What will the home of 2035 actually look like: One humanoid robot that does everything, or 10 specialized robots, each handling one specific task extremely well?
In this episode of NEXT with John Koetsier, I talk with Amber Atherton, serial entrepreneur and investor at Patron, about a very different vision for the future of home robotics.
Instead of assuming that every household will eventually have a general-purpose humanoid assistant, Amber argues that consumer robotics may scale first through highly specialized devices that quietly take over specific routines and chores.
Think skincare. Hair. Gardening. Cleaning. Wardrobe management. Kitchen tasks. Pet care.
In other words, the future home may be full of robots without looking like it’s full of robots.
We discuss why Roomba is still such an important example of successful consumer robotics, why specialization often wins in consumer markets, what people may actually be willing to pay for useful home robots, and how falling hardware costs plus better AI models could create a new wave of robotics startups.
We also get into the bigger platform question: if homes eventually contain dozens of physically intelligent devices, who owns the operating system underneath them? Google DeepMind? NVIDIA? A new robotics platform? Or an ecosystem we haven’t seen yet?
And, of course, we debate whether humanoids ultimately win anyway.
This episode is cross-posted from my Humanoid Daily podcast, where I cover the companies, technologies, investments, and ideas shaping the humanoid robotics boom.
Topics include:
- Humanoid robots vs. specialized robots
- What home robotics could look like by 2035
- Robots for hair, skincare, gardening, and household chores
- Why Roomba remains such an important robotics success story
- Consumer robotics business models
- Pricing home robots
- AI foundation models and physical AI
- Robotics manufacturing and supply chains
- Robot training data
- The future operating system for physical AI
- Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, 1X, Figure, and Apptronik
- Whether the future home needs a humanoid at all
Transcript
Amber Atherton: So it’s not just going to be limited to laundry, folding, and putting dishes in the dishwasher. I think there’s going to be a much more creative landscape when you think about every ritual in the home that could be really owned by some sort of enchanted object.
John Koetsier: Today we’re chatting with Amber Atherton. She’s a serial entrepreneur and investor at Patron, which is an early-stage venture capital firm focused on consumer technology. Super interesting robots, not too certain about humanoids. So we’re going to get into all that stuff. Welcome. How are you doing?
Amber Atherton: Hey, John. Yes, excited to be here. Nervous to have a non-humanoid take on your podcast, but I’m excited for the people to hear it.
John Koetsier: You are allowed. It’s a free speech podcast, so you’re allowed to have a different opinion. Nobody will throw anything at you. It’s all good.
I’m going to start with chores that you want robots to kill, but we’re going to go everywhere. We’re going to go over specialized robots, humanoids. We’re going to talk about what jobs get automated first. We’re going to talk about price points and all that stuff, what investors are getting wrong right now. And we’re going to end with what the home looks like in 2036, a decade from today.
But I want to start here. What chore do you most want a robot to kill in your home?
Amber Atherton: This is going to be maybe, again, contrarian. But for me, it’s more on the consumer side. It’s more like, what if a robot could do my skincare and my hair and maybe sort of my wardrobe? Obviously, everyone talks about laundry, but I think that we are going to enter this era of some very interesting new types of devices that are more about self-care in the home. So those are the ones that I want from, like, a feminine chore perspective.
John Koetsier: I love it. I love it. Sure, there’s a feminine piece, 100 percent, but there’s also just a human piece. I mean, I think it was two years ago I got a massage from a robot at CES in Las Vegas. And that was pretty good. It wasn’t amazing, but I assume it’ll get better. And wouldn’t you like to have one of those every single day? That’d be pretty cool.
Amber Atherton: I mean, wouldn’t you? Yeah. If you’re doing a seven-, eight-, 10-step skincare routine twice a day, it would be pretty awesome to have that chore taken care of. Or, you know, if you’re braiding your hair or if you’re just doing your hair, I think that the efficiency gains that will be had through consumer robotics in the home are going to be awesome.
So it’s not just going to be limited to laundry, folding, and putting dishes in the dishwasher. I think there’s going to be a much more creative landscape when you think about every ritual in the home that could be really owned by some sort of enchanted object.
John Koetsier: I’m so happy that you came on the podcast because you know what? We should know this already. We’ve been told this about 50,000 times, right? We’ve been told this for decades, right? You know, I am a man, and so I may have that perspective, right? And you’re bringing out a different perspective here, which, you know what, is amazing. It’s wonderful. And I haven’t heard that. I’ve heard that from zero other people.
Amber Atherton: Great.
John Koetsier: Zero other people. But I can totally see that that makes sense. How many women, professional women, live alone who want to braid their hair? How do you do that?
Amber Atherton: Yeah, I think this is why consumer investors have an edge over deep tech investors in this category, because the companies that define consumer robotics are going to be ones that can build these really tasteful, beautifully designed devices that consumers want to kind of put out there.
Think about it like a Dyson or, I guess, even a Roomba, right? You are proud to kind of have those objects out there. You’re proud to have, like, an Apple object out there. And so I think that consumers will continue to choose these objects that look nice over ones that have marginally better robotic manipulation but no aesthetic value.
John Koetsier: Cool. We’re going to get off this particular topic in a bit, but I’ll just say that’s not even just a female thing. Men are getting much more into skincare. I’ve had skin cancer surgery four times. I have another one scheduled, so skincare is a thing for me too. So it’s something I need to think about. And you know what? It’d be amazing to have specialized help with that.
Okay. Let’s hit the core part of your thesis right now, which is specialized robots over humanoids. My personal bias is we’re going to see lots of both, and there’s going to be different answers for different people. Talk about your thesis and where you’re coming from, where you see it, and how you see the world with specialized robots potentially winning over humanoids.
Amber Atherton: I think it’s a sequencing thing. You know, we’re coming at this, and I’m coming at this from a consumer investor lens. So it seems obvious that humanoids are already and will continue to be deployed into industrial factory settings. I think the general dexterity is still a little bit further away than people may think.
And so for me, when I look at the consumer landscape around, you know, how do these markets evolve? It isn’t through generalization. It is through having a very specialized product that then owns a specific ritual.
And I think a good example of that is to talk through, you know, Craigslist started as everything, and then you have Airbnb that siphons off accommodation, and then you have Zillow that siphons off real estate, Indeed siphons off jobs, StubHub siphons off tickets. So I think, like, you have this general initial product, but then it really evolves as a market through these specialized verticals.
And so when we think about robots in the home, we want to see beautifully designed objects that own a specific ritual that help you live your life in a more efficient way. And so I think that the primary thesis that I had shared that got a lot of interest was this sort of Beauty and the Beast-esque analogy of having these enchanted objects that come to life and help you with a specific thing. And yeah, I think that’s our vision, this sort of more kind of magical consumer version of the home than iRobot.
John Koetsier: It’s fascinating to hear you talk about that and also to think about that, right? Because we have, at one and the same time, diverging forces in technology, right? At some points, we have convergence, consolidation on an object. So you look at a smartphone today. What does that do? That’s your radio, that’s your phone, that’s your computer, that’s your game machine you play. That’s your fun station. It’s so many things, right? It’s everything in your hand, right?
And yet, you’re very accurate in what you said, that there was Craigslist and it exploded because niching out gives you a better product in specific verticals. And then you see things that niche out.
Let’s take LinkedIn, which is one thing you mentioned, and that explodes. Why? Well, that gets traction. At first, it’s a social network for work, and of course very soon came job search and recruiter tools and a bunch of video and a lot of other things there, right?
And so it’s interesting because when I consider a robot that maybe would braid your hair, that’s got very dexterous fingers or end effectors. Let’s not assume that it’s fingers.
Amber Atherton: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
John Koetsier: I was just at Genesis AI‘s offices in San Carlos, California, and they showed me—and it’s on YouTube as well—their robot hands. And it’s taking wires, electrical wires, braiding them, putting tape around them, which is a pretty dexterous thing to do. It’s not easy for a human to do necessarily even, right? Maybe that robot can braid your hair. And my point is, a robot that can do that, braid hair, can probably use those hands for a lot of other things too.
Amber Atherton: Yeah, and I think that’s coming, by the way. I think it’s a sequencing thing of, are we going to see that in the home first, or are we going to see a very specific object that is for the hair that’s kept on the dressing table versus a full robot?
What’s the end state look like if you have these arms? Why does that have to be attached to a robot body? Why can’t those arms be attached to something that’s more beautifully designed?
And so I think this is where consumer investors and deep tech investors have opposing views on how consumer adoption plays out. But you’re exactly right, again, to mention, you know, Facebook had all of these categories, right? You could post for jobs. Ultimately, LinkedIn built out professional identity, Discord built out these interest-based gaming communities, Strava, fitness and athletes. Like, these are all billion-dollar companies.
And I think that’s sort of the view of these consumer platforms that can be specialized. But no doubt that there will be demand from a segment of consumers who want to have that humanoid in their house, who can do everything for them. That’s their friend, that’s doing the dishes, that’s helping them.
I think we just think maybe before that is the reality, there’ll be a few more vertical specialized objects along the way before we fully get to household humanoid adoption.
John Koetsier: Yeah, I just saw, again, Noetix has a basically realistic human head, 32 degrees of freedom, mounted on a box, basically, right?
Amber Atherton: Mm-hmm.
John Koetsier: One of the roles is to be a friend. So yeah, that’s a role. I also had this thought: how much does it cost for a woman to get her hair done? I mean, that’s probably 150 bucks, you know, basic, even if you’re not getting coloring or other things done, extra work done. And to get a personal hairstylist to style your hair every morning? Wow. I mean, you’re talking thousands of dollars a month minimum.
Amber Atherton: Yeah, totally. There are so many industries. I mean, even just look at the kitchen, right? You don’t have a fridge that also washes your dishes, is a microwave, and is a toaster oven. They are specialized devices still in the kitchen.
And so I think a lot of the Silicon Valley leading vision of consumer robotics has been this sort of single humanoid capable of performing all tasks around the home. But I think this just sort of ignores the reality of, like, everyday consumer life and that we do buy products that do one job exceptionally well.
Like Roomba—we talked about that in the beginning—is a good example of that. It’s a robot that perfectly cleans floors and has been probably one of the most successful consumer robotics companies of the past two decades. So I think that that will still play out.
I would listen to your conversation with him, and it’s interesting seeing this new kind of wave of robotics companies coming out that are positioning their devices, or even toys, as more emotional companions. And I talk about this in my piece, and it does seem that that’s an inevitability too, and that some of these embodied AI objects will ultimately become companions and friends.
But I think that for a large swath of adult consumers, actually just having the chore done, whether it’s cleaning up after your kids, your pets, gardening—like, getting the chore and the utility and the ritual taken care of comes ahead of companionship.
John Koetsier: Yeah, and I think that there’s definitely a segment of us that are kind of weirded out by having a robot for companionship. That said, we’re amazing at treating things like humans, whether they’re pets, whether they’re objects, other things like that.
Okay, you mentioned Roomba. That’s a good segue because I believe that’s still the one and only billion-dollar company based on a home consumer-level robotic solution. Why haven’t we moved past that? Is there something that’s different now that’s going to open up this market?
Amber Atherton: I think that there is a very specific window and opportunity in the next kind of six to 12 months for founders to actually solve that question, right? Like, why haven’t we seen another Roomba?
And I think it’s that there are three different sort of converging curves crossing. One is that foundation models are giving robots the ability to perceive, to reason, and increasingly just manipulate things in the physical world, where it’s been so impossible to get that training data cheaply, instead of following these very rigid pre-programmed instructions.
And then I think the other one is that consumers are now just more ready to invite intelligent hardware into their homes. I mean, like, Oura, Eight Sleep, all of this has normalized buying hardware and then paying this premium subscription.
I think Roomba did this amazing job of opening the market, and now it’s cheaper than ever to produce hardware. You’ve got all the foundation models making it easier than ever to help you kind of train robotics and build off these, you know, synthetic or otherwise data sets.
And so I think the cost of this is also critical. Decades of investments in electric vehicles and drones and smartphones have brought down the cost of everything you need to build a home robot or, like, a specific ritual-based device: the cost of motors, sensors, batteries, and compute.
So I think those three curves allow there to be this very interesting time for founders to go after consumer robotics in a way that just hasn’t existed before.
John Koetsier: Another thing that’s super interesting about this opportunity right now—in fact, there are two other things, just two, probably many more. But another couple of things: I’ve talked to multiple founders in the last three months or so who have operated with incredible speed, who have used AI to accelerate.
It’s not just asking a question about a project or a report that you’re doing or information you need. They’ve actually used AI to accelerate product development, engineering tasks, product-design tasks, and other things like that, and have come to market.
A drone company that I talked to—they were shipping 10,000 motors a month six months after starting the company. I mean, just insane. Whereas before, we might think that some consumer electronics company startup might get funding and three years later you might see something, two years later you might see something. You can see stuff really, really quickly right now. That’s interesting.
The other thing that’s impacting all of this, which I hadn’t even considered when we started this conversation, is what the FCC did. Every robot over four pounds needs specific clearance. It, by default, is not allowed from China. Whether it’s from China or from the world, it has to be produced basically in the United States or get a special waiver. That’s a sea change, if that lasts, in home electronics and robotics.
Amber Atherton: Yeah, I think that—let’s see if this lasts, because I love the premise of this and the sort of philosophy around why this has been put out there. But I think the reality is that the U.S. is still pretty far away from having the manufacturing supply chain to be able to fully execute on a robotics renaissance.
I think the thing that helps founders right now in places like China is the ability to buy your motor, your sensor, your battery. They’re all in the same place. And so that density of supply chain is so important for rapid iteration, like what you were just talking about in terms of how quickly and how cheaply you can get products out.
And so I think we’d all love to see more of that taking place fully end-to-end in America, but there’s a lot that we would need to do, I think, to fully make that come true. But yeah, I think it’s a good premise. Let’s hope it doesn’t hinder innovation in the way that it might worry some, but it will.
John Koetsier: It’ll be super interesting, actually, and it might actually tilt the premise towards the humanoid versus the specialized robots because I see multiple startups in the United States. And I’m thinking 1X, I’m thinking Figure, I’m thinking Apptronik, although they’re not going for the home market in any way, shape, or form, which we’re mostly talking about now with consumer electronics.
But I see some of those companies and a few others as leading candidates in the humanoid robotic space because they’ve got great tech, great AI, and they’re doing really, really well. So I see them, and also many of them have verticalized very extensively, so they own and manage and control their entire supply chain, especially 1X. Huge amount of vertical integration there.
Amber Atherton: Yeah, 1X is awesome. Yeah.
John Koetsier: But I haven’t seen anything like that in the consumer electronics space, so that might be super interesting.
Maybe I’ll ask this question. What if a home robot—let’s say it’s humanoid; it could be wheeled, it could be bipedal, it could be four-legged, whatever—it’s a home robot that’s generalized. What if that was $10,000? Does that invalidate your thesis or not?
Amber Atherton: It’s a really great question in the sense that what price point is going to tip consumers into that level of adoption? I suspect that the type of embodied AI that we’re thinking about in terms of these smaller ritual-owning robotics, they’re going to be under 10K. They’re going to be under 5K, probably under five.
I mean, and then you think about even, like, what did a Roomba come to market at? And obviously, that goes down over time. And there’s undeniably going to be a portion of consumers that will happily be the first 100,000 customers for a 10K humanoid.
But I still think there is a massive opportunity in the under-5K that will then go down to under a thousand, into the high hundreds, where you have a very specific object doing a ritual and chore for you. Whether that’s sorting out your wardrobe, whether it is watering your plants, whether it’s any of the rituals you do every day, it’s very confronting to ask a human, “What chore do you want done?” Or, like, “What would you even do with this humanoid?”
It just needs to be packaged in a way where it’s more about the solution to own a high-frequency ritual. So I think undeniably in both camps, we’re going to see costs continue to go down, and that’s just going to make this reality of a very sort of robotic-centric home come true.
John Koetsier: Yeah, yeah. Let’s make it specific then. Let’s say that tomorrow you learn about a company that has magically just blossomed. None of us have noticed, but it does exactly what you want. It does the morning skincare routine, does the evening skincare routine, and it does it to a high degree of excellence. You’re happy with that result. What’s that worth to you?
Amber Atherton: Gosh. Well, I mean, thinking about doing the math, I’m like, how much would you spend on the alternative of going to get a professional gardener, if you’re talking about gardening, a professional hairdresser, like what we were chatting about earlier? Those costs stack up.
So I think if it’s comparable to what you’re already paying for that, which is probably in the thousands, then hell yeah, I’m going to buy the robot that does it for me.
The other thing I want to mention here is I don’t think anyone is going to— Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
John Koetsier: About 3,500 bucks. You’d spend 3,500. Yeah.
Amber Atherton: I’d spend up to five for something—
John Koetsier: Okay.
Amber Atherton: —that, I mean, can take that chore off my hands. I think that that’s very reasonable. And I think with the humanoid, you probably have more scope to be much greater in price because it just, on the surface, would promise much more ability.
Whereas I think that, you know, just going back to this point, I don’t really feel consumers are going to say, “I’m living with all of these robots in my house. I have one that does the gardening, I have one that does the kitchen, I have one that does my hair, I have one that does my skincare.” Nobody’s going to say that.
Like, nobody today says they own six computers. You say that you have, you know, a phone, a laptop, a television, a watch. And so I think that computers are in your phone, are in your iPad, are in your television, in your watch, and they’re all separate devices that serve a specific purpose. So I think there’d be some nuance.
John Koetsier: Yeah, I agree with you. And then maybe they add the hair to it as well. Maybe you up your price about $1,000. I don’t know.
Amber Atherton: I mean, I think that the business model for these consumer robotics companies is going to be really interesting because you have to figure out a way to do repeat purchasing off the back of the hardware. You don’t just want to buy the robot once. There needs to be a whole ecosystem around it. There needs to be app stores—
John Koetsier: App stores, skills.
Amber Atherton: —UGC, some type of additional subscription revenue somehow. I think that’s what we look for when we’re meeting any founders today, is how do you continue to engage consumers post-hardware purchase? And that’s going to be, I think, very important.
John Koetsier: What are investors getting wrong about humanoids?
Amber Atherton: I think what investors tend to get wrong is adopting this sort of sheep-like mentality that humanoids are the only way forward. Every few months—you are in the thick of it—you see another humanoid demo, all these predictions: there’s going to be one general-purpose machine that will absorb countless tasks.
And I think that view that science fiction has really propelled has been very much adopted by VCs and Silicon Valley more broadly, this, you know, one humanoid to rule them all sort of destiny.
And so I think that our job as consumer investors is to sort of look the other way and think, well, what are consumers outside of Silicon Valley, you know, outside of the Elon Musk bubble—like, what do they actually think? How do they actually buy products, and how do these products become a dominant force in every home in America?
And I think we believe that there’s a different path to how a consumer robotics company comes to life and is executed. And that is through, you know, specialization. And that could then obviously lead to expansion from one ritual to the next to the next.
It’s a much easier proposition and less intimidating proposition, I think, for the majority of American consumers to bring into their home a device that doesn’t necessarily look like a humanoid. So that’s my answer.
John Koetsier: Super interesting. And then it’s also super interesting just to sort of imagine how you make that one entry point and then how you land it, expand it, and how you create an ecosystem.
And we’ve really learned the importance of ecosystem over the past couple decades, I guess, of iOS and Android. I relearned it from Mac OS and Windows, right? And we have to learn it again every generation. I don’t know.
But, you know, what’s that ecosystem look like, and how do you fill the niches of that ecosystem? How quickly do you need to fill those niches of that ecosystem in order to satisfy demands so that somebody doesn’t get a piece from here and a piece from there and a piece from there, and they don’t talk to each other? That will matter.
Will the smart home protocol extend itself to home robotics as well as home electronics, right? So that’ll be really, really interesting.
Maybe we’ll try and come to a finish here because we could talk about this for hours and it’d be interesting. I’d love to do it, but you probably have something to do, and I probably have a life too, as well as our listeners.
What’s the average home look like in 2036? I mean, like, you know, 10 years is a while, right? And what will change by then? What do you think that’ll look like?
Amber Atherton: I think we will see these companies, these robotics companies, may not look like robotics companies at all. On the surface, they may actually just look like next-generation household brands. They may look like the next-generation Ring, Dyson, but the difference is that underneath that, they’re going to each own a specific ritual.
They’ll have deep expertise in one repetitive physical workflow that they’re owning, and they’ll just quietly, in the background, replace minutes or hours of effort with this sort of invisible automation.
So the home to me doesn’t look like one where we all have a humanoid in the corner sitting there waiting for us to click our fingers and wake it up. It looks to me more around these beautiful objects that just very quietly do these things and disappear into everyday life.
And then suddenly you’re thinking, “Gosh, why did I ever do that manually?” You know, and actually it’s the robot busy doing it for you without you even asking, or you just engage with it directly.
John Koetsier: It’s super interesting to consider what that might look like. And if that comes to pass, you know, who is the Android or the iOS of 2036? Who owns that, right?
Google DeepMind. They’ve got huge investments in physical AI. Apptronik is one of the humanoid robots that uses it, but there’s many things that are open and available. NVIDIAhas huge software investments in owning the future of physical AI, right?
And will all these consumer companies say, “You know what? Rather than us going and inventing the world, we’ll take that, we’ll take this, and we’ll build out our physical AI on this platform and go forward based on that”?
There are trillion-dollar companies that are going to be built and destroyed over the next decade. And yeah, I hope you pick the winners.
Amber Atherton: The operating system argument and opportunity is super interesting too, by the way. I think you’re right. It’s whether, you know, how do you compete in that space? Do you go up against the big guys? Can people just use this combination of the most up-to-date open-source frontier models and then build off the back of that?
Or will you see these more specialized companies emerge where you have to buy even just the training data and the data sets from specific companies for specific chores?
I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen some of these companies, right, where you can strap on a camera to your head and get paid to show robots how you do things. And that’s real. That’s happening. You know, you see what’s happening with Mercor, this huge, huge demand for data capture for physical AI, and there’s definitely plenty of interesting investment opportunities in that space to serve these consumer robotics companies.
John Koetsier: Yeah, that’s why you can get a robot to clean your place in San Francisco and New York right now. Lots of cameras, and they’re watching—
Amber Atherton: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John Koetsier: —and they’re learning. Okay, wonderful. This has been a great conversation. I think we have to chat again in a year or something like that and see if you’ve changed your mind or been validated and where you’re going.
I think it’s a great thesis. I think there’s lots of winners and there’s lots of losers, and it’s not always easy to determine who’s going to be it. Otherwise, everybody could be a VC. I mean, like, I could be a VC. Throw a dart. Hey, come on. How hard can it be, right?
But thank you so much, Amber, for this. I really appreciate the chat.
Amber Atherton: Thank you, John. Yeah, appreciate it. Thank you.