MFG Podcast Ep. 8 with Russell Aldridge, founder and CEO of SISU Robotics

In this conversation Russell Aldridge, founder and CEO of SISU Robotics shares how his company got started and found a niche making easy to use robots for cinematography and other industrial applications. We touch on several topics including managing growth, the future of automation, and why in 2021 there still are not robots that can fold laundry.

Good question. I moved to Austin in 2007 to work for National Instruments, a great tech company here in town, and a lot of their customers really wanted to automate with their products. And they said, who’s the company that can help us to put together robotics and these kind of things? And with some of the newer products they were coming out , there just weren’t a lot of options back then for automation. And so with the other co-founder, Mark Christiansen, we decided, let’s start an automation company and let’s do kind of the hard automation. Let’s do the ones where machines need to feel their way through a problem with lots of different sensors. So that was kind of the niche that we originally left to fill.

I remember my talking to my wife and saying, “How do you, feel about this?” You know, we had a mortgage and a couple of kids. And she said, “Well, what’s the worst that could happen?” And I said, “We could lose everything and have to move back to Utah.” And she said, “Well, we don’t have anything, and I’d love to move back to Utah. So, go right ahead.” And so we did that. We started the company. Worked out of the garage. My garage was the manufacturing division. Mark’s garage was where we’d do all of our design. And you know, it’s hot in Austin. The mosquitoes would fly in at four o’clock in the afternoon. Just building it out of the garage—it was challenging. But it also allowed us to get a lot of the lower-level stuff figured out as we grew the business. And we eventually had some early success with some companies like Intel, building machines for them, some machines for National Instruments. Got our name out there, hired some great people, and really kind of evolved the business from there.

You know, it was critical. I went to a professor when I was at school at Brigham Young University in Utah, and said, “You know what? I want to start a business. I’m thinking about doing that right out of college.” And he was very wise and talked me out of that. He said, “You know, that’s great. You should do that. But, you should go work somewhere for a while. Pick a great company, go work there, learn some things, and then start.” And so, National Instruments: great company, great culture, highly technical, a lot of great connections. And so we were able to leverage a lot of those things and a lot of the knowledge that we learned in both doing some machines for National Instruments that became a customer, but leverage their network as well. They have a great network of integration partners and other customers that we could really kind of start from. So we weren’t starting from scratch. We could leverage some of that to get going.

Definitely the flags hanging from the roof came from National Instruments. You know, we’ve been very, very lucky, very blessed to find really good people. And they’ve come from all over. We have a lot of great people from Austin and from Texas, but actually, the majority of the people that work here aren’t even from Texas. They’re from all over the place. And I think it’s just this idea that we don’t care where the best ideas come from. They’re not going to come from me and Mark typically. They’re going to come from all over. We’ve had great ideas from everywhere. One of our best ideas, which is really kind of this fundamental concept of moving the robot around in an intuitive way, was first developed by one of our interns. And we saw that and thought, “Man, that’s a great way to do that. Let’s leverage that in some new and different ways.” And so this idea that anybody can come up with something. We’ll listen, we’ll hear them out. The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of bad ideas. And so we encourage a lot of ideas and we’ll sort through them.

I think that especially the small and medium sized businesses, they have a big challenge right now. Trying to find people is very, very difficult. And so they know they need to turn to automation. It’s just kind of a given, but they don’t know where to start. They don’t know who to trust. They don’t know what equipment to use. Robotics can be very intimidating. It’s also very expensive. Our goal was, can we create a robotic system that somebody can learn how to use in one day and be making product on their first day? That was our goal. These robot arms, like the orange or red ones you see they’re building cars right on the news? When we got our first robot in, I thought, “Man, this is amazing, but it’s really difficult to get up and running. You know, what would be the best experience?” We thought, let’s make this as easy as playing a video game. Let’s put a game controller in one hand and an iPad in the other hand. These are tools people know how to use. And we’ll write just a custom app for whatever they’re doing, whether it’s making movies, or grinding, or welding or whatever it is. Let’s just customize it. And, and so then they’re not writing code, right? They’re just doing something that just feels very intuitive. It’s intuitive to move the robot around. So, you asked about the technology. We made this game controller. It fits in your hand as you move your hand. The robot follows the movements of your hand. It’s just very intuitive. People can do things like welding with the robot the way they would actually do it in real life. This lets us put the controller in the hands of a welder and they can successfully program a robot.

That was really interesting. We created this technology, and the idea was it would be used in industry. Well, we invited a cinematographer to come over and make a commercial for us, and he said, “Guys, have you ever thought about putting a camera on the end of one of these robot arms?” And we said, “No, that’s not a thing. No one does that. “And he said, “No, it very much is a thing. They’ve been doing it for 30 years. But everyone hates them. They’re slow. They take all day to set up. They’re complicated. You need a guy who’s an expert. You’re lucky if you get five to 10 shots a day out of it. It’s just really difficult. But there’s just some shots that you can’t get any other way besides using a robot. What I’ve seen with this technology is it’s amazing. You can do things so quickly.” And so we humored him. We put a post out on Instagram, and I think we sold four of them. And these are not cheap, right? They’re over a hundred thousand dollars a piece. And we sold them to small companies. And so then the light started going off. We thought maybe we’ve got something here. And we called up one of our first customers and you know, this was kind of the other light bulb moment, we said, “Are you able to get those cool robot shots that you can’t get any other way?” And he said, “Yes, we are. But what’s more interesting is that all the stuff that we used to do, we can now do much faster. Jobs that used to take three or four days, we get done in an afternoon because we just leave the camera on the robot. It’s our tripod, it’s our slider, it’s our skater, it’s our gib. It’s all these things and we’re not continually moving the camera around.” So that’s when we go, “Okay, now the market has gone from maybe some bigger Hollywood studios, to now we’re looking at video production all around the world.” And that’s in tens of thousands of companies that we could help out.

It’s a big part. We went from being a services company doing all these custom automation applications to really being a product company. And we’ve really only kept one of the projects that we had before them, which is also a product development opportunity for us. That one is making a robot that sharpens knives, which we can talk more about later. We’re doing the knives and we’re doing the cinema robotics. Those are the two main focuses right now.

Yeah, for sure. On the knife side, for example, you show up to one of these food production houses. You say I have a robot that sharpens knives. Okay, great. If it works, I’ll buy it. They know they need it, right? But you’re right, with the cinematographers, they’ve been doing these things a certain way. You show up with a robot and their initial response is, that’s big Hollywood stuff. That’s not me. That doesn’t help me grow my business. But then we tell the story of these customers that we’ve had that have bought the robot and how they’re able to turn still photography customers into video customers. They’re able to get things much more quickly put out and be able to do more work than they could do before. They’re able to produce Hollywood-type effects for a video production type budget. But the burden of education is on us to show them that those things are possible. So, it is something of an uphill battle. The plus side of that is that they’re all connected. They all talk to each other. And as we get customers that are successful, they talk and we’re gaining momentum.

I think there’s a couple of challenges. One of them is to find this new paradigm, this new way of thinking about video production and kind of educating them as to what some of the tools are that are available. Helping them maybe to think bigger. That maybe I’ve been doing kind of these traditional effects and now I can do bigger Hollywood effects. You know, it’s definitely a challenge. Getting the word out is a bit of a challenge. And finding the right markets for this. Really, where is this robot going to help the most people? We have some of the big companies, big shoe companies, for example, are using our robots. They’ve got all these skews going out the door all the time, right? They make so many different products every single year, and it takes them hours to get all of the product pictures together to put up online. And companies are making more and more pictures and video. That’s the content that that sells, right? And so with our robot, they find that they used to take hours moving around this shoe or this piece of merchandise and getting the pictures. Now, they’ll put the shoe on one robot and the camera on another robot, and they zoom around at high speed and they get all the pictures and all the video in a matter of seconds. And so helping customers understand that I can get all my marketing done for shoes or for cars, or for whatever it is—where it used to take a long time, I can get it done much more quickly. I think that’s kind of a challenge as well.

It’s a lot of fun. It’s very different, right? Our customers used to be all these industrial customers and now it’s kind of this Hollywood crew and they’re very different people, but it’s a lot of fun at the same time. And it’s interesting the overlap that we’re seeing.

It’s not where I’ve been most comfortable, I’ll be honest. There’s so much going on with my family, and work, and church responsibilities, and those kind of things that I actually don’t watch much TV. And I’m kind of mean. I make my kids work all the time. And so I say I don’t, like them to watch TV, and I like them to work. So what do I do for a living? I make robots that make people not have to work and that create movies. So it’s a little bit different. It’s interesting, but it’s a fun world to be in at the same time. You know for me, the thrill is seeing these small companies grow and be successful. Or to see some big production where… an example would be that we had a robot on an H B O Max shoot the other day. They’re used to getting five to ten shots. We talked to the director and asked how many shots he got. He said, “I got 86 shots in one day. It was amazing. I’ve never seen that before with a cinema robot.” So that’s exciting for me. And then going to the movies and seeing a shot and saying, “I know how that was made.” That’s pretty cool.

That’s a good question. Being an engineer, of course, I grew up watching Star Trek. I remember in Star Trek VI, they talked about how back in Holland, they flung their wooden shoes called Sabot into the machines to stop them, right? And that’s where sabotage comes from. There’s always been this fear, ever since anybody made a machine at all, that life would change. And it does. There’s been this fear that jobs would go away. What’s interesting with robotics is if you look at the number of robots that are sold, you know, of course that’s been ramping up significantly over time and is accelerating. But if you look at the jobs that have been created—and there’s these dips, right? As you know, robots will go up and down and the numbers sold. But if you look at the jobs that are created, jobs actually go up when robots go up. It’s because these companies can do more. For example, if we sell a robot to a cinema company, maybe their cameraman gets nervous and says, well maybe I don’t have a position anymore. It’s not the case at all. These companies are able to do much more than they used to do. They’re able to get more content out. They’re hiring more editors, they’re hiring people to run the robots. The cameraman, maybe he used to point the camera on the tripod. Now he knows how to program a robot and he’s running the robot. And so they’re just hiring all around. So that’s what we see. The jobs do change. I’m not naive enough to think that there aren’t jobs that are automated away. It does happen. So just in general, I think that the burden is on everybody to continuously educate themselves. And it doesn’t matter where they are, just learning a new skill. I think that’s just going to be something we’re going to have to do as automation increases. I also think we’re up to the challenge. It’s really been fun to watch people come into our company and as we automate and do different things, giving them opportunities to learn and to grow.

We actually had somebody approach us with that one time, and it was an intriguing problem. We did a quick prototype that actually worked. But it’s a difficult problem. There’s some other people working on it, and we decided that wasn’t one we wanted to tackle, My wife asked me about that constantly. She also says, “Why do I have dull knives? You have a knife sharpening company over there. Why are my knives still dull?”

I think it’s stuff that most everybody’s looking at right now, from a short-term perspective, which is supply chain. It’s difficult for us to get parts, just like everybody else right now. We have shipments that are delayed. We have customers that are patient, but it’s hard for them. Finding people is especially difficult. And more so on the assembly side, the manufacturing side. As we grow, we’re making more cinema robots, we’re making knife sharpening robots and finding people to put those together I think is very challenging.

I think longer term…look, things are changing so quickly with technology that the burden’s on us to constantly be reading and watching and educating ourselves to know how we need to shift and what we should we be creating next. And how are people engaging with robots, how are they using them? We’re just learning more about that over time. So I think just being responsive to the market is going to be an important challenge.

I would agree. There are opportunities. There are also some challenges. We bought this facility. It was a machine shop, and then we added onto it about four years ago to triple the size of it. And we’re about ready to grow out of it. We’re looking for space right now. And it’s just interesting, you know? We’ll go visit a spot and we’ll like it and then the next week it’s bought up. So finding the right kind of space is challenging. We’re having to build those farther and farther out. And as we go farther out, is it still in a location that our employees can conveniently get to work? I think it’s a little bit difficult. Of course, the costs are going up for everything. Especially land values around the Austin area. Things have gone way up and so prices have to increase and helping explain that to customers who are already paying a lot more for a lot of other things too, it can be difficult. I think we’re navigating all those things. But overall, you’re right. Central Texas is right in the middle of things. All these great companies that are moving here, there’s a lot of opportunity coming.

The next one on our horizon is actually a grinding robot. They got these great folks that are in the trenches, grinding steel, sanding things. It’s dirty work. It can be monotonous. But there’s also a skill to it that these folks have that they’ve developed. They’re very good at. And so being able to create a robot where somebody who knows how to grind something can come in, and just in a few minutes, program it to do what they were already working on, and kind of multiply their efforts. That’s what we’re doing. We have a prototype going at a local company here that early indications are, it’s very successful. They’ve got some guys who came up to speed on it in just about a day. We want to roll that out here in 2022, get that productized, and then looking for the next thing. We’ve got a few ideas on that. So that’s what’s next.