Latest / The ReForge Podcast / We Went Looking for Duct Tape (with Daniel Scott Mitchell) | ReForge 025

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We Went Looking for Duct Tape (with Daniel Scott Mitchell) | ReForge 025 · The ReForge Podcast

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to the Reforged Podcast.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Matthew Chad, and we're here to explore all things AI, automation, and the American worker.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_02: Proving that the American reindustrialization is possible, pivotal, and pressing.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for joining us today.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: Let's get into the episode.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back, everyone, and welcome to episode 25 of the Reforge Podcast.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: We are joined today by the one and only Daniel Scott Mitchell.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: You might know him from his ex-celebrity status.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: We are thrilled to have him.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome, Daniel.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for having me on the show, man.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, it's great to have you.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: And for the audience, Daniel is co-founder and CTO of Tacton, where they build fast, affordable manufacturing technology for small and mid-sized manufacturers.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh before Tacton, he spent his career in engineering and manufacturing, including the Skunkworks team at Tesla, and as well as uh program managing the launch of Rivian's electric delivery vans, excuse me.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: He started Tacton in May 2025 with his college friend Carson, and the team spent its first six months touring 150 plus American factories before building anything, which led to sense manufacturing their machine intelligence product.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: So again, Daniel, welcome.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: This is a guy who obviously has spent plenty of time on the shop floor, probably almost as much as Matt has.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: That was an epic uh Twitter trip that you took.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: That was so cool.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_02: I was watching along and I would see it in units of like 20.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: So it was like we just saw 20 factories, then we saw 40.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so you did 150.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_02: Was that the total?
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: We did, yeah, between my co-founder Carson and I.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I will say that's that's a real testament um to our investors who agreed with us that the most prudent use of funds was spending the first six months after launching the business not selling product, going and learning.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that's something that like I think would be hard for misaligned investors to stomach to say, like, hey, we're gonna take your money and then not start making it back for six months.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that really helped us narrow in on exactly what we wanted to be working on and why.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um I we have a yeah, that's incredible.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's a it's a pretty big jump from scaled manufacturing like Tesla, right?
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_02: To what the the smaller shops around the country deal with.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: For sure.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that that's really the learning curve that I started to experience toward the tail end of my career in automotive when I was working at Rivian.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: I had the honor of being on this team they call the supply chain task force, which is basically like a manufacturing tiger team that sat under the VP of supply chain.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: And our job was to go into the supply chain, into the tier two, tier three manufacturers and understand where the bottlenecks were, apply technology, apply manufacturing best practices to try and help help solve problems.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, oh my gosh, this is a completely different world from what I was seeing and living and experiencing when I was at Rivian's manufacturing plant.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that that started to open my eyes to say, you know, there's so much more out there and so much opportunity, so much green space to go build technology to help small and mid-sized manufacturers.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh absolutely I want to hear about the basically the product mix.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, because at Rivian, like the product mix is here are the vehicles we make and what color would you like it in, right?
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I granted, I know there's there's some deviations between the vehicles, but uh I'm sure you saw, I mean, probably tens of thousands of products either being run or or being set up to run if you saw that many shops.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: For sure.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I've I've been to one shop where they're running several thousand SKUs in one shop.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um nightmare.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: Nightmare, but also incredible to to see the absolutely the amount of organization and honestly, a lot of these people doing stuff on whiteboards and with paper and thousands of SKUs and still shipping 99 plus percent on-time delivery.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's a that's a uh um an exercise in building a strong culture and strong leadership and strong organization to be able to get that done without technology helping you move move the ball forward.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, absolutely.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it it the discipline is incredible, but then I mean, that's one one example of it.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: You multiply that times X instances of that, and it really sets the stage for how remarkable America's production capacity really is, despite how much has been eroded, despite how much of a legacy industry it still remains, the ability to produce as much as we do and build the things that we do with thousands of SKUs using whiteboards and very manual processes.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's really, really uh testament to to the men and women who are on the shop floors building us stuff.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: So it's important.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so Daniel, how do you get, I mean, if if you're if there's a strong team and they have that type of SKU diversity and they don't have a lot of automation, they don't have a lot of software.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: That means most of the knowledge of how to run a custom setup is in somebody's head, right?
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_02: How do you get it out of Frank's head and into you know some sort of organizational knowledge probably?
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_02: A million-dollar question, billion-dollar question, probably.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_02: Well, this is our chance to hear the answer, Colin.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know that I've got a great answer for it.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I've I've heard a lot of people approaching things different ways.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think one of the great things that that people are doing is just starting to get better at writing stuff down.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: And if it's hard to write stuff down, then take a video.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: And if it's hard to take a video, then at least record audio.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: Get someone to think about what they're doing and narrate it out loud.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's been super helpful in a lot of shops that I know, the owners, specifically lots of these shops, brave owners who made their money in New York City doing finance, and over the course of the last two years is saying, I want to get, I want to touch something real.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: I want to work on something real.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: And they're getting involved by buying and maintaining and preserving a multi-generational family business and making sure that you know that that business keeps able to produce the parts that our economy needs.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, these guys, some of them have never been in a machine shop before in their lives.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so how are they learning what's going on in the shop floor?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: Matt, the answer is you got to keep Frank around for as long as you can and learn as much from Frank for as much as you can.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: But one of the couple interesting ways that I've seen people doing that is even something as simple as like throwing a pair of meta glasses on him and saying, Can you just wear these and record what you're doing while you're doing it and narrate it out loud?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: This isn't going on the internet.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: This isn't going to be repeated to anyone else.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: But just for our understanding, for our training, if we build a document later from this, can you at least narrate us what you're going through?
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: That has seemed to be a uh pretty low barrier to entry way to get someone to document what they're doing and document a lot of their tribal knowledge without the burden of having them say, create an SOP manual for someone else, even just using something that helps them look at things from their point of view and say, just narrate it to me as though I'm your apprentice going through your day.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's something that I don't think requires like a really complex technology stack.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: You can use something that's pretty much commercially available off the shelf, though I don't don't think they make those meta glasses that are Z87 rated.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um they don't, but they do make replacement lenses.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: I looked into this.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen those and also the side shields.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, yep.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, you get a lot of things.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_02: That's how you know you guys are real factory dorks when you're safety rating metaglasses.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_02: That's awesome.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so uh can you tell us about the product?
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_02: Like after the six-month journey, 150 plants, what'd you find out?
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: What what direction did that put you on?
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'll explain the ambitions of where we want to go and then explain why we're working on what we're working on first, because I think we needed that to get where we want to go.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um I've seen a lot of really interesting technology applications, even in high mix manufacturing, um, when folks have had billions of dollars on their balance sheet and hundreds of engineers to solve the problem.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and there's a lot of those outcomes that if you choose the Pareto 20% of those features, 20% of that technology, it could have 80% of the impact for a lot of shops out there.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not super complex to build and it's not super expensive to implement.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that's our goal is to take kind of take the Pareto principle to all the advanced manufacturing technology that exists out there and kind of make something super similar to the Kirkland brand version of technology, manufacturing technology stack that may not be the sexiest thing out there.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: It may not have all the bells and whistles, but you know for dang sure you're getting a good value for it and it's good quality.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: That's what we want to build in manufacturing tech.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: The first product that's that that's such a huge point to make, though, is it it doesn't have to be sexy.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of money um flowing to groups trying to make something super sexy when it just doesn't need to be, it just needs to work and needs to get the job done.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: So hearing you kind of frame it as the Pareto principle uh is refreshing, frankly, but also we need more of that.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: So keep it up.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I as a guy who's been in interested in deep tech, and like I host a deep test deep tech podcast, what we're working on is not deep technology.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not reinventing, I'm not inventing anything new.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: We're not innovating at the frontier of building new things from scratch that have never been seen before.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, what we're doing is we're we're rebuilding a lot of the interesting stuff, but simpler and cheaper and more easy to implement, building it with the mind of the small and mid-sized manufacturers that that customer persona at the very, very forefront of our mind.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: Matt, the thing that we built to start with is super simple when we explain it this way.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh machine learning enabled edge computing and sensing that helps us tell on any industrial machine, is it currently running?
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yes or no?
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: And was it running well?
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: Health perspective by tracking the power and vibration signatures, was the machine running well?
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: 1410 days once once per minute, 24-7, giving you a little heartbeat on your machine saying, was I producing parts and making money or was I sitting idle?
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: And if I was, if I was running, if I was producing parts, was there anything anomalous about the power of vibration signals on that machine that could indicate something about the machine health?
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of behind-the-scenes work that our team is doing to make it sound that simple and make applying it that simple.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: But 15-minute install, non-invasive sensing, doesn't void any warranties, is air gapped from your machine so it doesn't touch your CMMC secure enclave and just sits on the outside of every single machine and tells you whether your machine was being utilized and if it is being utilized, whether it's healthy.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_02: So for every every machine that I've got that I want to have some intelligence on, I can just install a device on every machine, and then I get this information back.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um I'm imagining that with this data feed, I could, you know, I could determine uptime, I could take a stab at OEE.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's probably not perfect, but it's it's better than zero information.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: And um that's kind of the inspiration is like a lot of people are at zero.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: A lot, a lot of people are at zero, or a lot of people are at 100% OEE tracking on their two newest machines in their shop, but the 28 old ones, they're still at zero.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so what can we do?
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: Again, it's not 100%.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: What's the 80% that we can derive with 20% of the cost that helps a lot of manufacturers unite their entire fleet and get a baseline understanding on what's going on in my shop without me having to be there 24-7 to look at it?
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_02: Then I think as we have this kind of silver tsunami of Frank's, right?
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: So a lot of these guys you met are at the tail end of their career.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the first thing that's gonna go is maintenance, right?
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: That's the first thing that's gonna walk out of the door.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, do you do you think this solution helps with predictive maintenance that you know business owners can actually plan on how to have a proper maintenance cycle?
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's not intense enough yet, or intensive enough yet, where I can listen to a vibration or watch a vibration signature go awry or a power signature go awry and tell you exactly what's going wrong with the machine.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: We're desperately asking our customers to help us log as much information as possible so we can learn and make it better and better and better to see if we have early warning signals.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: But the way we view it right now is very similar to a Frank walking around the shop floor who's heard this machine operating for years and years and years, and he can hear that something's weird.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: He may not know exactly what's wrong with it, but he can hear that something's weird or he can see that something's weird.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's what that's the analogy of what we're able to provide 24-7 on every single machine.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: We've got a set of eyes and ears with technology that sit on the machine and are constantly learning what normal looks like during operation and also keeping track of are things starting to creep in the wrong direction, or have we seen anything severe, severely anomalous over the course of the last minute that indicates that something could be wrong with the machine.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: We never ask anyone to like go emergency stop your machine if we send you an alert.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: But the way we view it is like if you see an alert on our platform, we're telling you exactly what it was.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: It was magnitude of vibration in the y-axis spiked.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: We're telling you exactly what that was.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: So you've got that information in the future, but treat it as though you walked by the machine and it sounded weird.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: Or treat it as though frankly.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's reductive, Daniel, but it sounds kind of like a whoop for the machine, you know.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: It is a lot like a whoop.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm a I'm an Aura ring guy, so like I wear my aura ring.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's your heart rate monitor, it's your blood oxygen, it's all of that.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't know what's going on inside my body, but corollary, it does kind of understand what's going on.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: And aura has a great feature.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: I like I I applaud them for their naming of it because we're trying to come up with something similar.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I just want to copy the aura name and I know we can't.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: Is symptom radar is like we don't know exactly what's going on inside the machine.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: The aura ring doesn't know exactly what's going on inside my body, but they do understand if the symptoms are different.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: If my temperature's off, if my heart rate's off, if my blood oxygen is different, they can they can help diagnose that with the symptom radar.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I like the analogy to the whoop strap or the aura ring.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's very, very similar to what we've built for the outside of machines.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, one of the things that I I think is cool and was great about what you're doing.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, there is the MT Connect or other proprietary, some of the proprietary brands have their communication protocols that you can pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: But small shops forking over tens of thousands of dollars a year per machine for a bunch of information that frankly, if they're starting from zero, they have no idea what to do with it.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it it's the information overload.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: What you guys are doing is really providing you know a clear runway for a lot of these shops to start to better understand their business, their machines, how they operate.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, as obviously your product evolves and is able to, you know, offer them more, they're going to be able to use more of that.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: But for so many shops, you know, I I've seen a handful of them, they they pay the subscriptions and it is they don't use any of it.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: They they and it's it's crazy.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I mean, seeing something that is a more affordable and frankly, much more practical solution is just awesome.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that that's all we need more of is solutions to problems, not just solutions in search of problems, I think.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: One like asterisk, I'd say, to what you've mentioned.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: Two things.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: I love the MT Connect protocol, I think it's incredible.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: We are starting to build PLC integration via the MT Connect protocol as an additional sensor feed into our platform that allows us to layer in information around the feeds and speeds of the machine alongside the vibration and power to help give us an understanding.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: But the challenge there with MT Connect is I walk into a shop and not 100% of their machines on their shop floor give you this level of visibility.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um you've got to have a shop that's got something relatively new, and I use relatively pretty generously, but a lot of shops that I've seen personally, I mean, they still have you know a fairly manual lathe that they're running.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: They've got machines that don't have much intelligence capabilities.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: Period.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: There's a customer I visited yesterday.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: Has he doesn't exactly know the vintage of the machine, but he thinks it's 1890s and it used to run off of a main line, so like the belt driven on wood wheels, the yeah, the big ones from a water wheel outside the plant, and the water wheel would would spin belts which would spin the main line, and this thing would pull power from it.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: They've converted it since it uses a motor.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: But fortunately, he's saying, could could you install on this piece of equipment?
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, absolutely.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: Does it vibrate and does it pull power?
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: Those are the two questions I ask.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: If the answer to those questions are yes, then we can try throwing a sense device on it.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I think try is an important word too.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we tried to learn a lot about how and why small and mid-sized manufacturers invest in technology and how and why and when they don't.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: And part of the reason that a lot of folks aren't as technologically advanced as they'd like to be is simply because the vendors make it too much of a pain in the butt to even give it a give it a try, right?
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: Minimums, minimum contract lengths.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you unlock something on one machine and turns out you don't like it, you can't get your money back, or you can't move that feature that you unlocked on one machine to the other.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: We've tried to make it like no nonsense simple to say, if I were a shop owner, put myself in those shoes, if I were a shop owner, what would I want as a solution to make it really easy for me to experiment with technology?
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: And part of that is being able to own the hardware so I can move it around from machine to machine to machine if I want.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: Understanding that if I want to try it out risk-free, there's someone that will put a guarantee on the back end of it because they're willing to stand on business enough to say, hey, if this doesn't work for you, we'll buy the hardware back from you.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: And then also not requiring a minimum contract length when someone buys or requiring a minimum order quantity.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: I don't care if someone buys just one.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: I'm happy if someone buys just one because the vast majority of those people are ones who later come back and say, hey, I want two, then I want four, then I want six, and hey, let's do 16 more to cover the rest of my shop.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's the natural way I would experiment as a person.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I feel like not enough manufacturing technology vendors are being sympathetic to the way people actually want to experiment with new energy.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe we will like not keep all of those perks forever.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: But being in the early stage we are in the business, it makes it really, really easy for us to reach out to someone who's even aware of this technology segment and say, Hey, by the way, are you willing to experiment with this?
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the first time someone's asked them, do you want to experiment versus do you want to outfit every single machine in your entire shop?
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, and it doesn't surprise me necessarily to hear you say that.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: You know, a lot of these vendors, suppliers, whatever you want to call them, that that are bringing in tech, they didn't start by targeting small, mid-sized shops.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: They started with the big boys, where you've got your legal, you've got so many hoops to jump through.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: You they have those built-in protections rules, whatever you want to call it.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so they've just tried to force that down onto smaller shops.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: They don't realize that a lot of these smaller shops they have handshake agreements, they don't have you know long-standing, you know, open-ended orders.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's they've worked with this company for 20 years, and so they keep doing work with them.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very different dynamic, and so they don't understand that.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so having somebody come in and say, Look, we're not trying to force you to act like a Fortune 500, we're not trying to make you change everything.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: We're here to actually solve a problem for you.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's unfortunately rare, but it doesn't surprise me here, you know, and see the success you guys have had because of that.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Colin, you were talking earlier about like what makes American industry unique.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's one of them is 98% of factories in the US have less than 500 employees.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: Look at that split across other countries, specifically ones that are actually industrial powerhouses that are that are worth paying attention to.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the vast majority of countries in the world do not have an ecosystem that supports small, mid-sized businesses that are owned by families.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: Some of our customers, the business is 130 plus years old and it's in its fourth or fifth generation of ownership in the same family.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: That type of family business actually contributing to the backbone of the economy does not exist in the same form in any other country in the world.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm confident to say that.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: And it's simple.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: And tech vendors, for the most part, I don't blame them, right?
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: You you've raised a bunch of money from an investor.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: You have if you have to only close 10 deals from large large companies to pay back their money versus working with a thousand customers or 10,000 customers to make the same amount of money, it just makes sense to focus upstream.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: But we we are trying to be a little bit different, and that's why I applaud our investors for being aligned with our mission.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: Is the hope is to build something durable?
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, let's talk about that.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: You said earlier, uh, not a lot of investors are going to be so well aligned that they support you spending six months, you know, going on the great American road trip of factories and seeing these, you know.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: I guess maybe what was some of that discussion like, but also, you know, let's talk about that experience.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: What what were some of the most, I guess, interesting takeaways you found from the 150 plus you know visits you made?
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, well, the one thing that sticks in my mind, which was the uh actual genes.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Of building the product that we built today is the number of people I saw with like a nest Google Nest camera or a ring camera or uh a walkie-talkie or a baby monitor duct taped on the inside of their machine.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: We looked like when we were looking for inspiration on what technology to build, we were looking for duct tape, like physical duct tape in the plant.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: Where's the duct tape?
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because that indicates that there's a real problem there that someone spent time to solve themselves, but odds are it's not the perfect solution and they don't want to maintain that solution forever.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's exactly where duct tape is used.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: Is when you want to fix something and it's bad enough, you have to fix it, but it's not permanent.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: So we were looking for find the duct tape, ladies and gentlemen.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: Find the duct tape and solve it.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: We were looking for duct tape, and the most duct tape we saw was around people just trying to get an understanding.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: Is my machine running?
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, no.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so that that's why we went out and built what we built.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: But I I mean, the overwhelming thing that I learned outside of looking for physical and digital duct tape is just the the sheer impressiveness that a lot of these family small family owned businesses have.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: They we a specific customer of ours, I'm gonna shout them out, Atlas Toolworks.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Zach Models, a friend of ours, and he's also in the X community, reached out from X, and their business has supported several different fundamental generations of technology, everything from tele telegraphs and telegrams to telephones to telecom to now they're on spacecraft that are that are in space.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's like several generations of a very similar industry, and then also they have evolved their business several times several times over several generations to be able to keep up with the latest, to be able to serve customers in the best way possible, and then also use the best production equipment to be able to pick produce those parts.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: That's just one.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Zach comes to mind, but that's just one of several dozen family businesses where we've seen the same level of history, the same level of innovation.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I think a misconception a lot of people have is thinking, uh, you know, small, medium shop owners, someone who's a baby booner, booby baby booner, and they're about to retire.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, they're probably a curmudgeon and they don't like technology.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's the misconception that a lot of people have.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: And to some extent, that's not to say it's not true.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's not to say it isn't true, but to your point, there's a lot of absolutely incredible multi-generational family, you know, manufacturing companies.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: We had Jack on our last episode, Jack Watson, you know, fourth generation.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's like you you don't hear enough about those, but that is you put that into the context you just did from telegraphs to putting parts on spaceships.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: I I mean, that is incredible.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like that context is just really mind-blowing.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: And if you look at the the responsibility that Jack has to maintain this family business, and they view themselves as stewards of the business, not just owners of the business, stewards of the business for the next generation.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Jack's an awesome example of it.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: He knows he needs technology to be able to survive and be able to compete.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: And he knows that they're gonna have to adopt technology and evolve the way that they operate because he's seen the last four generations before him do the same exact thing.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so no one that's survived, their business has survived for 130 years.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: If you look and they're using numerically controlled machines, you already know that they've made a massive fundamental change in the way that they operate because most shops didn't have those 30 years ago.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: No, I I saw some statistic.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: I want to say, like in the early 90s, it was less than 10% of shops that had a relatively modern CNC, and it's like, wow, we that's crazy if you go.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's you're not necessarily gonna find a Shenzhen type shop every single place, but I mean, that's a pretty big leap.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I think though, where you're getting at is a really important point, is yes, there are some of those curmudgeon types that they don't want to do things, they it is what it is, but the the companies that have survived, those third, fourth generation companies, there is something there, a mentality that they've built into the culture of that company.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: And what's made them successful and so durable is a willingness and a desire to continue to get better any way, shape, or form.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's you know, obviously exciting to me.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's that's so motivating and encouraging.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: But I I guess my question would be of those 150 plus factories you visited, what's maybe the flip side of somebody who, yes, we we want to embrace this, we want it.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: What's the flip side of, yeah, no, we we're not eager for change.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: We we like the way things are, we're happy with the status quo.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, did did you encounter much of that where you kind of had that pushback or people who just they didn't want to didn't want to see the world evolve around them?
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: There's definitely some.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that it may come down to the industry that they're in, the the history that their family has in running that business.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of people have been burned by technology vendors in the past, and they've they're still carrying those scars.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so there's no one that I met that I would not happily have as a customer.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: And there's very few people that we met who have not signed on to be a design partner of ours and to help us at least give us feedback and design new products.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we only visited 150 factories, but our design partner network encaptures 200 plus.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: So we've met and virtually met and virtually signed on design partners that exceed the number of total factors that we visited.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: So that helps us when we want to build something new or we want to change a feature, it helps us get quick feedback from people who are actually running shop machines on the shop floor to say, thumbs up or thumbs down, do this or don't do that, or do this, but do it a little bit differently.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um vast majority of people were willing to be collaborative.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: There's some people who I think are just a little bit slower than others to come around to it.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of people, it's because they've they were early adopters once and they got burned once, and now they said, never again am I gonna spend X number of you know, hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dollars and commit ourselves to make a huge technology change without first seeing that it actually works for a lot of other people first.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so there's a lot of people that I think when we first discussed our product with them, they said, like, great, let me know when more people actually use it, or let me know when it actually works, versus can I be your first beta tester?
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um But I think that's the same with any product.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's the same with any industry.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: I think manufacturing owners, there's there's a there's a huge misconception and misalignment, and I don't like this attitude that a lot of people have that are basically saying like the boomers need to die off or the boomers need to retire for American industry to be able to have a resurgence.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think that's the case at all.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I I think we I mean you you have 150 plus you know case studies that I would argue you're in a better position to push back on that that notion than most people.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: You you met with a lot of those boomer owners, they want to disappear.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: For sure, but but I don't even think I like there's still so much more to learn.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't think we're experts.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think we have just started to scratch the surface, but you're right, Colin.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe we've seen more than the average Joe.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but not a lot of people have had an incentive to actually go visit 150 small medium small medium factories.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it it took a lot of time, it took a lot of effort, and we we spent a good amount of resources on traveling around too.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't blame anyone for having this misconception, but if anyone's listening or willing to change their mind, I'd urge them to consider what a world looks like where we preserve lots of these businesses rather than waiting for them to fail and then buying their assets or assuming all their work.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of people out there that think, you know, if if we're gonna have CNC reshore itself completely to the United States, that we need all this mom and pop CNC shops to die and we'll just need 10 Hadrians out there to scoop up all the work.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that there's a version of this that I would much rather see that I think is a lot more American and a lot more true to our tradition, which is maintain 98% of our businesses being small, maintain 98% of our businesses employing real people from a local local town, and there's documented evidence of the fact that small and mid-sized businesses do a better job at injecting capital into their surrounding communities.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's a little bit of an exaggeration.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: They build the fibers.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they they they're the ones who are sponsoring little league teams, who are doing PGA meetings.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they're they are you know fiber of a lized community.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: So this is this is my exaggeration, and I'm politicizing it for sure.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_01: But if you want to save the middle class, you got to save this mom and pop machine shops.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_01: The you can't you you won't have a middle class in America without these 98% of manufacturers being small and mid-sized family owned businesses.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's uh, you know, again, one of those things that makes uh you know American industry particularly absolutely unique, you know, compared to the rest of the world, like you said, you know, you just you don't have that.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's they're either large corporations or they're state state subsidized or both, or the the local regulations make it impossible for small small mom and pop shop to actually contribute meaningfully to the economy.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: The the ecosystem we have in the US is definitely unique, and I think it's worth saving.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: I I agree.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: So we got a few more minutes here.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: What is next for Tacton?
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: What what are you guys working on?
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: What cool stuff?
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: What's the direction?
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there's a lot of things that are on our minds, if you can imagine.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_01: There's there's a lot of stuff that we want to fix out there in the world, and a lot of stuff that people, especially, especially once they've seen that we have a little bit of a track record of being able to deliver on, hey, I have a problem, can you help me solve it?
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: You can only imagine the the influx of ideas we're constantly getting from people around what what what is going wrong in their shops and what we could potentially fix.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: We don't actually have anything concrete in the hopper yet, but also we're we're definitely exploring a lot of stuff in the information technology space, we're exploring stuff in the material supply space, and we're also exploring stuff in the supply chain and networking space.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: All of those are areas where we've gotten a lot of feedback from people saying the existing vendors are either too expensive or too hot, too challenging to integrate.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the way that we look for duct tape, one of the tells that we're also looking for in the manufacturing ecosystem as a place where we could potentially help create a fix is I call this like the prefix versus the a la carte menu.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, a lot of people, um, startups included, I'm I'm gonna, I'm gonna call out a couple startups here, think that the best way to build a technology platform for manufacturers is to build the everything in one platform.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the factory brain, we connect to everything in your entire shop.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um I fundamentally don't think that a lot of shop owners are willing to adopt something like that because you could take the same two buildings, duplicate them, the same set of machines inside them, duplicate them, the same raw material, and they're building the same part to the same print and shipping it to the same customer in the same location.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: And the processes inside those four walls will look completely different.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: And both of them can create a part that's well within spec, and both of them can make a good profit.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so I don't think there's a one size fits all.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think there's, you know, a giant software platform that's built exactly one way that can solve everyone's problems.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I would much prefer rather than going out to when I personally go out to dinner, I would much prefer rather than going to like a fancy restaurant where there's a prefix menu and you just sit down and you're charged$500 and you have to eat a bunch of weird foams and saps and things like that, versus being able to go to like a good steakhouse and just choose exactly what kind of steak I want and exactly what sides I want.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: I want the a la carte menu, not the prefix menu.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of manufacturing tech owners buy technology the same way.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: So we're looking for where there's a large a la carte or a large prefix menu and say, is there a way that we can find the Pareto and build an a la carte menu that makes it easy for people to invest in technology?
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_00: And as long as your steak is cooked rare, then then we're good.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: I'm more of a medium rare guy, but but I I would much rather rare than well done.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you that, Colin.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: There we go.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_00: We can agree on that one then.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: So tell us where people can find you.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, on X, you are at Daniel Mitchell.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: But if they want to find out more information about Tacton, about you know, just get in touch with you or Carson, what's the best way for people to get in touch?
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh XDMs is actually a great place to get in touch.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: The vast majority of awesome people that I've met that I'm I'm internet friends with, yourself included, Colin, all started in XDMs.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: But that that's a perfectly suitable place to reach me.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: If not, Daniel at tacton.com is my email.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: I got no problem sharing that.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: Shoot me a note.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_01: What I'm looking for more so than like a customer for any of our products or a specific partner to solve a certain thing.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: If people are open and collaborative and willing to talk about technology in the manufacturing space, and it really helps if there's someone who's active who are actively solving problems or actively running a shop, the more information we can gather, the better.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: That the goal we have is to build lots of products that solve lots of problems for lots of manufacturers around the US.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: We want to become the most trusted supplier of manufacturing technology to small and mid-sized manufacturers in the US.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: And we can't get there with only 150 factory visits.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: We'll get there with 2,000 factory visits.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: Daniel, thank you so much for joining us.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: This has been awesome.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we are definitely gonna have to have to have you back again soon.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: Bring Carson in as well.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but this has been great.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: And to all of you listening, thank you for tuning in to another episode of the Reforged Podcast.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: Whether we're talking robotics on the factory floor, policy that moves the needle, the next generation of American makers.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: Our goal is always the same to prove that reindustrializing America isn't just possible.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's happening right now and it's pivotal.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: If you enjoy this episode, make sure you subscribe and follow at the reforge pod everywhere and check out the reforged podcast for more, including our seven steps to reindustrialization.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: Till next time, keep building.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: Boom.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for tuning in to the reforged podcast.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_02: Make sure to like, subscribe, and follow us on all of our social media at the reforged pod.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_02: We will see you next time.