Episode 325: Alex Shashou - Co-CEO & Co-Founder, 10Beauty

Episode 325 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Alex Shashou, Co-Founder & Co-CEO of 10Beauty. About 10 years ago, Peter Thiel is credited for saying “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” True, Twitter or X certainly was not in the same frame of mind as to what we saw on The Jetsons, but are we finally starting to get there? The Roomba was a step in the right direction in terms of a consumer robot success story. But… the future just might be closer than you think in terms of the possibilities of robotics and automation? Behold… I share with you 10Beauty! The world’s first and only autonomous manicure machine. I might not be the target market for this robotics company, but my wife and two daughters are definitely in the strike zone and when I told them about it… their immediate response was "WHEN AND WHERE CAN I GET ONE!" 10Beauty is not going to be available for consumers to purchase (at least not initially), as they are taking a B2B approach in terms of their go-to-market strategy. For me, it’s less about the tasks that this robot is performing and more about a team that is thinking bigger and ultimately delivering on something that is incredibly difficult. 10Beauty has raised $38M in funding from Shine Capital, Lerer Hippeau, Imaginary Ventures, and Red Sea Ventures. And, they already have serious traction as they already sold out of their entire first run of machines which means they have over $13M in annual manicure subscription revenue ahead. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * A deep dive into the challenges and the complexity of building a robotics startup. * Alex’s background story and how Alex met his co-founder, Justin Effron, the first day of school at the University of Pennsylvania. * The story of their first company, Alice, a task management platform for the hospitality industry that was acquired by Expedia, plus how they connected with their technical co-founder, Dmitry Koltunov. * The definition of a good partnership between co-founders and how they divvy up roles & responsibilities. * All the details on 10Beauty… from meeting Chris Casey (one of the original Roomba engineers) to building out the initial prototype to raising funding to the company’s business model and projected launch. * And so much more.