Matt Leitch

1️⃣Currently: Deploying and scaling robot company 2️⃣Recently: Chief of Staff at a robotics startup 3️⃣Long ago: Army helicopter pilot

[Matt Leitch @MrStand_Fast]

Thank you to all who followed me based upon a comment I made about my experience as a helicopter pilot!

To intro myself a bit more, I flew UH-60s and was in the Army for 7 years with a combat deployment to Afghanistan. My last UH-60 flight was almost 10 years ago!

Now I’m much more focused on my lovely wife, daughter, and son on the way!

I don’t tweet often, but it will most likely involve faith, aviation, or robots!

[Matt Leitch @MrStand_Fast]

@GunFoundation Thank you!

[Matt Leitch @MrStand_Fast]

@miss_magagul Love these! Keep them coming!

[Matt Leitch @MrStand_Fast]

There is a long list of dead pilots who made one mistake that cost them their lives.

People dunking on a young, enthusiastic pilot (who was the junior officer in that cockpit) should be ashamed.

It’s a terrible tragedy that was probably avoidable, and I hope this story reminds us of our own mortality and fallibility

[Matt Leitch @MrStand_Fast]

There is a long list of dead pilots who made one mistake that cost them their lives.

People dunking on a young, enthusiastic pilot (who was the junior officer in that cockpit) should be ashamed.

It’s a terrible tragedy that was probably avoidable, and I hope this story reminds us of our own mortality and fallibility

[New York Post @nypost]

Learjet co-pilot in fatal Florida crash ID'd as 20-year-old who got her license in high school https://t.co/enThTCvdMb

[Matt Leitch @MrStand_Fast]

There is a long list of dead pilots who made one mistake that cost them their lives.

People dunking on a young, enthusiastic pilot (who was the junior officer in that cockpit) should be ashamed.

It’s a terrible tragedy that was probably avoidable, and I hope this story reminds us of our own mortality and fallibility

[Matt Leitch @MrStand_Fast]

Morning: Tractor-treat at an apple orchard
Afternoon: choosing a spot on the property to burn brush

We certainly don’t live in Dallas anymore!

[Matt Leitch @MrStand_Fast]

Ambi is a great system!

[Vedant Nair @vedantnair__]

I've enjoyed getting to know Jeff because I love his balanced approach to building and deploying Physical AI systems.

On one hand, he is a pragmatic technologist. @AmbiRobotics has deployed 100+ robots that do real work for some of the world's biggest logistics operations.

On the other, he's a PhD from @UCBerkeley, and his team's academic roots mean they're constantly pushing the frontier of end-to-end models.

The result is a harmony of both rapid deployments and rapid progress on Ambi's autonomy stack.

More companies and leaders should operate like this, and I'd encourage you to check out this episode with Jeff, out now.

[Matt Leitch @MrStand_Fast]

@vedantnair__ If you’re not prepared prior to that event, you’re ngmi

[Matt Leitch @MrStand_Fast]

Jobs I’ve held:

Little league umpire
Cart boy at a country club
Busboy
Helicopter pilot
Army instructor
Consultant
Customer Success Program Manager
Head of Product
Ops Director in robotics

Most important: dad

[Zach Whitt @ShowMeYourCIM]

Jobs I’ve held:

Lawn guy
CrossFit coach/personal trainer
ER scribe
House flipper
Sales guy
Startup data analytics guy
Waste hauler biz owner
M&A guy
(10 years from now, hopefully, full time pilot)

[Matt Leitch @MrStand_Fast]

@vedantnair__ Great to chat with you @vedantnair__

[Vedant Nair @vedantnair__]

These are my favorite ideas from my conversation with @MrStand_Fast.

Matthew leads Product Operations at Pickle Robot, where his team deploys and sustains robots that unload freight from shipping containers.

Before Pickle, he scaled fleets at Ocado and Six River Systems. Before robotics, he served as a helicopter pilot in the US military.

-> Product Operations is everything after the contract is signed.

Deployment, support, maintenance, training, and customer success all determine whether the customer gets real value from the robot. For example, Pickle has reduced deployments to as little as six hours from arrival to the first pickl. Excellent Product Operations is what gets you the renewal.

-> A Robot Operations Center (ROC) commands the fleet at three levels.

At the robot level, it diagnoses individual failures. At the site level, it identifies environmental or operational problems. At the fleet level, it finds structural patterns that engineering needs to fix. The ROC is a remote command center that helps product operations scale!

-> Optimize for repair time over failure rate

To Matthew, a component that fails slightly more often but takes two minutes to replace can be better than one that takes 20 minutes. Pickle has maniacally focused on this: they standardize tools and bolts, make consumables easy to swap, and even rehearse failures at HQ before technicians ever reach the site.

-> Utilization is the metric that matters most.

Response time, resolution time, training numbers, and peak performance are useful, but they can easily become vanity metrics. When customers consistently use products and reliably achieve performance, you know it has become a key part of their operations.

That utilization is what drives renewals, expansions, and referrals!

[Matt Leitch @MrStand_Fast]

@TonySeruga Really bad take.

This is a completely acceptable separation of air traffic.

[Matt Leitch @MrStand_Fast]

@vedantnair__ congrats dude! and happy birthday!

[Matt Leitch @MrStand_Fast]

@aarondfrancis @laravel Awesome news! Congrats to @laravel for landing @aarondfrancis

[Matt Leitch @MrStand_Fast]

I'll never fill out a "contact us" form on a website again.

Claude just researched service providers, drafted emails to the top rated providers in the area, and all I had to do was talk to Claude for 30 seconds.

Home services providers need to take note.

[Matt Leitch @MrStand_Fast]

If you’re passionate about solving problems in your domain, software will remain a great path.

Pursue with violence of action when opportunities present.

[Lewis Jones @thelcjones]

STOP BUILDING SOFTWARE. I’ve talked to so many startups trying to do some kind of software tool for robotics and it’s very hard for me to believe in any of them. If you want to sell picks and shovels to robotics, build a hardware company instead. Better edge compute, better sensors, better actuators, better manufacturing equipment, even just operating better machine shops. We will happily onboard new hardware vendors and take a bet on you because that is the bottleneck right now for all robotics companies.

[Matt Leitch @MrStand_Fast]

@RoryTyer What did it for me: a good class that helps you think through relevant decisions in your life. Apply it to work only after that happens.

[Matt Leitch @MrStand_Fast]

@F1 @AstonMartinF1 Biggest upgrade would be replacing Stroll but that ain’t gonna happen.

[Matt Leitch @MrStand_Fast]

Biggest upgrade would be replacing Stroll but that ain’t gonna happen.

[Formula 1 @F1]

The upgraded @AstonMartinF1 👀

Here's what's new 👇

#F1 #HungarianGP