Ali Kashani, Serve Robotics

Ali Kashani is the co-founder and CEO of Serve Robotics, and he has done what almost no one in Robotics  has: put robots on real streets in dozens of cities and made people love them. He is the youngest Iranian-born CEO on the Nasdaq, the youngest CEO of any robotics company on the exchange, growing revenue around 600 percent year over year and scaling from 100 robots to thousands in a single year. We also get into the part most founders never put on a slide. Between spinning out of Uber and ringing the Nasdaq bell, Serve hit its last payroll ten times. Two of those times Ali made payroll out of his own mortgage.  Ali was born in Iran and left at 17. He did his robotics PhD at the University of British Columbia on fusing LiDAR and cameras, started an energy hardware company that nearly died and then sold  I co-hosted this one with a friend of the pod Brendan, Managing Director of AI and Partner at Human Agency.   Our News Letter : https://substack.com/@seondnewsletter Ali Kashani Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/in/alikashani Ardalan Javadi : https://www.linkedin.com/in/ardalanjam1369/   00:00:00 The youngest Iranian-born CEO on the Nasdaq    00:01:19 Why a public company beats a private one  00:02:47 The path to Serve: a robotics PhD and LiDAR 00:04:14 Fired, broke, and one step at a time  00:07:20 The dead company that came back  00:08:31 DARPA 2005 and the contrarian bet on LiDAR  00:12:45 Designing a robot people would forgive  00:16:04 Principle before perception  00:18:45 Building the ecosystem: NVIDIA, Magna, Uber  00:23:56 Dots versus lines, and "Exit Path"  00:26:24 Turning customer concentration into a feature  00:29:38 The real unit economics of a delivery  00:31:48  Picking cities and rolling out robots  00:33:17  The case for optimism on AI and jobs  00:37:49  Sidewalks versus streets  00:41:18  The IPO and the numbers  ‘00:42:23  Ten last payrolls and the Kashani loan  00:46:10  Two days before Christmas: the call to Jensen  00:48:50  From bankruptcy lawyers to the bell in three months  00:49:11  The coming valley and the humanoid hype  00:50:50 Where the value is in physical AI  00:53:24 Why narrow robots beat humanoids, for now  00:55:00 Don't follow trends  00:57:44 Uncertainty is the job  01:00:59  Startups as entropy reduction engines  01:02:31 Touraj, Noosheen & Pejman 01:04:39  His hope for Iran References :    https://investors.generac.com/news-releases/news-release-details/generac-announces-acquisition-neurio-technology-inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge https://bothsidesofthetable.com/invest-in-lines-not-dots-611f36491d73 https://www.therobotreport.com/four-ways-to-make-ai-products-that-people-will-love/ About Us :  Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/company/secondpodcast/ Twitter : /thesecondpod    Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/thesecondpod/ #Secondpod #Second_Pod #پادکست ـ دوم #secondpod #پادکست