Jagdeep Singh, co-founder and CEO of Rhoda, discusses raising a $450M Series A round for his robotics company and shares insights on investor attraction.
Jagdeep Singh, co-founder and CEO of Rhoda, discusses raising a $450M Series A round for his robotics company and shares insights on investor attraction and building a winning startup. He also touches upon his previous experience with QuantumScape.
Usually, it's not the risks you worry about that come back to bite you. It's the risks that you aren't worrying about that actually cause a problem. And so, the more you think about the risks up front, the more likely you are to be able to deal with them preemptively and and not let them come back and bite you. All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the Dealmaker Show. So today we have a really a spectacular guest. You know, he's done it so many times, so many companies that I mean, just from counting, I I got dizzy. So I think that you guys are all going to be able to learn a lot. It's going to be quite inspiring. You know, the whole full life cycle of building, scaling, financing, exiting. He's done it multiple multiple times. And I think that you're all going to find the conversation of today really, really inspiring. So without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, Jack Deep
Singh. Welcome to the show. >> Hiro, pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. >> So born in Delhi. Uh obviously you don't remember much because you moved out of there at four years old to to the US. But but walk us through how was life, you know, growing up for you. Give us a walk through memory lane. >> Yeah, you know, so I I did grow up in the DC area. You know, I did start college a bit early at 15. Uh, and I remember um, you know, when I, uh, was, uh, still in high school, I think, seeing an episode, an issue of Time magazine with Steve Jobs on the cover. Uh, and, uh, and that was pretty inspirational and I, uh, I felt like that's the that's the path I wanted to pursue was, you know, was entrepreneurship in the in the technology field. >> So, at 19 and not even not even waiting any longer, you moved to to the valley. Now, now there being in the Bay Area, I
guess um I want to ask you like the whole problem solving because you went to study computer science. Where did that whole law for solving problems, you know, come from? Because I mean, in your case, you've been starting, you know, so many companies and so deep into into grabbing a problem and resolving. I mean, what where did the love for that come from? Yeah, I I think basically, you know, pretty much from that uh you know, that issue of Time magazine where I wanted to kind of follow in the footsteps of Steve Jobs. Uh but, you know, as I I realized I wanted to start a company, but you know, starting a company really just comes down to finding problems that need solving and then being able to solve them better than what has been done before. Uh I mean to be more precise uh you know over time I came up with sort of four key things that I think are required to do a great company. Um and
these these learnings came over time but but uh at this point the last my last several companies have had these four things in common. Uh the first is you have to find a large unsolved problem. I mean you you can't build a great company in a small space right? So, it's got to be a big problem. And you define big by how many people have that problem times how much they're willing to pay uh per unit for that for the solution, right? So, it's got to be a big problem. But the second thing you need is you need it to be uh you need to have a differentiated solution. You need to solve that problem in a way that has not been solved, not been done before. Now, if it's a big unsolved problem, then you know uh chances are it's been looked at by others because it's a big problem. Uh and then the question becomes why have others not solved it? Uh and you have to be able to do a lot of research,
understand why previous approaches haven't worked. You got to come up with a novel approach that's different that does solve the problem. Uh and that that's key because if it's not differentiated, then you're kind of in a commodity business and commodity businesses are just aren't fun because there's a lot of pricing pressure, the margins are low, you can't really reinvest in R&D and so on. So the second key thing is a differentiated solution. The third key thing, obviously it goes without saying, uh, and this is kind of almost a cliche, but you really do need a world-class team, right? You need people who are the best at what they do. And you really don't want to settle there, especially with your co-founders. You really want to get people that are, you know, really deep in the domain, that have the IQ points, uh, that have the people skills ideally, uh, and have the history of
getting things done, right? Getting results, not just talking, right? And the last thing that I look for in my companies and this is just this is not required for for every company but for the kind of companies that I do which tend to be more deep tech companies I look for early customer validation right before we even uh spend a dime on on on building anything I like to engage with with the potential customers and say look here's what we're thinking here's what we see as your problem here's how we think we can solve it is this compelling to you uh and if they say if they say you know yeah it's it's interesting come back when you a product uh that actually is not a good answer. The answer I want to hear is is uh uh well this is so compelling that we want to help you get this to market. What can we do to help you make this thing real? That's when you know you got something interesting and
that's when you kind of you know actually go off and do it. So those are the four things I look for. If you look at um you know my startups uh they've all to one extent or the other had those four things in common. So I've been doing a lot of different spaces as you know you know from telecom equipment to you know solid state batteries and now this you know AIdriven uh you know robotics um you know project but um the common things are those four things they all have attacked what I've seen to be really big unsolved problems they've all had very novel differentiated technical solutions uh they've had just exceptional teams and in every one of them we got early customer validation uh to give ourselves comfort that we're solving a real problem that needs solving. So in your case, I mean you you did the after your um your computer science degree and and basically the the masters I mean you
were working at Huelet Puckard at you know a another company micro what was what was the other one it was >> Sun Micros Systemystems yeah >> Sun Microsystems yeah so what pushed you in your case to entrepreneurship >> again it's something that I'd wanted to do since before I was even in college right and All throughout college, I just kept wanting to, you know, uh, to to start companies. I did some, you know, I started little consulting companies when I was a computer science, you know, undergraduate trying to help people, you know, implement, uh, software systems for in their, you know, companies. Uh, and when I came out to California, uh, you know, to Silicon Valley, I realized this was kind of the epicenter of of entrepreneurship. And that just kind of fueled the fire, if you will. Uh and and so I've always wanted to do you know to to start a company. I I felt like
you know I feel like um you know uh uh starting companies is the best way to make a sustainable impact right uh you you solve a problem that someone needs sol solved and you do it in a way that if you succeed generates you know an ongoing revenue stream and and an earning stream that allows you to fund you know uh additional innovation uh to keep making an impact right so it's kind of a self-sustaining uh paradigm >> but what were you waiting for you to really launch, you know, what became your first one, airsoft, because obviously you worked at these big companies and you knew that you wanted to do this, but what were you waiting for? I wasn't waiting. I was literally I was literally coming up with ideas all the time. I had I had these notebooks I would I would keep where I wrote down the ideas and I would really uh try to, you know, do the do the homework for each idea. You know,
I say, "Here's a concept. Here's a problem I think is is a problem. Um, you know, how how big is this problem? people really care about this problem, you know, can I solve it? What what are some different ways to solve it? Can I convince other great people to join me in this effort? Can I actually talk to some customers to see if this is if they really care about this? And then I would rule out the idea and I would go to the next page and start go through another idea. And I did that for years uh while I was still working at Hilipackard and Sun Microsystems. And finally um when I was doing my my uh my master's degree in computer science at Stanford um you know one of the ideas was this notion of um of building um uh of improving the uh the network protocols to allow them to work on very low bandwidth high latency networks of the type that were coming out with wireless and and remote
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