Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:00:00 · Daniel First
[00:00:00] S0: Actually had a medical device manufacturer, and the surgery equipment was malfunctioning during surgery. And I I would read reports about people losing blood when these, devices would malfunction. And there were actually two distinct root causes that the AI picked up. And so we were able to to flag that, and I think that that was an example where we, you know, very clearly impacted people's lives. So Axion is an observability platform that links together all these datasets and helps manufacturer understand what the issues are, why are they happening, and how do we solve them.
00:00:30 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:00:30] S1: Welcome to Inspired. I'm Alexa von Tobel. What if I told you there is a 2 to $3,000,000,000,000 opportunity hiding inside the $30,000,000,000,000 American manufacturing industry? Quality failures, recalls, medical devices that fail during surgery, and planes with faulty parts. For decades, manufacturers have been blind to these issues until it is too late. Enter Axion, an AI command center that helps manufacturers detect and solve product problems before they become disasters. I'm joined today by Daniel First, founder and CEO of Axion. Four years ago, Inspired Capital co led Axion's Sea Ground, and since then, we've watched Daniel build what is genuinely the future of American manufacturing. Today, companies like Boeing, Pratt and Whitney, Baxter, and others rely on Axion to catch catastrophic issues before they happen. In this conversation, you'll hear all about Daniel's journey building Axion, how AI transforming manufacturing from playing defense to playing offense, and his vision for a future where every product learns and evolves based on real customer needs. Let's dive right in to this very ambitious way. If you're running a startup, we know things like managing equity and communicating with investors are always top of mind. Carta has built a connected suite of tools that over 40,000 companies use to do just that. Their platform of software and services helps you lay the groundwork so you can focus on building. To learn more or get started, visit carta.com.
00:01:57 · Alexa von Tobel, Daniel First, Cameron
[00:01:57] S2: And with that, let's welcome Daniel. Daniel, first of all, I'm so honored to have you here today. So excited to talk about your journey, everything that you're building at Axion. And Cameron and I have been really fortunate to get to work with you. So I want to go back to the beginning. Let's go to your childhood. I like to ask one really simple question, which is, if you go back to your childhood and look to where you are in the world today, you've accomplished so much in a short period of time, what from your childhood really stands out as something that was a real gift to helping you get here? [00:02:28] S0: Yeah. I think that, you know, my childhood really had absolutely nothing to do with computer science or technology. I think that I was I was brought up in a a very religious, very intense Orthodox Jewish community where we were debating medieval texts all day. But I do think that what it taught me how to do is really think for myself. And I think that, you know, thinking for yourself and forming your own views is really something that is essential to to survive as an entrepreneur. [00:02:58] S3: So, Daniel, you have an impressive and unconventional background from studying cognitive science and neuroscience during undergrad at Yale, then a master's in philosophy from Cambridge, and then also a master's in data science from Columbia. So can you walk us through that journey? Was there a through line that connected all of those experiences? And maybe to start, why don't you start with what made you interested in neuroscience initially?
00:02:58 · Cameron, Daniel First
[00:02:58] S3: So, Daniel, you have an impressive and unconventional background from studying cognitive science and neuroscience during undergrad at Yale, then a master's in philosophy from Cambridge, and then also a master's in data science from Columbia. So can you walk us through that journey? Was there a through line that connected all of those experiences? And maybe to start, why don't you start with what made you interested in neuroscience initially? [00:03:22] S0: So, when I was, in my teens, I was really interested in these thinkers who were... Would connect, religion and philosophy and, you know, what at that time was science. And they would try to form ideas about the human mind. You know, for example, Maimonides, who was this twelfth century thinker. And so I thought that if I studied neuroscience, maybe I could come to some sort of deep scientific understanding of human nature about why, you know, what human flourishing looks like, why we desire what we desire. And in philosophy, there's... You know, a lot of philosophy ultimately is derivative from people's ideas about human nature. That really is what drew me to neuroscience in the first place.
00:03:22 · Daniel First, Alexa von Tobel
[00:03:22] S0: So, when I was, in my teens, I was really interested in these thinkers who were... Would connect, religion and philosophy and, you know, what at that time was science. And they would try to form ideas about the human mind. You know, for example, Maimonides, who was this twelfth century thinker. And so I thought that if I studied neuroscience, maybe I could come to some sort of deep scientific understanding of human nature about why, you know, what human flourishing looks like, why we desire what we desire. And in philosophy, there's... You know, a lot of philosophy ultimately is derivative from people's ideas about human nature. That really is what drew me to neuroscience in the first place. [00:04:02] S2: By the way, Daniel, you and I had never put that together. We had that in common. I also started studying mind brain behavior out of such interest. So, you did something that I kind of want to call out because it's pretty fascinating. When you were at Yale, you founded the Society for the inter... Interdisciplinary human flourishing, which is a mouthful. What does human flourishing mean in your mind? Maybe just start there.
00:04:02 · Alexa von Tobel, Daniel First
[00:04:02] S2: By the way, Daniel, you and I had never put that together. We had that in common. I also started studying mind brain behavior out of such interest. So, you did something that I kind of want to call out because it's pretty fascinating. When you were at Yale, you founded the Society for the inter... Interdisciplinary human flourishing, which is a mouthful. What does human flourishing mean in your mind? Maybe just start there. [00:04:30] S0: I became a little bit less religious in my late teens. And, you know, after I I got deeper in neuroscience, I wanted to to really think about... I I just felt like there were a lot of different ways that I could live life if I wasn't just gonna, you know, blindly follow, religion. And so I started looking, and a lot of my friends were studying these questions about, you know, what it meant to live a good life, what human happiness is, really an entirely different discipline. So I had one friend who was a philosophy, major, and he was studying virtue ethics. And then I had another friend who was an economist. She was studying, Bhutan and how they use gross national happiness instead of, GDP to measure success of their economy. [00:05:09] S2: That's what I wrote my senior thesis on. Never... Yeah. We never connected to that. Sorry. Keep going.