Felipe Chavez, CEO of Robot.com, wants to use robots to fill in the jobs people don't want.
Courtesy Robot.com
For Felipe Chavez, the future of robotics might look something like an idyllic yogurt commercial.No, really. During Business Insider's visit to Robot.com's headquarter in San Francisco on Thursday, Chavez, who is the co-founder and CEO, took out his laptop and played a Chobani commercial.The video had the whimsy of a Studio Ghibli movie. Light flutes played over scenes of frolicking children, while farmers, animals, and robots peacefully co-existed with the natural world. There was balance. And yogurt.In Chavez' vision, the organic world is still prioritized, animals are "very important," and people pursue the things that they enjoy like art or cooking. Nothing is wasted on the superfluous and mundane — in part, thanks to robots."The mission that we have as a company is to bring automation to the physical world, to free human beings from labor that they don't want to do and that they can now actually pursue their meaningful life," he said.It's a loftier way to frame Robot.com's bet: Machines will first take over the boring, repetitive, physical work that so often leads to high turnover.Chavez said he came to the realization as he was making deliveries for his first startup. Before launching Kiwibot in 2017, a campus robot delivery outfit that later became Robot.com, Chavez ran a grocery-delivery company akin to Instacart in his home country of Columbia. The startup was completely bootstrapped, he said, which sometimes meant he completed some deliveries himself.
