Sarah Guo

Thrilled to finally talk about @watneyrobotics. Sean and I spent 90 minutes the first time we met talking about why ~every robotics startup has died to date. The priors were very bad. And yet I came out of that meeting a believer, and asking if there was *any way* we could invest. @rgannon_ and Sean exemplify how I hope to operate. They are so good they overwhelm the priors: 1. Choose worthwhile missions 2. Free yourself from the prison of the mind 3. Make contact with the coal face 4. Maintain both belief & paranoia 1. Increase the speed and capacity of American industry, starting with data centers. 2. Decide you can, in fact, be a vendor to hyperscalers as a 10-person company. If you were right about problem importance and urgency, and you solve that problem, much conventional wisdom about big customers can be ignored. 3. Identify whatever problem prevents progress — model, data, security, networking, contracting, hardware, ROI math, politics, and attack it furiously. As @Alfred_Lin would say, they know how to be “heat-seeking missiles for pain.” 4. Ryan is exceptionally good at continually testing his own beliefs, and then is (or at least seems) very comfortable being unreasonable and contrarian. From building a mock datacenter in a week, to convincing people to leave their jobs and homes for an international supply chain tour-of-duty, to taking non-consensus technical bets — I trust no one as much to figure out what needs to be done, assume it is possible in the next two weeks, and then convince the team to do it in one. The guy has a screw loose.