304: How to Build a Manufacturing Company from First Principles with Supersede CEO Sean Petterson

0:00Folks on the floor working in the RV world are some of the hardest working people I've ever seen. And they move so fast. A lot of them are building on average 12 units before lunch, right? And so this is effectively building a house inside a couple of hours. Welcome to Manufacturing Happy Hour, the podcast where we get real about the latest trends and technologies impacting modern manufacturers.

0:31each week we interview industry experts that are at the top of their craft and give you the tools tactics and strategies you need to take your career and your business to the next level and now your host chris lukey what's up folks it's episode 304 and today we are speaking with Sean Pedersen, CEO and founder of SuperSeed. SuperSeed makes lightweight, waterproof plywood alternatives. We'll get into what that means in just a second, but this episode covers a whole lot more than that. We talk about capital efficiency in manufacturing. We talk about scaling in the U.S. We discuss co-founder stories, all that and more in today's episode.

1:21So let's meet up with Sean.

1:31all right sean welcome to manufacturing happy hour we're talking about super seed marine board and before we get into what you're building how you're growing i have to ask if we were having this over a drink where would that be paint the picture for us oh i would be in a dirty dive bar that's that's yes he was in the goldfinger yeah yeah so for those uh for those of you not watching the video today and listening on audio i know that's most of you i am wearing a goldfinger t-shirt some classic 90s uh and current california skate punk so dive bar listening to goldfinger sounds like a great spot for this conversation perfect uh what uh so in that case So we're hanging out in a dive bar.

2:21We got some good pop punk tunes in the background. How do you talk about SuperSeed in a setting like that in a candid fashion? Yeah, sure. So SuperSeed is a buildings manufacturing company with a huge focus on material science, which means that we're able to formulate really interesting high performance products. And it just so happens to be made out of recycled materials. So they're really good for the environment. But what we really promote to our customers is just better performing materials. Our first products are structural sheathing, so replacing marine plywood, but also your standard OSBs and plywoods as well in the building industry, which is a massive market, particularly here in the US.

3:01And because we're an innovative company focused on material science, as well as the manufacturing processes, we develop a lot of really cool building materials that we'll be bringing to market over the next several months. Yeah, I'm excited to talk about what's going on right now, where you see the company going over the next, you know, five, 10 years. But before we get there, let's go back in time. Did I hear correctly that SuperSeed started when you were in college? Is that correct? No, not exactly. But all the co-founders met in college. And so we started companies together and helped each other out over the years.

3:39And so three co-founders, we all went to RIT up in Rochester, New York, and we've been friends making head ever since. Nice. What were some of those early companies you were venturing into? If you can share some of that background, because we know you're doing SuperSeed today, but it didn't necessarily start with what you're doing today. Yeah, all over the map. So I think there's some not worth talking about. And there's some that are. So myself, having grown up working construction, my father passed away on the job. So I started a company that helped prevent injuries on job sites. And so I made extra skeletons, sold those for a while.

4:22Those had a number of applications, then manufactured wearable sensors to help prevent injuries. And then co-founder Jordan started a company that manufactured jet skis. and those are made out of a polymer. So the first polymer jeskies, which has become pretty commonplace today. And so a lot of those factors blend into kind of an obvious blend here, which is for making building materials out of polymers. Yeah. Why is material science so in vogue right now? It seems you're not the first manufacturer that I've spoken with recently that highlighted, It's like, hey, we're doing a lot of manufacturing that's so focused on material science.

5:08Like, are you are you encountering more companies that are, you know, really focused on, you know, just get the materials that they're building with right now? I'd be very curious to get your general take on that. the general take is that i've been in manufacturing my entire career um and it in a big portion of that is how do we reshore manufacturing how do we bring back the american dream and it is just starting to feel like that's happening right 15 years into it and it feels Great. And I think what it offers is sort of a clean slate, which means that obviously with leveraging AI, being able to bring some outsized talent that you couldn't have just as we're vertically integrating our compounding and extrusion process.

6:04We've got to vertically integrate a lot of the talents that would have been disparate. And it's also out of a business need. So it still is expensive here to manufacture. And there's a lot of tailwinds that are making that beneficial, but you've really got to start from the ground up. And so I think a big piece of that is inherently just working with first principles and how do you reverse engineer your way into a product? And you really have to start all the way down to the molecules as well as you do to the final end of the QA process. And so that I think is permeating everywhere. It's just that one, there's better access to technology too.

6:40Two, we're starting from the ground up. And three, got to be competitive. And you have to move fast. And so by incorporating that material science aspect and not just us, but in anyone, it just allows you to move at a pace that is required, frankly. Yeah, one thing I would definitely ask you over a PBR at a dive bar is something you mentioned right at the start. And we like to do acronym checks on this show where appropriate. But you highlighted OSB. I think that would be worth defining, given that's a huge part of your product. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Orient Strand Board, it's the usually less expensive plywood that is made with a bunch of glue smushed together to create that particle board looking product that you see on pretty much every construction site around the country.

7:35Yeah, and you're building this. correct me if I'm wrong, your first factory is in Phoenix. And as this episode comes out, you've just opened your second facility, correct? Can you kind of give us a bit of the lay of the land there? Yeah, absolutely. So the goal here is 10 plants in five years. And our goal to do that is deploying really CapEx efficient plants, doing everything I can to avoid using the term micro plant. But that is the path we're going down. And the real rationale behind that is obviously CapEx is a massive component of the business, de-risking that by putting it in other areas of manufacturing, help kind of de-lever the balance sheet and make it a little bit easier for us to ease into production as we expand into markets.

8:26But it also localizes our distribution. And And there's a massive trend in the market today of kind of removing two-step distribution from the process and just getting closer to the customer. And that all benefits us because we're buying recycled polymers. And so locating these near those sources reduces carbon footprint, but most importantly, reduces our costs. So you're not doubling up on transportation, keep COGS feedstock low. So all those things kind of mixed together indicate that, you know, we should be building, looking at this as a plant building business, just as much as a product building business.

9:04And so as we go down that path, we're just sticking to our goals. And so we have our first plant in Phoenix, that was sort of the beta showing how this can be done, but also how this can be done most efficiently. So we run our lines in pairs, meaning that they're kind of mirrored in the middle. So you can have as minimal operator foot traffic as possible and keep them as efficient as you can. And now we're expanding that. So we've got a new facility going up in Bristol, Indiana, which is located right near 80 % of where all of the RVs are manufactured. And so that's a huge market for us. And we'll be able to service that now.

9:44And it's just demonstrating what our kind of go-to-market strategy is, you know, locate it near the customer, be a good vendor, be responsive and build up volume where the market needs it. Yeah, and it's interesting. I remember when we were having our conversation beforehand, I had in my notes that you were 5x as capital efficient as a lumber plant, and you said 10x during this conversation. So again, go over that really quickly, the few key reasons that you can be that much more capital efficient. I know it's the recycled materials, part of it's the location. If you can just recap a couple of the others, I want to make sure our audience picks up that piece of the puzzle.

10:26Yeah. Starting with just the logistics of the supply chain itself for lumber, right? You've got to have logging equipment. Then you've got to have milling equipment. You've got to cut down those logs into a transportable format. Then you've got to transport them. And in most operations, depending if it's plywood or OSB, you have to let them dry or soak. So you might have to have a huge, huge acreage just to let effectively logs cure in some way, shape, or form. And then you need big machinery to move locks. And then those got to go into other big machinery. And this isn't equipment that you could lever from a third-party vendor, right?

11:03These are all custom one-off jobs. And they're built at massive scale because that's where, one, the economics work for that type of manufacturing. but two it is just the sheer scale of the raw material input so by shrinking the raw material input by using a raw material that requires less steps to get it into the point of production and then by vertically integrating that production which is for us the compounding operation you come up with a really efficient model where you're now feeding your compounding right into your extrusion in basically you have raw plastic that's recycled, comes in on one end of the factory, goes through compounding, spins 180 degrees, and then gets extruded and a finished product comes out the other side.

11:50So you're just significantly reducing the infrastructure required to process effectively your raws. But then also by doing some really good engineering, you're able to get higher output out of that, out of those machines that are producing the product. So all those things combined net you into a really highly efficient operation on a very small footprint. Now, combine that with the ability to just generally increase rate, run these things 24-7, reduce the amount of direct variable labor that's required, and then also reduce the startup costs because these aren't custom massive facilities that have to be built over the course of a year or two.

12:34you know we can stand these plants up really quickly and so I think that that is part and parcel to what that capex efficiency looks like the third component of that is you know these the the lumber plants take typically several years to get going because just sheer scale and then you're you're inviting all different forms of financing that have to come into and that project finance bit adds further fees and so these things start to to compound into a fairly big bill. These are just two different business models. For us, having a distributed manufacturing footprint adds to boot, which is, again, why we can be nimble.

13:17Simplifying the supply chain, simplifying the materials, simplifying the build-out process, it all makes a lot of sense. I'd be curious. I do have a question around advice you'd give to other manufacturers, right? Because we have a lot of folks that listen to this show. Some work in machine shops. Some work for automation companies. Some work for end users. I'd be curious. You know, obviously, this isn't going to be a one-to-one situation. But what advice would you give to fellow manufacturers out there that want to be like more capital efficient of a scale you're talking about? Right. Not just like, you know, slightly more capital efficient, but like magnitudes of difference in capital efficiency.

14:03And you mentioned it earlier. It's about going back to first principles a little bit, but I'd love to hear you kind of package that into some pragmatic advice for the audience. is back to the first principles piece, which is every aspect of our CapEx is driven by margin expansion. And margin expansion for us is driven by cost down. And the more pieces of the puzzle that you can control are going to drive the cost down. And then the larger margin expansion you have, the more effective capital that you can take in and put into the business. And so if you can, you have to look at it in those spectrum and that spectrum, which is on the long run, where do you want to be?

14:47You know, what is the market? What does it look like where you want to have your wildest dreams to go and accomplish? And then working backwards on the front end, you know, what is the value proposition that you can drive into justifying that CapEx? and then it just is about having a operation that can then make one plus one equal three, right? And so for us consolidating those factors, you need to look a little bit outside of the envelope of just, you know, what it would cost me if I had this machine with these operators, this overhead and these inputs and this electricity bill, et cetera. You have to look at it from a perspective of, well, if these two machines are located right next to each other, we've just reduce the purchasing person that's required to manage that end of the supply chain.

15:33We just reduce the need for us to have excess warehousing operations to put raws in somewhere that were, you know, closer to finished product. And then we were able to also just generally make our operations more efficient because we know exactly what the general constraints could be feedstock. We know exactly what the feedstock schedule is. So everything just becomes more efficient. And then you translate all that into what your EBITDA margins look like. And that's a way to make the business case. So I think it's really, it's just, again, first principles and, you know, having some financial acumen to really make that make sense.

16:12But it really does start with how do we, how do we service a market? How do we look at this from a market share perspective? And, you know, just having the, having the, you know, kind of the vision to go and tackle that. We'll be back in a moment, but first, a quick word from our sponsor.

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17:55Sean, in a world, I should say specifically a manufacturing world that often thinks about a big win as a 5 % quality improvement, for example, you're thinking about much different numbers and much different impact here. What experiences or, you know, just what about your background has allowed you to think differently about manufacturing, to think more in the context of first principles? So the nature, I think high level nature of just being in startup land for a long time and, and, and, and also being able to have kind of the industry experience on the outside, just compare the two. It's really comforting, honestly, to see the variance between a, you know, four or$500 million top line company and a brand new company.

18:53And to see the inefficiencies that lie between the two. And a big contributor to those inefficiencies is frankly, just legacy that gets embedded. And I know you talk a lot about AI on the show, and I don't need to make everyone fall asleep with my take on it. But what is pertinent is It's just the example of how some just haven't adopted it yet, right? It's been a viable thing that anyone can use for, I mean, sure, about 12 months. But if you hadn't got on that bus 12 months ago, you're a decade behind, right? And so seeing how there are, again, being able to start sort of from scratch means that we can build things up again from the base.

19:41Back to, it sounds like a broken record here, but back to first principles. And so in my experience, the ability to just see where those inefficiencies are and capitalize on them and then making sure that we're building from the ground up, which is, again, the benefit of a startup is that you get to start from a clean palette. You get to learn from the mistakes that have existed in the industry. And you also get to set the tone for the company so that in 10 years from now, it one doesn't make those mistakes when legacy creeps in, but also that you can just constantly build an infrastructure that stays ahead.

20:15So with all that kind of on the very high level, on the tactical level, it is effectively being able to leverage software in a process where you're looking at the software development cycles are obviously much faster than hardware. And so I've had the benefit of being on both sides of those fence, both on understanding constraints of manufacturing, understanding constraints of software, and then being in an environment where we're not necessarily contract manufacturing as I've done in the past, but knowing that there are, again, constraints with that. We're now building software that directly is affecting on a real-time basis the output of our manufacturing line.

20:58And that is just a really exciting place to be. So my experience is, and that's where I think I get the most excitement out of it, is being able to lever things from other industries, other practices, and other development processes that we can then bring in. And so in manufacturing, things can move slow. And we just have the unique benefit of making sure that we're investing effectively, but very efficiently and cautiously, but in R &D that enables us to get ahead. And so having a kind of sprint cycles as you would in software development or wearables development, for example, and being able to apply that to manufacturing just means that we're operating at a different speed.

21:39And so that's, you know, that's what gets me going. yeah i'll have a question around ai in a second but i think one thing we talked about it a little bit right at the very start but when you're what are the key applications where your product is being used and then where where do you expect it to be used in the future as well like just paint the picture of some of the spots where people listening to this would encounter what you're making in everyday life. Yeah. So anything that's made out of wood, eventually we want to make it out of super seed materials. It's simple as that, you know, that's where we want to get to.

22:18But when you look at sort of the more ubiquitous products that you'll see on a construction site, for example, there's some, there's some big, big, big companies that we're going up to bat with. Right. And we have a competitive message, right? We're like, there's so much recycled plastic. We barely touch 9 % of it here in the United States. There's a huge resource for people to turn that into a viable, but also higher performing product than what the status quo is. And that's kind of a contentious message, right? There's been so much built into the zeitgeist of sustainable forestry and things that are, you know, justifying the proliferation of these materials and in our, you know, in our own building.

23:05but at the end of the day you know we know that we're fighting a pretty big battle so we wanted to start in a market where the competitive set or the incumbent materials that we're displacing is fairly more nuanced a little more disparate in terms of you know the size and that is because of specialization when there is specialization it means that there's one higher top line priced products, which means that there's always room to compete on price. But there's also a lot of flexibility in that. And two, an area where we can provide a really, really strong value proposition, right? So a hungry market with a dollar to spend, to put it real simple.

23:49So for us, that was the marine world, which is why we labeled our first product, the marine board. And we started in the boating industry. And the reason for that was wood rots and boats get wet. So let's put a better material like real simple uh launched that in november 2024 was really successful got a lot of traction um and that was in the oem space huge crossover in that industry to rv we got quickly pulled into the rv industry and that is also the same the beautiful proxy about uh rv and the next stage of growth of our business which is construction is that rvs are homes that just have to go 60 miles an hour.

24:29So they're going through thermal cycles or going through all sorts of, all the elements. They're shaking and rattling. They're being tested for everything that we're creating, which is you got to have a structural product first. You got to have a product that is truly waterproof and you have a product that has a value proposition that resonates beyond just the OEM. How does this value prop translate to their customer, which is the distributors and the dealers. And then their customers, again, you're selling to an end product, which is your average consumer. So working backwards, you have a consumer, some of them love the environmental story and also the fact that this isn't made with formaldehydes and CCEs that are going your living quarters, right?

25:10No one wants to sleep on top of a formaldehyde laden bed if they knew it was in there. It's not great. They also don't want to buy an RV that was made from exotic hardwoods that came from illegally forested products, right? Like there's a whole list of marine plywood alternatives that are just being blocked out of the market because folks are realizing, you know, how detrimental that is and what that supply chain looks like. Then you go, um, onto the, the, the dealer side, we're providing better warranties, right? If there's a leak in an RV, all water makes its way to the ground at some point, right?

25:47It's going to go to the ground floor. It's going to go into the floors. And if it was wooded, you get soft floors. And when you get a soft floor, you get a rotted floor. No one's going to buy that unit. And now you have a warranty claim. And now you got to, in an RV, you have to build the whole thing again from the chassis up. And so that's a hugely expensive impact. And then now going to OEMs, which is we're providing all the benefit to the ring customer, a clear value proposition there, but then it has to work. And so the, again, the proxies of the RV industry to housing where we're going is exciting because there's not going to be a tougher environment than those manufacturing plants.

26:22I mean, those are some of the folks on the floor working in the RV world are some of the hardest working people I've ever seen. And they move so fast. And a lot of them are building a quota of, you know, on average, 12 units before lunch, right? And so this is effectively building a house inside of a couple of hours. And it's really impressive, but it also means your materials have to perform, right? They have to perform and it means that it doesn't slow down production. It's easy to work with. It works with common tools and can be a real drop-in replacement. So mixing all those things together has just really enforced our value prop.

27:01It also provided a nice revenue base for us to be confident to start to now invest in our growth. And so our growth is back to where we started is we, we would like to be everywhere. And that's the kind of big hairy audacious goal, um, where that permeates more, uh, immediately is going to be in residential housing, um, then commercial housing and commercial construction. And so we're entering those markets with our, you know, with our, with our panels as they are today, but then we're also developing a lot of things that demonstrate the flexibility and unique attributes we built into our manufacturing process.

27:40So we're really proud of a lot of the patents that we built because they enable us to enter new markets with new features really quickly. And it's a quick iteration cycle in testing markets. So that's going to allow us, it's really going to expand our product portfolio and just increase adoption. So I want to ask you about artificial intelligence as well, because I don't feel like we hear it enough from folks on the front line that are building things, how it's impacting your productivity, design times, all the above. And one of the things that stuck out in your last answer was, you know, your first plant was up and running late 2024.

28:19Did I hear that correctly? Yeah, like that's only two years before the recording of this interview, right? So that's practically no time at all. You've just opened a second facility. So I'm very curious to hear what would be one of your pragmatic examples that you're able to share around how artificial intelligence has allowed you to go at, let's be honest, a lightning speed in your operation? Yeah, it's a great question. And it is not to be redundant, right, but back to first principles back to how are we going to punch above our weight as a, you know, a lean team in a, you know, with a fledgling startup, you know, what is what is everything that we can do.

29:05And so what that means is just exploring where it's going to be time at where it's going to be additive. And that really turns out to be a great deal of the aspects of our business. So first and foremost, tool design. Tool design is really long and can sometimes take a team of half a dozen folks to get right. We're able to do it with one person and some help with AI. And so that informed being able to run flow analysis, being able to run analysis on the end product in terms of what type of being able to form those tools for the end goal of span ratings, impact ratings, weight, and cost. And so being able to take material cards in real time out of the mold or the tool while it's being built just rapidly accelerates the process and eliminates huge pieces of the steps.

30:11That was kind of step one of just, you know, early kind of app layer embedded AI stuff that was levered. And then as we, as Tool got better, as our needs got stronger and we went to the go-to market, it became important to have an ERP. ERP is sort of the next thing, right? And ERPs are tough. Everyone knows that. No one likes onboarding a new one. we had tested a pretty large breadth of the market from the really expensive enterprise level stuff to the startups and we looked at everything in between and nothing just quite fit and the development time to create our own was equal to the onboarding time of using a third party ERP and so we took this tact of saying we need to scale this operation We're doing a lot of new and unique things.

31:07There's not a good library of resources on exactly what we need to run efficiently. So how do we build this without any software developers on the team? And so luckily with a lot of the tools that we have and I was able to kind of piece together the first iteration of it, but then to really design it for what the team needs, we need to get it into the hands of production. And luckily now there's enough tools where we can have a really a user driven design process. So we're kind of taking the product management function out of that. And so what would be a team of 10 we're doing by just dispersing the needs into effectively things like Slack channels, where we can back channel things into Slack, have that go up into Jira, have that fall down to a GitHub repo and have this iterative cycle where the team is truly designing.

32:02the NERP that is required for them. And so that is a huge light bulb moment for us and just being able to see how we can collaboratively build tools that are really necessary for this level of operation. There's not a single operation that we can name that is doing the compounding and the extruding and the material science all in one place. And so now we're saying, where can we lever that? So we're driving that into our material selection. We're driving that into our sourcing. We're driving that into the way that we actually bench validate formulations. And so it's all in the name of compressing time and frankly, just reducing the amount of people that need to have input on that.

32:43And so by flatlining that, driving the input, we're reducing meetings, we're reducing, you know, just general overhead and just increasing the process. So for us, all of that has been key for kind of the backend of production. Now on the front end, it's easier than ever to embed machine vision it's easier than ever to make really unique tools that work for you there are some incredibly expensive QA machines that can be custom built but again they just it's less about cost it's more about time and you know we need to stand these plants up quick we can't be relying on a third-party vendor to create tools for end-of-line QA and so we're able to embed that on our line and so that's a combination of you know machine vision, a little bit of LIDAR, but then how do you interpret all that into basically driving that and marrying it with PLC codes that you can have everything on time series and doing that just creates basically the first steps of true automation.

33:43And so that's the pathway that we'll continue to push on with AI. Those are a few incredible examples of how you're leveraging AI. I mean, and it also ties back to your capital efficiency at the end of the day. If you're leveraging it to, I mean, one of the words that stuck out was a user driven design for your in-house ERP. Your first example was how it's accelerating tool design. Then you started talking about vision and how it's helping with automation. Like those are three very great concrete examples that I hope the audience out there is taking notes on and thinking about how am I going to apply that to my own operation as well.

34:21But a few incredible answers there. next round of our interviews coming up right after a word from our sponsor

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35:43You know, we are getting to the end of our conversation, so I do want to put it back in perspective, right? You have two facilities now. I mean, what is what you're just accelerating how fast you go? How long do you see it taking to build the next facility and the next facility? Like, what is the system, the process you've kind of built to get these off the ground by going back to first principles, by leveraging artificial intelligence in the right spots and by simplifying your supply chain? Yeah. So I think we've, we've, we kind of made the recipe for, for what would be a successful business model.

36:24We've now deployed that. And now it's a matter of acting on it with the, with effectively the market, right? So the market becomes the driver for the speed. We started this, you know, sheet of paper business plan with the intent of, okay, we need to scale. We're going to scale based on sales cycle. And so being indicative of sales cycle, we need to step back on our timeline to stand up a plant. We were fairly accurate in what it would take us to stand up a plant. And then we need to say, okay, the best indicator for that plant, again, being CabX efficient is that in that vein, you need to have that product sold before you start investing in it, right?

37:11Effectively, you need to have as much confidence as you can that that product line, that production line is going to be making sell the product out of a date. And so balancing that now, we said, all right, let's go. Once we have basically 50 % of pipeline coverage for the capacity of that plant, let's start building the next one. And we are very fortunate to have such a strong market pull right now that that was way too conservative, right? We should have started this at like 5 % because at the rate, because right now we're lucky to be able to launch the second plant. And that'll be news by the time this comes out.

37:59But we were 300 % over capacity in terms of sales orders back to our, our, our, our order. So we've already justified plant three. And so we'll start working on that. Um, um, in, in pretty short order, we just want to make sure we can actually expand our second plant further. So we want a little bigger on this plant. Our typical plant footprint, um, usually is, is modeled around having eight, eight production lines effectively. We're going a little bit bigger. And so this plant is going to be a hundred thousand square feet or it is a hundred thousand square feet. And so that'll have a couple more lines in there.

38:40So we're going to work on that. Also going to work on driving more innovation out of the Phoenix plant. So it's a little bit more of an RD facility to still be producing product, but enabling us to have sort of a standalone line that we can drive more automation on allows us to just increase throughput, increase gross margin and create new products out of as well. It's going to allow us to be a little more nimble. And then so effectively, it's just for us, it's how do we start that third plant with all the lessons learned from the scale up, right? We went from beta to a bona fide plant and now we want to make sure we nailed it.

39:21And then once that's in, the plants are CapEx efficient enough that they can start to replicate themselves basically every year in terms of earnings. And that is our immediate strategy to scale. So it is really, at the end of the day, our risk tolerance because we've justified the pipeline coverage. We've justified the ability for us to stand these up. And it's just a matter of kind of biting the bullet and going for it. And so that's what we're gearing up for. And I'm really excited to get that deployed. Yeah, I mean, we are in a fascinating time of building companies, but also manufacturing companies specifically, where we have so many tools at our disposal now that the ultimate question is really about product market fit.

40:16Now, if you can leverage AI and you can build quickly and, you know, when you've hit capacity and when you need to expand and you're reading the market, right? I mean, that's really what it's becoming all about. It's allowing more focus there and less focus on spending years coding and getting the minimal viable product out. Not only can you get the MVP out faster, but you can get the actual product built much quicker as well. At least that's the way I see it from conversations like this. A hundred percent. And you can, you just have a, you know, the ability to drive so much data to know exactly what are the barriers to entry, which greatly informs our product cycles.

40:57So, you know, we, we do everything from, we build scrapers that understand what current pricing is. And so lumber particularly, but most commodities that are in the building materials market fluctuates so heavily, particularly right now, it's just the state of global economic affairs. And that allowing us to inform that in our development process is just saying, hey, maybe we can add this extra feature to this, or maybe we need to dial back this feature. And this is just a cost perspective is how this market's facing. But it just opens up so many different opportunities. And the more visibility we have into those, the less de-risk that go-to-market is.

41:35And so it's the way we look at it is effectively, you said it really well, it's having a new go-to-market for each planet. And the reason for that is you're focusing on the other attributes that you bring to the table, which is being a better customer, being able to focus on price, being able to focus on economics, but also being able to focus on and just like what we're doing in Indiana right now is what what is that local market look like? And how do you kind of put a flag in the ground and say that we're here to not just sell your product, we're here to service. And we are uniquely positioned to do so because of our manufacturing capabilities and how nimble we are and how quickly we can move into R &D.

42:15So those are the soft benefits that really create good relationships with the customer, but also really de-risk our scaling plans. so Sean my last question for you then and I think we brought this up like right at the start of the conversation but like building and manufacturing in the U.S. how does it make you feel that you've been able to build a company that is not only able to build here but able to you know rapidly scale here as well just how does that make you feel that's that's my last question for today's conversation is the word justified too much hey i know go go for justified is totally fair i love hearing that but you gotta explain it a bit more yeah it's a big facetious but uh like i said i've been a huge proponent of this uh of you know reshoring and american manufacturing since i started um you know in college making products and in product design and a lot of groups there's a lot of talks in the early years.

43:27It really started for a long time to feel like it wasn't going anywhere. And it just seems like there is, one, there's a lot of tailwinds right now, just generally. I mean, honestly, tariffs can make certain capex an issue, but it really makes us competitive on a price point, which is driving those things. The state of the economy creating such huge fluctuations in the cost of goods is also driving us. There's a lot of factors that have made it possible but i think that there is just so much more of an appetite um and whether that is looking at it from homeland security standpoint whether looking for product standpoint but at the end of the day it's just a quality standpoint right and so to see a better drive and now american products having frankly um a better stamp of quality which is honestly what we lost.

44:21I think we lost that battle overseas for the last several decades as we watched things dwindle. But to see, I think that piece of it come back to the top where American made products are again, rising to the top of quality because of all the others doing these things that we're talking about, vertically integrating, bringing the material science, and also just leveraging AI to create more nimble production facilities. So for me, it just, it feels great because because it's like kind of happening, right? It's just been, we've been at this for a long time. And it, and it feels like we have a real, a real tiger by the tail opportunity.

45:06And it's, and it's not just because of all the tailwinds and generally manufacturing, but it's because we're going after a commoditized product. We're going after a multi tens of billions of dollars market that is absolutely mission critical to how we build and to how our economy runs. I mean, right now, so like, let's just talk about OSB and plywood. 94 % of the homes in the United States are still built that way. They're still built with those products. That is a huge thing to say that we can just be a meaningful piece of that. will genuinely change the way people perceive materials and also domestic manufacturing.

45:51Yeah. Well, Sean, it's awesome to see your bets paying off. I think our theoretical PBRs at the dive bar are getting to the bottom of their glasses. The final notes of Goldfinger's cover of 99 Red Balloons are being hit right now. So as our conversation, I thought I'd bring it back to where it started. So as our conversation comes to an end today, Sean, I just want to thank you for being on Manufacturing Happy Hour. Same here. Thank you so much for having me. It's a good chat with you. Cheers.

46:28Hey, folks. Thank you for listening. If you want to connect with Sean, check out the show notes page at ManufacturingHappyHour.com. There, of course, you can learn more about SuperSeed. I also want to thank our sponsors for today's episode and all the sponsors that make this show possible. Hey, Manufacturing Happy Hour, we are always throwing events. If you'd like to catch us on tour, we'll go to ManufacturingHappyHour.com slash tour to find out where we are. As of this episode, we have been touring the U.S. for our 10-year anniversary, and that is not going to stop anytime soon. We'll be doing that all the way into 2027 and beyond.

47:09With all of that, stay innovative, stay thirsty. Make sure you're subscribed to Manufacturing Happy Hour wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll catch you next week. Cheers. Thanks for listening to Manufacturing Happy Hour. Powered by the Industrial Network.