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Sam Parr and Shaan Puri host a special "Shoot Your Shot" episode, inviting founders to pitch their businesses in a live format. This time, they're in San Francisco, listening to entrepreneurs who have built businesses ranging from a million dollars to hundreds of millions in revenue. The founders get 15 minutes to present their big number, pitch their business, and answer questions. The hosts emphasize that they don't know who's coming, making it a blind audition for these entrepreneurs.

Pasha: The Robotic Chef for Every Home

The first founder to step into the hot seat is Raghav, based in San Francisco. His company, Pasha, is in the robotics space. Raghav immediately drops a compelling number: Pasha is among the 1% of robotics companies that have actually shipped a real product, with 1,000 real-world deployments in homes and kitchens. He explains that Pasha is putting a private chef in every home by building cooking robots. The inspiration came from observing companies like Waymo and Tesla using computer vision and AI for autonomous driving, leading him to wonder why the same technology couldn't be used to cook fresh meals at home. Raghav highlights the problem Pasha solves: takeout is expensive, cooking at home is time-consuming, and there's no easy way to get fresh, delicious food without spending 60 minutes in the kitchen or $25 per serving.

Shaan Puri, humorously admitting his current diet consists of "man kibble" (3 pounds of ground beef and rice), expresses his support for Pasha's mission. Raghav shares that Pasha is backed by Accel and has raised $8 million. The company started eight years ago in India, initially as a project, and was formalized about five years ago. Raghav then presents a freshly cooked spaghetti alfredo with mushrooms, prepared by the Pasha robot. The robot, priced at $1,500 (less than a month of takeout for a family of four), cooks using fresh ingredients, including fresh olives, garlic, milk, butter, and pasta, topped with parmesan cheese. The hosts are impressed by the quality of the food.

Raghav explains that Pasha has 1,000 customers who use the robot three times a week, surpassing the usage frequency of a human chef. He proudly states that Pasha's M6 retention (six-month retention) beats DoorDash, HelloFresh, and other food service providers. Last month alone, Pasha clocked $2 million in bookings, a figure they expect to repeat this month. He clarifies that "bookings" refer to pre-orders, as they have 1,000 units shipped and a long pre-order waitlist. The current bottleneck is manufacturing and operations, as scaling a hardware product requires significant hand-holding in the early days to ensure customer support.

Raghav details the robot's components: a dishwasher-safe pan, a detachable stirrer and spatula, ingredient containers, a drawer for spices, and space for oil and water. Most impressively, a camera monitors changes in color, texture, and consistency to mimic a human chef's intelligence. To train the robot, Pasha initially used human chefs, but now their customers contribute to training, creating what Raghav believes is the world's largest culinary vision dataset. He likens their approach to Tesla's: releasing a useful product to consumers, using it to collect data, and then scaling. The robot currently cooks one-pot meals, addressing the trend of simple, all-in-one dishes. It's not designed for complex tasks like flipping burgers or baking cakes, but excels at dishes like paneer, risotto, spaghetti, Thai red curry, and green curry. The robot handles stirring, heat regulation, and ingredient timing, reducing cooking time from 60 minutes to about 10 minutes of active involvement. Raghav envisions a future where cooking becomes a leisurely activity, done for joy rather than necessity, with every home having a robot chef.