Interviewee
Charlie Andersen, Founder and CEO of Burro, a company building a fully autonomous robotics platform based on a vision of helping people work more productively; joined the Builder Nation's podcast to share his experience in the industry.
Transcript
Charlie Andersen: Name is Charlie Andersen. I grew up on a working fruit and vegetable farm in Pennsylvania, so on the east coast of the US And for me growing up, I think I loved the kind of machinery and technology used to do work outdoors. And what I really disliked on my family farm was getting out of an air conditioned tractor cab where I could push buttons to do a lot of work. And instead of having to do work by hand on the ground and on a fruit and vegetable farm in particular, a large portion of the week's work , probably like 90% or more, takes place with manual labor. And so kind of my lifelong obsession has been how do you, how do you do things with machinery and technology rather than, you know, you yourself doing it in a, in a not so expeditious kind of boring, tedious way and fast forward a bit I, or for a number of different companies and then got an MBA and got outta the business school and took a really, really funky role with a company called CNH, which is Deere's largest competitor. And there, part of my job was looking at autonomy companies from an acquisition perspective. And I also was doing a lot of things like selling and marketing machinery to farmers.
And from that came the conclusion that the way to get into the robotics space and AG is not to work for a big company, but rather to start something myself. And so I quit that job and found my two co-founders, Terry and Bor. And since then we've gone from basically a team of three guys in the unheated barn with a dog to a team of about 40 today. And we have one of the largest employed fleets of robots in ag at the moment. And the product we build is a robot called Burro and Burro’s, you can kind of think of them as like Disney's Wallie for outdoors in a 1.0 format. So what does it actually mean? It's a computer vision-based autonomous ground vehicle that can carry and tow, can scout and can patrol in semi GPS denied to fully GPS denied environments alongside people. And they're used today a lot in vineyards, nurseries, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, solar crops and beyond. S
Elisa Muñoz: And, talking about BURRO and about what you guys are doing, I know that you were just elected as a top 10 product at the 2023 World AG Expo for the second year in a row. So congratulations on that. What do you think this announcement means for the company?
Charlie Andersen: Yeah, so last year we were one of the top 10 products of the world at the AG Expo, which is the largest farm show in the world. This year we've received it for a second year in a row and for a slightly new, a newer iteration of the product. I think what we're discovering is that moving safely alongside people, effectively what we're building is like the first pointing click interface for a vehicle to be directed and to move autonomously safely alongside people up and down rows and in, you know, a long kind of long, long autonomous roots. And if you have that functionality and you have a vehicle that is four wheel drive and processing two terabytes of imagery per hour of runtime and has a big GPU and a CPU on board and is online as well, you can build that product in such a way that other entities can build layers on top. And so the top 10 product this year for the world like Expo is actually a collaboration between us and another company called Bitwise Agronomy.
And so our systems can now navigate up and down locks of vineyards and berries and as they do that, they're running a bunch of AI locally that is scanning each and every vine in the field and spitting out account in real time of the number of crops in the field that you can then click into. And what's cool about it is we are doing the mobility part and the processing part and Bitwise is providing the crop ai. So it's kind of a collaboration to yield more value for our customer base, which I find really exciting. I think that my opinion is that the way robotics is gonna evolve is it's not gonna be one company doing everything. It's gonna be companies building layers, we're doing the mobility layer and others can build stuff on top of our system that creates more customer value, which again to me is quite.
And fast forward a bit, we're like eight generations in, we've all outsourced production. We have done about 50,000 autonomous miles on the platform.
Elisa Muñoz: I was about to ask you how hard it was to educate people, you know, like thinking about the beginnings of the company?
Charlie Andersen: I think that number one for this company was trying to build a robot to pick up dead chickens, as crazy as that might say. So I went to lunch with this guy and his family had a bunch of these things called broiler houses where they grow chickens. Basically when you grow chickens you put like 30,000 birds in a house and if you have 30,000 of any living animal in a house for a period of time, a portion of them will not survive. And so I think number one was build a robot to pick up the chicken and that was a, I guess could be interesting commercially, but was really distasteful in terms of like the beacon core thing to build a company round and, and separately it was really, really hard to do.
So I pivoted from that concept as Terry and before my two co-founders joined, and we pivoted to this concept of a robot that could be used for a variety of carrying, towing, scouting, patrolling and manipulation type tasks alongside people. And I would say that the idea since that point forward has really kind of left me as the sole contributor and it's really become like a really collaboration heavy thing where what we have done is we've tended to push stuff into the field before it's ready and gathered a ton of customer feedback and then tried to iterate very rapidly to drive a minimally viable product into something that people will really pay for at scale. And fast forward a bit, we're like eight generations in, we've all outsourced production. We have done about 50,000 autonomous miles on the platform. If you're, if you're a laborer in the field and you're harvesting fruit and our system shows up, people can almost immediately intuitively understand what it does. Hey, like I just pick fruit and I put this fruit on this device and it runs it out and I don't have to like wheel around a two or 300 pound wheelbarrow all day long and 110 degree heat like that. That's the immediate value proposition that our vehicle brings, which is really quick and intuitive to most people. And then making that vehicle quick and easy and intuitive for anybody to operate has definitely been a journey.
Elisa Muñoz: I think it's amazing. And if I have learned anything from past interviews is that customer feedback is key. So I need to ask like, what do you think has been the biggest progress since you started the company?
Charlie Andersen: This is gonna sound really silly, I think especially to you perhaps kind of, you know, sitting in in, in, you know, I guess sitting in Mexico and being very fluent in Spanish, one of the biggest surprises for us as a team, as silly as it sounds, is that when you're selling, when you're selling a vehicle that is used by laborers in the field in California, nobody in the field speaks English. It's almost exclusively a Spanish speaking audience. So you've got really, like you have some of, if not the hardest working people on the planet in the field in California and initially as a bunch of, you know, people from eastern the east coast of the US kind of flying out to California and getting into that, into that area, we didn't really understand going into it that like everyone in the field was gonna speak Spanish. And so fast forward a bit and I, we hired out a big sales and support team who are nearly all from the background where like their parents worked in the fields or they have worked in the fields at some point and they also are all incredibly educated as engineers also. And so they bring this like superpower where they can go into the field and communicate and understand what the customer pain point actually is. I think that to me, that ultimately a product is all about the people and getting great people on the ground who understand the customer pain point and communicate with them on their terms and then can iterate towards what they want has been like a probably one of the things that's that's, that's expedited our progress more so than anything else.
Elisa Muñoz: And now one of my next questions, normally we speak with CEOs and founders in the hardware industry and most of them are really involved in the procurement process of their companies. So, how close are you to this process? I know that you guys have an operations team. How does that work?
Charlie Andersen: At Burro, we've been through, so you've been through eight generations of hardware and, and, and this kind of hardware, it's not like, it's not like one or two things. You know, you've got a mobile base, motors, hubs, wheels, tires, inner tubes, wheel encoders, cabling, weatherproofing, waterproofing, still chassis assembly on the front and the rear batteries and then a brain box. So within the brain box you have probably 400 components, you know, gpu, cpu, cooling system, gs, GPS receiver, et cetera. So, within all of that, each one of those individual components sits within a broader system and there's a lot of interplay between each individual component from interference, positioning perspective, et cetera. And so what we have found, the first seven, first six generations or so, we did every single thing in the house top to bottom, I guess for the first five and a half generations.
We did everything top to bottom. Then by generation six we reached a stage where we had a couple of sub assemblies. So like we could get cabling done by somebody, we could source a brain box from a vendor who did it for us. We could source a mobile base from a vendor who did it for us. And then where we are today, on our core product that we sell regularly is we have an outsource supply chain where we've got a couple of different vendors that do the sub assemblies and then one vendor that does the final assembly. And that's like for the steady state part of the business, we're just producing stuff regularly. That's how that part works. And then on the new product development side, then you go right back into the earlier stage thing where you're sourcing a bunch of components that all interplay a bit and really do require that talking with like early stage companies either in the US or or in Asia who are building particular sub-components that we, that we want to test and they gotta go for this test validation and then prototyping and then more of a production thing. And I think in the early stage part of the process that in particular is pretty messy for us. And candidly a lot of things like spreadsheets, phone calls and the kind of engineering group kind of assessing things.
So might not be the clearest answer, but we've been through an evolution. All production at this point is outsourced to some level with one vendor doing the final assembly. And then in the early stage stuff, when we're, when we're designing what we're gonna sell, you know, next year, in the year onwards, that again goes right back to the, you know, spreadsheets, speaker, things out, et cetera. And probably could be a cleaner process at some level.
Elisa Muñoz: What will you say are the next steps for Burro?
Charlie Andersen: We're growing quickly, we are finally reaching the point. It's actually kind of a funny, funny thing. I think building the physical part of a robot is definitely difficult. Building the autonomy that underlies it is this intense rapid iterative process where solving these problems that are so intuitive for you as a person that you don't even realize it, but are actually monumentally complex or difficult to do well at scale. So said another way we've gone from, you know, 2018 when we first went in the field, every single mile that a robot traveled, it would have like 11.19 failure cases within that single mile travel. Fast forward a bit, we're now at the point where we can go 20 to 25 or so autonomous miles without a human having to intervene at all.
And so we're suddenly at a point where we can actually ship a product in a box without shipping a person with that box to set it up, make sure it works for customers and make sure it works reliably. So we're suddenly at a point where we can actually ship stuff to other regions of the US, not just California, other parts of the world, Australia, South America, et cetera, Europe, et cetera. And increasingly the product can be used not just in vineyards but also in nurseries and berries and solar panel sets and beyond. And I think in our space what I can see is that there are a ton of sectors where there's demand for movement of a vehicle safely alongside people that can support other applications. And we're like just, you know, just cracking open the door a tiny bit and like what's beyond it is really exciting and, and near end it's scale product within a larger and larger group of, of customers and then start to shift into some of these new geographies and new use cases where we see tons of demand.
Elisa Muñoz: Charlie, could you share a piece of advice for future engineers or future CEOs starting on this path?
Charlie Andersen: Yeah, so I think unequivocally get into the field where your product is gonna be used and I'm, I'm using a feed field, not in the literal sense. Get into the environment which you think the product will be used and show people stuff that is embarrassingly laughable as early as you possibly can because you, no matter what you have on your head, you, you might, you can be the most, like maybe you are Steve Jobs and maybe you can envision the iPad before it exists, but for most mere mortals you don't know what a customer actually wants until you get it into their hands. And it should be premature, it should not be ready in your view. You should rapidly get it out there. And I think with autonomy in particular, this really, really applies because you can't tell what a product needs to actually do until you get it into an environment. For me, the iterative cycle is the superpower of moving quickly with an autonomy product in your world.
Elisa Muñoz: That's great advice. Thank you so much Charlie for being here today!
Charlie Andersen: Yeah, Elisa, thank you so much for having me on. I really, really appreciate it.
