Notes from a conversation about Physical AI with Touraj Parang
Last Thursday, May 28, a small room in Palo Alto stayed later than it should have, hopefully the signal that an evening worked. Mavka Capital and Foley convened the third installment of “Hard Things,” our invite-only series for the founders, investors, and builders working at the frontier of physical AI. The conversation, moderated by my partner in this series Vitaly Golomb of Mavka Capital, ran past the point where people normally start drifting toward the door. Nobody drifted.
We built Hard Things around the shift from bits to atoms, from intelligence in the cloud to intelligence embodied in machines that have to survive contact with the real world. The bits are easy to write about. The atoms are where companies break, and where the honest lessons live. So, we keep the format deliberate: no stage, no deck, just one operator in a room with people who build.
