Ryan Gibson, Eclipse Partner on Physical AI, Robotics and Industry

Grace Gong (0:01)

Hi, Ryan, please come to Venture with me.

Ryan Gibson (0:03)

Hey, thanks, Grace. Thanks for inviting me. I'm glad to be here.

Grace Gong (0:08)

You're welcome. I'm ahead of our conversation, but before we get into it, I want to quickly thank our wonderful sponsor. This episode is prepared with Nebius, an ideal and promising solution for innovators in the She sphere. Nebius provides infrastructure for She, which can be used to combine reliability and speed with flexibility and support, which are not compared to hyperscalers. Leaders of the She branch, like Meta, Shopify and Higgs, are already cooperating with Nebius to launch their work loads. In addition, startups with venture financing can save up to $ 150,000 on accounting expenses, applying for access. Visit nebius.com or nebius.com to learn more about the startup. So, let's get started. I would like to start with your experience. To be honest, I am delighted with the Eclipse team. Of course, I love one of your portfolio companies, Bedrock, and I feel that Boris, Kevin and the team are doing really amazing things. In addition, I see that lately, Laura's work is very much shooting in the Lincolns.

Ryan Gibson (1:01)

Of course.

SPEAKER_3 (1:01)

So I want to start with the fact that before we move on to Eclipse, maybe we will talk about your experience, because you have such a valuable experience, I was working at EBC, and I was the co-founder of the company before I returned to investing. Maybe we could talk about the lessons you learned at the beginning of your career that shaped you as a person today. Yes, great question, great question. I always took the next step in my career while I was learning and hoping to learn and hope to change the world for the better. And each of these stages gave me a lot. I studied at the University of Waterloo in Canada, And this gave me the opportunity to use a variety of perspectives during my studies.

I was able to work in Google, Facebook, Microsoft and see what are such wonderful ideas.

Ryan Gibson (1:51)

In Google, Facebook, Microsoft, I saw how you Let's... see how quality engineering and ambitious projects look like. I guess, the most important thing I took out of that experience, in particular, during my work at Microsoft after the release, is how the golden standard engineering looks like. As an electrical engineer and computer engineer, I worked with teams that actually had unlimited budgets Thank you for watching.

But I also found out about the other side of such companies. Unfinished money and world class engineering do not necessarily guarantee the creation of wonderful products.

Thank you. Thank you for watching. The opposite side of big organizations and the fact that they may lack the opportunity to introduce innovations and supply products of such quality that force the client to buy and sell them. I took a lot of useful lessons, a lot of both positive and negative work experience in big technological companies. The culmination of this was the work in Microsoft on the release of HoloLens, the first and the second versions. It was a good example of the added reality, which, in my opinion, was quite early for its time and reached quite impressive heights. Then I worked in 8VC and it was incredible. It was an accidental opportunity to work in Venture to someone named Alex Golachich and Joe Lonsdale just when the company had just started its activity. And I would say that it was the biggest formative experience in the early stage of my career. I just fell in love with startups and venture capital. I saw the power of very small teams that work with a very clean structure of incentives to create products that are important for customers, which is the only incentive when making decisions about technology, going to the market, How do you spend your days and what is cultured in the enterprise? It was enlightenment, and it was very different from my experience of working in large tech companies. It was like heaven and earth. And I also understood that startups That's what I want to do in the course of my career. I have seen the effectiveness of small teams, and from the point of view of the invested dollar of the created product, startups win many times, and I also like this effectiveness. So, I found out that there are wonderful people who build startups, and there are wonderful people on the side of venture capital. It was a branch that was actually quite foreign to me, But I'm really grateful, that 8VC team accepted me, and I was able to do a great job there. It turned out, that I got a lot more than I expected. I also understood, that I want to build a company with someone, and I also built a company with my co-founder Maria. We created and scaled a construction-technology company to several hundred million. The lessons learned from this are big and deep, I use these names in my work in Eclipse, which I will tell you about in a moment, but I have learned a lot of things about how to build companies.