Fast Times @ Google
Fast Times @ Google who had a team post the fastest robot build time of 2025 with a time of 29:36 making them the 27th fastest team All-Time, and third fastest Google team All-Time!
The Top Times in 2025
- Google 29:36 10/9/25 (pictured above)
- Netflix 30:08 6/26/25
- Incode 30:43 10/2/25
- Henry Company 32:06 2/18/25
- Holder Construction 33:05 8/4/25
- OpenAI 33:20 10/2/25
- Bain Capital 33:25 3/29/25
- Meta 34:35 6/5/25
- Meta 34:44 2/26/25
- Acclaro Medical 36:36 1/22/25
The Google team were mostly software engineers, which show up in our top 10 build times of 2025 about half the time. The other half are companies and employees as diverse as you can get including investment, construction, building materials, and medical supplies.
The diversity of top performers makes sense, as the Robot Build and Battle event is really a teamwork event, more so than a tech or engineering event. The form factor is endearing to most folks who are engineers or in tech for sure, however success in the event comes from teams that work together better.
Meta-thinking and planning about the project yields valuable saved time: Which of four parts do we invest the most energy? What order do we assemble the four component parts? How can we best divide and conquer? are all critical questions to building the robot faster.
In addition, for success in the robot battles many critical questions can help generate better results. Do we modify the attack arm? If so, how will we modify it for strategic advantage? We built our robot, what are the best ways to fix the robot between rounds, and to prepare for the finale?
We ask every team that makes the top 100 build times what they think was the reason or reasons for their success. Inevitably their first response is: “Talent!” Upon deeper questioning some common themes do appear: urgency combined with calm dividing of human resources, a team captain that sees the “forest and not the trees”, individuals that do their part well, a combined focus on bringing the robot together in the end.
A huge thank you to Google for having us out to your campus for another amazing Robot Build and Battle team event!
