I started my career as an anthropologist. I have spent most of it working inside moments where hardware-based innovation meets the real world. Today, we call that physical AI.
Investing in them. Building institutions around them. Sitting on boards while companies make decisions that may eventually become infrastructure.
I co-founded Assembly Ventures, a transatlantic venture firm that invests in teams building companies that change the way the physical world moves. I have spent the years since investing and serving on boards, close to the point where technologies stop being prototypes and start encountering customers, institutions, regulation, labor, and one another.
I have already lived through one version of this transition as automakers moved technology from research project to real roads. I watched the argument change again as the cost of the game pushed most out. I was part of building the first wave of app-enabled mobility services.
Now a faster transition is arriving through physical AI. That is part of why I went back to school.
I joined the Master of Applied Positive Psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania because technology founders and their investors need more tools to measure and grow judgment, resilience, and sustained performance. My top character strength is learning, which surprises nobody.
I have a habit of ending up in the spaces between institutions: company and government, technology and workforce, investor and operator. I love the spot between a rock and a hard place of what is being built and what everyone else will eventually have to live with.
This might have looked like an oddly nonlinear career. I no longer think it is.
Jessica Robinson is an investor, board member, researcher, and educator working at the intersection of technology and the institutions around it. She is co-founder and partner at Assembly Ventures and the author of Systemic Topography, a framework for understanding how technologies harden into infrastructure. She studies human strengths and flourishing, and lives and works in Detroit.
Detroit is not a biography footnote.
It is where I learned to think about technological change from both sides of the transition.
I have sat with people building autonomous vehicles and with the institutions responsible for workers whose jobs those technologies change. I have lost track of time chatting with neighbors from very different circumstances on the city bus. And I have invested in the companies creating the next systems that shape how the world moves.
That dynamic has shaped nearly everything I work on.
Write to me about a company, a question, or a room you are organizing.