I absolutely love this, and I really want one. Have you sold many/any yet? What stage of development is the company at?
Also, what sort of time frame can I hope to just order one and have it show up in a month or two?
I absolutely love this, and I really want one. Have you sold many/any yet? What stage of development is the company at?
Also, what sort of time frame can I hope to just order one and have it show up in a month or two?
ls /foo/bar/this_is_the_file.txt
cat "esc + ."
which expands to
cat /foo/bar/this_is_the_file.txt
In a similar position as yourself, I'm in deep tech and can share similar frustrations where funding is scarce and commercialization seems far away. Having attempted to fundraise, I can say that we've been blessed to be forced to bootstrap at this stage and are slowly identifying our commercial path. Happy to help you find a market.
The good news is that you are in a hot investment area and I can probably point you in the right direction with the right investors. Firstly, how far along are you? Do you have a prototype and have you spoken to potential customers?
One program that might be suitable for you is Creative Destruction Lab, who specialize in deep tech such as robotics (https://www.creativedestructionlab.com/program/). They don't take any equity and you'd have opportunities to be mentored and invested. I'd be happy to provide an introduction.
The creative destruction lab looks really cool, and I may ask for an introduction, but, I worry that I'm am not really trying to build a business here. I don't see a product or customers in growing forests robotically. It's just a forest. And the robots are to handle the scale, they are doing nothing a low skilled worker couldn't do.
I don't see any real business opportunity outside of selling carbon credits, but there are vastly more profitable ways to use land.
But it's a reliable and feasible solution to climate change nonetheless, and something I could theoretically do with funding. So, hence Kickstarter, a place where businesses don't need to be businesses! :)
Oh, I built a rover named Henry, but I can't quite say that he is a forest planting prototype.
This image always a good reminder: https://studentaffairscollective.org/wp-content/uploads/2015...
I am in a similar position-- a full-time roboticist and an moonlighting entrepreneur on the side. My goal here is to pick up marketing and sales skills that when the right robotics business opportunity presents itself...I'm ready for it.
If there's anything I've learned by watching the string of robotics companies close shop recently, it's that business model is more important than the technology.
Don't give up!
If you'd like to chat more-- you can hit me up at kyle (AT) castalytics dot com.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AD4b-52jtos&t=30m46s
Marketing and sales are the domains I am the worst at, maybe we should chat. Though, while I do foresee a market for carbon, I do not see much in the way for climate solving robots, only return is saving the world ;)
Rather than making one system to do all the forestry jobs, it's probably better to design one robot for one particular task that can save money for forestry companies. Once you have a business selling one kind of robot, expand outwards from there.
And you are right, a likely good place for me to start, is in logging industry (forestry). Though, I was more hoping to build robots to create and maintain forests, not cut them down at scale more efficiently.
Making robots to hasten climate change may not be the right approach to solving it. Yet, the best customers I could get would be logging, mining or oil.
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I would get a job that to provide yourself a safety net such that you can continue your passions. It doesn't have to be all or nothing!
Don't get me wrong. This is likely what I will need to do to pay for rent and food. I'm just not happy about it. And saddens me when I see large numbers elsewhere
Soil, in prodigious quantities. We need to be making it.
Using human waste - food and faecal from our cities; Using whatever plant fixes the most CO2 in a useful form that we can turn into charcoal (quick trees? bamboo grass? something genetically modified?), releasing heat energy, and then fixing carbon in a useful matrix, for soil regeneration a la Terra Preta.
I sort of made this post elsewhere here, I just wanted to repeat and focus on the soil angle.
We have huge swathes of the globe that due to poor historical environmental conditions have poor soil, so not much can grow. Some have become desertified, perhaps some of which is our fault (eg. Mediterranean deforestation). If we add soil to these places, at least hardier plants can grow and we can expand the reach of our efforts.
Strikes me that the most important thing is that plants can grow, and for that we need soil.
Soil.
If you had prodigious quantities of good soil, you could grow trees and food at sea, where we have lots of space to grow, especially at the equator.
The problem then becomes a floating platform, and controlling it all, but those seem less difficult.