Paradigm Shift

EP17: Building remote controlled mobile vending machines, with Dmitry Shevelenko, who was early FB, Linkedin and Uber, before founding Tortoise

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Dmitry is the founder of Tortoise ($11m raised), which is building remote-controlled mobile vending machines, which are the world’s first “smart stores”. It takes less than 15 seconds to complete a transaction with frictionless tap-to-pay user experience and Tortoise is piloting these robots in at least a dozen cities around the world. In this episode we talk about how Dmitry approached building a robotics and automation startup, and the many decisions that led Tortoise to where it is today.

We also talk about Dmitry’s stellar early career and lessons learnt from being part of the early team at Facebook, Pulse, Linkedin and Uber. Dmitry shares his best career advice, some incredible stories from the early days of Facebook/Linkedin, and his experience at Uber where he championed the JUMP acquisition and overall multi-model mobility strategy.

In today’s episode we discuss:

  1. Early Facebook experience 
    1. What Facebook got right in the early days, and lessons from that experience
    2. How Dmitry managing the Zynga partnership from early days to it becoming the biggest single largest source of revenue for FB in 2009/10
    3. Some of the people Dmitry learnt the most during that experience
    4. Advice on how to navigate hyper growth, and Dmitry’s best career advice
  2. Pulse, LinkedIn, and Uber experience 
    1. How the culture at Linkedin differed from FB
    2. How Dmitry ended up at Pulse working on early mobile/tablet experiences
    3. How the environment at Uber changed from before/after the media storm
    4. How Dmitry framed the strategy that led to the JUMP acquisition
    5. How Uber thought about the business case for new modalities
    6. Dmitry’s view on the big opportunity for micro-mobility (Bird, Lime, JUMP, etc.)
  3. Founding Tortoise and building autonomous delivery robots 
    1. Core pillars to bring robotics / automation products to market
    2. Last mile, middle mile and mobile vending use cases
    3. How the Tortoise mobile smart store works (world’s first!)
    4. How Dmitry thinks about cost strategy for autonomous robots
    5. How Tortoise built a 15-second frictionless tap-to-pay checkout experience
    6. How much the mobile stores sell every hour and how many are live (dozen cities so far)
    7. What it takes to build and manufacture a robot (hardware iteration loops)
    8. Dmitry’s fundraising advice for a hardware and robotics startup
  4. Closing questions 
    1. Most talented person Dmitry has ever worked with
    2. What superpowers does Dmitry lean on day to day
    3. Who are some people that have given him a break
    4. Who are some of Dmitry’s heroes that inspire him

Links

  • Follow Dmitry on Twitter
  • Read more about Tortoise
  • Tortoise mobile smart stores

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Paradigm ShiftBy Ashish Kundra and Zane Salim
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