It’s the sort of sight you’d only see in San Francisco. You’re chilling on the Marina Green with your friends, sipping a Philz Coffee and shivering in the fog, when all of a sudden, a robot with a smiling face rolls up to your group. “2 cookies for $7,” reads the text on its side. And they’re not just any cookies: They’re those really trendy ones from that new bakery you just heard about. You want to hate it, but you also really want to try those cookies.

This is the scene portrayed in a TikTok I came across recently, soundtracked to a jaunty indie rock song. And it wasn’t just a one-off: These robots have also been spotted hawking cookies and other treats in Dolores Park, Golden Gate Park and the Embarcadero.

@kailynowak robot cookie machines will take over the world #sanfrancisco #fyp #marina ♬ Love You So – The King Khan & BBQ Show

The company behind the entering robots is called Tortoise, a Mountain View-based robot delivery company that recently pivoted to “Mobile Smart Stores,” or “the world’s first robotic remote-controlled store-on-wheels,” as it claims.

“We had a remote control grocery delivery robot, and we were deploying that in a bunch of different markets,” said Tortoise co-founder Dmitry Shevelenko. “We saw the same thing happening again and again — whenever the robot would be parked, people would walk up to it and talk to the robot and interact with it.”

He said that when the company asked people what they were expecting from the robot, people thought they could buy something from it.

“As is often the case, your customers are a lot wiser than you are,” Shevelenko said. “We kind of took the insight to heart.”

A Tortoise “Mobile Smart Store” prowls around Dolores Park.

Courtesy of Tortoise

It only took one modification to turn the grocery delivery robots into miniature mobile stores: installing a tap-to-pay card reader in the top of the container lid. People who want to buy something just tap their card, the lid unlocks and they grab their box of cookies from inside. All the while, the robot’s remote controller, who can be stationed halfway across the world, is watching the transaction and playing audio messages to guide the consumer.

For those wondering what’s stopping people from robbing the robots, the fact that it requires your credit card information before the container unlocks discourages most people from taking more than their fair share. Plus, it has a camera prominently displayed (a not-so-subtle reminder that we are literally always being surveyed).

“We’ve done hundreds of transactions, and there hasn’t been a single person who’s taken more than one box,” Shevelenko said.

While Tortoise is based in the Bay Area, its launch is worldwide: Robots will soon also be popping up in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Denver, Dallas, San Diego, Santa Cruz, South Carolina and Missouri, hawking everything from headphones to truffles.

A customer retrieves a box of Bake Sum pastries from a Tortoise robot.

Courtesy of Tortoise

Bake Sum, an Oakland bakery selling Asian American-inspired pastries, was one of Tortoise’s first customers. Owner Joyce Tang is a friend of Shevelenko’s — they used to work at Facebook together — so she was happy to give Tortoise a try for its fee of 10% of gross sales.

“Pastries don’t require refrigeration or heating to transit, and that makes it a lot easier for the kind of logistics required in a mobile smart store,” Tang said. “So it was kind of an easy, natural fit.”

Over the past few weeks, Bake Sum has sent its robot into San Francisco parks to sell cookies. Every time the bakery has used it, Tang said, it’s sold out.

“It’s actually a great way for us to widen the market a little bit and get a little bit more exposure in areas that we don’t normally get to,” Tang explained. “So I think it’s fun, and it makes it a lot more convenient to get our pastries, given we’re only open so many hours a day and you have to come to Oakland most of the time.”

A tortoise robot stationed in front of Bake Sum, a bakery located at 3249 Grand Ave., Oakland.

Courtesy of Tortoise

Tang has also tried stationing the robot in front of Bake Sum after its normal business hours to sell pastry boxes. Since the bakery has quite limited hours — it’s only open Friday to Monday until 1 pm — it allows them to drum up more business after hours in a time of labor crisis.

“I think while the business environment is still kind of weird and evolving, Tortoise definitely gives us a lot more flexibility to be able to pull off another sales channel without a crazy amount of overhead,” Tang said.

These are certainly not the first robots to pop up in Bay Area businesses — over the past few years, we’ve seen robots waiting tables, robots giving manicures and robots delivering food. As robots have begun to infiltrate more and more of our everyday life, particularly during the pandemic, fear that they are taking jobs from humans grows more palpable.

Kiwibot, a robot food delivery startup based in Berkeley, responded to these fears in a 2020 SFGATE interview by arguing that it was actually creating jobs: Its bots, like Tortoise, are not autonomous, so an actual human must be employed to navigate them. But these companies tend to outsource that labor to countries with cheaper labor — Kiwibot employs remote workers in Colombia, and Tortoise’s are based in Mexico City.

A customer retrieves a box of Bake Sum pastries from a Tortoise robot.

Courtesy of Tortoise

San Francisco hasn’t exactly been hospitable to delivery robots. In 2017, the city strictly limited the number of delivery robots allowed in the city and banned them from most sidewalks.

This is partially why Tortoise made the shift from delivery robots to “Mobile Smart Stores”: A business doesn’t need a permit to park a robot in front of its own private property. As for the park sales, that’s not strictly legal. But Shevelenko says that element is not their business model — the focus is more on stationing the robots in front of businesses — and putting the robots in parks was more just for testing purposes.

“The thing that just obviously we want to be cognizant of is in some of those cases, you’d need a mobile vending permit. … We don’t want to run afoul of any of those,” Shevelenko said. “So I think it’s a question for merchants that are using us in the Bay Area. Wherever they’re getting permits, that’s where they’ll be deploying their robots.”

Tang says she’d love for her cookie-selling robot, which she’s named Leonardo, to make more appearances in San Francisco parks or elsewhere. She’s even considering making an Instagram account for Leonardo so people know where to find it. The use of robots in restaurants has always been of interest to her, she said.

“That’s always been in the back of my mind, but with the way that small businesses work, I’ll never have enough time or resources or energy to dedicate to mechanize my workflow like this,” Tang said. “So it’s kind of the perfect partnership that Dmitry gets to focus on what he’s good at, and I get to focus on making the pastries themselves. And it enables us to reach more people together than we could have otherwise done alone.”

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Austin made The headlines last year were for a number of reasons. There is a new headquarters for Oracle.Tesla Large Gigafactory in the capital of Texas. People, mostly technicians, have settled in the city away from the Bay Area, driving home prices soaring.

But it’s not just engineers. Austin has many venture capitalists including: Jim Breyer of Breyer Capital and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale said last year that he is running his venture capital company 8VC from Silicon Valley to the city.

“I don’t think everyone should move to Austin. I don’t think it’s right for everyone, but I think it’s right for us. ”

The Latest VCs to Call Austin Hometown Jeff Lewis Founder and Managing Partner of Bedrock Capital, an early stage venture capital firm four years ago with $ 1 billion in assets under management. Lewis began his investment career at the Founders Fund, where he was a partner for several years. He was or was a board member of companies such as Lyft, Nubank, Vercel and Workrise.

Lewis also led initial investments in Wish, Upstart, Tilray, Canva, Rippling, ClearCo, Flock Safety and many other unicorns. He is highly regarded for using the term “narrative break” to describe promising companies that are overlooked or undervalued because they do not align with popular narratives.

When moving to Austin, investors were disaffected with Silicon Valley and said they weren’t focused on solving what the region identified as a real problem.

Middle Officer Lewis said he first became acquainted with Austin after supporting Workrise (formerly known as RigUp), a market for skilled workers. In fact, he was the company’s first seed investor eight years ago and has invested in the company eight times since then.

Lewis said he’s drawn to the company not only because it’s “getting huge,” but also because “it’s far more interested in real people and places than today’s Silicon Valley giants.” ..

“Simply put, it’s a more humane tech company,” writes Lewis. “And what brought me to Texas was to look for this more humane genre of innovation. I live on the coast and am building a career as a technology entrepreneur and investor in Silicon Valley. I was there but I never felt it. As a coastline or an insider in Silicon Valley – I didn’t go to Stanford or get rich. “

TechCrunch spoke to Lewis to learn more about his decision to relocate his business to Austin and learn why Silicon Valley has become a “bubble” (spoiler note: you are you). May not be popular with many of them!) And he plans to invest more in Texas startup connections.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You said you grew up in Canada. What made you want to get into the technology industry?

I started out as an entrepreneur and founded a SaaS company in the travel industry. [Topguest].. I started the company in New York City and moved my team to San Francisco in 2009. I spent most of my career from 2009 to 2021 commuting between New York and science fiction. We eventually sold the company in 2011, which was a pretty good result. I joined the Founders Fund in 2012. So I’m addicted to investing. I made a very special career there and 2012 was a great opportunity to be a young VC in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Ultimately, I focused on both consumer and corporate markets, helping companies like Lyft and Canva early on. I also made my first FinTech investment in Latin America and helped Nubank. The company is currently valued at $ 30 billion.

I grew up pretty humble and in 2017 I thought I was pretty successful as a VC. I have to make an effort to get back to what I want to do, which is more entrepreneurial. That is why we founded Bedrock at the end of 2017. I am currently using Fund III, which corresponds to my investment philosophy. That is, we try to find so-called narrative violations, or those narrative companies that are overlooked or undervalued. We were very early investors in cameos. Cameo, for example, is clearly a fairly well-known business by now.

You originally decided to lay the foundation in New York. Why?

When I was at the Founders Fund, I had houses in both cities (SF and NYC) so I was a kid who grew up in Calgary, Canada and wanted to live on the beach and be the center of the action. However, Silicon Valley tended to be a little overly self-referential and a little bit out of the way of the noise, so we decided to move to our headquarters in Bedrock, New York, in 2017. New York is not a city of horses so I decided to start a company there, but I have actually invested and continue to invest all over the country and honestly all over the world. We invested in WordPress early on and more recently in Argyle and Lambda School.

VC Geoff Lewis on moving to Austin and bursting the “self-referential” bubble in Silicon Valley – TechCrunch Source link VC Geoff Lewis on moving to Austin and bursting the “self-referential” bubble in Silicon Valley – TechCrunch

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Q: I read an article of yours about water hammer and it led to this note. While I don’t have a problem with a noisy water pipe, I do have a problem with a noisy chimney.

A few years ago I replaced my old brick fireplace with a fire box insert and a metal fireplace. We burn wood but use gas jets to start the fire. Everything was fine until a few years ago the fireplace started making popping noises after it was warmed up. It has gotten worse over time.