What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong (and Right) About Manufacturing: Workforce, Risk, and Getting Out of the Bubble
Manufacturing Happy Hour
This live episode of Manufacturing Happy Hour, recorded at Hapa's Brewing in San Jose, California, was split into two parts. The first panel, Vinod Anandarajah of Kanavu Automation and Kevin Toomer and Adam Soder of Sumitomo Drive Technologies, covered mechatronics and how manufacturers can build the skilled workforce they need instead of waiting for it to show up. The second panel, Kim Losey, Glenn Reid, Nick Haase of MaintainX, and Florian Pestoni of InOrbit, discussed the relationship between Silicon Valley and the factory floor: what the Valley's appetite for risk and disruption offers manufacturers, where it clashes with the plant's need for predictability, and why builders on both sides need to spend time with the people actually doing the work.
A Show That Started in a Rockwell Demo Room
The host, Chris, noted that Manufacturing Happy Hour began in the Bay Area, and that Vinod was its very first guest. The two were co-workers in the automation industry at the time. Vinod remembered working in the Rockwell demo room when Chris walked in holding two beers, explaining that their manager would let them drink beer at work and record a podcast.
Chris used the story to pass on some career advice he often gives to people starting side projects while holding a full-time job: don't let the side project interfere with your daily work, and get your manager's blessing. He thanked that manager, Paul, by name. The first episode was a low-budget video shot on an iPhone in a controls room, about managed versus unmanaged switches. Its best-known detail, and the top comment on YouTube, is that Vinod grimaces every time he sips the beer. Vinod explained that Chris had brought a dark Guinness-style beer and he prefers wheat beer.
Mechatronics, Explained Over a Beer
Chris asked Adam to explain mechatronics the way he would to someone at the bar. Adam said people often assume he invented the word, but it is now an industry-standard term for combining mechanical and electrical engineering, "mechanical electronics."
He described it from Sumitomo's point of view. The company has long been a mechanical business. The electrical side was always present, but controls are now becoming dominant. Adam said Allen-Bradley and everyone else in controls are moving products toward that level of control. In his view the gearing itself is largely staying the same, apart from some technological change, while the control side is what is really changing. Understanding how the two come together, in terms people can relate to, is the core of the field.
Chris explained why the topic belongs at the start of a workforce conversation. As more people enter manufacturing, mechatronics is where many of them are focusing, and all three panelists built their careers around it. Vinod founded Kanavu Automation. Kevin is a product and program manager for mechatronics at Sumitomo. Adam leads the engineering team there.
Kevin's Apprenticeship in Germany
Kevin entered the field through a three-year apprenticeship in Germany. He started as an electronics technician at a midsized mechanical engineering company that built grinding and milling machines, going straight from school into the company. The program combined classroom education with practical work. He could apply what he learned in school directly to the company's machines, and from the beginning he was part of the company's work culture, its processes, and the machines it eventually sold to customers.
Kevin described the arrangement as empowering for him and good for the employer. The company could train its own people to its own processes and standards, and it ended up with staff who had come through its apprenticeship, understood what they were talking about, and knew both the products and the company. He suggested the US could apply the same idea through apprenticeship programs.
Sumitomo's In-House Apprenticeship: Growing Your Own Machinists
Adam described how Sumitomo Drive Technologies built its own program. He said the problem was not unique to them and was concentrated in the machine shop: finding machinists, finding good ones, and keeping them long enough to become experts. The company concluded quickly that it had to train its own.
It partnered with a local community college. At first Sumitomo was effectively attending the college's classes and hiring graduates as they finished. Now the program runs inside Sumitomo's own facility. It is currently a two-year program. Apprentices hold a full-time job and a full-time apprenticeship while also attending school, and their on-the-job work ties back into their coursework and grades. Sumitomo studied the college's curriculum and applied it to its everyday machining. Whatever the company needs to make on CNC machines, the apprentices learn to do, and the same goes for manual machining. When they finish, they have a 40-hour-a-week job waiting; Adam stressed there is no question about that.
Several graduates who started in machining have become manufacturing engineers. They continued on to bachelor's or higher degrees on their own, not through Sumitomo, building on the foundation from the apprenticeship, and now work as manufacturing engineers for the company. Adam framed this as "growing our own," because finding good people has become hard. He was not sure whether to attribute that to a generational shift, a lack of workforce, or a lack of good workforce. Sumitomo has been moving assembly in-house, and he said it made sense to bring worker development in-house too. In his experience, people who learn from the ground up tend to be good and to stay a long time.
Chris drew out a takeaway for manufacturing leaders: a program like this does more than fill machinist positions. It creates pathways for career advancement, including going back to school for a degree.
Vinod's Path: A Master's Degree, Apple, and a Bootstrapped Company
Vinod took a different route. He earned a master's in mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, partly influenced by his father, who was a civil engineering professor at Johns Hopkins for 30 years. Vinod's younger brother also worked at Figure, which he described as a humanoid robot startup in San Jose.
Asked whether there were other reasons for the choice, Vinod said he was interested in his father's academic world but wanted a more practical path. He said plainly that you don't need a master's or a PhD to succeed in automation. Still, the experience helped him. As a teaching assistant he taught CAD, generating G-code and sending it to a CNC machine. For one lab he had students draw Bart Simpson. He said that kind of creative, hands-on mechanical engineering work helped him throughout his career.
After Rockwell, Vinod worked at Apple as a manufacturing engineer on the MacBook team, where he learned to bridge product design and manufacturing equipment. The drawback was the travel, which was hard with a family. His wife told him that if he was going to work that hard, he might as well work for himself. He bootstrapped Kanavu Automation eight years ago and built it "brick by brick," deliberately not as the venture-backed company people usually picture in the Bay Area.
He described the company's history in two halves. In the first half he worked as a consultant. He saw that the Bay Area had many good integrators who needed help, either with bandwidth or with particular skill sets, so he contacted people he knew and offered programming help. That led to a lot of complex robot programming on systems with around a thousand I/O points, five robots, 12 vision cameras, and 50 servos. In the last four years the company has moved to building its own equipment, developing its own designs for assembly, inspection, and AMR equipment. Vinod said he now has good work-life balance; last season he coached his child's kindergarten basketball team.
What Mechatronics Looks Like on the Front Line
Chris asked Kevin to describe mechatronics in practical terms for frontline work, recalling that Kevin had earlier called automotive an industry of the future, where people and automation work in harmony. Kevin said a purely mechanical job done by one person is largely a thing of the past. Workers now need support, whether from software or from a robot alongside them. His maintenance example: there is no longer just one person walking the facility checking on systems. That person is now supported by many sensors. Kevin saw this as a change of the last few years.
Asked what keeps the work exciting, Adam said every day is different. Sumitomo serves many industries. It does standard gearing for conveyors and equipment such as a grain mixer, and he noted there was a conveyor right in the brewery. When the company moved into precision products, Adam found a whole industry he had never heard of growing up, and now sees everywhere. He might work on a jet bridge one day and a robot lifting cars the next, or an AGV pulling a dump truck. He said there are products that let a single AGV move an entire dump truck, something he would never have thought possible. His whole department now works on both the electrical and the mechanical side.
Kevin's answer was simpler: finding solutions to problems. He noted that customers often don't know exactly what they want from Sumitomo; they only know they have a problem, and his team's job is to help solve it.
The Founders Panel
For part two, Chris did a "hot swap" of panelists and asked each to name a current or recent focus and something people don't know about their entrepreneurial path.
Kim Losey was most recently CEO of Rapid Robotics, which she wound down about a year before the recording; she called it a terrible experience to go through. Her first company dated from about age nine. Her grandparents had a summer house on a golf course, and during a tournament she hired her brother to fish golf balls out of the bay and sold them back to golfers at the tee. She said she saw a way to make money and solve a problem and figured out the rest from there.
Glenn Reid started in software. The highlight was building iMovie and iPhoto at Apple, where he worked for Steve Jobs. He moved into manufacturing because he loves products, especially things people will actually pay for, which he said is usually not software. He co-founded a company making washer-dryer combos, which he said "almost succeeded" and taught him a lot about manufacturing. He then spent a year and a half in advanced manufacturing at Ford and now runs a startup working on autonomous robot navigation.
Nick Haase is a co-founder of MaintainX, which builds software that helps frontline workers execute work, mainly in maintenance and asset management. He said a focus on making the product easy for the end technician has driven much of the company's success. His career has wound through very different businesses. He started in sales and founded his first company in medical devices, and he named effort and persistence as the common thread.
Florian Pestoni said he usually feels like the only software person on panels like this, so he was glad to have company. InOrbit doesn't make robots; it makes robots work better together. The company started using the term "orchestration" when people tended to respond "orchestra what?", and he said the industry is now coming around to it. Since Kim had talked about her first venture, he talked about his planned last one: he is obsessed with pizza, doesn't believe in retirement, and expects to spend his later years making pizza.
Bringing Silicon Valley to Milwaukee: Risk and the $21 Laser-Cut Parts
Chris, who lives in Milwaukee, asked Glenn what it was like to bring Silicon Valley know-how to Milwaukee when Glenn built the washer-dryer company there. Glenn said everyone in Milwaukee wanted to introduce him to their friends because he was "the weird guy from California," and he became a kind of cultural ambassador between the two places. In his telling, Bay Area people treat the Midwest as flyover country and can barely tell Milwaukee from Minneapolis, while Midwesterners think Californians are crazy, and Glenn said they aren't entirely wrong.
The central difference, in his view, is risk. He developed a whole presentation on "the anatomy of risk." He described the Midwest as an approval culture: if your sister or your mom doesn't think something is a good idea, you don't do it. The Bay Area, he said, is more "hold my beer." He added that there are probably more smart people in the Midwest than in the Bay Area, where many people show up just trying to get rich, but that some risk appetite is missing.
His example: the team needed a small plastic model to demonstrate their technology. Instead of cutting it by hand, Glenn wanted it laser cut. After searching Milwaukee they found a shop with a laser cutter that quoted roughly seven days and around $750 for seven or eight parts. It was 11 o'clock on a Thursday, and it didn't seem like the best option, so Glenn searched online and found a company that turned out to be in San Francisco. He uploaded his CAD file, got a full quote in about four minutes, with next-day delivery and a cost of about $21. He bought it, then went back to the Milwaukee shop owner to tell him what was happening.
His lesson: many businesses look at the equipment they have and what they've done before, figure out what they need to earn, and send a quote on a sheet of paper. Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, someone is automating that job out from under them, charging a tenth of the price, and delivering overnight. If you aren't watching for that, and aren't a little scared, customers stop ordering and you won't even know why. He concluded that you have to challenge and disrupt yourself.
Treating B2B Users Like Consumers
Chris asked Nick what he learned from his consumer businesses, including Loot and a line of startup-themed shirts that Chris said got good at Facebook ad targeting early on. Nick said B2B companies give themselves permission to focus ruthlessly on logical outcomes and ignore user experience. In consumer products that isn't possible. He had built a free product, and he said even free wasn't free enough: users complained about ads, dropped off if the product was hard to use, and wouldn't watch even a five-second tutorial. If the app didn't make immediate sense, the user was gone, with no chance of winning them back.
That experience shapes how he and his MaintainX partners think about their software. Users shouldn't need to be hand-held through it. If it isn't intuitive, it creates friction, and friction hurts adoption. Nick called adoption a metric undervalued by many B2B companies, which assume people will figure the software out because their job requires it. Without adoption, he argued, you don't get the results you are after, and treating B2B users the way you would treat consumers produces better results.
The same thinking carried over to marketing. MaintainX was one of the few companies advertising to frontline manufacturing workers on Facebook and Instagram. Other software companies asked why, since that wasn't where their customers were. Nick's answer was that these workers are people too and check Facebook to see what their kids are doing. Those ads were also cheap relative to what MaintainX could afford, because the company wasn't competing on thin consumer margins. He believes treating the audience as consumers, with that kind of respect, has given the company a major advantage over how the rest of the ecosystem treats these users. Chris added that people are used to easy, intuitive tools in daily life, and manufacturing software should try to match that.
Disruption Versus Predictability
Kim's background includes leading growth and marketing at Hasbro, running an omnichannel retail company, and being part of an organization acquired by Autodesk. Chris noted that she has often led companies through inflection points and asked for advice.
Kim first connected the two previous answers. She said Silicon Valley loves risk and disruption because to people there it means something new and better. On a manufacturing floor, the last thing anyone wants is disruption. They want predictability and to know exactly what throughput will be at the end of the day. She said that mismatch often hurts.
Picking up Nick's point about user experience, she said people in deeply technical industries often don't see complexity and don't notice when something is far harder than it should be for an average person. She often casts herself as that person, the one asking why something is so complicated. She may not understand how it works, but she can say how she wants it to work.
On inflection points, Kim said she finds them exciting. She thinks of them as do-or-die, like driving a car very fast with no guardrails and perhaps no safety net, making it up as you go. Her lesson: there is a lot of opportunity, but you can't be afraid to make it up as you go. Instead of looking for familiar patterns, look for the outliers and for people willing to do something different and ask why things are the way they are. Chris summarized the point for manufacturers: you don't need everything figured out before you start.
A Robot Storefront on Mountain View's Main Street
InOrbit has a storefront on the main street of Mountain View where visitors can walk in and see robots. Chris asked Florian how it has helped the business. Florian first noted that Mountain View is where Silicon Valley began, and he likes being part of that history. InOrbit works with manufacturers and many other industries. He said the fun part about robots now is that they're no longer confined to production lines: InOrbit's customers include hospitals, airports, and retailers. One early customer was, as he put it, the largest retailer in the world, which got the team thinking about robots in retail.
The storefront came from a communication problem. For a long time, when InOrbit said it did robot orchestration, people didn't know what that meant, and when it was explained, they said it wouldn't work. So the team decided to show them. Florian said there were two usual ways to do that: beg a customer to let you bring other prospects to see their setup, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, or rent a warehouse in the middle of nowhere and fill it with robots. Neither appealed, so they made it very public. It started small and grew into its own thing.
The space lets InOrbit engage with the large Bay Area robotics community, for which it hosts frequent events, and with the general public, including people whose only exposure to robots is a scary movie. Florian described visitors who come in, see a robot, and conclude it's just a machine, which he said opens up a whole conversation. InOrbit also partners with nonprofits. The previous summer it brought in 40 kids from San Francisco, who took the train and walked over, and gave them what Florian described as a million dollars' worth of robots to play with for two hours. He doubted that would happen in a remote warehouse. He added that investors will tell you not to do something like this, and sometimes sticking to your guns works out. Glenn joked that he had once had a retail space because it was cheaper than warehouse space, and Florian said it is cheaper than office space too.
What Role Does the Bay Area Play?
Chris asked each founder what role the Bay Area plays in industrial innovation and the next generation of manufacturing technology. Nick, joining from a hotel in Florida, called the Bay Area the birthplace of the innovation that drives the world, pointing to the cloud revolution, and said the same moment is happening with AI. The world's leading AI companies and researchers, he said, are within about 20 miles of the venue. He acknowledged that most of that work isn't reaching manufacturers yet and is still being figured out. He said the leading robotics engineers are also in this ecosystem, and described a permissiveness and a concentration of talent willing to try unconventional ideas, which he believes spreads around the world, generally for the better.
His caution was that you also have to "touch grass" in flyover states and cities to understand where people actually are, and then work out how to bring them along so manufacturing isn't 20 years behind the next wave. Pointing to how long it has taken many manufacturers to digitize and move to the cloud, he argued that if it takes 16 years to adopt AI and robotics, the US won't be a leader in manufacturing. Accelerating that adoption, he said, is the challenge of this wave.
Florian joked that this was the longest he'd gone at any event without hearing "AI." He said San Francisco has 17 AI events every night and that robotics has been rebranded as "physical AI." He acknowledged enormous hype but said hype doesn't mean something isn't real, and that some of the progress is amazing. In his view, the industry is at the intersection of agentic AI and physical AI, and the key shift is what he calls "intent over specification." Using a beer example: previously you had to program exactly when the beer would be poured; now you can express what you want, perhaps what kind of beer, and the system handles the rest. He recognized that AI's non-deterministic nature scares many people but said there are ways to manage it, including using AI to create deterministic behavior. He finds it exciting that tools built to move pixels on a screen are now being used to move atoms in the physical world. Chris noted they had made it 35 minutes before anyone said "AI."
Kim had spent several months in Indiana the previous summer, where people kept asking why she was building in the Bay Area and urging her to come see how they lived. She sees an opportunity to bring industry and Silicon Valley innovation together, because "time is money" applies to both. In manufacturing, downtime costs money and jobs. In Silicon Valley, burn costs money, jobs, and reputations. She thinks each side would benefit from understanding the other's pressures. What she believes Silicon Valley can bring to manufacturing is a sense of "what could be," not just "what is," and a sense of wonder. She said she refuses to believe things are impossible given enough time, money, and the right minds, and she encourages customers outside the Valley to think that way.
Glenn offered a metaphor: Silicon Valley is like your weird billionaire little brother. Others want someone else to take the risk first. They watch, follow if it works, and if it fails, they say "I told you you'd break your neck." Glenn said the Bay Area takes pride in going first, and it helps to have a couple of billion dollars in your pocket. His example was Elon Musk, who, for all his faults, Glenn said fundamentally disrupted automotive manufacturing. When Glenn was at Ford, people there kept asking what Musk was even doing. Glenn said Musk didn't know anything about making cars, and that this was both a strength and a weakness.
Getting Out of the Bubble
The final question asked how each founder keeps a pulse on what happens outside Silicon Valley. Chris framed it as relevant to anyone at a large company who spends too much time inside headquarters or a single factory.
Florian had just returned from visiting a customer's plant in Poland and had recently been in Minnesota at minus 10 Fahrenheit. His principle is to go where the robots are. Because InOrbit makes software, it could in theory work with deployments from anywhere, but he said you can't relate to people that way, so being with the people doing the work matters. With deployments on four continents, he can't be everywhere, but he tries. He also stressed industry events, mentioning Automate, where Chris has a role, while warning that talking only to people inside your own universe creates a bubble.
Glenn said there's no substitute for "throwing yourself out the front door": robotics meetups and events in San Francisco, and anything that connects him with people. He said you always meet someone doing something you've never heard of. LinkedIn helps, in his view, but runs about six months behind what's actually happening.
Kim told the manufacturing audience to watch for her on LinkedIn. She often messages people with interesting-sounding jobs, such as those running labor teams or managing frontline QA, to ask what they're looking at, share what she's seeing, and learn what she's missing. She said they always enjoy telling her what she isn't thinking about, and she welcomes it.
Nick gave the closing answer. You have to go to the plant floor and talk to people, especially those who aren't using your systems or adopting the technology. He said you need to understand what creates their friction: whether it's psychological, whether it's intimidation, or whether there's a real learning curve you've missed. He warned that early adopters can mislead you into thinking a product works when it only "kind of works," because those users were excited enough about its potential to push through the friction.
He said the same advice applies to manufacturing leaders. Many graduated from the front lines five or ten years earlier and never go back to shadow their teams. They believe they solved problems that still exist a decade later, while workers now spend much of their time on some elaborate spreadsheet workaround, and leaders lose sight of how many labor hours go into wildly inefficient tasks. His conclusion was that nothing beats going to the front lines non-selectively, without cherry-picking the people doing the work you find most exciting.
This is the birthplace of all innovation that drives the world around us. If you look at what happened with the cloud revolution, that all originated here.
I talk a lot about risk and disruption in Silicon Valley. We tend to love it because to us it represents something new and something better. But when you get on a manufacturing floor, the last thing somebody wants is disruption.
Hey, what's up, folks? This is a live episode of Manufacturing Happy Hour recorded in San Jose, California. It's essentially a two-part episode featuring part one on mechatronics 101 and pragmatic approaches to starting companies that are making an immediate impact today. Then part two, we really focus more on startups and Bay Area's impact, I should say Silicon Valley's impact, on the current manufacturing ecosystem. Part two is a panel of founders that I'm going to get you introduced to shortly, but we're going to spend the first 20 minutes talking about mechatronics with a very special guest that was one of the original members of the Manufacturing Happy Hour series.
Let's head to Hapa’s Brewing in San Jose, California, to meet up with our crew. Special thanks to MaintainX and Sumitomo Drive Technologies for sponsoring this whole California tour. Let's jump in.
To kick things off, I had mentioned that Manufacturing Happy Hour started here in the Bay Area. And sitting to my left tonight is actually the very first guest that ever appeared on Manufacturing Happy Hour. So before we talk mechatronics, we're going to get into a little bit of lore around Manufacturing Happy Hour. Rather than steal all the thunder, Vinod and I were co-workers in the automation industry a long time ago. Vinod, what do you recall about that very first episode of Manufacturing Happy Hour?
Well, I remember that I was working hard in the Rockwell demo room, and in comes Chris holding two beers with a giddy look on his face and talking about how our manager is going to let us drink beers and work on his podcast.
It was a pretty sweet setup. I always give career advice to folks when they're like, "Hey, what advice would you give me if I want to start a side hustle and I'm working a full-time job?" And my advice is, well, hey, don't let it get in the way of your day-to-day task, but also get your manager's blessing. So shout out to Paul, who said he might be here tonight. I don't see him yet, but shout out to Paul for making it all possible.
When Vinod and I were doing this very first episode, this was a very campy video series. It's not what it is now, where we're filming a long-form podcast in a brewery. We had an iPhone set up in a controls room, and you and I were talking about managed versus unmanaged switches. And the thing I remember about that first video is, as excited as Vinod and I were to drink beer on the job, Vinod was not necessarily as excited about my beer selection that day. So you can still find this video on the internet. There's a great Easter egg, and in fact, it's the number one comment on YouTube. Anytime you see Vinod take a sip of the beer, he makes a face of, let's say, displeasure that he did not like the beer. So he hammed it up there. That's my favorite memory of that very—
Well, he had this Guinness dark beer, and I'm more of a wheat beer kind of guy. So to each their own.
That's totally fair. Totally fair.
So let's get into mechatronics. Vinod, we're going to get back to your story here in a little bit, but Kevin and Adam, we're going to start with you guys. And Adam, I believe it was you and I, when we were talking, you were saying one of your strengths is being able to simplify complex topics in an approachable way. And that's really been the spirit of Manufacturing Happy Hour this entire time. So we said we're going to talk about mechatronics here at the start. How would you simplify the topic as if you're having a beer with someone, right? How do you describe it as if you're having a beer with someone here at Hapa’s Brewing like we are today?
So mechatronics, when I first describe it to people, people think I make up the word. I swear I didn't make up the word. It's an industry standard word nowadays, but it's literally the tying together of mechanical and electrical. Mechanical electronics, right? Mechatronics.
Coming from our side, we've been a mechanical company for the Sumitomo side for years, where the electrical stuff has always been there, but now we're seeing with controls. So you mentioned Allen-Bradley. Those guys are just—not just Allen-Bradley, everybody. They're taking over. Everything is going to that level of control. The gearing is really staying the same. Technology is changing a little bit, but the control side of it is what's changing. And being able to understand how they come together in ways that we're used to, ways that we can relate to, is the best way to describe it. It's just the two technologies coming together.
And one of the reasons we wanted to talk about it today is, as more people are starting to enter into the manufacturing industry, this is one of those areas that a lot of folks are putting their focus. All three of you are examples of people that have built their careers around it. So Kevin, I'm going to ask you. You're going to lead off this part of the conversation because we're going to be exploring different pathways into the manufacturing industry, right? We've got a panel of founders coming up after this, but let's go the opposite direction first.
Kevin, you got into this through an apprenticeship in Germany. Tell us a little bit about that, and what are some things that manufacturers listening here in the audience today or listening to the podcast afterwards, what are some best practices we can take away from that to maybe implement that into our own businesses here for an audience that's primarily based in North America?
Yes, correct. I completed a three-year apprenticeship in Germany. I started as an electronics technician. It was a midsized mechanical engineering company that builds grinding and milling machines. And so directly from school on, I started working there in the company. I had also, during my apprenticeship, time in school. So it was combined education, school and practice, and I had the opportunity to work on those machines directly and could apply what I learned in school on those machines. And from the beginning, I was part of that work culture and of those processes, and then also part of whatever machine we then sold to the customer.
So that was very empowering for me, but also was good for the company because they had the opportunity to train their own guys, their own machinists, up to their processes, to their standards, and then had people that have been through their own apprenticeship who know what they were talking about. They knew the products or the company itself. So I think that's something we could also apply here in the US with apprenticeship programs.
Yeah. And Adam, that's actually what we're going to jump into next here. Before I do that, I get a little excited when I do these podcasts. Sometimes I didn't really introduce our panelists tonight. So we have mechatronics experts. Everyone to the left of me is a mechatronics expert tonight. Vinod, you're the founder of Kanavu Automation. You've built a career and a business around that. We'll get into that a bit. Kevin, you're a product manager, program manager for mechatronics at Sumitomo. And Adam, you're leading the engineering team there as well. So these are folks that know this topic inside and out that are really helping us simplify this for folks that might be getting their entry into this space.
So now that I've set that a little bit, Kevin, you gave a great example of what it was like going through apprenticeships in Germany, the combination of schooling and the companies. Adam, you have implemented this at Sumitomo Drive Technologies as well. You built your own in-house apprenticeship program. Paint the picture as to what that's like and what you think folks can learn from that as well.
Correct. So the issue we were having, and it's not just us, is mainly in our machine shop: finding machinists, getting good machinists, having them stay a long time and become experts in their field. Well, we learned really quickly that we need to train our own. So we partnered with the local community college. We actually started, we went to their classes essentially. We were hiring them already when they came out of the program. Well, now that program is in our doors.
So right now it's a two-year program. They come right out of there. It's a full-time job, first of all, full-time apprenticeship, but they're also going to school. But they get all that; it ties into their schooling. So it comes back to a grade, but we worked with their curriculum. We learn their curriculum. We apply it to our everyday machining practices. So anything we have to CNC, they're learning how to do. Anything that we have to manually machine, they're learning how to do. So it helps them, it helps us. And then when they're done with their two-year program, they have a 40-hour-a-week job right from the get. There's no question about it. They will have a job when they come out.
And we've had a few of them now that went into machining, but turned into manufacturing engineers. So they kept going for their bachelor's or a higher-level degree, not through us, but they got the foundations, like you were talking about, as an apprentice, and they went ahead, and now they're a manufacturing engineer for us. So we're literally growing our own because it's hard finding good people anymore. Whether it's the generational shift, the lack of workforce or lack of good workforce, whatever the term may be, we can now train our own, and all in-house. We try to get our assembly in-house. Let's get our workers in-house too. So it's definitely helped us get good people that'll stay a long time because they learn it from the ground up. They're not just coming from industry itself.
Yeah. So Adam, what I'm hearing is that you've built this in-house apprenticeship program, and as a result, one of the key things I'm hearing is that folks are going back to get their bachelor's. You're creating other pathways to advance in their career through this program you've created. That strikes me as one of the takeaways that manufacturing leaders can pull from this. Vinod, we're going to jump to you because your story is somewhat completely different, right? You went and got a master's in mechanical engineering and control systems, I believe. Is that correct?
Yeah, I did the master's at Michigan.
Okay.
In mechanical engineering, kind of driven by my father. He was in academics, and he was a professor at Johns Hopkins for 30 years for civil engineering. So kind of followed in his footsteps. The apple doesn't fall too far from the tree. My little brother also worked for Figure. They're a humanoid robot startup in San Jose. So just followed those footsteps and got into—
Were there other reasons that you went into it beyond just the, I guess, the family history or the building history of your brother going into it as well? I'm just curious, were there other aspects that attracted you to it? Did you see it as something that could help you take your career to the next level, or how did it help you found a company as well? That's kind of a unique path. Was any of that in your mind when you started down this path?
Yeah, I think going into it, looking at my father's background and going into academics, I knew that I was interested, but I didn't want to follow that same path, right? I wanted a more practical path, and so I left with my master's. But during that time, we talk about in our industry, I would say that you don't need a master's, you don't need a PhD to be successful in automation for sure, but experiences I got there. For example, as a TA, I taught CAD, and I generate the G-code, throw it to the CNC machine. And I remember that for some of our lab work, I had the students draw Bart Simpson, right? So just getting creative and having that experience in mechanical engineering really helped me in my career.
So I've got a couple more questions for you all as we're up here. Kevin, the next question is for you because I want to paint a picture of what mechatronics looks like pragmatically for the front line. When we've talked before, you've said the automotive industry really looks like one of those industries that's the industry of the future. You have people and automation really working together in harmony. Paint a picture of what that mechatronics-style work environment looks like.
So basically, as before, we spoke of combining two areas, two fields there, and it's the combination of mechanical and electrical. So as we spoke before, you don't have that just mechanical job anymore that's done by one person. Mainly you need support, whether it's software support or you need a robot at your side. And for example, maintenance, you don't have one guy anymore just working in the facility and checking up on the systems. Now you have a whole bunch of sensors that is the support for this guy working there. So I think that's something that changed in the last couple of years there.
So last question is a bit of a segue into part two of our conversation, which is our founder panel. And Vinod, since you're a founder, I'm going to have you help us wrap this part up. Vinod, you've built a business around automation solutions, around mechatronics here in the Bay Area. Not necessarily a venture-backed company that a lot of people think of when they think of Bay Area companies. I'm curious, when people think of startups in the Bay Area, how did you find an opportunity to build a company focused around something a little more non-traditional out here? Or maybe just, I might be wrong too, maybe this is more of an opportunity than I think it is.
Well, after Rockwell, I worked for Apple, and that was an amazing experience. Got to be a manufacturing engineer for the MacBook team. Really learned how to bridge the gap between product design and manufacturing equipment. But the challenge with that role was just the travel and having a family. So I bootstrapped this company. My wife was like, "If you're going to work that hard, then you might as well work for yourself." So started this eight years ago and just built it brick by brick.
Started off, it's kind of a tale of two halves. The first half was really a consultant. The need I saw in the industry was there's a lot of good integrators in the Bay Area that need help, whether that's bandwidth or skill set. So just reached out to people I knew, asked if they needed help with programming, and ended up doing a lot of complex robot programming, systems that had like a thousand I/O, five robots, 12 vision cameras, 50 servos, so really complex equipment. And then that evolved into building our own equipment. So the last four years really developed our own designs around assembly, inspection and AMR equipment.
So yeah, it's been a blessing. I coached my kid's kindergarten basketball team last season. So have great work-life balance and just blessed to be building this brick by brick.
Yeah. Kevin, Adam, I should ask you as well. What do you love about the space that you're in also? Vinod was just highlighting building his own business, balancing the work-life. What's something that's kept this space exciting for both of you guys? Adam, we'll start with you. I saw you raising the mic first.
For me, it's different every day. We're in a whole bunch of industries. We do the standard gearing as well. So your typical conveyors, we were looking at one over here just the other day. There's a grain mixer over here. We do that all day.
Long. But then when we started doing the precision aspect of it, it's a whole industry I never even heard of growing up or anything like that. But now you see it's everywhere. We'll go from a jet bridge one day to a robot lifting cars up the next day, or an AGV pulling a dump truck. You'd never think that was even possible. But there's products out there that I can move an entire dump truck with one AGV. And just being able to do that every day, have something different, whether it's electrical, mechanical, again, we're doing both. So we do it all, and my whole department is that now. So it definitely makes it fun every day coming to work.
Adam, you brought up something really important. This is probably one of the top three episodes in terms of having done the podcast right in the middle of the production floor. There's fermentation taking place right next to us right now, actively in the brewing process. So yes, we are absolutely right in the middle of the floor right now. Kevin, take us home on this part. What's kept this exciting for you throughout your career, from apprenticeship to where you are now?
Well, basically it's finding solutions for problems. We do that every day, different applications. Adam just talked about it. And sometimes the customer doesn't know what he wants from us. He just knows he's got a problem there, and I need something to solve that for me, and we are here to help them.
Yeah. Well, excellent. Hey everyone, give it up for Vinod, Kevin, Adam for kicking off part one of tonight's show. Thank you, gentlemen.
Thank you.
All right, keep in your seats because we're actually just going to be, in the spirit of talking automation, we're going to do a hot swap right now. So our next panel is going to be coming up. We got Florian, we got Kim, we got Nick, and Glenn as well. I think I see everyone accounted for right now. So let me pull out one more stool.
All right, I am not going to make the same mistake that I made during part one and do the introduction three questions in. We're going to jump right into introductions, and Kim, we'll start with you and then we'll go down the line to Florian. But this is tricky because everyone up here to my left is a serial entrepreneur, more or less. So an introduction could take a really long time. I would say answer with, hey, what were you focused on most recently or currently, as well as what's something that you wish people knew more about your entrepreneurial journeys that they don't? Let's go that route. So Kim, how would you start us off?
All right. So most recently I was the CEO of Rapid Robotics. I ended up winding that company down, which is a terrible experience to have to go through. That was almost a year ago. I think the thing that is interesting maybe for people to know is my first company, I was about nine years old. My grandparents had a summer house on a golf course, and I hired my brother to fish the golf balls out of the bay and sold them back to the golfers at the tee.
How did you—did you do it yourself at all to figure out the process first, or did you just hire employee number one, your brother, right out of the gate to take on that responsibility?
Well, I think it was sort of, there was this golf tournament happening, and I saw a way to make money and solve a problem, and so then I just figured it out from there.
There you go. Entrepreneurship 101. All right, Kim. Glenn, we're going to go to you next.
So I started out in software. I did a bunch of stuff. A highlight of my software career was building iMovie and iPhoto at Apple and worked for Steve Jobs. All that kind of stuff. I pivoted into manufacturing because I love products and I love things that people actually want to give you money for, which is usually not software. So did a company building washer-dryer combos, which almost succeeded. Learned a lot about manufacturing. Went to Ford, worked in advanced manufacturing for a year and a half. Now I've got a startup doing autonomous robot navigation stuff. So all over the map, but products more or less.
Like I said, serial entrepreneurs up here doing everything from washing machines to fishing golf balls out of the nearby golf course. Nick, I know you have some wacky stories as well, but share what you're focused on right now, as well as one of the more underrated parts of your entrepreneurial journey.
Sure. Yeah. So I'm one of the co-founders of MaintainX. We build software to help frontline workers with work execution. So primarily maintenance and asset management, and really focused on making it easy for the end user, that end technician, easy to use. And that's been a large part of what's driven the success of the business so far.
My journey's been kind of very winding as far as which types of businesses I've worked on. I started my career in sales and ended up starting my first company in medical devices, which is very different from where I am today. But it's all about effort and persistence, is sort of the key thread that works through it all.
All right. And Florian, wrap us up on this one.
I was a little bit afraid to be up here because I'm usually the only software guy, but good to know that I'm in good company. What we do at InOrbit is we don't make robots, but we make robots work better together. So we started using the term orchestration, and usually we got, "Orches-what?" And now it's changing, right? A lot of people are kind of coming around to that term.
Kim, you talked about your first entrepreneurship gig. I'm going to talk about my last one, okay? Which is, I'm obsessed with pizza, as you know. So I think that's going to be—I don't believe in retirement either. That's boring. So I think in my golden years, I'll be slinging pizza. So hopefully you'll come and visit.
Yeah. And I've got some group questions for this crew, but I have individual questions for everyone first, because in addition to every unique thing you just shared, there are other unique things about your careers we can get into as well. And one thing we like doing on these podcast tours, right? This week Manufacturing Happy Hour is visiting the Bay Area. We're going to the Central Valley and we're going to Los Angeles. And yes, you're all here in the audience today, but when this episode comes out, a month or so from this recording date, people across the country are going to listen to this. So we love celebrating and learning from, hey, what are the unique things about the market that we're hanging out in today? And one of the unique markets in the world is the Bay Area.
So, Glenn, this first question goes to you. You were talking about how you were doing washing machines, right? Marathon machines. That was one of your more recent ventures. And you actually went to Milwaukee, which is where I live today. You were building that company in Milwaukee. I'm very curious to hear from you. What was it like bringing Silicon Valley know-how to a region like Milwaukee, or insert midsize Midwestern or coastal city or southern city here, right? There are a lot of spots that don't necessarily have that Bay Area vibe, right? What was it like bringing that Silicon Valley know-how to a different market like that, and how did it help you in your business?
That's a great question. And first of all, I'd say everybody in Milwaukee wanted to introduce me to their friends. I was the weird guy from California. But I became a sort of cultural ambassador between Silicon Valley and Milwaukee. Out here it's a flyover state. They don't even remember if it's Milwaukee, Minneapolis, kind of the same thing. And out there they think everybody out here is crazy, and they're not completely wrong about that.
But a big part of it is risk. And I developed an entire presentation around the anatomy of risk. And the Midwest is kind of an approval culture. It's like if your sister or your mom doesn't think it's a good idea, you just don't do it. And out here it's sort of like, hold my beer, get out of the way. So there's probably more smart people in the Midwest than there are here. There's a lot of people who come here trying to just get rich and whatever, but definitely a risk appetite that's missing at some level.
And there's one story that really stands out. I'll shut up in a second, but we were going to try and make a little plastic model to model up technology, and we're getting out the saws and the drills. I'm like, we should have this laser cut. Let's find somebody to laser cut some Lucite. And so we looked around Milwaukee. We finally found somebody with a laser cutter, and they wanted like, I don't know, seven days turnaround time, and I think it was like 750 bucks for seven or eight parts or something. And it's like, okay, but it was like 11 o'clock on a Thursday, and I was like, I'm going to look on the internet. This doesn't feel like the best possible thing.
I found a company, turned out to be in San Francisco. I could upload my CAD file, and in about four minutes I had a full quote, and they're like, we can deliver this to you tomorrow, and the cost is like $21 or something. And I was like, obviously I pushed the buy button, but I actually got back to the guy who was running this business. I'm like, this is what's happening while you're over here running your laser cutter in Milwaukee.
And I think the lesson is a lot of times you take what equipment you have and what you've done, and you sort of price out, okay, here's a job. We need to make a certain amount of money. We'll send you a quote on the back of a piece of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper. In Silicon Valley, somebody's automating your job right out from under you and charging one-tenth the cost and delivering it overnight. If you're not aware of that and paying attention and a little bit scared, then all of a sudden nobody's going to be ordering parts from you anymore, and you won't even know why. So you got to challenge yourself and disrupt yourself and all that kind of thing, I guess I would say.
All right. Excellent story. I knew you'd have some good stories. Nick, I know everyone up here has good stories on this. Nick, I think when you were on the podcast two years ago, we talked about this, but I don't know if the whole audience knows about this. You have some pretty unique B2C experience as well. In addition to starting off in the med space with your entrepreneurial journey, what lessons did you learn from running companies like Loot and Startup Drugz, which was actually where I came across you? It was like startup-centric shirts that you guys got really good at the ad algorithm in Facebook at an early time. So I'd been seeing your work long before I knew you. But my question is, what lessons did you learn from the B2C space that have helped you running MaintainX now?
Yeah, I think the B2B ecosystem gives themselves permission to be just ruthlessly focused on this logical outcome and not about user experience. And when you're building something for B2C, I was building a product that was free, and it couldn't be free enough. We'd get complaints if we had ads. We'd get users that would drop off if it was hard to use. They weren't going to sit and watch a five-second tutorial video on how to, or even instructional on how to use the product. The app had to just make sense, or that user was gone. And so you'd see instant drop-off, and there was no chance to get them back.
And so that really helped refine both the way that I think about it and my current partners in the business, and everyone thinks about treating our software product very similarly. You shouldn't even need to be handheld through the product. It should be really intuitive. If it's not intuitive, you're creating friction. When you create friction, that impacts adoption. And adoption is a metric that is undervalued by so many B2B businesses because they think, well, they need to do this for work. They're going to figure it out. But if you don't have adoption, you don't get the results you're looking for. And so if you treat your B2B customers and your B2B users the same way that you would a B2C user, you're going to find that you're going to get better results.
And so that treatment carries over to how we advertise to them. We were one of the few companies that was advertising to end users in manufacturing on Facebook and Instagram. And I'd have other software companies in the space be like, why are you putting ads on Facebook? That's not where they are. And I'm like, they're humans, too. They're going on Facebook looking at what their kids are up to. And those ads are a lot cheaper than our rate to buy those ads. We're not competing for small consumer margins. So our opportunity there was a lot larger. So we've constantly treated our audience as consumers and with that sort of respect, and that's given us, I think, a major leg up over the way the broader ecosystem treats them.
Makes a ton of sense. Making it super simple. I think we always talk about in our industry, right? We're used to things being easy and intuitive in our day-to-day lives, right? We should be trying to emulate that in our B2B world, in our manufacturing world as well.
Kim, you're up next, and you also have B2C experience, right? You were working with Hasbro. You were leading their growth and their marketing. You led an omnichannel retail company. You were part of an organization that sold to Autodesk. You've led a lot of companies, from what I understand, through inflection points, right, at times when they were going through a bit of a transformation. Based on what you've learned, what advice can you give to folks that are listening to this about leading their own organizations through inflection points?
Wow. I think actually tying it back to what both of you said, those two things resonate with me a lot. I talk a lot about risk and disruption in Silicon Valley. We tend to love it because to us it represents something new and something better. But when you get on a manufacturing floor, the last thing somebody wants is disruption. They want predictability. They want to know exactly what is that throughput going to be at the end of the day. And I think that hurts it a lot of times.
And then I think, as you mentioned the B2B and B2C reference, I think sometimes when we are in deeply technical industries, we don't see complexity, right? So we don't always think that this is way harder than it should be for the average person, and so sometimes we need that person. I tend to claim to be that person a lot of times, the one that's like, wait a minute, why is this so complicated? Because I don't understand how it really should work, but I can tell you how I want it to work.
But I think inflection points are, to me and probably to all of us, really exciting. I think that it creates a situation where I tend to think about it like it's do or die, which is what I love about what I do. It's kind of like driving a car really fast with no guardrails and maybe no safety net. And you just have to kind of make it up as you go. And I think that that's maybe the lesson in leading through inflection points, is there is a lot of opportunity. You just have to be not afraid of making it up as you go. And you kind of look for not necessarily the patterns you've always known, but the outliers and the people who are not afraid to do something different and ask, why is this this way? That can really help you figure it out because there's a lot of opportunity.
Yeah. One thing that resonated there is, especially if I think of
An audience of manufacturers that listen to this podcast later on, not being afraid to make things up as you go. You don't need every little thing figured out. I think that is one of the lessons we can certainly pull from your experience from a region like this.
Florian, my question for you is maybe even the most unique because you have a very unique setup here in Mountain View, California, right? One of the areas along the peninsula between San Jose and San Francisco. InOrbit literally has a storefront location on the main street of Mountain View where you're able to display your technology in more of a B2C setting. How has that helped your business? How do you think other people can learn from that? Because it literally is a place you can walk into during the nine-to-five, right after you get your cup of coffee next door at Philz or something like that.
Yeah. And first of all, Mountain View is the origin of Silicon Valley. It literally started in Mountain View. So it's great to be part of that history. And look, I think we work obviously with manufacturers, but we also work across many industries. And the fun part about robots is they're no longer limited to the production line. You can see robots. Our customers are in hospitals, airports, and retailers as well. So maybe one of our first customers was, I guess, the largest retailer in the world. And so that triggered the idea of how do you use robots in retail?
And when it came time to—so I mentioned at the beginning, we do robot orchestration, and for the longest time people said, "I have no idea what that means." And then we told them, and they're like, "Nope, that doesn't work." And we're like, "Okay, we're going to show them." And the two ways that you can do that are you go to a customer and you say, "Please, please, please, can I bring some other people that want to see your setup?" And that sometimes works, sometimes not. So the other is you get a warehouse in the middle of nowhere and you get a bunch of robots. So we decided neither of those was for us, and we're like, "What if we make this very public?"
It became its own thing. We started small, we grew. It gives us an opportunity to engage with the community around us, both the robotics community—and there's a lot of robotics people in the Bay Area, so we host events all the time—but also the general public, the people who maybe have never seen a robot. Maybe their only experience with robots is, "Oh, I watched this very scary movie where the robots went crazy." And we're like, "Okay, come on in. See the robots." And they're like, "Wait, this is a robot?" And they're like, "Okay, it's a machine." We're like, "Well, that's a whole conversation we can have." So I think it makes it really interesting.
We partner with nonprofits. So last summer, for example, we brought in 40 kids from San Francisco. They took the train, walked over to our space, and we basically gave them a million dollars' worth of robots to play with for two hours. And that's pretty awesome. And I don't think we'd be doing that in a warehouse in the middle of nowhere.
Yeah. So I think some great lessons around building in public a little bit, right? Letting people see what you're doing, debunking myths along the way, showing folks the reality of what's going on. Did you have something you wanted? Yeah, go jump in.
Yeah. And also your investors will tell you not to do it, and you stick to your guns, and sometimes it works out.
Yeah. This is a great panel of folks that, when others are doubting or when other people say, "No, you can't do that," there's something important to that. And Glenn, I know you've got something to add to this.
You can't fool me, Florian. I had a retail space once. It's just cheaper than the warehouse space.
It is. It's cheaper than office space, actually.
Fair point. Fair point. Well, this next question is for all of you. And Kim and Glenn, you've both led off so far. So, Nick, I'm going to have you lead this one off for us. And all of you, you've either lived out here, worked out here for a period of time. Some of you still do. I know some of you have gone, come back, are in other spots. Nick, I think you're outside of the Bay Area right now. Am I making that up?
Nope. Yeah, I'm out in Florida.
Okay. You're in Florida right now.
I'm in a hotel, though.
All right. Well, then I think you're a great person to answer this question because now you can reflect on being on the opposite side of the country right now. What role do you feel the Bay Area is playing in the context of industrial innovation and the next generation of manufacturing technology?
This is the birthplace of all innovation that drives the world around us. If you look at what happened with the cloud revolution, that all originated here. I think we're seeing that same moment happen right now with the AI revolution. The world's leading AI companies are all within 20 miles of us right now, however far. And the world's best researchers there. Are all of their projects and products reaching manufacturers today? No. A lot of that's still being ironed out and figured out, and we're still figuring out what does this brave new world look like.
And if you look at the world's leading robotics engineers and folks, they're all in this ecosystem. There is that permissiveness that this ecosystem offers. And there's a robust concentration of talent here of folks that are willing to try something outside the box. And that ends up infecting people across the world, and for the better generally. And so that's where I think it's really exciting to make sure that you don't lose touch with what's happening here, but also recognize that you've got to touch grass in the flyover states, flyover cities.
So that you know where people are, right?
Yeah. So you got to understand where is the world at today, and then figure out how do we lift them up so that the manufacturing world isn't 20 years behind this next wave. If you think about how long it's taken so many of them to just digitize and get into the cloud, if it takes 16 years for them to take advantage of AI and robotics, the US will not be a leader in those industries, in the manufacturing industry around the world. So that's sort of the challenge I think that comes with this next wave of innovation, is how do we accelerate that and make this a positive impact for the world around us?
Excellent start. And Florian, we're going to go to you next, and then Kim and Glenn, you're going to bat cleanup on this one. And I'm saying that in that order because this is one of those where, as everyone answers, you kind of have to get more creative with your answer. So Glenn, you're really going to need to be pulling from it by the time we get there. But Florian, what role is the Bay Area playing in the next generation of industrial innovation, robotics, technology, et cetera? I've got to say, I go to a lot of events, and this is the longest we've gone without saying the words AI until you did.
There are 17 events every night in San Francisco about AI. We decided to rebrand robotics as physical AI, as everyone has heard. So it's actually really interesting. Obviously there's an insane amount of hype, but hype doesn't mean it's not necessarily real. Some of the progress is really amazing. And I think what we're—short ad—we're at the intersection of agentic AI and physical AI. That's a mouthful, but basically what I think is changing for manufacturing and for many other industries is you're going from—you're doing intent over specification, is what I call it, right?
So before, you needed the beer to be poured at a certain time, you had to program that. And now you can express what you want, maybe what kind of beer you want, and there's magic happening in between. I think that scares a lot of people, right? This non-deterministic aspect of AI. But there are ways to manage that, right? You can use AI to create deterministic behavior, right? So I think we're seeing a lot of things that were created for software and to move pixels on a screen, they're now being used to move atoms in the real world. And I think that's really exciting.
Yeah. And I do take it as a point of pride that we made it 35 minutes before the word AI got mentioned during this, because that is happening a lot right now. But I think it's worth bringing into this conversation. Kim, what would you add to this? What role is the Bay Area playing in the future of industrial innovation and technology?
So I think I have spent a lot of time actually in those flyover states, especially last summer. I spent several months in Indiana where everybody said to me, "Why don't you come here? Why are you building in the Bay Area? Come understand what we're living in." So I think there is this opportunity actually for us to bring the two together, industry and the innovation that comes from Silicon Valley.
And because I think when it all boils down to, time is money, and that is true for everybody in this space. And I think if we better understood where each of those people were coming from, in manufacturing downtime costs jobs, it costs money. In Silicon Valley, burn, it costs jobs, costs money, reputations. And I think there is a lot of similarity there, but I think what Silicon Valley can really bring to manufacturing is this sense of what could be, not what is, but really what could be, and this sense of wonder. And I fail to believe that it can't be possible. With enough time and money and the right minds on it, I'm sure most things are possible. And so I think that's something that I would encourage, or I do encourage, a lot of my customers and the people I work with outside of Silicon Valley to think about.
Yeah. And that's actually going to be kind of how we wrap up our conversation. So you're touching on some things. Well, no, no, no, it's good. That's good. These topics intentionally kind of tie together. So, Glenn, same question for you on this one. The role the Bay Area is playing in the future of automation, industrial technology, et cetera.
I've been pondering this while we all talked, and I guess I would say Silicon Valley is like your weird billionaire little brother. It's like, "You go first, I'm right behind you." People want someone else to take the risk first, and they'll watch for a while, and if it goes well, "I'm right there." If it's not, it's like, "I told you you were going to break your neck, you idiot." And we kind of take pride in that out here. We'll go first. And it helps if you have a couple billion dollars in your back pocket.
But Elon Musk, for all his faults, has disrupted automotive manufacturing fundamentally. When I was at Ford, they're just like, "What is he even doing?" And he didn't know anything about making cars. And that was a strength and a weakness all rolled up into one. So I kind of feel like it's like, "Go ahead, I'm right behind you. I'm watching. Good luck with that." That's what we represent.
Yeah. Well, let's go to Kim's point here, and Florian, you'll lead this one off. I'm curious, how do you keep a pulse on what's going on outside of Silicon Valley as well? Because I actually think this is applicable for a lot of listeners that might work for large companies that maybe spend a little too much time inside the four walls of their headquarters, inside of their factory. Nick, as you said, you got to go touch grass, right?
So I'm curious, what are the things that you're doing to keep a pulse of what's going on outside of this Bay Area bubble that I've lived in before, we've all lived in at different times, most of us are living in right now that are in this audience? What are the things that you're doing to keep a pulse on what's going on in the front line? Because that really ties back to where this conversation started, right? So much of our industry is around mechatronics, what the future of frontline work looks like, right? So what are the things you're doing to touch grass and keep that pulse?
Do you want me to start? So I just got back from a crazy trip. I was visiting a customer's plant in Poland. I've been in Minnesota with minus 10 Fahrenheit. So that's what it takes, right? You have to go where the robots are. We have a unique situation, which is we make software, right? So in theory, you can touch software wherever it is, but you can't relate to people that way. So I think it's really important to go be with the people who are actually doing the work.
One of the challenges is we're global. So we have deployments in four continents and can't be everywhere all the time. But I do try to do that. Events are super important. I know you have a role, Chris, at Automate, which is coming up very soon. That's a great way to connect with people. Everyone descends on Chicago this year, or Detroit, or wherever it might be. But there is a little bit of that kind of bubble mentality if you're just talking to other people who only exist in this universe. So I think it's super valuable to get out and just see the real world.
We're not going to go in any particular order. We're going to go to Glenn next because you did bat cleanup on the last one. So what are the things you're doing? We talked at the start, you were building a company in Milwaukee, right? You were out there living it. What are the things you're doing now to keep that pulse on what's going on outside of this region?
Honestly, just getting out there and doing stuff like this and meeting people. I go to events in San Francisco, robotics meetups, just anything I can connect with people, and you always meet somebody that's doing something you've never heard of. And there's LinkedIn, of course, but that's usually about six months behind what's actually going on. So I don't know. I don't think there's a substitute for throwing yourself out the front door and going to events like this or whatever you can find to do.
I love the emphasis on events because that's what 50% of my business is right now. So thanks for the shout-out, guys. Kim, we'll go to you next, and then Nick, you're going to take us home. This will be the last question for this panel, and then we'll be here hanging out, having beverages a little bit longer. So I know there are a lot of people in this audience that I'm still looking forward to catching up with at the end of the night. So, Kim, what would you add to this? You were just talking about being in Indiana, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
Maybe what's your next step, right? Now that you've been to Indiana, what is next for keeping that pulse and bringing the worlds of Silicon Valley and Middle America together?
Well, I guess for your manufacturing audience, maybe I should tell them to keep an eye out for me on LinkedIn because I do tend to find random people that seem to do interesting jobs and just send them a note and say, "Hey, I'd love to talk, and I just want to understand, what are you looking at? Let me share with you what I'm seeing, and what am I not seeing?" And just get that perspective from people who are running labor teams or people who are managing frontline QA, or just very diverse sort of perspectives. Because they always love to tell me what I'm not thinking about, which is great.
Very fair. Very fair. Nick, you're going to take us home on this one. And by the way, since you brought up LinkedIn, for folks out in the audience, for folks listening to this podcast, over at the show notes page at manufacturinghappyhour.com, you can connect with everyone that was up here from start to finish today. So
Nick, what are your final thoughts? The ways you're keeping a pulse on what's going on, whether that's in Florida, Bay Area, or somewhere in between.
Yeah. You've got to go to the floor. You got to go to the plant floor. You got to go talk to the folks, especially the folks that aren't using your systems, especially the folks that aren't adopting these technologies. Really understand what is it that creates that friction? Is it psychological? Is it intimidation? Is there an actual learning curve that you're missing?
Because you can easily become jaded by the early adopters of your products or your systems or your tools into thinking, I've got something that works. But you may have something that kind of works, and these people were just so excited about the potential that they paddled through the friction to get there.
And this advice is something I think is just as useful for an entrepreneur or someone building a business for these folks as it is for leaders in manufacturing. There are so many folks who graduated from the front lines five, ten years earlier in their career, and they don't actually go back and shadow and see what are the processes that my team's still doing. They thought they solved problems that are still existing ten years later, and they've got some new crazy spreadsheet matrix that they're using to solve it that takes up all of their time. And they forget how many wasted man-hours there are going towards things that are wildly inefficient.
So there's nothing you can get better than non-selectively going to the front lines. Don't cherry-pick the folks that are doing the thing that excites you the most.
Awesome. As we wrap up here, give it up for Florian, Nick, Glenn, and Kim. Give it up for Adam and Kevin and Vinod, who kicked off our show tonight. Give it up for Sumitomo Drive Technologies and MaintainX for sponsoring this event, this tour. Give it up for Chris for hosting.
Thank you.
Thank you, Nick. Thank you to all of you. And give it up for yourselves because these events, as these guys highlighted up on stage, it's all about getting out there, making connections in your industry. That's what helps us drive all our businesses forward.
Shout out to Hapa's as well for hosting us. I actually recorded a podcast here back in 2017 when I was running a beer podcast where I would drink beers with folks that were doing interesting things. I interviewed a group called Downward Drinking Dog that had this really innovative idea of combining beer and yoga. It was a lot of fun. I got history here, too.
But hey, thank you, everyone. We're going to wrap this the way we do all of our episodes with our tagline: stay innovative, stay thirsty. Keep hanging out. We're going to be here till 8:00 tonight. We'll see you soon. Cheers, everyone.
Great.
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