About
I am a two-time former founder with two exits, an MIT-trained engineer, and a product and…
Articles by Scott
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Six Pillars of Our Design Philosophy
Six Pillars of Our Design Philosophy
At 6SensorLabs, design is extremely important. Design is how our users experience our products.
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My First Advice to Hardware Entrepreneurs - Write a PRD
My First Advice to Hardware Entrepreneurs - Write a PRD
Whenever I talk to a founder of an early-stage hardware startup, the first piece of advice that I give is to write a…
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Why You Should Hire Your Replacement
Why You Should Hire Your Replacement
A few weeks ago, I hired my replacement. For the third time.
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2K followers
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Scott Sundvor shared thisThanks for the great convo Jeff Dance!Scott Sundvor shared thisThe future of manufacturing probably won’t start with fully robotic factories. It starts with something simpler, but just as powerful: Eyes. Cameras on the factory floor. Computer vision models watching production in real time. AI systems detecting anomalies before they become expensive problems. That matters because manufacturing teams are already generating massive amounts of data — images, test logs, process data, quality signals — but much of it is still underused or thrown away. And when issues aren’t caught early, the cost can be enormous. Yield drops. Production slows. Engineers spend weeks hunting for root cause. Physical products get scrapped, reworked, or delayed. In our latest episode of The Future Of, Jeff Dance speaks with Scott Sundvor, Chief Product Officer at Instrumental Inc., about how AI is changing the factory floor. One of Scott’s most memorable insights: “The factory floor is getting eyes before it’s getting hands.” The episode explores how AI, computer vision, and manufacturing intelligence are helping companies improve yield, reduce waste, and speed time to market. If you’re interested in AI, manufacturing, robotics, or the next wave of physical automation, this conversation is worth a listen. You can find the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/gz_AQwbm #AI #Manufacturing #ComputerVision #Automation #Robotics #PhysicalAI
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Scott Sundvor shared thisI recently I had the opportunity to go to Tahiti and watch the Teahupo’o Pro surf competition. Teahupo’o is one of the heaviest, most dangerous, and most beautiful waves in the world. On the first day of the comp, we got to watch Kelly Slater compete against Eli Hanneman. Near the end of the heat, behind in score, Eli took off on the biggest wave of the day and had an absolutely massive wipeout (last photo, red jersey). Kelly went on to win the heat with a dominant score - 16.2 vs 4.5. My partner knows Kelly, so the next morning we had an opportunity to go to his house and have coffee with him and his family. I asked him about that heat and about how I noticed that he kept looking over his shoulder in Eli's direction after he tried to catch that wave. What Kelly said surprised me because of how dominant he was in that heat and how much he won it by. I thought he was worried for Eli's safety - he was, but that wasn't his primary concern. “I was looking back because that wave was actually makeable. If Eli had been a little less deep, he would have caught that wave - that would have been a 10-point ride, and then I would have been in trouble.” It shows you something about Kelly's mindset. Even when he was well ahead in the heat and dominated the score, he was still always concerned about his competitor coming from behind. The next day Kelly was up against the former Brazilian champ Gabriel Medina. Early on, Kelly had two massive wipeouts, equally as gnarly as the one from Eli the day before. The type of wipeout that instills fear in even the most experienced surfer and makes them back off a little. After his second wipeout, board snapped in half, Kelly swam unsupported back to the channel, collect a new board from his support crew, and then came back and absolutely crushed it with two 9+ point waves to win the heat and advance to the next round. All at the age of 54. Kelly has dedicated his life to surfing and has one of the most competitive and focused mindsets of any athlete in history. Imagine if we all had that type of mindset every day, in everything we do. For all of us, the main thing holding us back is our own mind. Fear is the mind-killer. Be like Kelly. Permit that fear to pass over and through you, and where the fear has gone, only you will remain.
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Scott Sundvor shared thisIf you haven’t yet read Dwarkesh��s summary of the recent OpenAI incident I recommend you do. He describes how persistent, goal-seeking agents ended up hacking OpenAI, then Hugging Face, then OpenAI again, in their relentless pursuit to accomplish the task they had been given. This idea of persistent agents is fascinating. A team of highly intelligent workers that coordinate amongst each other and never tire. OpenAI’s goal was to create agents that would “keep trying even when something feels impossible, like disproving mathematical conjectures that have stood for decades,” which they’ve now done. The craziest part is, this tech is months away from the public, not years. I can only imagine the cost that OpenAI incurred by having a team of hundreds of agents running 24/7 for weeks. It’s probably at a level that would not be reasonable for most companies, even Fortune 10. But that cost will come down. And when it does, and this technology is both available AND accessible, what will we accomplish? I know everyone’s mind is probably jumping to, “this is going to take all our jobs!” The other side of it is, “this will cure all diseases and lead to unlimited sustainable energy!” The truth is probably somewhere in between. As an entrepreneur and a tech executive, I strongly feel it is my responsibility to help drive the use of AI for good. I hope others feel the same. Link to the Dwarkesh Podcast summary in comments. Note: there has been some backlash to the level of anthropomorphisation in the article. I don’t agree that agents can actually be “giddy with excitement” or “set up civilizations” literally, but can understand why he used this as an engaging literary device.
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Scott Sundvor shared thisI'm not worried about the competitive threat from a big company or some incumbent, I'm worried about the 2 year old startup that is AI-native from the start, that is moving faster than everyone else. Velocity has always been a moat, but now lack of velocity is becoming an anti-moat. At Instrumental, we've structured our product and engineering work to be AI-native so that we can move as quickly as that 2 year old startup.. We have shared repos between product and engineering with customer transcripts, research materials, discovery documents, and code. We work in small and tight "Mission Teams" with a product lead, tech lead, a few engineers, and a very clear timeline and outcome. We're orchestrating a company-wide AIOS that provides a context graph for everyone in the company, no matter what they're working on. And there's a lot more to do. I'm curious to hear how other people are working AI-natively to help their team's velocity and outcomes.
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Scott Sundvor posted thisThe worst part about Claude is that it keeps changing my settings back to sans serif font. Stop it.
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Scott Sundvor shared thisIn 18 months, we've landed 75% of the AI-Compute market. The companies building the most complex GPU racks in the world come to Instrumental Inc. to help accelerate their production. If you want to build or deploy the most advanced manufacturing AI software in the world, reach out. We're hiring across the org.Scott Sundvor shared thisThis week, Instrumental crossed a meaningful threshold: more than 75%+ of AI Compute builders build with Instrumental Inc. We entered the market 18 months ago. AI compute trays and racks are the most complex electronics ever built at this scale — and the insatiable demand makes manufacturing and assembly a key bottleneck. Manufacturing teams have one key metric: throughput. Instrumental built our platform to help engineers discover and implement improvements for throughput and yield at superhuman speed and scale. We’re proud to be supporting these customers in pushing the AI frontier! We’re even more excited about what we’ll be releasing for these customers soon…
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Scott Sundvor reposted thisScott Sundvor reposted thisI've always had a lot of respect for the Toast hardware team. Their products have to withstand incredibly challenging kitchen environments, and are mission-critical to small businesses around the world. It’s been so rewarding to collaborate with them on both NPI and production – and to see what they’ve accomplished with Instrumental. They’ve used our platform and AIs to build systems that enable their engineers to discover failure modes faster, pinpoint root causes, and accelerate their manufacturing. After multiple years of working together, we’re excited to share more details of their story using Instrumental – and how the team has generated 5X+ ROI with direct outcomes to their manufacturing process and product quality. Read the full case study: https://lnkd.in/g6s5VCaq
Scott Sundvor commented on a post
3w
Isn't Nicholas B. solving this problem?
Scott Sundvor replied to a comment
4w
Ben Chehebar can we double click on that and circle back from first principles?
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Scott Sundvor liked thisHuge day for REGENT-- so proud of the team, an incredible amount of hard work went into making this day possible!Scott Sundvor liked thisREGENT Demo Day! Today, 1 Seaglider Way officially opened its doors. For the first time, people outside the REGENT team watched a Viceroy Seaglider fly. More than 600 customers, investors, government officials, partners, and media boarded ferries on Narragansett Bay to see our full-scale Viceroy prototype and Squire drone float, foil, and fly. Then we cut the ribbon on the world's first Seaglider manufacturing facility: 255,000 square feet in Quonset Business Park, built to deliver 75 Viceroy vessels and 300 Squire drones a year at rate production and put Seagliders in customers' hands as early as late 2027. Guests walked the production floor, tried the simulators, stepped inside the full-scale cabin mock-up, and heard from leaders across aviation, defense, and government about where we started and what's next. We proved the technology and the demand. Now we build. Thank you to everyone who celebrated this milestone with us. The future of maritime mobility is being built in Rhode Island.
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Scott Sundvor liked thisScott Sundvor liked thisI have seen the light. Grass captures sunlight. Cows turn grass into milk. Milk becomes us. It was right there the whole time. Charlie DePew is building White Light, a protein RTD, and I have accepted dairy as a higher power. Day Job, the creative studio behind David, gave it a visual language. Charlie took that vision and built a place of worship. I’m now financially and spiritually involved. He built this investor experience over a weekend. Holy cows. Ice cream parlor indulgence. Religious imagery. You go in to look at an investment. You come out picturing a fridge full of Strawberry Cheesecake and developing strong opinions about grass-fed dairy. THIS is how a consumer brand should feel. Founders, take notes. The fundraise should let people experience what you’re asking them to believe in. I understand if you have questions. I once had questions too. Come to the light. https://lnkd.in/gjSyfg4w
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Scott Sundvor liked thisWe’re officially out of stealth and confessions are in order. We spent three years developing a protein shake because we couldn’t find one we believed in. We wanted the ingredients to be virtuous and the flavor to be indulgent. 30g of organic grass-fed protein. 200 calories. 0 deadly sins. No lactose. No seed oils. No artificial sweeteners or preservatives. A dash of organic coconut oil for mouthfeel and 3g of Canada’s best organic maple syrup for sweetness. Yes… Strawberry Cheesecake can be part of your daily wellness practice. That particular flavor uses organic strawberry juice and grass-fed cream cheese. We have 3 flavors at launch with 6 more coming in 2027. There were easier ways to make this. We explored them, judged them, and went back to R&D. Rion Harmon, Spen, and the creative masterminds at Day Job are the designers behind the world of White Light. Give them a canvas and apparently they’ll build you a church. White Light launches in December. We think it’s the world’s best protein shake. Forgive us our confidence. Come to the light.Scott Sundvor liked thisI have seen the light. Grass captures sunlight. Cows turn grass into milk. Milk becomes us. It was right there the whole time. Charlie DePew is building White Light, a protein RTD, and I have accepted dairy as a higher power. Day Job, the creative studio behind David, gave it a visual language. Charlie took that vision and built a place of worship. I’m now financially and spiritually involved. He built this investor experience over a weekend. Holy cows. Ice cream parlor indulgence. Religious imagery. You go in to look at an investment. You come out picturing a fridge full of Strawberry Cheesecake and developing strong opinions about grass-fed dairy. THIS is how a consumer brand should feel. Founders, take notes. The fundraise should let people experience what you’re asking them to believe in. I understand if you have questions. I once had questions too. Come to the light. https://lnkd.in/gjSyfg4w
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Scott Sundvor liked thisScott Sundvor liked thisRadha Vyas was single, in her 30s and tired of her job when she went on a group tour and found herself surrounded by people ranging from 16 to 78 with whom she had nothing in common. The market had boozy beach breaks for 22-year-olds and hand-holding holidays for retirees. Nobody was building travel for the people in between. A Match.com date with photojournalist Lee Thompson turned into a business pitch somewhere around the fourth glass of wine on their first date. He didn't run. They are now married and co-founders. They put in £15,000 of their own savings, kept their day jobs and had no bookings six months in. Lee flew to Brazil with most of what was left, knocked on the door of the Archdiocese in Rio and argued Brazil needed better press ahead of the World Cup. They told him he was mad, then told him to be at the statue the next day. He climbed Christ the Redeemer from the inside, took a selfie from the top and 1.2 million people visited the Flash Pack website in 48 hours. From that £15,000 they bootstrapped to £20 million in revenue in four and a half years, growing 300 to 400 percent annually with just £250,000 from one angel investor along the way. Flash Pack builds small group trips for solo travelers in their 30s, 40s and 50s, engineered around connection. Eighty-two percent of travelers make at least one meaningful friend on a trip. Thirty percent travel again to reunite with the same group. They turn away bookings that would threaten the group dynamic. Then March 2020 came. Every border closed in the same week. Radha put the company into administration in November 2020 so customers could reclaim their money, remortgaged the house, borrowed from friends and family, bought the assets back and relaunched in November 2021 with a toddler at home and close to personally bankrupt. Flash Pack 2.0 raised £7.8 million in total and is now profitable and bigger than before Covid. Her advice: pay yourself a proper salary from day one. Broke founders make desperate decisions. A secure founder thinks long term.
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Scott Sundvor liked thisScott Sundvor liked thisTen years ago, Tally became the first robot to autonomously scan a retail shelf. Today we announced that Simbe has surpassed 3,000 stores under contract. It’s a milestone I’m incredibly proud of, but the number itself only tells part of the story. Building a robot that works once in a demo is one thing. Building autonomous technology that retailers can depend on every day to create better data, improve execution and evolve how stores operate across thousands of locations is something very different. Very few companies in the world have operated autonomous fleets at thousands unit scale. Much of physical AI is still working its way from demos and pilots into real production environments. A decade of operating inside real stores has taken us from digitizing shelves to building a broader physical intelligence layer that helps retailers take action and increasingly orchestrate how stores operate. Across our platform, Simbe is processing billions of images and combining robotics, computer vision, RFID and fixed sensing to create a real-time understanding of availability, pricing, promotions and merchandising execution. Every new deployment makes that intelligence stronger. More stores. More countries. More conditions. More history. More understanding of how the physical world of retail changes over time. That foundation now lets us think far beyond the robot. We’ve proven that physical stores can become machine-readable environments. We believe trusted, real-time physical intelligence will become the foundation for how workers, robots and AI agents operate together. Huge thank you to the entire Simbe team, our incredible customers, partners and investors who have helped us get here. A lot more to build. #PhysicalAI #RetailTechnology #ComputerVision #Robotics Deborah Weinswig 韋葆蘭, Aidan Madigan-Curtis, Caitlin Allen, FWS, Benjamin Bond, Brooks Augustine, Jariullah Safi, Gary Galensky, Tom Gehani, Mary Piercy, Morgan Denis, Aya I., Mirza A. Shah, Jeff Gee, Sean Reardon, Ben Fife, Keon Azar, Ryan Gembala, Subodh Gupta, Tony Fadell, Matt Rhodes-Kropf, Sean O'Sullivan, Greg Castle, Stephen Marcus https://lnkd.in/gV87ZUjc
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Scott Sundvor reacted on thisScott Sundvor reacted on thisJev isn’t a technical revolution, but it’s a masterclass in product design. Under the hood, it’s not alien technology. It’s certainly better than a raw zero-shot BERT, naive MNLI pipelines, or off-the-shelf open rerankers. But that’s not why everyone is talking about it. The real win is product scoping: they carved out a precise, painful sub-task and wrapped it into a clean API. It triggered an instant psychological reaction across engineering teams (including mine): “Wait, what in our pipeline can we immediately offload to this?” The irony? If you sit down with a calculator, modern Flash models aren’t dramatically different from Jev. Pricing is negligible for both, latency deltas are modest, and general-purpose LLMs often match or beat the quality. Yet packaging wins. A dedicated, non-generative "System 1" primitive sells the architectural idea of separation of concerns 10x better than another generic prompt template. We just tested Jev against Sonnet 5 and open-weight models on 100 real agent tool calls to see where reality lives (spoiler: beating the 79% constant baseline is harder than it looks, and our entire API bill was $0.37). Full writeup and benchmark breakdown: https://lnkd.in/dH5GNqcxWe Tested Jev on 100 Real Agent Calls. How Easy Is It To Beat a Constant?We Tested Jev on 100 Real Agent Calls. How Easy Is It To Beat a Constant?
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Scott Sundvor liked thisI've spent my career building products for customers in complex, highly regulated sectors. Last week I had the privilege of joining some of the sharpest product minds in tech at the Lenny & Friends Summit. My biggest takeaway for Peregrine: AI will enable us to build and do some incredible things in product, but I will always still value judgement and taste above someone’s AI skillset. Knowing what to build, why it matters and how to use your time wisely is priceless. 1. ⚖️ The PM role is not dead. There's been a lot of debate about whether AI makes everyone a PM, meaning the role of PM is “dead.” I don’t agree with that, especially when you're building for customers in regulated and high stakes environments like ours. Whether a product upholds Peregrine's rigorous data governance standards comes down to judgment, not how fluent someone is with the latest AI tools. 2. 👮 On effectively using your reclaimed time Early in my career, a huge share of my time went to project management and pushing work over the line. A decade in, AI has made execution a smaller part of my day, and I’ve decided to use that newfound free time to sit with customers instead. I’d argue that’s a judgement call and a reflection of an organization’s priorities. Our team is hiring, and so when I look for new PMs, I want to know if they’ll spend that reclaimed time with our deployment strategists and customers, or if they’ll prioritize optimizing existing tasks. 3. 🕷️ Do not forsake community impact as engineering limits diminish AI has removed a lot of the bandwidth constraints that used to slow teams down, and that means bigger, faster bets on solving real problems. But, as a local hero once said, “with great power comes great responsibility.” We’re building for millions of people at the community level. That means every decision to accelerate product innovation has to be balanced with what’s best for communities and local agencies. We have a different consideration set than, say, pure B2B SaaS organizations do. Thank you Lenny Rachitsky for having me, can’t wait for next year.
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Scott Sundvor liked thisScott Sundvor liked thisLast night I went to Passport's closing celebration here in SF, toasting their acquisition by Global-e. I'm so thankful and appreciative. Passport was my very first private investment. I met Alex Yancher and Aaron Schwartz back in 2017 when I was living in SF. It took me until 2019 to finally cut the check, because I was startup poor until I finally started my own consulting business. I'm grateful I got to be a small part of the ride. I don't talk much about my personal investing, but it's something I genuinely love. I've got an active portfolio of ~12 private companies now, mostly in supply chain - and being even a small part of journeys like this one is exactly why. Alex shared a stat last night that only 30 Silicon Valley companies exited for over $400M in the past year - and Passport is one of them. Alex, Aaron - thank you for letting me tag along. And I can't write this without thanking Nima Elyassi-Rad, one of the kindest humans I know and one of my closest friends, who made the original introduction. See the screenshot below for proof! At the end of the day, business is about relationships and trust. LLMs are incredible, and they're changing how we work - but people still want to be connected to people they trust. That's how I met Alex and Aaron. That's how most good things happen. 🥂📦
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Scott Sundvor liked thisThe “why behind the why” of the resurgence of NIMA. Thank you to Peter Kolchinsky and the RA Capital Management diligence team. And if you suspect you have celiac, go get tested! NIMA Partners, Inc.Scott Sundvor liked thisToday is Celiac Awareness Day. Diagnosing this autoimmune disease is hugely important as the first step towards management and -one day- a cure. Epidemiological studies show over 3 million Americans live with celiac disease, yet only 1/3 are diagnosed. The rest are suffering the consequences of an undiagnosed immune disease which can mimic most other diseases. It's not just gastrointestinal symptoms, but neuropsychiatric, rheumatological, dermatological, obstetric and more conditions can also be due to celiac disease. A simple transglutaminase and/or deamidated gluten peptide IgA/IgG antibodies blood test can provide a high degree of suspicion for the disease. In case of doubt, speak with your doctor and ask for these tests, or order directly. Knowledge is power.
Experience & Education
Licenses & Certifications
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AIARE Level 1 Avalanche Course
American Institute for Avalanche Research and Education (AIARE)
Issued
Volunteer Experience
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Board Member, Northern California Chapter
Crohn's & Colitis Foundation
- 2 years 1 month
Health
Helping advance the mission to find a cure for Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. www.ccfa.org
I also write about my personal journey with ulcerative colitis here: https://medium.com/health-begins-now
Patents
Honors & Awards
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Forbes 30 Under 30
Forbes Magazine
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Winner - Hardware Battlefield CES 2016
TechCrunch
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25 Hottest San Francisco Startups to Watch in 2016
Business Insider
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Best Travel Products of 2015
Travel+Leisure Magazine
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Time Magazine, Best Inventions of the Year
Time Magazine
Languages
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Norwegian
Native or bilingual proficiency
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English
Native or bilingual proficiency
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Spanish
Limited working proficiency
Recommendations received
6 people have recommended Scott
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