E4: The future of home robotics with Mehul Nariyawala, Cofounder & CEO Matic Robots

Hi all,

I was traveling for work the last couple of weeks which pushed back some of our episodes but excited to get back on schedule. This is one of the Lex Fridman-like long form ones, there will be 3-4 of these. I am still experimenting with the format and would love to hear your feedback. I am aiming to do 70-80 min pods post editing for future recordings but curious to hear if we should keep it under 1 hr.

Mehul has spent the last 20+ years in Silicon Valley. He’s gone from moving to the US at 15 barely speaking English, to an early career in DC-area dot-com startups, to product leadership at Salesforce (back when it was just 300 people), and building and working with teams that launched like.com (acquired by google for ~$100M), Flutter (vision-based gesture recognition; acquired by Google for ~$40M), and key parts of the Nest camera and home hardware lineup where he worked closely with Tony Fadell, the father of iPod and Nest.

From all his companies, he was compounding skills, relationships and experiences that led to Matic. This included his long term relationship with Navneet (Cofounder Matic) from Like.com days, insights from computer vision based products like Flutter which were ahead of their time and learning from Tony Fadell about building consumer hardware products.

In this episode:

* Value of compounding

* How to create your own opportunities, “create a job for yourself rather than finding one”

* How building companies is different from creating cool technology

* Finding and keeping motivation after a $40M exit

* Raising kids with ambition

This is for if you are doing laundry, house chores or hiking.

Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction

01:10 - Early life and the Immigrant Journey

04:43 - How Mehul started his career

11:42 - Role of proximity and entrepreneurship

14:51 - Risk appetite

16:56 - Value of compounding: Life, skills and work

23:37 - The first Computer Vision startup

27:42 - Cool tech vs useful product

36:44 - The Tony Fadell story

41:33 - Lessons in hardware by Tony

46:37 - Building products through deletion

52:22 - Safety in hardware products

54:07 - How people emotionally connect to products

58:44 - WhatsApp: Simplicity and failure to monetize

1:01:04 - Defining breakthrough innovation

1:10:49 - Identifying agency and hiring

1:15:58 - Raising a teenager and the education debate

1:27:42 - What motivated Mehul to keep building after million dollar exits

1:33:19 - The Matic masterplan

1:45:38 - The importance of storytelling

1:51:51 - The role of Apprenticeships

1:58:31 - The art of cold emails

2:06:17 - Being shameless

2:11:16 - Solving hard problems and being optimistic

2:18:25 - Recommended reading and watchlist

2:23:00 - The art of paying it forward

On Youtube:

Also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wethebuilders.us