Rerun co-founder and CEO Nikolaus West said after a speech at the Y Combinator Paper Club that now is the best time in history to start a robotics company, urging more people to launch robotics application companies to address valuable issues in the real economy. West noted it is now possible to quickly start such businesses by adopting teleoperation, using off-the-shelf hardware, and targeting partial autonomy rather than waiting for fully autonomous general robotic intelligence. He emphasized that foundational models will continue to improve, the hardware supply chain ecosystem has been fully initiated, and there is explosive demand for physical AI data layers, allowing application companies to enter the market without building a complete hardware stack. Rerun focuses on building data layers for Physical AI, and its open-source multimodal data visualization tools have been adopted by Meta, Google, Hugging Face LeRobot, and Unitree. The company previously completed a $17 million seed round financing. This week, the YC Paper Club focused on the robotics field, gathering researchers from institutions like Stanford to discuss developments in memory architectures, tool operations, and world action models, with West's theme being "The next great robotics companies will start from teleoperation." From a market mechanism perspective, this viewpoint is a signal driven by the entrepreneurial ecosystem, attracting early funding and talent to the application layer rather than purely foundational models or hardware.