Simone Giertz on Her Robots and Returning to Work After Brain Surgery

All right, Simone, yecch! Welcome to the podcast.

Hey, thanks for having me!

How you doing?

I'm great! I'm really excited to, like, be invited to Y Combinator. I've followed you for a very long time, and I'm like, this is where it happens.

Yeah, I wouldn't have guessed that YouTube entrepreneurship would lead you here.

No, well, it's been a path, but it led me here, and I'm very happy about it.

So for people who don't know you, you are the self-proclaimed builder of shitty robots slash YouTuber.

Yeah, I mean, the queen of shitty robots was the dubious title the internet gave me. Yeah, it started as people calling me the queen of r/shittyrobots on Reddit, and then kind of the r/ dropped somewhere along the way. All I'm trying to say is that I did not come up with that title myself because I'm very humble, obviously.

This led you to making videos by yourself on YouTube?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah! It's just a parade of humility, like my whole YouTube channel. Yeah, I'm an inventor and YouTuber is generally the title I use to describe myself, which is cool.

I want to start with a quote from your mom, and she says, according to you, "Whatever feeds the ego kills the soul."

Yeah, and I thought that was hilarious given your occupation at the moment.

Yeah, in her occupation too! Like, she's a TV host back in Sweden and has worked as a TV host for, I mean, more than 20 years.

So, yeah, I mean, I think I agree with it, and it's kind of hard to have... or you're trying to find a balance of having a job that does have a lot of ego in it but at the same time, like, not letting it make you an a**hole. But moreover, there's the trick of, like, staying in love with the thing you're doing.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Because now, like, your first video... well, your first video I saw, it was in Swedish, and then like your second video was 30 seconds long, right? And then you became famous or something like that?

Yeah, or, I mean, his first, the first project I had that kind of went viral was the toothbrush helmet, which is a skateboard arm and the forehead, kind of like a unicorn horn, and a toothbrush at the end of it, and it brushes my teeth. Yeah, and that was the first, like, shitty robot project that I published, and it kind of, like, I think within four months after that, I started working full-time with my YouTube channel, which is crazy.

It's kind of unprecedented.

It was. I mean, I was in a phase in my life where I could make that transition 'cause I was living in San Francisco, I was working as an intern at an electronics company, and I was... my visa was expiring, so I was moving home.

And I'd kind of planned to go home and like maybe do some freelance work, and I was like moving in with my mom and just trying to, like, I just wanted to bring down my costs as much as possible so that I could really spend time just exploring things that I was interested in. That was kind of like me creating this leap-year type environment for myself.

So it was very easy for me to make the transition. Like, it was never that I was like, "I'm gonna quit my job, and I'm gonna start working full-time with YouTube." I was more like, "I'm just freelancing," and kind of like giving some Arduino workshops and trying to get around with that, and then like the YouTube channel just kind of snowballed.

Yeah, was it obvious to you early on that that's where you were drawn to, or were you just all about dabbling in the beginning and like trying stuff out?

I was... I mean, I was going full force at it, and I was really enjoying it. Like, I felt I've had a lot of different jobs and in like a lot of different fields, and it always felt like trying on a bunch of different pants and being like, "These kind of fit, like I can wear them, but they're like also like a little bit crawling up my butt," and like these guys, I don't know, like they're not the most flattering.

But putting on the pants of like having a build YouTube channel was just like, "Okay, this is perfect."

Okay, and now how do you keep that passion for it going? Because like what we were talking about before is it can be a real grind.

Yeah, it's... I mean, I think for me, it's kind of two sides of it...