Liz: We started to understand we were falling behind in so many different areas as a country and that it wasn't enough to sort of just outsource and offshore all of this for efficiency's sake. Resiliency matters, but also The convergence of a lot of these types of technologies that now make building and scaling in the U. S. feasible and more economic. Voiceover: You're listening to Augmented Ops, where manufacturing meets innovation. We highlight the transformative ideas and technologies shaping the front lines of operations, helping you stay ahead of the curve in the rapidly evolving world of industrial tech. Here's your host, Natan Linder, CEO and co founder of Tulip. The frontline operations platform. Natan: Welcome everybody to a special episode of Augmented Ops. I know we just kind of wrapped up a season, but Liz Reynolds is here. Hi. How are you? Liz: It's great to be here, Natan. Natan: We just got back from Detroit from the re industrialized conference and it was a pretty interesting experience that merited us jumping into the studio and talk about what went down there. So we're going to jump into that, but Liz, this is also the first time we're coming together after many years of doing work, but now you've joined Tulip. So welcome. Liz: It's awesome. Yeah. Love being a strategic advisor and have, as you say, like, I can't remember the first time we met, but it's been such an exciting time. And particularly given where we are right now in the U. S. and elsewhere, this is really an exciting time to be working with you. Yeah, Natan: and maybe you can share a bit about what you were focusing before joining to Tulip and how we come together for those listening who don't know you. And then maybe a little bit about what you're going to focus on at Tulip and what's driving your interest. Liz: Sure. Well, I am a professor of the practice at MIT. I've been at MIT for longer than I'm going to admit. Um, but That is Natan: a common MIT people problem. People tend to stay there. It's Liz: such an interesting place. There's just so much going on and I love the nature of the place which is about doing and solving problems, right? So I did my PhD in urban studies and planning in biomanufacturing and got into this whole question of where can the U. S. compete in manufacturing because these are important jobs for the middle skilled worker and they're important for communities. And as somebody who came from Manchester, New Hampshire and saw the mills disappear there and the work head to China and now it's exciting to see it come back, right? Natan: You know, the history of Tulip, the first customers was New Balance with their factory in Lowell. Liz: I did not know that, that connection to Lowell. Natan: All the amazing giant brownstones, the industrial brownstones. Liz: Turned Natan: into condos. Liz: Right, so in Manchester, the mills are actually slowly have been revitalized and are now, we've got a number of companies and regenerative medicine going on with Dean Kamen and his work there. So Natan: you're industrializing. Liz: So we're re industrializing, what a great moment. So then just to say, you know, ran research center at MIT for a decade, um, helped co lead the MIT's task force on the work of the future, which was all about this question, how are the new technologies, AI, robotics, additive, going to change the nature of work? And subsequent to that, then actually headed down to Washington and worked for the Biden administration and the National Economic Council as Special Assistant to the President for Manufacturing and Economic Development. And it was from day one to day, you know, to the last day about supply chain crises. But the flip side of supply chain crises is actually, what are we missing in our own supply chain? What do we need to be building and rebuilding in the country? So very much in tune with reindustrialization. Do you have a Natan: perspective on The research and education aspect and how government plays into that. Liz: Oh, yeah. I don't need to pitch this too hard, but we've had an extraordinary change, right? Ten years ago, you know, was there a conference on reindustrialize? We've had a moment in which the supply chain vulnerabilities for the country, the geopolitical changes, the threat of climate, all of these things have converged. Natan: Global pandemics. Liz: Pandemics, exactly. And they've shown the vulnerability from PPE to semiconductors to critical minerals. Natan: Go to national security aspect as well. With what's happening globally and we need to be ready for. Liz: That's right. So national security, but now it's expanded actually into economic security, right? So semiconductors. I Natan: see them as a very intertwined. Yes, Liz: they are. Exactly. And I think that's now really understood by everyone. And so that's led to a whole range of investments from the federal government, right? We've had the CHIPS Act to try and rebuild some semiconductoring. We've had the Inflation Reduction Act, which is about our clean energy. We've got focus on critical minerals. And importantly, because the government can't do all this clean energy, right? The IRA and clean energy. But those have now crowded in. And that's what we're going to need is this public private piece to make this happen. Do you feel Natan: the government got the memo? Liz: A hundreds percent, and frankly I also think the government got the memo and partly this was because we figured out that we were being played by China. Mm hmm. Right? And now they have really provided those demand signals and the investment that is needed. And you know, we kept hearing about this a lot at reindustrialize, which is where are those demand signals? How are we going to support scale up? You know, a lot of momentum around this right now. Natan: Speaking of momentum. We came from pretty exciting two days in Detroit, at New Lab, which is an old book repository. Yeah, incredible. Amazing building, next to another amazing building. Liz: Next to the old train station, which Ford has redone. It's just Natan: extraordinary. It's beautiful. And we're both wearing our re industrialized shirts that we got. So shout out to the re industrialized crew. This event was pretty interesting, you know, speaking about momentum. Or lack thereof. Liz: Right. Natan: Share a little about the event in Genesis. You've been involved with the people setting it up and you spoke on a few panels and had a few discussions. That's right. Liz: You know what was incredible about this in some ways was, first of all, it was organized in about three plus months. Like there was just a momentum that came from, largely from the startup. And the VC community as Natan: well, which, Liz: you know, you can speak to that was not there 10 years ago and they came together and, and then brought in what I thought was super interesting. All a number of different aspects of the industrial base. So you had folks from. You know, you had your auto or your aerospace, but you had robotics, we had energy, we had critical minerals, we had transportation, there was space, you were touching almost every piece of the industrial. You had major Natan: B2B software vendors like Palantir, you had people who are from the DoD. Liz: Yeah, they had some government folks. But what I, I thought was interesting was, it wasn't your, it wasn't your typical manufacturing group. It wasn't. It really wasn't. And you've had, you know, a little bit of Silicon Valley and a little bit of DOD, but you had also, we had, there was machinists. I actually felt that there Natan: was like, Almost like an anti Silicon Valley vibe. It's like, we're going to do this in Detroit. Yeah. We're going to build a new Silicon Valley. There's this new alliance that is formed and proceeded to that. And I guess we could share some of the links, but a manifesto was like written and a moment where this, uh, really serious urgency is like, we need to do something else and re industrialize. At scale. At scale. Right. And everybody needs to come together. And that was the theme. It was definitely not industrial technology conference and it was not like a thought leadership conference. It's like, let's do something else conference. Right. The other part that was also very great to see is, um, a lot of hardware startups. Exactly. That are, you know, building, uh, new types of, um, nuclear reactors and new techniques to do dye and mold cutting and improving that. And, um, EV and battery. Charging solutions, a long list of like, you know, I met like a small group of machine tool builders to cut signs, you know, because like if you want to put a giant sign on a building that is happening all the time, you need a machine to do that and you're not going to order that sign in China and ship it because it's too expensive. So it was like an interesting combination. Liz: Right. And various different scales. I mean, folks who had, you know, were at the very early stage, um, and, you know, grounded in machine shops to folks who are really advanced, sophisticated software plans and introduction to larger scale. So it felt, Natan: so it felt like this is a moment. Right. So I moved to the U. S. 2008. And that's when I started working for, um, Heartland Robotic, then became Rethink Robotic that, uh, Rodney Brooks started to build the first collaborative robots back in the, feels like a million years ago, but for me it's like five minutes ago. Liz: Yeah. Natan: And I was like, where were you all this time? You know, and this is especially like with a wink to all my VC friends and, cause at the time. This is sort of, you know, then starting Formlabs and starting Tulip. People were like, huh, hardware companies, that's interesting. Or when we were talking about early days, Tulip pitches got a lot of responses that more or less the spirit of them was like, this is not on a VC timescale, which actually meant We don't know how to fund this. We're afraid this is too complex. And now you see re industrialized. It was just like all these VCs that are focused on this space right now. And they want to invest in dual use. How did we come to that moment? And why did it take us a decade? Liz: Yeah, I mean, Well, nothing like necessity being the mother of invention. I mean, we started to understand we were falling behind in so many different areas as a country and that it wasn't enough to sort of just outsource and offshore all of this for efficiency sake. Resiliency matters. That's kind of, I think, what came out of the pandemic, but also, and you can speak this better than anyone, but like this moment from a technology point of view, right? The convergence. of a lot of these types of technologies that now make building and scaling in the US feasible and more economic. Natan: Despite our real acute gaps, you know, we have a different system. This is not China or other places in the world. We actually like democracy. Lucky for us. Yeah. Yeah. We like that. We like free markets. We like innovation and we like capitalism. It's not a bad word. Right. It's a good thing on one end, but on the other end, like we don't also don't have the same industrial workforce anymore. Liz: Right. A lot of gaps. A lot of gaps. A lot of gaps. And at the same time, what I felt there was, uh, real consensus around is, this is not about reshoring production from Asia in the same way or, you know, repatriating certain assets. This is about doing it differently, building differently, designing differently, building on again, strengths in the kind of innovation. And winning differently. Yeah, I mean, that was a big theme as well. Natan: So we'll get to that in a second, because honestly, it's gonna be a bit difficult to like summarize what we've learned and re industrialize in like a few minutes, we'll do our best, promise. But before that, I think one anchor that was very clear across many speakers in many sessions, it was like, the American industrial base, With the allies and the supply chain that came together, made sure that the allies won. You know, supply chain won, not won, World War II, actually. You know, the examples people gave that, you know, Lend and Lease shipped over 6, 000 trucks. Some of them may have been built in this building that we're sitting in, because this used to be a Ford factory that, at the time, you know, it was producing Edsel car, Ford Edsels. Oh, yeah. That wasn't a very successful car, but in the 40s, it made armored. troop carriers. Right. So they sent 6, 000 of them on US ships to Russia. That's right. And Zhukov's army sped on jeeps to capture Berlin. And that was part of how the West won, how democracy won. Liz: Absolutely. Natan: And it's easy to forget because like it's been, it's been a while. But so was there was some, I'm not saying romantic in a way that is negative. I'm saying it's like, Liz: Well, what was possible in the moment of global crisis? Natan: So when I was sitting and listening to this, it's like, how did that happen? It happened because when the urgency was there and there was a national strategy, it wasn't random that we were up for the challenge. And it felt like there was a bit of romantic, like, we have to get back to that. We have to be, I think the idea was But I felt like you have to get back to the ability. Liz: That's it. It was just that we have the capacity and, you know, be prepared for doing important things, certainly from a national security point of view, because we've seen, obviously, that the U. S. has been stretched with the demands of Ukraine and what our defense industrial base can do. But at this point in time, defense industrial base and the rest of the industrial base are really intertwined. You know, one can't really survive without the other, so this is why that re industrialized message felt so powerful and was represented across so many different verticals, which I thought was So this was like Natan: an attempt to, I think, understand the national strategy and like try and coordinate? Like this word coordination, it's like not enough just to, well, let's see what the, the Let's see what the private sector does. Let's see what government does. Let's see. And how does it all come together? I thought, Liz: I actually thought the, the power of reindustrialize was for everyone to understand, you know, this huge depth of connectivity and interest in this topic. You know, it was almost like there was a calling that said, we're going to do this thing. And then people just flocked to this. I mean, they had over 600, 700 people, a huge wait list. Because people understood. That this is, they're part of something bigger. And often these folks are not, they don't use, they don't see advanced manufacturing as the foundation across all of these pieces, but in fact, you know, it's very interconnected. So it had this moment of sort of, uh, both setting the challenge ahead, but also that we are, there's a large coalition of the willing, uh, there's a lot of people who really believe in this and want to make this happen. Natan: Yeah. And one thing we should keep in mind, obviously this was very U. S. centric, but this issue is global. Like you look at Japan, for example, the mother of lean, you know, this is where Toyota production system was invented. And, and you go into factories in Japan today and they're beautiful, amazing factories, super lean, everything is in place. You could eat off the floor sometime, but. They're analog and they don't have enough capacity for production either, like from, from a people perspective. Right. So I think this is also a good segue for us to talk about, okay, whatever we learned, how can we try and summarize Liz: the discussions and the Natan: main themes, like for people who are not there and translate the urgency and what comes next. So what would you say? Well, I Liz: guess I heard a couple of themes that I think are important and they, again, important in a U. S. context, but probably in a broader context. The first was The importance of software, but software is a tool and it has to be integrated with the people side. And that is a huge challenge. You know, we have a shortage of people right now over Natan: So, so we, we heard this from a few people there and it was, because there was a lot of talk on automation and, and digitalization is going to lead the way and it's the path to, you know, making more complex things and all kinds of stuff and kind of led. Naturally to like, we have the technology here and we can make more complex and more valuable products and we will have the core skills to make them, but like the question of scale was not addressed anymore. How we get back to scale? What kind of scale? And that obviously you can't really do that. Without people, without bringing people who are now working for the, you know, more traditional five or six generation sometime manufacturing firm somewhere that, you know, maybe still in the family, maybe what moved to PE, next to the Greenfield new startup that is starting today, next to, you know, shops like Hadrian that is trying to reboot, how So, thank you very much. high end machine shops are kind of operating but they were lacking a lot of answers like how do you address the people aspect and the scale aspect. Liz: Right. And what the exciting part was, there was a lot of experimentation and there's a lot of, it was interesting to see even the investor side on figuring out how do we address the skills. What, did you Natan: see something specific that were like excited you? Liz: You know, it was interesting that the state of Michigan had a lot of stuff going on to try and bring in the next generation of workers and also upskill current workers. I mean, there was a real public private partnership on some of that that was intriguing. And the fact that there was a discussion, our friend Myles Arnone from Rebuild was saying, you know, don't forget software is a tool. And it has to be connected to humans and something that workers can use and that this is part of the rebuilding is also actually attracting the next generation into this field because we're definitely not going to have enough workers for the demand, I think, going forward. So technology will play a role. Immigration will play a role, but also building. Tools that are human centric is part of it. So I thought that was actually, by the end, it's funny how many people were acknowledging, you know, both their workforce challenges now, but what they're doing to try and address some of those problems. Natan: Yeah. It's not, not lost on us, Tulip. Of course. And anyone who would listen to us, what do we talk about? We talk about, well, we need to help you build a production system and yes, some bits and pieces of it is technology XYZ and the architecture in which it's organized and all those good things. And honestly. I'm not trivializing it, but it's relatively the easy part. The harder part is adoption and change management and adoption in the morning and adoption in the afternoon and in the evening and then every day. You Liz: walk away from those two days in Detroit, our issue is not innovation. We are, the innovation is like crushing it. It's in AI, it's in robotics, in all these areas. It's the adoption. How are you going to get? And it's difficult. So, from large firm to small firm, how are you actually going to accelerate adoption so people see the benefits for growth and productivity and all that? Natan: You know, I was thinking about characterizing this as kind of a strategic risk, explain. Because It's not that complicated if you're ambitious and talented and good to come get educated in the United States. Actually, it happens all the time. When I think about MIT, think about how I got to the US, you know, lots of great schools over. So the world comes here to learn how to innovate, but then if they can get to scale here. Where are they going to build? They're going to take the knowledge and the innovation and the techniques and their relationship connection, and they're just going to go somewhere else. Liz: So that was another thing that came up that's important to recognize is that whole question of how do you scale up in the US and what the challenges have been. And so actually I was part of some research at MIT in 2013 2014. that tracked MIT startups, which had a hardware component to them. They had the wind at their backs. They'd raised 70 to 80 million in venture funding, you know, very, very strong, kind of out of the gate story. But then when they hit the first pilot production or the fact that they needed to raise tens of millions of dollars to actually start to demonstrate the technology at scale, they could not find the capital and they couldn't find the talent either. So they're often were pulled to Asia. I mean, a lot of our clean energy companies, that's, you know, what happened. Natan: I met quite a few founders, you know, in the seed A stage the past couple of days, exactly in that situation, they raised maybe less, you know, like 10 or 15 and they have the core stuff working and maybe they're sitting at the engine or in other places like that, like New Lab and they're like, I don't know. I mean, I want to stay optimistic here because like, it seems like now there's a new cohort of VCs or, you know, Andreessen Horowitz started talking about American dynamism. Now it's like becoming like a trend. I hope, I hope it doesn't become a trend and a hype because the one thing I've learned in my personal quest in advanced manufacturing startups, hardware startups, that you got to have a long term view. Otherwise, like, you can't fund those things in the economics that govern, like, traditional VC, say, the past, say, 20 years, you know. But Liz: that's what I think we have now, is this convergence on the long term view, that the U. S., along with other countries, has to think of the world now through the lens of supply chains. We were not doing that a decade ago. So that Natan: was interesting on that point. The was the first time the folks from the DOD shared that, you know, 2024, they put out this national, uh, defense, industrial based strategy. Industrial based strategy. Yeah. Liz: Defense. Defense, industrial based strategy, Natan: defense, industrial based strategy. And I think they also mentioned that in the next few months they will also publish the implementation of that. So it's not just like, okay, here's the strategy. Right. So things are moving. Liz: That's right. And, and I think on the scale up side, the discussion was. It's not clear venture is the answer, right? They're not necessarily traditional vendor. It's not only the answer and that we need to come up with more creative, again, it could be public private models that are going to blend the financing. But if you think about what the federal government has done, there's a, first of all, an acknowledgement we've got a problem and they've set up a bunch of offices. The DOD now has an office of strategic capital. That is now going to try and fill that gap between the startup and sort of acquisition. We've got a new Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chain at the DOE, Department of Energy, Office of Clean Energy Demonstration providing those hundreds of millions of dollars of what it takes to actually demonstrate at scale some of this technology. That's the kind of thing the capital markets in the U. S. are not organized for that, you know. You go to other countries. The government plays a huge role there, but historically that's not what we do. We have obviously acknowledged that we need that kind of investment from a semiconductor point of view, right? And a few in some of the other areas. I Natan: had this conversation with one CEO of a multinational. That shared a bit of how they set up in Singapore. It was just an amazing story. It's like, yeah, it took us two months. Right. We got the land and we got from draft to contracting to go. And, and all of a sudden we were building a factory in Singapore faster than we thought. And of course, Singapore is its own story and it's very different and smaller. And strategic Liz: to be there for companies. Strategic, Natan: but the speed in which the Singaporean government moved to, I don't know, create their reality. You know, to, to kind of take control is very impressive and there's a lot to learn from that. So, and there was like all this talk there about China this and China that, but the thing that I saw happening in the, in the past couple of decades is that, of course, China is kind of a center of gravity, but it dissipated in the region. You know, Samsung has like, uh, cities in Vietnam. And there's a lot going on in India right now. It's not showing all the way to, say, the Immaculate Door in Mexico. Also that, but it's also going to India organically because of the size of the market, because of what the Indian government is pushing. Liz: And the situation in China has been a little bit more volatile for companies. So they're shifting strategy, right? So there's a, often a China plus strategy. So you want to serve the Chinese market, but then you're, you know, Moving things elsewhere. And that's just the reality right now of a shifting sense of the global economic order, you know, supply chains, what resilience really means, what it looks like. I mean, these are all things that I think are going to be with us going forward. Natan: So a lot going on. I think we want to end on the role of government. And maybe you can share a bit about your recent work with the task force folks at Liz: SCSP, Special Competitive Natan: Studies Liz: Project. Natan: Yeah, Liz: it's a think tank in Washington, and it actually came out of the National Commission on AI that Eric Schmidt led and now is a nonprofit that he's funding that's focused on national security and critical technologies. And so they've covered a whole host of what they consider critical technologies for the country and the recent report that came out last week is focused on advanced manufacturing. And I really think it's put a stake in the ground. So, we're going to Natan: put a link. It's out, it's public, right? So, it's out, it's public. I know this is tough, but like, if you have to summarize the key findings there, what are the highlights of this, of this report? Yeah, so, I guess I would Liz: hit on a couple things. So, first of all, it goes from ecosystem to moonshot. Right, so it's not stuff that's going to happen overnight, but it also requires us to think about from the micro, you know, how we're going to get people into this industry, how we're going to help support the small and medium sized firms and get them incented in investing in digital to the moonshots, you know, what is it going to take? Do we need a manufacturing ARPANET? You know, these kind of big, interesting thoughts, but I think it focuses on the adoption as a major issue. I think it focuses on, on the innovation, like we have to kind of continue to ramp up our investment in R& D because that is really where we're going to build in, in new ways. It also focuses on the workforce. What can we be doing to really think about increasing our workforce and attracting and upscaling those who are in the workforce? So all of those are key pieces to the report. But as I keep saying, everybody can find something that speaks to them on this, and what it really does is, um, is hopefully mobilizes everyone to be thinking about, you know, wave one of industrial strategy in the last couple years really helped set the stage for the what. Like, we really need to rebuild in semiconductors, and we need clean energy, we need to be thinking about critical minerals, etc. But I think the next wave is exactly how are we going to do this? How are we going to reindustrialize? What are the tools we need? You know, what are the public private partnerships we need? How do we build that urgency? Natan: And you know, as it comes to government, one important thing to remember is, is also, I don't have data to fully back this up, but it's like, I feel like it's the most bipartisan thing that exists because it just affects everybody. Absolutely. And, you know, we're in an election year, and I think whatever happens in the election, we don't know, but it's not going away. That's right. This is not like, oh, we're just saying it because it's an election year. Liz: No, no. Far from it. I think there is, like, a consensus that actually we don't have a choice. We really need to be. Making this investment. And the trajectory we've been on has left us in a very vulnerable spot. So we've got to change that trajectory. And Natan: the thing I got from the report and the discussion, because we had a few good sessions, is like, it's now almost like prime time to link like the future of these, you know, new production systems, you know, driven by technology and AI with manufacturing strategy, because it seems like the Washington is like all over like AI is the thing. But it hasn't Liz: been connected actually to the manufacturing agenda. Not connected. Right. But, you know, I think industry I think Washington is always going to lead on this and needs to, but I think Washington now is really attuned to this issue and has taken some very bold steps to try and change the direction here. And I think that will hopefully continue because it doesn't stop with semi, as you and I know, and from what the conference said, it does not stop with semiconductors and clean energy and critical minerals and you know, there's another wave and where the US really should be a global leader. Natan: Yeah, Liz, I think this is our cliffhanger. Right? Because Stay tuned. Stay tuned because we're actually, we're not just sitting here analyzing the conference and re industrializing. Yeah, kudos for the It's real time. It's like real time and there's a lot of action coming and uh, we're going to do our part. Liz: It was motivating. The whole thing was It was Natan: definitely motivating. So the combination of this urgency and inspiring and reality check and yet good energy. Like a mix of energy and enthusiasm to build. Right. It's kind of time to build. Liz: That's right. And it's got to be collaborative too. I mean, you had state folks there, you had federal folks, you had the startups, you had, you know, some of the large OEMs. That's what it's going to take. Natan: That's awesome. So we're going to set up the next episode and share more things. Report back. Yeah, report back on what we're building. And what our customers are building, what partners are building. Thanks for joining, Liz, this first Augmented episode. Great. And Liz: not the last. Natan: Not the last. And, uh, have a nice break and we'll see you all soon. Look forward to it. Thanks. Voiceover: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Augmented Ops Podcast from Tulip Interfaces. We hope you found this week's episode informative and inspiring. You can find the show on LinkedIn and YouTube or at tulip. co slash podcast. If you enjoyed this episode. Please leave us a rating or review on iTunes, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Until next time!