Building the Robotic Workforce: Yondu AI's Michael Chen on Warehouse Robots, Teleoperation & Going from MIT to YC
with Michael Chen — Co-Founder & CEO, Yondu AI
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What does it take to put humanoid robots to work in real warehouses today — not in a lab demo, but in messy, live customer facilities?
In this episode of the 18VC Podcast, we sit down with Michael Chen, co-founder and CEO of Yondu AI (YC W24), the company building the robotic workforce of the future starting with logistics automation. Michael takes us from his childhood building jetpacks and a robot waitress in his parents' Chinese takeout restaurant, to MIT CSAIL and a summer flying autonomous drones, to founding Yondu with his MIT classmate Tahmid Jamal.
We go deep on the technical and strategic bets behind Yondu: why they deliberately don't build their own robot hardware, how "brownfield" deployment lets warehouses automate without halting operations, why teleoperation sits at the top of the data-quality pyramid, and how their world-model VLA squeezes more out of less data. Michael also breaks down how Yondu stacks up against far better-funded players like Figure, Galbot, TARs, Amazon, and Symbotic — and why focus, real-world deployment, and deep warehouse integration are their moat.
A candid, tactical conversation for anyone interested in robotics, embodied AI, and what it actually takes to build a hard-tech startup as a young founder.
About Michael Chen
Hosts
Timestamps
00:00 — Welcome to 18VC: what this episode is about
00:42 — Intro: Meet Michael Chen, co-founder & CEO of Yondu AI
03:01 — Building since childhood: jetpacks, dogfighting drones & a robot waitress
09:15 — Lessons from the family restaurant: resilience under pressure
11:53 — Autonomous drones at ARA, MIT CSAIL & connecting ChatGPT to robots
15:40 — Calling Tahmid & founding Yondu (Y Combinator W24)
16:28 — Co-founder fit: why complementary skill sets matter
18:32 — Why warehouses & bin-picking — and the 80–90% automation gap
22:12 — What "brownfield" really means & why deployment is the moat
23:22 — Early pilots (ShipBots) & humanoids as the ultimate value-add
26:42 — How intelligent are the robots today? Fine-tuning per task
27:50 — Why Yondu is hardware-agnostic and doesn't build its own robots
31:46 — Cross-end-effector & form factors explained
33:47 — Data strategy: teleoperation vs. motion capture vs. synthetic (Galbot, TARs, Figure)
39:33 — What teleoperation actually looks like (VR, exoskeletons, UMI grippers)
41:52 — Internet video, egocentric data & world-model VLAs
43:36 — Does it take 10 million hours? Scaling data in a vertical
45:26 — Model architecture: how Yondu differs from Helix; the "Waymo for humanoids" analogy
49:23 — World models vs. Fei-Fei Li's approach
50:23 — A crowded logistics race: what's defensible vs. Figure, Amazon & Symbotic
55:05 — Hiring: new blood over 20-year veterans
55:53 — Culture: why "having fun" is a core pillar
57:13 — One word to describe himself: "learner"
58:22 — The YC experience & tips for applicants
1:01:50 — His worst decision as CEO: trying to be engineer + CEO
1:03:41 — Advice for uncertain student founders: timing & never giving up
1:05:22 — Wrap-up
Show Notes
- Yondu AI Website: https://www.yondu.ai/
- Michael Chen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/themichaelchen/
- Tahmid Jamal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/74hm1d/
- Yondu is hiring robotics researchers & engineers — see: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/yondu/jobs
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