After a long pandemic hiatus from giving speeches in person, I was invited to be the in-person keynote speaker at The Right Place’s Manufacturing Leadership Summit, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

I spoke about why it’s so difficult to start a robotics company and what’s needed to start a successful robotics company.

I spoke about the great work being done by companies including:

• Dusty Robotics (construction)
• Rapid Robotics (manufacturing)
• IronOx (agriculture)
• AMP Robotics (recycling)
• Icon Robotics (construction)
• Zipline (delivery)

Starting a successful robotics company is hard! You need to find a problem robots are capable of solving, make the right technical choices in order to scale, and get the business model right. It was so fantastic to share my knowledge about robotics and to travel and attend an actual conference with other people, after not traveling at all for work during the pandemic.

I was fortunate ArtPrize was happening while I was in Grand Rapids. ArtPrize is this annual huge art competition in Grand Rapids where participants compete to win over $450,000 in prize money. I got to see some of the 1700+ art pieces that were competing. It was also really cool that not all the artwork was in one place, but was scattered all over the city, for everyone to enjoy in a distributed, parallel way. Also, it rained while I was there, and the artwork outdoors had to withstand that as well! The art pieces were so big and creative! Grand Rapids was a fun city!  Here are some of the pieces of artwork I saw being proudly displayed.