Stoel Rives | Deeply Rooted Podcast S3E3: AgTech Innovation and Robotics with Burro CEO Charlie Andersen

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In this episode of the Stoel Rives Deeply Rooted Podcast, host Patrick Abell sits down with Charlie Andersen, co-founder and CEO of Burro, a pioneering company in agricultural robotics. Charlie shares his fascinating journey from a childhood on a family farm to leading a robotics company that innovates in the farming industry. He discusses the challenges of integrating robotics in agriculture, focusing on Burro's unique approach of developing collaborative autonomous ground vehicles that assist rather than replace human labor. The conversation also delves into the future of robotics in farming, highlighting the significance of user-friendly technology and the potential for diverse applications in outdoor environments.

This episode offers insights into the intersection of technology and agriculture, presenting compelling reasons for anyone interested in these fields to tune in. Key highlights include:

• An in-depth look at Burro's mission to augment human labor in agriculture with autonomous robots.
• Discussion on the challenges and future prospects of robotics in the agricultural sector.
• Charlie’s perspective on the importance of human-centric design in robotics development.

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Episode Transcript

Here we are in a space of however many acres you’re trying to manage of timberland. You’re trying to produce wood fiber from market, and you’re trying to do it in a way that’s economically viable, and you also are trying to produce. I would say, superior, but at least adequate but I’d say we’re after superior biological outcomes for the species and ecosystems that are also there.

Patrick Abell:
Welcome to the Stoel Rives Deeply Rooted Podcast. I’m your host, Patrick Abell, a real estate attorney and member of Stoel’s Agri Business Industry Group. This season, we’re interviewing respected industry leaders and discussing how they and their companies are embracing innovation and capitalizing on new opportunities to move their industries forward in an ever changing world. Subscribe at stoel.com that’s s-t-o-e-l.com or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Greetings, listeners. Welcome to this episode of the Stoel Rives Deeply Rooted Podcast. I’m your host, Patrick Abell. Our guest today is Charlie Andersen, co founder and CEO of Burro, a robotics company focused on providing autonomous robots to support the farming industry. Burro is based in Philadelphia and has a growing team of over 40 employees. The company has taken on multiple rounds of venture funding since its inception in 2018. As stated on the Burro website, the mission of Burro is to solve the labor problem facing farmers by making robots like Wally a reality. The fact that Charlie referenced a Pixar movie in his company’s mission statement tells you everything you need to know about Charlie’s wit and down to earth style. Charlie and I have been friends for over a decade and attended business school together from 2012 to 2014. For as long as I’ve known him, Charlie has loved to build things and work with his hands. So his career at the intersection of robotics and farming seems to me like a perfect fit. In this episode, Charlie and I will be discussing the challenges and thrills of starting a company from scratch, Burro’s place in the agri business market, and what he thinks the future of robotics looks like in general and in farming in particular. Charlie, welcome to the program.

Charlie Andersen:
Pat, great to be here. Thank you for having me on, really a pleasure to be here.

Abell:
Yeah. I know you’re a busy guy. So I appreciate you making the time for us. I wanted to start off by just letting you tell your story a little bit. I know you’ve got farming in your blood . So just tell us where you’re from, and how did you get interested in the intersection of farming and robotics?

Andersen:
Yeah, sure thing. So I grew up on a working fruit and vegetable farm. My family has two businesses: One is a working farm, and then my dad has a construction business, a real estate business and for me within both of those things, kind of from day one, what I loved was the machinery and the technology and the tools that people used to work. I probably started driving farm tractors at just about four years old, and like if I can do it in an airconditioned cab pushing buttons and with the throttle, that’s so much more appealing to me than getting out of a cab and doing something by hand. On my family farm there were tons of tasks, whether. it’s, you know, weed whacking, spot spraying, picking, pruning, there’s just this endless scope of tasks that require getting out of the cab and doing something by hand. So fast forward a bit, got an MBA, got into business school and I was…I went to work for this big company called C&H, which is Deere’s largest competitor and I had a really funky role there, both looking at autonomy companies from an M&A perspective and also doing a lot of like sales and marketing and strategy work with farmers. And from that, I kind of conclude, hey, big company is not really where I want to be. I really want to build something on my own. And so fast forward, I had a colleague whose family had a chicken farm, and idea #1 became building a robot to pick up dead chickens, and thank God we have pivoted since then. But that initial, conceivably, I guess conceivably not the most glamorous idea has kind of unfolded into a very, very different path. And today we are a team of around 44 with about 350 robots running within agriculture on multiple continents and growing fast as things have kind of evolved in a hurry in retrospect. But it definitely was a lot of tireless, tedious, kind of high perseverance steps along the way.

Abell:
The story about the chickens is great. It reminds me of, you know, a case that we read in business school about the early, early prototype of the 3D printer where a guy, you know, took an inkjet printer and he used kitty litter and Elmer’s glue to concoct this initial prototype showing the concept of how you could print layers and make a 3D object. And it sounds like maybe that was kind of your test case with the, with the chicken thing. What are some lessons that you learned from that initial prototype that, you know, ultimately carried through to the robots that you see today?

Andersen:
Yeah, so I think, yeah, there’s a bunch of lessons. I think seeing for one, robotics is really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really times like a billion hard. It’s just really, really hard. And so building a system that can move around, that can do perception, that can navigate reliably under canopies, that can behave safely near people, all, you know, along the movement side that can also recognize a live or dead animal, and that can do a manipulation-type task and do it in a really not glamorous, kind of dull, dirty part of the food economy that people don’t really want to think about…that felt like a really, really hard way to start a company. And then my wife at the same time was, you know, coming up with names for the product, there was Rumbach Lordy for the mortician. So just like every, the aspect of building a prototype, to…or let me actually…let me take a step back. Within broiler houses, which are how chickens are produced in the U.S., they typically have a 30,000 to 40,000 square foot facility, and within those houses, people have to walk up and down the aisles throughout the day and literally collect chickens that have perished because they’re grown in so much confinement. And so that initial idea for me seemed like, okay, it’s dull, it’s dirty, arguably dangerous. Maybe that’s a good place to go with robots. As I got further and further into looking at this space, I realized hey, it’s really hard to do, really niche market, and not a glamorous market that people really want to work on. I think robotics, so much around both, you know, the potential and practicability today and the broader vision, and starting a company around a really kind of gross part of the economy was not…proved to not be the best place to start in short. So there’s, I guess, a couple of lessons woven in. I think I probably spent about like two or three months on that concept and pivoted very hard to the concept of Burro. Burro is mobility first and foremost. There’s no manipulation element today. And I think what I was discovering was that where there are a lot of people working, if you can introduce an autonomous vehicle alongside those people, the fact remains where there are many people, there’s a lot of labor and so robot next to people means a robot can get into environments where there’s a lot of people working. The most labor-intensive areas in agriculture tend to be in harvested produce and nurseries, which are, I think, much more aligned with kind of where people…where we want the food system to go. People eating, you know, healthy fruits and vegetables and buying, you know, arguably things that are more green as opposed to things that are meat based.

Abell:
Tell us about the early days of Burro. How did you connect with your co founders, and, you know, what kind of trials did you go through searching for product market fit as you launched and scaled a company?

Andersen:
Yeah, so 2016-2017, I was working for C&H. Had this, went to lunch with a colleague one day and that is where the idea of building a robot to pick up deceased chickens came up. Started doing that for probably two or three months. Probably spent like $30,000 or $40,000 trying to build a robot to do that. Realized very clearly I did not have the skills to do it. It was not something I wanted to do in terms of, like, the thematic focus area, and so at that point I did the logical thing and I quit my job. I had no money, and I tried to find some co founders. And so through that, and at the same time I had this application on my computer that would send probably like 150 emails a day. Really just spam emails to different kind of people within agriculture landscaping with different robotic concepts. And what I could see in the marketplace very quickly was that, or what I could see very quickly is that within agriculture half is from revenues crops; half is livestock. Within the crops space two-thirds of the revenue pools is corn, wheat and soybeans. And that space is almost entirely mechanized meaning there’s no labor in it. So it’s like, it’s not, it’s 60 to 70% of the farm, of farm revenue is in corn, wheat and soybeans, but only 8 to 10% of the labor works in that space. And about 80 to 90% of the labor works in fruit, vegetable and nursery crops where people are screaming for automation and there’s virtually nothing they can buy, and that virtually nothing they can buy remains true to today. So when I was spamming people with different autonomy concepts, that’s…that segment was emerging most forcefully and I was kind of concluding that an autonomous ground vehicle likely was something that people wanted, and I would literally go fly out to California and like sleep in the trunk of a Kia and just go drive around and meet with farmers and they really, really positive in responses with the concept of an autonomous ground vehicle that carried heavy things alongside people at work in harvesting and nursery application. So that was like the Genesis or kind of pivot point of the idea. And so I was at a point in time (this would be in 2017, early 2018) where I had no money and I moved out of my childhood bedroom into my little sister’s basement in Philadelphia. Philadelphia has a big robotics scene. And so I just started reaching out to people. And from that I found Terry and Vibhor who are my two co-founders,. And we literally, you know, start out with like three guys and a dog in an unheated barn, you know, welding stuff by hand, soldering it together and then pretty quickly, we found a couple groups, mainly Driscolls, the California Table Grape Commission, and actually one of the largest blueberry growers in the world. And those groups are very keen on paying to trial something. And so with like literally, you know, agreement to buy two systems for like $25,000 we then could go back and raise a little bit of friends, family and full money, and then go through a couple of accelerators and kind of work…always doing this kind of Catch 22, you know, pursuit of opportunity beyond resources control thing where you’re like establishing there’s demand and then racing, racing, racing to get a little bit money to fund it. And then I guess by 2020 our team was at six people and we had 20 systems running the field. 2021 we were at around 12 people and we had about 90 systems running the field. Last year we were around 200 or so systems in the field and around 30 or so folks. And this year around 44 people and will be, you know right around 350 systems in the wild and should be north of probably coming close to like 1,000 by the end of next year. So it’s a little bit of the of the growth ramp, you know, to where we are today.

Abell:
You know, I spent a little over a year working at a start-up as one of the early employees and someone I worked with once told me that startup years are like dog years…you age seven years for every year. It can be a volatile environment, really fun, or really awful. You know, what advice would you give to someone who’s maybe just coming out of business school or in their 20s and they’re excited about start-ups? What would you, what would be like one or two sort of nuggets of wisdom that you would share?

Andersen:
Yeah, I think it’s definitely a marathon, not a sprint. You need to do it for the right reasons. I think there are many, many, many, much, much better ways to do well for yourself economically that have nothing to do with starting a company. And I think that to be starting a company…like, you have very, very genuine reasons to do it and it’s very much a marathon. And the final thing, I think it really is a people game, meaning that a great company is all about the team you assemble and then how do you empower them to do things better than you ever could and really get the heck out of the way so they can just go, you know, make stuff happen. And that kind of general principle applies both to members of your team as employees or co-founders, but also to investors. And so I think that the, yeah, I think it’s insanely hard to start a company. The highs are incredibly high, the lows are incredibly low, and you’re gonna have many, many, many of them. I definitely, I love the dog years analogy. I’m about to close a round of financing which has been my checklist preventing me from getting a dog, and I, I’m definitely sympathetic to the, or it’s definitely true that you learn so many things so rapidly, and if you don’t learn them, you just fail. And then the failure case, in a regular career path, failure is, you know, you got a bad review. Or maybe you get laid off and you go onto the next one. With a company, if it fails, it’s hey, I got to lay off, you know, dozens of people and they go home without a job. And I failed my customers and failed my investors. And so I think the fear of failure part it remains there at some level. The highs are very high, the lows are very low. And at least for me personally, it’s the only thing I can imagine doing. I think, I’ve, I’ve worked inn other companies and like to me like building this this high growth engine is all I want to do, and so even though the, even though the lows can be very low sometimes it’s like, well, at least I’m driving it and like if I have a really bad day, I can chart my own course and my team’s course to fix it the next day which I find really exhilarating and fun, you know, at the same time.

Abell:
Yeah, that’s great insight. I mean, I think that’s a common thread you see among successful entrepreneurs is there is no Plan B. This is what they want to do, and they’re gonna do it, and they’re gonna drive until they make it work. Can you tell us a little more about where Burro is situated in the market now? You know, what’s your typical customer, what products or services do you offer, and what’s the problem that you’re ultimately trying to solve?

Andersen:
Yeah, totally. So, so, very succinctly, I guess, to a mass audience, we build Disney’s Wall-E or Star Wars’ R2-D2 for work outdoors in a 1.0 format. So I think the mass audience kind of tagline, i.e., Wall-E. To a farmer what we build is effectively an autonomous ATV. It is either people-scale or pallet-scale so it can carry 500 up to about 1,500 lbs. of payload, and which can tow between 1,000 all the way up to about 5,000 pounds behind it in vineyards, nurseries, berries, stone fruit, citrus and a variety of other kind of ag and ag-adjacent segments where you have a lot of people doing a task like harvesting, moving things around or carrying or surveying back and forth consistently. And so in more practical sense, what we’re doing is augmenting, or we’re a collaborative autonomous ground vehicle that is automating movement so people only do the higher value manipulation-type tasks and by virtue of being collaborative, if you have a collaborative vehicle and you augment 4 to 8 people with that collaborative vehicle with each of those 4 to 8 people per system being, you know, 20 to 40% more productive, you’ve got this really, really, really punchy labor savings. It has a very, very short RY packaged in an autonomous ground vehicle that over time can become the logical layer on top of which people start to do added things such as autonomous, you know, weeding, picking, pruning, etc. So we’re an autonomy company building mobility starting in agriculture, augmenting the workforce today in the most labor intensive areas of agriculture and also building the platform for mobility that could be used in ag and non-ag applications. And when you think about robotics in agriculture, it is in the sea of failures. Today, there’s no successful example of a robotics company outside of warehouses and factories. Maybe with, like I-robot, being the only exception. But they’re they’re virtually no examples of robotics being scaled in a massive way outside of warehouses and factories to date. Agriculture is the top frontier for robots that do real work in the great outdoors. And it’s the top place where things are starting to come together. And what we build is a really weird, we have this very weird approach in the market. We’re not putting an autonomous tractor. We’re not doing autonomous spraying. We’re not doing autonomous harvesting. We’re just doing mobility near people. What we found is that where there are many people, there’s a lot of labor. And if you move heavy things around next to people or if you tow heavy things next to people, you’ve got punchy labor savings today, packaged in something that can do a lot more things over time. But again it’s, I think it’s the approach you’ve taken seems very basic and obvious in a way. I’m almost surprised sometimes that that it’s not how everyone else has started. So it’s a, I think we look novel and maybe a little bit mundane. And to me a great robot is arguably boring in a way, but kind of is mundane, but once in the background is a real tool.

Abell:
Mm-hmm, that makes sense. A CEO is always thinking about risk. So I wouldn't be a lawyer if I didn't ask, what are some of the general legal challenges or regulatory hurdles that you've faced in this industry and as your company is operating in it?

Andersen:
Yeah, so I think autonomy is hard. And it really, really cascades into risk and legal risk as well. So we, I've got about 350 systems out there in the wild today. On a light day, we're driving like 50 to 70 miles across the fleet. On a heavy day, we're north of a 1,000 miles across the fleet. So like a 1,000 miles driven a day. If you can imagine, when you as a human being drive, you make mistakes. The same is true for robots. And so we track something we call autonomous miles per user intervention. We're typically around 25 or so autonomous miles per user intervention with a teeny, teeny, tiny sliver of those being P0s or P1s. So ones that cause, ones where a teeny sliver of those faults are ones where a robot has detected an obstacle and bumped into it and had another safety device trigger or instances where a robot has stopped because it's lost and therefore cannot proceed. So most of our interventions are very light touch things where a user can just send something on its way. And we are built in a form where we're moving at about two miles an hour with soft bumper bars all around the device, with sound, with noise, with red buttons, et cetera. So the device itself is very intrinsically safe by virtue of design. However, autonomy will and probably will always, or at least for the foreseeable future, make mistakes. And that mistake does admittedly introduce quite a bit of risk. And so you can imagine when we go out and get product liability insurance, a policy is pretty difficult to underwrite because you're talking about insuring both a physical piece of hardware and then also a literal, like every system we build has 12 cameras on board, it’s processing … it's got a much bigger GPU than a laptop you're running. It's about 300 watts of compute, and it's processing two terabytes of energy per hour of run time to drive through the world. In that drive time, it will make mistakes. And so legally, what is tricky, things that become tricky for us are getting good, tight insurance on things, ensuring that we are safe and safe at the standard of each respective region because we're in the US, Australia, and other parts of the world. Beyond making sure we're safe, making sure we're viewed as safe from a regulatory perspective, and making sure that we are properly insured, you then get into the other things around like customer privacy. You got a vehicle running around with cameras on board. It's logging everything for three months so that if it makes a mistake, you can go back three months into the past and look at exactly the point in time when it made a mistake, and get to recalls on it. And so I think there are a litany of safety regulatory insurance things that we deal with for sure. And then past that, I guess maybe the final realm from a legal perspective, again, is that privacy element of a robot running around or driving around your people as well. So I think that's probably too extensive of a list, but hopefully addressing the question.

Abell:
No, that's great. I mean, it's a complicated product you're putting out there. But that sounds like you're thinking about all the right stuff. You've told me before about the development of a lawnmower attachment for Burro. What are some of the challenges and opportunities with that product in particular, and what are other developments you're working on for the next couple years? What do the next few years look like for you?

Andersen:
Yeah, so right now we have what we call a people scale system. And we will soon be launching a pallet scale system. So again, that's one, most of our fleet today is people scale. So it carries up to like 500 to 700 pounds, and tows about 1,000 to 2,000 pounds. We're about to launch a pallet scale, which can carry 1,500 pounds and tow 3,000 to 5,000 pounds. Once you get to a pallet scale format, you then can start doing towing in a much more significant form. You can also start doing things like mowing. When you do something like towing and mowing, you tend to be operating in GPS-denied areas. And then if you think about it, if you are changing how the world looks like behind you, i.e. towing a trailer or mowing, as you are towing or mowing, you have to rebuild your map or your localization layer to reflect the fact that things are blocked behind you or things are being changed around you. And so a major… when we look at the fault … my fleets have done roughly 75,000 autonomous miles over the past five years, and in those miles, localization has been the hardest thing that we have faced. So that is answering the question, where am I in the world? Where am I in the world when you're under a canopy and you cannot see the sky, and therefore cannot always rely on GPS. And so as we talk about launching something like a mower and doing more and more towing, localization is actually the hardest technical problem that we're facing. And we've got a big team of PhDs and really incredible people working on it. But it's probably the hardest problem relating to launching those products and those should be coming in a big way this coming year.

Abell:
You and I have talked a little bit about the robotics industry in general before. You've mentioned to me that you think this is sort of a watershed moment, like the early days of computers. Where do you see agribusiness and farming as a good use case for robots? Where are you bearish? Where are you bullish?

Andersen:
Yeah, so I think that, so panning way, way out and then forward to specifically to kind of farming and agriculture beyond. Think about autonomy, think about robots. You define robot as a fusion of hardware, software, and training data or data to do a real-world physical action. I think they've been most successful thus far in factories and in warehouses. And in the past three or four years, what you've seen is this booming capability set around computer vision, so cameras are really cheap and high quality, around artificial intelligence. You know, with the low-cost camera and the cheap GPU, you can suddenly see something and recognize it in real time, and then also around just emerging modularity. So those sets of things, cheap cameras, great AI and modularity mean that suddenly you can build a system that can go into the great outdoors outside of a fixed environment, warehouse or factory, and do a real-world physical thing. The flip side of that is that once you're outside, your permutations of scenarios increase exponentially. So if you're in a warehouse, it's flat floors, the layout can be very clean. I mean, it can be a very clean, controlled setting. Once you're in the great outdoors, all bets are off. Like Arizona streets look a lot different than Boston streets, look a lot different than Tampa, Florida streets. And so as we talk about robots going into the great outdoors, it seems most likely to me and to a lot of others that they will mature most rapidly within agricultural settings because within agriculture, while you do have, well, you do have sometime a lack of homogeneity within a given crop, there are some specific types of crops or operating environments that are fairly consistent between crop A, crop B, crop C. And then separately within agriculture, you're off-road, you're slow smoothing, and there's a ton of labor. And so fast-forwarding that kind of set of things, so robots are now able to go outside of warehouses and factories, and agriculture seems like the top domain because outside of agriculture, on-road automotive hasn't been super successful, last mile delivery thus far has not been super successful. Some of the commercial landscaping, mowing type stuff, that stuff I think is starting to emerge. And then some of the construction stuff I think is emerging a bit, but still not super formidably. I think there's some groups like Canvas, which does drivable robots, those are I think maturing really nicely. But within agriculture specifically, which I would argue is one of the top frontiers for robotics today, if not the top, the spaces that seem like they have struggled the most have been some of the autonomous harvesting stuff, saying people have thought this idea of let's go into the great outdoors, let's go into a really niche-specific crop, i.e. strawberries, let's go into a particular production environment within strawberries, i.e. ones grown in the ground, and let's go try to pick those at the same rate of a human being and at the same rate of fidelity. And that has not worked really well. I think the thing… and then the idea of fully automating a tractor has also seemed to struggle a little bit, although it might be maturing a little bit, but still really, really difficult. I think that within agriculture on the autonomy side, the things that seem to be maturing today, I would argue autonomous ground vehicles in our scale are really starting to get mature. We've got more vehicles probably than any other company in the space today running. It's like that, so I think, I would argue our space is maturing. I think autonomous spraying is specific enough that companies like Gus can get it working and can scale it quite a bit. I think autonomous spot spraying or weeding is starting to get better, although there are some ironies of it where if you want to take it into corn, wheat, or soybeans, which are the big segments, it's actually a lot harder to go into those spaces than it is to go in the niche-ier smaller markets, i.e., things like lettuce. And so maybe to apply a thematic rule, I think the challenge of robots in agriculture, putting the technical stuff aside, is that on the, within the segment, within the segment, if you try to comprehensively replace a human being, i.e., to offset labor, that tends to lead you into trying to do a whole host of things, because people do a bunch of different things. And so if you want to replace a human operating a tractor, or if you want to completely replace an input such as you're doing something like spotting really reliably, you have to do so many, many things to get that working, and you then, because you have to do so many things, you tend to hyperfit to one crop, and then end up with something that's really difficult to get working technically, and also has really, really fit to one nichey space. And so I would argue that companies who are in agriculture building layers, i.e. an autonomy layer that can work across segments or building things like a sprayer which can be used across segments. Those types of approaches are going to be more successful. The companies that go vertical and try to do every single thing that might be automated to get their solution to work within one niche because at the end of that approach you end up with a robot that can do one task not quite as well as a person in one nichey crop in which you can't easily jump to others and agriculture is a land of many niches and if you're just in one, it's hard to have a big TAM. So again, I'm being really long-winded with that answer. That's a hard question. But those are some thoughts.

Abell:
No, that's great. I mean, you know, one thing that has struck me as a thread through a lot of your answers is that even though you're a robotics company, like people is really kind of at the center of everything you do. You know, you've got the laborers in the field that you're interacting with, you've got the people in your company. Just talk about people management and sort of the, how much of real estate that occupies in your day-to-day life.

Andersen:
Yeah, I think, so one of my largest customers, it's a huge vineyard in California. They say very similar things to other customers. One of the major things they say though is it's all about the people. I think that's really, really true. If you're running a very labor intensive operation, you as the owner, operator, or person running it start to become a little bit more, it's almost like labor becomes your customer because it's difficult to get laborers in and labor is really expensive and you don't have the ability to like pay a ton more per hour per person because if you do then that cost gets passed along to a consumer who will not buy from you given you're in a commodity segment. And so I think on the people side, I'm trying to close this, where there are many people, there's a lot of labor. And then building something in such a form that people using it love it, and people who would buy it love it because they know the end user loves it. Past that, I think for me what I've found is that where people stand is a function of where they sit. And for me personally, frequently I'm selling to, if I'm selling to a customer, I'm selling to an owner, then I'm selling to a middle manager layer who actually has to implement stuff, and I'm selling to an end user or laborer who if they're in the US probably is a Spanish speaker and has to be able to figure out how to use a robot which they're encountering for the first time ever in a real world production environment to make more money. And if they don't like it, they're just not gonna use it, and therefore the owner of the operation is not gonna like it. And then going back to the where people sit [stand] as a function of where they sit theme, on the building it side, if you think about a group of engineers, a lot of engineers that are thinking about economy and want to build it, don't necessarily have a lot of experience, you know, going to work in a large production nursery that's selling potted plants that are sold in Home Depot, they're more kind of oriented towards the technology. And so I think, for me, the challenge and opportunity, I would argue the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity set for robotics is building robots that people can actually use in kind of a point and click type format. And whoever solves that in a big way, in a format where it can be used across a bunch of different applications, will be building something really, really big. And I have not seen that yet. And I would argue that we're kind of on our way to doing it. But it all kind of stems from end users loving the product and building something that is, a great autonomy looks really, really simple and looks really, really boring and people enjoy using it. And it really requires understanding what do people want, what do people want and will they actually practically use to get that to work?

Abell:
Well, we look forward to watching Burro succeed in this market for sure. Last question, where can people go to learn more about Burro?

Andersen:
Yeah, sure thing. So you can visit us online. We're www.burro.ai. If you are a large nursery operation, vineyard, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, citrus, stone fruit, et cetera, and you'd like to check us out, you can always email us at sales@burrow.ai as well. We've got tons of stuff running in California, Oregon, Washington, Texas, where else, East Coast in a bunch of areas, Australia, New Zealand, and we increasingly have distributors as well. And you can also, you know, again, use our auto website. So we now have a dealer locator, and you can use that to actually just go see one in person as well.

Abell:
Great. All right, Charlie, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it. I'll give you the last word.

Andersen:
Yeah, awesome. Well, yeah, Pat, really, really appreciate you having me on. And yeah, I guess if anybody ever wants to reach out, they can always reach me at charlie@burro.ai. And we are an autonomy company starting in agriculture, building the future of work outdoors with a collaborative robot called Burro that I think has a ton of applicability to a bunch of applications. And I believe that robotics today is very much like Mount Everest in 1952 or PCs in 1978. There's so much potential right now. So it's a really, really exciting place to follow as well.

Abell:
Great. Thanks, Charlie.

Thank you for listening to the Stoel Rives Deeply Rooted podcast. To follow along and get additional insights from each episode, visit stoel.com. Please also take a minute to rate and subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. The views expressed on this podcast are solely those of the individuals involved and may not reflect the views of Stoel Rives LLP. Participation in this podcast by any individual is not an endorsement of any view or opinion expressed. This is not legal advice and the podcast does not create a client attorney relationship.

About Stoel Rives | Deeply Rooted Podcast

This season, our hosts are interviewing respected industry leaders and discussing how they, and their companies, are embracing innovation and capitalizing on new opportunities to move their industries forward in an ever-changing world.

The views expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals involved and may not reflect the views of Stoel Rives LLP. Participation in this podcast by any individual is not an endorsement of any view or opinion expressed.

This is not legal advice and the podcast doesn't create an attorney-client relationship.

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