The last time James Kuffner and I spoke was on the eve of world-transforming change. I interviewed TRI-AD (Toyota Research Institute – Advanced Development)’s then-CEO on March 3, 2020, at a robotics and AI event on the U.C. Berkeley campus. We set up extra Purell stands around the venue, while our corner of the world remained open for the time being.
We spoke about TRI’s plans for the Olympics in Tokyo that summer. A few weeks later, the entire event would be pushed back a year — the first such postponement in history. In the years that followed, Covid-19 tested the limits of health, communication, commerce, trade, and virtually every essential piece of human cohabitation. Technology offered the obvious solution for many, in the form of Zoom meetings and telehealth.
The moment also marked a turning point for robotics investments, as more organizations looked to automation. Companies faced difficulty meeting increased demand for e-commerce, as stay-at-home orders restricted employee movements. Even as such requirements loosened and disappeared, staffing shortages persisted, particularly in fields requiring manual labor.
Much of Kuffner’s work at the time revolved around Japan’s longstanding concerns with an aging population. In that way, TRI’s focus on automation can be seen as anticipating Covid’s fallout — even if most of the world was caught off guard by how work and care seemed to change overnight.
Kuffner has changed jobs and geographies since the last time we spoke. The executive had relocated back to the States and stepped into the CTO role at Symbotic, the Massachusetts-based warehouse automation firm that made a name for itself through high-profile partnerships with grocery and retail giants like Albertsons, Target, and Walmart.
Transitioning from TRI to Symbotic meant a change in focus from concepts like Woven City, Toyota’s “test course for mobility,” to the more immediate concerns around retail and logistics management in the real world.
“I’ve been very lucky that I get to work not only thinking strategically about what’s coming next. I get to work on solving problems today for customers,” says Kuffner. “I love doing that. I learned a lot building up and managing Woven, but there’s a lot of things you do as CEO that isn’t related to the technology. It’s just all the other things, HR and all that stuff, which I love, and I enjoy a lot just working with really bright engineers to solve hard problems and make customers happy.”
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Symbotic was founded in 2007 as CasePick Systems by grocery billionaire Richard Cohen. The firm got its current form five years later, around the time Amazon System took key steps toward transforming logistics robotics through its purchase of Kiva Systems. Much of the intervening time has been a push to determine precisely what concern needs to focus on. A number of high-profile partnerships from the likes of Target and Walmart have provided an important north star.
“When I looked at Symbotic, I thought, ‘wow, this company’s actually been around for over 18 years, and it took them like a decade to get product market fit and get a product that works.’ But now we have a huge backlog and it’s nice to be at a company where you have a lot of customer demand.”
While not unheard of in startup land, a decade to find market fit can feel like several lifetimes. Symbotic, however, had the support and funding required to go after the big fish.
“You could try to go after the lowest hanging fruit, but you do it knowing that there’s going to be a cap on your ROI and maybe limitations with adoption because you end up with a lot of poor density metrics,” says Kuffner. “Or you could go after the harder problem. And it took 10 years before they really got the technology working and got a customer to make big orders. But then you suddenly unlock so much more value. And I think by really focusing on that, trying to solve it, and then solving it at scale has allowed Symbotic to really jump ahead. And now I’m really excited about all the new things we’re doing. There’s huge customer demand.”