Women Leading Visual Tech: “Robotics Makes Us Superhuman,” Says Carol Reiley, the Mother of Robots

LDV Capital invests in people building businesses powered by visual technologies. We thrive on collaborating with deep tech teams leveraging computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to analyze visual data. We are the only venture capital firm with this thesis. We regularly host Vision events – check out when the next one is scheduled.

Our Women Leading Visual Tech series is here to showcase the leading women whose work in visual tech is reshaping business and society.

Carol Reiley is a serial entrepreneur and a computer scientist with the nickname “Mother of Robots.” Her 20 years of academic expertise and industry experience lay in artificial intelligence and robotics with applications in medical space, space exploration, disaster rescue and much more. Carol is the first female engineer to appear on the cover of MAKE magazine and is listed as a top female businesswoman by Forbes, Inc, and Quartz.

She worked for Intuitive Surgical, Lockheed Martin, and General Electric. As an entrepreneur, she co-founded Drive.ai, a startup that managed to raise over $77 million, grew from an 8 person company to 200+ employees over 4 years and was acquired by Apple.

Reiley founded DeepMusic.ai, is a creative advisor and collaborator for the San Francisco Symphony, and a brand spokesmodel for Guerlain Cosmetics. She is also a published author of the children’s book “Making a Splash” in addition to her dozen scientific publications and 8+ patents.

Watch this short video and meet the next guest in our Women Leading Visual Tech series!

LDV Capital’s Abigail Hunter-Syed spoke with Carol about current trends in robotics and AI, hard decisions and the hurdles of starting a company in a highly regulated industry. (Note: After five years with LDV Capital, Abby decided to leave LDV to take a corporate role with fewer responsibilities that will allow her to have more time to focus on her young kids during these crazy times.)

The following is the shortened text version of the interview and the unedited video can be found below.

Abby: You have so many different roles, whether that's a collaborator for the San Francisco Symphony, the mother of robots and a daughter. What do you answer to the question, "Who are you?" How do you prioritize all these different roles in your life?

Carol: I aspire to be someone that is constantly growing and learning, guided by compassion and kindness. I don’t want to be defined by a single job and I hate staying stagnant. Whether it’s as an artist, author, businesswoman, technologist, I use these different roles to explore various sides of myself and find balance since I love to delve deep into a topic for years at a time. I tend to pick hard problems since they’re often the most interesting and unexplored and keep me intrigued. Technology has been a great way to tie things together for impact and allow the flexibility to go into different fields. I’m lucky that way. My formal education is as an AI roboticist where I work on human-machine interaction so I’ve always stayed at that intersection. I've started a few companies, so a serial entrepreneur seems like a current title. I’m someone that likes to build community, and teams that are caring, work hard and look out for each other.

But no question, my daughter has the top priority. It's where I’m most needed, get the most fulfillment, and I feel happiest spending my time.

“I don't start a startup because I want to. I do it because I find a problem that I may be uniquely qualified to solve and that bugs me so much that I can’t help but find a solution.”

Abby: You're always looking for the pain points that you can solve. Where did your fascination with robots start?

Carol: I wasn’t one of those kids that were coding since they were five or a gamer girl. I didn't quite know what I wanted to be growing up, probably because the job I wanted didn’t exist yet. I thought maybe a doctor because I wanted to do something meaningful, impactful, and help people.

I had my first hacker experience with engineering at age eight. My dad is an engineer and for my 2nd-grade science fair project, we jerry-rigged a safe mouse trap to capture our runaway hamster. There was nothing on the market that we could buy that wasn’t lethal. We managed to get my hamster safely back in her home. That was the first time that I recall the feeling of satisfaction using tools we had around the house already to solve an existing problem; that engineering was cool.

It wasn't until my freshman year of college that I started robotics. In my senior year in high school, I had been choosing between attending UCBerkeley where I would have majored in business, or Santa Clara University (SCU) for computer engineering. I chose SCU because I had been granted a full scholarship that was tied to me joining a research lab and because I thought it was a safer environment to learn engineering. At UCBerkeley, I knew I would have been intimated and “weeded out” of engineering. Since I'd never done any type of engineering, I knocked on the door of a mechanical engineering robotics lab and asked to join. Little did not know that that pivotal moment would lead me down this route twenty years later. I’m so thankful for my educational experience and teachers at SCU. It gave me the confidence and time to discover myself.

“My advice to young adults is to keep yourself open to constantly learn. Your job might not exist yet. You might invent the job that you want in the future.”

Abby: When you decided to study robotics, how many other women were in those classes with you at that point?

Carol: I attended Santa Clara University for computer engineering undergraduate studies and Johns Hopkins University for graduate. I would say more women were researching in the robotics discipline than other types of engineering like electrical, civil, or even computer science labs because it's so interdisciplinary and there are so many applications to it. In my lab, there were almost 50% women and maybe that was one of the reasons I was drawn to it.

I've been a computer scientist hidden underneath a mechanical engineer because I majored in computer science and my background is in coding, but I hung out in robotics labs which are mainly housed under mechanical engineering.

Robotics lab touches so many different skill sets, it's a collaborative environment. You work together to build systems. You have to do what needs to get done for the job to work. You rely on your electrical engineering skills to do the wiring and circuitry, mechanical engineering skills to physically design and put in the motors, sensors and actuators, and computer science background to program logic to it. It could be one person doing all three or it could be multiple people.

Abby: It seems like one of the reasons why you felt comfortable getting in the space is because you had so many other fantastic women around who were also interested in various aspects of it.

Carol: Having inspirational role models affects the whole tone and the culture of a center. In grad school, we were lucky because we were all under this umbrella research center, the Laboratory of Computational Sensing and Robotics at Johns Hopkins University. There were about 80 graduate students and multiple advisors, you can collaborate between labs. It was a fun time in my life.

My undergraduate and graduate advisors were amazing and aspirational. But some of the best advisors and bosses were males who were female advocates. Those champions are so important and could open a lot of doors.

Abby: Are there any examples of something fascinating for you in the current state of robotics and AI?

Carol: We're undergoing the fourth industrial revolution right now. People have been researching AI and robotics for decades. AI has made huge strides in the last decade and is currently integrated into various commercial products. While it used to be a niche field of a few researchers, a few hundred of us gathered together for conferences. Now you've got this explosion, where anyone who wants to learn it can do so. I’m excited to see what applications and opportunities people choose to pursue.

Another area that I'm interested in exploring is AI in the arts – seeing where AI can help artists be more creative and free them up. Not a lot of thought has been put into where technology can help artists and how artists help define what the future of music or painting is, and where it all goes. I founded and launched DeepMusic.ai with 3x Grammy winner Hilary Hahn to pair up top AI Scientists with world-class artists. I view AI as a superpower so I’m curious to see what happens in the hands of professional artists. We’re building a community and sharing the state of the art AI tools. We just had our world premieres of the first 3 pieces where human composers used AI tools OpenAI’s Musenet and AIVA.

Gift of the Machine - Composed by Michael Abels (who scored Jordan Peele’s Get Out and US soundtracks) Performed by pianist Dominic Cheli.

iDragon - Composed and performed by 2x Grammy-winning cellist Dana Leong.

out of body - Composed by Pulitzer Prize-winner David Lang. Performed by violinist Hilary Hahn.

“You might think it might take away some jobs, but I would say that the computer has been tremendously helpful for all of us doing our jobs. I’m also interested in AI exceeding human limitations and creating things that humans typically can’t do on their own.”

Abby: I can only imagine how the workflows of composers can be improved by the addition of AI.

Hopefully, we can find ways to remove and expedite the tedious parts of their job. Or find something new that inspires them to be more creative. Much like how electricity and the computer help us work more efficiently and faster. No more writing notes out by hand with candlelight. :)

Abby: I'm going to put you on the spot. When are we going to buy your first autonomous vehicle?

Carol: I don't think that consumer vehicles are anywhere close to being here, but we’ll have features that are assistive. Your first experience with a fully autonomous self-driving vehicle is probably going to be in public transportation. You would not own it. Why would you want to own a car that sits in a garage or on a parking spot for 22-23 hours of the day?

“I believe the future of cars is going to be dispersed, and it would be shared ownership.”

Abby: I like that answer. We often think about it in terms of “is it going to carry people or is it going to carry goods first?” Talking about autonomous vehicles, tell me about starting up your fourth company, Drive.ai. How did you decide it was the right time to get into it?

Carol: In 2008, I was with my Ph.D. advisor out at Stanford who was on sabbatical. I sat in Sebastian Thornton's lab for the year (started Google X) working next to his students who had just won the Urban Grand Challenge, so they were all self-driving car folk. I got demo rides and we discussed the latest breakthroughs in AI. I thought it was a cool, fun project, but it still felt too early for self-driving cars.

I moved back to the Bay Area in 2011 and things had changed at that point. There was a breakthrough in deep learning, so AI had leveled up. Google Brain had started. The self-driving car project had turned more serious. It felt like an interesting time and I had a background in regulatory product development and bringing out surgical instruments that needed FDA approval, so it was a hairy area to get a regulated product out.

There was a group out at Stanford AI lab that specialized in deep learning. Most of them had never worked or started a company before. They were bringing in a lot of different experts at the time to chat with them. I gave them advice on how you think about the regulatory issues and how to incorporate the company. Everyone was on the fence of, "Should I start a company?". For eight months they were back and forth, and then it was like “this has to happen or it's not going to happen” because kids are graduating, some were sitting on lucrative job offers from companies like Google and Facebook.

I decided the fastest way to get started was to seed fund the company myself. Nvidia generously donated all the GPUs. It was like “who has the guts to start it? We need to go or it's not going to happen.” So, we incorporated. I got us free office space in an incubator. There were eight of us, we knew each other, and we all sat in a whole row. There was a comradery and an understanding of what is needed to get done and everyone had their specialty. We were fortunate and lucky. We had an acquisition offer to buy the company the first week we pitched that we turned down.

That's how Drive was kickstarted.

Abby: Being your fourth company, it seems like you had a lot of connections already in the space to get you a free workspace and all these other kinds of things that can be imperative at the onset. Were there any critical lessons learned that you had from the experience that helped you overcome so many of the early hurdles and obstacles, especially in a huge industry like autonomous vehicles?

Carol: Every company is unique and a lot of logistical things need to get done. I was lucky to have people I knew in Silicon Valley who had started companies. A lot of times I didn't know what I was doing or I wasn’t doing it in the Silicon Valley-style, so I read like crazy and called friends for advice, "Can I run my pitch through with you guys? What would you do? What should we do now?". Having people who have done it before or reading blogs helped me hustle more efficiently. Time is your most valuable asset and there are too many things to do so it’s about ruthless prioritization and to keep moving. Another word of wisdom is “done is better than perfect”. We know this but this was one of the hardest lessons for me to learn. You don’t want to release subpar work but it’s good to get early feedback from people who can offer constructive criticism. It’s important that your team has trust in each other, accepts the risks, or communicates about what is acceptable.

Abby: Having those people around you that you trust is incredibly important to your journey.

Carol: It’s good to have a community of people who you trust. Being an entrepreneur is a lifestyle and personal journey – you’re consumed by your work, your insecurities, the millions of daily fires that come up all the while trying to inspire a vision as a leader and stay positive. People around you will see you as vulnerable and exposed at times. You need people who you trust who can be honest with you too. Some of the problems are the same for any new company, and some are different.

AI is also a transformative and fast-moving technology, which drives competition among startups. If you flashback to 2014-2015, there wasn't a space for autonomous cars yet. We got shot down by 33 VCs in Silicon Valley who said, "You guys are way too smart as a team to be working on too dumb of a problem. Self-driving cars are not going to happen.” One VC asked us to pivot to drones which was the hot thing that year. On the flip side, we received an acquisition offer the first week we started pitching. I’m glad we listen or do either of those paths because we knew something about the transportation industry and trusted our instincts on this paradigm shift. The following year, it was completely different and several of the VCs that turned us down came back and billions of dollars were being invested into self-driving cars. It’s amazing how quickly perspective changes around technology.

Abby: You guys are lucky that you only had 33 VCs turn you down instead of 330 or 3,330. Sometimes it takes talking to 500 people to get a single investment, especially in some of the things that are thought of as being science fiction at the moment.

Carol: Or you hear these miracle stories of people who only pitched once and got it. It makes you question, "What's wrong with us?" but every person has a different experience. Sometimes you meet the one and sometimes it takes a while. And we knew we were already so fortunate and had the right ingredients to be something great.

Abby: Taking into account all of your entrepreneurial experiences, can you tell me about one of the hardest decisions that you've ever had to make as a founder and maybe how you relied on your brain trust to help you make that decision?

Carol: There's a ton of hard decisions along the way and you never know if you're right or wrong.

Probably the hardest decision I had to make was choosing to leave the company, your baby. This was four years in and we had fundamental leadership issues that I didn't agree with. There were a lot of things about culture or fairness that I felt strongly about. And then we decided to sell. While this was not what I wanted to do or the outcome I wanted, there’s an “agree to commit” once a decision has been made. Life is short and I didn’t want to sit at a company with golden handcuffs biding time. We had eight co-founders which has pros and cons – a lot of voices and groupthink but a lot of people who care deeply about the company. I didn't believe in selling the company, but it was perhaps the best decision for this team.

“I don't start a company to sell it and make money.”

When that decision was made, it was a group discussion. I respected the decision and I stood on the board and as an advisor to help them towards that transition, which took us about two years. We had inbound offers from the first month that we started the company and in the end, sat on several offers trying to decide which one was the best fit. It's a hard personal decision and leaving the team I built was the hardest part. But I left it in great hands when we hired an awesome VP.

Abby: It sounds like a great learning experience for you, too, to understand that's a critical question to ask of your co-founders at the onset. It's one that we ask a lot in our due diligence process. “How much money would you sell this for?” If somebody walked in and offered you $50 million tomorrow, would you take it? Different people have different responses because everybody's got different personal circumstances or goals. If you're looking to build a business that's going to improve the way that the world works, ultimately having a goal of an M&A isn't necessarily what you want to be shooting for all the time.

Carol: It’s true, startups are different from big corporations. But sometimes it’s for the best if vision aligns and they can help the startup in ways that they couldn’t on their own. But you need to watch the impedance mismatch and be aligned. There needs to be a strong level of respect from both sides

Abby: Is that something that you took with you as you went forward and started to look at founding new companies? Is that now a question that you've always asked of your co-founders or potential co-founders?

Carol: That's not a question I ask since it depends on the situation. it’s hard to know what the company will be or who we will be down the road. Sometimes there is a partnership that makes a lot of sense and that is the best thing to do.

Carol is the first female engineer on the cover of MAKE magazine

After Drive.ai, I started another company. It was the company I was going to start before Drive.ai because I had that idea. I was starting to work on my current startup, and when Drive.ai came along, the timing was right. I could see self-driving cars were going to be huge. I saw it as a way to do preventative medicine to save lives because of so many car accidents. It aligned with my mission. Once I saw it in that light I became excited about the idea. For the last four years, it's been in my mind to start it. After I left Drive, it was immediate to jump to do this startup.

Abby: I had never made that connection between surgical robotics and autonomous vehicles before but it makes sense. Aiding people's lives and being preventative of injury seems like that's a huge connection.

Carol: It's the number one leading cause of death among young adults today.

Abby: It's one of the things that I talk about with my mom who's obsessed with COVID at the moment, is about how getting in your car and driving down the street to go to the grocery store is a much bigger risk than going in the grocery store and potentially catching COVID there.

Carol: I'll throw something else out at you, too. Think about how dangerous is getting an Uber, because you have no idea about the driving record behind your Uber driver, number of accidents, etc.

Abby: You see how friendly they are, that's about it.

Carol: Exactly. I’d say for people who are scared of self-driving cars – you have the whole history of the car and it would be visible to you how safe it is. It would be much safer than trusting the human to drive. Humans are prone to error and it's extremely dangerous.

Abby: Does that same thing carry over now into surgical robotics? You went to work for Intuitive, the market leader in the surgical robotics space. Would you feel more comfortable getting operated on by a robotic surgeon or by a person?

Carol: I’d trust surgeons who use the Da Vinci robot regularly and have those skills. It's got benefits such as hand tremor reduction, magnified views, it can scale up and down your motion, so it could be more accurate and precise in a way that supplements the human. The surgeon is still in full control.

“I believe in collaborative robotics. A human and a robot can work together based on their strengths. A robot never gets tired, has 360-degree views, 4 arms and it can enhance our limitations. All of that complements a human.”

I'm not asking for automated surgery. I'm looking to have a surgeon be in control, but our human weaknesses would get supplemented. I always say that robotics makes us superhuman. Things that we can't see with our natural, biological limitations, robotics and AI can help address. These are the types of things I'm interested in.

Abby: Every year we write an LDV Insights report where we do a deep dive into a sector that's ripe for disruption by visual technologies. Two years ago, we wrote a report on the healthcare space, where we looked at Intuitive and a bunch of other companies in the surgical space. We learned that the amount of time that you are in surgery can be 15-20 hours depending on what you're doing. Understanding that there's a better way to do it and having some assistance to make sure that it's much better from a safety perspective is one of the biggest things that was a finding of ours. Our 2020 report is all about food and agriculture. We were looking at visual technologies in this industry, new ways to make food safer and produce enough to feed the entire world.

Carol: That's a great trend. The food industry is an area that I've never touched but that I've been fascinated with. There’s a lot of value in having all that automated, clean, sterile, fast. Especially in the time of COVID.

Carol Reiley in Women Leading Visual Tech series.png

You've recently co-founded a new startup in the healthcare space, why did you decide to pursue your own company as opposed to being an intrapreneur at a company like Intuitive?

Carol: Many of my ideas are around cutting edge technologies that are just coming out of the research. I imagine it would be hard to have full autonomy inside a company and hard to find full alignment. Plus I want to start immediately and get moving. In a company, you most likely need to apply to a program and take time to wrap up current projects and only have a limited window of time to explore. The great thing about being an intrapreneur is that there are resources, infrastructure, smart people to help, tech support, money. There’s a big difference between research, building a product, and building a company. So it’s wonderful to explore an idea or build a product. It’s not good for building a company.

I loved my time working at Intuitive Surgical. It was not a huge company, and still had a lot of the values and things I like about startups. I learned a lot from smart people in all departments and how to work in a professional setting with different groups of people. It was 3,000 people when I was there around 2011. There's a lot of experiences that you can have, a lot of mentors you can gain from working at a strong, respected company.

There's a culture that's defined and processes that are in place that you don't appreciate unless you're starting your own company and you realize you're lacking the simple workflows.

“I recommend every entrepreneur to have at least one work experience at a large company to learn what is good about that. A service job is also important for every person. Additionally, take an ethics class.”

If you're unsure about taking the full step out to be an entrepreneur, try being an intrapreneur at your company or in residence at a bigger company. This could be a way to get resources and figure it out. You won't be so lonely too, because the path of an entrepreneur can be lonely.

Abby: Talking about loneliness and your first hires, is there anything that you look for with those first hires for your team to help you build a resilient business and start on the right track, especially when you're getting involved in highly regulated industries in the way that you have been?

Carol: One of my favorite interview questions to toss in at the end is for a candidate to describe their personality. It catches people off guard because a lot of people are good at interviewing and have prepared for all the expected questions. I don't think there's a right or wrong with describing your personality. That helps me determine how to manage a person. It also gives me insight into their self-awareness that I might not have picked up on during the interview process. Understanding their values and what is important to them has helped with smoother starts.

The second is to know my strengths and weaknesses and what I can do and can't do, and then try to find people that help round out the team. When you are small and scrappy, everyone is hustling, everyone's trying to do whatever their skillset can do, and sometimes you don't want too much of the same skill and a huge gap somewhere else, so you need your small team to be covering the bases.

Having a strong vision and goals aligned early on is the third thing. For instance, one thing I know about myself is that I'm good with a high level of ambiguity. For me, "Oh, we don't know this!" is fine, we'll figure it out and we'll keep going, and that can be disarming. That could be scary for a lot of people. They might need the order, they might need the steps and more clarity. If there's a change, it needs to be communicated. Those things are important for me to know. It's also important for them to know what type of person I am so that it doesn't scare them and we know how to work with each other.

“I look for hustle, integrity and then the distance traveled – where they started from and what they've had to work through as opposed to were given. If you went to Stanford to learn computer science, that doesn't mean much to me. I'd say, "Great. What else?"

Abby: What would you give as a piece of advice to women from technical backgrounds who are interested in starting up their own business?

Carol: I can’t speak for all and I hate generalizing, but what I notice with myself or having worked with several technical female employees, is hesitation with starting a company. My advice is to go for it! Some have wanted to be in more of a support role, but recently I have noticed that they are choosing to be the CEO now which I’m excited to see. We are all pioneers and take on so much. It’s amazing to hear everyone’s unique individual stories and have done a lot to get where they are. My advice was to embrace what you are and be bolder. I’ve just been so impressed and inspired.

My advice was to embrace what you are and be bolder. As hard as it is, try not to overthink it. Just do it!

Abby: At some point in time you have to jump. One of those things that I remember learning when I got out of undergrad is that there's no right and wrong. When you come from this environment where there's always a right answer and so you either got the right answer, you got the wrong answer, then all of a sudden you emerge into this world where it's all gray area, and you have to trust yourself at some point in time, do as much background check as you can, and then jump.

Carol: If you make a mistake, the thing that matters is how quickly you can adjust and continue. I feel like sometimes you get down and you want to stick with that decision. Sometimes it's good to let go and try to figure out how you correct and move in the other direction. It’s important to have hard conversations upfront.

A lot of times when I'm chatting with entrepreneurs, I hear "we haven't talked with my co-founder about equity and our roles." The longer you wait, the more invested in time you've given and both of you have different expectations, so it is probably to everyone's advantage to talk upfront about what you need, what you want and then make an agreement at that point so that it will be fair going on. It's not like a year down the road your co-founder is going to see you in a different light. If anything, you'd probably lose your leverage as you put more time in.

Abby: In a way, it would be like getting married without a discussion whether you want kids or not.

Carol: Time is your most precious commodity. You have to move fast.

Abby: A question that we wrap up all of our interviews with: if computers didn't exist, what would your career choice have been?

Carol: A piece of advice I got from a graduate school professor – change careers every 10 years, don’t be scared to start over again. I've taken that advice to heart because technology is moving so fast. It's been less than 10 years that I've done these career changes.

If computers did not exist, it would be something highly creative and it would be something that I felt would help people. It might be in the healthcare space still. It might be writing books by candlelight. Or an electrician. Maybe I'd want to be the one to help invent the computer if it didn't exist yet. My answer is I don't know. It could be anything.

Abby: I appreciate you taking the time to chat and share some advice that you've had and some of the guidance that you give to female founders and founders in general as they move down the process of starting up their own company based on the experiences that you've had with Drive AI and all of the other phenomenal work that you do across the board. inspiring to learn that idea of creating value and helping people is at the core of everything that you've done throughout your career and I appreciate you sharing.

A video version of this interview is available below:

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