00:25:06 · Ty Morse, Jim Belosic
[00:25:06] S0: I know you've been like very focused from the beginning on like hobbyists and people that just tinker and build things and they need a part quickly. But as you kind of scale, you're gonna be able to go from just having a given part and you have to like know CAD and stuff to be able to even order it to you basically just type in here's what I want, and then a finished product comes to your door. So how does that actually look like? [00:25:28] S1: Yeah. It's happening now. Right? So we built our own tools so that you can kinda talk to it and say, hey, I need this kind of bracket, you know, it's three inches long, whatever, and we can generate the CAD for you using LLMs. And that's that's good. But I think there's a limit to what we can do in house. We only have so big of a team. We only have so many ideas. What we're doing is we're just open sourcing, you know, how how our system works so that everyone else out there can go and make better tools than we could even make. Hey guys, here's all of our DFM calculations. Here's our limitations. Here's our capabilities. And it's all in, you know, a language that's readable by an LLM. It's like, go make tools, go figure it out, go make your own plugins, go make your own little use cases and we'll manufacture it for you at the end of the day. I don't want to, you know, gatekeep anything. I just wanna make parts. So if people can understand our ecosystem and make really cool tools to make even more parts, then I'm all for it.
00:25:28 · Jim Belosic, Ty Morse
[00:25:28] S1: Yeah. It's happening now. Right? So we built our own tools so that you can kinda talk to it and say, hey, I need this kind of bracket, you know, it's three inches long, whatever, and we can generate the CAD for you using LLMs. And that's that's good. But I think there's a limit to what we can do in house. We only have so big of a team. We only have so many ideas. What we're doing is we're just open sourcing, you know, how how our system works so that everyone else out there can go and make better tools than we could even make. Hey guys, here's all of our DFM calculations. Here's our limitations. Here's our capabilities. And it's all in, you know, a language that's readable by an LLM. It's like, go make tools, go figure it out, go make your own plugins, go make your own little use cases and we'll manufacture it for you at the end of the day. I don't want to, you know, gatekeep anything. I just wanna make parts. So if people can understand our ecosystem and make really cool tools to make even more parts, then I'm all for it. [00:26:33] S0: As we were walking through the factory and just doing a tour before this, there was a sign that said 3PM is the new midnight. And I think that is basically when the trucks leave. And if the trucks don't leave on time, then they don't make the plane, so the parts don't get delivered. So how did you kind of like come to that?
00:26:33 · Ty Morse, Jim Belosic
[00:26:33] S0: As we were walking through the factory and just doing a tour before this, there was a sign that said 3PM is the new midnight. And I think that is basically when the trucks leave. And if the trucks don't leave on time, then they don't make the plane, so the parts don't get delivered. So how did you kind of like come to that? [00:26:50] S1: We we had this problem where, you know, on work orders, it has different due dates. So, hey, it's due, you know, into bending on this date. It's due out of powder coat on this date. You know, it's due to ship on this date. So let's say, you know, it's it's June 3 is the due date. We would have people like, oh man, high five. You know, we we shipped it on June 3. But I was like, no, you missed the damn truck. You know, you shipped it June 3 at 9PM. Like that doesn't count. It's not a real ship date. And I think you've experienced that as a consumer too. It's like, hey, you order something and and you get a shipping label and then you're watching the tracking and like it hasn't moved, it hasn't moved, it hasn't moved. We don't wanna do that. So yeah, 3PM is the new midnight is just a culture thing. It's like, hey guys, if it's due today, it's actually due today by three hustle. You know, I wanna see the Indiana Jones, you know, rolling under the door to get it into the truck type thing as it's pulling away, and then we do that. [00:27:49] S0: What's the biggest thing that you're fearing right now?
00:27:49 · Ty Morse, Jim Belosic
[00:27:49] S0: What's the biggest thing that you're fearing right now? [00:27:51] S1: I'm fearing the unknown, the unknown of having a lot of money to deploy. Capital has been a great constraint for us. It's everything starts from there. It starts with like, how much profit do we have? How much can we spend? How much debt can we handle and service? And all of our decisions have worked backwards from there. And so now, you know, with some great partners that believe in us, that's not really a constraint right now. And I don't know what the next bottleneck is. You know, we're gonna find it. I'll find it really damn quick. I believe it's actually gonna be recruiting and training. I think we have three recruiters right now. We have two more coming on board. So five recruiters, we need to scale up our HR staff because that's that's a whole thing. But then even if I could hire, let's say I had 50 recruiters and I could hire 200 people in a day. I can't train them. I can't train them that fast. So we need trainers. We need all these different processes. Like we need more classrooms. We need more equipment that's just dedicated to training so that we're not taking it out of production. That's that's my fear. I just don't I have vague ideas, but I don't really know what's gonna happen. So we're biasing towards optionality right now. [00:29:14] S0: What were the biggest like bottlenecks or, you know, things that you would have feared twelve months ago that you were able to kind of solve?
00:29:14 · Ty Morse, Jim Belosic
[00:29:14] S0: What were the biggest like bottlenecks or, you know, things that you would have feared twelve months ago that you were able to kind of solve? [00:29:19] S1: Yeah. In the last twelve months, some of our big challenges have been, we've been scaling really fast, especially the CNC side. I mean, this is this whole building is twelve months old. We ran into bottlenecks of power. [00:29:32] S0: Just getting power to the building?
00:29:32 · Ty Morse, Jim Belosic
[00:29:32] S0: Just getting power to the building? [00:29:33] S1: Yeah. So I think we have 1,200 amps in this building and you start to add more and more machines. And then we're like, oh, turns out we miscalculated on how much air compression we need. And so, know, really the manufacturer says it uses this much air, but it actually uses a little bit more Then you need a second compressor. Compressors use way more electricity than our CNC machines do. And so you're like, okay, crap. That one compressor is gonna take the electrical footprint of four machines. So we need to figure out what our next batch of machines is gonna be. It's just these little unexpected things. We'll be like, hey, we gotta land all these machines. And we're so focused on getting the machines, negotiating the price, scheduling the techs to come out that like, oh, we also need a lot of electricians here that day. And, our favorite electrician is booked out six weeks because they just landed a huge job somewhere. So we have to go to a backup electrician and they don't know us as much and they're unfamiliar with the equipment. And then they wire it a different way. It's just like all these little things that just... It's like death by a thousand cuts.