#30 - Kenneth Cassel, Founder of RMFG

0:00The day we got the laser was probably, I would say it was the highest stress day of the entire startup journey so far. Basically our only option was just to buy the equipment out. The rigger shows up and he looks extremely invisibly stressed, throwing papers on the floor. He's very angry and I'm like, oh, our laser's not going to fail. You actually do have a family and so you have like 300k, then you spend 200k on this laser. We had bet the farm on getting this laser. It was very stressful. This is Kenneth Castle and he is building an autonomous metal fabrication company here in Fort Worth, Texas.

0:34Yeah, not Dallas. not not Dallas Texas not Dallas Texas we need to be careful on that yeah um so I'd like to start this off with you basically didn't initially think that this was I think going to be the company that you were going to build um and I think early last year right uh you decide with like three hundred thousand dollars or something left in your bank account uh to pivot into this yeah and with like two hundred thousand dollars you know you buy this like massive laser and you're kind of like betting the farm on this yeah um what was that like pivot like yeah i mean that was actually probably like our third or fourth pivot so there's like a long backstory do you want to tell do you want to start at the beginning i think like the story is like more more coherent if we start with like the thing initially before yeah let's do that um and then we can get into like the backstory but um yeah essentially we were working on this robotic startup and the the bet was that you know the software for controlling robots was getting a lot better, right?

1:30And so there was a handful of papers that I saw probably late 2022, late 2023 kind of era, and it was just getting a lot easier to control robots, right? So the SACAN paper came out. It was this kind of like LLM control robotic thing. There was a lot more kind of improvements on the vision side for controlling robots, and we thought there was some opportunity there, right? And so we basically were building software for off-the-shelf robot arms, and we were trying to rent them out to manufacturers. And so we spent roughly a year working on software in this space. And we built some really cool software where you could do kind of like text-directed, pick-and-place.

2:11And the idea was the major cost of the robotic systems isn't necessarily in the robot hardware itself. It's in the integration, right? so most robots today are position controlled right so you need like a very repeatable process the robot needs to you know pick from the exact same location every time and there's only like you know some subset of there's not a whole lot of intelligence in it no it's absolutely no intelligence right it's just like go to this exact spot then move or whatever so we were building a vision-based robotic control and we were trying to rent it out to manufacturers and it just felt like an uphill battle right and we just weren't getting much traction do you remember what those like early conversations were like well one it's really hard and now being a manufacturer like I get it it's really hard to get in front of manufacturers and for them to take you seriously they're just like absolutely bombarded with people trying to offer them stuff like all the time right and so you know we spent some time talking a handful of manufacturers and we actually didn't get super deep into it like we got we talked to a handful of people.

3:14And basically, really early on, I could tell like, this is not the direction I want to go, right? And I started talking to other robotics founders, and especially people who had started off like in this kind of robots as a service kind of kind of vertical and then switching to like providing them the service themselves, right? So I talked to a handful of people like that. And I was like, really a big believer in that because like, necessarily, like the person using robots going to get more value out of it than the person renting it right so um we decided like maybe we should just try to find something to do with robots and uh particularly interested in manufacturing right and so like that that was kind of like the the the focus the whole time was like can we help us-based manufacturers um and so we started talking to like hardware engineers and really like the move particularly into like metal fabrication kind of came from like one like key encounter a buddy of mine was a robotics founder and he had left his company and was like working on some random stuff and he ended up getting into the side project where he was like making these like industrial sheet metal mailboxes and like selling them on etsy and uh you know we were like lots of money there were three grand a piece three grand yeah yeah and uh he was like uh he's selling a whole bunch of them but he was turning off his etsy store like halfway through the month every every month and then like one week into the month so because he couldn't keep up and the part that he couldn't keep up with was on the fabrication side like actually doing the welding assembly it was pretty easy for him to get like the individual components but actually like getting someone to build the thing for him uh was just very difficult and so he was like losing out on like tens of thousands of dollars a month because he couldn't find someone to take him seriously right like the big fab shops they wanted him to place a big order and and then he's like left with like you know some dude in his garage that can weld there whatever someone he finds off facebook marketplace and so um so it was like super fragmented and like sporadic and yeah and we so first we were like we didn't have any customers we'd be building a software we were like completely lost and uh we were like hey like maybe we can like weld some stuff up with some robots for a year or whatever and so he actually moved into his property um like the december preceding us launching so two years ago uh two december's ago and was that like his garage or it was like a detached garage right very dirty dusty it was like a small like rickety quarter like 10 by 10 square feet of area and uh yeah we started uh you know hacking on some like robotic welding demos and stuff and uh then we decided like after hacking on that for a while we were like okay maybe it's like getting a robot to weld it is not the thing necessarily it's more like can i just find someone that'll do this it doesn't really matter if it's like a human or a robot or whatever um and so we started talking to hardware engineers and we basically found a lot of people had the same problem right like it's pretty easy get individual components when you need something actually fabricated assembled welded together lead times and everything like really kind of like go crazy and so we decided we were gonna what was that prior to you guys being a thing progress was being a thing yeah so I mean you might get your you know individual components from like a number of like online suppliers or whatever and then take them to like a local fabricator or you might just go straight to a local fabricator but you know usually it's the same kind of story right like they have like labor challenges it's hard for them to keep up the lead times are really long etc and so um yeah we we decided okay well we need to start cutting metal right and uh at the time we were in a small we had a small office and then we had james's spot which was like in his little garage um and uh yeah yeah like his garage was like very remote there's like deer walking outside and stuff and so it was like it was like a shack i guess just the middle of the wilderness kind of thing yeah it's like out near like uh near the lake and um so we started looking for commercial property and we were like okay we need to buy a fiber laser or a plasma cutter or something and uh we need to move into a building and we need to actually start starting start cutting and like get some customers yeah and we knew like we didn't have enough money to keep doing like they're trying to do robotics service thing because like even if we could get a customer it's not like it was going to cover any meaningful amount of burn or like future R &D or whatever.

7:30We were like, we have to like go make some money. Right. And, uh, first we try to finance the equipment, but like, I don't know if you know, but it's like really hard to get financing for a startup with zero revenue, uh, for, uh, it's all risk. It's an industrial fiber laser cutter. And, uh, you've never cut any metal and you have no back background in manufacturing. So, uh, basically our only option was just like to buy the equipment outright. So like, yeah, we had about 300 grand left. We signed the lease on the commercial property. We bought the fiber laser and then we waited. And one day I was supposed to show up from Houston and I got a call from the sales rep and they had accidentally knocked off the laser from the truck they loaded onto.

8:12So then we had to wait an additional six weeks for a new one to come in. And it was very stressful. But ultimately we ended up getting the laser. We got it installed. They did the training with us. They were very confused why we didn't have any customers they were like what kind of metal do you typically cut and we were like we don't we don't know anything about this and um yeah so they trained us and we started cutting right and we started learning and so like a big part of what we do is like you know we just dive into something new we learn we obviously try to learn from like you know people that have done it before and stuff if we can and uh but i think like looking at things with like fresh eyes is obviously important but yeah the first three months ended up really going really well we raised a little round and we've been live for about a year so yeah there's a really long-winded way to explain it but it's totally perfect um like what was what was the first few days in the shop because i know that we were talking yesterday and uh all right maybe it was this morning and you were saying that basically when you bought this laser it's like 30 feet yeah and the shop is not massive it's like the new one that you're getting is a little bit bigger yeah um what was it like taking delivery of that laser and setting up the shop.

9:19Yeah, I would say that was like most, okay, when we first got the shop, we got it like a month before we got any equipment. It was just me and Alfredo in a warehouse just sitting at two desks and it was like very empty. And the space felt really, really big. And like our neighbors would come by and they'd be like, what are you guys doing? And there was like two dudes in a desk in an empty warehouse. We're actually a startup. Yeah, I'm like, actually. But anyway, that was kind of weird in its own thing. And before we had the equipment, we were just writing software but like before you actually start cutting parts it's hard to know exactly what to do so we were writing a bunch of the customer facing stuff um but the day we got the laser was probably i was i would say is like the highest stress day of like the entire startup journey so far because like we had bet the farm on i'm getting this laser we had picked this specific uh you know facility and it's not like those are not decisions you could change really fast right like i can't just move into another spot tomorrow um and the rigors show up and uh and like unlike most founders you actually do have a family and so you know you have like 300k then you spend 200k on this laser because no one will finance the purchase of it and then you have a hundred thousand dollars left like yeah what was that like it was very stressful how many months of runway did you have uh i mean we were barely burning anything at that point but you know maybe we could have lived for another four or five months something like that uh but uh not infinite no definitely not infinite um but yeah the day we got the laser the rigger shows up and he's like looks extremely invisibly stressed he's like seeing a lot of swear words he's like who sold you this job and he's like looking at the garage and the access and stuff and he's like you know throwing papers on the floor he's like very angry and i'm like oh our laser's not gonna fit like we're not gonna be able it's not gonna work i'm like trying to think okay what happened like maybe we could put it in the back outside like that probably smash a little bit through the wall or something yeah or maybe the landlord can like you know tear down a wall or something but uh Ultimately, they were able to fit in an office to show you the video, but it barely, barely fit.

11:14They got in through this garage door right here, but it was very, very tight fit. And I just remember being extremely stressed. I was sitting at the table watching, wondering if it was going to get put inside of the warehouse or not. Ultimately, it ended up fitting, so it all worked out. So when you first started out, you already know that there's some demand for mailboxes, $3 ,000 a month or whatever. But how did you end up getting the first few customers? First few customers came from Twitter. And we also talked to a ton of hardware engineers and stuff before launching. So after we hung out with James and stuff, we went through YC in 21, so part of the YC network.

11:53And I reached out to a bunch of hardware engineers through the YC network and talked to a whole bunch of people about various different manufacturing processes, what's difficult, what's not, etc. and so like you know weldments came up you know very often and uh you know we we knew we had to kind of like enable in order to get like good margins and stuff we'd have to do the cutting the bending just fabrication everything right and so yeah so we we launched with just laser cutting so just laser cut sheet metal parts and there's like a variety of places you can get that you know today online or whatever um but first uh first first customer is pete actually really uh He is at Toolpath now, but he was working on his own startup.

12:34And he actually ordered through our API. He was actually our first and only customer to order through the API. We plan on releasing a full API for ordering fabricated metal components, but it's been pretty much in alpha stage for a while, right? And so we kind of consumed that internally and we use it to power our own stuff. But eventually, we want to release that to customers. But yeah, Pete was like an early adopter. uh so uh twitter this is a long story short we got handfuls of customers from twitter we started doing a little bit of posting on instagram we got some bigger customers from instagram and then now it's been kind of like word of mouth relationships that kind of stuff and so yeah and you actually uh you said yesterday that you like for at least one of the orders to pipe train you just like put it all in a truck i believe and then just like drove 200 miles to Austin to deliver in person to Garrett.

13:26Yeah, for sure. How do you think about like building customer relationships kind of like going above and beyond? Yeah, I mean, I think like, like this is such a tech bro thing to say, but there's this like Sam Altman thing where it's like, you know, get on the plane in marginal situations or whatever. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a plane. It could be a rented car, which is like what actually is. You get rented you all. Yeah, I rented a car and I drove down there. And, you know, I really like the Pipedream guys. They were like, you know, some of my first like, like hardware founder buddies, right?

13:53and hadn't met them in real life. But yeah, I mean, I think like, and maybe it's kind of like the YC thing of like, you know, do things that don't scale, but like manufacturing in particular is like a very relationship-based kind of business, right? And so like if you can meet your customers in person, I think it's almost always worth it. Like even if they're like a small order volume, right? Like if there's a customer doing something interesting, they order a couple hundred dollars worth of parts. Like I'm totally down and like go see them. um and uh so yeah i've done that like a number of times you know you start out building stuff with software and then you go into the like robotic arms and stuff and now you're doing this yeah um what were some of the like earlier ideas and you know kind of path that got you here yeah okay i can tell you the whole story so maybe helpful so i get a bit about my personal background so um i used to work at the gas station before i became a software engineer so i did maintenance So I did like plumbing, electrical, HVAC.

14:50It was like a special gas station, right? It's a quick trip. Yeah, it's like a really large private gas station. They do, you know, tens of billions of dollars of revenue. They have their own in-house maintenance staff. And I had a good job, good career there, right? So I started when I was like 19 or 20 there. And I would just fix everything, right? Like anything that broke, basically a fix. And I would drive around fixing stuff. And I got into software by accident because I was always like building and tinkering on stuff like on the weekends. I grew up working on cars and stuff. and I wanted to build a kegerator.

15:19A kegerator? Yeah, a kegerator is like a beer machine. It's like you take an ice test and you hack it so that it dispenses beer. And I'm not a big drinker, but I just saw it one day on Reddit and thought it was really cool. And people were using Raspberry Pis to control them. So I bought a Raspberry Pi. Long story short, I ended up really liking programming. Figured out it was a good career path. Maintenance was cool. I was making pretty decent money, but I had a young family and I had to work weekends, holidays, overnights. I had to be on the roof in like 100 plus degree weather, tons of overtime and stuff.

15:50And so I started learning programming, went back to school for computer science, and then I got a job as software engineer. So that's kind of like the background of like how I got into software engineering originally, right? So the genesis of the company, it started in summer 21. I built a course to teach people BIM, which is like a way to move around your code editor it is like kind of like a code editor itself but like the key bindings are really powerful right so like you know programmers you know it's a way for them to kind of edit code extremely fast is this something that you just like put on Udemy or something or like you I made my own course right so I made my own course it was like its own platform and everything and I put it online and I made like 10 grand a month really I was like wow this is crazy like I'll just make like 50 of these courses and then I'll be extremely rich and it'll be great and uh you know i can just like you know do fun hardware stuff like wear cool cars or whatever in my free time uh well it turns out i didn't really know a lot of other stuff to teach like i had like some novel insight about teaching them which related to like muscle memory but um what i realized really was like really hard the hard part of delivering the course wasn't like putting the contents down it was like doing all the other stuff right like creating no like creating the website the authentication like the payments, basically hooking up all the stuff that let you make the course.

17:13So I ended up building this like course platform for developers. And that's what I got into YC with. And that's what this company started with. Was that Diode? No, it was called Slip actually. Slip. Okay. Yeah. So in summer 21, we got into YC, solo founder with that idea. Right. I think at the time I had, I don't know, tens of users, maybe$500 monthly recurring revenue, went through the batch. and the long story short is like I just kind of happened into that idea and there was like a lot of momentum and then I started figuring out like, oh, like startups are really hard, right? Like they're really hard no matter what you pick and it just felt like I was waiting to do my real startup, right?

17:53Like it felt like, oh, okay, like maybe I'll do this path. Like you do some software thing, you have some kind of small exit and then you can work on like something more interesting like hardware or whatever. And, you know, hardware software was like how I got into the field originally And that's where I thought like a lot of value creation and a lot of interesting problems and stuff would come from. What was your experience going through YC? Was that like a positive thing? Were there, I don't know, any, did anything come from it that you believe wouldn't have happened? I mean, I think General like was just like a Silicon Valley outsider, right?

18:24Like, you know, I live in Fort Worth, Texas. Never worked at like a really big software company, a startup or anything, right? Like, so it was just like really, really cool. I mean, I'm pretty anti-credentialist in general. I dropped out of college two times. And I think that the one interesting thing is credentials can be an accelerant for sure. After having the YC stamp, it's like, oh, people default, taking more seriously, right? But yeah, I mean, it was basically a crash course in startups, how to raise, how investors think, how to think about growing your company, how to go through the hard stuff.

18:59I think YC was like, yeah, I love YC. I think it was like a really great thing. I think that if I were ever to do another startup, I would probably try to do YC again. I definitely recommend it. Even if you're like already successful? Probably, yeah. Really? Yeah, I think it's like a, also just like from a fundraising standpoint, like I think like the Demo Day auction mechanic is like super powerful and stuff. So it could be like an accelerant. And I did the batch remote. So this was like during COVID. So it was a little different now. It's like all in person and stuff. But yeah, I made like lifelong friends.

19:30it's easier to get connected with other YC founders and stuff um so yeah I definitely think like the value that they add versus like the cost or whatever it's heavily in favor of doing it for sure yeah and so at what point did you kind of like you come out of the batch and you decided that uh the path that you were going down was not what you wanted to be going down so we spent like about a year doing like random developer education stuff and um it was just like over time just getting more and more convinced like this isn't what i wanted to do for the long run right and people always say like you should do a startup like you could see yourself doing for like a decade plus and uh at first i thought like you know i think i'm gonna just like shut down return capital and like you know go off and do do something else like pretty bad it was pretty bad and like at the point i think we had like a million dollars in the bank or something because we we'd made money doing developer education stuff but it was obvious it wasn't going to be like a venture scale thing and like one of the things that made it obvious too is like this is when like copilot was starting to come out and I was like, oh, no one's going to buy developer courses.

20:31Like this stuff is getting really, really good. Right. Like, you know, I think AI is going to like kind of like eat this whole market. And so it was like obvious that it wasn't going to work. We had raised money. And all our, we were mostly raised like from angels and stuff. We did like, you know, classic, like 2021, like party round kind of thing. And ultimately ended up talking to YC partner, Diana, about the whole situation and what I wanted to do and stuff. She basically was encouraging of like, you can always just tell your investors, hey, this isn't working. These are the areas I'm interested.

21:07There's pros and cons of that, and that's ultimately a decision up to you, whether you want to shut down return capital or whether you want to try to keep going. Were you going to try and potentially give the investors individually the opportunity to just take their money out on that new idea? yeah yeah i was like basically thinking about like both options either offer to return all the capital you know pro rod or whatever or you know go down a new path and so ended up deciding to go down new path and that's when we started working on diode which is what you were talking about uh at the beginning but uh yeah it was very that was a stressful time for sure i think like in general spent way too long knowing i should pivot and do something different and like waiting because of like social norms etc and now it's just like inertia inertia right like i also think like in general like and obviously i don't have everything figured out we're still very very early but i think like more people should pivot more drastically faster if the thing that they're working on is not working like a lot of people will pivot to something slightly adjacent right yeah and so um yeah was that like the second major pivot that you've done in your life because i know that you went to school for like music and then just decided randomly nope this is definitely not going to work yeah and then you kind of you know change that I don't know I think I've made those kind of decisions a number of times but yeah uh the music thing was like you know I I did music in high school I played the saxophone I was in jazz band I really liked that I thought I wanted to be either a jazz musician or a music educator and I went to University of North Texas the largest music school in the U.S.

22:41very competitive and uh I just saw what the career opportunities for a music education major were and they were grim uh and and then I had my first son at that same time so I was like I need to go make money now and working at the gas station made more money than I was going to make as a music teacher yeah so that was like the first kind of I guess like major life kind of thing and then you know eventually getting into software that was like an interesting thing in itself because I was still working full time doing maintenance like you know 50 plus hours a week and then going to school for computer science like in the evenings and I did that for a few years and my whole goal there was like can I just go long enough until I get a job and so a few years in I got an internship once I got an internship I like burned the boats I was like okay let me just quit I'll catch up my 401k from the from the gas station job I'll quit my gas station job and I'll quit school and I'll just go as hard as I can on this internship and I think if I do a good job, he'll just hire me full time.

23:37And a lot of my friends and classmates and stuff thought I was slightly crazy, right? But I had confidence it would work for some reason. I mean, the company never told me that, hey, if you do a good job, we'll just hire you full time. You just believed it. I just believed it and then it happened. Has there been any advantages to being in Fort Worth versus SF or El Segundo? Because I've got a few ideas of what might be advantages. Yeah, I mean, I think in general, like for this type of business, like DFW is a pretty good place to build it. Right. So like metal fabrication is like pretty low margin.

24:10In DFW, you can actually get, you know, industrial space like fairly cheap. There's a lot of it. There's a lot of aerospace talent and manufacturing talent in DFW. It's the second largest manufacturing hub in the US. So there's a lot of like reasons to be here. But my my primary reason is actually family. Yeah. Yeah. Would it would have worked if you tried to do this in like San Francisco or LA with much higher like real estate costs and stuff? I think, yeah, probably. I think it could work. The way I think about it is like, you know, certain people have the optionality to be somewhere. And if you do, like you should probably be at the best place to build the thing.

24:46But if you don't have the option to be somewhere, okay, like you can't, if you can't change it, then you can't change it. You need to do the Peter Beck thing, right? So like Peter Beck started Rocket Lab in New Zealand when there was, not only was there like no rocket industry, there was basically no aerospace industry. There's no space industry, there's no rocket industry. Yeah. And, uh, you know, he made it happen. And so like, I think that, you know, basically like if you are in a circumstance that you cannot change, you can just make it work. Right. Like, uh, I wanted to build, I want to work at a cool hardware startup doing something really awesome.

25:21There's not really a lot of opportunities to EFW. I'll build it myself. You're, you're working with the same tenant or the like same landlord. Yeah. Same. Right. Yeah. So how did you initially like get in touch with the landlord for this place and then how has that relationship like evolved yeah the landlord for this place is really awesome he has a background in manufacturing then he ultimately ended up getting into real estate um but we found him through our just like normal real estate agent we had a regular small startup office like the typical like oh it's like an old building it has bricks and stuff and it was just like a small thousand square foot space and then we we told a real estate agent that helped us find that place like hey we need to find a manufacturing spot and so we toured a handful of spots couldn't really find anything that great and then also like we were in a kind of a weird situation where like we'd never done manufacturing and didn't have any revenue for the previous year and so he was like well let me introduce you to this guy he's like a interesting landlord and he likes collecting interesting tenants he likes collecting interesting tenants that's a strange way of putting it.

26:23And so we ended up meeting him and he was just like the most kind of like pro startup, pro manufacturing kind of landlord that, I don't know, basically you could find, right? Like definitely has a soft spot for manufacturing and startups and stuff. And they've been awesome, right? So like they've, anytime there's any kind of issue, they help us resolve it. They like did a bunch of tenant improvements, really kind of like startup friendly. They want you to win. Yeah, they want us to win. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So at what point do you, you know, you're you're in this place for i think the last like year and four months is something around there yeah at what point do you wake up in the morning and you say oh my god we have to get a bigger space we just have too much going on and we yeah i mean i think it was like when we started taking over some of the common area of the building for sheet metal storage right uh so there's like a common area there's multiple tenants in this building we just started sticking just putting stuff in there and it was supposed to be like pretty temporarily it's like and then And it's like, we just kept getting more and more orders and bigger stuff.

27:20And I was like, I think we actually need more space. And yeah, this space has been really great to start with, but it's like super not ideal. Right. It's like partitioned off really weird. Too much of it is like office space and stuff. So yeah, super excited to get to get a new spot. Do you have any crazy stories about buying used equipment at like an auction or anything? I do have some stories about used equipment. And so we wanted to start offering PEM insertion, which is like basically you press hardware into sheet metal. So you can press like metal studs and nuts and stuff like that. So anyway, I found one at a metal shop like two hours away and I go and it's like it's enormous like metal fabrication kind of company.

28:03They go through like, I don't know, they must have had like 20, 30 plasma tables. They build bumpers and components and stuff like that. and the guy tells me like oh yeah like we we just like took this out of our other facility works great and he was like uh seemed like a good dude and everything and like i i i basically they didn't have it hooked up and they didn't have a way to hook it up really easily because it needed air and plugged in and everything and he was like it was working it was great this is the best one anyway buy it and uh we hook it up and it doesn't work it doesn't work at all uh no it doesn't work and uh it turns out like they took it out of the other facility like i don't know three or four years ago i think like one of one of the cylinders is like jammed in it or whatever and so had they like not turned it on in three or four years i think so uh we plugged in when we got in and like turned on but like we didn't actually like hook it up that gave you like a false sense yeah exactly right and so um then actually this week we just bought another one to replace that one because it's like okay we need to offer this like we turned down a lot of work because we're not offering it and so how often are you turning down work because you just don't have like all the machines or anything like that or enough staff or whatever not super often but it does come up okay right like maybe a handful of times a month but sometimes it's like pretty meaningful amount of work sometimes it's gonna be like tens of thousands of dollars worth of work it's like hey we don't have that capability or whatever at what point do you have to make the decision or the call on like okay let's make this investment in some machine even if it's just like one or two orders that you have yeah i don't know i think a lot of it's just kind of like vibes space like okay like you're not doing a spreadsheet you're just like yeah it's like okay some customers ask for this I think more customers will ask for it and some of it it's like the customers are not even tell you right they'll just go somewhere else yeah but yeah so we bought a new PEM Surtr this last week I go this I'm gonna make sure it works in person so I bring the part that I want to test I bring our own tooling our own hardware I go and I press all the parts and it works great and I was like okay cool let's buy it so I kind of sucks that we had to buy this other one maybe we can salvage it for parts or something and uh did you get your money back at all on that or after you buy it definitely no it's like you're just getting whatever okay um and so which probably there's probably some case with like getting to the point where you always buy new equipment as soon as possible it's probably the right move just because it's not worth the risk of just like downtime and all these other things downtime yeah mispromises like stuff like that right and so like we buy the new machine it works great they deliver it and then just today I found out like they accidentally cracked the screen on it and so like you go to try to use it but the touchscreen doesn't work now and so you know we have a customer like waiting on those parts but luckily I ended up finding like a replacement screen and like having oddly like having like the maintenance background where I like fix stuff all the time it's like very comfortable to like oh yeah yeah and so anyway I ordered one it should be here tomorrow I shouldn't pick the deadline or anything but it is definitely annoying to have to deal with do you have any really good stories of you know you take on some customer contract or whatever um and then for whatever reason shit just goes horribly wrong whether we machines or we do yeah popped we do it does happen way less often now okay what was it like in the early days in the early days so like we definitely sent people we accidentally sent someone like the wrong material because we got it mixed up like oh we accidentally sent you like stainless when i how do they respond when you when you accidentally send them i think that in general like i don't know like being earnest with customers and stuff and like admitting when you made a mistake and just offering to fix it as fast as possible is like really it's just the best room yeah and then they're they're happy with that well what's interesting is like i even heard about this uh i think there was like a study done where the optimal hotel stay is that you go to the hotel something small minor gets messed up and then they like very quickly fix it rectify it and like make you you know say sorry and everything yeah that like leads to the best possible experience I think that makes sense right because it's like okay they actually care right yeah and so I think it like comes down probably to caring another thing that we happen was like you know we hadn't really had a lot of experience like shipping stuff and we got an order from this guy Jack he was in the YC network his company's called Beanstalk they're really really cool company they do indoor vertical farms and they build a lot of their own automation like it's like you know they they they're really cool and we got a big it was a really big order for us at the time I think it was like percentage of revenue it's like 50 % or something yeah right but it was like in the grand scheme of things not like a gigantic order for manufacturing company but it's really big for us at that time and so we made all the parts also I should say at this time like me and Alfredo were making all the parts and me and the software chair it's just you and you're like in the factory like all day writing software in the morning and then like fulfilling all the orders like in the evening and we did that for our first like three or four months um but yeah we we we made all parts they came out great we packed them up and we didn't use a strong enough box to ship them out we should have used a crate we used the cardboard box to ship it out in on a pallet and fedex dropped the parts off of the side of the pallet and they just destroyed all it destroyed most of them right so like um did you have like insurance at the time to cover you know no no we didn't get insurance on that because it's like yeah you just eat it it's probably faster just like remake the parts right so like the raw material cost is only like a small portion of like the total cost or whatever and so like you know rather than dealing with all the insurance stuff and try to do it you just like remake the parts for the customer and so they i think they ended up having like not a super great experience with us which was you know pretty sad from our end uh but we offered to like remake all the parts that were completely damaged and uh you know we we like hustled and got them back out to them yeah are you like one of those people that's uh or one of the founders that are like super frugal um where you just really don't want to spend money and uh you know in the early days you maximize the amount of possible output that you and the co-founder can do and then slowly over time decide to bring on one person as it just becomes overwhelming we just have never had a lot of money so that helps by necessity have been you know pretty pretty frugal but you're also willing you know there's this like a counterpoint where not everyone will take action if they don't have any money yeah it's like there's some people that just decide not to do anything if they don't have any money and you're willing to take the risk yeah for sure i think especially if it's gonna like accelerate or make things faster or like let us get more customers or whatever and we'll pay for it what are the things that are like the biggest um i don't know not kpis but the things that you're most focused on when you wake up in the morning the top things on your mind uh how to make more parts faster and cheaper, I think is like the prime directive, right?

34:44So like, if we can make a higher mix of parts at a higher volume, and we could do it cheaper, and we can continually improve that, then, you know, you get a better and better business every time. And so like, there's a lot of stuff where like, you build it once, and then you can like reap the benefits of that forever, as long as like the company keeps going, right. And so we think about like those kind of decisions, like when we're making software um so like yeah i mean i mean also i guess the other side of it is like customer experience right so like how do you build like a beloved brand i i think like in the space we're in there's like a handful of competitors that people like really love and like really well known yeah and i think like there's something to be said about like having like very worthy competitors like it makes you better and stuff too are these just like super you know long long-lasting businesses no they're fairly new they're like basically doing similar stuff to what we're doing um and uh you know they're online and you know engineers basically before these companies came around didn't have a great place to get parts online now there's like a handful of places that are doing it but as a percentage of like the total manufacturing volume in this space it's still pretty small right and so like when you make an improvement do like how fast do the competitors try to copy that i think we're like the small fry we're still like the the small small one so i i don't know necessarily if like anyone's really paying that close attention to us we try not to like pay too close attention to competitors either and just like talk to customers and stuff i think that it's probably a failure mode to be like hyper focused hyper focused and super fixated on on the competitors and instead just like see like what are the holes on the people that are actually giving you money right and like what are the holes in the market for them like you know because they they can go to your competitors and a lot of them cross shop across you know different competitors and stuff for different stuff and so i think for us it's like, you know, what's the direction that we can go to that we will be like uniquely positioned, you know, to tackle.

36:37And so I think like the assembly fabrication, the welding side is something that, you know, hasn't really been offered out there on this kind of like really quick kind of turnaround instant quote kind of thing. So I know that you've used Twitter a lot for great benefit to great benefit. Do you have any good stories from just serendipity that came from using Twitter and try and engage with people? Yeah. I think I've met some of my best buddies that I talk to pretty frequently and stuff like off Twitter. I think getting into YC was kind of like in a roundabout way through. Do you want to explain how that happened?

37:15Yeah, so the whole YC thing, I basically was a software engineer. I was building a bunch of random stuff, putting it out there into the world. And I say putting it out there as like publishing to a URL. and then no one comes right and it's like i spent some time trying to build software for like trades people and i would like try to meet up with them and i never had that much traction but i was always like building random projects on the side and then finally i started posting on twitter i thought twitter was like for arguing about politics um and i joined twitter and i just started doing the whole like building public thing and um there was just like a lot of momentum from that right and And then I started becoming aware of like more of the startup ecosystem of YC in general.

37:58Did you just not know about startups prior to that? I mean, I knew about startups, right? Like Uber, Airbnb and stuff. But I didn't really, it didn't really seem plausible to like go raise money for a startup or something for myself. Like I thought that was something that happened to other people. So anyway, I started posting on Twitter and really it was like one kind of chance encounter. There was a guy, Farza, a lot of people on Twitter know him. Yeah. Farza's awesome. Um, um, he was the founder of a company called build space. Um, they raised from like a 16 Z and a bunch of people and stuff.

38:27And they went through YC, but he went through YC as a solo founder and I knew he had come from Florida and I was like, Oh, that's crazy. Like that's, I'm a solo guy and I live in a definitely not Silicon Valley place. So I DM them and I was like asking about it and he was like encouraging. Right. And I was like, okay, maybe I should apply. And then I got a handful of other like YC founder people that, you know, kind of like help me out with my application and stuff and um the whole like vouch for you i don't know if anyone recommended me necessarily because they have like a recommendation system but um yeah so in a round about way like just like from tweeting and stuff like ended up getting an yc so it kind of like started me on the whole software journey how are you finding many like great talent you know i understand the process of finding great software engineers yeah you know people else can know it make sense yeah what about you uh twitter on ironically also so uh we hired this guy john rahagen i think is how you say his last name i'm not entirely sure um he might watch this what's up john um but but john is great i i found him because he was like tweeting a bunch of manufacturing stuff yeah and he was going to a &m and uh it was really easy to see that he had built cool stuff like he had a personal website i could still see like he was a doer right and uh what made me reach out to him i think is like one day he posted like all i want for christmas is a trump fiber laser which is like a very niche it's a low tam banger yeah i was like i gotta talk to this guy and uh anyway he ended up coming to the shop we met him and then i was like oh this guy's like really smart he's a brilliant guy and uh uh the interview process was super straightforward i basically knew he was smart and capable he's just done first robotics and stuff and he had like uh you know you you could easily see like there was like online stuff that he'd done really cool interesting things right and so basically i was like texting him i was like hey do you want to come help us do some hardware design stuff and uh he's like yeah and i was like okay cool let's do a five minute phone call we talked for five minutes and then he was hired as like uh he he worked for us part-time like an intern and uh now he's at spacex um oh man but uh how long did he work with you oh not super long maybe like six months or something and so like yeah we haven't had a ton of experience on like a hiring like hardware people but i i think in general like finding people that have evidence of their abilities um and then also really smart people vouching for other people so like john's replacement is actually ryan who john and ryan were on the same first robotics team that won worlds and uh when I just invited Ryan to come show up to the shop and I was like what have you built and he pulled up his camera roll and showed me a bunch of really cool stuff that he built and I was like oh all right all right great just kind of checks all the boxes we're probably good and you know that that's not the case for all engineering candidates even mechanical engineering you would think that like you know if you go to school for mechanical engineering you come out you have like you've built a bunch of cool stuff but like there's not always the case is that like even typically the case or is it kind of rare for someone like that that's probably more of outlier i think like a lot of hardware startups are having luck hiring people that have done like first robotics facts or fsae or have you noticed that the people that tend to have those like big portfolios of just having done a bunch of awesome stuff do they tend to also be more public about it or is it not necessarily correlated not necessarily okay i think as long as they just have the evidence right like i've had candidates and then i'm like okay cool can you send me something cool that you've built and then they're like well I can't because so-and-so reason whatever whatever NDA that's a classic excuse right like I have like 20 NDAs and don't worry I've built stuff yeah I mean I feel like if you're super passionate and you're you're really into it like you will have some evidence yeah right if you have zero evidence it's probably like a red fly let's end on like what's the hardest thing you've overcome I don't know life's been great man I think life's been great I think it's all like relative like I have a pretty like uh like the variation in my affect is not super wide right like bradley earlier i was like kenneth have you ever yelled at anybody and i think like a general like uh you know like grew up like really poor and stuff but like my parents grew up like extremely poor like my mom's from peru my dad had 11 siblings and uh he was like homeless for a time when he was a kid and stuff and so like uh are you just generally like a really happy person i would say i'm generally mostly happy but i mean i've had hard stuff happen right like i had my first kid when i was 20 years old i had to drop out of school and get a job at the gas station it looked like i had no career aspects like whatsoever you know uh going back to school for computer science like while working full-time having a family and stuff was like a really grindy part of my life but like i also really enjoyed it like it was like fun looking back fulfilling or it's more like you know type two fun right so like you know train for a marathon or whatever it's like oh it really sucks in the moment this really sucks but i know if i keep doing it like there's gonna be like the outcome i want on the other end um and then like the kind of stuff we talked about right the startup journey has been hard there's been like very low points where we thought we were gonna like raise out lose all the money fail my investors fail everyone that worked for us and and all that but i mean things have been hard but like i mean relatively you know we live in a first world country i get to do the thing that i really love like every day i get to come and like work with cool customers and stuff and so like yeah i i don't know if i would say it's been overall pretty good yeah yeah which was maybe like a weird way i don't i don't know if it's like i don't know you i can definitely be like grandiose about oh you know it's so hard like going back to computer computer science and like working full-time yeah it was hard for sure but just making try and trying to do good and make the right decisions to go to are you are you now in like a position where you think i'm going to be super excited to run this company for the next 10 or 15 years like have you finally achieve that i think it'd be like generational like i think i could like you do you want to just do it for the next rest of your life yeah i think i could work in manufacturing the rest of my life i think there's endless problems to solve i think it's one of the most interesting spots right now and also like one of the most needed spots i think that like i don't know it's just like like the flavor of problems of manufacturing like touch like everything i'm interested in right it's like there's like a hardware automation aspect there's the software side there's like getting to meet like really cool people building cool stuff um and it's like playing like factorial like in real life you know it's like uh you know you you get to come in you try to make things better and it's like oh sweet like now we make more money for every order this is so cool and uh you get to buy new machines like nothing's cooler than like getting a new machine right like you get the new machine it comes in it's on the semi truck it's like the best birthday present or christmas present yeah i can't wait till the day when every day is new machine day and i think like that's a possibility eventually uh and there's manufacturers that are big enough where you know they can say that and so yeah i mean i think that you know the very largest largest manufacturing companies are really large right they're doing many billions of dollars in revenue and so like the ceiling is super high and i think like the possibilities are are really endless and like also like very opportune timing right like you know i was in the trades i get into software oh software is easy now like all the ai is doing software but what i'm really interested it is in like the software hardware kind of thing.

45:43And it also seems to be... And the AI can't do that yet. Can't do it yet. Yeah. But it'll help. And if you own a factory... Make it more efficient. Make it more efficient.