We’re back with a Startup Spotlight episode on the Fireside PM podcast. It’s not every day you get to speak with someone who’s straddled the worlds of architecture, gaming, AI, and robotics—and managed to turn those disparate threads into a startup tackling one of the most important problems in our robotic future.

Steven Ren, the co-founder and CEO of Palatial, joined me from Lower Manhattan to share the winding journey of his company—from Cornell’s architecture school to optimizing simulations for robot training at scale. We went deep on the technology, market evolution, and product insights he’s picked up along the way—and there are dozens of takeaways here for early and mid-career PMs, especially those building infrastructure, devtools, or working in AI-adjacent spaces.