Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:08:22 · Daniel First, Alexa von Tobel
[00:08:22] S0: In in, you know, in plain English, Axion, really, it's a it's a command center that American manufacturers use across aerospace, medical devices, consumer electronics, really all to try to understand what are the top issues that are impacting their customers. So you can imagine a company like Boeing's trying to understand, you know, why are planes, having issues in the, you know, in the hands of airlines. Medical device, manufacturers like Medtronic are trying to get ahead of recalls. And, companies like SharkNinja will release slushy machines and try to understand what issues our customers facing so they can also, you know, makes... Make the next, version even more compelling. It turns out that there's just tons and tons of data, that that, you know, comes from IoT and telematics, from other types of customer feedback, from technician investigations. And so Axion is an observability platform that links together all these datasets and helps the helps the different groups at the manufacturer understand what the issues are. Think Issue three sixty, what are the top issues impacting customers? Why are they happening? And how do we solve them? [00:09:26] S2: I wanna ask a really simple question because it's fascinating. But so right now you work with some of the biggest names in manufacturing, Boeing, Baxter, Newell, Pratt and Whitney, I won't name them all. In plain English, what are you doing for them? You're an observability leader of tons of data's... Datasets. But practically, what are you doing?
00:09:26 · Alexa von Tobel, Daniel First, Cameron
[00:09:26] S2: I wanna ask a really simple question because it's fascinating. But so right now you work with some of the biggest names in manufacturing, Boeing, Baxter, Newell, Pratt and Whitney, I won't name them all. In plain English, what are you doing for them? You're an observability leader of tons of data's... Datasets. But practically, what are you doing? [00:09:44] S0: We'll go to a manufacturer, and they're often solving a lot of issues impacting their customers. And our challenge to them is we bet that there's tons of issues driving billions of dollars of costs often that you don't even know about. And so where this all started is that we were working with a a Japanese, OEM a couple years ago. And, initially, you know, the the idea for Axion was slightly different, but, you know, what what we we basically did a prototype and found and discovered that they had tons of issues costing them, you know, contributing to their billions of dollars of warranty costs that they were just totally unaware of. So that's really what the platform does. It... Today, a lot of the customers, they use it to try to understand, you know, what are the issues impacting our customers, and how do we solve them so we can stop the bleeding of bad customer experience and warranty cost. [00:10:30] S3: Tell us a bit more about the problem of quality. You know, how big of a problem is this to manufacturers? Why are they so focused on it?
00:10:30 · Cameron, Daniel First, Alexa von Tobel
[00:10:30] S3: Tell us a bit more about the problem of quality. You know, how big of a problem is this to manufacturers? Why are they so focused on it? [00:10:39] S0: So I think that there's a couple different lenses about why manufacturers are so focused on this today. So number one, you know, you have this very obvious reason, which is that many manufacturers are just getting totally debilitated by things like recalls or warranty costs. A company like Ford might have $5,000,000,000 of warranty costs every year. So I think, you know, that... That's, I think, well recognized. You also have a lot of these booming industries like like data centers where uptime is really critical, and you need uptime from power systems, from HVAC. And when you don't have that, that's obviously a huge problem. I think that there's a a much deeper point though about why, quality matters so much to manufacturing right now, especially in America. A lot of American manufacturing, a lot of leaders of American manufacturers are trying to position themselves against more commodity, markets and commodity manufacturers by positioning their products as high quality. And you can't do that if you don't understand what issues your customers are facing. [00:11:45] S2: Daniel, let's talk a little bit more about recalls. I mean, I think when I first met you and you talked a little bit about just how massive of a problem recalls are for US American manufacturing companies. We'll just start there. Give us a sense of the scale of the problem.
00:11:45 · Alexa von Tobel, Daniel First
[00:11:45] S2: Daniel, let's talk a little bit more about recalls. I mean, I think when I first met you and you talked a little bit about just how massive of a problem recalls are for US American manufacturing companies. We'll just start there. Give us a sense of the scale of the problem. [00:12:02] S0: If manufacturing is 30,000,000,000,000 of revenue every year, quality probably costs anywhere from, you know, 2 to 4,000,000,000,000 depending on on what you count. I think recalls are the most pernicious and most, you know, widely recognized example of a quality issue. But the reality is that when you when you release any product, there's actually usually, you know, hundreds to thousands of, you know, death by a thousand cuts quality issues that customers experience, you know, every time. So I think that that's really what makes this such a big problem is customers' their experience of products is really that they, you know, they buy version five and they have a lot of issues, and then they buy version six and all those same issues are still there. [00:12:43] S2: Are you in a position where, let's say, you have three of the biggest companies on Axion's platform where you find an issue with company one and you can actually now alert and get ahead of an issue with company two and so that there's true network effects? Talk about that.
00:12:43 · Alexa von Tobel, Daniel First, Cameron
[00:12:43] S2: Are you in a position where, let's say, you have three of the biggest companies on Axion's platform where you find an issue with company one and you can actually now alert and get ahead of an issue with company two and so that there's true network effects? Talk about that. [00:13:00] S0: We we never, share private data from one manufacturer to another. Where I think that this can happen is very often a lot of these OEMs, the the the systems aggregators, the manufacturers who assemble all the parts, they might find an issue that gets localized to a supplier, and then that supplier might be supplying that same part to many other manufacturers, or there might be lots of other models that that it's included in. So that can often happen. [00:13:24] S3: So, Daniel, when we first met back in 2022, you had just signed your first contract. And fast forwarding to today, you now serve many of the largest manufacturers in the world. And Alexa and I and our team have had a front row to your growth. But in your words, what has surprised you about the journey so far as you've scaled? What has changed, and what have you learned?
00:13:24 · Cameron, Daniel First
[00:13:24] S3: So, Daniel, when we first met back in 2022, you had just signed your first contract. And fast forwarding to today, you now serve many of the largest manufacturers in the world. And Alexa and I and our team have had a front row to your growth. But in your words, what has surprised you about the journey so far as you've scaled? What has changed, and what have you learned? [00:13:45] S0: I think that one of the the biggest things that's been surprising to us is that when we started off, we thought quality was really for for one department, for the quality department, and that it was really about defense. You know, you release a product, you're suddenly, you know, attacked with all this warranty costs, and you're trying to, like, defend it away. But, you know, at Harley Davidson, for example, within the first couple of months of us working with them, they had 12 different departments on the platform. Everybody from marketing to CX to supply chain to the software engineering team and product strategy. And when when we picked at it, it turned out that people were using quality to learn more about what their customers wanted. And a quality issue is just a a situation where a customer's needs are a mismatch with what your product is. And so they were actually using this to to inform not just the messaging and not just the CX of the existing product, but actually to inform the next generation of products. So I think that was a very big shift that we saw.