What happens when a hardcore operator decides to build for the physical world?

Denis Lussault has scaled companies where things actually move: robots, vending machines, and industrial systems that keep the real world running.

After 10 years in automotive and oil & gas, he joined Balyo to build autonomous forklifts and led its U.S. business from $0 to $5M in two years, eventually taking the company public. Then, at Vecna Robotics, he led deployment of self-driving warehouse robots during the pandemic automation boom.

Today, he’s the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Kadeya: a climate-tech startup reinventing hydration with a closed-loop vending system that washes and refills bottles on-site.

In this episode, we dive into how Denis keeps choosing the hardest possible arenas and what it really takes to build physical products that work at scale.

We cover:

• Why most “impact startups” fail to sell and how Kadeya fixed its pitch in one sentence
• How Balyo turned unscalable pilots into a scalable robotics business
• The messy reality of building across hardware, software, and supply chains
• What founders get wrong about global teams (and why trust > tech)
• Denis’ controversial take: most startups don’t need a CTO
• How to hire curious people (and why it matters more than skill)

This episode is a crash course in real-world entrepreneurship: where code meets concrete, and leadership means eating complexity so your team doesn’t have to.

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to build something you can touch, not just deploy, this one’s for you.

🎧 Listen to the full episode of Founders & Empanadas with Denis Lussault, available now on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.