Technology

Creator transparent burger robot doesn&t grind your brisket and chuck steak into a gourmet patty until you order it. Thatjust one way this startup, formerly known as Momentum Machines, wants to serve the worldfreshest cheesebuger for just $6. On June 27th, after 8 years in development, Creatorunveils its first robot restaurant before opening to the public in September. We got a sneak peek…err…taste.

When I ask how a startup launching one eatery at a time could become a $10 billion company, Creator co-founder and CEO AlexVardakostas looks me dead in the eye and says &the market is much bigger than that.&

Herehow Creatorburger-cooking bot works at its 680 Folsom St location in San Francisco. Once you order your burger style through a human concierge on a tablet, a compressed air tube pushes a baked-that-day bun into an elevator on the right. Itsawwed in half by a vibrating knife before being toasted and buttered as its lowered to conveyor belt. Sauces measured by the milliliter and spices by the gram are automatically squirted onto the bun. Whole pickles, tomatoes, onions, and blocks of nice cheese get slices shaved off just a second before they&re dropped on top.

Meanwhile, the robot grinds hormone-free, pasture-raised brisket and chuck steak to order. But rather than mash them all up, the strands of meat hang vertically and are lightly pressed together. They form a loose but auto-griddleable patty thatthen plopped onto the bun before the whole package slides out of the machine after a total time of about five minutes. The idea is that when you bite into the burger, your teeth align with the vertical strands so instead of requiring harsh chewing it almost melts in your mouth.

If you want to be the first to try it, Creator is selling early access tickets at 10am Pacific today. Otherwise it will be open for lunch Wednesdays and Thursdays until the public launch. Eventually, an app will let people customize the exact ratios of all the ingredients, unlocking near infinite permutations.

For now, the startupinitial pre-set burger options include the classic-style Creator vs. The World with a mole Thousand Island special sauce, the oyster aioli Tumami Burger designed by Chef Tu of Top Chef, The Smoky with charred onion jam, and the sunflower seed tahini Dad Burger from Chef Nick Balla of Bar Tartine.

The taste of each is pretty remarkable. The flavor pops out of all the fresh cut and ground ingredients that lack the preservatives of pre-sliced stuff. The patties hold together as you munch despite being exceedingly tender. And afterwards I felt less of the greasy, gut-bomb, food coma vibe that typically accompanies scarfing down a cheeseburger.

&This is the kind of burger you would get for $12 to $18 [at an upscale restaurant], and it$6& saysVardakostas. It might not be the best burger I&ve had in my life, but itcertainly the best at that price. A lot of that comes from the savings on labor and kitchen space afforded by a robot cook.&We spend more on our ingredients than any other burger restaurant.&

The CEO wouldn&t reveal how much Creator has raised, but says itbacked by GoogleGV, frequent food startup investor Khosla Ventures, and hardware-focused Root Ventures. However, SEC filings attained by TechCrunch show the startup raised at least $18.3 million in 2017, and sought $6 million more back in 2013.

Itunderstandable why. &McDonalds is a $140 billion company. Itbigger than GM and Tesla combined. McDonalds has 40,000 restaurants. Food is one to the top three biggest markets&Vardakostas rattles off. &But we have a lot of advantages.The average reastaurant is 50 percent bigger in terms of square footage.& Then he motions to his big robot thata lot smaller than the backside of most fast-food restauants, and with a smile says &Thatour kitchen. You roll it in and plug it in.&

From Flipping Patties To Studying Physics

Creator co-founder and CEO Alex Vardakostas

What you want in a founder is a superhero origin story. Some formative moment in their life that makes them hellbent on solving a problem. Vardakostas has a pretty convincing tale. &My parents have a burger joint& he reveals. &My job was to make several hundred of the same burger every day.You realize thereso much opportunity not taken because you don&t have the right tools, and ithard work.&

Robots and engineering weren&t even on his radar growing up in the restaurant in southern California. Then, &when I was 15 my dad took me to a book store for the first time.I started reading about physics and realizing that this could be a possibility.& He went on to study physics at UC Santa Barbara, got to work in the garage, and finally drove up to Silicon Valley to machine the first robot prototypeparts at the famous Silicon Valley TechShop.

Thatwhen he met his co-founder and COO Steve Frehn. &Steve told me he was from Stanford and I was super intimidated&Vardakostas recalls. But the two had a great working rapport, and a knack for recruiting budding mechanical engineers from the college. Momentum Machines started in 2009, was a full-time garage project by 2010, incorporated and joined Lemnos Labs in 2012, and the startup began to make serious progress by 2014.

In the meantime, other entrepreneurs have tried to find a business in food robots. There was the now-defunct Y Combinator startup Bistrobot that haphazardly spurted liquid peanut butter and Nutella on white bread and called it a sandwich. More recently, Miso Robotics& burger-flipping arm named Flippy made headlines, even though all it does is flip and cook patties on a traditional griddle. &We have an arm that pulls out the burgers, but thatprobably 5 percent of the complexity& of the full Creator robot run by 350 sensors, 50 actuators, and 20 computers,Vardakostas scoffs.

Breaking Burger Behavior

The CEOpast in the kitchen keeps Creator in touch with the human element. He tells me he thinks the idea of a staff-less restaurant where you order on a computer sounds &dystopian&. In fact, he wants to give his food service employees access to new careers.Vardakostas says with a sigh that &people look at restaurant work as a charity case, but man, we just need a chance.&Referring to the old Google policy of letting employees try out side projects, he explains how &Tech companies get 10 percent time but no one does that for restaurant workers.&

&Something we got really excited about in 2012 and we&re just starting to excute on is reinventing the job of working in a store like this, where the machine it taking care of the dirty and dangerous work& his co-founder Frehn explains. &We&re playing around with education programs for the staff. 5 percent of the time they&re paid just to read. We&re already doing that. Therea book budget. We&re paying $16 an hour.As opportunities come up to fix the machine, therea path we&re going to offer people as repair or maintenance people to get paid even more.&

One tradition Creator couldn&t escape was french fries. Vardakostas says they&re basically the least healthy thing you can eat, noting they&re &worse than donuts because theremore surface area exposed to the frier.& But chefs told him some people simply wouldn&t eat a burger without them. Creatorcompromise is that burgers are paired with hearty miniature farro or seasonal veggie salads by default, but you can still opt for a side of frites.

Creatorfate won&t just be determined by the burger robot and the people that work alongside it. The startup will have to prove to fast food diners that it can be just as quick and cheap but a lot tastier, and that they&re welcome amongst the restaurantbougie Pottery Barn decor. At the same time, it must convince more affluent eaters that a cafeteria-style ordering counter and low price don&t mean low quality. Oh, and the name is a bit rich for a burger spot.

For now, Creator won&t be licensing out its bot or franchising its restaurant, though those could be lucrative. &I don&t want someone putting frozen beef in there or charging way more& says Vardakostas. Instead, the goal is to methodically expand, and maybe take advantage of its petite footprint to move into airport terminals or bus stations. &We want to get out of San Francisco& Frehn confidently concludes. &Our business model is pretty simple. We take a really good burger that people like and sell it for half the price.&

In a press release touting &another record year,& Intel dropped a a bombshell, announcing that CEO Brian Krzanich is resigning, amid revelations of a &past consensual relationship& with an employee.

&Intel was recently informed that Mr. Krzanich had a past consensual relationship with an Intel employee,& the company notes in the release. &An ongoing investigation by internal and external counsel has confirmed a violation of Intelnon-fraternization policy, which applies to all managers. Given the expectation that all employees will respect Intelvalues and adhere to the companycode of conduct, the Board has accepted Mr. Krzanichresignation.&

Krzanich is stepping down from both the chief executive position and the companyboard of directors half a decade after being appointed to the role. CFO Robert Swan has been named the companyinterim CEO in his stead. Swan has been in the CFO role since late-2016, having previous held the position at both eBay and Electronic Data Systems Corp.

Herewhat he had to say on the matter, &Inteltransformation to a data-centric company is well under way and our team is producing great products, excellent growth and outstanding financial results. I look forward to Intel continuing to win in the marketplace.&

Meantime, Intel is looking in earnest for a more permanent replacement with both internal and external candidates.

&The Board believes strongly in Intelstrategy and we are confident in Bob Swanability to lead the company as we conduct a robust search for our next CEO,& Intel Chairman Andy Bryant said in the release. &Bob has been instrumental to the development and execution of Intelstrategy, and we know the company will continue to smoothly execute. We appreciate Brianmany contributions to Intel.&

Twitter this morning announced it has agreed to buy San Francisco-based technology company Smyte,which describes itself as &trust and safety as a service.& Founded in 2014 by former Google and Instagram engineers, Smyte offers tools to stop online abuse, harassment, and spam, and protect user accounts.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but this is Twitterfirst acquisition since buying consumer mobile startup Yes, Inc. back in December 2016

Online harassment has been of particular concern to Twitter in recent months, as the level of online discourse across the web has become increasingly hate-filled and abusive. The company has attempted to combat this problem with new policies focused on the reduction of hate speech, violent threats, and harassment on its platform, but itfair to say that problem is nowhere near solved.

As anyone who uses Twitter will tell you, the site continues to be filled with trolls, abusers, bots, and scams & and especially crypto scams, as of late.

This is where Smytetechnology & and its team & could help.

The company was founded by engineers with backgrounds in spam, fraud and security.

Smyte CEO Pete Hunt previously led Instagramweb team, built Instagrambusiness analytics products, and helped to open source FacebookReact.js; co-founder Julian Tempelsman worked on Gmailspam and abuse team, and before that Google Walletanti-fraud team and the Google Drive anti-abuse team; and co-founder Josh Yudaken was a member of Instagramcore infrastructure team.

The startup launched out of Y Combinator in 2015, with a focus on preventing online fraud.

Today, its solutions are capable of stopping all sorts of unwanted online behavior, including phishing, spam, fake accounts, cyberbullying, hate speech and trolling, the companywebsite claims.

Smyte offer customers access to its technology via a REST API, or it can pull data directly from its customerapp or data warehouse to analyze. Smyte would then import the existing rules, and use machine learning to create new rules and other machine learning models suited to the businessspecific needs.

The customers data scientists could also use Smyte to deploy (but not train) their own custom machine learning models, too.

Smytesystem includes a dashboard where analysts can surface emerging trends in real-time, as well as conduct manual reviews of individual entities or clusters of related entities and take bulk actions.

Non-technical analysts could use Smyte to create custom rules tested on historical data, then roll them out to production and watch how they perform in real-time.

For Twitter, the use case for Smyte is obvious & its technology will be integrated with Twitter itself and its backend systems for monitoring and managing reports of abuse, while also taking aim at bots, scammers and a number of other threats todaysocial networks typically face.

Of course, combatting abuse and bullying will remain Twittermost pressing area of concern & especially as itthe place where President Trump tweets, and the daily news is reported and discussed (and angrily fought about).

But Twitter could use some help with its troll and bot problem, too. The company, along with Facebook, was home to Russian propaganda during the 2016 U.S presidential election. In January, Twitter notifiedat least 1.4 million users they saw content created by Russian trolls;it also was found to have hosted roughly 50,000 Russian bots tweeting election-related content in November 2016.

Presumably, Smytetechnology could help weed out some of these bad actors, if it works as well as described.

Twitter didn&t provide much detail as to how, specifically, it plans to put Smytetechnology to use.

Instead, the company largely touted the teamexpertise and the &proactive& nature of Smyteanti-abuse systems, in todayannouncement:

From ensuring safety and security at some of the worldlargest companies to specialized domain expertise, Smyteyears of experience with these issues brings valuable insight to our team. The Smyte team has dealt with many unique issues facing online safety and believes in the same proactive approach that we&re taking for Twitter: stopping abusive behavior before it impacts anyoneexperience. We can&t wait until they join our team to help us make changes that will further improve the health of the public conversation.

According to Smytewebsite, the company has a number of high-profile clients, including Indiegogo, GoFundMe, npm, Musical.ly, TaskRabbit, Meetup, OLX, ThredUp, YouNow, 99 Designs, Carousell, and Zendesk.

Twitter tells us that Smyte will wind down its operations with those customers & it didn&t acquire Smyte for its revenue-generation potential, but rather for its talent and IP.

LinkedIn reports there are only a couple dozen employees at Smyte today, including the founders. But Smtyeown website lists just nineteen. Twitter wouldn&t confirm Smtye&scurrent headcount but says itworking to find positions for all.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Smyte had raised $6.3 million in funding from Y Combinator, Baseline Ventures, Founder Collective, Upside Partnership, Avalon Ventures, and Harrison Metal, according to Crunchbase.