Cynthia Yeung: You Have to Fight For What You Want
Welcome to All Raise’s Women Crush Weekly (#WCW), a series where we highlight genius women who are funding or founding tech companies. Please come back to the All Raise Medium blog weekly to find a new profile of an awe-inspiring female VC or founder. Our focus in the next few weeks is hardware and robotics. This week our crush is Cynthia Yeung, Mentor at First Round Capital.
The primary purpose of being a mentor is giving good advice. Even in a brief 30 minutes, Cynthia Yeung gave me advice that stuck with me long beyond our conversation. To Cynthia, being a mentor means being available. It means giving people the guidance and support she did not have when she was starting out. The former COO of Cafe X is now a Mentor at First Round Capital’s Fast Track program, where she assists entrepreneurs within the portfolio.
While she has been in the technology industry for over a decade, her particular focus right now is with robotics companies. Before serving as the COO of Cafe X, she was a Product Evangelist at SoftBank Robotics. In addition to mentoring at First Round, she is now an advisor at Fox Robotics, a seed-stage warehouse robotics startup, and a consultant at Diligent Robotics, which created Moxi, an award-winning hospital robot assistant.
Even though my understanding of robots begins and ends with my Roomba, Cynthia, not only helped me gain a better understanding of the world of robotics, she excited me too. Warehouse automation never seemed so thrilling. Cynthia and I chatted about what it means to be a mentor and what is exciting in the world of robotics.
Q: You recently joined First Round as a mentor to entrepreneurs and operators, what made you want to take that position?
A: I’m really excited about helping a lot of other startups, especially those in the robotics space. I want them to learn from others’ mistakes — including my own! There are many really valuable lessons that can be taken from large companies like SoftBank Robotics that can accelerate the growth of all the new companies that are coming on board now. Honestly, it’s a lot of fun for me and I want to be the type of resource that I wish I had earlier in my career. I had so many questions and I didn’t necessarily have a lot of people who could answer those questions for me.
First Round has a really well-structured mentorship program that I think is fantastic. Not only do they have regular events for mentors and mentees to get together, but they also host events just for mentors to share learnings amongst themselves. They even give me advice on how to become a better mentor, which I really appreciate.
Q: What are some of the lessons you’ve learned as an operator that you want to impart to others in the robotics space?
A: Robotics startups are much more expensive than other types of startups. The capital requirements of software-only companies are lower because you can effectively bootstrap them in many cases. When you are dealing with hardware, there are so many other things to take into consideration. You have to think about the actual physical cost of the hardware/bill of materials, supply chain risk, manufacturing costs and/or deployment costs. With software, you could easily sell to a customer on the other side of the world and it wouldn’t really increase your costs significantly. With hardware, you would need to figure out the actual cost of getting the product to that location as well as the cost of setting up a team locally to support the ongoing maintenance of that particular product. There are other general operating costs associated with hardware that people do not always necessarily take into consideration, especially if they come from a software-only background. Deployment of robots is nearly always more expensive than you may think due to the challenge of dealing with a potentially changing physical environment (that may affect the reliability of the robot) and the necessity of having to debug onsite — especially in the early days.
Q: How do you use your capital most effectively when building a robotics startup?
A: Definitely build a low-fidelity prototype to start off with. That way you make sure that you’re actually building the right thing before you go out to source components and whatnot. In software, if you build the wrong thing, you can take a couple of sprints to fix the code and then you have a new and improved product. With hardware, the cycles are so much longer and building the wrong thing is a much more expensive mistake.
Q: What are the areas of robotics you think will disrupt our future?
A: Warehouse robotics is definitely a burgeoning field as well as construction and agriculture. I think those are fields where companies are building the right thing at the right time for the right people. It’s not that these industries haven’t existed but the technology has actually progressed and has become sufficiently robust to serve the needs of the industry. For example, in the warehouse space, a lot of the day-to-day is pretty routine. Because employees are moving pallets from point A to point B, the spaces tend to be in a fairly robot-friendly layout, especially when compared to an environment like a home. Some companies are even designing warehouses with the intention of having robots do most of the work. For example, instead of having pallets stacked one after the other like bales of hay, you can have the pallets stacked against a wall or some kind of a barrier so a robotic forklift can move them more efficiently without having to worry about accidentally sending one pallet tumbling into another like dominoes.
Q; What advice would you give if you were mentoring you from the past?
A: “Be less afraid of telling other people what you want.”
There is one example that still comes to mind to this day. This was in Hong Kong, right before college, and I was in the final rounds for a prestigious scholarship that would pay for all of my tuition at the University of Oxford, where I had been offered a place to read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. The scholarship would relieve my parents — one who barely graduated high school, the other who dropped out — of a significant financial burden. For me, as a gay, first-gen college student, it would be validation; a family friend had told me earlier, with the best of intentions, that people like me didn’t belong there. I had been determined to prove him wrong.
And so I found myself on the top floor of this landmark building in Hong Kong, where an older, white gentleman was sitting at the end of a very long table. “What do you want to do after graduation?” he asked.
I froze at that moment, but not because I didn’t know the answer. I knew exactly what I wanted. I just thought he would laugh at me if I told him. The words were on the tip of my tongue but I could not get them out because I thought they would sound preposterous to him. He kind of shook his head at me and looked disappointed.
“You need to know what you want,” he said.
It was obvious I wouldn’t get the scholarship at that point and I remember kicking myself on the way down thinking, “Why didn’t I tell him? What did I have to lose?” That experience definitely pushed me to be more forthright in advocating for myself. If I don’t vocalize what I want, no one is going to give it to me. I have to fight for it.
