#5 - Fil Aronshtein, Co-Founder of Dirac

Podcast: Relentless
Source: whisper-base
Language: en
Duration: 5749s
URL: https://anchor.fm/s/e402cdc8/podcast/play/84003993/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2024-2-13%2F370830709-44100-2-aa0a63865ff2e.mp3
Fetched: 2026-03-03 01:35:05

The process today of drafting a work instruction involves a manufacturer engineer getting a cat file over email from a mechanical engineer, pulling it apart, part by part, figuring out what would do all the assembly, extremely manually, taking hundreds of screenshots and then throwing them all together into a several hundred page PowerPoint or Word doc over the course of weeks or months, just agonizing. And that is how it is done everywhere. Hello, I'm Ty Morse, welcome to Relentless. This is my conversation with Philip Aaronstein, the founder of DRAC. DRAC is currently focused on automating work instructions. I hope you enjoy the conversation. How did you come up with the name, DRAC? Right, so funny. The Nobel Prize for Quantum Mechanics went to three people, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and DRAC. Everybody knows Schrodinger and Heisenberg, nobody knows DRAC, unless you were an electrical engineer or a physicist, in which case you know him like the back of your hand. And very similar to the problem that we care about, engineers love building software for other engineers. Nobody really likes to build software technicians or manufacturing folks that actually improves their quality of life, and that's what we're doing. So I thought, hey, also a really cool name, DRAC. Very, it's actually got some really nice symmetry to it. You can actually see by the logo, you can basically take this shape, rotate 90 degrees, rotate another 90 degrees. You get like really nice symmetry. That's like a 90 by 90 square. And so it's got that really great symmetry, but also at the time of starting the company, we, I was reading the biography on Paul DRAC. It's called the World Strangest Man, by Graham Framello, really, really great book. And I was like, huh, this guy's awesome, sleeper. Nobody really knows about him. Reminds me exactly of my best friend and now co-founder, Peter. And I was like, you know what, very apt, we should definitely name the company after this guy. And that's where it comes from. That's where it comes from. So it's partially, from the book, from reminding me of Peter, and from wanting to shed light on a problem that bring light to a name and a problem that like nobody else really cares about. Yeah. You and your co-founder have known each other for a very long time, you met in college. What was the first project that you guys worked on together? That's an interesting question. That's funny. So initially, Peter and I met in this freshman electrical engineering undergrad class. I turned around in this class, trying to make a friend, the Strangest guy behind me, and it was like, oh, where are you from? I was like, oh, New York, no way, me too. Turns out we grew up five minutes away from each other back at home, neighboring high schools. We competed against each other in math late, but we never met. See, his school used to come to my school and we did math late since Capty or against each other. He's where he remembers me from that, but I'd never ran to him. And, you know, so really, really funny coincidence. And basically, since then, we've been best friends and partners on many adventure. And the class that I met him in, we had a final project. And the final project, they gave us four options. There was a Mastering Electronics class. It was like, oh, no, it was digital system fundamentals. So like freshman year class, you're like learning about logic gates, really, really interesting stuff. And I noticed that this guy was, you know, just cranking away, just cracked. Super, super smart. It was really, really good. And so that also was kind of the onus of like trying to talk to him. I was like, oh, this seems like a really smart guy. Like, want to get to know him. And for that final project, I was trying to like, just like meet some people who were like, also working on the same project. There were four options. They gave us a month to do that final project. I mean, one week, Peter did all four options. So you just like met this guy that's incredibly talented and like, really hardworking and you're like, this is the guy. I mean, kinda, yeah. At least for the project. Yes. Well, more or less, I met him like before that. And then I saw, like, I just would talk to him every week. And I met him and I would just ask him about the project, like a couple days later. And I was like, you know, because the class met like every other day. So I was like, oh, like, how's it going? He's like, yeah, I just finished another one. He's like, oh, my God. What do you mean you finished another one? He's like, yeah, I finished a second project. I was like, okay, I gotta speak more time with this guy. Yeah. And he's just really fascinated me because he seemed different. And I found it very, very interesting. And so that was sort of like when we first started working together. That was in the spring. And I started to kind of like towards like the middle of the spring, like, end of spring. This was like end of spring, right? Like a month left in the semester, two months and a month in the semester. I would like ask him to like come over, like, let's do some problem sets. Let's meet in the library. Let's try to work together. Yeah. And it was really funny because he like, he just like didn't, he want to be like left alone. I was like, no, no, Peter, come on. Like his, could meet me in the library. I just kept dragging him. Like, I just kept pulling him. I was like, come on, let's hang out. Let's, let's, you know, do problem sets together. And I would just like hold on to him. And I would hold on to him. And it got to a point where like he would just like regularly, like I would just regularly like grab him to like, like work with me on stuff. And like I'm problem sets, we doing together. It was really funny because like Pete just blazed through everything. And like, you know, I kind of like took my time with some stuff. It's like, I don't, it's funny. There's, there's like a couple of classes where like, Peter, it's just, the guy is just literally the smartest person I ever met. And there were some classes where he would like get up and like help like teach the class or the professor. Like he was sort of like that guy. And I was the guy who like I was up all night like working on some like other stuff on related to school. And you know, I would like sleep, I would show up like to class pretty regularly. I would get like two, three hours of sleep a night. And I would be like roughly like five minutes late to class. Every morning. It's, I don't know why. It's weird. It almost sounds like this. You know, I studied like Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia and Brian's got this line where he says, you want to be working with co-founders that you're almost intimidated by how good they are. This kind of sounds like a situation where that would be, you know, similar. Yeah. Yeah, like I said, like Peter, we had friends over, we didn't go to MIT, but we had friends who were over at MIT. And Peter was the guy who they went to to do their math homework for them. Interesting. You know, effectively, Peter's probably earned like roughly like eight or nine degrees. What? And just like did people's homework for them? You just like blew through it. Okay. Like from various schools. You know, Peter and I both had like a master's in a bachelor's in electrical engineering, a master's in robotics. We figured out a way to, it's like, it's funny. Because you kind of see it now in the company. I like planned and he executed. So I found, I'm an optimizer. So like I found a way that we can construct our schedules and like overlap specific classes with the requirements so that we could actually bang out with overloading, bang out the electrical engineering undergraduate degree in three years. And then we're like overloading a lot. Yeah. And then I kind of found this like loophole in the master's program where like, you can kind of overlap some stuff. And they like, but it wasn't like explicitly said. And so I got us to apply for the master's program while we were still in undergrad before we like finished the degree. And they were internal. So it was like, oh, it's like one of those like, it was like one of those four plus one programs. But like you can only do that if you overload and you take extra classes and you try to like double count. But because we finished the undergrad degree in three years, we started to and we were still overloading. We had to get the registrar to like sign off on it anyway. So we kind of like got them to accidentally sign off on two things, which was overloading and also taking master's classes. So they didn't realize. And so they actually sign off on us taking in our senior year all of the master's classes without while still being undergrads. So at the end of the four years, we basically also squeezed like the master's degree for robotics in like one year. Like overloaded on like grad classes, which they additionally did not want you to do. They like max of three classes. You're not supposed to take a fourth. We did four and four. And so in the fall and spring. And so at the end of it, we actually had two graduation ceremonies. Like back to back, we actually got our master's degrees before we got our bachelor's degrees. It's kind of funny. Yes, because the grad degree graduation ceremony was like two or three days before the undergrad. So for like two or three days, we just only had master's degrees. It's kind of funny. So that was just kind of like a neat thing. So like I kind of planned like that. Like the the jerrymandering of like the schedule and the structure of it. And yeah, like Peter executed it. I mean, like I obviously like did my homework and stuff and like took my own tests. But like I certainly, he carried you a little bit. Peter carried me a little bit. You know, I mean, we were also trying to do startup stuff at the same time. Yeah, so what else were you doing? Like I mean, you said three hours of sleep, which is so ridiculous. But the second startup for you doing. First idea that Peter and I had for a startup was in sophomore year. We wanted to build the 21st century update to the pill model. So still have the CAD files for it. It was essentially supposed to be fingerprint activated, only dispense according to your prescription. And so the goal was to essentially combat the opioid epidemic. I so a little bit of a personal reason for this. My uncle, he was battling cancer and it was that May. So like the May before sophomore year. And he was prescribed opioids for killing the pain for some of his cancer treatment. And he had taken some of these opioids one to many like too close to each other. And he like while he was going up the stairs, he had like passed out and he fell down the stairs. And a couple of days later, he died. And that felt really like stupid. They just felt just felt fucking dumb. Yeah, felt really dumb because like why there's like so much control over like over opioids, right? So much control from when it's made to when it's put into somebody's into somebody's bottle. And then there's no last mile control whatsoever to stop people from like dying accidentally. So that felt really dumb. And I was talking to my dad about it. And I was talking to Peter bad. And I was like, oh, you could solve this. This is actually, there's something to be done in here. So we still have like the, we still have like the CAD files where I don't think there's anything like it even to this day. At some point, we might just like sell the like design. Yeah. But basically it was a controlling system with a motor. You're like a sort of like a case and a cartridge. And it's like the densest way you can pack. We never like filed a patent or anything, but like totally could have we didn't like know how patents worked. We were working on that for a while. So we like cat it up to the electronics for it. Got like a little bit of a prototype going actually in my backpack, I actually carry around with me the 3D printed models of it to this day. Do you want to go grab that? Yeah, let's grab that. That'd be awesome. Yeah, you can cut it. I always hear it when I when I'm walking around. I can actually I always hear the jingle. I've got here. Yeah. Awesome. Here. It's like different versions, different iterations. It's roughly like this. Okay. See that this is a high resolution printer. And then these were sort of these dials. Interesting. You guys made it four or five years ago. I've been carrying these around with me for like forever. Yeah. Why what what made you decide to stop working on it? Couple of things. COVID hit. COVID hit. And we were trying to talk to NIDA, the National Institute for Drug Administration. And we're trying to talk to somebody about doing some sort of pilot. Yeah. And basically when COVID hit, everybody stopped answering our emails and everything went completely dark. We couldn't talk to anybody there anymore. All the resources have galvanized towards COVID. So just put you at a standstill and you decided to move on. Yeah. I mean, you know, to this day, like we still have the CAD files, right? We still follow the patterns. We still put it literally carrying around in your backpack for years, which is wow. So the way I won't describe how it works, but it's it's kind of cool. I'll yeah, I'll share off camera. But okay. Just because it's IP, exactly. If we ever, you know, decide to do something with it. Yeah, which is fine. Yeah, I mean, well, somebody should. I would love to give it to somebody. Do you know how many people die of a year from like mis-treatment of millions? Yeah, okay. Rough. I think the number, if I'm recalling correctly, it's there's one number that's 600,000. And one number that's 3 million. And what do you, so I imagine that there's, I think it's mis-timing of prescription related deaths. I think that's something like 600,000 maybe. And then opioid related deaths in general. I think that's 3 million. Jesus. Wow, and that's, that's wild. What, what did you like decide to work on after that? After you decided to move on from the profile? So there was sort of a long, worked out a lot of different things. I at the time was also doing a brain computer interfacing research. So that was why I was at Hopkins. I, for when I was 16, I, when I was 16, I really wanted to do brain computer interfacing research. I wanted to start my own brain computer interfacing company. I, basically was deeply fascinated by the concept of consciousness. I thought the final frontier, originally I wanted to be an aerospace engineer. I wanted to work at Tesla. I'm not sorry, not Tesla. I wanted to work at SpaceX when I was, you know, like 10 or 11. Actually, it's funny. I made my Twitter account when I was like 13. It was like 2013, right? Yeah. 2013 and 2014. I was still 13. I made my Twitter account specifically. So I could tweet at Elon. Because like I was, I was like 12. I knew he was. Back in 2012, because I was like obsessed with, I wanted to be like a spaceship designer. I was like, my, yeah, I didn't know what it was called. I wanted to be like an inventor, a spaceship designer. I had heard about Elon because I saw this meme that like compared him to like Tony Stark. And before that, I was like, I gotta be like Tony Stark. That's the guy. That's the, so I heard about Elon. I was like, oh, it was like a stat page. It was like, Elon Tony. It's like the real life Tony. And I was like, ah, yes. Like I, that, that, that's the time to start me for a model when you were younger. Yes, from basically from when I was seven. I had a very thick Marvel cinematic universe biography book when I was seven. And in there, you flip the Tony Stark's page and you see like where do you go to school? You went to MIT, he had a bat. He only had a master's in electrical engineering. He got it when he was 19. And he, so no bachelors, but in a master's in electrical engineering from my time when he was 19. And like born where? It just said Long Island, common New York. And I was like, yeah, just like me. I was like, did you just like use this as your role model and you, you, did you get the degree because of Tony Stark? I did, I did think, you know what's funny? Like, kind of, yeah. It's hilarious. Yeah, I thought I was like, yeah, like that's the degree to get. Yeah. Because like, you know, it's, yeah, basically I think. It's funny like after the fact like realizing it like, yeah, I guess so. It was really that I, I started to understand like, I want to have a really far breadth of engineering experience and understanding. And I started to look at, I was kind of leaning towards like biomedical engineering because I'm sort of like dancing around like timelines here. But I was leaning towards biomedical engineering. But then I sort of began to understand like, if you're a BME, you're kind of like a jack of all trades master of none, they're not like really good programs in general. But as an electrical engineer, there's like a lot of things you could self teach in engineering. You could, you could self teach like mechanical engineering, I think, you can self teach computer science certainly. Like you can, you can absolutely teach yourself how to, how to do software. There's also a whole bunch of like free courses that are available. So it's not a problem. So I was like, why am I going to waste my time getting a degree in CS? I actually kind of had like a little bit of a deep resentment for like software engineers. I don't know why. Well, I do know why. Why? Longer story. I just like, I, I, I very much valued people who like built like physical products, yeah. And I was like, I guess resentful of the fact that software engineers got paid like one and a half times as much as electrical engineers and mechanical engineers. I was like, why? Does it make any sense? So I guess throughout college, I mean, growing up, and throughout college, I just like was like, you know, like fuck software engineers, like those guys suck. Now we're a software company ironically. However, we do call ourselves the anti software software company. Yes. Everybody in the team has a hardware background and has pivoted their career into software and taught themselves at code. And I'll get more to that later. But like, the team is so awesome. Very, very, very lucky. Is that something that you actually like filter for? Yes. People that are explicitly. Yeah. Explosively. Yeah. Interesting. OK, what, what is your, your flow of how you actually decide to hire someone? Where do you find, because I know that X is an important part of your life, as I think so. It's funny, a lot. Yes. Yeah, Twitter is great. I don't know why we call it X. It's mainly because of Elon. I just, I mean, not Twitter. I love them, but it's just Twitter. There are explicitly four things we hire for. I have a three-round interview process. We're starting to modify this to make it a little less, you know, like, I guess it's a little more rigorous. It is four things. You have to be based, align, American values in mind. You have to know who we're building for and why. You have to be on the right side. You have to be extremely competent. You have to be willing to be in person in New York, but now in El Secondo, so you can pick a place. And you have to have a hardware background but put it in the software. Because software engineers who are pure software engineers very frequently with no hardware experience, don't understand, they don't have like a mental framework for understanding the discrepancy between simulation and reality. And that is the gap we're trying to close at direct. So if you've never built anything in the real world, if you've ever been to a factory, if you're gonna work with your hands, you don't actually have a mental framework for understanding the gap we're trying to close. And frequently, you don't care about it either. So we explicitly filter for people who know and care. If you don't know, you don't care, you know, do you really wanna work with us anyway? So that's our mentality. Yeah, and are you guys, when I was researching for this, I heard you say something along the lines of, basically people will design things, and then by the time that someone's actually like, creating it in the real world, the design doesn't work, or like things don't fit together. Yeah, very frequently. So before the 1970s, engineers and manufacturers are connected by one thing, that was the blueprint. Classic, sanitite blueprint that you imagine your head when you say blueprint. And like the late 70s, early 80s, cats offer emerged and became ubiquitous. And so all the mechanical engineers who were living on the shop floor well integrated production, they actually like knew how things fit together in the real world. They were blue collar. They were all relegated to the back office and went from being blue collar to white collar. And basically since then, mechanical design has been completely divorced from reality. You've got mechanical engineers coming out of school. You know, never having been to a shop floor, designing systems 5,000 miles away from where they're actually built, frequently designing systems that are not actually manufacturable. Because what does that mean? Not actually manufacturable. You can design, so this is the problem with cats software writ large. Cats software and most design software looks at things from the top down platonic ideals of solid perspective, like the top down engineering perspective. And so you can have a cat environment that does not reflect reality. There's not mimic something that is actually physically possible. I can cat something up. I can cat a closed box and put something inside of it. And it not actually be like assembleable. And then frequently people will cat things up. And this has been happening for the past 25 years. People will cat things up, send those cat files to the shop floor. They'll send to a manufacturing engineer, manufacturing engineer will try to throw their other work instructions. They might not catch it. They'll throw those work instructions together, send it to the shop floor. And some technician will be like following the work instructions, trying to put the thing together for the first time. And they'll be like, I can't fit my hand into this little nook to torque this bolt. You guys got to move this part back a little bit. And they'll find that out like 18 months later. It's that they'll try to surface that design feedback back to the mechanical engineer design thing. By the time they get that back to the guy who designed it, it doesn't work there anymore. So that is a monumental problem. It's this design for manufacturing ability problem where you have no context for the real world. So how are you going to design something for designing something to be actually manufacturable without having that context? So that is actually vis-really at its core, the problem that we're trying to solve at Dirac. We think that context is king. So we were automatically generating assembly work instructions with just your CAD file. But really, what we're also being is this data aggregation platform for manufacturing ability information and tribal knowledge around how things actually fit together in the real world. Both being a data aggregation platform for it and a knowledge dissemination platform. So you can surface that across your entire manufacturer engineering team. But really, what we want to do with that information is we actually want to bring it earlier into your mechanical design process. So we actually want to take all that information within the context of your mechanical design and then bring it earlier into your mechanical design software. Then eventually, we're actually going to build our own mechanical design software, specifically focused on assembly, with manufacturer ability built into the core of it. Understanding that these aren't just some dumb set of parts. These are, we understand this isn't just like a couple of dumb solids sliding around each other. This is a nut and this is a bolt and this is this specific nut and this specific bolt. And we actually have an understanding of how they relate to each other. And it's just context. That's what we're aggregating. It's just context. Are you trying to like, so I remember reading about a company that would every time someone gave someone an order or instruction, you had to provide the why behind the order or instruction or else, you know, within, if you didn't do it twice, you'd be fired. And so basically it was like, they wanted to make sure that people understood why they were doing a thing. And so you didn't have a situation where someone just did it for the sake of like doing it in the past, right? Is that, so you said you're kind of providing context across, like even if someone leaves, then people in the future at the same company will understand why that person did what they're doing, right? Yes. Yeah, chronologically information with a conversation around it is the context we want to be able to preserve. So understanding why did somebody select this torque spec? Well, you know, why did somebody say to grease this or lock tight that and be able to preserve that information within the context of the instruction is where we like seek to like aggregate that information. There's also a lot more to it. There's a lot of things that we have not figured out. There are better ways to collect that information. What we do right now is like you can add notes, you can add tools, and we will automatically associate those like bits and pieces of information with specific components over time. So the next time you drop in an assembly and it's a part that you've seen before, we will automatically populate your instructions with the information that you added last time. So if you added a torque spec to a specific bolt, we will automatically populate the next instruction that you generate with that bolt, with that torque spec. And so like that sort of extrapolates to tools as well. It's, yeah, that's basically what we end up propagating. So that's like V0 of it. There's a lot of other stuff that we're looking at aggregating over time. Yeah, that's true. I did see something called a true print on your website. What is a true print? That's like a final form of your company. What is that? That is the mechanical design software with manufacturer ability built into the Corvette. Our goal basically would happen when Kats off were emerged, basically took the blueprint and it fractured it into two parts. Kats off were on the design side and work instructions on the build side. Kats off was gotten all the upgrades for the past 50 years and work instructions never have. It's literally people are, the process today of drafting a work instruction, involves a manufacturer engineer getting a CAD file over email from a mechanical engineer, pulling it apart, part by part, figuring out what would do all the assembly, extremely manually, taking hundreds of screenshots and then throwing them all together into a several hundred-page PowerPoint or Word doc over the course of weeks or months, just agonizing. And that is how it is done everywhere. You ask any manufacturer engineer at any company of any scale and that is how they do it. There's one or two pieces of software out there that basically look like PowerPoint with a couple of extra buttons and they sometimes use that but it's basically the same workflow and people are not happy with those software either. So we are looking to automate the majority of the grunt work of that process. So we are essentially trying to build the 21st century update to the work instruction and then basically bring Kats off and work instructions close and close together until we reunite the blueprint. We want to bring manufacturer ability back to mechanical design and we think we can do that by bringing these guys closer together and reuniting them into one platform with manufacturer ability built into the core of it. What kind of efficiency gains do you think you'll get from doing this? It's kind of tough to quantify. Imagine being able to get a product to market significantly faster not having to do as many redesigns because you don't have to worry about something you're building not being manufacturerable. What we've seen is in what we're looking to get out of what we're looking to offer our users is at least an order of magnitude speed up in the process of drafting work instructions. We've actually got a little bit of an active actually from our first ever customer in Southwest antennas. Incredible team. I love Southwest antennas. Big shout out to them. They are the best. The best antennas you can ever get, period, bar none. They are a 2122 supplier of antennas based out in Poway, it's in San Diego down in California. And they make 2,000 different types of antenna. Incredibly awesome company. They have a head of engineering over there named Chris. Chris is a badass. Chris is the best. I love Chris. So he was the one who brought us in. And now that they've, as they've been onboarded and as they start to use the product, Chris actually brought in somebody else from a different part of the organization to be sort of, he said his documents are. The person in charge of using our software. So there's a new position being created just for you guys. Effectively. Effectively, there's just somebody who's responding. Usually it's a manufacturing engineer, but he brought in somebody else from the other facility from a different part of the facility to be in charge of using our software for their work instructions. And she was able, she was junior, not really much CAD experience herself. She's really smart, but not as experienced as Chris. You know, head of engineering been at the company for like five, six, seven years. And so she was basically able to get from zero to completed a 65 page really complex assembly work instruction in just four days. And Chris said it would have taken him four weeks to do by hand. Oh my gosh. So like that is, that's what we're looking to do, basically. That's a massive efficiency gain, yeah. You can bring in less skilled people and still have them save in order of magnitude of time, drafting their work instructions. So you guys did not initially start with this idea. My understanding is this was basically like in-house software that you were trying to build like a factory or a manufacturing place. Okay, tell me about this, yes. So we started basically what we initially went out to do. We, when I was at Northrop, I saw unfortunately how our kick, a lot of the infrastructure was on the manufacturing side of things, of what to me seemed like the most advanced companies in the world and the engineering side of things. And we initially wanted to bring automotive level automation to aerospace. We wanted to build the aerospace factory of the future. And we basically said, okay, look. And I can explain a little bit more like the logic in the math. It actually still, still believe in it, still wouldn't make sense. We initially went out to go essentially build this robotic assembly facility. We wanted to do robotic assembly for aerospace systems at scale. And essentially, I'll sort of explain thinking around this. Basically what we observed was this phenomena that we called the middle volume value death, where for the past like 40, 50 years, aerospace manufacturers would sort of fall into this volume category, where basically more than 100 units is too many to do by hand. Fewer than 10,000 units isn't really enough to justify automating economically. Nor is it enough to get the attention of like the massive contracting factors like flex or jable. And so when you fall into the middle volume value death, what ends up happening is you either run out of money and die or you get rolled up and acquired. And that is where we basically thought the consolidation that we've seen in the aerospace has happened and what has in the past 40 years led to the formation of the primes. And so we said, okay, what if we can shepherd manufacturing companies through the middle volume value death? So we said, okay, let's start with one archetype of a system, let's say a drone, quadcopter, smaller than a cubic meter. And let's say we basically built a flexible, now robotic assembly system, where we can take 10 to 15 of these low demeaning volume contracts, stack them up, call them 10 contracts and trench coat, where they essentially look the same. Stage an assembly line for these contracts. And essentially take these, this 10 contracts and the trench coat and put them down the same assembly line and essentially artificially induce economies of scale. That was the plan. We thought if you can handle enough variance but stage your process of assembly like generally in the way that these system will all kind of look the same, then you can handle all that variance and you can essentially artificially induce economies of scale. So that was the plan. We recognized like, okay, if you're handling a lot of different mix, you don't want to constantly replan all the path planning for all the robotic arms. So we're like, okay, like let's see if we can just like figure out how to throw in a CAD file and have it automatically figure out what order to do the assembly in and automatically do the path planning too. And so that was like a core piece of software and we had like a little bit of a demo for it. It was like a nut and a bolt, like a nut being inserted into a bolt. And we went to like 90 aerospace manufacturers over the course of six months and we were like, hey, you guys want to like give us an L.O.I.s, like contract your assembly out to us. And they basically all said like one, like who are you, like what are you talking about? And they basically all said, you know, the factory seems kind of cool but that software you mentioned that's under the hood that's figuring out what order to do all the assembly and planning all of that for you. That would actually be game changing for our guys on the floor today, can we have it? And you know, for the first couple of months, I pushed back, I was like, no, you know, we're doing the factory, you know, it's fully committed, we're not selling the software. Then at a certain point, we were like, okay, maybe we just kept hearing it over and over again, we were like, maybe we should actually sell the software. And at what point, like you say you talked to 90 different, 90 different organizations, yes? Yeah. Okay, at what point were you starting to think maybe we're going in the wrong direction and then we should sell the thing that they want to buy? I still don't believe that. I think it was, actually, there was one pivotal moment where I was talking to a lead manufacturing engineer over at Astra. I can actually, this was over Twitter. I can actually read the text. Okay. By the way, his name is NATO. Nathan, a side check from a company called Longshot Space. They're awesome. They're very, very cool. So NATO was a lead manufacturing engineer over at Astra. And I basically post on Twitter saying, hey, does anybody have any CAD files that we can use? We're trying to test out some software that we're building and NATO reached out and he's like, here's some CAD files, like what do you need them for? And I said, we're working on some software for the factory we're building, the goal of the software is to basically generate assembly instructions and relationships between parts and a CAD file just from the file itself with minimal hard coding. And he said, I want to hardize emoji that. That would have been really, really helpful in my last role, which is lead manufacturing engineer over at Astra with literally spent hundreds of man hours on contract engineers, slash technical writers to make assembly instructions for technicians to follow. Even getting approximately 90% correct instructions that just need some tweaks and corrections would have been amazing. I wish you luck in your venture. NATO's awesome. That was a huge vote of confidence. Yeah, at that point I was like, we should, can we like talk? I was like, I want to hear more about this. I was like, okay, maybe there's a there there. We talked, we spent like two, three hours talking. And then I basically went back to, you know, I emailed, I think like 45 or 50 of the manufacturing folks that we spoke to. And I was like, hey, like we're thinking about a little bit of a change of pace, you know, kind of some discussions that we've had. Can we like find some time like the next week or two to just like throw an idea at you? And we're like, yeah, they, like 20 of them said, like, yeah, let's do it. So basically I went to a bunch of these guys and I was like, hey, like, what do you think? We're gonna rip the software out and just like give it to you guys. And they're like, yeah, that sounds awesome. Like, let me know, like, and I, I'm a hardware guy. So like I know like, otherwise, I don't know like, at the time I didn't know like, SaaS contracts. So I thought like, otherwise we're the thing. So I went to all these guys and I was like, hey, like can you sign an LY for like some software? And they were like, yeah, sure. So yeah, like a bunch of LYs. And I was like, yeah, we got it guys. And yeah, and then I like tore up the LYs because they was like, I just, that you don't do that in software, apparently. I was talking to like one of our angel investors. And yeah, basically that catalyzed the kick off. We were able to raise like a 300K angel check or like a, like a pre-season. Yeah, not really like an institutional check. 300K from Dan Romantic, from Air Angels, the best. Dan is the reason we're able to do this today. Dan is awesome. I cannot think Dan enough for taking a chance to not be around if he hadn't written you the check. Yeah, probably not. Dan, I were getting dinner last night and I was telling him like, he is, he took the real bet on us because we had nothing. I was not at Northrop anymore. I had like quit to like do this full time. And Peter's actually still at Amazon. But like we like didn't have, there was like no real like P-built honestly at the time. So Dan, Dan like with the 300K angel check. I met him on a Monday. He said he's interested on Tuesday. Wednesday he like we signed the safe note. Thursday wired Friday in the bank. So just an incredible like, just like that. And you know what's really funny? That is actually one year ago exactly to this day. Really? Yeah. Is that crazy? That's wild. Times, times are man. They're in your, you're moving really fast, you know. Life has been very, very fun. I am incredibly lucky, incredibly lucky to have an incredible amount of people who support me and support us, who believed in us, who have helped us along the way, who took chances on us. Like pure chance. And I just been fortunate to be able to do what we do. It's, I wake up every morning and I'm excited about how the next day is just gonna be better than the last. And I, I love life. Life is just incredible. Yeah. When we think about that first, so my understanding is when you guys decided to finally go into doing the software, you throw up a form on your website. Like this is the most MVP thing. Like you just throw up a form and see the interest and within 48 hours you got 110. So this was a little bit of a time skip. We were able to do a, we raised the 300K, Peter quit his job at his Amazon. I call it Peter up like the day the money hit the bank I was like, Peter, it's time to quit your job. We're doing it. So Peter quit and then we just started building. Actually, I spent, this was really, this was really, really fun. Augustus and I, Augustus Dworko, founder of Rainmaker, he's my best friend. We spent two months, roughly two months, like month and a half on the road together. Another guy, Cam Hardaway, incredible, incredible guy, took a bet on Augustus and I, just because he wants to help, because we have aligned values. Cam wants to make America better and we do too. And Cam introduced us to a bunch of awesome people. And so we had a bunch of people we wanted to meet. I wanted to go do more customer discovery. This is like March and April. And so basically Augustus and I, we call it the great based American tour. We hit six cities. I hit 35 facilities and six cities over the course of like, roughly two months. And also just like, kind of fun raising along the way. It was like, hey, we're raising a seed round or something. I don't know. You know, sort of like sharp and not like super professional. This is like the first time you're going out and raising money. There's so many funny, yeah, it was, it was really, really funny. There was a moment. So Cam had introduced Augustus and I to a family office. Awesome guys in Dallas. I won't mention their name, but incredible, incredible guys. And we, Augustus and I, two different companies, right? Augustus is talking to farmers at the time. He's also a great fundraising. I'm doing the same. I'm visiting factories and trying to talk to customers to get like, you know, it was not LOIs, but like get like design partners and like early customers for like, you know, Peter's at home, Peter's cranking out code, you know, and I'm out trying to find customers. We go into this family office. The elevator had like paintings in it. You know what I mean? Like it was, it was like that level of affluence. Literally, it was like Dallas oil money, probably, I think. Incredibly, incredibly great guys. We sit down at this table, Augustus and I next to each other across these two, you know, fellas, you know, like probably mid 40s, like early 50s. Probably like real estate investment, like billion dollar real estate investment, like type guys. And we sit down like, I'm doing direct. We're automating assembly instructions for manufacturers. And, you know, I give the pitch and then the guys ask, so you guys are co-founders and it was like, no, no, no, we're doing two different companies. And they're like, oh, okay, for future reference, don't do that. Like don't go into meetings together. Like why you guys, gosh, just like definitely now. I was like wearing a polo. Augustus, we're in a Hawaiian shirt. He's like, he's got the mullet, he's got the sneakers. We're just like, I'm just kicking it. And we're like, I go and then Augustus pitches. And like, yeah, guys, like cool. For future reference, don't do this. You should like do this individually. And also like what we, we literally, we can write you like a $500 million check for some massive real estate development. But like we don't, you don't do startups. They were like, we don't do 500-kate checks. Like we just don't, we don't do anything less than like 50 million. So like let us know when you do that. But like, until then, it's nice meeting you. Awesome, awesome guys. And like, just like funny experiences like that. Do you have any crazy stories that are, no, you haven't told before? That one is when I tell sometimes, Augustus and I have some fun stories. Some, some just like between us, just like have fun and reflect on. It's been really, really fun. Life is, life is blessed. Yeah, some stories best left unshared. That's all good. Just to, you know, on a slightly different note, I know that Isaac Asimov and the foundation series had some impact on you guys or influencing you guys deciding to, yep, to build this company. What influenced did Isaac Asimov have on your thinking? So at the time of starting to react, Peter and I were both, Peter and I were both reading Isaac Asimov's foundation series. And I was over at Northrop. And I was seeing how all these aerospace systems were being assembled entirely by hand, very, very manually and artisanally. And we're reading the book series and we're talking about it. Peter was over at Amazon. And we were talking about how, you know, here is humanity today artisanally crafted spaceships. And here is humanity 25,000 years in the future sending a million ships into the stars. How do we get from here to there? And we thought, well, like we have to start doing what we do in automotive. You have to start mass production. You know, high volume low cost mass. And that is the only way we can actually send humanity into the stars. That was the mentality. We like the foundation series a lot for a lot of different reasons. We're actually thinking about different naming conventions for our software internally. Like the other different versions. You know, like Ross, Ross is robotics operating system. It's a communication protocol effectively for how you would have different robotic systems like connected up to each other and communicating. They have a naming convention with a name releases after like turtles. We were like, okay, like what if we named our releases after like Asimov characters? That's awesome. Yeah. So that's, yeah, really, really love the Asimov books. Peter also read like all of the like short stories as well. And actually I haven't gotten around to him, but if you ever want to know more about Asimov, Peter is your guy. Yeah, Peter's, I mean, Peter's your guy for a lot of things. Peter also loves, nah, I shouldn't get it to go for it. Peter loves musicals. Really, really loves musicals. If you ask him about like any music, he can like pick the, like knows the composer from like that time that they perform, like he's got it. He's got locked. Peter, Peter's got a spectacular, spectacular dome. Very, very lucky. Sorry. He's the first customer that you were able to actually onboard and started paying. So I know this is like Southwest Intense. Southwest Intense, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then what does it look like since you started, you get your first customer, how does the growth look like? And what's the like lepers that you pull on to make it grow? I saw that you do like these 30 to 45 minute calls with every perspective customer, is that right? Yes. Did you, how did you, where did you see that? I don't know. I just, I don't know, I just found it somewhere. But I was like, yeah, she's looking at my calendar. No, no. I think you may have done it in a different interview, but I was like, I don't know of very many founders that are spending like, that's like three or four calls per day, yeah? Yeah. And you're doing more sometimes more. Yeah, so you're talking with customers for like two to three hours or more a day. I wouldn't rather be doing anything else. That's okay. What is your philosophy for like communicating with customers and taking customer feedback and stuff like that? I, that's rare. I don't think many founders do that. I love the people we build for. I, I find it incredibly, incredibly insightful to spend a lot of time with them. I love to understand like what their lives are like and become like very good friends with them. So like we've got, for example, like we've got like a user over at Standard Black and Decker. You know, he, the awesome guy, he texts me. You know, like he'll, like we're, like he texts me every day, like feedback about the product and we have a Slack channel and he gives me back in there too. But like, you know, he's like, ah, how do I do this? And I'm like, ah, I just like texting. I'm like, yeah, it's like this how you use it. That's the kind of relationship I want to have with all the people that we build for. Like I would love to be as involved as possible. Unfortunately, like now I'm kind of feeling the pain of like not being able to be as actively involved in like the relationship. And I mean, I still am. We're getting this point where basically it's actually been kind of crazy. We sort of like early customers, early users. And at the end of January, we decided to put out like a $2,000 a month, like LinkedIn ad. Where it's just like, part of it is like just the gift of like a ball valve with like bolts going into, or actually nuts going onto bolts. And it's just rotating. This is like an old gift of mine that I made. And it's like work instructions automated. And then the gift, just kind of rotating. $2,000 a month, LinkedIn ad. And basically since then, we have had an enormous amount of inbound from like several multinational corporations. Really? Yeah. I would love to like ordinarily, I love like rattling off like the names of stuff. I can't do to like, you know, NDAs and whatnot. That's fine. There are some really, really awesome companies. And so the other thing is like, if you're getting these people to reach out to you from a $2,000 gift, the $2,000 gift LinkedIn ad. Yeah. This is a problem that like other people are experiencing. And I get probably once a day or every other day, somebody will message me on LinkedIn telling me about how awful work instructions are for them and how excited they are about what we're building. Which to me is like the most awesome thing ever. I can actually, like literally I'm thinking about one right now, I can read it to you. Yes. This was on Sunday. Sky reaches out. Awesome guy. He works at a, I'm going to leave the specific name out, but he works at a ship maker, a ship builder, a boat manufacturer. And he says, hey, Philip, came across your company watching a video on YouTube, the S3 video. You guys are doing really interesting work. Something software companies like DeSo and Siemens have always brushed to the side, looking forward to seeing where you guys take it. And I said, thanks a ton, really appreciate that. And he said, then he responded to that. So we use solid edge, because of how painful it is to do documentation slash assembly instructions. And the nature of our work, we tend not to do it. Really? Yeah, I would say a part of it is the skill level of our guys and custom work we do. But if there was a more intuitive, easier way to make it happen, I would certainly budget for it in every project, as I think it would help a lot, with overall communications and engineering involvement with the shop floor. Although companies like Siemens love to brag about it, their software is still super basic and difficult to pull off, similar to how you explain in that video. You're basically doing everything manually, so no one wants to do it. And like, yeah, the difficulty of doing the right thing is so hard that people are just advocating, like they're just not doing it. Yeah, that's wild. Then he actually sent me a photo of, he sent me a photo of one of the work instructions, and it looks like an IKEA assembly instruction. But like really, just like a screenshot and like some bullet points. That's wild. Yeah. How do you, so you are very particular about who you hire, how do you keep, you know, what kind of culture are you trying to build, and then like, how do you keep the culture? This is a very, very tough question that I'm still trying to figure out actually. I've asked some really, really good people about this, and I actually had a really great conversation about this two days ago with somebody we're talking to on the investment side. And he, I asked him this question because this is something I'm actively thinking about, because culture to me, I love to build culture on a team. It's really, really important to me to be able to preserve that, and keep the barks extremely high for the folks that you bring out. But you know, I was kind of asking them like, at what point, because this guy has scaled organizations into, you know, billion dollar organizations with, you know, tens of thousands of people from zero. I asked him, at what point do you realize that you no longer have control of that? Or like, how can you not lose control of that? And I think the answer is, you have to make sure that in the beginning, you're only hiring AAA players. And as you hire AAA players, you have to make sure that you give people a comfortable out. You have to make people understand and know that if somebody is, you know, not a AAA player, if somebody's a B player, it's okay to come to you and tell you it's okay to make that known, because they should feel comfortable understanding that you will take care of them on the way out, to be extremely, extremely generous with people on the way out. And I've been thinking about that a lot lately, because that's, it's really, really interesting, because what you don't want is, you don't want AAA players protecting somebody who's like, not really on the ball, because they're afraid that if they sort of speak up about it, and pointed out that, you know, they'll be kicked to that curb, and they're not gonna be able to pay their mortgage, and they're, you know, their life is over. You want them to have an off ramp, yeah. And that advice translates into a lot of other places. Yeah, I'm translates into a lot of other places. You want people to feel comfortable taking the out, because if you don't, then it results in a lot of decisions being made, unfortunately, way too late. So that's something that you will regret and look back on, is making those sorts of decisions too late. Well, so I imagine for all the companies down here have like very, very strong missions. Like, if you don't build, like with a rainmaker, if Augustus doesn't build rainmaker, I don't think anyone's building rainmaker, you know, might be the same thing with this company. When you're selecting for, you know, not talking about actual investors investing, but like when you're selecting for investors, and you're thinking about what do I want these people to do for me or help me? How does, how do you select, how do you think about that? So I look at the folks who work with on the capital side as partners, and I put them under the same scrutiny that I do for folks that I hire, you know, based on line of American values in mind, had the competent, you know, in person, is like a little bit of like a, you know, that's where it sort of differs. And, you know, harder background, most investors do not, they've never been to a factory. So it's a little bit tougher for those, but at least you have to be mission aligned. You have to know and you have to care. You just gotta give a shit. You just have to give a shit, exactly. So that's sort of the table stakes. And then really what I evaluate is, I love to stand on the shoulders of giants. I realize there's a lot of playbook stuff out there that I don't have to reinvent. There's stuff that I do want to reinvent, but there's stuff that I don't think I have to, and I shouldn't. And so I love learning from people who have been there and done that and are able to help guide me, right? Help me see around corners. So I really, really love being the lean on folks who have just seen it before. So we have some like really, really awesome early angel investors who have just been there, done that. A guy named Brad Rothenberg, Brad is the CEO and founder of Entipology. And Entop is an awesome, awesome company. And they're exceeding you. They essentially allow you, it's like a generative design software for like parts. They, without like getting deep into the technical, they allow you to design and mesh components for various applications. Very, very, very useful software. A lot of incredible teams use Entop. They're like a series E company. They're an incredible software. I actually was just asking a guy, like what he thought of them, and he was asking a guy what he thought about them, and how he heard about them. And he's like, yeah, they're like that new CAD software, right? They're like one of the new big CAD software's. So like, like mind share wise, it is now like up against SOLIDWORKS. And we don't talk about Autodesk, but like SOLIDWORKS and X and CREO. It's like, it's a getting there. And that's so exciting, like that's awesome. I think CAD software has become overgeneralized. You can design parts and you can design assemblies. And because these software's, I mean, all of the big CAD companies, their entire business model is M&A. They've really built anything new in the past, like 10, 15 years. Yeah, yeah. So like SOLIDWORKS was an acquisition. Most of their software is that you like have heard about, that you think is like built by like DeSoe or Siemens or PTC. Those are acquisitions. Unfortunately, they're business, like these businesses basically look like this. It's like sales and distribution and product focus. So is it kind of like they don't innovate and then as soon as they buy the thing that does innovate the innovation stops? Yes, usually. So really funny story, like piece of lore that like, you know, people know about like public information, like people don't like realize, it's really funny. The big, the four big CAD companies are PTC, DeSoe systems, Siemens and Autodesk. DeSoe acquired SOLIDWORKS years ago. And so people like assume that like they built it, like no, they acquired it from these two guys. They call them the Johns. John McElaney and, I forgot the other Johns last name. John McElaney and John, other John, John something. I'm sorry, John, other John. I just know Mac, I haven't met him yet, but he seems really cool. And so they started and sold SOLIDWORKS. They were there for a while and they left. And then they, I'll get a little bit back to this. There was this company called ONSHAPE. ONSHAPE was also an acquisition. They got acquired by PTC recently. Really, really awesome company. Like all the startups out there use them. They're the first browser-based CAD software. It's supposed to be the SOLIDWORKS killer. Did they go through YC? No, no, no. I think NEA backed them. Dana from Construct was on their board when she was at NEA. She's awesome. She's really, really great. She's the best. So ONSHAPE was acquired by PTC. PTC also makes CREO. And what's really funny about ONSHAPE is when the Johns were done at SOLIDWORKS, they left it and they started ONSHAPE and they sold it to PTC. So like these are two main competitive softwares that the Johns have sold to different companies. It's just a very, very funny anecdote. Yeah, you can just kind of like do the playbook. So they get it. They really, really get it. They're really, really smart guys. And I look forward to meeting them. So yeah, unfortunately, and ONSHAPE is still innovating. I'm really, really happy about that. Because what ends up happening is like when you get acquired by a big company, politics starts getting into play and it becomes like incentives get disaligned and decay happens, unfortunately. It has not set in an ONSHAPE, which is really exciting. I know some of the folks there, they're head of sales for North America crystal. He basically took them from like, founded sales to their acquisition by PTC basically. And he's actually helping us with our good markets. A really good friend. And he's actually been helping me figure out, like I'm an engineer, right? What do I know about sales? I've just been like doing the hand-hand comment myself and figuring it out. That's actually a really good way to learn it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Chris was introduced to me by a guy named Sean Marshall. Sean was the head of sales at Clavio and like, like rode with them as they went public. And so he, Sean is a beast. Sean is such, like, just a killer in sales. So Sean's been helping us figure stuff out. He actually knew Chris and introduced us to Chris. And Chris is, Chris, in like beginning of January, started helping me figure out, like, our good market, like, sales machine. Like, how do I structure trials? Like, how do I do contracts and, like, sales and stuff like that? And so, like, from Chris, I see, like, they are still innovating. They're still killing it. It's really, really awesome to see. But, yeah, unfortunately, like, writ large. The CAD companies just, they're incentives are just misaligned. They are, they're sales and distribution machines. They, like, have a multiple head count more sales folks than they do engineering hires. Which is unfortunate. Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, like, they'll have incredible engineers on staff work for, like, four or five years on a project. And then it will just, like, never get productized. And they get, like, so disaccentivized, like, be there anymore, that they end up trying to leave. And it's really frustrating. It's funny. I used to say this, because computational geometry engineers, people who, like, build CAD kernels and, like, know how to build, like, some of these CAD softwares and, like, these engineering softwares, very, very short supply. And I like to make this joke, like, we care so much about, we pay so much attention to the aging out of the American industrial base and manufacturing base. The average age of American manufacturing employees in their 50s. Really? Yeah, that's a whole other separate conversation, but yes. So they're going to take all that tribal knowledge with them in the next five to 10 years. And the only way we can save American manufacturing is if we are able to aggregate it. And that is what we're after. So that's a whole separate conversation. But I like to make this joke that we care so much about the American manufacturing industrial base aging out. We forgot to care about the American computational geometry base aging out. And yeah, it's that labor-based aging out. I would say from, like, the folks we've interviewed, roughly, like, around about age of, like, a real good computational geometry engineer is, like, at least, like, their 40s. Like, is you run to some guys who are, like, in their, like, mid-30s, they've been doing it for, you know, they came out of a University of Wisconsin with a Mecky degree and they've been doing it for, like, 10 years. And you run into some guys who are, like, 50, 60s, still writing the code. And they're, and they're so, so smart. They're, they're some of the smartest people you ever meet. And they've just been doing the code for, like, 60 years. They're gonna retire soon. Or they have already retired. Or they're still writing the code for fun. But it's like, that skill set is so rare. And we're not teaching people in school about computational geometry because, like, they're like, oh, who cares? We'll just use, like, parasolid. It's like, well, yeah, like, all these cats offers are still built in the same CAD kernels that they, that were created 30 years ago. Yeah. It's, it's, this is a whole rabbit hole to go down, but it's brutal. Yeah. So, yeah, these, these CAD companies are sales and distribution machines and they will, they will butcher you if you try to go toe-to-toe with them against, like, their main products against each other. They really, they're like, they're, yeah. They're really, really good. Like, PTC actually notoriously has, like, this crazy sales culture. They used to have this, they're trying to get away from it. And they, I think they have. This is more of a thing in, like, the 80s and 90s. PTC effectively, like, invented 3D CAD software. The most part, I'm pretty sure this story is correct. It could be wrong. But I think for the most part, they invented, like, 3D CAD software and everything else was 2D. And they ended up, like, developing a sales culture where they would, their salesmen, like, they knew they had, like, the best thing since sliced bread. And so, their salespeople would, like, call somebody, try to convince them to, like, buy the software. And if they didn't, they would call that person's boss and be like, hey, you should fire that idiot for not buying our software. And, like, it worked a lot of the time. They were, like, super, super aggressive. And so, I, there's a book out there from Ben Horowitz, called, a hard thing about hard things. He talks about Mark Cranney, who he worked with at OffSwear and Loud Cloud. And he was, I think, he was his head of sales, or head of operations. I've got the specific title, but I think Mark Cranney came from PTC. And I think, like, that was, like, the thing. I think PTC is going to, you know, you can't really, like, do that anymore. And also, like, they're not the only ones with 3D CAD software anymore. So, that's Mark competition. Yeah, I mean, well, that's actually, I think, how, I think that, and this is my own conjecturing, right? I think, as a result of that sales culture, you know, DeSoe and, like, DeSoe and Siemens, like, caught up. And they had 3D CAD software. And because they were, like, maybe nice, nice to their customers, they were able to outcompete and capture a lot of, like, large-scale multinational customer base. And so, if you look at, like, aerospace, almost fully captured by Siemens with NX and TeamCenter. And then, if you look at, like, automotive, almost fully captured by 3D experience and Katia. And, like, you'll see some crossover. And a lot of these organizations have, like, multiple licenses of, like, different, like, software's. So, you know, you'll see a lot of crossover, but PTC has lost a lot of market market share to DeSoe and Siemens. I conjecture, am I, because that original sales culture, and just, like, the momentum of having these, like, suites of software, is almost, like, unripe-outable. Does it work, kind of, like, these companies build something that works really well? And then, they start hiring salespeople, like, crazy, because they can sell that thing really well. They can make lots of money. And then, they just decide to keep on selling that thing, that, and, okay, they don't really change. More or less, you know, people get tied to the center structures that are more aligned with, like, hitting quotas. You know, we got to hit these numbers to hit, like, please the shareholders. And that's, that's, like, you know, public company stuff. And, you know, companies have to have this balance of, like, innovation and selling. I think the CAD companies are trying to get it back. They're doing some interesting stuff, but, like, notoriously, they have a little bit of a tough time with it. Not many people are very happy with a lot of their products, but they just use them because they have to, because there's nothing else out there. I'm so think a lot of people try to innovate, but then they try to penetrate these, like, impenetrable fortresses. Fortresses. Like, you just, the most of them are very big. Yeah, you just, like, I really, really am not a huge, anybody selling, like, MES software is extremely, so MES software, ERP software, any sort of, like, PLM is incredibly, incredibly tough. To sell to any, like, multinational corporation, because they've been penetrated by, like, Siemens and So, and they've sold them Team Center, and they've sold them through the experience, and they're fully hooked up, and they need that PLM for traceability. So, any sort of, like, legal requirements that they have to tie to, like, understand who did what and when, and, like, what revision of this model is this, and, like, who signed off on that, is tied to their PLM. And so, you can't, like, sell PLM software to, like, Toyota. Like, they're not gonna buy it, because they're, like, we can't rip out, are you out of your mind? We can't rip out 3D experience. We literally have to shut down production. Like, are you crazy? So, like, I would never, I wouldn't try to, like, build software like that. What we're, the way that we see it, like, we are, like, specifically ripping out a process of, like, using PowerPoint in words. Like, there's no, and what we will do, and what we are doing right now, is building integrations into those PLM. So, we have a Team Center integration cooking. We have a 3D experience integration cooking, so that we can actually integrate, and work with large-scale enterprises that have expressed a lot of interest in working with us. So, yeah. What, what is this company going to look like? So, I don't think you've completely given up on your manufacturing aspirations, if I'm correct. What do you think this company is gonna look like long-term? And am I right about not giving up on your manufacturing aspirations? I don't usually publicly talk about the 25-year plan. It just is 15. It's spooks people, it spooks people. You know, they don't, if they've waited, if they've stayed there for the interview, it might be fine. My early investors, early investors, they were, they told me early on, like, don't talk about the factory. Drop it, like, just don't talk about the factory. Yeah. Yeah. What, what, what gets you excited? What ideas get you excited? So, there are interesting applications. What we have with Builder West is this core kernel of interesting, of value, that is really that a lot of different people care about how things fit together in the real world and how they come apart. You change six lines of code in our software and you don't just get automated assembly instructions, you get automated disassembly instructions. So, there's a whole other wide world of market out there for people who need to do maintenance repair. And we can automatically help them generate those instructions. So, and that's, I can't specify like the name, but like we are working with a really, really awesome company for repair manuals and repair instructions. So, like maintenance repair instructions. I'll similarly, also can't mention explicitly the name, but, you know, like, that's an automotive manufacturer and we have another automotive manufacturer we're working with to do robotic assembly. So, ironically, we're back. We're doing robotic assembly again. Super funny. I was speaking at a conference and there were two people from this corporation who came up to me. One from that company's automotive team and one from their automation team. And the automotive team was like, you know, they said, yeah, let's talk about doing like a POC for the automated work instructions and the automation person said, hey, you know what? Like, that seems really cool and useful for people. Can you like plug that into a robotic assembly system to help it do assembly planning? And I was like, actually, yeah, we, yeah. We actually built it for that in the first place. When we do that, yeah. So, yeah, we got the code still. So, yeah, so we're cooking something right now that's gonna be exciting. It's gonna be exciting. Yeah, well, you know, when I asked him if I could talk about it and they were like, no, don't, not yet. So, when that, there'll be like a thing we'll do to discuss it publicly. But that's, it's really, really cool. It's really like not much additional work for us. You know, we already, we basically already built the thing. So, really application for it. Yeah, literally just a different output. Yeah, it's like instead of like output to PDF or output to like the native, we just output it to a CSV, you know, of like what are to do the assembly of the parts in and like what paths to follow. It was fun enough. The animations that we automatically generate. Those are actually paths for a robotic arm to follow. So, yeah, that was what it was originally for. We actually repurposed the path planning for animations. Are you gonna be working with like Tesla and Boston I know X and stuff and like figure? No comment. Okay. Sounds good. Yeah. Yeah, okay. So, Tony Stark's your hero from when you were younger. Still, to this day. I'm still a junior, they shouldn't have killed them off. Yeah, that is so. I know, I know his contract is inspiring. I'm really, like I'm really upset about it. I mean, his price tag is quite high. It's like 120 million. Pay it. Pay it. You need to spot going into the movie. Yeah. Yeah, inspire a whole new generation of builders. I mean, that's where I came from. Like I saw that and I was like, yeah, let's do that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, who's your like favorite historical figure? Who's your favorite historical figure? Like sometimes I go on, you know, history events and stuff and I'll just like listen to biographies on like Napoleon and stuff like that. Who's that person for you and what do you like about them? Favorite historical figure? Besides Iraq. Yeah. Let me think about that. I read, so there is, you look at who great men have studied Napoleon, Red Caesar, Caesar, Red Alexander. And who did Alexander read? He read Cyrus. Cyrus, the great. Really, really interesting guy. There's a book written about him called the, the Syropedia. Highly recommend, highly recommend reading it. What I learned from that was that the best way to build something meaningful and long lasting is to build up the people around you and fill them with both autonomy, agency, and wealth. And the real wealth that you can build is by bringing up others around you. And that is something that I very, very heavily lead my life by. So I found that really interesting. There are a lot of really interesting historical figures that I admire. Cyrus, the great, very, very close to the top. It's one that I haven't heard of before, which is good. So see, I mean, they call them the great for a reason. Funny if he's also, sorry. He's also, I think the only person in the Old Testament that is referenced as like Messianic in the context of, he's referenced as a prophet. Like he's very, very lauded in the Old Testament because he's the only, I think he pardoned and like basically gave the kingdom of Judea, like it's land, like an autonomy. I think I might be like butchering that a little bit, but like he is like viewed by the Old Testament as like the only like non-Jew that's like a prophet effectively. Which is kind of interesting. Yeah, he's great. Like that's just like leading with benevolence, leading with putting other people first and building other people up. And I very highly value that. Yeah, I love that so much because it's all about, like it all goes back to like incentives. And if you incentivize good behavior, if you incentivize people building things, stuff like that. If you built the up, like when you look at Elon, he doesn't typically say I did it all. He's constantly talking about we have an amazing engineering team, we have an amazing manufacturing team, all this stuff, our engineers at SpaceX are changing the world, whatever. That's a very totally similar thing. Like this, our team is incredible. So I'll tell you some more about my team. We have, it's myself, Peter and four engineers. Yeah, we've got Jared, Sam, Keenan, and Vossel. Two front end, two back end. What's funny about that is like they're all just doing multi-disciplinary stuff. They're all like front end and back end, but like everybody's kind of doing everything and even some non-technical stuff too. So Jared is actually flexing in a product. He's probably gonna be doing that like full time later on as we start to like bring more people on the team and he's such a killer at it. He's just got the, he's got it. I love seeing him like talk to people. He's so articulate and friendly and just great at it. So I'll tell you a little bit more about the front end team. Like this is also kind of like bleans into like how great they are for the team. They just like know and care. And so Keenan was the first guy that came out of the team. He was a manufacturing engineer over at Boeing. I was in there, Renton and Everett facilities working on triple sevens. He manufactured engineer draft to work instructions a bunch and then he found out he had an act for software taught himself how to code pivot internally and then wrote software for their manufacturing engineer and team for four years and then came and joined us. Jared was a manufacturing engineer over at this company called the Hubble Power Systems. They make transformers down in Georgia. And then he was a senior nuclear engineer over at General Dynamics Electric Boat. So it's like the only civilian like person type of person that takes the Navy officer exam. So he like, yeah, you like man of Virginia class sub. He's awesome guy. And then he taught himself how to code entirely himself. Then he worked at this company called Sengage to make textbook software and then he came and joined us. Yeah, it's funny. We had a job posting it just closed and he messaged me on LinkedIn. He was like, hey, I know the posting is closed but I love to chat anyway. And I was like, I like that. I appreciate that. So we chat and he just like, we're off the bat. It was just so enthusiastic, same with Kenan. So enthusiastic and we're off the bat. I was like, yes, Jared and Kenan are both the front end guys. Sam and Volts are both the back end guys. So Sam's working on computational geometry. He's got a robotics background with a hardware and a software. Such like, you know, probably like just so insanely smart. Got it. That seems like a very constant theme where you're like surrounding yourself with extremely intelligent individuals and hardworking. Yes, yes, I would not rather have it any other way. And then Volts will incredible, incredible engineer, super, super funny, super friendly. He's our ML engineer. He's working on this problem right now. It's like not an ML problem. He just came on and it was like, sorry, Volts will but like we've got this thing for you. We call it inheritance. It's a very, very cool problem of like geometric inheritance of like if you upload a cat file that's like, let's say you like diff two models. You know, we're not in saw works, right? How do I take a step file as an input? Have one version of it and let's say I upload a second version with like two parts removed, two parts added. And how do I have a system understand that these are the same model and like this part corresponds to that part and this part corresponds to that part. That's the problem we call inheritance. Very difficult, but Volts will solve it. So that's something we've been cooking for months and we're very, very excited for that actually to get onto the platform. It's gonna be very, to save a lot of time. It's sort of like this, there's an aspect of like geometric fingerprinting that like we have like incorporated geometric fingerprinting. Understanding based on various like geometric properties of a model, like how to identify something. So like looking at like a combination of surface area of volume, axes of inertia, moment of inertia, axes of the moment of inertia. The like a variety of like geometric primitives is like native to the file, native to the part. And like where's it center of mass, moment of inertia, and just like a variety of other things as well that we are like, you know, don't want to share too much specifics, but like things that you can in combination have as like attributes and like numerics that can uniquely identify a part without like doing an overlap of meshes and saying like, ah, they're roughly, yeah. So a couple of like statistics, a couple of not statistics, a couple of numbers that we can like, you just to say, this is exactly this part in this database. So that in combination with a couple of other methods is like how we are able to do inheritance. A couple of like very, very cool things that we'll also play into how we simulate. So we don't have to like re-simulate when they're like the entire assembly simulation if there's just like one or two parts dipped. Yeah, I can go on about that. But how often do you come across a problem that's like extremely difficult and you don't even necessarily know if it's like solvable and then you just give it to your team and they do it? Basically, all the time. I'm just, look, I just trust the team. They're great. I'm like pretty consistently. I'm like, like Peter, like just, you know, figured out. Like I, yeah, I should, yeah. Like, it inheritance was that, honestly. That's no idea. I was just like, Votsal, good luck. Welcome to the team. Here you go. You can get it done. Literally like it within the first like, we had been wanting to work on inheritance for like a month or two and then we brought Votsalon who was like an ML guy. He actually, it's so awesome. Votsal joined us the day he got his US citizenship. So it was awesome. Yeah. And he moved and joined us literally seven days later. He just came and just like that. Yeah, he's such a killer. So yeah, I was just like, yeah, so welcome to the team. Here's inheritance. Figure it out. And you know, obviously he'd like coordinate a lot on it. He, I'm like a thought partner for him on like, how do we like think about this? And Peter, like, is very much so as well. I like to stay very actively involved in like product road map and like, architecturally speaking, like what is to be built and where and why and how and in what way. I would like to stay as close that as much as possible for a long time. It's very important to me. And I also enjoy it a lot. Like I, you know, yeah, it sounds like a whole bunch of problems that you just get to tackle constantly. Yeah, it's awesome. Literally, like I love life. There's literally nothing I would rather be doing than this. It just invigorates you. Nothing. I was actually talking to a friend who works at a guest, this is company, Schultz. He's awesome, just an amazing engineer. And we're talking about how, again, I don't think if anybody, there's not a single person on the planet who, if they offered me like, you know, I don't know, some crazy percentage of a company to come and join them. I wouldn't drop anything. I would not stop working under act for literally anybody. If you along was like Phil, I want to give you, you know, 25% of SpaceX, you know, and come in, like run the company. I'd be like, that would be a very hard offer to turn down. That would be a very hard offer. I don't know. We got to run that. It'd be a hard offer to turn down, but there are problems where, point being, the mission is like important to you. I just, it's funny, like, at home. I have like a work area. And if you look behind me, like if you're on Zoom and you look behind me, you'll see two things. You'll see an IKEA desk with a bunch of Legos on top of it, like a bunch of like fully, but like all the space Legos. So like, I got a Saturn V rocket. I've got an ISS. I've got a lunar lander, I've got a shuttle. And they're all on this IKEA desk. You look back at that and you're like, huh. Yeah, Derack is called the assembly company. It's kind of for a reason. I guess I've like, you know, found them in deep in your personality and your... Founder problem fit. I just love putting parts together. And now taking them apart for a very good margin. I mean, well, I mean, we help people put them together for a good margin. What's the most difficult thing? This is a final question. What's the most difficult thing you've ever had to overcome? That's a good question. Sometimes I get in my own way. Building a company I've realized is a... Is frequently a battle against... It's a battle against how you think about yourself and the world. And, you know, like... Overcoming, like... Overcoming preconceived notions about certain things. Especially if you were like, I'm a stubborn person. And like, I love talking to people. I have this... Like, I will never say no to a conversation. Like, you text me at the end of me. I'll talk to you. It's actually a problem. Like, I will keep conversations running like long. All of that, like, just... It makes me prime for podcasts. I can kind of just ramble. There's a certain aspect of that that I've needed to unlearn. Or I'm still working on this, right? Or like, viscerally, like, people kind of just don't care. And that's kind of like hard for me. Like, I get very, very excited about stuff. And, like, I want to share. Like, I love getting into things. I love, like, talking. And, you know, a lot of people like don't want to hear like the whole thing. Yeah, people like just don't want to hear. Like, when I tell a story, as you can kind of tell it now, I go off on, like, side quests. And I get into, like, tangents. Which I love doing. But a lot of the times people don't even care about the story. They just want to hear the beginning and the end. And they just want, like, the spark notes. And for me, that's, like, I don't like that. Like, I get it. I get it, but, like, that's been, you know, person I've had to, like, overcome that. Like, figure out, just, like, strategies about, like, the better way to, like, talk about stuff. And, like, you know, refine the way that I think about conversations and just, like, get the reps in. So the toughest, that's one of the tougher things to overcome. It's just, like, understanding, I like to be, I like to very much consider myself, like, coachable. I love to just, like, learn from people about how to, like, improve. And it's very important to me to, like, to be constantly, constantly improving. If I am the same person that I was three months ago, I'm doing something horrifically wrong. And I very much, like, pride myself on being a constantly changing, constantly improving person. And so, some of the difficult things I've had to overcome, I would say, among the hardest are trying to find the right people to learn from. This kind of goes back to, like, fundraising and, like, what investors to work with. Like, I very much want to work with people who I can learn from, who I can learn a lot from. About how to do, how to be the best version of myself. And it's tough to find those people. And, yeah, so that's one aspect of it. Similarly, you know, stuff like with the factory, right? Like, I was so, I pitched, and I, now that we're sort of, like, over the stump, I don't mind sharing a bit. But, like, I was very embarrassed about, like, that, I felt like that was a very deep personal failure that I was not, I tried to raise money for the factory, tried to raise venture capital for the factory. I spent, like, like, six months. I pitched 300 VCs in six months on the factory. Yeah, and, you know, it's fine. It's funny. Some of those investors who I pitched on the factory are now investors in direct today. So, like, no hard feelings whatsoever. You know, like, that sucked. That sucked a lot. Because it's like, it felt, and I imagine it felt like a personal failing. Yeah. Even if it isn't. It's just, I wish a lot of, I wish more people got it, because it still makes sense. And, there's still a way to win. It just might not just be venture capital. But, I wish more people saw the work of the world the way that I do. And a constant, the way that I live my life and a constant thing I'm trying to do is help people understand that just a little bit better to, like, share and help, like, you know, put my glasses on, like, share how I see the world. Like, I am relentlessly optimistic that we, the world might be not so great today. It's, the world is wonderful. The world is better than it's ever been. But, it can be better. It can be so much better. And, all you have to do is choose to make it better. You can have agency. You can have autonomy. You can just do things. You don't have to ask people, like, permission. You can just build. You can just do things. That's, I think, what a lot of, like, the else again, no movements about. Just not asking people if it's okay to build hard things, just going and doing it. And, that's why I love these guys. I saw a tweet from Zane Mount Castle a few weeks ago where he said, people don't realize that you can just, like, buy a warehouse and then, you know, buy a bunch of materials and just start making shit. And you can. Yeah. Zane is a very, very good friend. Like, he's right. Zane, by the way, he's super humble. Yeah. Literally a pre-seed hardware company. And they're profitable. I know. Crazy. Like, his margins, he won't tell you this, but they're quite high for a hardware company. Yeah, I got that, you know, I interviewed him and I got that. Like, 80% plus. Like, they're also going to need to say. Well, I'll cut that now Zane, thank you. Yeah. We like you. I'm not, I don't know what I'm like now. No, no, I'm saying. He's like, his margins are 80%. Oh, I know. What's the case? Yeah. Oh, like, operating? Like, operating margin? Yeah. Jesus Christ. That's what I'm saying. Well, yeah, no, that's what, yeah. So I talked to them a little bit and he was talking about basically doing a fixed price model instead of a cost plus. Yeah, I mean, that's what that allows for. As you basically say, I can deliver this at X price and if people are willing to pay that price, then then you've got a business. Yes, you know, literally, you've got to say. That's how businesses work. Cost plus is, cost plus is an abomination. Cost plus is why I left Northrop. Really? Yeah. I don't like it because of the incentives. I don't think that misline incentives are not good. And especially if you're not spending your money, you're spending out of this money. Destroyed cultures are downstream of misline incentives. So like what I saw when I was at Northrop was everybody came in like 11 to three roughly and that's maybe not so fair. It was like more like 10 to four. And I, you know, every other day they were in the office. And I, like I was just working at a mentor there and I was working with him. And I just kind of like, I guess I like took a step back one day when I was working with him. And I kind of, I looked at him and I was like, he'd been there for like 30 years. You know, he was only in on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And I was just kind of like, if I stick around here, do I want to become that? Yeah, yeah. And he was such a nice guy, but like, I just, I don't want to turn into that. We're like, I just don't care anymore. I'm just kind of, you know, I'm the shape of my boundaries here. I'm physically the shape of my seat. I have like, you know, yeah, and I just kind of was like, I gotta be out of here. So that was happening at the same time as when Peter and I were doing, we're reading the foundation series. It was at the same time as we started to think about this stuff. And I was like, you get to see the contrast between like, you know, this idea, this story and the reality of your like day to day. Yeah. So I was like taking a different direction. Exactly. So I was like, you know what? There's room to do something different. And I've always wanted to, I mean, honestly, it's also just being a tiny cog and a huge machine. You know, I got T.S. clearance when I was at Northrop. They actually got it from me when I was 19, which is crazy. Yeah, like I, it's because all of their guys with T.S. were aging out. And so they wanted to like grab a couple of folks from like, you know, early cohort. It took me, I was so candidly like for the record, I was not at Northrop for very long. I was there for a three month internship between junior and between software and junior year. And again, between junior and senior year. And also like for the co-op, like a little bit after that. And they gave me a return offer. They spent to get me T.S. clearance. It took, you know, I was 19. They had to like do a background check and stuff. But like I hadn't done anything. They asked me like, oh, why did you go to Costa Rica when you were like 14? So I was like, I don't know, for a week or two. I don't remember. It doesn't really matter. But that was it. Normally, like it takes people like, like two years or three years to get T.S. Particularly like six months. You got expedited. Yeah, I'm just like, what are they gonna do? They talked to my parents. They talked to some roommates in college. Just like, he's not a terrorist. Yeah, I'm just like clean slate, right? Like what am I, I've literally like barely ever been out of the country, right? It's super easy to do background check on me. And they spent, I think it was actually probably closer to nine months. They spent more time getting me T.S. clearance than time I actually spent there. And they spent more money sponsoring my T.S. clearance than they offered me yearly salary in my return offer with like a master's. And I was like, guys, this is like brutal, this is brutal. This is so silly. Right, exactly. Yeah, that makes no sense. Yeah, I know, I know. And you wonder, how much does it cost? Is that like more, I would imagine more than 120. They didn't offer me 120. Well, yeah, okay, really? They offered me 90. Huh, that's not much. No, for, I had a master's in robotics and a bachelor's in the E.E. And they were like, yep, is that with stock or no? No stock. It's just 90 base. It was like 91. Yeah. Yeah, I was like, you know, it's guys. Yeah. And they paid for my T.S. Why would they, yeah. Again, incentive structures, right? Like, well, something. And I was just so hungry to work on a hard thing there. And I kept asking people, hey, can you like give me more working, give me more working, give me more work. They gave me a project there that they said would have taken me, it was supposed to take me three months for an internship. I finished it in three days. And I was a king, give me more working, give me more work. I went to a senior E.E. And he had like some board. They were like, they initially had me on like some like design, not design. They had me on like some test work. They wanted me like do some tests, right? Like some scripts, some matlab scripts to test. And they, they basically, I finished that in like a day because it's like it's matlab, it's not hard. And I found this senior E.E. And I was like, hey, can I do some design work? Can you just give me some work? So you just like offloaded a whole PCB design project to me. And so I got to work on, and like this I can't like specify too much about, but I got to work on some pretty cool radar, like board design stuff. And that was really cool. But like, and I finished that pretty quick too is before the end of my internship. And I just kept trying to hunt for like interesting work to do, I really wanted to work in their space systems team. I want to work on like a hard problem. And they wouldn't give me a hard problem. They wouldn't like let me throw my energy at something. And like that's the problem. Like, that's what it says in Android like fix. Is they can let people who are young and hungry throw themselves at something and just let them figure it out. And like that's what I wanted to do. And they wouldn't let me do it. Like it's, and so you just had to leave. Yeah, I'd get out there. Yeah. I don't know. Well, thank you so much Phil. I appreciate you coming on. Thank you for having me, man.