Wen Hsieh spent part of his childhood in the Amazon jungle, studied electrical engineering and biology at Caltech, founded a biochip startup called OnChip Technologies, advised semiconductor companies at McKinsey, and rose from associate to managing partner at Kleiner Perkins before joining Matter, with a career that has also taken him through Brazil, China, and the U.S. He has said he wants robotics to free people from repetitive, physically hard jobs, and he has shown real enthusiasm for the difficulty of precision engineering, once discussing at length why he admired the sapphire manufacturing behind MB&F watches.