Boris Sofman Went from Leading Autonomous Trucking at Waymo to Building Bedrock Robotics

**Boris Sofman** (0:00)
Over $700 billion of data centers being built this year, and it's going to be over a trillion next year. It's just unbelievable. But when you look at the labor pool, there's a kind of this generational transition where people have not been going into construction, and so the retirement rate is accelerating. There was already a 500,000 worker shortage just as a baseline. That's being exacerbated with the demand, and some of our partners are telling us they're expecting 50% retirement in the next seven years. And so what we're doing is we're enabling fully autonomous heavy machines starting with construction, to enable effectively turning these machines into operatorless machines where Bedrock becomes the digital operator in the software services around it, and enables the general contractors in construction, or the miners and quarries and mines, and farmers and agriculture to be able to operate these machines.

**Alexa von Tobel** (0:51)
Welcome to Inspired, I'm Alexa von Tobel. Construction is one of the most dangerous jobs in America. Demand is at an all-time high, and the industry is facing a shortage of almost half a million workers with no end in sight. Boris Sofman has spent his entire career building robots that work in the real world. He co-founded Anki, which ships almost 4 million consumer robots globally. He then went on to lead autonomous trucking at Waymo, where he was part of the team that pioneered what is now the world's most advanced driverless vehicle program. And now he's taken everything he's learned across both of those chapters, and applied it into machines that literally build our world. Boris is the co-founder and the CEO of Bedrock Robotics, a company that is almost valued at $2 billion, that retrofits existing construction equipment into fully autonomous machines. In this conversation, we're going to talk about what it actually takes to make heavy machinery driverless on an active and dangerous job site, his fascinating predictions for autonomous vehicles in our cities, why he's more skeptical about humanoids than almost anyone else in the field, and why physical AI may be the most defining technology story of the next decade. Let's dive right in. If you're running a startup, we know things like managing equity and communicating with investors are always top of mind. Carta has built a connected suite of tools that over 40,000 companies use to do just that. Their platform of software and services helps you lay the groundwork so you can focus on building. To learn more or get started, visit carta.com. With that, let's welcome Boris. Boris, first of all, I'm so excited for this conversation on many fronts, both all of your experience on autonomous trucking and where that's heading, and then obviously on autonomous robotics. So just welcome. Thank you so much for coming here today.
It's a pleasure. I want to start with the beginning.
And before we dive in, I'd love to talk a little bit about how you got here in life. You were born in the Soviet Union, later immigrated to the United States.
I would love just to get a sense of a formative moment in your childhood that you feel like launched you to where you are today.

**Boris Sofman** (2:51)
So I was born in Moscow, like right in the heart of the Soviet Union. My parents had been trying to leave for well over a decade, and you just couldn't. That feels like such a foreign concept today. They were finally able to leave in 1989 It was actually one of the earliest families that were allowed to leave, and my dad was actually pretty deeply involved in helping coordinate families of Russian scientists and mathematicians and engineers that through coordination with the US government were negotiated to be able to leave the Soviet Union. I was six years old, and so we moved through a few countries in Europe and ended up in New York, lived in Brooklyn for a bit, and then through my dad's work ended up in Texas, where he was in telecommunications doing large scale optimization. So I was in Dallas suburb for most of my childhood.
And so I was always excited about mathematics and engineering, and video games was actually one of the things that got me interested in AI, where I still remember there's a famous computer game series called Civilization, where you're basically kind of simulating the history of the world and kind of playing Civilization, thinking about research and units and everything. And the complexity was so immense, which was part of the appeal of the game. The AI was okay, but not great at all. And I started to think about what are the kind of algorithms that drive the kind of coordination of all these systems. And that actually got me interested in engineering and computer science, which took me to Carnegie Mellon. And it's funny, because today my 11-year-old son, I got him into civilization, and normally parents would be upset when their kids get into video games. And I'm strangely proud that my son's following my footsteps.