I'm leaving a16z to start Ixian Robotics. We're deploying intelligent robots to help reindustrialize America.
I have this obsession with factory resetting my life (2024) (2025). It's a little strange starting something with incredible partners, friends, and mentors already alongside me. The last couple of months have felt like knocking down dominoes I've spent years putting up.
Joining a16z's American Dynamism (AD) fund as an Engineering Fellow gave me time to move back to the Bay, settle in again, and spend time with people building across manufacturing and robotics. I got to work across the AD, infrastructure, growth, and speedrun teams, which exposed me to people and ideas I wouldn't have encountered staying purely in robot learning. I'm very grateful to everyone who took the time to bring me into their world.
When I left Persona, I wrote that I wanted to make great contributions to embodied AI, but I wasn't sure whether that would be as an IC or through leadership. I referenced Hamming's You and Your Research, where he talks about moving toward management when your vision grows beyond what you can accomplish as an individual.
I still aspire to be a full stack roboticist, but my definition of that has expanded. Robotics doesn't just end at software, hardware, and learning. There's a whole world of understanding customers, selling products, navigating supply chains and capital markets, building teams and cultures, shaping policy, growing communities, and earning public trust that we need to figure out to truly push robotics forward. I'll always be a robot learning person at heart, but I'm excited to take responsibility for everything it takes to make this vision happen.
This moment in time feels electric. America has an imperative to reindustrialize to protect our national interests, and radical advances in robot learning give us the opportunity to leapfrog the industrial model we spent decades outsourcing. We can build an industrial base more capable than anything we've had before, bringing manufacturing back at an entirely new pace and scale.
I'm excited to share more about what we're building later. For now, we've closed our pre-seed with backing from a16z & Accel, and moved out of my living room into a new office.
If you want to work at the intersection of robot foundation models and rebuilding American industry, I want to talk to you. I'm looking for people who are personally invested in making this future happen, and excited to do whatever it takes to get there.
It's time to build.
You can reach me at jz @ ixianrobotics dot com or @jacobzietek.
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