Most of us are familiar with the podcasts about robotics from the Robots Podcast group. For different perspectives, from the funder’s point of view, here’s a list of podcasts from the VC’s that fund robotics and technology ventures — funders like Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Greylock Partners and Y Combinator.

Venture Capitalist POVs

Erin Griffith said: “It’s starting to seem like every firm wants to be in the literal ears of entrepreneurs.” She compiled this list for her Fortune Term Sheet column. After listening to a few different podcasts, I found it an entertaining, informative and fascinating way to get insight into VC thinking.

• a16z podcast by Andreessen Horowitz
• The Riff by Box Group‘s David Tisch and Union Square Ventures‘ Andy Wiessman
• Traction by NextView Ventures
• Collective Wisdom for Tech Startups by Founder Collective
• Startup School Radio by Y Combinator
• Ventured by Kleiner Perkins
• The Balderton Podcast by Balderton Capital
• Notion Capital, by Notion Capital
• Venture Perspectives by Scale Venture Partners
• Origins by Notation Capital
• Lead by Menlo Ventures
• Greymatter by Greylock Partners
• Bothsides TV by Upfront Ventures
• The Full Rachet by Nick Moran of New Stack Ventures
• The Bootstrapped VC by Backstage Capital
• Human Proof of Concept by Janelle Anderson of CTI Life Sciences
• Acquired by David Rosenthal of Madrona Ventures
• Masters of Scale by Reid Hoffman

Robotics Focused Podcasts

The Robots podcast is run by Robohub and creates bi-weekly interviews with leaders in the field. Robohub is a non-profit independent organization run by volunteers. To date, the podcast team has produced 232 podcasts. Robots is available via Soundcloud, Apple iTunes and all other major podcast servers.

The 2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) took place in October, in Daejeon, Korea. IROS is an annual robotics conference that seeks to “explore the frontier of science and technology in intelligent robots and smart machines, and to stimulate innovative ideas, exchange technological perspectives and assess future directions in the field of intelligent robots and smart machines with a view to promote progress and prosperity for all nations.”

All images by Robots Podcast interviewer MeiXing Dong.

Be sure to listen to upcoming interviews from the conference on our Robots Podcast channel!

Link to audio file (22:28)

In this episode, Sabine Hauert talks with Erin Kennedy at the Open Hardware Summit at MIT. Kennedy is famously know as RobotGrrl, the self-made roboticist and proud maker of the RobotBrrd, Buddy 4000 and BotBait. Starting at age 13, she taught herself programming, electronics, pcb design and mechanical engineering. She’s been sharing her passion for robotics through her blog and weekly G+ Hangout Robot Party that brings together robot enthusiasts to share their latest contraptions. She’s now bringing her work to the next level with robot kits commercialized through indiegogo last year and funded at 151%.

In the long term, Kennedy dreams of making robots creatures with their own personality and robo-culture.

Erin Kennedy is a maker and app developer based in Montreal, Canada. For years she has been documenting her quest to build social robots. Her main robot, RoboBrrd is an animatronic character designed to help kids learn about robotics. Her work has been featured in her RoboBrrd build-a-long video series, on Instructables, at many Maker Faires (Maker Faire NYC Editors Choice Award) and in mainstream media including WIRED and Forbes. Erin has also mentored a FIRST robotics competition team since 2009.

Links:

• Download mp3 (10.9MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• RobotGrrl Website

In Robots Podcast episode #93, Sabine interviews Erin Rapacki, who previously worked at DEKA, iRobot, and Anybots, and is currently Product Marketing Manager for Mobile Robots at Adept Technology. In the interview, she argues that robotics research should be more driven by real-world problems in need of marketable solutions, and that they should take advantage of available platforms, such as those available from Adept, rather than continually reinventing the mobility aspect of their projects. She also discusses the prospects for cloud robotics and states that many of the missing pieces roboticists have been waiting on have arrived, mentioning faster processors, tablet computers, and the Kinect. Ms. Rapacki recently authored a guest post on the IEEE Spectrum Automaton blog, titled “Dear Reader, I Have News for You: Robots Are Boring” in which she states: