Deep Future

 If you are any kind of deep tech founder, or an early stage, deep tech investor, this is a required episode. You need to know about Newlab. It’s one of the most special things in the entire deep tech ecosystem. Scott Cohen is one of the cofounders along with David Bell. They built this thing over the last decade or so in the Navy Yard in Brooklyn partly as a civic project.

This is a place where hundreds of startups that are doing very difficult, very ambitious deep tech projects have gotten their start. It’s a community that’s helped each other out. Scott is one of the most soulful guys I know. He’s just trying to help create an environment where these things can thrive.

And I’m so proud of him and what he’s done. I think more people need to know about Newlab. It’s one of my favorite things whenever one of our companies gets involved in Newlab. When you decide that you want to leave your job and go work in a deep tech startup, you should just check out the menu at Newlab.

There’s so much we talk about. By the end, you will really understand Newlab. You’ll believe in them and what they’re doing. You’ll want to be a part of it.

Towards the end of this episode, we also talk about the coolest, newest thing that Deep Future is, working on.

• Newlab

Two nerds bullshitting about the cloak and dagger marketplace of raising a venture fund.

For 2,000 years, there’s been this incredible mystery in material science: how do the Romans build the Pantheon? It’s made of unreinforced concrete, in a seismic zone. After they built it, nobody’s been able to figure out how they did it for two millennia. Until last year when Admir Masic, scientist, professor at MIT showed the world, publishing in the journal Science, showing exactly how the Romans did that.

Cement is the most used material on the entire planet. Between 8 and 13 percent of global CO2 emissions are associated with making cement. Obviously, the most used construction material. We now know – thanks to Admir – how to make cement that lasts virtually forever, use less of it, use less steel, it doesn’t cost more, you can make it in any cement plant, and the kicker is it’s about 20 percent less CO2.

So this is a major breakthrough, Admir is the founder of a company called DMAT, which is commercializing this. I’m so proud to be one of their first investors with the Deep Future Fund.

I couldn’t find a more delightful human to hang out with all year long. Admir’s an amazing guy. He started his life out in Bosnia, became a refugee as a teenager in Croatia during the Bosnian war, and then managed to somehow, go get educated in Italy. Then he became, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Germany before becoming a professor at MIT, where he is now studying all the things that you can do with cement and other amazing things we can learn from material science in antiquity. We spend a lot of time talking about cement, but I promise it’s interesting.

We also spent some time talking about Admir’s childhood growing up, as a refugee in Eastern Europe and it’s such a soulful conversation. I’m so thrilled to share it with you guys and I hope you’ll share it with your friends because everyone can get some inspiration from this story.

• DMAT

Recorded August 27, 2024 at MI

Two nerds bullshitting about the most important kitchen toy.

Avi Geiger is a super creative roboticist in Seattle, and I got a chance to sit down and pick his brain. He built a company called PicoBrew a little while ago after a career at Microsoft making hardware. PicoBrew was a way for people to do their own brewing at home, he built an entirely automated factory for it. I was always really impressed with the clever things he came up with.

Now he has a company working on making robotics much more practical to integrate with AI, meaning how do you get the language models connected up to the vision models? So when you talk to a robot about what it needs to do, how do you correlate that input to what it’s seeing in the world.

Avi’s new company called GroundLight is building the toolkit you need to do that.

• GroundLight

Recorded July 18, 2024 in Seattle

Two nerds bullshitting about how to jettison Google.

Two nerds bullshitting about electric toys you can ride.

Two nerds bullshitting about the massive leak of social security numbers this week.

 One of the really important things to solve for is how do we get robots working much more closely with humans. And this is really difficult for a whole bunch of reasons, and you guys know some of them. But the truth is they need to be able to really get close. We need them to touch our bodies.

And right now what we do with robots is we put them in giant cages and keep them away from the humans in case they need it. move at the wrong time. And that’s, that’s a good stopgap for now, but where we really want to be able to go is a world where we can trust the robots to treat us as the way that our, friends and family or massage therapist would.

And so today we get to hang out with Eric Litman, who’s on the forefront of trying to solve this problem by making robots that can give you a massage. And I, for one, have been wanting to do this for years. If you listened to the episode that Ash and I did, about the MassageBot 5000, you got a kind of a preview.

This week I got to go visit Aescape which is Eric’s new company,. They’ve been working on this robot since 2017. I got a massage from it. My first massage from a robot. It’s in beta here in New York City. You can do that too. And hopefully soon these robots will be all over the world. And so Eric and I talk about his, journey, what caused him to get into doing this, taking this on in the first place, the hard problems that they ran up against, why this is difficult.

And look, these guys are pioneers. They’ve been at it for seven years. They’ve spent a lot of time and effort figuring out how do you make a. robot that’s literally right up on you, specifically trying to manipulate your body. That is safe, trustworthy, comfortable, not scary. And they have solved all that.

I can tell you for sure. If anything, I wanted it to be more aggressive with me than they’re willing to let it be at the moment. But it is a really competent. Massage therapist already. And so it’s very exciting, why I want to share this stuff with you and why I’ve been seeking out these kinds of roboticists, and there are a couple of others that you’ll meet soon, is that there’s really important inflection point coming.

And Eric and I talk about it a little bit here in this conversation, but the thing that has to happen is we have to make it a lot easier to go do new things with robots. And in the past, up until now, and even with Aescape they’ve had to just build everything from the ground up, and it’s too much for a startup to take on.

It’s too much to do, in one, company. We really need to get to a point where building robots and building, automation and building all these automated tools is as easy as building things in software. And this is happening. The toolkits are coming, the frameworks are coming, the SDKs are coming, the software to be able to integrate these things is coming, and we’re at an important inflection point where those things will start to exist in the next couple of years, and so the, as you listen to this conversation, think about how the next company that’s trying to do something like Aescape not going to take seven years.

We will be able to do them faster. We will be able to do more and more of them and it’s going to make a huge difference. So look, Eric is an experienced, guy who spent his whole career in the tech industry, had a couple of exits, was able to take on doing something new. We don’t really need to pick all that apart.

If you want to go read his bio, we’re going to link to it in the notes, but as you’ll get immediately by listening to this conversation, he’s a great entrepreneur. He’s got a lot of energy. He knows what to do and they’ve been, they’ve been at it and it’s really exciting. Please enjoy this conversation and then, quit your job and go work for Aescape.

• Book a massage at Aescape

Two nerds bullshitting about the imminent scale of computation on Earth.