Hello and welcome back to Equity, a Tech Ranch podcast about the business of startups where we unpacked

the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines.

My name is Alex, it is Saturday and I'm here with a surprise episode because we had something

to talk about and we had someone to talk about it with.

So today the theme is robotics and I have rustled up our friendly local hardware editor here at Tech Ranch.

Brian Heater. Brian, hello, how are you?

Alex, first of all, thank you for coming in on a Saturday.

I appreciate it.

I know you've got a lot to do.

For you, anything.

Lawn mowing and whatnot.

Actually, no, I don't mow my own lawn.

I've outsourced that to other people because it turns out that the

little push lawnmowers are awful and that's why we invented powered lawnmowers it turns

out. Well we've also invented robotic lawnmowers Alex. Are those any good? I mean we're

going to get to some of this stuff later on but are those actually good enough to like go out and buy if you're a regular person?

I don't know. Here's what I'll tell you. A couple of CES as ago, maybe God probably like three or four CES as ago, I robot announced that they were doing a robotic lawnmower.

It has not come out yet.

Ah, probably a lot of reasons for that, you know, they did have some layoffs and there were some like there were some struggles with

company at one point but it's also probably something really hard to get right

the way most of them work right now I believe is you effectively like show your robot what the lawn is, give it a layout and

then I'll sort of like automatically go through and hopefully miss all of the

...