Excited to be featured in
@TechCrunch
today!
After working quietly with our early partners, I'm excited to share how our Factory Operating System is helping manufacturers build better, faster, and safer for a better world.
I am incredibly happy to announce our $14m Series A round today! This funding validates the work we've been doing and will allow us to scale the ION Factory OS to more manufacturers solving today's most important challenges.
SpaceX took ULA’s contracts AND created new market.
Anduril will take Northrop’s.
I will add 100 other companies to this list by the end of this decade.
We are a startup based in Los Angeles that is building the critical digital infrastructure for over 50 companies building insane things like nuclear reactors and electric airplanes.
I can’t imagine not being this ambitious.
LA is the home of deep tech because only a hydrogen-extracting nuclear reactor-powered eVTOL that goes to space can get us from a happy hour in Torrance to a VC dinner in Pasadena on the same night.
Investors be giving people $1bn to 3D print something that doesn't need to be 3D-printed, but think purchase order automation for the industrial base is solved 😅
@Austen
"Oh wow. Saw that you're connected to Austen. I'm building something in edtech. Could you connect us?"
"Nah, saw him from across the hallway once in 2011."
Most people that say "ITAR" have no idea what they are actually saying let alone how to manage it.
No, an order for office snacks is not an ITAR-regulated information exchange.
Technical founders: It's important to know that when you move from a technology world to a CEO/founder role, you are signing up for a career change from technology/engineering to psychology (not really even business. Accounting and financial modeling are very easy)
Amazing to see what our team has been doing with manufacturing data and machine learning. We are soon going to be able to predict material failures, fixes to them, lead times for supply chain, and more. This is going to change everything.
What a day. Toured a portable nuclear reactor company, mapped requirements for an autonomous airplane company to their regulatory needs, and discussed the economics of concentrated solar power at our happy hour.
Stock markets be damned. Your boy is powering the future.
On 10/8/18,
@NealSarraf
and I flew up to San Francisco to meet with a bunch of prospective customers and investors, not sure if we were even worthy.
Today, we're having our first company all-hands meeting with our team of 9 strong.
China was never going to be the only place to build. The sheer idea of sending all knowledge to one place and then putting all of those things on boats to ship out to the rest of the world is wild. Imagine if we did this with pizza...
It's hard to work with me. Because I get shit done, and I hold a high bar – for myself and everyone I work with.
The people who enjoy working with me IMPRESS me regularly. Non-impressive people struggle.
We may get fewer applications bcuz of this tweet, but they will be better.
Overheard in LA tech: "I heard he moved to Miami, bought a house, and got married. I don't even follow him on Twitter. The algorithms just wanted me to know."
Person: How did you meet your fiancée? Were you arranged?
My brain: I listened to Linkin Park, played Halo, ate Toaster Strudels, and skateboarded. I was whiter than your kids.
My mouth: We met in college.
Photos from
@firstresonance
annual summit. As we've expanded to almost 50 people this year, our annual summit is an opportunity to connect personally and professionally, so we can build a better ION Factory OS.
Holiday party 2018 vs. holiday party 2019.
Feeling blessed to have grown something from nothing with
@NealSarraf
this past year and to have an amazing team of Resonators and our family and friends as we charge into 2020.
@PPathole
@elonmusk
Isn't another way to measure demand (as a function of the price) to charge the full cost of the vehicle? Or even slightly discounted to incentivize opting into the up front payment? You can do that right now too.
As an early-stage founder, I'm busy trying to build the best product for the customer, build a team, etc. It is relieving when the customer approaches ME about growing our contract so we can deliver to them faster.
#humblebrag
Candidates be asking me about our ethical position on powering aerospace and defense companies.
And then they tell me they are considering opportunities at Facebook 😅
People think "boring factory software".
Meanwhile, the First Resonance team just spent this past week touring companies building the future of air and space travel. Companies building on ION.
Excited to share that I'm joining
@beondeck
's On Deck Scale fellowship!
Looking forward to connecting with other founders that are pushing the boundaries for the world, their companies, and for themselves. Ready to learn and share!
When we were fundraising in 2019, we used to hear ridiculous things like "All manufacturing will eventually go to China". This is as myopic as saying that all food will one day grow in Illinois.
One of our engineers went on a week-long camping trip. Upon his return, he's been wearing a collared shirt and tie every day. Idk what happened in that forest 🌲
My favorite part about interacting with other software for hardware founders is spending the first 10 minutes telling each other about how we're not going to bleed into each other's domains. Because one company can definitely build all of the following:
CAD
PLM
MES
ERP
I've been using
@auth0
for identity management for my new project. It's amazing how these "as a service" things are continuing to come up. We're getting a resilient "composable internet". This idea transferred to the enterprise is HUGE.
Silicon Valley won't get manufacturing right because they are physically too close to Apple and is influenced by too many people from Apple to understand the broader picture, including where the world is going (localized manufacturing, defense, energy/utilities, etc.)
Dentist just texted me saying I owe $200. Asked if I want to pay or they have to call collections.
Yeah cool let me just hit the "Pay" button nicely integrated in this text message.
Help,
@fast
!
Amazing to be a part of
@jobyaviation
's rollout of their first aircraft off of their production line. Their ingenuity from design to manufacturing to business model is impressive. It's a great honor to watch their development and be along for the journey. ⚡️🔋✈️
Any great
@webflow
developers in LA? We're looking for someone to make our website designs come to life. We're building the manufacturing intelligence platform for next-generation hardware companies. This is a very cool thing.
Software is eating the world. We are about to debut a low-code interface to further connect people building atoms with bytes. True to its name, a Factory OS is extensible and interfaceable.
@zebulgar
Musk Industries products in increasing order of impact:
The car is the product.
The rocket is the product.
The factory is the product.
The people are the product.
Started learning to DJ this past weekend. Those who know me know that I love music. I also find that I'm a huge pattern matcher. Analogies, metaphors, and cross-industry lessons are where I work best.
I'm excited to exercise my passion with a new form of creativity.
No surprise given the amazing team we've been building through 2019!
2020 is set to be an even more exciting year. Make sure to follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to keep up with the latest. Pssst: We have some very exciting announcements coming in a few weeks!
If you are an investor looking to make more investments in the physical world, hear this from this guy:
Design costs round down to 0. We live in a world where being operationally excellent is the value. And in hardware, that's manufacturing. Not design.
Somewhere in the USA, a 25 year-old FAANG engineer just got a raise to $190k so that they don't leave to go join that one startup solving climate change.
Somewhere else in America, a family just received $700 in the mail.
"Big hairy audacious goals" are harder to write when you're an infrastructure company. It's not as glamorous as "flying cars for everyone by the end of the decade!"
But being comfortable in enabling the world's biggest endeavors is self-selecting... And a bigger opportunity.
Awesome to visit some of our growing customers
@EatStellarPizza
and
@launcher
on our
@firstresonance
field trip. Their products are more than cool.
Stellar is making delicious food affordable, and Launcher is opening up access to a growing space economy. The future is now!
Just visited a customer who told us the horrendous story of their multi-month wait for an ERP implementation that is still not on track. They had a request for a keyboard shortcut in the ION interface. We deployed it while we were in the room.
A lot of smart people have been advising that I put our focus on legacy/traditional companies.
Well - one of those is apparently selling itself for parts (If you don't know ULA, you at least know Boeing and Lockheed Martin).
On the other hand, a company built on ION just got a
I remember conversations like this about 5-6 years ago:
"I work at SpaceX"
"What's that?"
"You know Elon Musk?"
"No. Who is that?"
"You know Tesla?"
"Yeah."
"The guy who runs that... He has a company that builds rockets."
Actively hiring for people who will paddle like hell to catch a great wave rather than just expect to catch one for free.
By the way, let me know if you ever want to go surfing
🏄♂️
I was recently asked about why I left such a cool company doing very meaningful things for the world. Aside from rockets and spaceships, one of SpaceX's most important products is hunger. I have friends who have gone on, hungry for something different.
In a startup, you keep pedaling even on a cloudy day. Literally and figuratively.
Really great to celebrate our summer beta push and to welcome news members to our team in Catalina last week. We're just getting started!
A challenge I've had recently: Explaining to people that the true disruption coming out of Silicon Valley in the past ~20 years is not technical.
It has been about distribution and democratization of access.
All over LA, founders are setting up clean rooms and robots to manufacture everything from rocket engine components to portable nuclear fission reactors.
@jdsisteron
and I compiled a list of 50 hard tech companies you should know about in and around LA:
There is a big opportunity for a "pull-based" enterprise communication tool. Email and Slack are assaults on our attention, and we put the onus on the individual to manage their notifications.
People should be able to put anything into the system and "pull" information like,
Incredibly grateful and humbled by the super intelligent, respectful, and caring team we are building at
@firstresonance
. Scaling is tough, and I feel blessed that we are bringing in just some gosh darn good people.
So on the bright side, I've reconnected with multiple founder-friends this past few days and scheduled for next week. We all know it's going to be hard, and we can't rely on the fat funding rounds, press, awards, events, stages, glamor, VC hype squad, etc. Game on.