Ep 119: Former Waymo Leader Boris Sofman on Autonomous Construction & Bringing AI into the Physical World

Jul 16, 2025

Boris Sofman, co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Robotics, shares his journey from the Soviet Union to becoming a leader in robotics. He discusses how AI can revolutionize the $2 trillion construction industry by making it faster, cheaper, and more efficient. Sofman provides insights into his experiences at Waymo, tackling the complexities of autonomous technology in different environments. He highlights the potential of reinforcement learning to solve unexpected construction challenges and the promising future of job growth through automation in heavy machinery.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

ANECDOTE

Boris's Immigration Story

Boris Sofman immigrated from the Soviet Union to the U.S. at age six with his family.
His father was a mathematician working on telecommunications, greatly influencing Boris's passion for engineering and AI.

ANECDOTE

Anki's Seasonal Robotics Business

Boris founded Anki, a consumer robotics company creating popular AI-powered toys.
Managing its seasonality was tough, with 85% of sales in Q4 causing volatile cash flow challenges.

INSIGHT

ML Powers Autonomous Driving Scale

Machine learning enables autonomous driving systems to generalize across cities and vehicle types.
Using data-driven models, Waymo unified tech stacks for cars and trucks, improving safety and reliability.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

Construction is a $2 trillion U.S. industry ($13 trillion globally) that impacts nearly every aspect of our lives. Yet, building has become too expensive and too slow to meet rising demand and aging infrastructure. What if we can apply breakthroughs from self-driving to construction? And what if we can use AI to operate heavy machinery autonomously 24/7?

This week, we bring the AI revolution into the physical world with Boris Sofman, co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Robotics. Founded by three former Waymo leaders, Bedrock emerged from stealth this week to bring autonomy to the construction industry. Boris earned his PhD in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon before founding Anki — a consumer robotics company that produced some of the world's most popular toy robots. After Anki was acquired by Google, Boris became Director of Engineering and Head of Trucking at Waymo, where he was instrumental in Waymo's successful deployment into major cities across the country.

We begin with his journey from the Soviet Union to the U.S. as a young boy, and how Boris fell in love with engineering. We discuss the consumer robotics wave and his time building Anki, before jumping into the race for self-driving cars. Get a rare look behind the scenes at Waymo and the extreme engineering challenges Boris and his team had to solve. Next, he reveals the recent developments that unlocked autonomy for heavy construction and the immense potential to transform the cost, quality, and speed of building in the U.S. Already, unions and special interests are lining up against these technologies; learn why Boris believes autonomy will unlock a wave of pent-up demand and create even more jobs and opportunities for humans. Bedrock is one the companies and teams I'm most bullish on, and you'll see why!

00:00 Episode intro

02:16 Soviet Union to robotics leader

06:57 Conquering self-driving at Waymo

14:38 Why leave Waymo to start Bedrock?

19:10 How to make heavy machinery autonomous

24:06 AI breakthroughs that make this possible

31:06 Why autonomy will create jobs, not destroy them

37:44 The impact of the robotics revolution

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