Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Oprah Winfrey speaks at the DNC, WNBA star Angel Reese signs a deal with Reese's, and Magic Leap's ex-CEO tackles robotics as her next career. Have a terrific Thursday.
- On the job. Before taking a job as the CEO of Agility Robotics, Peggy Johnson had never worked in the robotics field—and definitely not with Agility's particular brand of robot, a humanoid named Digit that walks on two legs and moves boxes in warehouses.
But Johnson, the former CEO of Magic Leap and an ex-executive vice president of business development for Microsoft, had kept her eye on the emerging industry over her career in tech. And she was familiar with what it took to manufacture hardware, from Magic Leap's VR headsets to mobile phones during her decades at Qualcomm. "People say hardware is hard," she says. "And it is—it's very complex. It's not like cloud software; it's something altogether different."
Since starting her new job this year, Johnson has dove headfirst into the robotics space. Her Zoom background is a looped video of Digit moving boxes in a factory—which the humanoid really does for Amazon and the logistics provider GXO, which manufactures Spanx. Built to resemble a human, the robot accesses narrow aisles, shelves, and other small spaces that other kinds of robots—like stationary arms or wheeled robots—can't. At the same time, it's built for structured spaces like warehouses, not other human activity. "It's not trying to fold clothes or cook dinner inside of a house," Johnson says.
In an emerging technology field, Johnson's mission is to stay focused on what the actual business opportunity is. She's not building cool new technology for the fun of it but staying focused on the actual use for it, which right now is warehouse logistics—where there are 1 million unfilled jobs, she says. That's part of what attracted her to the CEO role, she says. "They not only have very transformative technology, but they've also got product-market fit," she says.
It's similar to what she did at Magic Leap, where she pivoted the VR company from consumer to B2B. At Qualcomm, she was part of the company as it scaled from a few hundred employees to 30,000.
"Much like other technical innovations, [robotics] takes time," she says. "But it's definitely hit its stride now."
After working at Magic Leap and Agility, Johnson has immersed herself in the startup world following multiple decades at Qualcomm and Microsoft. But she says she'd consider returning to big business for the right job. "Can never say no to that," she says of a hypothetical Fortune 500 CEO gig. "But it would have to be something very appealing."
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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