🚀 3.2.1. Find Your Billion-Eye Stage ::: Atomic Scaling

72 hours ago, a billion people tuned in to China’s Spring Festival Gala — think Super Bowl halftime show, but watched by a fifth of humanity, all at once, on Chinese New Year’s Eve. This year’s breakout star wasn’t a pop singer. It was a robot.

Last week I told you AI’s disruption will be bigger than COVID. Turns out it’s not staying digital. The physical world is next. And that changes everything.

3 IDEAS FROM ME

I. The cost floor just collapsed — and that’s your opening.

China ran the same playbook it always runs: pick a winner, flood it with infrastructure, compress costs until competitors can’t breathe. Unitree’s R1 humanoid: $5,900. Boston Dynamics’ Spot: $74,500.

The EV supply chain became the robot supply chain overnight. The cost floor collapsing means a small team can now deploy physical intelligence that would have required a division two years ago.

=> The question isn’t whether robots get cheaper. They will. The question is: are you positioned to move when they do?

II. You don't need a bigger team. You need a better stage.

On that billion-person broadcast, Unitree’s robots performed drunken boxing alongside kung fu children, executed 3-metre aerial flips, and ran cluster formations at 4 meters per second. Within 20 minutes of the broadcast, they sold out on JD.com — more humanoid robots sold in one night than the entire world shipped in the previous year. No sales team. No ad budget. One stage, one night.

Small teams can’t outspend incumbents. They can out-engineer the moment.
For atomic scalers, the question is never “how do we build a bigger sales team?” It’s: what is your CNY Gala? One keynote. One book. One appearance in front of the right audience at the right moment can do what a hundred sales people can’t.

=> The Gala didn’t just sell robots. It redefined what Unitree was. One moment, engineered perfectly, can do the same for you.

III. Build the body before you build the brain.

Unitree’s CEO Wang Xingxing said something that sounds like robotics advice but is actually the best founder principle I’ve heard this year: “Locomotion is a fundamental prerequisite for robots. They must first master physical mobility before they can be put to work.”

Most founders do the opposite. They chase the intelligence layer — the vision deck, the AI narrative, the grand positioning — before the business can actually move. Before it can ship. Retain. Survive.

Unitree spent years perfecting motion control before anyone cared about its AI roadmap. The Gala moment only worked because the foundation was unshakeable.

=> Affordable leverage exists. The stage is available. But neither matters if your fundamentals aren’t ready to perform under a billion eyes

2 QUOTES FROM OTHERS:

I.

“With AI models and robotics technology applied at scale, the heat could be 100 or even 1,000 times higher than it is now." — Wang Xingxing, Co-Founder & CEO of Unitree Robotics

II.

"It's not man versus machine. It's man with machine versus man without." — Garry Kasparov, World Chess Champion after losing to Deep Blue

1 ACTION FOR YOU:

This week: start from the stage, work backwards.

Imagine you’re already on your CNY Gala moment — the one appearance, the one book, the one keynote that puts you in front of the right audience at the right scale. Now reverse-engineer it: what needed to be true six months ago? Last month? This week? That’s your roadmap.

Happy Chinese New Year. The Fire Horse is back. So are we. Let's ride.

Ludovic Bodin

3x Entrepreneur, 2x Unicorn Investor, 1x IPO
Founder of BOBIC Generational Wealth
Author of Atomic Scaling

P.S: This aired 72 hours ago to a billion people. A year ago these robots could barely wave a handkerchief — now they do backflips with nunchucks. Watch it here.

P.P.S: Nominations for my new book "Atomic Scaling: AI Edition" keep coming — thank you. Top new picks so far: Unitree and DeepSeek from China; Pixel Flow from Turkey — a 20-person studio, 12 months old, $1B+ exit to Scopely.

Congrats to Pixel Flow founders Kübra Gündoğan and Emre Çelik, and seed investor Akın Babayiğit. Atomic Scaling in the wild.

Still open: what would you most want to learn from DeepSeek, Pixel Flow, or Lovable? Mindset? Reply. I read everything.

WHAT THEY ARE SAYING:

"In Atomic Scaling, Ludovic Bodin shows how boosting talent density, team alignment, and efficiency can overcome capital limits and achieve more with less."

— Xiang Wang, Former President at Xiaomi