I'm leaving Every Flavor Robotics, searching for my next opportunity
Every Flavor has challenged me as a leader, communicator, and manager. It’s now time for me to return to being technical on the frontier of robot learning.
As a company, Every Flavor Robotics set out to accelerate the pace of robotic innovation by producing high-quality open-source robotics tooling and educational content. Personally, my mission was twofold. First, I aimed to learn how to lead a team in converting a simple idea into a healthy, growing business. Secondly, I wanted to learn the engineering skills required to push technology past prototypes into consumer-ready products and progressively expand the frontier of the technology that was accessible to us and our customers. Despite the overwhelming advice and evidence pointing in the other direction, I expected to spend 80% of my time on the engineering and 20% on leadership and management. Maybe it’s my own hubris or naivety, but it takes experiencing the visceral pain of some lessons before I understand them truly.
As Every Flavor grew and our goals reached further, I quickly discovered that the advice was indeed true: I spent 80% of my time on the leadership and 20% of my time on the engineering. The exact type of work changed everyday. Some days were filled with conversations, half getting advice from external advisors and half making sure the team is on track internally. Some days required that I shut off from the world, rehash our business plan, strategy, and pitch deck once again. Other days were engineering adjacent: reasoning about our engineers skillsets and use those to differentiate our content. All of it was critical work that kept the company moving forward and it was incredibly rewarding. However, it did pull me away from the research and engineering that I was itching to do. As we made progress, it became obvious to me that this divide would keep growing and that I had to make a decision: did I want to fully lean into leadership or do I want to step back into the weeds of engineering?
I decided it was better to find an opportunity to jump back to the bottom of the ladder by finding an opportunity at another company. The urgency of my decision is especially clear given how fast the industry is moving at the moment. Whether or not the hundreds of robotics startups stick around, the advancements they are making are certainly going to be the foundations of the robotics innovations for the next few decades. I want to spend time becoming intimately familiar with all of these new tools so that when I am back at the head of a startup in the future, I will truly understand what it takes to build with them.
To be clear, I found the leadership work I was doing immensely rewarding. I was learning a new set of skills that I never had the opportunity to train previously, many of them much more challenging than any engineering problems I’ve tackled. I appreciated the amount of human touch that came into play and learned to enjoy the fact that there were not even clear metrics of success. The decision isntead came from the realization that I need to focus on training my technical skills a few years longer before I am ready to fully dive into leadership work.
Given that framework of thinking, my primary criterion for my next opportunity is mentorship: I want to be led by people who have been around the block with robotics companies, can show me new ways of thinking about the problems in front of us, and open doors that I didn’t even know existed. Additionally, I want to be at a company that’s working on transferring cutting-edge research into industry, with a strong focus on actually deploying robots.
I’ve wrung out my proverbial sponge and now it’s time to jump back in the deep end to absorb more water.