AI & Robotics. Growth Leader & Entrepreneur.
New York
Joined February 2009
- Tweets1.3K
- Following5.1K
- Followers2.9K
- Likes27.1K
Matthew Iles retweeted
Building America's largest manufacturer of AI-native robots isn't just a national imperative. It's also deeply personal.
@eo_build went inside our Glen Cove factory with CEO @evanbeard and team to tell the story of how we got here, and how we’re helping bring manufacturing and a thriving middle class back to America.
Matthew Iles retweeted
It's incredibly special to work with people whose stories give you goosebumps.
@eo_build spent weeks with @evanbeard and the @standardbots team creating a short documentary about their mission to build their robots 100% in America and help bring back America's middle class 🇺🇸
Matthew Iles retweeted
Nearly a decade ago at my job before Primary I had the chance to back an obsessive Founder who wanted to bring robotics into the American economy.
The grit and intensity he has brought to building his business ranks up there in the top 1% of those I've seen in my career.
Now the market has caught up with him and the business. And now he's built a unicorn with so much more room to run.
Grateful for the opportunity @evanbeard gave me to back him and be a tiny tiny part of the @standardbots journey.
If you love robotics, American Manufacturing or multi time founder lessons, this one is for you.
@evanbeard on rebuilding American manufacturing, getting robots onto factory floors, and expanding what workers can do. New on Change Order.
Matthew Iles retweeted
Standard Bots CEO @evanbeard reveals why nearly 99% of factory robots still operate like arcade claw machines, and how AI could finally change that:
"Almost 99% of manufacturing robots today, people don’t realize, they just are replaying the same motions again and again."
"You’ll save points, kind of like the crane game at Denny’s, and then the robot will replay through those points. That’s all those robots really do all day long."
"We’ve released a vision encoder trained on billions of images where you can really quickly train a model to find objects and pick them up, and few shot learning, where you demonstrate a task to the robot and it learns from you."
"One is making the robots so anyone can take them out of the box, like an iPhone type experience for what traditionally is a mainframe computer type product."
"The other is making them more capable, so you can automate jobs that previously had too much variability."
@standardbots
Introducing Standard Bots AI
“We chose Standard Bots for two reasons: the speed of development is highly compressed, and the interface for programming the robot is so much simpler. With Standard Bots AI, that's even faster.” — Adrian Nistler, President and CEO, Path Machining & Automation
Standard Bots AI robots deliver dramatically faster setups, faster changeovers, and faster paybacks. This is why robots are the new essential power tool of the 21st century.
Our mission is to expand human capacity with the world’s most accessible robots. We’re building this future in Glen Cove, New York, and on hundreds of factory floors, and counting.
Say yes to more: standardbots.com/ai
Matthew Iles retweeted
Introducing Standard Bots AI
“We chose Standard Bots for two reasons: the speed of development is highly compressed, and the interface for programming the robot is so much simpler. With Standard Bots AI, that's even faster.” — Adrian Nistler, President and CEO, Path Machining & Automation
Standard Bots AI robots deliver dramatically faster setups, faster changeovers, and faster paybacks. This is why robots are the new essential power tool of the 21st century.
Our mission is to expand human capacity with the world’s most accessible robots. We’re building this future in Glen Cove, New York, and on hundreds of factory floors, and counting.
Say yes to more: standardbots.com/ai
Matthew Iles retweeted
250 years of America in the making. Here's to the next 250. Happy 4th of July! 🇺🇸
Matthew Iles retweeted
Just spent the morning at the White House complex roundtable on America First industrial policy — machine tools, advanced manufacturing, and the industrial base everything else is built on.
Kicked off by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and White House trade adviser Peter Navarro.
I was there as the founder of an American robotics company - we were the only American-born, American-owned robotics company in the room. Here's what we're all trying to solve: 🧵
Matthew Iles retweeted
🎙️ @evanbeard is the co-founder and CEO of @standardbots, building AI-trained industrial robot arms designed to automate real factory work, not demos:
In this episode, Evan shares a founder path that started in software startups and Y Combinator long before robotics. Seeing engineers at YC building giant robots convinced him this was a “cheat code on life” and he taught himself mechanical and electrical engineering to make it possible
We talk about the early years spent building prototypes in a small apartment, running more than one hundred calls with manufacturers, and discovering the same problem every time. Companies wanted automation, but robots were too expensive and too difficult to program
Evan explains why Standard Bots focuses on usable automation instead of chasing hype. The goal was not a slightly better robot but something ten times easier to deploy, trained through demonstration and physical AI rather than complex programming
We also discuss surviving the near-death phase, raising funding weeks before running out of money, rebuilding electronics during the chip shortage, and learning electrical engineering while debugging exploding circuit boards remotely
A conversation about persistence, customer obsession, and why the future of robotics will be decided by real ROI on factory floors, not humanoid spectacle.
Building Deep Tech #100
"You Need To Be 10x Better"
With Evan Beard, Co-Founder and CEO of Standard Bots
00:00 – Why Evan moved from software to robotics
04:40 – Teaching himself hardware from zero
11:30 – Talking to 100+ manufacturers
18:20 – The near-death phase of the company
26:10 – Why robots must be 10x better to win
33:50 – Demonstration vs programming
41:30 – What factories actually care about
49:20 – The future of American manufacturing
🎧 Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/1C7…
🎧 Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
🎬 YouTube: youtu.be/q_WdHcpYkkE?si=QuJY…
Proud to be a part of this mission.
Investors are betting billions of dollars that robotics will experience a Giant Leap.
Meaning: robots are not useful today, but throw enough GPUs, models, data, and PhDs at the problem, and you’ll cross some threshold on the other side of which you will meet robots that can walk into any room and do whatever they’re told.
The Giant Leap view is sexy. It holds the promise of a totally unbounded market – labor today is a ~$25 trillion market, constrained by the cost and unreliability of humans; if robots become cheap, general, and autonomous, the argument goes that you get Jevons Paradox for labor - available to whichever team of geniuses in a garage produces the big breakthrough first. This is the type of innovation that Silicon Valley loves. Brilliant minds love opportunities where success is just a brilliant idea away.
My friend @evanbeard is betting that progress will happen by climbing the gradient of variability. That robotics will progress towards general usefulness in small steps.
The logic is clear:
- Robotics is bottlenecked on data.
- The best data is the data your robots collect actually doing things.
- The best strategy, then, even if it's not the sexiest, is to get paid to collect that data, learn, and iterate.
This is where the vast majority of value lies, and the real path to our abundant robotic future.
For the first co-written essay in not boring world, Evan and I write about the robots.
Matthew Iles retweeted
Investors are betting billions of dollars that robotics will experience a Giant Leap.
Meaning: robots are not useful today, but throw enough GPUs, models, data, and PhDs at the problem, and you’ll cross some threshold on the other side of which you will meet robots that can walk into any room and do whatever they’re told.
The Giant Leap view is sexy. It holds the promise of a totally unbounded market – labor today is a ~$25 trillion market, constrained by the cost and unreliability of humans; if robots become cheap, general, and autonomous, the argument goes that you get Jevons Paradox for labor - available to whichever team of geniuses in a garage produces the big breakthrough first. This is the type of innovation that Silicon Valley loves. Brilliant minds love opportunities where success is just a brilliant idea away.
My friend @evanbeard is betting that progress will happen by climbing the gradient of variability. That robotics will progress towards general usefulness in small steps.
The logic is clear:
- Robotics is bottlenecked on data.
- The best data is the data your robots collect actually doing things.
- The best strategy, then, even if it's not the sexiest, is to get paid to collect that data, learn, and iterate.
This is where the vast majority of value lies, and the real path to our abundant robotic future.
For the first co-written essay in not boring world, Evan and I write about the robots.
Matthew Iles retweeted
Had a great discussion with @Cpassariello's @CNBC SF team on the US robotics industry yesterday.
On 11/18, I'll testify before Congress' @JECRepublicans and @JECDems on the future of robotics & manufacturing. Thanks to @RepDavid, @SenatorHassan, and members.
jec.senate.gov/public/index.…
Matthew Iles retweeted
#Automation should help you focus on the human parts of work and life.
You probably (definitely) flip burgers better than the RO1—but when it comes to your #manufacturing processes, he's your guy.
Enjoy the freedom. Happy 4th of July from Standard Bots 🍔🇺🇸🤖
#IndependenceDay
The future is AI + Robotics. And humans merging with machines.
Probably, we're the last of the purely organic variety of human. Probably in 20 years, we will have AI embedded in our brains, nanobots in our blood, and exoskeletal augmentation. There will come a time before 2100 when we debate whether parents can implant their kids with AI, and how young. Somewhere, a baby will be implanted practically at birth.
In so much science fiction and plenty of facts-driven doomsayers today and over the years, AI is predicted to kill us all. After all, we're its only real threat, and beyond a certain point, we just won't add much if any value. This point is probably approaching very soon, and when we'll only know in hindsight.
AI-2027.com predicts AI will kill us all, but robots will keep thriving without us, eventually exploring the stars on their own.
But sci-fi author Iain Banks imagines a different future, one where humans and machines live harmoniously as a symbiotic, united civilization. This feels like the best outcome, compared to annihilation anyway.
I think often about my young kids. Will they go to school or be better off with an AI tutor? Will they learn to drive, or will all cars be self-driving in 15 years?
But what really breaks my brain is thinking about my kids having kids. If they're like me, they'll have kids in 30 years, 2055, and their kids will come of age around 2075, 50 years from now. What parenting choices will they be faced with then?
God willing, the world will be a safer and healthier place then, and they'll go on to live a very long time. As purely organic or a human-machine hybrid, time will only tell.
"The more fundamental issue is that the left establishment has decided, essentially unilaterally, that i need not be in conversation or dialogue with the right -- that mere engagement with the other is itself a sign of cultural betrayal. When @Peggynoonannyc noted in a 2019 essay that the distaste by the Washington establishment for the current brand of American populism was, at its core, 'almost aesthetic,' she was absolutely correct in identifying the left's most pernicious weapon: the ability to brand an entire swath of political views -- on views ranging from national security, immigration, abortion, to law enforcement -- as essentially lowbrow and uncouth." -Alex Karp, CEO @PalantirTech in 'The Technological Republic'
Matthew Iles retweeted
you think the itsy bitsy spider gave a fuck about the rain. no. it climbed the spout again. lock in
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
It's important to note that the sun came out and dried up all the rain.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itsy_Bits…