GTC, Gemini Robotics and Growth vs Durability

Another reason why robotics is undervalued!

Mar 17, 2025

I’m back from playing frogger with floods and a tropical cyclone plus tornadoes. Actually I was in Australia and not the southern US states but much devastation also passed very nearby and made travel interesting, let alone moving an entire house. I hope you’ll forgive the lack of last weekend’s newsletter and the lateness of this one!

Growth vs Durability

This is one of the primary reasons behind poor valuations for robotics companies. Once robotics gets established somewhere the switching costs are much higher than for most software first companies. Robotics has a baked in durability advantage.

For a company to be valuable, it must grow AND endure. The value of a business is the sum of all the money it will make in the future, but many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth. Growth is easy to measure, but durability isn't.

Peter Thiel talks about this in Zero to One:

The Value of Durability:
Thiel argues that a company's true value lies in the long-term, not just the immediate growth numbers. He suggests that entrepreneurs often prioritize easily measurable metrics like weekly active users or monthly revenue, overlooking the more challenging, but crucial, aspect of building a business that can endure.
The "Durability" Question:
Thiel believes that the question of whether a company will still be around a decade from now is a much more important factor in determining its long-term value than short-term growth rates.
Focus on Building Monopolies:
Thiel suggests that building a durable business often means creating a monopoly or a dominant position in a specific market, which can provide a long-term competitive advantage and sustainable profits.
Examples of Durable Companies:
Thiel often uses Google as an example of a company that has carved out a unique category and is not competing like crazy, which allows them to achieve long-term success.
The "First Uber, Last Uber" Analogy:
Thiel uses the example of Uber to illustrate that being the first mover in a market is not enough; a company must also be the last mover, meaning it must be able to sustain its position and continue to innovate over the long term.
Characteristics of Durable Businesses:
Thiel suggests that durable businesses often exhibit characteristics like proprietary technology, network effects, and economies of scale, which can create strong barriers to entry and allow them to maintain a competitive edge.
Avoiding Short-Term Thinking:
Thiel cautions against companies that over-optimize for short-term growth at the expense of long-term durability, suggesting that this can lead to miscalibrated valuations and ultimately, failure.
"Don't Start a Restaurant":
Thiel's advice, in essence, is to avoid starting businesses that are highly competitive and focus on building businesses that have a unique position and strong barriers to entry, such as monopolies.

Hey roboticists!

A free and easy way to get your GTC on with ROS by the Bay x Silicon Valley Robotics NVIDIA GTC edition!

Tuesday March 18 at Circuit Launch Mountain View

ROS By-The-Bay is the Bay Area’s only meetup exclusively for Robot Operating System (ROS) users.
We’re hosting an NVIDIA GTC after party in conjunction with our friends at Bots and Beer / Silicon Valley Robotics.

A NEW VENUE
We’ll be meeting at Circuit Launch’s awesome new location in Mountain View (599 Fairchild Drive, Mountain View). You may recognize the building as it used to be the Hacker Dojo and Boston Dynamics’ office.
Our speakers this month will include

Emerson Knapp, a staff engineer at Polymath Robotics, former ROS TSC member, and frequent project contributor will discuss some of his recent contributions and how they relate to his work at Polymath.
Karsten Patzwaldt, Senior Manager, Robotics Platform, NVIDIA, Joys and pitfalls of using ROS on modern robotics stacks.
Katherine Scott, ROS developer advocate at Intrinsic will discuss the recent ROS Metrics Report, ROSCon 2025, the ROS 2 Kilted Kaiju release, and other miscellaneous topics.

Agenda

6-7pm - Pizza and networking
7-8pm - Talks and Q&A
8-9pm - Additional networking time and cleanup

Additional Details

We’ll provide pizza and refreshments!
We plan to have at least two hours for networking.
Talks start promptly at 7pm, please arrive early if you would like to enjoy a slice of pizza.
Event attendees must comply with the ROS Code of Conduct.

Open Mic

Hari is hiring founding robotics Engineering Lead to build industrial autonomous mobile robots. Email him: hari@atonomic.co ($10k placement fee if they hire candidate).
Frank is hiring for a robotics dev ops role.
Varun is seeking AI or Robotics software role.
Add to and check out full list here. (via SF Hardware Startup)

Explore the latest breakthroughs in autonomous systems and robotics

Collage of grayscale photos of autonomic devices, including robots with wheels and tracks, a dragonfly-shaped drone, a robotic arm, a humanoid robot, and a rounded self-driving car. Text reads: CITRIS Autonomy Series.

After some great talks by Vincent Vanhoucke, Terry Fong, Cathy Wu and Zenhui ‘Jessie’ Li, here are the next speakers in this free, and open to the public, speaker series at UC Berkeley from CITRIS and the Banatao Institute and the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute (C3.ai DTI). The UC Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (BAIR) is co-sponsoring the presentations by Tedrake and Vanhoucke.

Free and open to the public — no registration necessary! — the talks will take place in Room 250 on the second floor of Sutardja Dai Hall at UC Berkeley on Tuesdays from 11 a.m. to noon PT. Seating is first come, first served.

March 4:
Mac Schwager
Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University
“Perception-rich Robot Autonomy With Neural Environment Models”
March 11:
Jeannette Bohg
Assistant Professor for Robotics, Stanford University
“A Vision for Robotics in the Age of Foundation Models”
March 18:
Grace Gao
Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University
“Towards Autonomous Driving on the Moon”
April 1:
Andrea Bajcsy
Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
“Towards Open World Robot Safety”
April 15:
Dorsa Sadigh
Associate Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University
“The Data Problem for Pre- and Post-training of Robotics Foundation Models”
*April 22:
Russ Tedrake
Toyota Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Vice President of Robotics Research, Toyota Research Institute
“Large Behavior Models: Testing Specific Hypotheses About Multitask Learning for Dexterous Manipulation”
April 29:
Ricardo Sanfelice
Professor and Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz; Director, CITRIS Aviation
“Hybrid Systems Methods to Enable Use of AI-driven Algorithms: Formal Guarantees for Robustness and Performance”

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In case you were under a rock last week. Even I saw Carolina Parada’s March 12 announcement of Gemini Robotics. Since then, the team at Deep Mind have been sharing a lot of raw video footage demonstrating the capabilities of physical AI.

Tech Report: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini-robotics/gemini_robotics_report.pdf…

Blog: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/gemini-robotics-brings-ai-into-the-physical-world/…

YouTube Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqYmG7hTraZC4Mx6pEKr6FVJehafA7vWE