Henry Hu left Babson College to start Cafe X, which uses industrial robot arms to automate coffee making. He discusses recruiting engineers, fundraising, and his vision for automating repetitive food-service work so humans can focus on customers.
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Hey everyone, you're about to watch the founder of CafeX. His name is Henry Hu and he's got an amazing story. If you want to be one of the entrepreneurs learning here at Draper University, just like the people you see in the audience, make sure you apply today at draperuniversity.com. Hope you enjoy the video. I was thinking we start with some of the story as to how you got started. I know you dropped out of college, but take us a little bit before that and your journey into actually starting Cafe.
Okay, well, thank you for having me. That was a very interesting dancing thing. So I started CafeX in my second year of college. I was at Babson and then dropped out to work on this. Before Babson, I went to high school in— well, basically I grew up in Hong Kong. And I wasn't a very good student, so I started like an online store and a YouTube channel when I was in high school and middle school. Just 'cause I was bored with school and wanted to do something else. But because I had some kind of entrepreneurial experience, I got into Babson, which is an entrepreneurship school, with a fairly low GPA. But at Babson, I think, I was just being a normal student, but one of my friends who was in the MBA program wanted to— got into this course that required a business plan to get into. So it was just like randomly looking for ideas, gave him the idea, and somehow we got in and did it. So I was just kind of like, I wasn't actually taking it seriously. I just did it, and then it just kind of stuck.
And that was Cafe X?
Correct. Yeah, so I mean, the idea came from just standing in line. Like if you go to a Starbucks or any kind of chain cafe, like not a third-wave coffee shop, but like Starbucks or Peet's or something, most of the time the baristas are just moving cups around and pushing buttons on essentially automated machines. And I just had this like really terrible experience in the Singapore airport where it took like 30 minutes for a few drinks. And they were like making mistakes and they were panicking. So I was just like, well, this kind of sucks. Like people have— they're just like standing there moving cups around. pushing buttons, and then there's like a huge line of like angry passengers waiting for drinks. And the reason I was at the airport was because I was visiting like car factories in Germany where they have really awesome robots moving parts and building cars. So I was just like, okay, let's just like buy a robot arm, buy a coffee machine, play around and see if we can You know, like make a cool automated thing.
So did you say when you were studying at Babson, were you studying entrepreneurship or something different?
Yes. Well, I mean, I was in my second year, so I didn't really get to take any of the kind of concentration courses or any of the super interesting courses. But so I didn't really have like, you know, it was just like normal like business school stuff.
So the engineering aspect of Cafe X, When did that play in? Or who did you have to recruit in the very early days in order to make such a thing happen?
Yeah, well, initially I just kind of started talking to robot arm manufacturers and tried to learn how things work. A lot of the parts that we used initially come from the industrial automation world, which is kind of like the Lego of engineering. So you can just buy parts and learn how to use them and combine them, integrate them, and build something. So initially I was just learning very, very basic and terrible now CAD. And I was just making mockups and then doing some of the software mockups as well. Just so we had something to show people to recruit and to raise some money. But yeah, so after we were able to get some money, Had hired a bunch of engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical, software, and built our— sort of hacked together our first prototype. But yeah, that was like super shitty and scrappy.
How long ago was that?
We had our first prototype in 2015 in Hong Kong. One thing that was really helpful was one of the co-founders, He's no longer involved with the company, but was very helpful early on. His family has a manufacturing business in China with sheet metal. And so that basically made it possible for us to make prototypes with like no money. Yeah.
So the whole company or the actual vision, you think it came out of a problem that you experienced firsthand? And then you went ahead and started building. Did you ever have that vision So one question is, what is the vision that you guys have, and was that the same vision when you started?
Yeah, well, the vision is basically we think it doesn't make sense in the future for people in food service to be doing very low productivity, highly repetitive, boring jobs. I mean, basically, you don't want people just moving cups and pushing buttons. People are good for other things. So in the long term, we basically want to, yeah, basically have a future where people are not doing things robots can easily do and instead focus on delivering a really great experience for customers. So in the case of CafeX, the way we use automation is, Again, just doing, like, moving cups around, pushing buttons. We obviously don't actually push the button. There are some knockoff Cafe Xs that actually use the robot to poke the screen on the coffee machine, which is kind of silly. But basically, we have robots that do boring work, and then we have coffee bar specialists at all of our locations. And they're basically like front-of-the-house staff at a retail store. So I think, like, in the future with QSR or food service, it's going to be kind of like more like retail in terms of your interaction with other, like, staff that work there. So I have a question for both of you.
