a16z Podcast
Aaron Edsinger left his job as director of robotics at Google to start a company called Hello Robot. Aaron’s problem is this: How do you build an affordable robot that people can use to solve real problems at home? The result is a robot that looks nothing like a person. In fact, it’s closer to a Roomba with an arm.
In this episode, Aaron explains:
- Why home robots have barely progressed since the Roomba
- Why simpler robots can be more useful than complex humanoids
- Why the physical world is so much harder for AI than language
- How robot safety is fundamentally a physics problem
Connect with us:
- Follow Jacob Goldstein on LinkedIn, X and Instagram
- Email us at problem@pushkin.fm
- Follow Pushkin on Instagram, LinkedIn or X
- Listen to Jacob’s other show, Business History
- To listen to the show early and ad free, sign up for Pushkin+
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
-
Why This Isn’t the Dot-Com Bubble | Martin Casado on WSJ’s BOLD NAMES
Christopher Mims and Tim Higgins of the Wall Street Journal sit down with a16z General Partner Martin Casado on WSJ’s Bold Names to ask whether the AI spending boom is a bubble waiting to burst.…
-
Why America’s Health Crisis Is an Incentive Problem
a16z general partner Erik Torenberg speaks with Justin Mares, founder and CEO of TrueMed. They discuss why American health outcomes are so poor compared to the rest of the developed world, how crop subsidies created…
-
Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation
Recorded live at our Founders Summit, a16z general partner Chris Dixon speaks with Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril and Oculus VR. They talk about what it takes to build hardware at scale, where the biggest…
-
David Solomon & Ben Horowitz on Building Organizational Resilience & Navigating Macro Uncertainty
a16z general partner David Haber spoke with Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and a16z cofounder Ben Horowitz on the current macro environment, enterprise AI adoption, and crypto and AI policy. Solomon describes what he calls…
-
“Anyone Can Code Now” – Netlify CEO Talks AI Agents
Netlify’s CEO, Matt Biilmann, reveals a seismic shift nobody saw coming: 16,000 daily signups—five times last year’s rate—and 96% aren’t coming from AI coding tools. They’re everyday people accidentally building React apps through ChatGPT, then…
-
Marc Andreessen on Why This Is the Most Important Moment in Tech History
Recently, Marc Andreessen joined Lenny Rachitsky on Lenny’s Podcast. They talked about why 2025 may be the most significant year in tech history, how AI is reshaping the future of product managers, designers, and engineers,…
-
Ben Horowitz and Balaji Srinivasan on Netscape and Network States
Can a country be built from the internet up? Not as a metaphor or an online community, but as a system that replaces institutions we usually think of as fixed, money, law, and governance. In…
-
Healthcare 2026: AI Doctors, GLP-1s, and Insurance Defection
Out-of-Pocket is a healthcare education company founded by Nikhil Krishnan that helps people understand how healthcare works and how to navigate it in practice. In this episode, a16z Health and Bio partner Jay Rughani and…
-
The Hidden Economics Powering AI
In this episode, Jen Kha, Head of Investor Relations, and David George, General Partner, discuss how late-stage private markets are evolving as AI reshapes scale, capital intensity, and growth timelines. They explain why AI-driven companies…
-
How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents
Mintlify is a documentation platform built by cofounders Han Wang and Hahnbee Lee to help teams create and maintain developer docs. In this episode, Andreessen Horowitz general partners Jennifer Li and Yoko Li speak with…