From sleeping on the floor to Head of Product
Sasha Iatsenia went from sharing a small apartment with 9 people to developing and manufacturing delivery robots as Head of Product at Kiwibot.
“The first hackerspace I went to was FIXME Hackerspace in Switzerland. When I was a teenager, I felt like it was a very empowering community. People weren’t judging you there, and you could explore your creative side without limitation.” Sasha spent his time at FIXME experimenting with everything — mostly related to technology, but not exclusively, and building lots of small startups. “It’s a stepping stone to finding fulfillment and a better purpose in life.”
He came to San Francisco looking for adventure, and found Noisebridge Hackerspace when he needed to use a laser cutter for an art installation. “It’s a structure that illuminated those that were there in the moment, in the present. It only worked if you were there connected to each other instead of connected to technology. So if you had your phone on you, it would switch off and not function. We had five guys helping to cut parts. I learned how to weld at Noisebridge, and found more people to help with the project. We showed the project at Burning Man, and it’s provided the basis for my next application to an art grant that I’m really excited about.”
Eventually Sasha started using the equipment at Noisebridge for his work at Kiwibot, where he was prototyping a robot for delivering food. At the time he was sharing an apartment with 9 people, and all of them were sleeping on foam pads on the floor. “I had two pieces of cloth for a blanket.” A robot prototype would typically have cost $5000 to have made, but that was all the money they had, so they had to build it themselves. “We spent a lot of time using the laser cutter, vinyl cutter, and other tools here.” Another Noisebridge regular, Adrian Kelly, taught Sasha’s coworker, Alejandro Otálora, how to model prototype parts in Fusion360. “Alejandro went from doing designs in Rhino to making gorgeous designs that we could manufacture in a month with Fusion360.” They laser cut the robot layer by layer to make it three dimensional, and went to Ace Monster Toys to put putty all over it. They also tried vacuum forming the casing at Techshop, but it didn’t work. “It was a good learning experience and allowed us to experiment with things without spending $5000 on a prototype.”
Once their prototype was ready they took it to China to make their first production run of 50 robots. “It was a mind-boggling experience. There was an expert for doing everything, and you could just send someone a message on WeChat, and 24 hours later they could get the part into your hands with your specifications.” Since the fleet has been deployed, Kiwibot has fulfilled over 25,000 deliveries, empowering communities with deliveries that are more affordable and accessible, and even landing a partnership with Doordash. Sasha is now the Head of Product at Kiwibot, where he leads a team of designers, data scientists, and engineers. “It’s about making a seamless experience for our customers — whether understanding the data, designing the interactions, or helping our customers; our team makes it work.” Alejandro is the Head of Design, and does even more CAD in his spare time, submitting designs for engineering competitions, even taking Silver in 2016 and Highlight Silver in 2018 for the International Train Design Competition.
Sasha says that Noisebridge is also about the community — he still comes here today to talk to people like R, who are able to solve complex Python problems. “After twelve hours of banging my head against the table, R says, ‘Oh, you just have to do this and this and this, and — solved!’” Since their first hacked-together prototype, Sasha’s team has productionized a commercial robotic delivery service that has been featured in Bloomberg, BBC, Wall Street Journal, and Tech Crunch. Sasha has also been invited to talk about his work at Google, and at a United Nations conference in Geneva. He still prefers to sleep on the floor, but he has a real mattress now, and lives in a condo.
