Senra Systems' $65M Series B: Fixing Aerospace & Defense's Biggest Bottleneck

19:40Jordan Black:We're optimizing every single step of the process by removing all the little death by a thousand paper cuts that has to happen, whether it's moving material or finding a tool or staring at a drawing for two hours because you're trying to figure out what the hell to do next. Like that's the optimization standpoint. And the last thing is the automation portion of it, which is like, I am doing this repetitive task over and over again. How do you get the human removed as much as possible? And what's really great about Senra is like both the technicians and the entire engineering team are all in the same boat of like how do you automate this as much as possible how do you bring as much technology into so we're doing a multitude of things of like we are gathering all this data of like what a wire harness looks like in the digital world but doesn't really exist today what does a wire harness build look like in the digital world which also doesn't really exist today and then we're actually putting all these camera systems to start gathering all the data of like someone physically doing these parts.

20:30Jordan Black:So in theory, we can actually say we were the first ones to automate this because we're gathering all the data and getting ahead of the curve too. And I look at it as solar back in early 2000s, which is converting a photon to electron wasn't physically responsible for anyone to go move into that direction, but now it's incredibly cheap. So this is why you see solar farms and you see solar energy on housing and everything too. And similar with harnessing or automation, the dexterity and the models might not be at the caliber we need today to go automate this but we are getting ahead of the curve right now that we'll be the first one to say we're ready to go automate this almost completely because we are gathering all this data for the

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22:40Ken Venner:Do you imagine humanoid robots working within here? Are you just going to have armed robots? Not armed robots, but armed robots.

22:48Jordan Black:With guns, they'll have ASK.

22:50Ken Venner:Are we going to see optimists and figures around here?

22:54Jordan Black:Standard will always adopt the best technology to make sure we're building a high quality product at a very high throughput as well. So whether it's humanoid robots, robotic arms, custom machines, the answer is still looking a little bit unknown. but we're dabbling in all those different aspects today.

23:10Ken Venner:How do you do R &D on that? Are you going to these robot companies and seeing like, how are they selling you? I'm really curious.

23:18Jordan Black:So Ben Shanahan, my co-founder is leading up kind of this AI and robotics team. And he's going to all of the robotics companies, whether it's on the software side, whether it's truly on the hardware side or the modeling or anything too. And we're kind of getting this glimpse of the puzzle of like, We are the most manual manufacturing assembly portion of any single product line and seeing what works out there. What are the biggest differences or biggest gaps in this sector? And then figuring out who are the right partners to. So, for example, like our first step is like creating vision systems for the entire company to start gathering the data and also figuring out like utilization of the team, too.

23:58Jordan Black:So if someone says how efficient is your technicians? it's actually impossible because as I hundreds of technicians I can't go stare at each one and figure out who's sneezing at one point is going to the bathroom another point who's you know talking to their friend another point it's impossible so like we actually created this vision system in the factory to like start almost tracking all the little things that everyone's doing but like doing it automatically this wouldn't have happened three years ago like it's doing it today because of the technology we have and then it's going to be maybe another few years there's dexterous robots that say i can go put in um you know makeup on my face and it's like that's actually a very similar dexterity thing you're finding a very complex feature to go build off of and it's like we're going to keep going down in the direction too but ultimately the future of american manufacturing is not just automation it's configuration and so we're putting a lot of effort into how do we configure all these systems in the future versus just programming at once calling it a day because out of the hundreds of miles of wire harnessing that's on a plane, there's still hundreds of unique wire harnesses and that's also just one company in one vehicle and Senator wants to go build for everyone.

25:06Ken Venner:So let's talk a bit about the talent on the team. Obviously you and Ben founded the company, you came from SpaceX, we're in the, I don't know, is this a valley of SpaceX? We're in like literally wherever. Everybody in aerospace and defense is really kind of congregated now but you recently just brought in an industry legend ken venner who was the chief information officer of spacex how did you bring him into this and what else are you

25:33Jordan Black:hiring for yeah so we are incredibly lucky to have ken and he is a breath of fresh air of like what we need to go build over the next few years but ken built the operating system that helped scale SpaceX from hundreds of people to thousands of people and did the same thing at Broadcom in the 80s. And so he's just like the legend of how do software systems enable scale and enable this like new type of efficiency for manufacturing companies too. It was really important because like we were hitting a wall on so many of our different operations of like we need to give everything has to be in our digital system for buying parts to tracking inventory to even working with a customer that it wasn't actually the building the software is a hard part is like knowing what to build and like what direction we need to go build that product line into so Ken is just saw the vision instantly of like this is a company that will be 10x its throughput based off an operating system not just one to two x um kind of how it happened was uh one of our recruiters uh reached out to ken and was like there's this wire harness company would you be interested in just being an advisor and i met ken on like a tuesday we had a lunch in newport beach that weekend and then signed the offer and then next week he was hired and it was a really quick process uh but we were very gung-ho or maybe that's not the right word we were very confident in his abilities from not only just being a legend in the space but also like he saw the vision day one which is like you see all these people working around us and you can just see how efficient they are and how they're always having hands-on harness is what we like to call it where they're being incredibly efficient with their time based off of the operating system that like you won't necessarily see in the physical world but it has this huge effect on the physical world too and um i kind of always look at go back to like the culinary examples of like making pancakes is really easy but the hard part is finding like the recipe and the ingredients and the setup of the pan and but flipping the actual pancakes is not that bad it's just everything that's around it's the hard part and that's kind of what harnessing is it's like it is still a very difficult process per se and complex but if you can figure out how to get all the inputs simplified into a very streamlined process and making it so like, can me and you can go build a harness?

28:08Jordan Black:That's really the ultimate goal.

28:09Ken Venner:And so what roles are you going to be hiring out for?

28:12Jordan Black:We are going to be hiring more software engineers, continue to build the operating system. Technical program managers is a really big one too. Someone who's going to be the interface between the customer and the manufacturing site. And this is really one of our value adds is like, You get to go talk to someone who is an extension of all these companies and their teams of, you need a harness. I don't care if you need it faster than your current supplier. It's half broken. I need to go fly to wherever you need to to go talk about the manufacturing process. We are going to be the most white glove service in this industry as much as possible.

28:46Jordan Black:We're hiring more technicians, manufacturing engineers. So we have a whole plethora of whether you don't know what a wire harness is and you're hearing this podcast for the first time. and you're just like, this seems like a cool company. I'd love to get my phone in the door. Come build harnesses. Four weeks later, you'll be building harnesses for all the big aerospace defense companies. If you are working at a prime or an OEM or anywhere else and you're like, I would love to be on the other side, on the supplier side, but really seeing kind of that new age portion of it, which is not just built to print.

29:16Jordan Black:It is working as this extension of these engineering teams and being this embedded partner. That's really what we're going for too.

29:22Ken Venner:You obviously knew this when you were at SpaceX, but when you started the company, obviously there's a lot of adrenaline involved. Were you just looking at everything and being like, wire harness, wire harness, wire harness? How was that? Are you noticing that with your team too? Are they just excited about this or seeing how wire harnesses are literally in every product we use?

29:47Jordan Black:I think so. I think it's two things. One, I didn't grow up being like I want to, I'm obsessed with wire harnessing. I grew up being, starting my career off as a technician at the Santa Monica Pier fixing roller coasters and then also as a bartender and a bouncer and like on the customer service side. So this company is kind of the best of both worlds, which is like I love customers and I love kind of delivering some product and then I also love manufacturing and what I kind of fell into at SpaceX was a little bit of everything which is here's harnessing I got to go move into a little bit of a broader scope where I got to see a lot of the supply chain that went into it and what kind of got me obsessed with harnessing was it's so difficult to change this entire industry to make it 10x better because there's so many little things that have to happen to make this kind of like raise the entire ship at the entire time but the other thing portion of it too is like it's all doable it's all in my head and i kind of have the like the master plan uh either in my head or an investor text or some board meetings or anything else like that but it's like we're gonna be the ones that really change this entire industry because we're gonna be constantly raising the ship or every single time there's a paper cut we're gonna put the band-aid on it we're gonna fix it for the long-term ride and then yeah I think it's really cool to see wire harnessing everywhere.

31:09Jordan Black:When I'm on a plane, you'll see it. When you're seeing a generator, when you're being mic'd up, when you're in the car, anything else like that. I even had a rat eat through my wire harness in my car and the Toyota dealership was, this is going to be$5 ,000. I'm like, you're talking to the wrong guy. I will go fix this myself. But like everybody has a wire harness story, which I think is really funny. And when we're like going, talking to the government or going to talk to even these primes, it's really a simple case of raise your hand if you've ever been hurt by a wire harness. And most people are like, yes, it's done X, Y, and Z to me.

31:43Jordan Black:And our problem is to go fix all of that too.

31:46Ken Venner:With a hundred million dollars in total capital raised to date, you have collected some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley from Sean McGuire of Sequoia to Paul Kwan of General Catalyst to Delian at Founders Fund and now Lower Carbon and Interlagos. But there's one name that I find so interesting that co-led your series A or did he lead it?

32:07Jordan Black:Co-led it.

32:08Ken Venner:He co-led it. And this name, it's very interesting, keeps on popping up with these companies in LA. One of them was Rebel as well. It's Dylan Field. So how did he get involved in Senra and what was the investing process like? Yep.

32:27Jordan Black:I got connected through Dylan Field through one of our investors. and I have always been a fan of him personally because he's like the dream CEO that I want to be which is so level-headed an amazing operator has been through so many different storms and processes of like building a company for 13 years and this is just the beginning for Figma too and like this is just the start of it which is crazy to think about so just as an operator like I'm a huge fan boy and then got to meet him share the vision of like this is why i'm obsessed with harnessing and we were talking about making the figma of wire harness design uh and this is two years ago when we want to digitize a lot of the inputs into our factory um so i spent a lot of time with him on this is how we're building the manufacturing side this is how we're building the software side and we went on you know some long walks we spent a lot of time in the factory and then one day I was like, I'm going to go out to fundraise and he's like, I would love to put in some type of allocation in the round.

33:32Jordan Black:And then, long story short, ended up co-leading it with CIV, which is another really great investor of ours who's been incredibly helpful throughout this whole process too. And I think the advice I got early on was choosing the right investor is really important, but also choosing the people you really want to build this company next to. And you respect all of the lessons they have learned or all the things that they've built in the last few years or the path they've taken is incredibly important. And as much as I can learn from great operators like Dylan and great investors that we have on our cap table, the more successful Sen will be.

34:12Ken Venner:Yeah, he's the coolest. He's the best. Really cool.

34:15Jordan Black:Yeah.

34:16Ken Venner:Speaking of cool, how did you come up with the name? people there's some rumors around here you're a big fan of a podcast

34:24Jordan Black:um sadly i've never actually listened to the david center podcast but maybe i have to um senra is just the word harness backwards we just took out the h and the s because

34:35Ken Venner:we're deleting the horseshit of harnessing oh my god seriously yeah

34:42Ken Venner:were you high when you came up with that

34:45Jordan Black:No, we went back and forth actually with Jay was a really big component of coming out with that name. So Jay was our first investor in Senera and me and Ben and Jay spent a lot of time trying to figure out the name. And it was just, we went through so many wacky names. And then my personality is I like to keep things simple. uh like you know from the dinners i eat to the manufacturing floor i build uh so what's like a very simple name it's like well the companies also has very simple philosophy of like take a really fragmented and bespoke process and just use common sense to make every single part of it better uh or delete the horse shit the phrase i always say is like the horse the bullshit's over like and that's kind of something we always have here it's like if it takes 20 minutes to go do this thing how do we do it in one minute how do we do it even faster and like that's how my mind will always work so it comes from the name delete all the horseshit whether it's in a wire harness

35:48Ken Venner:or anything else we go build that's hilarious also you guys should like sponsor the wires that

35:54Jordan Black:he uses for his podcast i would love to so there needs to be some sort of integrated

36:01Ken Venner:strategy there.

36:02Jordan Black:I'll give him the shirt. Yeah, that works too. Okay.

36:06Ken Venner:As we wrap up and thank you so much for letting us in here. I know you're building out an 80 ,000 square foot facility. This is insane. I can't wait to see what it looks like in like maybe a month or three months. We have active construction going on behind us the whole time. We've cut a couple times, a lot of patience. So thank you very much. But what are you most looking forward to in the next 12 months?

36:31Jordan Black:I'm most looking forward to where we build factory number three and all of the growth we were going to have in the manufacturing and the customer sector too. I just want to build. The world needs more wire harnesses and I want to build every one of them.

36:49Ken Venner:Do you think with the SpaceX IPO more people are going to be throwing money at you? um possibly but i also just think it's makes it where people worked at spacex including me for

37:02Jordan Black:the mission and why i work on a really challenging problem and i think now with the spacex ipo people will have be more liquid and i think people are actually more scared like oh people are going to retire this isn't this and you'll talk to ken but like um i think it actually makes it more Or do you have an interesting problem to solve? And can you go bang your head against the wall to actually solve it too? I mean, that's going to be the exciting thing. So whether it's the capital markets open up more or the talent pool opens up more, I'm excited for both of it.

37:34Ken Venner:So AI harnesses are so hot right now and you're in the middle of it. So how do you choose between Anthropic or OpenAI?

37:45Ken Venner:What? It's the biggest thing. Everyone's talking about AI harnesses.

37:51Jordan Black:AI harnesses?

37:51Ken Venner:Yeah. You're creating all the AI harnesses, right?

37:57Jordan Black:All of them. Yeah, every single one of them.

38:00Ken Venner:What's the most popular one?

38:07Ken Venner:Are you bullish or bearish?

38:11Jordan Black:I'm incredibly bullish that AI will go build the harnessing. the company should shut our doors and we will have open ai build our harnessing soon okay so your team open ai i'm team open ai i like i like to support the ogs so i know we covered a lot

38:28Ken Venner:and i made some dumb jokes but is there anything else that we miss i think the one thing is what drives me every day for this company is people just need more wire harnessing uh

38:41Jordan Black:The world's becoming more electrified. We need more of everything that requires power and data. And I think we're one of the only companies there that is taking a really strong stance into making this entire industry better, from the manufacturing, the design, to the engineering services we provide. And if Center doesn't exist, I think it'll be very difficult for us to scale, not just the industrial base, but any of the critical systems we need to go build here too.

39:07Ken Venner:wire harnesses in nuclear facilities in data centers in space data centers in satellites

39:14Jordan Black:in cars in what else coffee makers and generators and hair dryers and hair dryers yeah without wire harnessing nothing turns off wire harness it's life

39:28Ken Venner:okay thank you so much yeah absolutely cool thank you this is great ken thank you so much for joining oh my pleasure i'm so excited to be here We just had an amazing sit down with Jordan. We went through the company. We talked about you joining the team. You have a legendary career. You're at Broadcom. Then you're at SpaceX. Then you've done a couple of space companies since then. So just like, I think it would be really interesting to maybe let's start first with why did you join Senra Systems? Yeah, I was really excited about Center Systems because cable harnesses is such a large, fragmented, unautomated business, and yet it's the backbone to everything that's being built today.

40:09Ken Venner:There isn't an autonomous vehicle or high-tech piece of equipment that doesn't have sensors, actuators, and computers that all need to be connected together through a cable harness. And most engineers, it's the last thing they think about and the last thing they want to build. And yet Jordan looked at this and said, this business is ripe for consolidation and improvement. And he's just making the right investments to scale up and scale out a business. And scaling up and scaling out are my core skills. So like when I was at Broadcom, I joined them and they were a thousand people, 400 million in revenue.

40:41Ken Venner:And the goal was to scale. And we, in the 11 years I was there, grew to 10 ,000 employees and 8.6 billion in revenue, did 52 mergers and acquisitions. So it's all about finding markets and growing reliable, repeatable, scalable businesses. And I think we can do that again here. What's going to be your playbook? Playbook is get it defined, get it working consistently and reliably in such a way that you can now replicate it and then go out and replicate it multiple times. And then every time look for ways to improve what you're doing, make that improvement, and then move it across the entire organization.

41:20Ken Venner:That's exactly how we did it at Broadcom. and it really worked well. And it was very similar to how we did SpaceX, which is bring automation to the table to help people do the right thing at the right time and have the system provide them the right information at the right time, and then scale the company without scaling all the employees literally to how the company's growing. So both Broadcom and SpaceX are having a bit of a moment right now. I guess if we look back at Broadcom to your point, you helped scale that company up And it reached a massive inflection point. So what were the biggest lessons that you learned there?

41:58Ken Venner:Yeah. The biggest lessons is each size you are as you grow requires a different behavior from the company. When you're 10 people, it's a network of us just talking to each other. I need very little processor systems. It's smart people just doing the right thing. You get to 100, you need a little more process, but not too much. And then you get to 1 ,000 and you need more process. But again, not too much because you can constrain a company by putting too much process in too early and stunt the growth. So you always have to assume smart people, stupid systems, let the right people do the right thing in the moment, but track them.

42:35Ken Venner:How they're doing it, what they're doing, and make sure they're accountable for the actions they're taking. And then you get to 5 ,000, 10 ,000. It's like everyone knows the piece they know, but they don't understand how a whole business works. but bringing that information together and presenting it to the top level people so they can understand how the whole company is operating together is kind of the focus. And that was both Broadcom's growth path. And when I joined SpaceX, it was, again, about a thousand employees producing about one booster a year. And through the years of growing up Warp Drive, the custom platform we built there, we scaled it up to 40 boosters a year and 9000 employees across multiple locations.

43:14Ken Venner:And it was just that continuously look at how people do what they do and then collect and present the right information at the right time. How did you make the decision to go to Broadcom to SpaceX? Broadcom to SpaceX. So Broadcom to SpaceX was a pretty simple one. The company had gotten big enough that it wasn't really innovating anymore. It was kind of just operating. And I get bored in those situations. I'm not really a true just run the system about continuously improving the system. and the CFO at Broadcom was at SpaceX was an ex-Broadcommer that I knew he invited me up one day to just do a tour of the factory I wasn't looking for a job but he invited me up I did this tour of the factory which is in Hawthorne downtown LA-ish and here they are building big metal objects it's supposedly cheaper than anyone else in the world in downtown LA and I'm like well this is crazy but I have manufacturing in my blood my entire career has been in manufacturing.

44:07Ken Venner:I'm like, this is a pretty interesting place. I have no idea who they are. I don't know what they do for a living because SpaceX wasn't a name back in those days. And they're an hour at least away from where I live. So he offered me a job and I'm like, I don't know. I want to drive an hour up to this place. But it was such an interesting story that Elon was going to save humanity from itself by colonizing another planet because we're going to screw this one up and we need to keep humankind going. And it was another scaling opportunity. So I thought about it, talked to my wife, and in the end decided to bite the bullet, take it.

44:38Ken Venner:It was a great move. And so you're a chief information officer there. Chief information officer working for Elon and Gwen. Yep. So I built all the systems and IT technology that drove that business. What was the day-to-day like? I just can't even imagine. It started at 5 o 'clock in the morning, driving up to Hawthorne, trying to miss the crowd, getting in by 6. and then working with all the various groups in the organization to define how they were operating and making sure we were not only collecting the information, but we were presenting design changes they were making up front and their impact on operations and making it very apparent very early what was going on so that you didn't get to a certain point and go, like, that design change just cost us$5 million to implement.

45:18Ken Venner:They knew as it was going through, so it was a very tightly coupled system that kept everyone working together and then just trying to scale the business. And Elon had hired me because they had a visual, a purchased application. He wanted to build the digital nervous system for the 21st Century Rocket Company. And I'm like, I started that way at AT &T early, early in my career building because no purchase software existed. And the opportunity to build it again, I'm like, this is either the smartest thing or the stupidest thing we've ever done. And I have no idea right now whether this is smart or stupid.

45:50Ken Venner:And I'd say for the first two years, I didn't think it was such a smart idea. By year three, when we really had the software working well and the company was really using it, I'm like, this man is a genius. He figured out what we needed to do, how we needed to get it done. It became one of the major differentiators for how SpaceX could scale and keep all the information together and connected with each other. What do you think the key components of Elon's magic is? Number one is first principles thinking eliminate before automation is clear to what he's saying and remove before automate is an activity and then just holding people really accountable and driving them the whole concept of a responsible engineer is what I learned there and that person owned that part from first requirements all the way through to post flight there were no handoffs there's no finger pointing either you got it done or you are no longer employed.

46:43Ken Venner:And like that kind of accountability and that everyone else is serving you getting your part through the process really created ownership. Like and the people there worked 10, 12 hours a day and didn't think about it. Like it wasn't like we were required. It's just like you're looking around at seven o 'clock at night and like nobody's left yet. Like, well, I'm not going to leave yet. I need to still finish the thing I'm working on. And so long hours, but really committed to the mission. and Elon was really good about keeping the mission as a forefront focus for what we were doing and just kind of energized everyone to get it done.

47:15Ken Venner:I know Elon is obviously a big spotlight of SpaceX, but I haven't heard many stories about Gwen and what it's like working with her. Oh my god. What was it like? What are the biggest lessons that you learned from her? So Gwen was to Elon what Henry was to Nick at Broadcom. Nick was the aggressive, make it happen, drive people to the very last ounce of juice they had. And Henry was pick up the mess that gets created, help people figure out really what they're trying to do, make sure everyone's safe as they go forward. I'd say Gwen is exactly the same thing for Elon. Elon is just very driven, very focused, very motivated, very hard to work for.

47:58Ken Venner:Never worked harder in my life than when I worked for him. And Gwen was as driven as Elon, but in a nicer way that helped the company keep moving forward and not just burn everyone out as they went. But brilliant, brilliant. Knew where to focus, what to do, kept things going when Elon would go up and focus on Tesla, the boring company and that kind of activity. And she was like the glue that held it all together. With such a strong culture like that, But how does that impact scaling it? Does it make it easier or harder? Yes, it depends how strong it is and replicatable. I'd say for the time that I was at SpaceX, they were able to sustain the culture as it grew up.

48:42Ken Venner:So they hired, promoted, trained to keep that accountability culture in place and that outcomes-based culture in place while we were going there. I've been at other companies that did it really well when they were small, and as it scaled up, it didn't scale with the company. And then the company became much more corporate-ish in its behaviors and characteristics where the outcomes weren't as important as the PowerPoint decks you created or the people that you know. Because SpaceX is now reaching critical stage with the IPO for wealth creation and kind of the benefit back to the employees. I know that this has happened over time with secondaries and tenders.

49:24Ken Venner:But this is one of the largest wealth creation events ever. Why are you still motivated to keep working? What would I do if I wasn't working? I don't know. Right, that's the question. I don't have to work. Having left Broadcom, I didn't have to work anymore. Left SpaceX, really didn't have to work anymore. I like interesting problems with interesting people trying to make a change that benefits mankind. And so, Senra was just that unique opportunity for me to come in and take a dormant market that I think is critical to what's about to happen in the US economy or the worldwide economy and really make a transformational change.

50:01Ken Venner:And Jordan gave me that opportunity and I've been here six weeks and friends ask and I'm like, every day is a great day at work. I feel blessed to be working with this group, creating what they're creating. like to me this is the second example of building what they built in redondo and until you built it three times you don't know if what you built will replicate itself so number two is just the beginning of all the things that worked at redondo that don't work down here say that model doesn't really work because it was locationally oriented so now we got two we got something as soon as we build the third one i think we'll have a rinse and repeat model and then games on like we're just going to go into this industry, increase the speed, reduce the price, up the quality.

50:44Ken Venner:I think it's just a very exciting time. This is obviously a little bit of a reach, but maybe it's not. We just recently had Tom Mueller on, and we were doing a tour, and he was like, oh yeah, it only takes three versions of an engine to get it right, and so maybe it's the same with the manufacturing facilities. It could be. I mean, the law of threes, it could just be the third time you got it and they're in different locations. Forces, as I think Tom would, to the engine, it's like three different versions of the engine. The first one just got you going, the second one you learned from the first but not enough, and then third one it's like all right I fixed, finished fixing this, and then just incremental tweaks from there.

51:24Ken Venner:I think in what we're doing it'll be the same thing here. Because the industry has significantly changed with AI and automation, the way you scale businesses now is dramatically different than before of throwing more headcount at it. But now we're throwing really talented headcount at it. And then also automating some of that backend with, you know, technology, AI, all this kind of stuff that's happening. So how do you imagine companies now scaling up with this new mix versus is just purely people. Yeah, yeah. Something like SpaceX and Broadcom, AI didn't exist. And so it just took longer and it was harder to build the systems and the documentation and figuring out where the automation opportunities were and to digest the data to figure out where the trends were.

52:20Ken Venner:Like at SpaceX, I had grown up to having a team the size of about 175 building the core platforms. I got a team of six here. I don't really think it's going to scale much more than maybe one or two more people. And I think I'll be able to do exactly what I did at SpaceX with only six because AI drives most of what we're doing. And AI is now starting to enable things we weren't even capable of doing for SpaceX. So that's one of the areas. And then you just look at machine automation or robotics and the ability to cost effectively apply it. Like AI is just driving the cost down and the speed up associated with finding unique ways to apply technology to help humans do what they're great at and getting the mundane, boring tasks out of the work that we do.

53:08Ken Venner:What do you think of the name Senra? I have no opinion one way or the other. I don't know how Jordan came up with the name. He just told us. Oh, so like you should tell me that story because I actually don't know the story. They took the word harness. Okay. They took off the H. No, this is what they did. They took the word harness. They flipped it backwards. They took the H and the S off because they don't like horse shit. And all that stuff just sent out. And that's the name. Harts and R. Wow. I had never heard that story. Good way to come up with a name. Names are so hard to come up with. Like I've got a winery and getting the name for the winery was incredibly difficult.

53:43Ken Venner:No way. Where's the winery? Up in Sonoma. So if you're up in the area, please come visit. It's Auteur Wines. So we're both in Healdsburg and in downtown Sonoma. What kind of wine is it? Pinot Chard, Rosé of Pinot and Sparklin. That is so fun. It is such a great business to be in. How long have you been doing that? Since 2009. Oh my god. For a while and we're just starting to scale right now so it's a great time. It's both a great time and a terrible time to be in the wine business. It's a shrinking market but we're growing share in a shrinking market. It's a good side project. That's the other reason I work.

54:18Ken Venner:Wineries are not cheap and I need some money to fund the winery. I guess people always find something to do. They find some side hustle to go do. Well, awesome. Okay. So as we close out, what are you most looking forward to in the next 12 months working with Sunra? I'm looking towards the scalability of the company and the simplification of it and the ability to show how a dormant business can literally apply technology to be transformational change in this particular industry. Amazing. Well, Ken, thank you so much for walking through your legendary experience, why you decided to join Senra, and of course, really excited about your winery.

54:59Ken Venner:So everyone go check that out. Please do. Thank you.

55:02Jordan Black:It was a pleasure. Thank you.

55:04Ken Venner:All right, Jordan, what's the plan?

55:05Jordan Black:So I'll show you part of our production facility. This is only 25 % built up. So everything around us will start having more tables, more machines, more automation over the next few months to really fill out the space. And we plan to be almost at 100 % capacity by the end of the year too. So starting off here is a dedicated production line for one of our defense customers. We're building actually 4 ,000 plus of a unit weekly, and this is where Senra did the prototyping early on, stepped into production, and be able to scale very quickly after that too.

55:40Ken Venner:Are each one of these bays a different customer? How do you organize it?

55:44Jordan Black:Yeah, what's really nice about the center method is that each one of these bays is a different customer, different harness. Harnessing, it's so high mix in the sense of like, you have a SpaceX rocket and it has thousands of unique wire harnesses. And now not only do we build for maybe one of those companies, but hundreds of them in the future, we need to be able to say, we can go do a production run and spend a week, a month, a year on that production line and configure the whole thing in a few hours versus weeks or years and be able to do it too. So that's why a lot of harness production is you find a few people who do it, they just do it over and over again, and it's hard for them to go switch to a new product line because all of the tribal knowledge and setup takes so long too.

56:22Jordan Black:So when you see all these different product lines around here at different bays, we're constantly changing what we're building based off of what the customer needs are too. So it's being as agile and configurable as possible for the customer.

56:38Ken Venner:Seems like such a satisfying job. You know, back in my day, I made some wire harnesses. I told you in the interview.

56:44Jordan Black:Yeah, yeah. So you can see different bays, different groups of automation, but they all look very similar, which is like if you come back here in two weeks, you'll see an entirely completely different harness being built and we'll ramp up the rate of how we build it and then change a lot of the tooling, fixturing, harnessing programs. But everything's being built on the operating system. So you look around, most people are building everything with their hands. But the biggest secret sauce is that they're not looking at a drawing. You're trying to find a tooling or anything, too. They're incredibly efficient because the operating system is giving them that perfect recipe and that silver platter instructions every single time, too.

57:22Jordan Black:So most other companies you might see would actually be, here's a piece of paper or the printed out email from a customer, and you're kind of pushing the technician to go figure it out and build it without the actual proper resources to do it to.

57:34Ken Venner:How are the assembly lines organized? And then in terms of the talent here and the training, do you start with simpler ones and then work up to more complex ones? Because we're, I mean, I'm looking around and some of them will look super complex.

57:49Jordan Black:Yes. Typically when people start here, we get them on more of the simplified systems to get their reps in. but everything is all different shapes and sizes too in the harness world. What's pretty incredible is that most of the people around us have never seen a wire harness a few months ago and now they are ramped up building high quality harnesses with our different systems and the manufacturing platform we build today. So what's really great about all this too is that like it's a very configurable system of like they might start on some simpler ones in the beginning but then they're building really complex things you know very shortly after too to kind of after they got their reps in.

58:22Jordan Black:And most of the people here are trying to build that 10-year career of going from apprentice technician to more senior technicians over time, too.

58:30Ken Venner:So what are we doing here?

58:32Jordan Black:All right. So this is called a wire crimp. And this is all done by hand today. And one of the hardest parts is visually inspecting it. So you have to look at this really tiny thing, smaller than like a fingernail, and figure out, does it look good or bad? And this is all done by hand today by very skilled inspectors who've been doing this for 20 plus years. So one of the things we've been spending a lot of time on is like this like AI and robotics sectors. Like how do we also get rid of this kind of inspection portion of it? Because harnessing is incredibly critical for turning things on, but also the quality output of it, too.

59:07Jordan Black:And to be like a little morbid, like the reason why the astronauts died on the Apollo 1 mission was like a small nick on a cable jacket of a wire harness. So like even the smallest nick or cut on the wire harness could be very detrimental for the whole system itself too. So what you see here is we built kind of our own system of, this is a very high reproduction order for a defense company. And if you look on the screen, I'm putting in this thing called a wire crimp. And you can see it's measuring what it looks like. And instead of visually inspecting every single time, I come over here, I hit capture, and then it actually will tell me if it failed or not.

59:48Jordan Black:And I don't actually have to have anyone inspect this thing anymore. It could be the operators and technicians on the production line saying, do I have good or bad quality? And this is really important as you continue to scale of how do you not just scale with people, but better process and more efficient manufacturing methods too.

1:00:04Ken Venner:And so what is it actually, is this like a thermocamera? What is it looking at?

1:00:07Jordan Black:This is a 2D vision system looking at a picture of one part of a wire harness and saying, this does not meet the inspection criteria or the design intent of the company itself. Thus, we need to fail this. And then alerts the technician, we can go throw it away, we can rework it, we can go do more training. But this forces us to say we have less human error in the process for such a manual manufacturing method too.

1:00:34Ken Venner:And where do you and how do you keep the standards for what each one of these different harnesses you're looking for?

1:00:41Jordan Black:And that's a great question. The reason was really important for us to build this manufacturing operating system for the get-go. So if we started just kind of down this path, it wouldn't have been helpful because we would have done it. And then we would have went back to the old methods because it's just been faster to have someone else manually inspected. Now, once we create these programs, it's in our custom manufacturing system. So we can just rinse and repeat this every single time. And so we're taking all this data of good and bad wire harnesses that we build and have this kind of giant library of we are training a model to say, this is a good, this is a bad wire harness.

1:01:15Jordan Black:And so whether it's a wire harness from, you know, an airplane company to a missile company to an automotive company, they're all sharing very similar data of like what a good wire harness is and what a bad wire harness is. And we're the ones really collecting all that data to actually make a perfect quality output every single time.

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1:03:19Jordan Black:Selling customers is maybe not the most difficult process in the sense of like we built our a lot of it's word of mouth. So I didn't have a sales team until four months ago. Oh my God. Yeah.

1:03:33Ken Venner:Really?

1:03:33Jordan Black:So we didn't have a sales team until four months ago because it was one, people just hate wire harnessing, but two, it's like, if you build a good product, like people will know about it. And you need to, if you build a good product, people will want more of it too. So that is part of the sales process. Also, it's like they come here and it looks very different than your typical factory where like there's a lot of automation. there's uh very organized big buckets and bins of material uh you have people who are technical experts like me and the manufacturing team that they can go call at any given moment of the day so uh with customers i think it's more about like hearing them and putting your money where your mouth is but in the beginning it was i would knock on these people's doors and say give me your worst harness and i will build it for you versus give me your biggest program and biggest production volume and let me go jump into that because i want to grow with them as well too that's a good

1:04:32Ken Venner:strategy um what is what is the difference between this area over here so this is all inventory

1:04:38Jordan Black:management okay so with harnessing it's kind of like legos where you need you know either tens or hundreds of unique parts that go into it because it's an assembly process and so what we do is that we have as parts come in and we do all the ordering and management material here people are kidding every single last piece that goes into a harness and because our systems are so critical everything from the you know fastener and washer the connector and wire has to all be tracked versus just one part that we kind of mold together to all right we've got a nice fan action we do

1:05:14Ken Venner:yeah yeah gotta get the face so if you didn't have your role as ceo what role would you want here?

1:05:28Jordan Black:That's a great question. I think my dream role would either be purely on like sales and business development. I love talking to customers. I love helping them. I love having them call me in the middle of the night and we go figure out their biggest problems or something more on the operating side of it of like really focusing on the technology to make the manufacturing team more effective. And like, it's a never ending problem because we can always do better, build faster, make more technology to speed every single part of the process up to. What is on this table? This is 120 foot long harness that goes into a defense system.

1:06:11Jordan Black:And we got called in the 11th hour to go build this thing in two months, because they are blocking a multi-billion dollar program. and then we are building it today. So harnesses will be as long as this long table to as small as fitting in the palm of your hand.

1:06:28Ken Venner:Wow.

1:06:29Jordan Black:So all different shapes and sizes.

1:06:30Ken Venner:We'll make sure to blur that out. Yeah. Okay, so the 25 % that's built out is obviously over here. I mean, you have a lot more room to go. We'll go look over here. Is it going to be like kind of the same structure of where the different bays are and then spread out? Are you going to have, like, are they going to be pods? Like, how does it work?

1:06:55Jordan Black:So manufacturing is all common sense. And what we want to do is, like, get all the material management along this kind of one row right here where it's easy for material to flow in from the bay doors and then goes immediately to production over these bins too. So on either side of these pillars will just be more manufacturing footprint for what we build today. And then the real goal is to be able to scale into different sectors, get even more shifts of people going through this too. But one of the biggest learning lessons I have for building this company is like, we continue to run out of space.

1:07:32Jordan Black:So started in my apartment, ran out of space there, started in a smaller factory in Torrance, ran out of space there. Within a few months of being in Redondo, we ran out of space. And so we really built this for kind of all the demand we're seeing and also we want to be able to scale with our customer growth too. We want to be able to tell them if they need a 10x their throughput in the next few months, we are right there with them to do it as well.

1:07:54Ken Venner:When we talked to Ken just now, it was funny because we were talking about Tom Mueller too, but he said it usually takes three tries, rules of three, so once you get to the third factory, you'll figure out if this really will scale and hit the road. And then, And Tom, he was talking about the different versions of engines. He's the Merlin engine man. And he said it took three tries and they got to a really good engine. And now it's all over the place. But yeah, so that's my little analogy.

1:08:25Jordan Black:Yeah, I think it's something similar where like the initial factory build in Torrance was like just try to brute force and make it work. The second factory was like in Redondo. How do you standardize the system? and like this factory is like, can you truly scale it? And then once you figure out how to truly scale it, then it is copy and paste. And like, how do you kind of make this a copy and paste model of like manufacturing skilled assembly?

1:08:50Ken Venner:So how are you dealing with air conditioning?

1:08:53Jordan Black:We are planning to put a company in called Big Ass Fans. Seriously? Yeah, that's what it's called. These giant fans that go overhead too.

1:09:01Ken Venner:Well, at least you're not in the valley.

1:09:03Jordan Black:Yes, exactly. I don't know.

1:09:05Ken Venner:There's a lot of facilities over there. I don't know why.

1:09:07Jordan Black:It's super hot.

1:09:08Ken Venner:It's really hot.

1:09:09Jordan Black:Yeah.

1:09:09Ken Venner:It's like always 100 degrees.

1:09:12Jordan Black:I think with the manufacturing company, part of the secret sauce that's not actually that secret is like, can you make a good working environment for the people who are here? So, you know, the air conditioning, the snacks, the records on the wall, things like that, that just make people feel comfortable. Like, this is my home and I want to be able to, you know, come in here and feel comfortable versus the bathrooms aren't working or there's, you know, you don't have coffee and you're tired that morning. Like it really becomes like, how do we give them the best tools with technology and the best workplace environment too?

1:09:43Ken Venner:I will say you have a really good selection of snacks and beverages over there. I did take a bar and a piece of gum and I had a coffee.

1:09:54Jordan Black:Satisfied customer.

1:09:55Ken Venner:I'm very satisfied to be working in here today and I'll be here until midnight. Perfect. Well, thank you so much. I'm excited to see the 75 % get billed out. Maybe we come stop by when that happens and check in on quality control. I know.

1:10:10Jordan Black:Absolutely.

1:10:12Ken Venner:I'm watching.

1:10:13Jordan Black:Yeah. You're an expert now.

1:10:14Ken Venner:I'm an expert. And if you have not checked out our sit-down version yet, we did a sit-down interview with Jordan. And then we also did a sit-down with Ken, who just recently joined. But thank you so much.

1:10:29Jordan Black:Yeah. Thank you.

1:10:29Ken Venner:Cool.

1:10:30Jordan Black:Amazing.

1:10:31Ken Venner:Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, Sorcery.bc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.