In this talk, Dr. Ross Mead will provide a first-hand account of his experiences over 15 years of competition robotics, and will discuss how these experiences influenced his career as a robot scientist and entrepreneur. Dr. Mead will provide an overview of his research and development of fundamental social behaviors (such as speech, gestures, eye gaze, social spacing, etc.) that serve as building blocks for autonomous face-to-face human-robot interaction (HRI), and how his company (Semio) is using these behaviors to bring robots to life.