The Missing Infrastructure Holding Robotics Back with Adrian Macneil
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.
In this conversation, Greg and Adrian unpack:
Adrian’s journey from early programming curiosity to building infrastructure at Coinbase and Cruise, and why autonomous vehicles made the value of robotics instantly tangible
Why robotics development is dominated by custom tooling, siloed data formats, and painful debugging workflows, and how that slows the entire industry
The origin of Foxglove and its mission to provide a shared data platform for robotics and physical AI, from logging and visualization to debugging and analysis
What makes robotics data fundamentally different, including multimodal sensors, massive data volumes, limited bandwidth, and edge-first constraints
The creation of MCAP as an open data format, and why interoperability is a prerequisite for robotics to scale beyond a handful of well funded teams
How Foxglove acts as a single pane of glass for understanding robot behavior across simulations, incidents, and real world deployments
Why robotics startups face “death by a thousand paper cuts,” from hardware and autonomy to go to market, pricing, and reliability expectations
Lessons from fundraising in a non consensus market, and why finding investors who already believe your thesis matters more than convincing skeptics
The parallels between today’s humanoid robotics hype and the early days of self driving cars, including the long tail of real world deployment
What Foxglove looks for when hiring, and why proactive ownership is the mindset Adrian would clone across the entire company
A ten year vision where starting a robotics company feels more like starting a SaaS company, with off the shelf infrastructure enabling founders to focus on real customer problems
If you care about the future of robotics, autonomy, and physical AI, and want to understand what actually needs to change for the industry to scale, this episode is a grounded and deeply informed look at the infrastructure beneath the hype.
Learn more about Foxglove: https://foxglove.dev
Connect with Adrian Macneil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrianmacneil
Connect with Greg Toroosian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregtoroosian/