- The autonomous vehicle industry is hyper-focused on scaling self-driving cars in the real world. - Startup CEOs told Business Insider that experience transfers well to the broader robotics industry. - AV engineers have seen the full development cycle from data collection to deployment, CEOs say. As the robotics world races to mature beyond closed demonstrations, founders and CEOs in the robotics space told Business Insider that experience with deploying self-driving cars into the real world makes AV employees ideal candidates for hire. "We definitely look for AV experience," Adrian Macneil, cofounder and CEO of Foxglove, a data infrastructure platform for robotics companies, told Business Insider. "The reason is that AV was the first big application of physical AI, so people who have worked at AV companies have seen what it takes to ship complex physical AI at scale." Macneil himself was an alum of General Motors' robotaxi venture, Cruise, before founding his startup in 2021. At his startup, which has 75 employees, roughly 40% are from AV or AV-adjacent companies, he said, including Waymo, Motional, Aurora, Applied Intuition, Luminar, and Cruise. Autonomous vehicles are a marriage of software and hardware, roughly boiled down to turning noisy real-world data into safe and reliable physical action, i.e., steering a car. Zoom in further, and the cycle could entail data collection, training the driving models, validating safety, and, finally, deploying autonomous cars. Robots, whether utilized for home or industrial applications, will require a similar process. Tony Zhao, CEO and cofounder of Sunday Robotics, which is building home robots, told Business Insider that seeing AV experience on résumés is a plus. He sees talent transfer on both the software and hardware sides. "When it comes to hardware, there are just not that many exciting hardware companies that combine AI and cutting-edge technology," he