The Mission

We talk about ‘vision’ all the time. Makes sense, it’s the core of what we do. After all, our mission is “robotic vision, made simple.”

But vision can mean all kinds of different things. First, the literal: we provide products and services that help robots perceive and interact with the world more like people do.

In order for an automated basketball hoop to recognize a ball, interpret its position and velocity, and then move to intercept the ball so that it goes through the net, it first has to intelligently recognize the ball–truly see it. We’ll leave the rest of the engineering up to the expert (he’s not even using our cameras, it’s just super cool).

In order for a robot to pass butter to you, it first has to be able to see the butter. Maybe best to not make it sentient though.

The point being that it’s vision that unlocks everything else. There’s so much that robots can do to not only help improve the engineering efficiency of the world, but to help improve the human condition overall. And that’s why we care so much. That’s why we’re so customer obsessed. Without trying to sound too grandiose, the way we see it is we’re enabling real-world productivity gains in the robotics industry in the same way that personal computers did a generation ago for the commercial office.

Focusing In

Which is why, even in the midst of the daily grind of putting in crazy hours and fighting for each and every win, we’re also keeping our eyes on the big picture, the metaphorical vision on the horizon. It’s hard, but it’s fun. Want to join us?

The even more exciting part is even though we’re in the trenches right now, a big part of that long term view is that we want to get to having scaled and sustainable impact as fast as possible. We love our employees, and even though we’re asking a lot of them today the goal is always to move more and more towards balance.

Companies need to measure success differently as they grow. What’s absolutely essential to survive at first can absolutely kill them later. Asking employees to run through walls and put in long hours is sometimes necessary early on, but it’s not sustainable long term and can be a huge reason for burnout.

The subsequent–and completely avoidable–churn means that intelligent, insightful, and valuable voices are lost, resulting in a kind of internal “reset,” a forced refocus away from the horizon and back to the foundation. Do that too many times and what once was growth turns into stagnation. It’s a kind of corporate cataract, and it’s not fun for anyone.

We want to reward our employees for dedicating their time and talent to us. We want to allow people to achieve more balance, work more sustainable hours, and still have ways to meaningfully contribute to our continued success.

If we need more help that’s a great problem to have; we can always bring in new (or old) teams of people who will work crazy hard for a few years, earn their stripes, push us farther, and become “long-runners” in their own right, who in turn find new ways to help the company iterate and innovate.

We say all that to say this: we have a clear vision for the impact of our product, but also a vision internally for ourselves. We’re in this for the long run, and while we measure our success first through customer wins, we also measure it through our own cultural health. And we’re feeling good.