Comment by canvascritic

this all makes sense and is honestly the most coherent humanoid startup thesis i've seen outside of figure.ai. You're right that the unit economics of hardware are a trap unless you can commoditize the complements. And humanoid hardware clearly wants to become a commodity, but no one's finished the job yet and it seems brutally difficult (see: the ghost of Willow Garage)

The tesla analogy makes sense to me but with a caveat: they still spend billions on CapEx and own verticals like battery chemistry and drivetrain design. In this case you’re betting that the value collapses upward into software, like the shift from phones to apps, but for that to work, your software has to deliver exponential delta per dollar

With that I think the real risk is that your "clean your house" package is deceptively hard in the long tail, and you will end up with the iRobot Roomba UX. Novelty fades fast when it constantly gets stuck under the couch or whatever the equivalent of that is for humanoids. To be fair iRobot/Roomba is a household name but still "only" a ~$1.5B company, which seems meager compared to ambitions in this space

As an aside I would love to see an RFC-style doc on how you think humanoid software standards should emerge. ROS is still a frankenstein, and someone needs to kill it gently lol