To develop products that resonate with all potential customers, new robotics start-ups are embracing competence and excellence while promoting diversity and inclusiveness. Although sometimes accused of having competing priorities, groundbreaking roboticists have used best practices to emphasize all of these priorities to ensure the market ubiquity of the cutting-edge systems they are developing. We interviewed some of these groundbreakers (see Figure 1), the founders of three robotics venture startups, Mayfield Robotics, Root Robotics, and Zyrobotics, for IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine (RAM). © 1994-2011 IEEE.