The reliability problem in robotics

There’s a graveyard of robotics companies—billions torched on beautiful demos we’ve all seen before, but never felt. This episode explains why the economics, the software, and the demand curve have finally flipped—and how Alloy plans to fuel the winners.

Joe Harris returns to Wild Hearts—but this time as a founder. An engineer by training (ML for telecoms), operator by practice (Eucalyptus growth & product), and obsessive systems thinker, Joe unpacks why robotics is finally crossing from hype to inevitability. We trace the structural shifts powering the moment—collapsing hardware costs, foundation-model intelligence, and urgent customer pull—and the hard lessons from failed vertical farming plays that recalibrated what reliable automation actually demands. Joe introduces Alloy, a horizontal data and observability platform for robotics teams: find the 1% of mission data that matters, surface edge cases, track reliability toward “four-, five-, six-nines,” and shorten the loop from failure → fix → redeploy. If you’re building, buying, or betting on robots, this is the market map and playbook for the next decade.

What you’ll learn

• The three real drivers: cost curves, capability (VLM/VLA), and customer pull
• Reliability as the business model: why 99% isn’t enough—and how teams get to 4–6 nines
• Data, not demos: robots emit GB/min; how to isolate the 1% that changes outcomes
• Horizontal vs. vertical: what failed in indoor/vertical farming and why
• Alloy’s wedge: multimodal search (images, time series, logs), “scenarios,” alerts, and instant mission summaries to accelerate deployment and reduce unit costs
• Team & culture: hiring for speed, humility, and learning in a field moving weekly

Chapter guide (timestamps)

00:00 First operator-to-founder return: Joe’s path (engineer → Atlassian → Eucalyptus → Alloy)

02:00 Maker roots: coding tutorials at 12, early internet leverage

03:30 Many small businesses → the “one-thing, 10–20 years” decision

08:30 Why now for robotics: cost curves + reusable rockets as mindset shift

10:45 Vertical farming post-mortems: unit economics, reliability, scale errors

13:40 Reliability is everything: from 99% to 99.999% in the physical world

15:45 The data firehose: GB/min, multimodal chaos, and missing tooling

18:40 Operator-to-robot ratio as the core unit economic lever

21:10 Selling into robotics: design partners, security, and data heterogeneity

23:15 Common data primitives (perception, time series, logs) + ROS-driven formats

24:30 Why LLMs aren’t enough: context-window limits & multimodal encoding

27:00 Alloy’s product: natural-language search, similarity, “scenarios,” real-time alerts

28:50 Instant mission summaries vs. days of manual analysis

29:30 Edge AI tailwinds: Jetson class hardware, cheaper sensors (LiDAR/IMUs)

30:30 VLAs explained: from perception → plan → act (and why smoothness matters)

32:10 The pace of change: weekly breakthroughs, staying on the frontier

33:40 Distribution & adoption: enterprise first; consumer follows reliability

35:40 Safety and necessity: underwater, heavy industry, logistics

37:15 Autonomy acceptance: the “first Waymo ride” unlock

43:00 Ideal customers: high throughput, real deployments, cloud telemetry

44:50 ICP discovery playbook: questions that qualify real readiness

45:50 Team design: missionary talent, humility > hubris, learn-fast culture

46:40 Macro lens: robotics as a deflationary lever & company formation boom

48:00 Jobs & leverage: from decoding info → higher-order coordination

50:05 The Alloy analogy: the coal-shoveler that keeps the engine running