Last week the Rose City Robotics team was in Las Vegas. You know that place where everything that happens there stays there? You know what we did on our big night out? We got VIP tickets to BattleBots Destruct-a-thon. Yes we are robot nerds.
If you are in manufacturing, you have likely been inundated with "AI automation solutions to all your problems" which end up not panning out. At the same time, the pressure is on to automate, that is not a question.
The pace of technology change over the past 18 months has been dizzying, even for me as a software engineer trying to keep up.
A key question every manufacturer should be asking their automation vendor: who are you actually building this for?
The answer you'll often hear if you really listen: their investors.
My co-founder, Joe Cole PhD, and I founded Rose City Robotics in a different way. Not using venture capital (VC) or private equity money, or any outside equity investor money at all. We built Rose City Robotics as a self-capitalized startup.
What Self-Capitalized Means A deliberate choice to capitalize the business through cash flow and customer revenue, not investor raising cycles (Series A, B, C... Z). Yes, it goes on and on indefinitely until a liquidation event.
Why that matters? Customer Obsession by Design
As co-founders, Joe and I are voraciously focused on our customers, their pain, their experiences and their happiness.
VC-backed founders spend their time managing investors. I've been an entrepreneur for 20 years and I am actively involved in the Portland startup community. I've written about the downsides of raising money from outside investors and the choices you need to make as a founder if you do go down that path.
Most of my startup founder contemporaries spend the vast majority of their time focused on their investors, board meetings and managing big egos (sorry but you know who you are).
Self-capitalized founders spend their time with customers. Every decision we make is filtered through one question: does this serve our customers?
Built for Our Customers' Scale
We're building for a market that VC-backed startups won't touch - or if they do only has a step to "move fast and break things" through on their way to the top. Mid-market manufacturers are underserved precisely because the unit economics don't excite venture capitalists.
One more thing VC-backed AI inspection vendors can't easily offer: your data stays in your building. If you're doing any defense or aerospace work, you already know that "just use our cloud platform" is a non-starter. We build for on-prem deployment and data security because that's what the shops we work with actually need. It's not glamorous. It doesn't help our valuation. It's just the right way to build for this market. We are not a data play.
Our Survival Depends on Our Customers' Success
Venture-backed companies survive by raising their next round. By "derisking" for investors and showing a path to a billion dollar exit.
We survive by keeping customers happy and growing. Those are very different incentive structures.
We're Not Building to Sell
Every venture-backed company has a liquidation clock ticking. Venture capital funds run on ~10 year cycles, that's how they work. They raise a fund, invest in 10 companies, wait 5-10 years and then harvest the results. Failure is expected for the majority of the companies in the fund, failure is anything less than a $1 billion dollar valuation.
We're building for the rest of our lives. Joe and I own this, our employees will own this. We have no exit pressure, no acqui-hire risk.
In my 20 years as an entrepreneur, I've seen the VC path up close and chosen something different, multiple times, with success. I’ve sat on the other side of the table as an angel investor and limited partner in venture funds.
Self-capitalized is a customer-centric entrepreneurial philosophy.
What that means for you: we're your nerds on the ground watching BattleBots, reading research papers and bringing battle-tested, production-ready innovation to your team. Assuming we are still providing value, we'll be here to support you.
If any of this resonates, here's how we work: we come to your shop, we run a proof of concept on your parts, and you don't pay recurring fees until you have hard data that our system work in your environment.
We've heard from every customer we've talked to that they've been burned before. We get it, and we think the right response to that is to earn the trust before asking for the commitment.
Duncan Miller
Operations / Business Development
Duncan is a software engineer and FIRST Robotics coach with over 20 years of experience as a technology founder. He earned an MBA in Entrepreneurship from Babson College and works at Portland State University as a mentor for tech startups and a judge at innovation competitions. Duncan lives on an extinct cinder cone volcano with his family in Portland Oregon. He is passionate about artificial intelligence, robotics, climate solutions, open startups and social entrepreneurship.