“Our Goal Is to Build an Electrical Engineer.” (Davide Asnaghi, Co-Founder & CEO of Diode)

[00:00] We designed circuit boards, which are the heart of every modern electronic product. This is what Diode is trying to do. Electronics was not a solved problem. Apple has clearly solved electronics at scale for production, but our prototyping cycles and the speed at which we could iterate was a fraction of what I was used to in Shenzhen. I will not trust somebody that tells me, oh, China can do it because the labor is cheap. That's not true anymore. They are incredible at automating things. We have to replicate that type of excellency here in the US. [00:30] Amazon started making AWS available to a ton of companies. Building became incredibly more democratized. This has not happened in the hardware world for many reasons. And I think that we need AWS for electronics. On AWS, you don't own the server, but you do own all the infrastructure. We want to be that for the printed circuit board industry in the United States. If you can bring the speed at which software companies move to the hardware world, in my opinion, we'll see a hardware renaissance. [01:00] as a company is to actually put beautiful copper in the hands of our customers in the form of circuit boards. [01:12] Around the 2000s, the West outsourced a critical layer of the electronic stack to Asia. [01:17] printed circuit boards. [01:19] These copper and fiberglass planes the size of postage cards may not attract the same attention as silicon. [01:26] but they are essential to create any kind of electronics product.

[01:30] From a phone to a drone. [01:32] to a humanoid robot. [01:33] Davide Asnagi is trying to bring that layer back to America. [01:38] He's the co-founder and CEO of Diode, a Brooklyn-based startup using AI to design and manufacture circuit boards. [01:45] in the United States. [01:47] The company's ultimate ambition? [01:49] to build the West's answer to Foxconn. [01:51] optimized for the AI era. [01:54] While there's a long way to go before Diode approaches that Taiwanese giant's scale, [01:58] They're off to a strong start. [02:00] since its founding just two years ago. [02:02] Diode has landed physical intelligence and Saronic as customers. [02:05] and partnered with Amphropic, [02:07] to help its clawed models become better electrical engineers. [02:11] In today's episode, [02:13] Davide and I discussed the three-week YC pivot that defined DIODE, [02:17] What Shenzhen actually does better than Silicon Valley [02:20] and what it means. [02:21] to build the AWS [02:23] for hardware. [02:24] I'm Mario. [02:25] And this is The Generalist. This episode is brought to you by .tech domains. I spend a lot of time speaking with founders and builders who are building the next generation of technology companies. [02:36] for all of them, [02:37] Finding a compelling and distinctive company identity [02:40] is essential. [02:41] to breaking through the noise. [02:42] That starts with a great name and a great domain. That's exactly the thinking behind dot tech domains. [02:48] for companies building in tech, [02:50] A .tech domain gives your project a clean, confident identity from day one, instantly communicating what you're building. Nothing.tech, 1x.tech, Aurora.tech, CES.tech. The list of companies choosing .tech is growing quickly.

[03:05] It's not surprising that many venture-backed startups secure their .tech domain early. If you're building a technology company, it's worth thinking about how you want to show up from the start. Secure your .tech domain today from any registrar of your choice. Every revolution in AI creates one question that never changes. Can you trust the output? [03:26] AI for work is incredible, but without trust, it's just leading to faster mistakes. [03:31] The challenge isn't building an AI that can answer questions, it's making sure those answers are right. [03:37] That's where Guru comes in. [03:39] It's the AI source of truth that connects everything your company knows. [03:43] So every insight, every answer, every recommendation [03:47] is grounded in verified knowledge, not outdated information or hallucinations. [03:52] When your teams and your AIs share one trusted foundation, [03:56] everything moves faster. [03:57] with fewer redos, fewer blind spots, [03:59] and more confidence in every decision. [04:02] Because in the age of AI, truth isn't just power, it's protection. [04:06] See what Guru is doing for thousands of companies like Spotify, DHL, and Stripe at GetGuru.com. [04:13] That's getguru.com. [04:16] Davide, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast. You're building... [04:21] A really fascinating company, I think. One of the companies that I'm sure people will be hearing more about over the next few years. And the reason I was so excited to talk to you is I think you're unblocking a really fascinating bottleneck in the sort of current world. [04:35] AI ecosystem and sort of broader electronics ecosystem. So anyway, that's a long way of saying great to have you here and excited to go deep on you and Diod. It's a pleasure being here. Thank you for having me. I'd love to start with

[04:49] the way that you describe yourself, which I think your GitHub calls yourself a copper merchant, which is a great way of phrasing what you do. Why is that the way that you think about your work? [05:02] I am first and foremost an engineer. [05:05] But building a company has taught me in a very humbling way that the merchant part of selling copper is incredibly important and probably the most correlated with my success. And... [05:16] What we want to achieve as a company is to actually like put beautiful copper in the hands of our customers in the form of circuit boards. [05:25] And this is what I get to do every day by coming to work, designing boards, delivering them to customers and making sure they actually make their way to the product. [05:33] So in some ways, we are shuffling copper from one place to another. [05:36] I love that. And for folks that are watching the video version, they can see what your work every day looks like, which is, you know, you're in a sort of cavernous, exciting looking factory, I imagine, in Brooklyn. That's right. Straight in Brooklyn. We actually have views of Manhattan. It's a bit too bright, but a wonderful place to work. Well, let's talk a little bit more about, you know, selling copper. In sort of the simplest level for folks that maybe aren't familiar with you or your space, what does Diode do and why does it matter? [06:06] I think every company has effectively three tiers of description. Like one is what we actually do. [06:14] And what we do is we design circuit boards, which are the heart of every modern electronic products, and we manufacture them and ship them to our customers. In this way, we are a very easy business to understand. This is something that's been done since the 1970s, really, since the early days of Apple manufacturing.

[06:34] We design, manufacture, and ship. And our goal is to deliver circuit boards that work. And we will do everything in our power to do it. [06:42] The second layer description of what Dio does is we are doing this in the United States. And the reason why we are so focused on designing and manufacturing in the U.S., [06:54] is that I have had the opportunity to live in Southeast Asia and absolutely appreciated the craft and the efficiency with which that happened. [07:06] And we think that there is a very important reason why we have to replicate that type of excellency here in the US. So we work with a lot of domestic customers and European customers to design and manufacture these circuit boards in local factories. And the third layer is... [07:23] the reason why we do this and the reason why it's important [07:26] is that if you can bring the speed at which software companies move [07:32] to the hardware world, we, in my opinion, will see a hardware renaissance, which is something that I really am interested in seeing in the world. [07:41] So this is what Diode is trying to do. And there's a lot of things that we do to make this happen. Like we use a large language model to design the board, removing like a strong bottleneck. We use newer manufacturing techniques that take care of the data. I'm happy to talk into details, but at the very core level, we design and manufacture circuit boards for our customers. I love that. And hopefully we'll go through all those three levels and more besides. Just to put even a finer point on that sort of third layer, if Diode sort of succeeds to your

[08:09] While this ambition is to the fullest extent, how does the world look different in your view? What do you hope is different? The best way that I have been describing what our success path looks like is when we're [08:22] Amazon started making AWS available to a ton of companies. We effectively got... [08:29] rid of the tragedy of the commons of everybody having to spin up their own server. And building became incredibly more democratized. [08:38] This has not happened in the hardware world for many reasons. And I think that we need AWS for electronics, like manufacturing layer that every single hardware company can use, feeling ownership. Like on AWS, you don't own the server, but you do own all the infrastructure. There is somebody responsible for doing that. We want to be that for the printed circuit board industry in the United States. [09:00] You mentioned that you had the experience to live in. [09:04] Southeast Asia and also, you know, other parts of the world. You know, the Davide Asnaghi clearly is an Italian name. And I know that from studying you. Where did you grow up? I grew up in a fairly small town between Lake Como and Milan in the northern part of Italy. [09:21] What's the small town out of curiosity? It's called Meda. Okay, my grandmother lives in Finomornasco. Oh, no way. Yeah. Oh, that's actually very close. Yeah, that's fine. [09:31] But it was a wonderful place to grow up. A lot of beauty, a lot of aesthetics. Surprisingly, a lot of small manufacturing, but not a ton of science. I think that the moonshot projects I've always associated to the U.S.

[09:46] And I came here for high school, in fact, in Minnesota. How did that happen? My grandfather traveled the world. He lived in Peru building infrastructure projects when he was younger. And he basically told me, look... [10:01] like sounds like you're [10:02] interested in scientific progress. [10:04] If I were you, I would basically pack it up and leave for the US. And so during high school, the Italian high school gives you a small scholarship opportunity that you can take and do one year abroad. And I decided, okay, I'm going to try and do everything that I can to actually go to the US. [10:19] I didn't specifically pick Minnesota, but I'm actually kind of glad I did. It's been a wonderful way of seeing parts of the U.S. that I would probably otherwise not have seen. I've spent the rest of my time in the U.S. in either San Francisco or New York, which are very peculiar cities. [10:35] Yes. It sounds like maybe you were the sort of kid that was, you know, building electronics of their own or taking them apart as at a young age. Is that sort of. [10:43] how you got started and interested in this world? So the other thing that Italy gave to the world, which I'm very, very proud of, is Arduino. A large part of my formative year was spent messing around with like small Arduino boards. There's a... [10:57] The concept of electronic fare is still alive and well in Italy. Like you can still go to Erba, which is actually very close to Fino Mornasco. And like buy components, there's going to be like resellers. [11:09] Because the northern Italian small manufacturing industry is still alive and kicking, you have all these small electronic manufacturers. And so I bought my first Arduino there, and it was an incredible thrill to be able to build things that didn't exist before. And this was apparent. I was kind of the only person that I knew that was interested in this kind of stuff. But my friends were definitely interested in the things I could build with it, which was even more exciting for me. I'm always interested in how often it feels like

[11:39] hyper ambitious people, founders, [11:41] often have an experience early on where they go to another culture and maybe that, [11:46] opens their horizons in some way. Maybe it scales their ambition in some sense. For you going to Minnesota, like what functionally, what did that sort of [11:54] How did that change you? So I've always been very interested in the academic pursuit, more research-y type roles. And a lot of the things that I did in Southeast Asia were robotics research and papers. But when I came to the U.S., I was in this relatively small town. It's called Winona, Minnesota. [12:13] And I kid you not, there's like two Fortune 500 companies that came out of this like really small town. Like one of them is Fastenal. And then like 3M is like very close and, you know, [12:24] like half an hour away. [12:25] And everyone, everyone was either like working at these companies or like a small company, like all my friends had this experience. [12:34] like wonderful drive to do things. And it was very different than Baicom. It was right after the financial crisis. And so like jobs were scarce in Italy. [12:45] It just painted a picture, statistically, catch and release. You random sample a place in the United States, and this relatively small town that I had never heard of before has incredible entrepreneurship and people that give back to the community. They donated to the local high school that I was a part of. That was very eye-opening. It was like, oh, you can actually do this, and it has a meaningful impact. And if this happens in Winona, Minnesota, I wonder what goes on in San Francisco.

[13:15] On that subject, you know, I didn't grow up in Italy, but Italian heritage certainly [13:19] Why do you think there aren't as many [13:23] great Italian founders, even compared to other European countries that, you know, it feels like Italy maybe is, [13:30] is batting under what you would expect from it. [13:33] as an economy? I think that this is a fairly complicated, multifaceted answer. If I had to give like a single point, it's probably that the financial markets and the way that the pension funds work is set up very different in Anglo-Saxon countries like the UK and the US and Switzerland. [13:50] which is not Anglitaxan, but like conceptually, it's like very fiscally like liberal than in Italy. Like Italy is a very, has a very specific capital market. So there is like some very logistical reason why I think that this does not happen. [14:05] There are some cultural reasons that we can't get into, but fundamentally, you live a beautiful life in Italy. [14:13] and the friction that it takes for you to actually be like, I need to effectively decrease my quality of life by 10x. [14:22] to then maybe have it better, maybe, like, you know, 1% chance of actually hitting it big. The incentives are not super aligned. [14:32] And I, like, maybe this is a weird opinion to have. I think that this is perfectly fine. Like, I know people that are truly happy. It's just not for me, but like, I believe that...

[14:45] It is a beautiful world because there are places such as Italy where you don't have to keep running for you to feel successful. There is a space for this in the world. But I also know very strong founders in Italy. Like bending spoons come to mind that there's a lot of people that I truly respect. [15:03] And of course, if you look at Bendis, this is a really interesting part about the financial markets. The way that they structure the acquisition business does go through Switzerland, the US and getting potentially public. So there's a lot to unpack there. But I think it's like, I love Italy. I still go back. My family lives there. But to do what I want to do, I think that the United States right now is a wonderful place. [15:25] Well, I agree with both those sentiments. I'm going back to Italy next week. So I always I always like an excuse to do that. You eventually come back to America for. [15:34] for more sort of studying for university and then have sort of these stints in Asia. I'm curious, yeah, when you think about, [15:42] You know, you've lived, I think, Italy. [15:44] Berkeley. [15:46] Shenzhen and maybe Hong Kong also? That's right. I was mostly in Hong Kong and then like going commuting to Shenzhen. [15:53] OK, got you. And now New York. Which of those cities do you feel like changed you the most? I think Hong Kong is probably [16:03] the largest amount of learning rate I have done. [16:08] in like a compressed period of time before starting this company. [16:12] In many ways, starting this company has helped out what it was feeling in Hong Kong. I think the reason is that,

[16:19] Up until then, [16:20] I was like, [16:23] one of the most knowledgeable people about electronics around me. Back home in Milan, like I would effectively hold all my like small embedded projects. But going to Hong Kong is an incredibly humbling experience. I think culturally, China and Hong Kong both have a very strong preference for the hard sciences. [16:41] So there's actually fewer people that go in pure computer science. Your parents are more proud of you if you are a physicist or an electrical engineer than just like a pure software major. And this is changing in many ways. But so many of my friends were just... [16:56] for standard deviation above average, like knowledge in electronics. People that had been building electronics for... [17:04] like years. And, you know, they were immersed in this culture. And I think that that left a profound impression that this not only can be done, but also there are people that are immensely more knowledgeable than I could ever like hope to be at that point in my life. And they are incredibly graceful at teaching this kind of stuff. There's this person specifically, Alex Wong, he, him and I like worked on a couple of papers on like a robotic hand for prosthetic devices. [17:34] at the time. And to this day, he's probably like at that point in time of his life, one of the best electronic engineers I've ever met. And I've met a lot. So it was just like a really interesting time to to absorb from people like this. What was it that had drawn you out there? Was it to, you know, do specific types of research? Was it, you know, just to get that sort of different experience? It was really like I truly enjoyed my time in the United States. And

[17:59] And I knew at that time that electronics was a very important part of my life. [18:05] And it seemed wise to sample what the rest of the world has to offer in a domain that I truly care about. Like, arguably, Shenzhen to this day is one of probably the most lively hardware hotspot in the world. And you want to be close to this type of centers to at least learn. [18:24] And there's a lot of learning, like also negative learning that happened. Like, for example, starting a company in Hong Kong and [18:31] China has drawbacks. IP is more complicated. The legal system is slightly different than the United States. And these are all things that are very hard to learn if you don't [18:42] live in, immersed in the culture. Like I was an exchange student in Hong Kong and a lot of the exchange students are there for like a semester and they effectively create a loan, like their own social bubble. But because I was like a full year, the idea was... [18:58] I was actually like hanging out with people from either mainland China or like native Hong Kong. And the cultural difference was just staggering, like in many ways. And it was a wonderful experience to learn that. [19:10] What are some of the things that Shenzhen does much better than Silicon Valley in your experience? It's very hard to say better. [19:19] I think that Shenzhen is a fundamentally slightly different beast. [19:24] Like, [19:25] In Silicon Valley, you had these wonderful network effects because if what is limiting your productivity is a keyboard and a computer, the network is largely composed of social relationships.

[19:39] And social proof, the ability to know that there is vouched talent at the fingertips has been an incredible engine of Silicon Valley. [19:49] What I see in Shenzhen is a radically different thing, where it's not necessarily just about social relationships. [19:55] It's actually about the community as a whole, dividing complex manufacturing processes into like a divide and conquer approach. And then each of the individual manufacturer like brewing manufacturing expertise. [20:09] and then being able to hand it off to the next step. And so... [20:13] the knowledge of how to make things permeates and percolates through the various layers of the stack in a way that... [20:21] that Silicon Valley, I don't think, has been focused on achieving so far. It's not that it couldn't. It's just that it didn't seem like the right problem to be solving because a lot of the other problems were, how do we improve productivity by unlocking new software, like new computing paradigms? And I think both of these type of realities have been very successful. And I think that there's a lot to learn from both. I think that it's very hard to replicate what Shenja has, but not impossible. [20:51] with my friends and people that are starting companies in the manufacturing space. [20:55] To put a finer point on that, like what what sort of things are you seeing? Like, is it cultural things? Is it sort of operational things? I meet somebody for coffee in Silicon Valley, and then four weeks later, they need a board made fast. And this is not like the exact service that we provide. Like what we provide is we will design and manufacture. And because we can co-design these two things, we are massively more efficient at the manufacturing. But if you're my friend,

[21:22] I'm just going to do this for you. And if you are happy with this type of service, I'm happy to like basically expand this to a proper business relationship. Or I have a customer that needs motors. And I know David Hansen in Silicon Valley, who's building a motor company. Hey, like you guys should talk. [21:41] And so because the stack is very wide, like printed circuit boards are very hard to build holistically, but also incredibly narrow in the stack of what it takes to actually build a full product. I get... [21:53] so much more reward from being able to introduce my customers to the people that will fix their pain points. And everybody wins. [22:01] And this I am seeing more and more and more and more. [22:04] And it's quite wonderful to see. You come back to the States and you sort of spend quite a lot of time at Apple in their sort of special projects division. I'm sure there's a lot of things you can't talk about, but what did you learn from sort of being... [22:19] Part of the best hardware company in the world, arguably. So special projects is a very unique part of Apple. So I don't want to pretend I understand Apple as a whole. I had a very peculiar experience. And the experience was largely determined by working with some of the best people in the world. [22:39] whose relationship I cherish to these days. My manager at Apple was a wonderful person that had a ton to teach from an interpersonal relationship perspective. The thing that was missing for me from that experience is that if you work at Apple, you own a very, very narrow part of the stack, but you do own it incredibly deep.

[23:00] And that is very good for honing a very specific skill set. But the moment you want to own a little bit more, it's very hard. And for very good reason. There were folks that were owning a larger portion of the stack with lower depth. And these people had done it all. These were some of the best engineers in the world that had a system engineering background and were responsible for... [23:24] requirements and capturing. And I think that like, [23:27] Apart from like many technical things I learned and it was a wonderful experience. The thing that I learned the most is that [23:33] electronics was not a solved problem, even for a company in the US that is largely the best at doing this. [23:42] Apple has clearly solved electronics at scale for production, but our prototyping cycles and the speed at which we could iterate was a fraction of what I was used to in Xinjiang. [23:55] And I think that that was a fairly shocking realization. Like it felt that this is like a systemic problem, not a like individual company problem or like an issue that comes from lack of resources or lack of knowledge. [24:08] I think that that was the key learning I made. [24:10] psychologically, uh, [24:12] You know, people who become founders, I think, [24:15] often struggle to be in as structured [24:18] or as large an environment for such an extended period of time. I think that you might be spot on with your read. I was there for about two years. There was a part of you that was itching to take on some of that more, some of that responsibility. I think so. And in fact, like when I left Apple on paper, that was a questionable decision.

[24:38] I left Apple for a much smaller company. I left Apple in the middle of my visa proceedings. [24:46] And, [24:47] This was not out of frustration. Like it was a wonderful place to work. It's very hard to work in an environment that does not reward you basically killing yourself over your job. And like, this is not good for everybody, right? Like you don't want everybody having to like work to the max. But in this specific period of my life, I generated such a high amount of personal enjoyment from like dedicating myself 100% to like this one thing. [25:17] place to be, but it's not structured so that you basically have a tapered off reward the more work you put in. You can't stop working at a certain point and it's mostly fine and everybody will be happy. And it just felt like I wanted to be in an environment where I could put as much of myself as I could into the craft. Have you always been that way that you want to sort of kill yourself for things that you're passionate about? My fiance will be very mad that I say kill myself. [25:47] that I have an incredible privilege of loving something that is very, like, is perceived as valuable in the modern world. Like, if I were, like, a musician, for example, I would, like, [25:59] it would be much harder for me to just dedicate 100% to my craft and like also pay bills, right? But like, because the things that I love are very, very aligned with what the modern world, like deems like financially rewarding from like, as an engineer, you can make a living, no problem. I just feel like an obligation of basically like, this is the few set of talents that I have, I want to be able to

[26:22] pour myself into it. I also find it super fun. [26:26] This is just like, I would do it for fun anyway. I studied biomedical engineering in my undergrad because I think that biology and physiology are a completely different tier of complexity than electronics or even silicon. It's just a language we don't understand yet. And I wanted to learn more about it. [26:43] But my personal things right now with Tronics, even during undergrad, like I would do it even if I weren't paid. So it feels like the optimal use of my time. I just get a ton of joy out of it. [26:55] That's amazing. You mentioned, you know, you go to this smaller startup, Chromatic, and it's there that you meet. [27:01] your future co-founder, Lenny. Yeah, what was it about Lenny that... [27:07] you saw something that you felt like maybe this was a larger partnership or someone you hoped to [27:12] work with for hopefully many years to come? So funny enough, I actually met Lenny on my very first job out of college. So I started working for this company called Butterfly Network. Wonderful, wonderful people. Incredible product. It was a custom silicone ASIC that would allow you to do ultrasound imaging in the space of a handheld ultrasound machine. This is a revolutionary [27:42] And I had a master's degree at that point. Like I did my undergrad in three years and my master's at Berkeley. And then for some reason, I think that that counted as like work experience. And so they assigned an intern to me, even though I had no reason to need or deserve an intern. And that person was learning.

[28:01] And it was very clear that he was way smarter than I am. [28:06] incredibly capable. He had done an internship the year prior on the iOS team, which is very different than hardware. And he was incredibly well versed in machine learning, front-end, just like a true full-stack engineer. [28:19] Like while I go like kind of embedded software down to the metal, he goes embedded software up to like the cloud. And so it felt like a super fun set of combination. Like it's a very complimentary technical skill set, at least like in software plus hardware. [28:36] And I just enjoyed working with him. And then when I joined Chromatic, everybody knew Lenny. [28:42] and liked Lenny. And we love it very hard for Lenny to work with us. And so purely coincidental that you ended up at Chromatic at the same time after that experience at Butterfly. I think I was part of why Lenny came and joined. I think that there were two people, one person that also worked with Lenny and we were like, yeah, he needs to join. He should join Chromatic. And Chromatic is also probably the most fun I've ever had as an employee. [29:12] a wonderful company to learn. Also, incredible founders. We are still very close to these days. We learn a lot from them. And like, [29:19] it's quite humbling to see how many things they got just right. And as I build a company, it's just like, how did they do it? What can I learn from them, from their experience? Incredible people. Very, very grateful to have met them.

[29:33] And it was acromatic that you sort of have this sort of first... [29:37] inkling of this need that becomes diode. How did that sort of [29:41] come to fruition or, you know, come into your [29:45] your frame of vision. I think that it was a culmination of observing the same problem over and over and over at different, like completely different scale of companies. [29:55] Like, Butterfly was a, like, pre-IPO company. Apple, obviously, like, largest company in the world by capitalization at that time. And then Chromatic, like, a fairly small, like, startup company. And... [30:08] Every time that we had to spin a circuit board, despite that not being the most complicated thing that we were doing as a team, it would just go wrong. The manufacturing would take weeks more than it was supposed to take. The boards would come back and have a yield rate that was abysmal, like less than 50%. And you would ask yourself, is the problem in the design? Is the problem in the manufacturing? What's going on? [30:34] And it felt... [30:36] just wrong. And so I started diving deep into this. And it turns out that a large reason why this is the case is that a lot of smart [30:45] people have poured their hearts and souls into making silicon design more efficient. Because the cost of getting silicon wrong is in the millions of dollars. The cost of getting software wrong is virtually zero. Like you just risk, like you just like push a patch. [31:02] There's some caveat. It's like, obviously, if you get something wrong on a security, that can be very strong. But let's say during prototyping, you can basically just fix it as you go. And PCBs or circuit boards are just in the middle. They're like this weird middle child that hasn't been loved enough. And...

[31:18] Like a wrong spin may cost you between $10,000 and $80,000. [31:23] Which is bad, but it's not destroying your company bad, especially with like U.S. companies. And so a lot of like very standard problems that you'd think like, sorry, but like this should be solved. [31:33] They haven't been solved. And I think that it was incredibly apparent when we taped out this incredibly beautiful piece of silicon that a way smarter engineer than I put together. And this guy got it right first time. He designed the entire silicon and the silicon just worked. I was responsible for a small part and I was wetting bullets. I was like, if this goes wrong, the entire silicon is not going to work. I was responsible for the bootloader in the device. And then the silicon comes back. [32:02] And the circuit board that he was on, [32:05] was like full of mistakes. And it was like through nobody's fault. It was not like that you could say, oh, the person that designed the circuit board made a mistake. No, like the tools were not helping. The manufacturing was not helping. Like we had to diagnose like yield problem, like all these like little things that slowed down the most beautiful moment of you get back your chip and you know that it works. [32:27] And like the chip worked first try. I am still amazed that that was the case. And it was absolutely wonderful. And it's really a testament to how good the team was and also how good the tools that were designed around that were. [32:38] But it felt that we deserved better tools around those circuit boards as well. [32:43] This episode is brought to you by Brex. If you're a founder, the hardest part isn't the idea. It's scaling fast without getting buried in back office work. That's where Brex comes in. Brex is the intelligent finance platform for founders.

[32:58] With Brex, you get high-limit corporate cards, easy banking, and high-yield treasury [33:02] plus a team of AI agents [33:04] that handle manual finance tasks for you. [33:07] They take care of things like expenses, [33:10] all according to your rules... [33:11] so you can move faster while staying in full control. One in three startups in the U.S. already runs on Brex. You can too at brex.com slash Mario. [33:22] just to restate it in the sense that to make sure I understand it, it's like, you know, so much effort, investment, [33:30] intelligence has gone towards optimizing the silicon because it's so important and expensive to get wrong. And then software has these fast cycles that are sort of [33:38] forgiving. And so there's, you know, plenty of architecture around that. But the circuit boards are in this weird middle zone where it's not that forgiving, but it's also... [33:47] you know, not catastrophic to failure. And so it sounds like it's sort of remained almost, I don't know, artisanal ad hoc, where there's really not this infrastructure around it. [33:59] I guess... [34:00] One, you know, am I sort of capturing the contours of this correctly? And then two, [34:07] Why has there not been more effort dedicated [34:10] towards this until now? Because clearly there's been plenty of investment in this ecosystem. Why has this part just been sort of overlooked beyond that maybe structural issue? So I think that you captured it beautifully, but there is one important thing [34:25] like a huge caveat. This has been solved in Southeast Asia.

[34:31] which was the geography where these matter the most. Like effectively, Western countries around the 2000s [34:39] collectively abdicated a part of the stack that they perceived to be, you know, not catastrophic failure, not necessarily my core IP, like the same way as the silicon. They abdicated it to geographies where they could outsource it or offshore it for a cheaper price. [34:56] And if you look at like a modern circuit board factory in China, there is nothing artisanal about that. The artisanal nature, which I think you capture beautifully, like it's quite beautiful because you can actually build a circuit board by hand, something that like you obviously cannot do with silicon. So it is truly like if you have a good artisan, [35:16] You can build a fully working circuit board by hand. There's some caveats, of course. But the thing that is more interesting to me is... [35:26] Why do we not have the level of precision and quality control that we have for silicon for circuit boards? And if you see the machines behind me, these are industrial machines. These are machines that are meant to address the gap between artisanal product and mass manufacturer product. And it's not true that people have not solved it. But where it hasn't been solved, especially in the U.S., is a fully autonomous pipeline that takes you from your design [35:53] to a manufactured product. Effectively, the case that the US market has been optimized around is, I have a design,

[36:01] We have iterated on it. Now it's time to build 100,000 of them. There's a lot of incredibly competent shops that will do this in the US. And this is not true for circuit boards only. It's true for CNC machining, like really any type of manufacturing. [36:16] the best manufacturing shops [36:18] stateside, thrive in volume. [36:21] Because variance is the enemy of yield. [36:24] As soon as you need variance, there's a lot of complicated calculations that you need to do. For a PCB, it's like you need to figure out how to place the components. You need to figure out how to place the solder paste. You need to figure out the optimal reflow profile of your oven. You need to figure out if your optical inspection machine is calibrated correctly to spot mistakes because this is a manufacturing process. There will be mistakes. It's just how do you minimize them? It's not like this is always going to work. [36:54] because China started with cheap labor, and then effectively, like labor progressively became more expensive, they truly invested in wonderful automation. Say, I will not trust somebody that tells me, oh, China can do it because the labor is cheap. That ain't true. That's not true anymore. [37:11] They are incredible at automating things and automating them in a way that makes them cost competitive. And yes, there are a lot of things that are, you know, there's an 80-20 of automation where the 20% is filled in with cheap labor. But if you look at a modern circuit board like factory, it is incredibly automated. And I think that this is very hard to replicate the novel.

[37:32] if you don't do something radically different. And our bet is that that radical difference is that you co-design the circuit boards with the assembly line in mind. [37:41] Like if you have these two concepts in your head at the same time, [37:45] which is a very painful process to have. It will make design harder to know that if you place a via with an annular rank that is not to spec of the machines that I'm using to drill the bare boards, it will cause a problem during manufacturing. It is very restricting. But the bet that we are making is that the models don't care. [38:03] Like you can let the model iterate until the design is as manufacturable as you possibly can. And so this yields a much more like amenable path to full automation design to production. In a way, it sounds like you're sort of uniting these two pieces of the input and the output. You know, you have the ability to have the, you know, the system understand the inputs you need to make, but also how those get translated into the actual outputs and the sort of capabilities that you have. [38:31] on hand. And like I'll go one step further, which is like if you look at the cultural stance that like my friends in Hong Kong used to have, [38:42] Every board is designed [38:44] thinking of, oh, I'm going to make this one-sided, even if it costs me like a little bit longer design time, because this way it doesn't have to go twice during assembly. I would ask them like, why? Like just designing both sides, like who cares? They're like, no, no, no, no. This will have to like go twice during assembly. Like the yield will go down because you're reflowing the components twice. Like if I can do it, I'll just do it like one-sided. And that like cultural mode

[39:09] is just like has been... [39:11] diluted in the US because it's so removed, right? In a lot of ways, when you send your design to Southeast Asia, they will tweak it to make it more manufacturable without necessarily telling you, which is quite interesting in my opinion. [39:23] Yeah, that is interesting. What are the companies that sort of dominate the [39:29] industrial scale production of this in China? Is it sort of like, [39:33] actually a market that's relatively diffuse or are there a few sort of [39:37] big players? I think that there's two clusters. There's Foxconn and Pegatron. These companies are huge companies. They don't do just circuit board production. They really actually do the full stack. We would classify them as EMS, electronic manufacturers. These companies are incredibly successful. The story of these companies is wonderful. Breakneck by Daniel Wang has a lot of really interesting tidbits about how these specific companies were founded and generated. [40:07] these companies are one end of the spectrum. But then you have other younger companies. There's a lot of mom-and-pop shops, by the way. It's not true that PCB manufacturing is a monolith in China. And [40:18] Of these, I think that some of the more famous companies in the US are like JLCPCB, for example, which is this Sequoia China-backed company. [40:30] incredibly interesting company that doesn't do just PCBs anymore, but they started with circuit boards. [40:36] And, you know, [40:37] Like if you look at the way that they are automating a lot of the stack,

[40:42] it basically makes the same bets that we are making. Like, I don't want to claim ownership of these ideas that we are putting forward. I'm just like looking at what's working. [40:53] and basically saying, okay, they do it in this way. Like, for example, they have a wonderful library of components. They hand annotate it. You cannot do it if you don't have very cheap, highly skilled labor. [41:03] which we don't have in the US. Like the electrical engineers in the US are incredibly talented and very expensive. You cannot like just do that. So how do we do that with a large language model, like a large language model, if you make it capable enough, we'll be able to replicate some of the mix of ingredients that make something like JLC very successful, in my opinion. You've [41:22] taught me a ton in the last 10 minutes that I, after a ton of research, didn't fully understand. So that's really helpful and really interesting. To jump back into the sort of diode story, you have this moment where you sort of realize how little has been invested in understanding, in making circuit boards really have the sort of level of fidelity one would want, in the US at least. You and Lenny apply to YC, but with a sort of a different approach. What was [41:52] then was I want to catch mistakes. [41:55] before they happen. [41:58] Like large language models, if you teach them like electronics very carefully in a very calculated way, for example, by representing the schematics as code, representing the layout in a way that like multimodal models understand. [42:12] There's a lot that you can catch. But...

[42:14] And I think that this goes back to the comment that you made about being a copper merchant versus just an engineer. This was a pain point as an engineer I was feeling. [42:24] But if you try to sell just this small part of the solution, you are... [42:30] selling vitamins, [42:32] to companies that don't have an express pain point right now. [42:37] the pinpoint that this company had was not, how do I marginally make my designs less [42:43] mistake prone, the pain point they had is I cannot hire an electrical engineer. I need a board now. And I need it fast. [42:53] And so in the exploratory space of the technology can do this, [42:57] I know that this is a problem because I've had it myself. [42:59] Can I sell this? We effectively stumbled into, huh, like if you truly, like in order to train the model that would catch the mistakes, we built a model that would generate boards. And so we effectively use the same infrastructure, but basically say, oh, like we can actually generate the board that you want. Like a lot of the boards that we, like in San Francisco, there's a lot of robotic startups. And these robotic startups maybe need some tweaks on some existing off-the-shelf boards. And this is like relatively easy to do. And so it turns out that people do want this. [43:29] And, [43:31] And, you know, I think that this was like another incredibly underrated, like, thing about YC. Like, it was basically, like, [43:38] you should follow what people actually say they want. And it has been... [43:43] very humbling, but also incredibly rewarding. Because in the process of switching from a solution-oriented mindset to a, tell me your problem, let me see if I can fix that first. We also figured out another beautiful thing about companies, which is incentive alignment. Initially, we were thinking about this design platform, right? Just make the design streamlined and more efficient. But

[44:07] If you think about a design company that has no stakes in delivering a product, you're not held accountable to the same standards. If you as a company will suffer the pain of having to rework 150 boards that were designed in roughly the wrong way, your incentives are incredibly aligned to make the best design software that will not do that. [44:31] And so we live by this tenant. Like incentive alignment with our clients has been a wonderful thing. [44:40] And you mentioned robotics companies. You have some... [44:46] impressive customers and partners that you guys are working with. [44:49] To understand the customer journey, [44:52] from sort of design to getting the board, what does that look like through Diode? Like, are they entering your software first and sort of doing, you know, some part of it themselves? Maybe sort of just going through that journey would be useful. [45:04] Of course. So this is something that's in flux. And the... [45:09] like the current process is we will capture a specification document with you. This is partially done like on a call. Like right now, every one of our customers is incredibly dear to us and we love them very much. And so whatever it takes to make them feel like their spec is being captured correctly, we will do. We also have a version of this where you can effectively explain your specifications to the model. And the model has incredibly high context about parts availability,

[45:39] designed and so they can be reused with minimal likelihood of failing? What is in our library? And so we have these, we call it the spec builder. So the first step is, as a customer, we will build a specification with you. That specification becomes our Bible. That is the source of truth. And then what we do is we have multiple agents that take the specification and [46:09] our design language into the general availability models. We are very invested in large language models becoming better at electronics because our goal is to effectively automate as much of this process as possible. And schematics are [46:23] on their way to be fully automated. Like I estimate like 90% of a schematic that we do is like the model can one shot it now. 90%? Yeah. Like schematics are like they're beautiful because they're very ideal. They're like a logical graph. It's very, very similar to code. Then one of our engineers, we hire incredibly talented engineers because our goal is to actually build boards that work. We'll review the output. [46:47] And then we have a platform where our customers can confirm that this is what they wanted. Maybe they realized that they said they wanted A, but they really wanted B. This is the platform that we expose at app.dio.computer, for example. I am very proud that this is just a visualization of the code. This is pure, if the yellow lamp touches the code, you will see it in a human readable way. We generate schematics.

[47:12] which the models have a hard time, like visual reasoning is hard. So we use the code as a hook for the models. We generate schematics for the humans. And then the next step is the layout. So here is where we do a lot of research. Layout is not 90% automated. I estimate it's closer to like 40% and 50% for us internally. [47:32] It's like very good at placement, less good at routing. [47:35] We have a few companies that we really look up to. Quilter is working on this problem. There's an entire company just dedicated to one thing that we do, which is routing. And there's another company called DPCB that we actually have worked with in the past. And both of these companies are wonderful. And I hope that they succeed because our goal is to automate everything end to end. But we do a lot of research in-house. And some of it is non-public, sadly. [48:05] become much better at routing. And I think that this will unlock the next layer of productivity for us. [48:10] You know, the sort of partnership with Anthropic I thought was super interesting. And it makes sense that, you know, the way that you talk about this, that you want these LLMs to become amazing at these parts of the process because it, [48:22] you know, just makes your sort of full stack approach [48:25] more effective. What does that sort of say about where you think value ultimately accrues [48:31] in this business? Like, does it become the manufacturing side? Is it just sort of, [48:36] I don't know, all these things sort of concatenated together and managing that full process. It depends on how AGI-pailed you are. If you truly believe that the models are going to become radically better at anything that has to do with a computer, there is a reasonable, like,

[48:55] like a belief that you can hold that the design portion will eventually be just the cost of the tokens that it takes to design. [49:04] this specific part. [49:06] And the bet that we are making is that first, this is a non-trivial problem to solve. Like today, this is not something that just works, right? The models are getting better and we are very happy about this. [49:16] But this is something that we... [49:19] like I think will take a couple of years at least before you have full automation on the design. The spot that you want to be is a one-stop shop where you can let your model design [49:30] and then you receive a board. [49:32] And this is really like, I think, where we eventually will want to be. You said, you know, depending on how AGI pilled one is, [49:40] How AGI Pilled are you like what? How do you build your business around these sort of horizons? The beautiful thing is that this is a great business. [49:50] Even at the current stage. The thing I bless my lucky stars for every day is that first, this is what we are good at. We design boards, we bring them up, we make sure they work, and we ship them to customers. And this has a very large amount of value. Even if you're just like 50% more efficient, like our schematic automation allows us to be 50% more efficient, which translates to radically faster design timelines. So this works today. [50:16] And I am very agile-filled. In fact, we are building the company by effectively assuming that a lot of these problems are just getting better. And we saw it day by day. Things that were completely out of the question six months ago are now table stakes. All of our library management, which is a very, very sensitive part of electronic development, there's a dedicated person at large companies, the librarian,

[50:46] and everything else. This is all done by the model. [50:48] And maybe you'll see something coming out soon in this domain. [50:52] But this is working. This is something that lifts... [50:56] hours and hours from our timelines. And we can do it on demand. So I'm very happy to see that progress is being made. We are very far from being able to build RF board that is very layout heavy. This still needs a human touch. And we do it for some of our Fortune 100 aerospace customers. And [51:17] they can compress their timelines from nine months to a month, including the factory delivery. [51:24] And so this has been just an incredible amount of value that we get out of this. [51:29] With these LLMs, with... [51:31] writing or with code, maybe, you know, a better example. [51:34] uh, [51:35] It's capable of producing... [51:37] performant code or competent code that sort of hits the bill or meets the brief, but it's not always necessarily the optimal code, right? Like, you know, a truly exceptional software engineer would find a better way to solve problems. [51:50] a certain problem. [51:52] I would assume that's the same dynamic [51:55] for you, but because it's less forgiving, [51:58] you know, maybe the stakes are higher. How do you sort of deal with that? Like, I imagine they're, [52:02] are circuit boards that [52:05] are viable, that a [52:07] unbelievable electrical engineer would say like, [52:10] Yeah, sure. It's it works, but [52:12] You know, if I was doing it, I would do it in an XYZ way. The usual telco sign of this behavior is in the routing.

[52:21] Like... [52:22] The schematics, it's [52:24] arguably more correct, [52:26] Then what the schematics are, so first of all, they are easier to verify. We have incredibly strong simulation harnesses that give optimization function to the model. This is like a core part of what you need to do to validate that schematic is good. [52:42] The other part is that schematics are largely... [52:46] They're a much simpler domain than pure layout. The ability in which you can compose code is massively easier. The tooling around electrical engineering has not evolved so that there are shared libraries of a lot of these things. People have tried, but there are... [53:00] a lot of complicated gotchas that can be solved, but they're fairly hard on the schematic side. No one complains about the validity of the schematics. [53:09] Everybody complains about the aspect, like the visual elements of them. It's a very human thing. Like people are very receptive to how good a schematic looks, even if it's correct. Like you can have a correct schematic that looks bad and people will perceive it as like poor craftsmanship. [53:28] for example. The way I like to put it is that the universe of boards that we can tackle is always expanding. [53:35] And today, if you start from individual components, the librarian is great. [53:40] And the librarian can also generate reference designs, which are like you can think about as the minimum viable board that you can build around a single component. [53:48] And now the models are starting to be so good that they can stitch them together and also build the layout. And our bet is that this will just like keep expanding to the point that the universe of boards that you can build is so vast that you can just do it all.

[54:03] Super interesting. I love this idea that often things that look wrong to humans are actually sort of the best version of something. You know, it's like the chess move that makes no sense. And then, you know, 10 moves later actually turns out to be right. To be clear, we spend an unbelievable amount of time to make sure that our schematics are very palatable to humans. Like this is a decision that we made at the beginning of the company. [54:33] and we have our trust but verify stance, our customers will get schematics. They basically get the same output that a human would give them, right? Because there is a human at the end of the day, like cleaning up the little edges. And this is what gives them the most value, even as a just archival foreman. So we do spend a lot of time on that. It's not just that we blindly trust the model. [54:53] I see. So because humans otherwise would have trouble trusting it, essentially, like there might be a version in the future where. Oh, for sure. Yeah, that's less necessary. But for now, in this transition, it's sort of important. Yeah. And I think that this is like the difference between building a research project and something that your customer can actually use in production. Like you need to deliver to them a small package that they can open in their EDA tool of choice. Like if they use Altium, they should be able to open in Altium. If they use Kika, they can open in Kika. [55:23] We work very hard to make sure that we are not just a helper tool, but a proper productivity suite. [55:30] that we actually can deliver good results on. You mentioned KeyCAD and Cadence. In the long run, I would assume your goal is to devour that workflow within your platform, right? We have a slightly different stance on KeyCAD. Like our

[55:45] like, [55:46] I cannot speak about Cadence. Cadence is like a closed software. I'm pretty sure that Cadence cares much less about their PCB software than they care about their EZX software. That's where most of their revenue comes from. [55:58] But KeyCAD is a wonderful piece of software, which is free and open source. Say that you are an Italian stone maize in Florence or an Italian leather craftsman. The tools are not necessarily what makes the artifact important. Like the artifact, the end product is really what matters. So our goal is not to devour KeyCAD or Cadence. It's to build an automation layer that becomes something that you dispatch work to. You can think about it as like we are a layer of automation on top of KeyCAD. [56:28] of our designs are built in a way where the agent can use keycat as a tool and we contribute back to mainline keycat if you go on the repo like we have a lot of patches that we have contributed about manufacturing fixing like some of the problems that we had internally we are about to contribute another like tool keycat and the tool should be open source in fact our compiler is open source it's called pcb github dioding slash pcb [56:53] fully open source. Our goal is not to gatekeep the compiler. Our goal is to build an electrical engineer that uses the compiler to build boards. [57:00] I'm curious where you see sort of like the most natural early adopters here. It sounds like robotics has been one, but... [57:08] Yeah, well, where do you expect Diode to sort of make most headway over the next few years? In many ways, like we work with a lot of enterprise customers, which are wonderful and were an important part of the initial set of hypotheses we were testing. It's like, can you deliver value at large enterprise corporations? This is like an important part of building a lasting company. It's like incremental adoption is so important. Every like a lot of the founders I respect the most have given me this advice.

[57:38] build a radically different system by throwing away everything from the old system, you're going to just face an uphill battle. But there's another lesson that you can learn from Stripe. Stripe in the early days... [57:52] had a wonderful product market fit with a lot of developers that did not already have a payment provider. These were folks that effectively were building wonderful things on the internet, [58:05] and needed a new solution that would work for them with them. And you could spend a lot of time trying to retrofit, strive into an existing solution, or you could go after all these new universe of players that just expanded immediately. We want to do both. [58:21] Because we think that it is important to make sure that we are good with enterprise customers. But the most fun that I personally have is with some of our wonderful clients in the Series B to Series C range, where they have an incredible appetite for boards. They just need to build so many boards. And it's so hard to hire like 100 electrical engineers because the United States just does not have this talent. [58:51] a long career and now they are deservingly resting, investing, or if I am at SpaceX, I'm going to be waiting for the IPO. I'm not going to join a grinding startup. I've already made it. There's a lot of these archetypes of people. And these are incredibly smart people that you want to learn everything from, but maybe they don't want to be going back to square zero, like build a hundred board from scratch. And so this is where we come in. This is the people that

[59:21] boards with them. And then we hope to become the best partner to bring them from like new product introduction to actual like large scale manufacturing. We have a lot of partnership with people that are set up for the world of here's one design that's done. Let's build a hundred thousand. And so even before we have the ability to do it, like this is very largely like a prototype line. This is not a line that will scale to millions of units, but this is something [59:51] new generation like Stripe, but for electronics and for hardware. [59:56] I think every great company ends up having at least one near death moment. Have you had to go through one of those yet with Diode? I am very fortunate that [1:00:07] I think that the near-death moment was in the very first few weeks because Lanny and I were just... [1:00:15] Like we are very deeply, like the engineering mindset is very deeply ingrained in both of us. And as an engineer... [1:00:21] a large portion of what you are trained to do, [1:00:25] is [1:00:26] Someone will give you a problem statement from A to B, and your goal is to get from A to B in the most efficient and optimal way possible. Like what I have found like building a company is like is you are given A, [1:00:39] And [1:00:40] you're asking yourself, [1:00:42] what is B? Not even where it is. It's like, what type of shape will I have in B? And so figuring out a business model that allows us to go where I want to go, which is I want to see the United States be as nimble

[1:00:57] as it is in software. The United States has such wonderful software talent. This is probably the thing I'm most in love with about this country. It's just that you come here and you walk around Berkeley and you see people that are... [1:01:10] so talented in the software domain, and they just find hardware unapproachable enough that they find it hard to actually go and apply those talents into that domain. I need that to not be the case. I want the U.S. to become as nimble as hardware as it is in software. This is like the third tier description of Diode. [1:01:40] Pop Electronics the same way that they can spin up a SaaS server. [1:01:45] This is what we want to achieve. So in that sense, you know, every company is unique. So making comparisons isn't always helpful. But for the sake of sort of clarity, it almost sounds like the ultimate goal is, [1:01:57] is [1:01:57] an American Foxconn for [1:02:01] the AI era. Is that like, how close am I there? [1:02:04] I think that you're incredibly close. I think it's also, it's very flattering of being compared with Foxconn. These are the aspirations, right? That's right. There is a lot of work that needs to be done. And the work that we are focusing on today is wonderful design and design for manufacturing platform that holds these two ends of the problem together.

[1:02:29] I'm curious about you and... [1:02:33] the way you run the company as a CEO, what is the sort of culture of Diode that you care about? And what are the things that maybe [1:02:40] you've chosen to do differently than some of the other [1:02:43] places you've worked? I think that there's actually a lot of like other places that I've worked. I don't know that I have anything reactionary. [1:02:51] There's a lot of picking the parts that I love the most about different places that I've worked. [1:02:56] I think that... [1:02:58] I am obsessive about the talent that we bring in. [1:03:03] I spend a lot of time here and when I spend time here, I love doing it with people that are [1:03:11] engaging and [1:03:13] I respect incredibly highly and I are fun to be around. And I'm very, very proud of like the entire team. So I think that [1:03:22] Like we have been very deliberate about hiring. [1:03:25] in a way that the bar is very high, and we have so much work, and it would be so easy to just give in and be like, okay, we might just hire 20 people because there is enough work. [1:03:38] But I think one of the things that we have been doing slightly differently is we have been focused on where is the pain? Like, where is the pain coming from? Where is the thing that is not scaling? [1:03:48] Like it used to be schematics and now schematic is gone. And now we see layout as the next like big hill to climb. And that signal has been very strong, but we are hiring. And in fact, I am hiring very aggressively. So if anybody listening is incredibly excited about electronics and you are either a very talented electrical engineer or a super smart software engineer that loves to like dip their toes in the hardware pool.

[1:04:15] Please, we'll fly you to New York. Come see the factory. This is truly, I think, a hallmark of building a good company is how excited are you to see your co-workers. And this is something that I have been blessed with, being very excited about it many, many times in the past. And this is the number one thing that we want to hold true. I think that the differentiating factor is in how high we keep the bar for hiring. Well, hopefully we book you a few factory tours from this. [1:04:45] Leaving New York, big perk. There you go. Yeah, absolutely. Where do you find you come up with your best ideas? Like, are you still, I don't know, fiddling around with electronics in your spare time to understand these things? Is it? [1:04:59] on a walk, you know, sports, whatever it might be? I would be truly unhappy individuals if I stopped building boards. There was a mandate of building at least one board per week. I need to be the least productive electrical engineer at the company with one board a week. Okay, there you go. I am the low bar. I am the worst E at Diode and I still need to build boards. And I think that this is starting to be harder [1:05:29] incredibly like high stake customers and we want to deliver a wonderful experience so what i'm doing today is i'm building a lot of the hardware that goes into the factory like a lot of the problems that we find is that the machines that you see are mostly meant for manual operation and we need to figure out a way to truly automate them from like figuring out the right data model figuring out which piece of hardware can pop to what even like the conveyor belts they are not particularly smart how do you make them smarter how do you stop them take pictures stuff like this

[1:05:59] lot of that hardware. And I think that the best ideas actually come from talking to Lemmy. [1:06:05] Like it is truly... [1:06:07] underappreciated how much talking with somebody much smarter than you kind of unlocks new modes of thinking. [1:06:13] I think that I am more prolific in the set of ideas that I generate. And Lenny is much better at discriminating which ideas are worth pursuing. And so this dynamic has helped me so much because he will basically say, [1:06:27] Like, okay, like you have 20 ideas. The rate at which you're generating it is probably going to kill the company. Let's focus on... [1:06:35] like these three. And I'm like, no, no, but I really like five. And he's like, why do you like five? And then we discussed like 90% of the time is like, you were right. Five is probably something that we can kick to later. And 10% of the time I'm like, oh, actually we get to do five. That's fantastic. And I think that that has been like, I have, I bless my lucky stars that Lenny is my co-founder because it's a wonderful person to have on this journey. [1:06:59] Amazing. Well, [1:07:00] I've enjoyed this so much and I always love to end with a few sort of [1:07:05] more thought experiment questions for you. If you had the chance to run any experiment, [1:07:11] with no operational constraints and unlimited resources, [1:07:15] What's an experiment you'd like to run? Is this in the realm of just like Diode as a company? Because there's a lot of like larger experiments that I think like should be. No, no, it should be as large as you'd like. Dog Patch in San Francisco needs to be the new, like this is the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It's like a part of New York that was like developed like in the, I think 50s. And now it's like an industrial space that just overlooks the city. I need Dog Patch to become like the Brooklyn Navy Yard of San Francisco.

[1:07:45] there's a lot of companies that we know in the industrial sector that are there. [1:07:48] And I think that like Astronus is there. The American Industrial Center is there. One experiment I would love to run is you take the entire surface and you make it like an industrial city. I think that that would be [1:08:00] incredible for like bringing Silicon Valley closer to what Shenzhen is and I think it will happen and hopefully we are a part of making that happen eventually. Okay final question for you. If you had a. [1:08:13] the chance to assign a book to everyone on earth to read and know that they would understand it, what would you want to assign? There's really two. And I think that they should be like done in sequence. So like if I have to pick absolutely one, it's going to be chip wars. Yeah, it's so good. It's just like no flaws. Like before starting the company, I spent like the year prior reading a ton of like both domain expertise books, like [1:08:38] chip wars and science fiction. I think it's tremendous how much science fiction actually captures what the ethos of progress was like felt like like 1970s science fiction like what did people 50 years ago like think. But I do think chip wars is a wonderful primer [1:08:55] to understand truly and deeply how much the American government has had this outsized influence in [1:09:06] developing silicon and how and why like ram production was outsourced to Singapore and Vietnam and like Taiwan and like how it happened and how like Japan was like this incredibly strong powerhouse and then like the balances of power that have shifted over the last like

[1:09:23] 60 years. I think that if you do not understand the geopolitical angle, [1:09:28] it's very, very hard to understand re-industrialization. Like it's very easy to devolve into like us versus them mentality, like for many reasons. But I do think that if you do understand the incentive structure that operate at a nation state, you can understand why even if you like are a full pacifist and you don't care about rivalry between like geopolitical rivals, having a strong industrial base is just important for like your long-term prosperity. [1:09:58] that I think Europe has... [1:10:00] like not done particularly well. And I would love to see more. Like I think that Europe has such, like all these machines are European by the way. Like it's wild. Yes, it's wild how many like high-end industrial machinery is still made in Europe. [1:10:17] But there's... [1:10:18] this weird middle ground where it's like, I want to transition to a services economy, but then I have like these, like small and medium businesses that do manufacturing. I think that this is not a contrarian opinion anymore. But like understanding the geopolitics is just very, very important to understand how the next 50 years will play out. And why China has been like largely so successful, which is, I think, something that it's worth learning and admiring the good parts of and recognizing where like there are bad parts that you can avoid. [1:10:47] Okay, so chip war is a recommendation one. You said there's two. What's the second one? Breakneck is just like in order to, and this goes again, like,

[1:10:58] demonizing like a [1:11:00] country like China is bad for everybody. Like you should yearn to understand it. And then once you understand it, you can have a nuanced opinion. [1:11:10] And there's things that you can denounce and there's things that you can admire, but you truly need to understand like the idea of an engineering culture and an engineering nation. [1:11:20] is [1:11:21] very profound and very powerful and very scary in some ways, like social engineering, for example. But Breakneck is, I think, a wonderful book to begin and understand that and be able to capture the good parts without throwing the baby with the bathwater type of thing. Well, those are two great recommendations that I feel like capture a lot of the spirit of this conversation. So thank you again, Davide. I really enjoyed it. [1:11:45] I enjoyed it too. And thank you for having me. This has been wonderful. [1:11:59] Ratings and reviews help others discover these discussions, so if you enjoyed the conversation, [1:12:04] I'd be grateful if you could take a moment to leave one. [1:12:06] For all past episodes and more, [1:12:09] Visit us at thegeneralist.substack.com. [1:12:13] See you next time as we continue to explore. [1:12:16] the future. [1:12:17] .