remote day per week and up to 50% travel.

Machine Learning Engineer, Physical AI (Modeling) | San Francisco
Venture-backed startup building fully autonomous factories where CAD goes in and a finished product comes out. Train closed-loop neural policies on synthetic simulation data, refined with real-world demonstrations. Already working with paying Fortune 500 customers. Competitive base plus meaningful equity.

Director, Automation & Controls Engineering | Los Angeles
Advanced manufacturer serving automotive, aerospace, and defense. Lead and scale the automation org across PLCs, HMI, SCADA, motion control, robotics, machine safety, and factory data. 100% onsite.

Mechanical Engineer | Los Angeles
Defense tech company building directed energy systems to counter drones and protect critical infrastructure. Own mechanical components for a high-power RF system handling around 100 kW, from design through fabrication and rapid prototyping. 100% onsite.

Know someone? Reply to this email and send them our way.

FUSE, Point One's location technology conference for physical AI, comes to Foundry SF on Thursday, November 19. It's one day and one track with no product keynotes, built around engineers sharing the system designs they've used to ship at scale.

It pairs well with this week's episode. Localization that works in the lab tends to break once robots meet the real world, and the agenda digs into exactly those conditions, from dirt on construction sites and tree canopy in the field to drones flying through wind and vibration.

A few names from the speaker lineup:

• Brian Schimpf, Co-founder & CEO at Anduril Industries
• Ali Agha, Co-founder & CEO at FieldAI
• Angus Pacala, CEO at Ouster
• Adrian Macneil, Co-founder & CEO at Foxglove
• Kanu Gulati, Partner at Khosla Ventures

If you're going, let me know. I'd love to connect while we're both there.

Reserve Your Spot

Shopper Thought a 6-Foot Ralphs Robot Was Following Him (The Cool Down)
Simbe's Tally is now scanning shelves in Los Angeles Ralphs stores, and some workers worry the data could eventually be used to reshape their jobs. It's a real-world look at Caitlin's point that trust has to come before value when robots share space with people.

Eka Robotics Raises $150M for Robot Hands That Sense Force (SiliconANGLE)
Andreessen Horowitz and F-Prime led the round at a $1.45B valuation. Eka's gripper and model work from force data as well as camera images, and the company says it can handle about 1,500 picks an hour compared with a human baseline of roughly 600.

Formic Raises $50M for Robots as a Service (Under30CEO)
Manufacturers pay Formic a flat recurring fee that covers equipment, software, maintenance, and monitoring, with no upfront capital. The company reports a 97% renewal rate across more than 100 facilities, a strong case for lowering the fear of messing up.

Former OpenAI Science Lead Launches Warp Science (TechCrunch)
Kevin Weil's new startup raised $215M at an $865M valuation to automate drug discovery lab work. Its chemists will wear cameras and sensor gloves to train robots on wet-lab tasks.

Thanks for reading!

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