Our manufacturing interview toolkit/cheatsheet: - bring in something you made. or have it in the background of your video call if remote. our best hires have done the intro call from their shop or workbench - show-and-tell your favorite 5 tools - describe what would you do for work if you didn’t have to get paid for it - talk about your hobbies, show off some photos. Saying “video games” is pretty meh unless you are applying to our simulation team - explain your favorite method of joining dissimilar materials - tell us about a part you designed that didn't work and how you changed it - if you've ordered from us, bring the part. if you haven't, tell us what you'd make with your employee discount. we love hiring customers - show us a jig, spreadsheet, or script you built to save yourself work - name a fastener, material, or process you think is overrated and defend it (7075 lol) - talk about a tool you bought that you regret

How I got my first customers: - I kinda cheated because I was my first customer. I needed parts made that no one wanted to make, so I bought some equipment to make them myself. Cash flow negative. - I figured a few of my friends and family would use the service too, since they are all fabricators and into hobbies and cars. Turns out friends prefer to pay in beer and burgers. Cash flow negative, but I got good feedback and learned how to run the operation. - Went to a couple local sheet metal shops and let them know they could sub out to me since I had capacity. That got me a couple jobs here and there. Cash flow negative but building a reputation for fast turnaround - still had capacity and told those shops that I could do all the weird stuff they didn’t want to do (qty 1, weird geometry, Etsy stuff). We said yes to everything. Pretty soon I was getting referrals from a few shops in town. Cash flow negative, but making a little money - built a website and started showing off parts that we made on IG. Got a few followers and they started telling their friends - spent some money on Google search ads. Got lots of clicks, but the work we were quoting was bad. Lots of weird stuff that wasn’t manufacturable. This showed us that we had to teach people how to design for sheet metal, so we started doing lots of how-to documentation and videos. That helped a lot. Nearly break even, not bleeding as bad - covid hit, got a few big orders for sneeze guard parts, battery systems for ventilators, covid keys, other random stuff for social distancing. Break even! (besides Capex investments) - continued to grind and deliver. The best advertising and marketing is a good product. I’ve done paid ads, PR, sponsorships, giveaways, billboards, you name it. The only thing that matters is having a good product and giving your customers what they want. - so far I haven’t found a magic bullet, it takes years to build up trust and loyalty. I haven’t ever seen an ad for McMaster, but they have a helluva product and reputation, so I don’t think they really need to advertise now. It took them a while though. - if I had to do it all over, I’d probably do it the same way: focus on making a great product and customer experience. I always think about those little restaurants with no sign, but they have a line around the block. If you make the best tacos in town, word will get around

I’m hiring a Director of Engineering (software). $280k-$400k range. You’ll be one of a handful of people that shape SendCutSend’s future - kinda a big deal. - help us grow our engineering team 10x - build and deliver the best possible product to our internal and external customers - manage a world-class team - build teams to develop cool shit that has never been done I’m looking for: - a SendCutSend customer - experience building teams - startup experience as well as larger org experience (we have 650 people now and will get to a couple thousand soon) - natural leadership traits - someone who wants to win and loves competition

Want to become exceptional at physical operations? Become an expert in: - recruiting, training and retention - running 27/7 operations - unplanned maintenance - EH&S - supply chain and vendor management - scaling with square feet vs tokens - negotiations with utilities - negotiations with machine sales guys - negotiations with banks - permits and inspections - roofing (factories always leak) - catering and redbull distribution - communication - rigging, transportation, and logistics - air compression - forklift certification - emergency fabrication - pain tolerance - concrete, electrical, and plumbing - packaging and shipping - waste management - customer service and hospitality

summer 2018: convince my wife that I can buy a laser and “it’ll pay for itself” if I can get a few customers. Just need enough to make the payment, then I get to use it for free

Hard things I learned in scaling a manufacturing business that I wasn’t fully prepared for: - as the company gets bigger, using slack to communicate across all shifts and factories in different states sucks. You gotta try harder than slack. Things can get taken the wrong way (gotta use lots of emojis) and important messages get lost. Phone calls and travel are so much better but you gotta put in the effort - with 600 employees you don’t know everyone, but you still feel like they are your kids in a way. When someone loses a family member, or they have a sick kid, or they get into a motorcycle accident, I worry about them like they are my own kid. I can’t imagine how this is going to work at 6,000 employees. - entropy is real. We are fighting laws of thermodynamics lol. Everything wants to dissolve into disorder and chaos. Gotta fight it 24/7 - it’s easy to make negative assumptions. I see front office teams grow and I’m thinking “really? It’s a full time job just to do xyz??!” But then I sit with them and realize at scale, yes…it’s a full time job to do things that took us 20 minutes a week in the old days - many vendors and salespeople don’t give you the time of day when you’re small or starting out. Then you get to a certain size and they are begging for your business, offering discounts, and giving you access to crazy deals. If you survive the valley of death it’s nice on the other side - safety and compliance becomes a big deal. When it’s just 5 of you, safety is implied and everyone kinda gets it because everyone has “done it” before. With a larger population, you have to worry about so much more. Some people are brand new to manufacturing and don’t have the instincts that come with working with machines for years and years - the larger the company grows, the more you have to lose. hundreds of families count on me for a paycheck, so the stakes are really high. Easy to lose sleep when things go sideways for a little bit. - when you first start, things seem to cost a couple thousand $. Then after a while it’s $10k. Then $100k. Then you get comfortable with $1M or more and your concept of money is wildly skewed. Every quote you get is some batshit crazy amount of money but apparently that’s how much things cost - mistakes can cost many millions of dollars at scale. You can still take risks, but the downside starts to get bigger - you can’t be everywhere all the time, so you gotta have great people that would make the same decisions you would make if you’re not in the room. Or ideally they make an even better decision. Great leaders allow companies to grow. Build them early