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Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Emerging Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.
How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?
The intersection of engineering, finance, and manufacturing. At this stage of the tech and product development, the amount of value engineering and design for manufacturability is highly correlated to the long-term design language of the product and thus the cost. If we can integrate the supply base early and often—from machine shops to electronic manufacturers, from specialty coaters to tube benders—we can get feedback at the right time so our design engineers can pick which industrial processes to use and which to develop specially for our application.
What’s your favorite emerging tech project you’ve worked on?
Even though I have worked in very cool tech projects most of my career, including rockets and sustainable aviation, nothing has come close to how I feel about fusion energy…Fusion so far has been experimental in nature—this means that there is no supply base developed that can produce more than a couple of pieces of hardware a year. If they can produce them in the first place.
It is not uncommon for companies to want to be part of the supply chain just because the hardware is so different from what is in their shop now; statements like “making parts like this is why I got into this business” make a manufacturing nerd like me very happy.
One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile?
I co-owned a small pizza shop with my now-wife—girlfriend back then—for a while. We both had full-time jobs in which we worked during the day and then took over from the day manager after 6pm every weekday. Then 12pm-12am on Saturdays and Sundays.