Ep 73 | Learn It Yourself Before Hiring for Expertise (w/ Madison Maxey)
In this episode, I talk with Madison Maxey, founder of LOOMIA, a company building soft, flexible electronics for everything: Everything? Everything! From robotics to automotive interiors. Maddie’s journey spans fashion school, a Thiel Fellowship, a return to Stanford in her mid-20s to study material science, and a decade of turning prototypes into real-world tech.We talk about growing up with a soldering iron and a sewing machine, how she designed a smart jacket for Zac Posen and Google, and why building a company means more than building a product. Maddie shares what it took to land early customers like Airbus, how she balances long timelines with fast-moving industries, and why her goal is to build something meaningful over 30 years, not just raise another round.We talk about early wins, hard lessons, the beauty of tactile sensing, and why confidence comes from doing hard things until they start to feel normal.
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Ep 72 | Found the perfect track, combining science and design (w/ Matthieu Lapeyre)
Yesterday, they launched a $299 robot. It looks like a toy, but it opens up a world of AI. Today, I talk to the person who made it real.Matthieu Lapeyre is the founder of Pollen Robotics and one of the most quietly influential roboticists in Europe. He’s been building open-source humanoids long before it was cool, from Poppy to Reachy to Reachy Mini.We talk about how growing up without a tech background shaped him, why he left research to ship hardware, and how he kept going through years of bootstrapping with barely enough to pay the team. He shares what it’s really like to live on the edge for years, and how joining Hugging Face gave them the launchpad they needed.We also get into the making of Reachy Mini, why it's designed to be unbreakable, what inspired the egg-shaped head, and how it could become the iPhone moment for robotics.
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Ep 71 | The Team Ends Up Like Charting the Path Too (w/ Kaan Dogrusoz)
In this episode, I talk with Kaan Dogrusoz, Co-Founder and CEO of Weave Robotics, a YC-backed team building Isaac, a personal home robot:Kaan grew up in Istanbul, chased curiosity across physics, art, and engineering, and eventually made his way to Carnegie Mellon, then Apple, where he spent nearly a decade working on robotics and shipping features like Double Tap on the Apple Watch.But something kept pulling at him. He didn’t want to be part of a massive machine anymore. He wanted to build something real, something personal, a robot he’d want in his own home. That’s how Isaac was born. A home robot built not for factories or labs, but for laundry piles and living rooms.We talk about leaving comfort behind, learning by doing, what it’s like to live with your own prototype, and why he thinks shipping a robot (not just dreaming one) is the hardest and most honest thing a founder can do.
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Ep 70 | Real Confidence Comes From The Work (w/ Benjamin Bolte)
🎙️ I talked with Benjamin Bolte, founder of K-Scale Labs, who left Meta to build something he actually believes in: an open-source humanoid robot!After working on Autopilot at Tesla, he saw the inside of Optimus and decided the big players were getting it wrong.Benjamin walks me through how he built the first robot with Alibaba parts and 3D-printed parts in his apartment, why raising too much money too early is a trap, and how soldering wires all night helped him remember why he’s doing this in the first place. He’s not chasing prestige or funding rounds. He’s trying to ship a $9K robot that can do your laundry. We talk about his time at Tesla and Meta, how he thinks about mortality, the power of conviction, why open-source matters, and what it really takes to build hardware that people want to own.
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Ep 69 | You can really build things with a small team (w/ Nikolaus West)
In this episode, I talk with Nikolaus West, Co-Founder & CEO of Rerun; their team is building the data stack for Physical AI:We get into the early days of Rerun: how an open-source visualization tool for multimodal data became widely adopted across robotics, spatial computing, and even inside companies like Apple and Meta. But that was just the start. Now, they’re building a full-stack platform for logging, querying, and managing robotic-scale data, from raw logs to model training.Niko shares his personal journey from business school in London to engineering in Sweden, to startups in retail, Kenya, and AR. Along the way, he learned the hard truth: physical AI teams are still flying blind when it comes to data. That pain turned into obsession, and obsession turned into Rerun.
The show for founders building real deep tech.
Each episode features technical builders and early-stage founders in AI, robotics, and hardware — breaking down how they ship, grow, and learn.
We talk about systems, mistakes, GTM strategy, funding lessons, and how to move from research to traction.
Hosted by Ilir Aliu from 22Astronauts.
Whether you’re building now or just curious — tune in.
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