Interviewee
David Rodriguez, Co-Founder & Head of Business at Kiwibot, a company disrupting the world with a new approach to delivery. He was the first non-technical employee, and ever since the beginning , he has enjoyed the privileges of being essentially the growth hacker that has taken Kiwi from an MVP with wheels, to more than 200 robots in 5 countries.
Transcript
David Rodriguez: Hey Elisa, thank you very much for having me here. My name is David. I run Business at Kiwi and I'm super excited to share our story. So I graduated as an economist in Colombia, like the other co-founders. I've worked in finance. I have a career in philanthropy and recently in technology, which has been my passion and the place where I wanna spend the rest of my life.
Elisa Muñoz: Now that you're mentioning that you studied economics, why did you have a sudden interest in robotics? Why would you say it was the main trigger for you to start this project?
David Rodriguez: I think that fundamentally there is always a passion between social science and technology, and science in general. Like how do we bring methods to improve human experience by introducing technology and all the forms of knowledge? My family has a background in engineering and architecture. So all of these elements have always been very present in my life and I'm super excited that we can apply them in a real context.
Elisa Muñoz: I know that you guys joined the accelerator program at Berkeley. What was that experience like? Were you nervous? Did you know what was going to come out of that program?
David Rodriguez: No, absolutely not. We came to the US trying to expand the work that we did with our previous company that was actually founded by the other co-founders, one of them Felipe Chávez. The idea was to create a startup, to make deliveries from students to other students. This was following the creation of the first grocery delivery company in Latin America. Coming to the US was a huge adventure changing environment and the dynamics of market economy and time management for people dictated there needed to be a different alternative.
Elisa Muñoz: I did a little bit of research and you mentioned that at the beginning, Kiwi was only for college students, right? How has this changed since 2017?
David Rodriguez: So one of the most eye opening moments in our company was the pandemic. We considered ourselves a robotic delivery system that runs on college campuses and essentially serves students in general. It was after the pandemic that we had an experience with the eight foundations where we started operating and we launched in Detroit, Pittsburgh, Miami, and San Jose in California. And this led us to understand that what we do is not only whims for students, it's actually a dream of increasing accessibility for cities, a dream of informing public policy into how to make cities open for everyone, that in this world, we have food deserts.
We have a variety of instances where having access to the world around you is something more vivid than just serving snacks for students. So essentially by tackling cities, by tackling other environments different from college campuses, we can increase quality of life. And ultimately that's what drives us.
"I think the most rewarding experience is that you can serve more people, you can scale faster, you can impact people at scale. I'm very proud to say that with new robots, we're building the largest delivery network in the world".
Elisa Muñoz: Wow. So you started as a B2C, and now you have changed to B2B. What would you say it has been the most rewarding experience about this change?
David Rodriguez: I think the most rewarding experience is that you can serve more people, you can scale faster, you can impact people at scale. I'm very proud to say that with new robots, we're building the largest delivery network in the world.
Elisa Muñoz: Do you remember your first prototype? How was it like?
David Rodriguez: Yeah. When we went down to UC Berkeley, we saw that students didn't know how to react to the robot. And we are very keen about behavioral economics. So we learned a framework from a psychologist that won the Nobel Prize of Economics in 2003, Daniel Kahneman, where we realized how expectations are right behavior and in the way that you can tweak people's expectations, that behavior is gonna change. So it's a factor of three things. First of all, the robot is small. Sidewalks are sacred and we cannot have technology that is competing with a wheelchair that is competing with other forms of urban mobility second. Okay. The fact that the robot has ice, when you're a baby, the first thing you're recognizing others are their eyes.
So you create empathy through the eyes. It always happens like that. So we have a small, cute robot that is no bigger than the distance from shoulder to shoulder who is triggering your small animal instantly. And this is fantastic because you are not to love the robot before you actually interact with it. And when you come close, you love it. And I think no one else has achieved this level of human and robot interactions in the history of robots deployed on the right of wages.
Elisa Muñoz: So let's go back to the beginning, after building the product. I know that you guys created a navigation stack. How was the acceptance from people?
David Rodriguez: The acceptance has always been good. I can tell you a secret. We do not do the traditional marketing campaigns. We run through memes. So if you look at UC Berkeley, we're still at the, at the main page of the biggest main page, our stickers and Giffy go north of a couple million views. See the number, it's incredible. So essentially we try to go with the culture. We try to flow with it. What's natural for people. So we've always been very lucky about that.
Elisa Muñoz: And what would you say that has been the biggest technical challenge that you have that you guys have managed to solve?
David Rodriguez: Good question. So when you, when you think it through, autonomy is always gonna be the ultimate goal. Every single company in this space has a group of solid engineers fighting to get the robots to the tunnels. I cannot talk a lot about this, but we're gonna make a move and we're gonna make a move.
Elisa Muñoz: Okay. Well, that's great. What are the next steps for Kiwi? Let's say in three to five years.
David Rodriguez: I would say that I would say that at this point, expansion across college campuses is paramount. Today. We live in 27 universities. That number will continue to grow exponentially. We are opening operations in the middle east. We are participating in some of the most interesting development projects in Saudi Arabia. We are even running experiments in Latin America, cuz why not?
And I think what excites me is that universities are this beautiful place where students live all year. Not necessarily just during school, it's this place where you can start navigating city streets. You can expand coverage, you can start operating at night. So I think that working with our main vertical English campuses, expanding on this vertical is gonna be critical for our success. Definitely we are exploring and have good advances on several other verticals that are out there. We are very excited about opportunities.
We have some elements that are different to what we traditionally do that serve the community and have even better unity economics, but those will be seen step by step. But yes, we're doing more than deliberate college campuses. As much as we know our focus is this and we prove this is what we should be doing now.
Elisa Muñoz: Do you have any advice for future entrepreneurs starting on this path?
David Rodriguez: Do it. I mean like, the hardest part is starting and the hardest part is navigating uncertainty, but freedom is always one step away from that insecurity. The moment you step into darkness, you will find yourself and you'll navigate.
My advice would be to find yourself. You'll find yourself surrounded by people that will wanna help you focus on a passion, develop a passion. If you just graduated college, please, please, please join a startup as an employee. That's the best experience and the best route to learning big things. I'm passionate about this. I think I found what I wanna be doing for the rest of my life.
Elisa Muñoz: Perfect. Thank you so much, David for taking the time.
David Rodriguez: It was my pleasure.
