Igor Kulakov is the Co-Founder and CEO of MicroFactory (SimpleAutomation, Inc.), a San Francisco-based robotics startup building autonomous "factories-in-a-box" for precision electronic assembly.

Backing their bet that tabletop manufacturing cells beat humanoids for real-world reliability, MicroFactory is backed by Naval Ravikant and Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue, using continuous human teleoperation feedback loops to reach near-100% precision.

MicroFactory: https://microfactory.com

Igor on X: https://x.com/ihorbeaver

Ilir on X: https://x.com/IlirAliu_

Ilir on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilir-aliu/

Timestamps:

0:00 Why we don't need humanoid robots for tabletop assembly

2:24 Inspired by "Back to the Future": Building pinball machines and telescopes at 15

6:30 Creating indie games and viral social media apps for 1M daily users

11:40 The pain of physical hardware: Running a wedding light startup in Ukraine for 9 years

21:16 Moving to San Francisco to be at the frontier of physical AI

32:06 Discovering the problem: Why hardware startups struggle with assembly

36:18 The viral photo frame demo that launched MicroFactory at Founders, Inc.

39:38 Why big AGI labs ignore precision and 99.9% reliability

43:07 Beyond pure data collection: Why reinforcement learning damages hardware

45:00 Human-in-the-loop DAgger: Correcting errors on Jetson Nano for $5 per retraining

52:15 Positive ROI vs. perpetual demos: Why shipping matters

62:41 Advice to founders: Change your environment if your experiments aren't working

Ep 104 | How to Train 99.9% Reliable Robots for $5 (w/ Igor Kulakov)

22Astronauts

Ep 104 | How to Train 99.9% Reliable Robots for $5 (w/ Igor Kulakov)