Manufacturing has long been the bottleneck between imagination and reality. From aerospace to automotive, complex physical products still take years to tool, validate, and produce. Machina Labs is working to change that equation by turning factories into flexible, software-driven systems that can build almost anything, anywhere.

Venture capital looks glamorous from the outside, but the reality is far more nuanced. From surviving market cycles to backing founders through years of uncertainty, long-term success in venture comes down to judgment, grit, and pattern recognition earned the hard way. Peter Harris, Partner at University Growth Fund, brings a rare perspective shaped by nearly two decades in venture investing, student-led fund models, and firsthand experience navigating both booms and downturns in technology markets.

Robotics does not stall because the ideas are bad. It stalls because the underlying infrastructure is missing. Adrian Macneil, co founder and CEO of Foxglove, has spent his career inside the systems that power some of the most ambitious autonomous technologies in the world, and he believes the next leap in robotics will not come from a single breakthrough robot, but from making robotics development radically easier for everyone.

Adrian’s path spans early work in payments and crypto, a formative chapter at Coinbase, and several pivotal years at Cruise during the early rise of self driving cars. At Cruise, he saw firsthand how much bespoke infrastructure was required to build, debug, and scale autonomy and how every leading AV company was quietly reinventing the same internal tooling. That realization became the foundation for Foxglove: a data and visualization platform designed to give robotics teams the same off the shelf leverage that software startups take for granted.

Robotics doesn’t fail in the field because of hardware alone—it fails when humans can’t understand, trust, or effectively work with the systems they’re given. Shakir Dzheyranov, founder and CEO of HelloRobo, has built his company around that reality.

With a background spanning visual arts, motion design, and product leadership at brands like Nike, Shakir brings a rare design-first lens to robotics and automation. After years in traditional design and marketing, he made a deliberate pivot into product design—drawn by the ability to tie design decisions directly to real user problems, business outcomes, and measurable impact. That shift ultimately led him to robotics, where he saw a massive gap between technical capability and human usability.

In this episode of Machine Minds, we step beyond today’s transformer-dominated AI landscape and into a deeper conversation about what’s missing on the path to truly autonomous, long-horizon intelligence. Jacob Buckman, co-founder and CEO of Manifest AI, joins Greg to explore why current AI systems struggle with long-term reasoning, persistent memory, and extended task execution—and what it will take to unlock the next paradigm.

In this episode of Machine Minds, we dive into one of the most overlooked choke points in logistics: the loading dock. Chris Smith, founder and CEO of Slip Robotics, joins Greg to unpack why loading and unloading trucks remains one of the most manual, time-consuming processes in modern supply chains—and how Slip is transforming it with autonomous, high-payload mobile robots.