Reflections on industry events, news and updates
INSIGHTS
What I believe about robotics and physical AI right now. September 29, 2026. Image credit: Chestnut Robotics. Every week someone asks me what I think about a data company, a humanoid round, or whether the market has run ahead of the machines. I answer the same questions in DMs, at
EVENTS
September 23, 2026 - San Francisco Jay Kapoor opened the third Dirty Jobs Summit with a list of jobs: the 3 a.m. shift in the factory, the road crew pouring an underpass in the heat, the people working thousands of feet down in a mine, the harvest that has to
EVENTS
September 3rd, San Francisco CA A few minutes into the workshop, Michael Raybman asked a man in the audience for his cup of water, and the man handed it over. "I'm in the middle of a talk," Michael said. "Why would you give me a
EVENTS
August 26, 2026 - Lumafield Headquarters, San Francisco Haomiao Huang opened the panel with the Underpants Gnomes from South Park. Their business plan has three steps: collect underpants, question mark, profit. As a venture investor, he said, he hears the data version of that plan constantly. Step one, collect a lot
INDUSTRY
August 18-19, 2026 - Fort Mason, San Francisco On Tuesday morning, Jason Ma of Dyna Robotics described a foundation model pre-trained on one million hours of human video - roughly 170 years of continuous waking experience. On Wednesday afternoon, Pete Florence of Generalist showed a model that learns a new
EVENTS
July 16, 2026 - The Midway, San Francisco Deepak Pathak opened his keynote with archival footage: a robot arranging blocks to match an image, a teleoperation rig with a human puppeteering an arm behind a curtain. The block-stacking result dates to the 1960s. The teleoperation footage is from 1957. Colorize
INDUSTRY
The 2026 Deep Tech Report Just Dropped - 461 Pages of Data on Where the Money, Talent, and Exits Are Going Download here: https://drumbeat.capital/ Drumbeat Capital just released the largest Deep Tech report in the world - 461 pages covering funding, talent, exits, robotics, AI, energy, and the transatlantic bridge
INDUSTRY
More than $15 billion changed hands in the silicon photonics sector between late 2025 and mid-2026. That figure includes NVIDIA's $4 billion split between Coherent and Lumentum, Marvell's $3.25 billion acquisition of Celestial AI, Ayar Labs pulling in $500 million in a Series E,
INDUSTRY
A detailed recap from the Drumbeat Capital event at Deep Tech Week SF, with a focus on the Robotics & Advanced Manufacturing panel. Drumbeat Capital kicked off Deep Tech Week SF 2026 yesterday with a packed half-day event titled The Global State of Deep Tech. For those unfamiliar, Drumbeat
INDUSTRY
Per BLS data from December 2025, there were 433,000 unfilled manufacturing job openings across the US. Deloitte and the National Association of Manufacturers project that number could reach 2.1 million by 2030, at a potential cost of $1 trillion that year alone. The skilled machinists who've
INDUSTRY
A field guide for anyone trying to understand silicon photonics, the OFC conference, and why this $20 billion industry is about to get a lot more interesting. Every March, roughly 12,000 engineers, executives, and investors descend on a convention center for OFC - the Optical Fiber Communication Conference. It'
INSIGHTS
I invest in robotics companies. I talk to founders building humanoids, manipulation systems, and autonomous machines every week. Now I've been trying to build a few robots myself. I've been learning by ordering parts, assembling a robot arm from scratch, and training an AI policy to