Скачать или смотреть Closing the Adoption Gap in Factory Robotics

“Robots are the only way my business survives, but it’s not viable for me.”

Formic founder and CEO Saman Farid joins Brett Gibson, managing partner at Initialized to unpack why that mindset keeps factories from adopting automation and how Formic closes the gap. They cover: de-risking with financing, productizing complete robot work cells, and running fleets with teleoperation, intelligent error recovery, and careful staging to hit factory-grade uptime. You’ll hear why palletizing is the ideal first beachhead, how the team cut deployment costs roughly in half, and why they say no to one-off requests until they can be productized. Saman also shares how the company resists “fun” engineering in favor of scale, injects controlled chaos into his company, uses daily 8 a.m. meetings for problem solving, and bridges the culture gap between the manufacturing and software industries.

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Follow Formic and Saman for more:

Formic: https://x.com/goformic

Saman: https://x.com/samanfarid

Content
00:00 “It’s not viable for me”—closing the adoption gap
00:44 What Formic does & where robots work today
02:24 Engineer → VC → founder: why start Formic
04:38 Adoption vs flashy demos. Solve one task well
05:47 De-risking with financing; manual first, then automate
08:23 The playbook: scope, build modules, deploy, operate
10:36 Work cells, not just arms
13:38 99.9% uptime
15:01 Why palletizing was the first beachhead
16:49 Cutting costs per deployment
18:08 Saying “no” & expanding scope the right way
21:15 Resisting “fun” engineering to serve more factories
22:07 Injecting chaos into your company
23:34 Daily 8am to crack hard problems
25:40 Culture clash: manufacturing × software
27:24 Evaluating new robots, regional rollouts
31:24 Where AI helps across the org
37:11 What’s next: more robots, more tasks, more factories