TechDrive Zurich

Justinas Mišeikis
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Casual short informal interviews with key people in the tech industry in Switzerland and beyond. 20 Minutes. All in English. Join private WhatsApp group: https://chat.whatsapp.com/JgGidD8SqsuFzohXvZmo5z

  1. 18h ago

    Why Your First Robot Project Should Start Small | Andie Zhang, ABB Robotics

    A robot can do a backflip. That does not tell you whether it can load a dishwasher or solve a customer’s problem. Andie Zhang joins Justinas Mišeikis for a drive through Zürich to discuss the practical work behind useful robots. Drawing on her experience at ABB Robotics and Tetra Pak, she explains why companies should start their first automation project with a small task, how workflows shape deployments, and what live demos can reveal. We also discuss hiring beyond the usual robotics CV, testing products with unfamiliar users, and connecting product features to value a customer will pay for. In this episode: Choosing the right first robot taskCollaborative robots and the surrounding workflowHumanoid attention and responsible product claimsThe live demo that became a robot danceJob descriptions, diverse perspectives and user testingSelling customer value rather than a feature list Join our WhatsApp group for new episodes and behind the scenes: https://chat.whatsapp.com/JgGidD8SqsuFzohXvZmo5z ABOUT THE GUEST Andie Zhang spent over 10 years at ABB Robotics and has released the first ABB Cobot YuMi. She's Global Portfolio and Technology Manager Collaborative Robots and has recently be recognised as one of top 100 Women in Robotics in Switzerland ABOUT TECHDRIVE ZÜRICH Candid, English-language conversations in a moving car with the founders, researchers, investors and operators shaping technology. Hosted by Justinas Mišeikis in Zürich, Switzerland. WATCH, LISTEN AND FOLLOW Website: https://zurich.techdrive.tv/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TechDrive-ZurichLinkedIn newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7475433043554598912LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techdrivezurich/Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033uReCOJSJ3CFbj8W5gDXApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/techdrive-zurich/id1896934782Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/3168e5f7-4ba6-402d-81a0-0ec5b66282e0/techdrive-zurichCastbox: https://castbox.fm/channel/id7276552Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/2egd0gr2Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techdrivezurichFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61591083008421TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@techdrive.zurich

  2. Oct 21

    Bilge Demirköz: AI in Space, Chatbots and the Questions We Should Ask

    Does moving AI data centres into space solve the problem, or change the engineering challenge? Bilge Demirköz joins Justinas Mišeikis on TechDrive Zürich for a conversation about cooling, crowded orbits and the choices we make as AI becomes part of everyday life. Bilge is a Professor of Physics at METU and a member of the UN AI Panel. Her perspective comes from working with AI in research while questioning where it is useful, what it consumes and how it affects people. We discuss why solar energy does not make heat removal automatic in orbit, how satellite debris can create further collision risks, and why large infrastructure plans need a broader environmental assessment. Back on Earth, Bilge reflects on children's motivation to learn, chatbots that tell us what we want to hear, and the difficulty of building evidence while the technology keeps changing. There is enthusiasm here too: analysing International Space Station data in the search for dark matter, an AI-assisted filter design she says worked despite looking unfamiliar, and student projects exploring the stratosphere. She also explains the local Qwen model in her lab and acknowledges the hallucinations the team still catches. In this episode: Physics, mathematics, music and learning across disciplinesPower versus cooling in orbital AI infrastructureSatellite collisions and shared environmental risksAI as fire: useful, powerful and in need of responsible useEducation, curiosity and chatbot behaviourScientific evidence and the UN AI Panel's roleHer lab's local-model exceptionAI-assisted simulation and engineering designStratospheric balloons and experiments closer to EarthThe case for keeping an efficient solution that already works Join the TechDrive Zürich WhatsApp group for new episodes and behind the scenes: https://chat.whatsapp.com/JgGidD8SqsuFzohXvZmo5z ABOUT THE GUEST Bilge Demirköz is a Professor of Physics at Middle East Technical University (METU) and a member of the UN's Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence. This episode shares her personal perspectives and research experiences. ABOUT THE SHOW TechDrive Zürich is an English-language series of candid, in-car conversations with founders, researchers, investors and operators shaping technology. Hosted by Justinas Mišeikis in Zürich, Switzerland. Video episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TechDrive-Zurich All episodes and platform links: https://zurich.techdrive.tv/ Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techdrivezurich/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techdrivezurich TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@techdrive.zurich Follow TechDrive Zürich on your podcast app for the next drive.

  3. Oct 14

    Max Vogt (Swisscom Ventures): why great tech isn’t enough to build a startup

    How do you turn a robotics breakthrough into something customers actually use? Max Vogt of Swisscom Ventures joins Justinas Mišeikis for a drive through Zürich to explore the gap between great research, a promising startup and technology that becomes part of everyday life. Join the TechDrive Zürich WhatsApp community for new episodes and behind the scenes: https://chat.whatsapp.com/JgGidD8SqsuFzohXvZmo5z Max’s route into venture capital began with law, took him to Hong Kong, and included helping students find their feet at St John’s College. That experience still shapes how he thinks about backing people. We talk about what he looks for beyond a founder’s pitch deck, why technical teams need to stay flexible about their solution, and what seeing technology deployed in Shenzhen made him reconsider about Switzerland. We also discuss robotics and physical AI, the timing of a startup’s market, and why the outcome of a venture investment takes years to judge. In this episode: From law and Hong Kong to venture capitalUnderstanding the person behind the pitchFalling in love with the problemRobotics, physical AI and whether customers are readyBringing Swiss technology into everyday useThe work, relationships and patience behind a venture fund TechDrive Zürich is a series of candid, in-car conversations with the people building technology in and around Zürich, hosted by Justinas Mišeikis. Watch TechDrive Zürich on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TechDrive-Zurich Connect with Max: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maximilianvogt/ All episodes and listening platforms: https://zurich.techdrive.tv/ LISTEN & FOLLOW TECHDRIVE ZÜRICH All episodes and platforms: https://zurich.techdrive.tv/Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033uReCOJSJ3CFbj8W5gDXApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/techdrive-zurich/id1896934782LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techdrivezurich/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techdrivezurichTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@techdrive.zurichFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61591083008421

  4. Oct 7

    Why Robots Can Backflip but Struggle With Real Work | Enzo Wälchli on TechDrive Zürich

    A robot can land a backflip, yet struggle to pull keys out of a pocket. Enzo Wälchli, founder of Operator Circle and former Chief Commercial Officer at ANYbotics, joins Justinas Mišeikis for a drive through Zürich to explain the gap between an impressive demo and a dependable product. From selling drilling machines at Hilti to building a robotics company’s commercial organisation, his experience shapes how he thinks about customers, hardware and investment. We discuss why deployments take time, what years of field data are worth, and where Switzerland has an opportunity in physical AI. For first insights and behind the scenes, join our WhatsApp group: https://chat.whatsapp.com/JgGidD8SqsuFzohXvZmo5z In this episode: From a 23rd-floor strategy office to meeting customers on construction sitesWhy robotics companies need different expectations from SaaS businessesWhat industrial pilots reveal that laboratory demonstrations cannotWhether robot software can succeed without close hardware partnershipsHumanoids, useful dexterity and the role of spectacular demosSwitzerland’s engineering strengths and the thinking behind Operator Circle TechDrive Zürich features candid, in-car conversations with the people building technology in and around Zürich, hosted by Justinas Mišeikis. Subscribe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7475433043554598912Join our WhatsApp group: https://chat.whatsapp.com/JgGidD8SqsuFzohXvZmo5zWatch the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/1ZWaSGfw--MConnect with Enzo: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ewaelchli/TechDrive Zürich website: https://techdrive.tv/

  5. Sep 23

    We Throw Computing at Our Ignorance | Daniel Dobos on TechDrive Zürich

    At a rooftop barbecue at CERN, a group of researchers asked each other what any of their work changed for ordinary people. One answer that came out of those evenings involved body bags, and the packaging used to protect particle detectors, and giving forensic teams enough time to return names to families. Daniel Dobos trained as a particle physicist and spent most of his career at CERN building silicon and diamond detectors. The data rates forced him into machine learning long before the current wave: the ATLAS experiment produced 80 terabytes a second, far too much to store, so the analysis had to happen in real time. He went on to co-found THE PORT, a set of humanitarian hackathons run with challenges from the United Nations and the International Red Cross. The technical heart of this conversation is a claim about understanding rather than cost. Daniel argues that we do not know how learning works, so we substitute scale for the missing knowledge, and that scale turns out to work surprisingly well. Good enough for fluent text, not good enough to call the problem solved. He points at reasoning benchmarks where a ten year old still beats the frontier models, and at the human brain running on 20 to 50 watts, as evidence that a far more efficient answer exists and we have not found it yet. In this episode: Why 80 terabytes a second forced CERN into real time inference on FPGAs, not GPUsForty million inferences a second, years before the AI hypeThe rooftop barbecue that moved him from pure research into the ecosystemTHE PORT, and how detector packaging ended up giving families back their deadWhy a hackathon team working on encryption recruited a magicianThe Harvard study suggesting one generation may not be smarter than the lastWhat social media should have taught us about scaling a technologyWhy he let his children play with AI image generators before saying anythingThe question they arrived at on their own, and why that mattered more than a warningFire as the oldest example of a technology that runs both waysRadiation in orbit, and why a flipped bit is worse for a transformer than for deterministic codeThe brain on 20 to 50 watts, and what neuromorphic and energy based approaches might changeLearning overnight, and what dreaming could mean for a language modelFifteen minutes in a robotaxi in Shanghai, and how quickly an eleven year old stopped noticing About the guest: Daniel Dobos is a particle physicist who spent most of his career at CERN working on silicon and diamond detectors and on real time machine learning for the ATLAS experiment. He is a co-founder of THE PORT humanitarian hackathons and a father of three. About the show: TechDrive Zürich is a series of candid, in-car conversations with the people building technology in and around Zürich, hosted by Justinas Mišeikis. 🔗 Connect Guest: Daniel Dobos - https://www.linkedin.com/in/danieldobos/TechDrive Zürich, hosted by Justinas Mišeikis - https://techdrive.tv/WhatsApp Group: https://chat.whatsapp.com/JgGidD8SqsuFzohXvZmo5zFollow the LinkedIn newsletter for the whole series: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/techdrive-z%C3%BCrich-7475433043554598912/TechDrive Zurich website: https://techdrive.tv/YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TechDrive-Zurich

  6. Sep 16

    Nobody Has Left a Robot Working Overnight, with Yulia Sandamirskaya

    Cleaning robots are real. Greeter robots are real. Anything with an arm is not, at least not as a product you can buy and trust to work unsupervised. Prof. Dr. Yulia Sandamirskaya said it precisely: nobody in the world has yet dared to leave a robot with a manipulator doing real work in a care facility and then gone to bed. That is the line between a demo and a product, and the industry has not crossed it. She is a professor at ZHAW, the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, where she leads the Centre for Cognitive Computing in Life Sciences, and she is spinning a company out of her lab to bring robots into elderly care. So this is not scepticism from the sidelines. We get into neuromorphic computing and why a fruit fly performs acrobatics on roughly 100,000 neurons and almost no power. Then the line that reframes everything: your eye is sharp across only about two degrees and jumps three times a second, so the steady scene in front of you is 95% imagination. Intelligence, she argues, is closer to how many things you can imagine at once than to how much data you collected. She is blunt about AGI. It has been almost here since the Dartmouth summer school in 1956, and bigger static models do not close the gap. She makes the case against humanoids on legs, because a robot on stairs is a hazard to everyone near it, and describes a Neuraverse where robot skills work like apps. Her team toured a care home, ended up in the staff room, and she asked a caregiving team leader almost as a joke why he needed robots at all. He paused, then started listing, and she had to get her notebook out. The people who will work beside the machine know where the real bottlenecks are. She also explains why the business model has to be robot as a service rather than a purchase, and tells the story of her grandmother in Belarus, living alone and refusing help, which is the actual reason she is building this. We just started a TechDrive Zürich WhatsApp group. Every episode the moment it lands, behind the scenes, the bloopers that did not make the cut, and updates straight from the guests themselves. WhatsApp Group: https://chat.whatsapp.com/JgGidD8SqsuFzohXvZmo5zWatch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TechDriveZurichAnd follow the LinkedIn newsletter for the whole series: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/techdrive-z%C3%BCrich-7475433043554598912/TechDrive Zurich website: https://techdrive.tv/

  7. Sep 2

    Physical AI Is Ready. Your Building Isn't. | Kateryna Portmann on TechDrive Zurich

    When Kateryna Portmann was a kid in Ukraine, she asked her parents for a robot every time they travelled. They could never find one, so she got dolls instead. She works in robotics now, as Senior Product Manager at ANYbotics, and she runs the Women in Robotics Society. Her route there was not a straight line: international business, an executive MBA, consulting, a PhD in Hong Kong she could not finish, then a startup where a language barrier pushed her towards numbers and into product management. She landed in robotics in 2019, for a reason that never shows up on a CV. Her sister has cerebral palsy and used neurorehabilitation devices, which is how she found the company that made them. The core of this conversation is what actually breaks a robot deployment. Assume the robot works perfectly. It has been simulated, tested and deployed correctly. Then people leave a ladder in the corridor, prop open the door that has to stay shut, and walk the stairs while the robot is on them. The machine is rarely the hard part. The building, the workflows and the people are. In this episode: Why the robot is usually the easy part of a deploymentNobody wants another interface, and what that means for integrationRobot ready, facility ready, organisation ready, and why all three have to line upThe gap between three robots and a hundred, and why most pilots never cross itWhy almost nobody has twenty years of mobile robotics experience, and why that helpsCompliance running behind the technology, and building safe by design anywayMoving from brownfield sites today to greenfield in three to five yearsHow to get into robotics now, and what these companies are actually hiring forServing a population that is half women with teams that are twenty to thirty percent Join exclusive WhatsApp Group: https://chat.whatsapp.com/JgGidD8SqsuFzohXvZmo5z You'll get sneak peek into upcoming guests, behind the scenes and more. About the guest: Kateryna Portmann is Senior Product Manager at ANYbotics, working on robots for hazardous zones and critical infrastructure, and runs the Women in Robotics Society. She was previously at Hocoma in neurorehabilitation robotics. About the show: TechDrive Zürich is a series of candid, in-car conversations with the people building technology in and around Zürich, hosted by Justinas Mišeikis. ▶ Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/uvoba2PyXEQ 🔗 Guest: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katerynaportmann/ 🔗 Women in Robotics Society: https://www.linkedin.com/company/women-in-robotics-switzerland 🔗 ANYbotics: https://www.anybotics.com/ 🔗 TechDrive Zürich: https://techdrivezurich.lovable.app/ 🔗 Hosted by Justinas Mišeikis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinasmiseikis/

  8. Aug 26

    Switzerland's AI Movement is About to Start! | Swiss {ai} Weeks Team on TechDrive Zürich

    For the first time on TechDrive Zürich there are two guests in the car! Katka Letzing and Anna Hakobyan co-initiated Swiss {ai} Weeks, five weeks of AI events running across Switzerland from 1 September into early October, with more than 200 partners and more than 200 events behind it. We recorded two weeks before it opened. It takes about twelve months to build, and they start the week after the previous one ends. Most of the conversation is about restraint rather than acceleration. Anna explains why generating ten pages of a document in two minutes does not mean you should, and what happens when the person receiving it summarises it with AI. Katka explains why leading with AI stopped being impressive the moment everyone started doing it. Both of them describe the shift away from large frontier models toward smaller specialised ones, and the gap between organisations that pilot and organisations that scale. They are also unusually direct about themselves. Katka says she handles negotiation and diplomacy because she was trained to negotiate in war zones, then says in the next breath that the technical side is not her strength. Anna talks about taking ego out of a project you care about, and admits that asking for help is the part she still works on. And one number worth sitting with: partner organisations taught 6000 children about AI, and then those children went back to classrooms where the teachers had not had the same training. In this episode:• Why they built a movement instead of a programme• Coming in with the mindset of an experiment• From Czechoslovakia and the UN to Zürich• Why organisations backed this with no direct business return• What people keep getting wrong about Apertus• Why smaller specialised models are winning• AI consciousness, and generating less• Whether hackathons actually go anywhere ⏱️ Chapters 00:00 Two guests, two weeks to go 01:44 It takes 12 months to build five weeks 02:54 Why a movement and not a programme 04:21 Come in with the mindset of an experiment 05:35 Katka: Czechoslovakia, Silicon Valley, Kickstart 07:46 Anna: the UN, Montreal, New York, tech 10:34 What each of them brings to the team 11:29 Taking ego out of the equation 13:29 Getting partners on board 14:32 They backed it with no direct business link 15:03 Why this works in Switzerland16:18 What would make this year a success 17:22 6000 kids, and the teachers who were not ready 18:41 Where AI is actually heading 19:42 The Apertus misunderstanding 20:51 Away from the frontier models 21:53 Ten pages in two minutes 22:55 AI does not make you cool any more 23:43 Do hackathons actually go anywhere 24:47 How to take part Join exclusive WhatsApp Group: https://chat.whatsapp.com/JgGidD8SqsuFzohXvZmo5z You'll get sneak peek into upcoming guests, behind the scenes and more. Swiss {ai} Weeks: https://ai-weeks.ch/ Katka Letzing: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katkaletzing/ Anna Hakobyan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annahakobyan/ More of TechDrive Zürich: https://techdrivezurich.lovable.app/ Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/mS4hiMQVwpk TechDrive Zürich is hosted by Justinas Mišeikis: https://jmiseikis.lovable.app/

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About

Casual short informal interviews with key people in the tech industry in Switzerland and beyond. 20 Minutes. All in English. Join private WhatsApp group: https://chat.whatsapp.com/JgGidD8SqsuFzohXvZmo5z

Information

  • Creator
    Justinas Mišeikis
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    14
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Justinas Mišeikis
  • Show Website
    TechDrive Zurich

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