Ep 89 | Business Masterclass: Selling First Before Building (w/ Albane Dersy)

Albane Dersy turned down Goldman Sachs to build Inbolt, a robotics company now deployed in factories across the world. Her story is a masterclass in execution:

In this episode, we talk about how Albane grew up in Paris, pushed her way through the French prep school system, and found her path into entrepreneurship after a semester at Wharton opened her eyes to what was possible.

She explains how she met her two co-founders during the X EC program, and how the first version of Inbolt had nothing to do with robots. They started with a real-time guidance tool for workers and later pivoted to industrial robots after spending months on factory floors and seeing where customers really needed help.

Albane walks through what it takes to sell and deploy automation inside global companies. She talks about why founders need to be on site all the time, and why selling early matters more than waiting for perfect reliability. She explains why deployment is everything in manufacturing and how Inbolt built a system that retrofit existing robots, reduced downtime, and proved value in a few weeks instead of years.

We also talk about ambition, hard work, and the pressure she faced breaking into industries that are not always welcoming to young founders. Albane shares her early years in boxing gyms, her drive to be taken seriously, and the mindset that helped her operate and grow a company that now works with some of the biggest manufacturers in the world.

If you want a clear look at how real robotics gets deployed at scale, and what it takes to build a company inside the most demanding industry in the world, this is an episode you should hear.