“As a new father at the time, number one pain point, feeding my kids.” @Augmodo started with @rossfinman driving 100 miles in a minivan looking for baby formula during the 2022 shortage. Stores said they had it in stock. They didn’t. Ross had already sold his first startup to Niantic, where he spent years working on computer vision and mapping. Then it clicked: “Oh, okay, this is actually a computer vision mapping problem.”

"We have 5,000 images of aisle four from 50 different people walking down that aisle. What are the best three..." Run a hundred-billion-parameter model on all of them? "Way overkill." @rossfinman on why physical AI is a context problem, not a model-size problem.

“I’m terrible at first ideas, but great at getting whacked by the market.” Our favorite line from @rossfinman. @Augmodo’s hardware evolution proves it: AR glasses. Then a camera in a hat. Finally, a customer asked, “Can you just make it a brick that bounces down the stairs?”

Augmodo founder @rossfinman grew up on a 1,200-acre llama farm in Idaho. He later told us you've “never experienced true fear until you've been chased down by 400 pounds, a very awkwardly galloping alpha llama.” His teenage rebellion was swearing off farming and building robots from PCB boards, coat hangers, and tuna cans instead.