Mondo Tech

After an incredible run, I’ve left the Tesla Optimus team to co-found a new venture, Mondo Tech (妙动科技), alongside my long-time friend and business partner from DJI, Soren. We’re building teams in both Palo Alto and Shenzhen.

I’m deeply appreciative of my time at Tesla and the opportunity to contribute to the ambitious Optimus program. Elon’s vision for general-purpose humanoid robots has not only accelerated the technical frontier, but also expanded society’s imagination of a future where humans and robots might coexist more closely. My departure does not reflect doubt about that trajectory, and I can’t wait to see what comes next. Instead, this transition is driven by a specific technical and product hypothesis we are eager to explore at Mondo Tech. That smaller, more accessible robots - designed with consumer applications in mind - can serve as both meaningful products today and foundational platforms for the future. These systems will be compact, user-friendly, safe, and useful, capable of running modern machine learning algorithms on a fully self-developed embedded and mechatronic stack.

If you’re passionate about embedded systems, ML/RL, and you want to build mini robots that can serve as little friends in people’s lives, we’d love to hear from you.

That said, what truly cemented this decision is something more personal:

Our son is almost three. He loves stories. Every night, I tell him adventures about a boy named Pike and his robot companion Nick. Nick helps fix trains using his own parts, scouts mountains (adapting into a drone), and stays up all night when Pike is sick. These stories came from a place of love and hope that he might grow up in a world where robots aren’t just tools, but friendly companions. My son never met Optimus, though he used to watch Optimus videos with me. But when I had to leave him crying to return to the lab, he gradually lost interest. Most nights, after storytime, I’d drive back to work, tuning Optimus algorithms in the Tesla lab, while watching him sleep on the baby monitor, wondering what future I was building for him.

One night, I told him: “Daddy’s not working on that robot anymore. I’m going to build you one, like Nick. One that can be with you every day.”

He looked at me, smiled, and said, “Okay.”

And that was all I needed.