Victor Boyd built an autonomous forklift from scratch — and deployed it in a pharmaceutical warehouse

that one we're still waiting on. But uh lot of good interesting predictions. Uh Jason Schuman says, "Wild how accurate these predictions were." And they were in fact.

Wow.

Very.

Without further ado,

yes, we have our first guest of Teal Fellowship, Gigastream. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Great guys. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today. Uh, introduce yourself and the company.

Yeah, I'm Victor Boyd. Uh, we're building autonomous forklifts. The the real goal of all of this is, uh, get anything anywhere in just a few hours and we're starting with what we think is right and we're going to do everything it takes to get there.

How vertically integrated do you want to be on day one? You want to retrofit? Is this the comma AI of forklifts or is this the Tesla of forklifts on day one? What are you thinking? Yeah, we actually started thinking we'd be the K AI of forklifts. Uh, but you know, cars have canvas standardized since 2008. It's software problem to get control over a car. You know, the difference between cars is just software. The difference between forklifts, even if it's the same forklift, same year, even the internals will look different from each other pretty often.

So, if you want to build like a kit that goes on any forklift,

it doesn't actually make sense.

So, we tried that. Uh, we did. And then, you know, we realized, okay, that's not the way to go. Then we decided, you know, let's just retrofit one forklift. You know, one model, you know, we'll deal with the differences on throughout the years, but at least it'll be okay.

Yeah,

we tried that. That also sucked. Uh, you know, it was just unreliable. It wasn't fast enough for the customer. We were kind of where everybody else was in the market. You know, this this isn't the most original ideal in the world. Everybody knows like

Yeah, construct big Well, there's also big there's applied intuition like there's big company there's big companies in the category that have been running at this problem for a long time. you kind of probably have, you know, you got a speedrun trying a bunch of different approaches and figure out what work.

But the same thing happened in the car industry where you know Ford and Toyota were like, "Yeah, we're doing self-driving, too." And then it was like, "Okay, they can do some lane keep assist and some adaptive cruise control, but we're still I'm still waiting for even Tesla level FSD from like 3 years ago to roll out into like the major American car manufacturers. So, there's clearly an opportunity. So uh how do uh so where are you now? Did you build that first autonomous forklift? Like what went into that?

Yeah, I mean uh I think what Tesla did right was that they got control over their platform, right? We realized that, you know, that was going to be the thing for autonomous forklifts if you wanted to make it viable for customers. You actually had to, you know, make the platform viable for autonomy first. So we had to build our own forklift. And we did, you know, we built our own forklift in uh like Q4 last year uh through a manufacturing partner and it worked great, you know, done some iterations since then. Uh and now like we we are deployed and we're deployed in a very difficult environment. We're doing better than anybody else in terms of throughput and reliability which is really all we care about.

Uh we plan on continuing this year. What we want to do this year is we just want to make it uh you know a super scalable product because to be right honest it's not right now.

Sorry to sorry to interrupt but Uh what has there been a company in the last 10 years that decided to build a new forklift from the ground up or is this a category that has been generally overlooked as everybody has wanted to build new EVs and and platforms that are maybe um more exciting to some.

You know, there's some people that um kind of got halfway there like they would go with somebody else's design and make a few changes and think that that was enough. But realistically like you have to be in the process from the very beginning otherwise there's just all these trade-offs that are made in the design process that you know really affect you. It makes your product horrible. Uh so we did it from the scratch. You know we we have some offtheshelf parts but that's a motor, right? Like obviously I'm not going to design a motor from the ground up. I don't need to. I'll just use a forklift motor. But everything else needs to be me. Everything else has to be my design so that we can have full control over the system, iterate faster than anybody else and build the actual like real product that actually works.

Can you talk about the the environments that forklifts operate in? You mentioned that you're deployed in a difficult environment, but what's the standard environment and then how does your test case differ from that? I mean, the standard environment, you can think of like a a warehouse where they just ship a bunch of dog food, you know, uh let's say like 400,000 square feet. Um just lots of racks. Uh you know, it's not that difficult, right? Like if you cause product damage in a dog food warehouse, it just stinks. It does stink really bad. Like don't get me wrong, they're not going to be happy. But, you know, we we went into a pharmaceutical warehouse.

So, whereas in the dog food warehouse, like, okay, I damaged the pallet. Let's say I destroyed everything on the pallet. a couple thousand in a pharmaceutical warehouse. I destroy a whole pallet, dude, that's hundreds of thousands of dollars. So, I think like our idea behind it was, you know, this is an incredible forcing factor. This makes us like actually build a reliable product that's not going to cause damages.

And then when we are successful here, we get to show this to all of our other potential customers. Like, look guys, I know you've been burned by the industry before,

but look at how good we're doing in this place. I mean if we if we destroyed product in their place we wouldn't be there anymore because we would have already you know we it's a bad thing we don't do it.

Yeah. Uh talk about tea operation. Did you go down that path at all? Are you compatible with tea operation? Is there any value? Yeah, I I feel like this is such a unique environment because you can you can figure out autonomy, but there should be relatively easy way to like take over the system and just use an Xbox controller as as you get to full autonomy. I don't know if that's

Yeah.

What

I'm glad you said Xbox controller. That's what it is.

So, like when we do teley up, which is about 50% of the time right now, um it is with literally an Xbox controller. Uh there's like some things where they have to click on the screen to like select what pallet they need to pick up for example. But um when there's like some scenario where the robots's lost like a deoizes or uh we need some extra training data on some workflow then it's like yeah just pick up the Xbox controller. It's literally guys uh you know they're not on site they're they're somewhere thousands of miles away just getting it done.

Um it works perfectly. I think it's it's extremely valuable. I think it was a dirty word in the industry for a long time to say like remote operation which is which is really stupid because like customers don't care guys like you know the customers don't care if you're fully autonomous. Customers care if the work is done. So if you're over here like you know stressing about oh dude we're we're only you know 10% uh autonomous but you're getting the job done every single time and you're profitable. Like I mean obviously keep going for more autonomy, push those margins, but

dude the the customer could not care less.

Yeah,

totally.

We've we've said that to some humanoid

Yeah.

founders on this show and they're like, "No, it's got to be fully autonomous. It's the only way."

Yeah, it is it is like a less sexy narrative and so I think people want to deny it or something. But uh yeah, the the end work product makes the most sense. uh talk to me about the interaction modality for the human or the manager or the owner of the warehouse in a basically full autonomous mode because I imagine at some point you have to have a system that decides okay we actually need to dispatch an order to get that dog food off of the top shelf and there's a lot of different pallets that are stacked up at different levels and like what is the what systems are you plugging into? Or do you want this to be something where there's still a human in the loop managing and and dispatching orders and then they're sitting in an office maybe overlooking the uh the warehouse uh just just sort of giving orders. But like what is the path of the workflow?

Right now it's it's basically like uh the robots have this task that needs to get done every day pretty much all day. Uh this is very common in warehouses where

you know there's only a few things that you need to do every day and uh it just takes a really long time and you need to have it done by the end of the day but it doesn't really matter how fast it is.

Yeah.

And in those scenarios I mean you know you just kind of give the robot instructions. We have a map and you can set up like zones or shelves and uh you say like this is what's in this zone or this is what's on this shelf and it needs to go to this other zone or this other shelf and then the forklift just does it. I mean it, you know, it can be that simple. Eventually, um, you know, the idea is that I would like to be able to run the warehouse for the customer. Yeah. I don't want them to ever have to think about it at all. I'd rather it just be like, okay, we we are literally your pallet movement within this warehouse. We run your whole business anyway in terms of physical movement. We also have your inventory management. We can make decisions based off of that. We know your truck is going to be in here soon, for example. We'll just set up the staging for you. You don't have to tell us that has to happen. Yeah,

that's the the goal in the next uh next year.

Forklift is the wedge.

It's very very smart. Have you thought about We were talking about uh simulator games earlier. The chat is asking, have you thought about making a forklift simulator where normal people could play the game online,

but in reality they're actually helping you train sort of

like the capture your own.

Yeah. Getting training data.

You know, that's actually funny. I did think of that because I was looking for a game myself cuz you know like I've always been into logistics but I got into warehousing like a few years ago and like you know I looked on I looked everywhere dude. Um I even looked on Roblox like I was looking on Roblox. They don't they don't have any like good warehouse games man. It's such a shame.

Uh

somebody needs to do that. Maybe maybe somebody in your chat will do that for us.

Yeah.

How did you make your first dollar?

How did I make my first dollar?

Yeah. Uh, I think I I'm pretty sure it was when I was selling I sold candy on Easter when I was very young. Um, and I actually made money there. Uh, which is funny cuz like the kid I sold it to was literally walking with a basket full of candy. Like definitely more candy than I got that year. But I sold him this egg and I was like, "Dude, there's there's something really good in here and you want it, but I'm not going to tell you unless you give me

mystery box. Random reward.

Get this man to Las Vegas." Did you did you uh did you drop out from anywhere or were you just are you are you coming out of uh

high school?

High school.

Yeah, I dropped out of uh UAB. I I went to a state school in Alabama. I mean, I grew up there and then uh you know, I didn't have the money to go anywhere else and I didn't know I didn't want to go to school in the first place. So, you know, the second I uh got the opportunity um to fly out here uh to SF, I was like, "Okay, it's over. I'm leaving.

It's over." I love it.

Just getting started. Well, Victor, thanks so much for coming on and breaking it down.

Fantastic to meet you. I'm sure you'll be back to uh this year.

Good luck.

Yeah, guys, have a good one.

Cheers.

Up next, we have the anti-fraud company. If you hate fraud, you're going to love this company. Alex from the anti-fraud company uses

We got to ask him about those bears.

Oh, yeah.

Fake bear attacks.

Yeah, this is a big This is a big opportunity. Yesterday on the show, we were talking about an insurance scam where individuals dressed up in full bear costumes with fake bear claws and vandalized a Rolls-Royce ghost from 2010 and then filed an insurance claim, which