Sam Baker is an investor at Scale Venture Partners, a VC firm that has invested in amazing companies such as HubSpot, DocuSign, Box, Bill.com, Root Insurance, and many more. He was named to Business Insider's list of Rising Stars in Venture Capital. Prior to joining Scale, he was a Growth Manager at Tilt.com that was acquired by Airbnb. Before that, he worked at Box. He began his career at Glouston Capital Partners, an investment firm focused on private equity and venture capital secondaries. In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - Robotics use cases in the warehouse, what functions can be automated - Why is the focus shifting to platforms - Why is the supply chain industry defined by exception handling and what can be done to address it - Collaboration between humans and machines - Robotics in the construction industry - Robotics in the restaurant industry - Startup trends within AI + robotics Sam's favorite books: - Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time (Author: Howard Schultz) - Hatching Twitter (Author: Nick Bilton) - Endurance (Author: Alfred Lansing) --------Where to find Prateek Joshi: Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com Website: https://prateekj.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi