Brian Gerkey

The idea that you could write code and then make something physical happen in the world, that was just so compelling.

And then I stuck with it, went through grad school, stuck with robotics, and did...

a series of things.

But for me, what I discovered along the way is I'm really a tool builder.

So I think of myself as someone who is providing people with the tools, especially the software tools that they need to program robots, whether they're programming robots for in a lab because they're doing science because they're like in a grad program or they're students who are learning robotics, which by the way, is now increasingly happening at like a high school and a middle school level, like much before people get to college, which is a fantastic thing.

Or they're in industrial research or they're going after increasingly products, like they're doing product development.

And so along the way, I spent a lot of my time building robot software platforms, let's say.

And a lot of that work has been open source.

So my team and I built an open source platform called ROS, which is pretty widely used throughout the robotics ecosystem.

in a bunch of different applications.

We had a commercial side of that company that was acquired by Intrinsic now a little over three years ago.

And that's how I came into Intrinsic.

Awesome.

Very cool.

But there is a real difference in when you're writing software that is interacting with the physical world versus writing software that is interacting with, say, a network or a database or a display.

So that physical interaction means that you're bringing in sensor data.

So you're writing a robot application.

It means your inputs are ultimately they become binary, right?

Ones and zeros.

But the...