The Idea: In 2016, Mehul Nariyawala bought a Dyson robot vacuum to clean up after his golden retriever. It was a disaster - the thing couldn't find its own dock, got stuck on rugs, and once ran for 45 minutes on the same spot until it destroyed an expensive rug. At the time, Mehul was a lead product manager at Nest, and his co-worker Navneet Dalal was a Google research scientist who'd pioneered computer vision technology. They looked at the robot vacuum market and saw the same problem everywhere: these machines were blind. They relied on crude 2D maps and bumped around like "bumbling toddlers with mops." The pair spent two months researching robotics and landed on a contrarian bet - while every competitor used lidar sensors, they'd build a vision-only system using RGB cameras, the same way humans navigate. Everyone said indoor robot navigation wouldn't be solved until 2030. They decided to prove them wrong. This was the beginning of Matic.
The Execution:
The lesson? Mehul spent seven years grinding on a single product while competitors rushed to market with inferior tech. The robotics industry rewards patience and first-principles thinking over speed. Sometimes the best way to win is to take the harder path that everyone else thinks is impossible.