Top of Mind with Brad Porter
He built Amazon’s robot army. Then walked away. Why? To build something bigger. Top of Mind is a weekly 2–5 minute audio drop from Brad Porter—former Amazon VP of Robotics, Scale AI CTO, and now founder of Cobot. Each short episode delivers raw, unfiltered insights on leadership, automation, and the chaos of building at the edge of physical AI. From warehouse floors to the frontier of machine intelligence, this is what it sounds like when a Silicon Valley leader thinks out loud.
Episodes
69 episodes
Graduation Season and Summer Deployments
Graduation season! Congratulations to graduates out there. Looking forward to a great summer.
Summer Jobs and Outdoor Leadership
Thoughts on summer jobs, the benefits of learning and leading in the outdoors, and physical AI progress.
Lean Into Uncertainty
All-in bets… uncertainty can be fun, if you have conviction in your thesis!
Insights On Physical AI and Performance Reveiw
Deployed Podcast, insights from Generalist's research drop, and thoughts on performance review processes.
Bottlenecks In An Age Of Unbounded Intelligence
On Deployed this week, Jeff Wilke spoke about bottlenecks. In today’s Top of Mind, I extrapolate further to where the bottlenecks emerge in an age of unbounded intelligence.
China vs U.S. Robotics
What's the hardest problem in robotics? My thoughts after a busy NVIDIA GTC week!
Most Scarce Resource in Robotics
The most scarce resource in robotics right now? Real world deployment experience. This week, I announce our new podcast, “Deployed” as well as talk about lessons in scaling robotics, as well as bottlenecks in AI and th...
Designing for Trustworthiness
Trustworthy, useful, adaptable have been our bedrock principles for our robots since day one. Today I go deeper on how we think about designing for trustworthiness.
Technology and War
The Anthropic/DoW negotiation was hard to miss this week. Reflecting on current events, technology, policy, and values. I also touch on the proposed National Commission on Robotics Act.
Striving and Recognition
Reflecting a bit on striving and recognition… why aligning striving with joy and identity is the path to success and recognition.
How to Think About Investments
We’re in a build phase now, AI, robotics, infrastructure… pays to pay attention to the great capital allocators.
Design Matters
Thoughts on design and shout out to the team and our supporters! Oh, and go Seahawks!
Cobot's Strategy
This week I go a bit deeper on our thesis when we founded Cobot and how we’re progressing… enjoy!
Positioning to Ride the Wave in 2026!
2026 is here! We can see the swell forming ahead of what will be the biggest change in the nature of physical work since the advent of the wheel. Get ready everyone!