After more than a quarter century, Boston Dynamics has a new CEO. The transition (which quietly occurred late last year), saw founder Marc Raibert step aside to become chairman, as longtime employee Rob Playter took the reins.
The key personnel change comes at a pivotal time for the company, which recently began the process of commercializing a pair of its extremely advanced robots. Along with the C-level shift, Boston Dynamics also announced that it’s making the SDK for its Spot robot available to all via GitHub. Boston Dynamics has already begun producing commercial versions of its quadrupedal robot. Among its earliest adopters is former Mythbuster Adam Savage, who is set to release a series of videos featuring the machine.
Ahead of making all of these announcements official, Raibert and Playter sat down with TechCrunch to discuss their new roles and what the future may hold for Boston Dynamics.
TechCrunch: Rob, can you give me a little bit of background on yourself?
Rob Playter: Marc and I have known each other for 30 years. I started as a student at MIT in his lab, getting a PhD and pretty much did a thesis on robot gymnastics. (Rob was a champion gymnast in 1985 with his Ohio State team, which won the United States Division I NCAA championship. – Ed.)
Marc had a robot that he showed me that was doing a somersault, we called it the Planar Biped at the time. And I swear it was my championship ring that got me that job in 1990. And so we’ve been working together ever since building the dream of gymnastic robots, I guess. So we’ve been working together that whole time. I joined the company early on and basically grew with the company. The job’s always been changing and we’ve taken on new and bigger challenges; it’s a dream come true to be in the position I’m in right now. I get to be CEO of this company that I helped grow and help lead it on to its next stage of life.
Marc Raibert: It’s a dream come true for me, too. I think that the company is in such fantastic shape. We’re well-funded. We have an unbelievable team, both technical team and exec leadership team and our robots have matured to the product stage, at least the front edge of that. It seems like a great time for me to step aside. SoftBank promoted me to chairman so that I could focus on the long-term direction and I have complete confidence in Rob stepping in and doing the CEO job.
Marc, why was it time for you personally to sort of step aside from that role and take up a new one?
MR: I’ve been the CEO for…is it 26 years? […] To be honest, I just had my 70th birthday. So I’ve been thinking about this for about a year that we needed a succession plan and I had been working on it during that time, talking to SoftBank, making sure they were cool with the idea and making sure I was cool with the idea and Rob.
Was there external pressure then from SoftBank to shake things up?
MR: Completely my idea as far as that goes.
And why was Rob the right person for the job?
MR: The job’s a big job. He was a COO up until this transition and he’s been doing many of those things for a while. He’s been co-running the company for a long time. So it’s not really that big a step in that regard.
RP: Obviously there’s a little bit of freedom and independence that comes with this job, which is great fun. But the job hasn’t changed that much. I’ve kind of been the organizational guy for a long time. I’m a good team builder and so I basically hired most of the people in the company and growing us aggressively is a big challenge right now.
Over the past year, bringing on new people into our executive leadership team has been a primary goal, as well as feeding an insatiable appetite for our technical teams to grow in order to meet the goals we’ve set for them. Which includes not only advancing the state of the art of robotics but actually making some of our robots into products and delivering them and supporting them and changing the organization to do so.
There’s a lot more than robotics that we’re having to do as an organization, and so anyway, some of that I was doing already and now I think I have a little bit more leeway in deciding how to do those things. But Marc and I are continuing to work together in terms of really setting a high-level strategic vision.
How aggressive has SoftBank been when it comes to pushing Boston Dynamics to become more of a product-focused company?
MR: I think the remarkable thing about SoftBank is they’re absolutely interested in the products and the moneymaking potential of what we’re doing while having a very serious interest in support for the longer-range stuff we’re doing. And over the 18 months that we’ve been part of SoftBank, I’ve repeatedly tested that commitment. Talking to the top leadership is SoftBank and they have repeatedly endorsed that. They’re very enthusiastic also for us to productize and make robots and make robot products. And I don’t think this came from outside but it’s been obviously supported by them.
RP: This transition started in 2014. We were acquired by Google in 2014, and at that point we quit taking outside contract research dollars. We became internally funded. And even at that time we were starting to ask ourselves — and Google was asking this — “how does this technology turn into a product?” And we were a long ways from that product at that point. We had built a single prototype. Each year there was a new prototype robot and we would build two or three of them. But at that time, back in Google days, we started saying, “Okay, well if we were going to graduate a quadruped into a product, what would it look like and what would it do?”
This transition was underway within Google and matured and accelerated under SoftBank. And it’s taken them years actually for us to get in a position of being able to deliver on this technology in a product form. So it’s really, I mean, as much from the technology maturity side as anything. I think the technology maturity is a key factor and then freedom to use the funds that we had the way we thought was best. Those two things contributed to that.
MR: I want to clarify what “transition” means. It’s still my view that we’re adding on the product direction and continuing to do forward-looking R&D. We’re not abandoning that.
Rob, what do you see as the biggest challenges of say, the next five years being for you personally and for the company?
RP: Well, I think we’re going to become a much larger organization than we’ve ever been historically. So that we’re going to be several hundred. We’re already 220 people. We’ll be 400 before you know it. And we’ll be supporting at least two different products and developing the next one. And so managing an organization that large that’s trying to take people that a lot of the core and senior people grew up with us as R&D engineers and having them learn the new skills required to manufacture and support and deliver product while still having fun at work.
What do the next few years look like for Spot? What’s the process of bringing Spot to market?
MR: I think the key step is to learn from users and explore the vertical applications where we think it can be a successful product. So we’re working with the early adopter customers. We’re calling our program an early-adopter program and both helping them apply the robot and then learning from them how it’s going to go forward.
What’s the status of actually bringing Handle to warehouses?
RP: We’ve been doing proof of concept tests with Handle and some early customers to validate our expectations on what the useful tasks are in a warehouse for moving boxes around. And those, we have basically a small set of those customers and we’re getting feedback from them. So far they’re really excited about this capability. It’s unique. As far as I know, we’re the only case-picking warehouse robot in development right now. And this is just a ubiquitous job, whether you’re unloading trucks or loading trucks or building pallets or de-palletizing. There’s thousands of warehouses just full of boxes.
MR: There’s about a trillion boxes handled a year around the world. So there’s no shortage of opportunity.
What’s the takeaway from the reaction to state police field training videos with Spot?
RP: Well, people do worry. There is a part of humanity that loves to worry about robots taking over or being weaponized or something like that. We definitely want to counter that narrative. We’re not interested in weaponized robots.
We’ve also gotten positive feedback from the fact that the police were using our robot to look at suspicious packages. There’s a real safety issue there and it generated some additional interest with us as well. I mean, this isn’t really anything different than any new technology. There’s a wide variety of things it can be used for. We’re working to to be responsible and trying find the good things that it could be used for.