Summary

In this conversation, Jothy Rosenberg and Marco discuss their backgrounds, their experiences working together at Dover, and their current endeavors. They touch on topics such as the importance of culture and communication in building a successful company, the challenges they faced at Dover, and the lessons they learned from those experiences. They also discuss the concept of grit and how it has shaped their careers. Marco shares his current role at Rebuild Manufacturing and the vision of reshoring American manufacturing.

Takeaways

The importance of culture and communication in building a successful company

The challenges and lessons learned from working at Dover

The concept of grit and its impact on career success

The vision of reshoring American manufacturing at Rebuild Manufacturing

Sound Bites

"I was doing things that I never imagined that I have to do."

"We were so close to putting you in and then suddenly, you know, you pulled the plug because, well, you know, we'd run out of money."

"My biggest struggle right now is really talent, getting talent.”

Links

Marco’s Re:Build Manufacturing: https://rebuildmanufacturing.com/

Please leave us a review: https://podchaser.com/DesigningSuccessfulStartups

Think Like a Startup Founder (book): https://www.manning.com/books/think-like-a-startup-founder

Jothy’s website: https://jothyrosenberg.com

The Who Says I Can’t Foundation: https://whosaysicant.org

Jothy’s TEDx talk on disabilities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNtOawXAx5A

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background

05:47 Working Together at Dover

09:42 Challenges and Lessons Learned at Dover

23:05 Smooth Landing and Lessons from Dover

27:57 Current Challenges and Talent Acquisition

32:54 The Power of Grit

36:39 Reshoring American Manufacturing

I edit this. Okay, so. Okay. And there you are. Hi, Marco. I'm excellent. You have, look at all those patents behind you. Wow, that is amazing.

Good morning, Jathy, how are you?

Working with people much smarter than myself.

I have a few back there. Hey, so let's start off with where are you from and where do you live right now?

Wow, that's a little bit of a conversation right there. So we're originally from Italy, came to the States as a little kid with my parents and my brother, grew up in the New York City area. And after New York City, moved up to New England to continue studying and working. And right now I'm in Sudbury, Massachusetts, where I live with my family.

And who do you get to speak Italian with all the time?

I speak Italian exclusively with my girls. I have three girls and they all have different levels of fluency. Speak Italian exclusively with my father. Speak Italian exclusively with my relatives in Italy who I'm in touch with quite a bit. So it's good. So I'm very fortunate that we always spoke Italian at home. So I've been able to keep that up my entire life.

Hey, I just got back from Italy and one thing from that trip is gonna stick with me forever. The only way I make coffee anymore is in a mocha.

Nice. I have several downstairs. I just had one about 10 minutes ago.

I just I Just absolutely addicted to them. So a little plug for mocha's it's spelled mo k a for the listeners

Yeah, which is interesting because there is an OK in the Italian alphabet.

But it was a guy's name.

I didn't even know that.

Yeah, it was a guy's name in the 30s. He invented them. Yeah. I don't know if he was Italian. I mean, he probably was, but anyway. Okay. So, you know, I think it's pretty, we, you know, we'll, we'll make it clear that we recently worked together a lot, very intensely over a period of time. But I want to go back just before that and ask, okay, you,

Was he Italian? Wow.

You had worked in pretty big tech companies, digital equipment, RSA, for something around like 30 years. And then after I enticed you, you decided to come join a three -person startup where we were incubating it at a nonprofit, where the plan was we would spin it out. So.

You

Hahaha!

Right.

What was I thinking?

Tell us what you were thinking. Exactly.

Yeah, so it's very interesting. So I was a digital equipment through the acquisition by Compaq and then the acquisition by Hewlett Packard. And it was great, you know, coming out of school, working for a large company, learning what it meant to be in the workplace, working with some super, super smart people. After 15 or 16 years there, I was still the kid because everyone there was just so senior. But after that all sort of folded and went away in the New England area with the demise of really digital.

I went over to cyber and worked at RSA security for a while. And while I was there, I actually worked for a manager who was passionate about innovation, passionate about doing new things in an already established environment. So he was really fostering organic innovation in the organization. I had gone over to MIT, the Sloan School, to do a certificate in strategy and innovation. And I realized that...

That's really where my passion was to do new things, building on an existing technology, generating IP, finding new ways to expand product lines. So I was really excited to try to do that inside of RSA because there was so much that could be done in identity and access management. There was so much great intellectual property on the cyber side. So I started to do that. I moved into a leadership role and I started to try to innovate.

organically with the team and push that in the organization. Unfortunately, at that time, we were acquired by EMC, another super large company that and their experts in &A. And that was really the focus. The focus was, you know, acquire a technology that's established versus doing the internal organic investment in our people, in our technology, in our growth. So I really wanted to find somewhere that I could grow a team.

start something new, innovate things that I hadn't really been able to do, but they were really exciting to me. So that's when we got connected and I learned about what you were building inside of Draper, which was great because we were under the umbrella of a well -established, very well -known organization, but with the intention of us eventually creating something new, spinning out a technology. And we had the backing of our CEO at the time, Ken Gabriel, who was already familiar.

with the technology and with you. So it took me a little bit to actually wrap my head around, hey, I'm 50 years old, I'm gonna go to my first startup company, am I crazy? But long story short, in hindsight, I don't think I'd change a thing. I just learned so much and it's really helped change the rest of my career ever since that, ever since then.

You came in with the plan, the role that I originally was thinking of was Vice President of Engineering. But the truth is you were really the chief operating officer. And I don't say that lightly because I even say in my book that a small startup doesn't really need a CEO and a COO. But what was...

going on at the time is that I was pretty severely spread across time spent in our nice little cocoon space. And also, what they were requiring me to do is to spend time within the other bigger lab organization. And so you naturally fell into a role of kind of doing everything.

Yes.

the guy with as many possible hats as possible.

Yeah, I mean, I think that was one of the probably the greatest detractor of the of the experience was that I was doing things that I never imagined that have to do. You know, even things like worrying about how we wire the bill, wire our room, the furniture. How do you set up a company as you're exiting to even start a startup doing things like onboarding employees and benefits and buyer in benefits systems?

looking at contracts, talking to VCs. I never knew how to do, I never did that before. All sorts of disciplines being involved in marketing, business, in legal, in HR. That was really incredible. And you're right, it was a little bit of a tax. I think we actually used to call it a tax, that you couldn't focus 100 % on the objective, which was spin up the technology, create a company, because we were still.

inside of an organization that had other requirements on your time. And that was just part of the experience of going through the Draper Labs piece of the Dover history. But that was great. I mean, you don't get that kind of opportunity to do so many different things easily.

You kind of defined, I think, sort of the ideal way to think about the COO role, which is you always said yes. If I said, I really need help with buying equipment, you said yes. If I said, I really need you to worry about wiring something in the room we were in.

haha

Yeah.

I don't think there was once where you said, I don't really want to do that. Or.

I think my goal was to try to think of those things before they took your mind share. Obviously, anything that we needed had to get done. So I was always trying to figure out what are we going to need and make sure that that's taken care of. So my goal was if you came to me with a request, ideally, I'd already thought about that and was trying to get that done or obviously, put that hat on and do the task at hand.

Yeah.

Okay, so there's the elephant in the podcast is that things didn't end up so great at the moment when basically, I mean, Dover didn't die, but for everyone on the team, it essentially did. And we had gone through a pretty rough stretch.

Yeah.

Certainly for me, I used to not have any gray hair. And I know, but we found out that it's still in the beard. Because after I wasn't raising money from investors, who are by the way, frequently ageist as we know, Carol said, you're done with that. Why don't you grow the beard back? And.

You hardly have any now.

Hahaha.

Yes.

and it's grayer than it was before. Anyway, so we had a lot of challenges and then ultimately, just as we were about to run out of cash, I had maybe, I thought, one chance to keep it from going under, but that required everybody had to leave because there was not enough money for payroll. And that was some painful stuff.

And so I think, you know, just talking a little bit about what you think went right and what went wrong at Dover, completely honestly, as I know you will, would be useful for everybody who's listening to hear.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah, it's funny because what went right and sort of how I think about leadership in general is can wind up being what makes things the most painful when things go wrong. So what went right is I think, I know that you and I both think the same way around culture and people and being genuine with your staff and genuinely emphasizing and caring. And that's sort of, I mean,

That's sort of a superpower that you have and I think that I have as well is genuinely wanting to do the best job we possibly can because as leaders, we have people's livelihood in our hands. The decisions that we make impact not only them, but their families and we care about all of them. And we know all of them, we know their families and all of that. So that's great. And what went right is certainly.

Day one when you telling me let's put together a vision statement. Let's talk about what kind of company we want to create Leveraging the way I wanted to build teams and the way you have built teams So what went right was definitely how we structured the company how we were always as honest and transparent as possible communication communication communication a hundred percent and Sharing with the team all of the information we possibly could at the right time

So that was definitely something that not only went right, but that if I ever had the opportunity to do again, I would certainly repeat that kind of mindset because that's really how you create a strong organization. Now, what went wrong? Well, I thought a lot about this, a couple of things, I think. I think, you know, you always talk to us about the bowling pin strategy and focusing. I mean, that's super important. I think probably.

I had to pick a couple of things, maybe one on product and one on team. On team, for myself, having been in Dober was my first startup and there were a couple of other of our co -founders who was also, there was also their first startup. I think maybe a better understanding of what it really means to be a co -founder and the sacrifices that you really have to be prepared to make. You know, you, I, a couple of others.

At the beginning we said, we'll do whatever it takes. We'll eat rocks and take no money, whatever is possible, whatever we have to do to make this thing viable and to go forward. But I think more conversation around what that really means and understanding what the focus of investors is going to be. As you've told us many times, they're all kind of cut from the same mold. I hate to say it because, you know,

I don't want to say they're coin operated, but they've got their goals. And you've got to understand that. And the sacrifices that you have to make, you really have to be 200 % in. So more conversation around that. That's on the team, the co -founding team side. On the product side, yes, we focused. But I often felt like we tried to boil the ocean. I think the technology is phenomenal. It's

Definitely is the way to go to protect, you know computing from inherent flaws in software. We all know that that's important. We all know that that's doable. But I think that it was a little too intangible for some folks. It was expensive for our potential customers and a little too intangible for our investors. So I think if I had to pick one thing, it would probably be to structure ourselves to make a fit to actually fabricate a chip. We've talked about this in the past. I think if we had fabricated a chip,

and try to tackle maybe one aspect of the technology and actually build a system that was a little closer to reality that might have really gotten us sort of over the believability reality hump with our investors. So there's a lot there. yeah, go ahead. Yeah, of course.

I was going to add a couple things. So I think your comments about the founding team are right on. I sort of pulled back from that and wrote about founders in this book. And basically, yes, the founding team at Dover.

was not all willing to make the same level of sacrifices. And that put some really severe constraints on what we could do. But the other thing about, no, let's you finish on founders and then I'll.

Yeah.

Just to be good.

Yeah, but to be fair, one thing that we, let's not forget is the technology is very hard. The technology that we were trying to put into the market is hard. So it did require a senior team because it required, I mean, we weren't a bunch of kids coming out of school, living in our parents' basement, you know. So.

Yes, we weren't ever gonna get, that's true. And we were never gonna get people that have that much seniority and families that are with kids in college and things like that. We were never gonna get people to work for nothing. But there were times when we were trying to all take pay cuts and some just said, can't. And that was hard. But the other thing was,

And this is all on me, that we had no business in the early stages before we'd been able to, you know, before we'd proven product market fit, we had no business having sales and marketing. And we really shouldn't. And that's, I'm sure that's hard for, you know, anyone on the team who's going to listen to this, who's in sales and marketing to hear, but you know, if you're...

cruising along and you discover that you don't have product market fit figured out, what you do is you say, I'm sorry, but we have to lay off sales and marketing and we're gonna go back and retrench until we have absolutely certain that we've got product market fit. And we had a lighthouse customer who paid us money and made us think, who said,

they want to be our Lighthouse customer. And we were so excited about that. And we put everything into that. But we spent three years working with that customer. And...

I know you know, Jotty, I thought about that a lot about NXP and we were so excited. You know, I remember you and I and Steve sitting in the meeting when the guys came out from Austin. And in hindsight, maybe we should have said no. You know, we were working with a new architecture, fifth generation RISC out of Berkeley. And that's what we were focusing. They come in and they say,

We'd like you to integrate your technology into our flagship architecture from ARM. We're like, what? That's amazing. But that was so fricking hard. And so I don't know. Did we do the right thing? Did we do the wrong? I don't know.

Yeah, and it.

But here's the thing, we did have a chance if the leadership, the main person in the leadership at NXP had not been forced out of the company. Because then suddenly everything at NXP changed, we no longer had any real support. And that was an issue of all eggs in one basket. But there were so many things that were hard for Dover because,

It's a, you're a small company. You're trying to sell into these gigantic semiconductor companies where even if they're, they're staying on track and moving it as fast as they can, it's still going to take two years from the point at which, you know, they start, they commit for sure to put you into a part.

Yeah, I mean, there were things outside of our control, too. I mean, you know, we we did wind up having a pandemic. They, you know, rightfully so had to focus on their revenue stream and supply chain was became their number one concern. All of their energy was there and new design starts and new investment in new technologies. Wanted to taking a backseat, so that hurt us, too.

But we went out and we're, I mean, you know, we were consciously trying to not have all our eggs in one basket. We took those two trips to Marseille to meet with ST Micro and it seemed like they were close to wanting to adopt it. We had super great discussions with Microchip. You know, they're now saying,

Yeah, for sure.

We were so close to putting you in and then suddenly, you know, you pulled the plug because, well, you know, we'd run out of money. So those were definitely tough times. And it's really the time in my career where I had the most cold sweats, sleepless nights of my life because, you know, because of all the stuff we just talked about, we couldn't raise a Series A.

Ha ha ha.

And then we started having the bottom feeding investors of the world offering us total cram downs, threatening to get me replaced. I mean, some tough stuff. Anyway, okay. So.

Let's come back into the light.

So, well, we'll talk about, well, maybe I should sort of say, okay, well, you know, what's happened since then? So, because you know a bunch of it, but I did the 180 degree pivot. So that said, okay, so let's go get a revenue stream that's more reliable, more predictable, you know, government contracting. They pay by the month, just about.

And they're good. They're good for what they owe. They do pay their bills. And then, of course, just a few months too late, this huge contract that I'd been working on for a year comes through. Six million bucks comes our way. Most money we'd ever seen. But it was, of course, too late. And the team we had and the team we needed were not

100 % the same to go after the government business. We did that for, we've done that until now. And now we're finally in a position where I made the decision and then I got the board to agree, we should sell. And we're doing really quite well on that. Obviously on a podcast, I'm not gonna talk about who were.

who we're talking to, but it's looking good. So, you know, that's the outcome. It won't be great for investors. It won't be great for the founders, but there may be something that flows past all the preferred people that get paid first. Okay, so let's come back to, let's talk about you. That's what we're supposed to be doing on this.

So tell us about, you're at Rebuild Manufacturing. And tell us a little bit about that and how it's going.

Yeah, so that's really exciting. So what's rebuild manufacturing? So rebuild manufacturing is a company that has the vision of reshoring American manufacturing, trying to do as much of the ideation, design, development, productization of products in a variety of various sectors, all in the United States. So building this conglomerate of capabilities, mechanical engineering, design services, embedded systems, composite materials, and focusing on

a few different thesis areas, electrification, automotive, medical. So Rebuild was founded by one of our early supporters of Dover and one of our partners on the board, Miles Arnone, who is the CEO and founder of Rebuild Manufacturing. So a couple of years ago, one of the capabilities that Rebuild decided they did not have in the family of capabilities was embedded systems.

the marriage of electronics and embedded software that's been the heart of all the electronic devices that we know about. So they decided to do two things. One, they hired me to build an embedded systems team here sitting in Massachusetts. Two, rebuild acquired and embedded systems team in New York called Applied Logics. So two core capabilities of the company are mechanical engineering design services and embedded system services.

The company where I sit, Fixed Product Development here in Wilmington, Massachusetts, is historically mechanical engineering, design services, and product development, focusing on medical devices. But their capability in mechanical engineering in general is just through the exemplary, very well known in this area, now also focusing on next generation warehouse automation. So in Fixed,

where we have 60 people, 50 plus of which are mechanical engineers, I have the small island of embedded systems. In New York at Applied Logics, they are a mirror where they've also got 60 people, a four or five person mechanical team and 55 embedded systems teams, engineers. So together we have over 100 engineers focusing on all of those three disciplines, software, electronics and mechanical. So we're now...

And is there a Marco there?

There are multiples. So they're a long history, 15, 20 year consultancy that have multiple business development leads. They don't have like one head of embedded systems and everyone works in that for that person. They've got multiple program managers or project managers that work on their client for projects for their clients and one or two biz dev people. It's an entirely different structure. And even in our consultancy here at fixed, I run.

the embedded systems team, but I do a lot of business development, obviously team leadership, project management, client relationship, these kinds of things.

Do you report directly to Miles?

No, each sister company of which there are now 11 has a GM, so I report to the GM of fixed.

And so there's a GM for the New York thing as well.

There are two of them because they're the co -founders of that company. And at Fix, there were two founders, the Sabin brothers, one has since left, one is still there. So he and the GM are sort of the leaders. But the one that actually reports up into the structure under Miles is Tom Merle, our GM. So I sort of report to both of them. But it's a very flat organization. It's very communicative, very nice organization to work for.

So I do interact with Miles on a semi -regular basis. He's very much into the details. What are you working on? How's it going across all of the companies? You know how he is, and he's just got a very high bandwidth and very hands -on. Which is now the headquarters of Rebuild Manufacturing, which used to be Cannon Capital and before that, American Capital. And same desk, three companies for him.

Yeah, yeah. He's in that same office in Framingham, isn't he?

So my biggest struggle right now is really talent, getting talent. It's very challenging in Massachusetts. We're predominantly in -person, so that's another hurdle that you have to overcome nowadays. A lot of people have sort of gotten used to some hybrid flavor to their jobs, but we do a lot of collaboration with our mechanical teams, and it's a very hands -on job, so we're always in the office.

Great. Well, it does sound like you found a good, it was an unfortunate departure, but a happy, smooth landing.

Yeah, I mean, I learned lessons that I'll have with me forever. And if I ever get the chance to build another company, would I do it again? Well, seven years on, I don't know, maybe, maybe not. It's a ton of work, but I never felt like I was going to work at Dover. I was always tired, but I never felt like I was actually going to work because it was so much fun. It was hard, but we learned a lot.

I'll say one thing about that too. So, you know, I'll tell some stories to people and they'll, and they hear some of the pain. And I, but I'm always quick to say, look, 98 % of the time of all my startups, it's been a joyful experience. And the,

the attributes that I love so much, being in control of your own destiny and being able to move quickly and decisions on a dime and all of that are just things I wouldn't trade.

Yeah, you know, it's funny. I talk about that a lot because rebuild isn't a big company, but it's getting bigger. You know where I am at fixed or about 60 ish people rebuild is close to a thousand. So just by the nature that it's getting bigger, there's more process. it's challenging to onboard people, to hire people. And I remember at Dover, you know, we show, we determined our own destiny. We were empowered by you.

to make the right decisions. That's why you hired us, because you trusted us. And we had a couple of occasions where we would bring someone in for an interview. We had one occasion where we brought someone in for an interview, never met the person face to face, just a phone call. And we went from hello to interview, offer, accepted offer in four hours. I mean, who gets to do that? Right, this was one of our verification guys that lived in Colorado.

And we had this method, this process where we would keep, you were sort of the anchor when we needed to sell. Because if we found someone that we really loved, we wanted you to help us sell Dover. But we didn't want to waste your time. If interviews weren't going well, we'd cut them short. We'd be honest with the candidate. So every time the candidate would come out of an interview with one of our folks, I'd talk to them. How's it going? Are we still going forward? And our CTO a couple of times would come to me and say,

Don't let this person leave the building. And we'd make an offer on the spot. That kind of agility, I miss that. That's one thing that I really miss about being in such a small company that's really empowering its employees to make the right decisions.

Well, it sounds like a negative thing to say, but let me say this. The other side of the coin, when we made a mistake, and no matter how many times you hire people, you're still gonna make mistakes. And we made a couple of mistakes. And to me, the adage, hire slowly, fire quickly, is important because I used to say to you guys, we've got a Bozo bit rule here. And if the Bozo bit gets flipped,

That's right. And it happened. You know.

We're going to act quickly. Yes, it happened. But the thing is, is that the positive part of that is that, OK, we made a mistake. We're going to fix it fast. And the fixing it fast totally re -energizes the rest of the team. Because they say, wow, don't abuse this power. But if you go to the leaders here and you say, this person isn't working out, they are.

They listen to you, they trust you. They might do a little bit of double checking, but then it's taken care of really fast.

Yeah, right. And for folks listening to what does really fast mean, we had a case where we had an engineer that wasn't at the bar that we needed. And our CTO came to us and said, it's not working. We need to make a change. And I still remember this because believe it or not, it was 4th of July weekend and it was a Thursday and we were going, we were having a day off and that person's last day was the following Monday. You know, it's painful. We love our people.

But at the end of the day, we're running a business. We want to be successful. And that message to the staff, hey, the CTO said this isn't working. Can you please help me make a change? We really listened to that person. And then we wanted to hire someone to replace that person that catapulted us to the next level where we needed to be. So it can be painful, but being able to make those decisions quickly is super important.

Yeah. Yeah.

sure is, well, hey, to do all of this stuff, you know, the stuff you've done, I would, I would go back and I would say the stuff you did that was hard at RSA, the, the Chinese mitigation attack, and then the mitigation that you had to do at RSA and all the stuff that, you know, we did together at Dover. And, and again, now all of this stuff takes grip. There's no one I've ever met.

Oof.

Yeah.

who is involved with the startup who doesn't have grit. And this is a question I've never asked you, but where do you think your grit comes from?

wow. I would have to say probably just culturally and from my parents and learning the struggles that they had to go through in their lives coming out of, you know, an occupied country in Italy during World War II and always looking for opportunity to help people, to work hard. I mean, we came here from Italy when I was a little kid. We didn't have anything.

You know, I think my parents had like a few hundred dollars. My dad worked around the clock. My mom worked around the clock. And it was all to just not to have aspirations of being wealthy, but to just be successful and to create a positive environment for the family and for the people around the community that they were creating around them. And I think that just. You know, became part of my personality and my brother's personality.

Becoming the first generation in our families to go to college. The first ones to get a professional job, professional career, and never relenting. There are always problems, whether they're at home, with family, with friends, with colleagues, with the environment, with the way you live, and never giving up and realizing that you've got a support system. Be open with your people. Be honest with yourself. If there's a problem,

Raise your hand quickly. And it's amazing. Now we teach these lessons to our kids. I've got kids going through college. And there are always problems that come up. And just being able to give the problem -solving skills to young people, whether they're your own young people or your colleagues, making them realize that, hey, if you raise your hand and say, I need help, and people see that you are working hard, you will always be successful.

And as a leader, sitting next to your people and sharing in that pain, you know, at RSA, like you just talked about, it was a marshalling event for us. We were attacked by a state sponsored hacker. And the company would have disappeared if we didn't have the grits to roll up our sleeves and say, what do we need to do to come out of this pit? Not everyone was able to do that. Some people wanted to be having to leave the company because they couldn't take the pressure.

but a few of us rolled up our sleeves and said, okay, let's start to, you know, how do you, I tell my girls all the time, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. What's the problem today? Let's solve that. Tomorrow we get to solve the next problem. And I think that really helped me for what was to come in the startup world. Tackling problems that I didn't even know what they were. I mean, I'd never pitched to a VC before. Next thing you know, I'm like,

Hehehehe

This is hard, but it can be really satisfying and fun too.

Yeah, I could see the the effects of the positive effects of because because when you join me, that was a still very fresh. That whole Chinese mitigation thing was fresh in your mind.

Yeah, but if you might remember this, I still remember this, we were sitting in your office at Draper and you did two things. One, you did something I'd never seen before in an interview process. I had an interview a lot. I mean, I'd only been in a few different companies, but you said, you know what? This might actually work with you helping me build this team. Why don't you just take an afternoon? I remember this, come to Draper, work with us. We're having some brainstorming sessions to figure out what's our business model, what are our potential customers.

And it was me, you, Greg, Brad Gaynor, sitting in a room trying to figure out what is this company, what are we actually going to do? Who are we going to go after? And we just basically worked together. And then afterwards, you said, I think it might've been the same day. I think I'd like to ask you to join the team. And I said, why? I've never done this before. I'm not sure that I have what you need. And you said, well, we'll figure out where you might be weak and we'll support you.

will give you the tools you need. And I'm like, man, no one has ever said that to me. You know, giving me the ability to build something and knowing that I'm going to fall down, you know, but that, I mean, no pun intended, but that's your background, you know, having talk about grit. I mean, who better as a leader than you that you're defined by your grit your entire life. So who better to help pick you up when you struggle.

Yeah. Well, that, that doing that, having you come back in, I mean, what I'm always struck by is that the, the interview process is inherently kind of an artificial situation. It's not like the job that them doing the job you're, you're talking to them about, you know, the best we've, we've, we've come up with is, is these behavioral interviewing questions where you're at least hearing them tell stories about.

Mm -hmm.

how they work and what certain situations were like and how they handled them. And so, you know, I just, I knew that what was gonna be really important for working with you was problem solving, brainstorming, innovating. And I just needed to see that happening in real life for a couple of hours and how we were gonna interact. And at that point, I felt like I see how this guy works. I want him.

Yes, it's funny you say that because for senior roles at Rebuild, they've started doing it. Actually, they started that with me. They'll call them functional interviews or something like that, where I was actually sent sort of a problem statement before joining saying two questions. How are you going to build a team? How are you going to build this embedded systems team for us? And how are you going to solve our embedded systems needs for the organization? So I went in there, and they said, we'll do a whiteboard session. And I said, you don't have to.

Would you guys be all right if I put it together in a presentation for you? So it was one of the guys that reports to Miles, our chief scientist. And we went in and he was essentially trying to do the exact same thing. How can we work with this person with a little bit of a twist? Five minutes into the conversation, he said, you know what? Forget all this. Let's fast forward. Let's make believe you work with us already. You're already on the team. Let's have a meeting about how we're actually going to do this. And it was the same thing that you did.

Basically, we just worked together for the next hour and a half. And that's what made us realize that, yeah, we can actually do this together. We've got the right personality, the right skill sets, and let's go build this team. Let's go do this thing. I think it's super powerful.

I do too. All right. I think this has been great, fun, and hopefully informative. And thank you for agreeing to come back and talk to me.

I'm flattered to have the invitation and to have another opportunity to hang out with you for a little bit. Awesome.