We first met Ryan and Sean a year and a half ago — we showed up late to a round they were nearly done raising. My partner Sarah literally stuck her foot in the door, just to get them to spend another hour with us.
For the next two months, Ryan and I went on a walk every Friday to debug the business. What I remember most is that, every following week, he’d tried the solutions we’d brainstormed before and had explicit results: “you were wrong, the root cause wasn’t that” or “it worked, I also learned something else.” They iterate faster than anyone I know.
Ryan and Sean are both obsessed with being great. Young as they are, they really see Watney as their life’s work. They’re obsessive about who works there (Ryan spends more time on recruiting than any founder I know) and about preserving the culture they’ve built so far. It’s a special, intense group.
Watney’s goal is to enable ambition in the physical world. They think that the clearest marker of that is being able to deploy robots to solve real problems, in an economically self-sustaining way. The foundation model companies present steadily climbing evals on constructed tasks but a) the real world is much messier and b) 95% solved is 0% deployed.
Watney knows what actual deploys take and on some of the hardest tasks with the most sophisticated customers — since 2025, they’ve been helping the largest hyperscalers accelerate their compute deployments, with four nines of reliability. Today, they run the largest fleet of dexterous robots, running 24/7/365. If we are serious about building things in America, it will happen because of teams like Watney —an automation-first mindset and gritty full-stack problem solving.
We @conviction are lucky and proud to work with Ryan, Sean & the whole team at Watney. For those of you who want to enable ambition in the physical world and care about having work that works outside a lab, we’d love if you’d join them.