Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S5E51 Manish Kumar | Being CEO at SOLIDWORKS
Today, we are honored to speak with Manish Kumar whose journey from a curious engineer to the CEO of SolidWorks is both inspiring and insightful. In this conversation, Manish discusses the evolution of SolidWorks, the introduction of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, the integration of cloud computing and AI, and the process of translating user feedback into product development. Manish also reflects on the challenges of being a CEO, the importance of embracing change, and lessons learned from failures.
Main Topics Covered:
- Manish's background and early influences that led him to engineering
- Transition from mechanical engineering to software and joining SolidWorks
- The evolution of SolidWorks and its user experience focus
- Introduction to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform and its capabilities
- Cloud computing and the development of X Design
- AI integration in CAD workflows and automation of drawing creation
- The process of gathering customer feedback and incorporating it into product development
- Challenges of being a CEO and the importance of taking risks
- Lessons learned from failures and the power of storytelling to convince stakeholders
About the guest: Manish Kumar, is a luminary in the world of CAD software and engineering innovation. He currently serves as the CEO of SOLIDWORKS and Vice President of R&D at Dassault Systèmes, where he has been instrumental in evolving one of the most respected platforms in the design world. With over two decades of experience, Manish has led transformative projects, from pioneering Agile methodologies at SolidWorks to spearheading the shift toward SaaS-based cloud computing.
A graduate of IIT Delhi and Harvard University, Manish combines technical brilliance with a deep commitment to empowering engineers and designers globally. Outside of his professional endeavors, he’s an avid reader, movie enthusiast, and traveler, finding inspiration in both the digital and real worlds.
Links:
Manish Kumar - LinkedIn
SOLIDWORKS Website
Aaron Moncur, host
About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us
Because if you are always being successful, it means you are not taking bigger risks. You are taking risks knowing that you are going to succeed.
Aaron Moncur:Hello and welcome. To the being an engineer podcast today. We are so thrilled to have Manish Kumar as a guest. Manish is a luminary in the world of CAD software and engineering innovation, currently serving as the CEO of SolidWorks and vice president of R and D at Dassault system, where he has been instrumental in evolving one of the most respected platforms in the design world. With over two decades of experience, Manish has led transformative projects from pioneering agile methodologies at SolidWorks to spearheading the shift towards SaaS based cloud computing. And we are so excited to have him on the show today and dive into the world of SolidWorks. Manish, thank you for joining us.
Manish Kumar:Thank you for inviting me. Aaron
Aaron Moncur:so Manish, you do have a background as an engineer. What? What made you decide to become an engineer those years ago?
Manish Kumar:You know, I grew up in a very small town of India, and my family is originally from an agrarian background, in the sense my grandfather was, he was in agriculture. Essentially he was a farmer. My entire family, on my mom's side, they are also farmers. In fact, my dad and his older brother, they were the first two kids in their entire family who broke from that tradition, and they became ingenious. So I was fortunate enough to have a dad who was a civil engineer. Now that is one part of the influence that I always saw growing up. The second part, I would say, is right from right from my childhood. I was pretty curious kind of guy. I would say, there have been times when I have mucked up things which at times I was able to fix at times I could not fix it. I'll tell you a story, a funny story, that is when I was, I will say, around eight years old. My sister, she got talking doll. And you can imagine, at that time, the world was limited to the shop next door, meaning, if you have something in that shop, it is available in the world. Otherwise it is not, because back then, we did not, we did not have things like Amazon, where our kids can literally buy anything from all over the world. So I had never seen I had seen dolls, but I had never seen a talking doll. So when I my sister got a talking doll, it was pretty intriguing for me that, how is this doll able to talk? And of course, my sister was very possessive about it. I was not allowed to touch it. But then once my parents, they went to some place with my sister, and I was home alone, not alone. I was there with a really talking doll that I needed to how does it talk?
Aaron Moncur:I think I see where this is going. I
Manish Kumar:was able to figure out how the dog talked. Essentially, there was a very small, tiny tape in there, and there was a switch. When activated that switch, made that tape roll, and the doll talked. The problem was that after that day, the poor doll could not talk because I think I messed up something with the switch. Something bad happened, but the doll didn't really talk again. My sister didn't know either. So till date, she is under assumption that she might have dropped.
Aaron Moncur:Oh, I hope she doesn't listen to this episode. Could be This is blackmail
Manish Kumar:episode. But essentially, I grew up as a very curious kid, and all around me there were really very amazing mechanical objects which were very simple. We used to have hand pumps in India, you can find it on every at every single nook and cranny. For that matter, it's a very simple device which you pump and the water comes out right, a simple mechanical device like that, that. How does it work? I used to take it apart. My dad had a scooter. Scooter is a mopid for US markets, or for US audience, we used to every once a month or twice a month, we used to open the entire engine apart in order to clean up the carburetor. So these are the kind of things which made me wonder that, why is scooter working the way it is working? Why is there a flywheel? Why does it need to rotate? So these are the kind of things and back. Then we did not really had internet, so having a curious mind was one thing, but having a dad who was able to explain things was awesome. So I think the combination of that was what inspired me to be an engineer. If it was just me being curious, without someone being or willing to answer my questions, would have killed my curiosity, or if I was not curious enough, I would not have been able to ask the right questions. So I think that combination was the reason why I'm here.
Aaron Moncur:That's an important insight, not one or the other, but the combination of the two is what really fostered that, that mindset
Manish Kumar:definitely
Aaron Moncur:you started out in mechanical engineering, but then pretty quickly moved into software. Is that right? It is, tell us a little bit about that. How did you make that change?
Manish Kumar:In fact, even that is a very funny story. We were I, I did my undergrads in mechanical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. And it was, I was literally, it was fourth year, and we were sitting in a class where our professor was teaching CAD to us, computer aided design to us. And back then, it used to be slides, which was put on a projector, on a on a, I would say it, and it used to get projected. So he was teaching us all the mechanics of how you create splines, how you can not just how you can create, I should say, curvy shapes mathematically in a precise way. And there was a company which the name of the company was geometric software services, which became through dplm, which was ultimately bought by dassa systems a couple of years back. So that company came to the campus for the first time to recruit undergrad kids, and we had no idea. We had no idea what this company does. What that company was doing was it was providing services to all the cat players, including solid girls and our professor. He happened to know the guy who was coming to interview all the all the candidates. So our professor came to our classroom, and he asked us that you are taking this CAD class. Why are you not applying for this job where a company is coming looking for young, curious minds like yours and go and apply for that job? And lo and behold, we all went and applied for job. I was hired from the campus, so I did not I faced one interview in my life that is pretty funny. Then I was hired, and on day one, I joined the SolidWorks r&d team. It was July 1, 1998 and I have been part of SolidWorks R and D since then. So I have been in one company throughout my life. Okay, I can say two companies, because I was in gssl geometric software services. And then in 99 I moved from being an employee of geometric services to being an employee of SolidWorks. But I have always worked for solid books, aren't he till date? And that's how I'm here.
Aaron Moncur:Amazing, amazing. How funny that you've only had one interview your whole life. I bet there are not many people out there who can say that we had, we had Jon Hirschtick on the show a bit ago, maybe a year or two ago. And I think he, I remember him saying that Solid Works was founded early 90s, right? Like early to mid 90s, okay? Russian in December 93 so you joined four or five years later, something like that. I joined in 98
Manish Kumar:Okay, so the release of SolidWorks was 95 and I joined when 98 plus was being developed, so I joined 98 plus onwards.
Aaron Moncur:What was the software like back then? I mean, obviously it was nowhere near the feature rich SolidWorks that we all know today. What take us back? You know, 2025, years ago. What was it like back then?
Manish Kumar:It is really funny, because we recently completed 30 years of SolidWorks in the sense, next year, it will be 20 or 30 years since SolidWorks 95 SolidWorks 95 was launched 95 next year at UB 2025 so we are going to celebrate that that we have been releasing software for last 30 years now. I was, I was as curious as you are, that what was it like to use SolidWorks 95 so what we did was we put SolidWorks 95 on a virtual machine. Oh, and I started to use it myself. Yeah, and it was pretty funny that the very first experience, and the, actually, the funniest part was that I went to chat GPT to ask the question that, what was the impact of SolidWorks 95 in the CAD board? And it gave a very rosy kind of explanation, that SolidWorks 95 it democratized CAD, ensured that CAD was on every genius desktop and so on. So I was pretty impressed by the answer of chatgpt. So I had to try it myself. And I tried, I tried to try it myself. And I took one of the simplest possible models that I could design, and I struggled with it. And I was not I was not too happy with myself. I was like, maybe it is me. It is not the software. So I gave it to a kid who was who wasn't even born in 1995 so I gave SolidWorks 95 on the virtual machine to the kid, and I asked him that, please record the screen, but also record your expressions while you are using the Sort. And this, I shouldn't call him kid. He's an employee of Sorted Books and a new engineer, I should say. And this, this person, he you can see the facial expression on minute one, he was all curious that he's all excited solid. Verse 95 I'm using it. And then you can see slowly he starts to get frustrated, to a point that about 30 minutes into that session, he was pretty frustrated. Now, the funniest part was that he he texts me, but do you really want me to complete the model?
Aaron Moncur:Hit my gun far enough
Manish Kumar:I had saved him from his misery. So what the poor, poor guy, all he could have done was he created bunch of sketches in those 30 minutes. Then I, I was curious to ask him that, can you try to do it in the latest version of SolidWorks? And he did it within 90 seconds.
Aaron Moncur:Wow, that's incredible.
Manish Kumar:The software, which was the groundbreaking, revolutionary software which moved people from where they were to, that brought SolidWorks, or I should say that brought CAD at every ingenious desktop it itself has evolved through those last 30 years. And it's interesting because it also taught me a lesson that no matter where the software is, there is always room for improvement. So even though it was revolutionary back then, if we did not improve it, we would not, would not be sitting here talking to each other. So this, this evolution has to continue. This evolution cannot stop or pause. Yeah.
Aaron Moncur:Well, I think speaking as an engineer myself, someone who has used SolidWorks for a long time, not so much recently, but for a solid decade. I used it every day, almost all day. We very much appreciate everything that SolidWorks has done for the engineering community and helping us design amazing products. I remember in college, I actually learned on they didn't have SolidWorks where I was in college, it was pro engineer, pro e back there, and that's where I learned CAD. And I remember just falling in love with it. I thought it was so cool that not necessarily pro e specifically, but just CAD in general. So cool that you could model these objects. And I would spend my weekends in the in the computer lab, just modeling things Ferraris and cell phones and whatever I could, you know, get my hands or eyes on. And then it wasn't too long after that, my first full time job where we started using SolidWorks. And sorry, BTC, but I remember thinking, Oh, this is, this is a lot easier than pro E, and it's just gotten better since then. Well, speaking of the evolution of SolidWorks, I'd love to speak talk a little bit about Lydia experience, the platform. Now, I'll be honest, I don't know a whole lot about 3d experience. I think 3d experiences has started to gain momentum, kind of as I was tapering off my use of SolidWorks. It's I was, I was an avid SolidWorks user up until probably 2017 2018 something like that. And then I slowly started kind of tapering off and focusing on other things at my company, but what? What can you tell us, for those out there who don't really understand what the the experience platform is, what? What is this and how is it benefiting engineers?
Manish Kumar:Oh, you. The way I explain it is that our users cannot just deliver functional products anymore. They have to deliver experiences. And now I'll explain what. What do I mean by that? You can take any product that you use, if it was just a functional product where you're trying to use it and it is serving that purpose? Is it going to be enough? And I think Apple is the one which ruined it for. Everyone, because people don't want just functional products. They want a product which is easy to use. It has looks wise, even it has to have a nice user experience. But just having that alone is not enough, making sure that when you start to use the product, it lasts for a really long time. It serves its purpose and completeness in the sense it's not something which is half baked. So you need to do all these testing in most of the product companies, where you have to use the you have to create a product, not just functional. Rather, let's say, you have to add aesthetical sense to it, but then you have to test it. And if you have to test it, and you try to do it using a destructive testing where you create a prototype, you're trying to use it, test it, it is going to cost you both money, time, effort as well as you are going to lag behind, because to create these physical prototypes, you are going to take a lot, of time. And if you're trying to do destructive testing, you are going to waste a lot of time. So simulation is extremely important in that particular aspect, to make the right product right the very first time. But again, just having simulation is not enough, because you need to manufacture this thing, and if you have to manufacture this thing, you have to ensure that you are going to do it with the least possible cost. In order to improve your margins, you have to deliver it in the right time. So you have to govern the entire process in the sense you need to make sure that you are going to go out at the right time in the market. And last but not least, I would also say that without putting your product in front of your consumers in a way, or in front of your users in a way that where they can connect with it, in in in an emotional way, you'll not be able to build brand loyalty. So essentially, if you look at query experience platform, what it is trying to do is that it is trying to find different aspects of delivering experiences into one single platform in a seamless way, where once SolidWorks users create the data, once it is on the platform, it connects to all these different disciplines in an extremely seamless way, where you modify your SolidWorks models without Ever worrying about, is the simulation team going to have? It is accessing the correct version or not? Is manufacturing team working on the right model? Is it working on the latest model, or is it manufacturing something which is not latest model, and so on. So essentially, the platform is the one which is trying to connect people, data and processes together, to streamline them, in order to reduce all the waste that you see in the manufacturing industry today. And by reducing waste, of course, people will be more profitable. Some
Aaron Moncur:of those things sound like PDM. Does that infer that 3d experience has some PDM capabilities or just works in conjunction with SolidWorks PDM.
Manish Kumar:So PDM is a very small part of what to the experience platform does, because PDM is a, there is a there is a larger model in the sense PDM is capturing your product data and trying to keep different versions of it. But product alone is not enough. With your product, you may need a lot of different data that comes with the product simulation data also needs to bind to the same exact product your if you are in a, let's say, life sciences or medical device company, you have to capture every single change why you did it? You have to capture every requirement. You have to capture, in fact, even before you start to produce some or design something, you have to define every single phase of your not only requirement, but even quality tests. How are you going to test it? You have to keep a record of every single document that you ever generated. So that if you are asked for proving why you made certain change in your product experience, you should be able to track all that, trace all that. So this platform gives you all that capabilities, plus you define all your people. Your people exist in the platform. They can do ad hoc collaboration based on community or open collaboration, I should say, where you are trying to create a community or a conversation, where you interact with people without going through a very precise definition of life cycle to a extremely structured collaboration, where once I'm done, I give it out to someone else. Once they are done, they give it out to someone else and so on. So we provide both these kind of collaboration techniques on the platform. Okay, it's way more than what you can do with PD. Would
Aaron Moncur:it be accurate to say that a very high level experience is is kind of a a. Collaboration Platform, a communication and recording platform.
Manish Kumar:We call it a business platform because we it's not built just for designers, and it's built for the entire company, where, if you have processes, you can automate those processes. In fact, I would even claim that if you have a hiring process, you can use a process management tool in order to build your hiring process. If you have sales process, you can use process automation tool in order to capture that process as well. So it's a business platform for entire manufacturing companies, but it is manufacturing company centric,
Aaron Moncur:okay, fascinating. I had not understood that in the past. Thank you for explaining all of that. Let's talk a little bit about cloud computing, because 3d experience is largely in the cloud. Is that accurate? Yes. What do you see as the next steps for SolidWorks moving more and more towards cloud computing platform. Is there a future where SolidWorks is running on the cloud, or is that not part of the
Manish Kumar:roadmap? Actually, today, if you go and try to look for our solutions, we have two versions. One version is where our SolidWorks the one that we have been developing for last 30 years. It is install version which installs on our users laptop, desktop or PCs, let's say, and it is connected to the platform. The other version is running completely in your browser. So we have both the versions, both these versions and these versions are both connected to platform, say. So they work in a seamless way, in the sense, if I create a an assembly on my SolidWorks version, I should be able to use that assembly, open it in my browser. Version, which is essentially x design, is name of the app that we use so x design and SolidWorks, they talk very nicely with each other, and we do have both the versions, where x design is completely running in cloud, it is compute is being done in cloud, and SolidWorks is where the compute is local, but your data is in the cloud, okay, but in both the cases, data is always in the cloud for collaboration reasons. Of course, is
Aaron Moncur:x design more or less synonymous with SolidWorks? With, of course, the exception that it's all in the cloud versus SolidWorks can run locally. Or are there very different and unique features and capabilities of each
Manish Kumar:bear we built X design for the future. By that, what I mean is, if you look at how kids use their their software today, they do not install their software. In fact, even my kids, if I see them, they they are mostly on Chromebooks. In fact, it depends on the town. There are certain towns which are on Macbooks, certain towns which are on Chromebooks, certain towns which might be on Windows as well. So I'm not saying that it's just Chromebooks and Macbooks, but Chromebook is very prevalent because it reduces the headache for all these system admin point of view, that it's just a browser running on a machine, and for maintenance purposes, it's very simple, it's cheaper devices and so on. So a lot of kids are are a lot of schools in US specialty, they are using Chromebooks. Now, if you are in a Chromebook, you are running a browser, and in that browser, whatever app runs, you use it. If it doesn't run. You don't use it. That's what I see kids do today now, if you have to and and those, those devices are not big. They are smaller devices because they have to fit in in in a very small bag that kids carry to school and so on. So they are not typically 16 inch or ultra large devices. They are typically small devices. Now, if you keep that constraint in mind, and if you are trying to build an application for future, you have to keep mobile devices as the as the space where you want to serve this particular application. It cannot be built with the mindset of what I have, in fact, in front of me. I have a 46 inch monitor. Kids are, I should say the next gen application cannot be built with this mindset, the next gen application has to be built with a slightly different mindset, that if I'm on device a, I should be able to use it. If I'm on device B, I should be able to use it. I should be able to pick it from where I left. Device a, I should not need to go and find certain stuff. It should be built for touch, because if you watch. Any young, I should say, any kid who has played with iPhone or iPads watch them. They will walk at times. It's funny that they walk to television sets and they try to touch things on TV too, to make to click certain buttons. So these kids are coming up with touch first mindset. They are coming up with mobile first mindset. So when we built X design, we built with that futuristic vision that if you do not have your traditional setup, large screen with a huge setup, how would you like to use a CAD application? And we we work with a and we also try to do a simplified version. We try to create it simpler than SolidWorks. Now, SolidWorks is simple enough. And I would claim that if I have to give two things which are running in the DNA of SolidWorks, every single SolidWorks employee, I would say user experience, which is where simplicity comes from, and customer first focused mindset. These are the two key things that we try to inculcate in every single engineer when we join on day one, because these are the two biggest attributes of any SolidWorks employee. So SolidWorks traditionally, and the reason why SolidWorks became SolidWorks is because of that user experience that we tried to make user experience as our primary driving force, even if we had to sacrifice on I and functionality. We did because we wanted it to be simple first. We didn't want to make it complete first. We wanted to make simple first so that most of, I should say, majority of our users, should be able to use it then only. We try to add high level functionality. We took it to one extra level when we tried to work on X design. So in fact, if you look into X design, the number of commands that we have in X design is the lot less than number of commands in SolidWorks. The number of options that you will have in SolidWorks is a lot more than the number of options we decided for SolidWorks X design. So you will see a lot of those differences, and those differences at times, if I place x design in front of a extremely, I should say, advanced SolidWorks users. The natural reaction is that I'm missing XYZ, whereas if I put this in front of my right audience, they love it more than they love SolidWorks. So we are trying to cater to both markets. And hence, I would say capability wise. The way i i try to judge capability myself is given a model that I can give, I give you a model now, can you create that model in equal amount of time between those or maybe even faster in one compared to to the other? That is my benchmark, the benchmark we never use that. Do we have, if we have 1000 commands here? Do we have 1000 command there? No, that's not the mindset we are going to go with. We are trying to make sure that, can you try to do it faster? Because the beauty of X design with Cloud Compute running on a browser is that in so networks, you have an option to put data on platform, meaning you can still keep your data on your local hard drive. If the model is running in browser, you do not have an option to keep data locally. You have to put it on the cloud, which means AI is going to be more predictive if you are running on X design, which means the future, or the next advancements that you will start to see here, it will move. I think, in my belief, is that x design will move a bit faster than SolidWorks, purely because all the data is there, which means we will be able to use that data, keeping users privacy in mind, but giving their knowledge and know how back to them in ways with which they'll be able to go and do their things faster or achieve their models, create their models faster, using their knowledge and know,
Aaron Moncur:wonderful, wonderful. All right, there are a couple of things I want to touch on here. So first, let me restate and clarify. Make sure that I got this right. So it sounds like x design is maybe not quite as feature rich as SolidWorks desktop, but it's a lot easier to pick up, especially if you're just starting out as a CAD designer. Is that a first statement? It is a fair stay. Okay, great. However, over time, just like SolidWorks, over the years, has grown in functionality year over year. You've started with an easy to use interface with XDesign, and the expectation is that over the years, just like SolidWorks, new features will be added and capabilities will increase over time. Is that also fair to say?
Manish Kumar:That is definitely fair to say. In fact, I would claim that there are certain things which are already we have X design is the basic mechanical design app. We also have an app called X shape, which is subdivision modeling capability with which you can create complex organic shapes, way easier than if you're trying to use the basic or the traditional surface approach that we have in SolidWorks, right? So it's it already starts to ease out certain kind of modeling is going to be faster even today using our browser apps. So combination of both is pretty pretty I should say it's pretty interesting, because we have started to see people where, even though on mechanical side, they still are on solid works for creating organic shapes, they have started to use X shape. And since they are able to use the models created in X shape back into SolidWorks. This combination is starting to work really nicely. So I don't think it will be one or the other. I don't believe in binaries, in the sense it will be a lot of gray worlds out there, where you will start with SolidWorks, you will go to x design, or vice versa. And this will start to coexist for a foreseeable future, for a really long period of time.
Aaron Moncur:So in the past, and as is still the case in many environments, I'm sure, if you wanted to work on a model that had very complex organic shapes, probably you're not going to start in SolidWorks, because the tools aren't really there. Maybe you start in a program like Rhino or something like that, where it's easy to create these very organic, complex shapes. Maybe an industrial designer would create that form, and then you'd import that into SolidWorks as a STEP file, perhaps, right? And so you have a shell, a surface of the form that you want, and then you start building on that. As the engineer in SolidWorks to create your whatever they are, your molding features, things like that. But if you ever want to change the the basic form, that's a problem, right? You have to go back into Rhino or whatever you used, re, import the shape, break all these mates. Create, not mates, but break all the relationships between the features. So with X design, these platforms are already working in tandem. So if you need to go back and change the underlying form, that's easy to do without blowing up your model is, I think what you're saying,
Manish Kumar:that's exactly the vision of platform. This is why platform was created, so that we can the reality is that SolidWorks already is there are more than 1000 commands, which means it's a very versatile application, but it also has a lot of capabilities in one single environment, where, if we add more and more and more, it will become super tool for someone who is extremely knowledgeable. But it will also become very hard to understand, very hard to operate. And this is where our futuristic vision is, that the future is where you will have a lot of apps which are going to provide you exact capabilities that you need in order to do certain tasks, but they will work very seamlessly with each other so that you are going to be your learning is going to be your learning curve is going to be extremely sort of you learn very fast, I should say, and you will waste, you will not waste time. In fact, you'll, you'll start to become productive in an extremely easy fashion, yet, having all the capabilities that all these tools provide to you because the data is going to work with each other. Beautiful,
Aaron Moncur:beautiful. You brought up AI, which is definitely a topic that I want to discuss on this interview. I have struggled a little bit to understand how AI is going to be integrated into the design workflow, especially in the context of CAD one idea I've had, and I'm curious to hear if, if maybe SolidWorks is working on this, or a part of X design perhaps, or maybe you're aware of of groups who are doing this, but I thought that design reviews could be a great place for AI to work. For example, you didn't catch yourself that a hole is not lined up a hole in Part A is not lined up with a threaded hole in part B, right? Things like that. It seems like aI should be able to catch things like that. Or you have a quarter 20 screw in a quarter 28 threaded hole, right? These types of things. Do you see AI being integrated to solve problems like that, and also, what else? Where else do you think AI will be used in CAD
Manish Kumar:I would say you're, you're right. Tom, I'm pretty sure you, you, you talk to a lot of people. So. Pretty sure you know where it is going to go, and you're right on, is all I'll say. But my my belief, is that even though every single person who has used SolidWorks that I have met, if I talk to them about things, about modeling, about designing new ideas or capturing new ideas. They all feel excited about it, but very few people I meet who like things which are extremely mundane and time consuming. For example, if you see a bunch of red symbols in your feature tree, meaning you are missing some references. What happened? You waste a lot of time trying to figure that out, if you have to. Even today, not everyone has gone directly from pretty they're not going from pretty modeling to manufacturing. Most of the companies, even today, they have to create manufacturing drawings. I don't think there are a lot of people who like creating these drawings, because this is a very tedious task. Yeah, but everyone has to do it. So these are the kind of tasks where we have openly announced certain things, and this is where one of the things that we announced at pretty experienced World earlier this year that we are working on automating the drawing creation using artificial intelligence, where you have a model, you give the model to AI. AI will try to look at similar models that you have created in past, and what kind of drawings you have created, and based on that, can I create the drawing for you that is still under your 100% under your control, where you can still go verify things are as per your expectations. You you still make the final choice, and then you release it. If we are capable, I shouldn't say if, because we are going to release this capability next year, middle, middle of next year, when we release this capability, it is going to help our users work a lot less on things that they don't like. So I do believe that a lot of repetitive, mundane tasks will go away, and this is where AI is going to come in and help us to find us more time to spend on things that we enjoy more, rather than wasting our time on things that we don't really like. That
Aaron Moncur:sounds amazing. I know for sure that there will be a lot of very happy CAD designers out there when that functionality comes out. Now is that slated to come out as part of X design or also part of
Manish Kumar:SolidWorks? It will be both SolidWorks as well as x design. Wow,
Aaron Moncur:amazing. That's phenomenal. I'm very much looking forward to that. Let's talk a little about translating. You mentioned that the DNA of SolidWorks employees, there are two things. There's a user of closer to experience, some user experience, yeah, yeah. And customer focus. Customer focus. Thank you. So, what is the process at SolidWorks for, for translating user needs into new features or enhancements in the in the software, like, Where does it start? What is the process through which it goes before ultimately showing up as a usable feature?
Manish Kumar:We have close to, I would say 7.5 million users out there, out of which I would say almost 1.2 million. Don't quote me on that, but I would say around more than a million users in the professional market who are using our our software, which means we get a lot, I should say, tons of new ideas all the time. We We gather these ideas in an open community where people, anyone with any idea, can submit that ID. So that's one source where we are openly seeking advice from our customer base, user base, that give us more ideas. On top of that, we interact with customers directly, whether it is when there is an issue that customer is facing, or whether we are or whether they are with us at some kind of alpha or beta kind of event. There are times when we go and visit our clients. We go and visit our customers. Then we have events like through the experience world, where when our clients come there, we have an open world Top 10 List, where we do open voting with all our clients. In the sense, we we have a community where we post all the ideas that these are the ideas that are coming from you, or you can even post your own idea, and then people start to vote, and then the top 10 goes to a list that we tried to track, and we have tracked it since day one. And the sense, whatever are the top 10 ideas. We have traffic throughout those many years, so we have these different sources from which ideas are coming in. Now, when the ideas are coming in, there are certain things which are, I would say, strategic for us, that we must invest in the sense. The example I'll give you is that Apple didn't wait for someone to tell them that kill the keypad. And then customers were initially, they were people were making fun of them, that, how can you kill your keypad? But then everyone aligns with it. Yeah, there
Aaron Moncur:were my Blackberry back, no more precisely.
Manish Kumar:So there are certain things which are strategic in nature, where we do it, whether anyone is asking or asking for it or not, and whenever we have done it, initially the reaction is always that, why are you trying to do it? But eventually people see it, why we try to do it? But then most of the things that we do is coming back from the community, where the community has voted for it. Community has asked us to do certain things, and then we let it bubble up. So the ideas which have bubbled to the top, we pick those ideas, and we try to prioritize them based on our capacity and capability, for that matter, and we just start to execute it to a point where most of the time, whenever we go to to the experience board, when we try to show these things, people connect with it, because you know what? This was asked by them, and we have delivered it for them. It is not something which we are trying to shove down people's throat. It is something which is asked by the community, and we are delivering it back to the community.
Aaron Moncur:Terrific. Where do SolidWorks users go to vote for an idea or to propose a new feature enhancement?
Manish Kumar:If you actually, if you just do a Google search, SolidWorks, SolidWorks idea forum or SolidWorks idea community, you will be able to find it. It is an open community.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, perfect. All right. I have a couple of questions about you and your role as CEO. First of all, what is the hardest thing about being CEO of SolidWorks?
Manish Kumar:I would say the hardest part is that we have a very good legacy of delivering a lot of value to our customers. Over the number of years, we have made SolidWorks easier. We have made SolidWorks better. It is more performant, and it has also grown in terms of number of users, in terms of financial growth and so on. So I would say the expectation is already too high to keep beating that expectation. Yeah, it is an extremely tough job. Yeah, that's a hard place to be. So that that is, I would say, on the professional front, that is the toughest part. On personal front, I would say managing, or, if my kids were listening to me, doing less travel is what they want, and I cannot. I cannot achieve as much as I want to achieve. Alright? So to me, on personal front, there are certain sacrifices that you have to make, and that is also pretty tough. So on professional front and personal front, there are few things that you have to sacrifice. Though, I would say that if I walk in any place, any store, with a SolidWorks shirt on, the chances of someone walking to me and connecting with me that you're you work for solid books. I love solid books. They they come and tell me those words. So I would say, in return, I also have a family of so many unknown I should say there are so many unknown family members that I have created over a number of years. It's amazing the warmth, the love that I feel when I am at through the experience board. It feels like I have a family of almost five, 6000 people out there. Wow, just have one single event. So there is also a perk of being SolidWorks CEO, I would say it's not just all that I'm giving and nothing I'm not getting anything back. That love is amazing.
Aaron Moncur:What an amazing feeling that must be to know that you've been part of the DNA, really, at SolidWorks almost since the beginning, and have contributed it at a high level to this this family, this community, lucky
Manish Kumar:that day. I consider myself extremely lucky to have been able to join it at early phases. And the funny thing is that if you look at the total number of years, when I joined, I had the lowest or I had the least amount of experience as a SolidWorks employee. I had the least number of years in this industry. For that matter, when I was hired at SolidWorks, not at gssf, but now it seems like when. Now, when we see new hires, I'm like, you know, I've been here pretty long because they're almost as the same as my older daughter. So it's really, it feels like I've grown a lot in this place. Absolutely,
Aaron Moncur:yeah, I'm sure, wow, over the years, you've had many, many successes. I imagine, along with those successes, there have been one or two failures.
Manish Kumar:Oh, my God, there are many failures. In fact, when, when? When kids ask me that, what is your single advice? Because at times I have to go to some university to give a lecture, or there are kids who are visiting our campus from different colleges or FRC teams. Whenever they ask me, my response is that if you are always being successful, it means you're not trying hard enough. Because if you are always being successful, it means you are not taking bigger risks. You are taking risks knowing that you are going to succeed. So take bigger risk, and I have failed multiple times. In fact, I would say, for the first 10 to 12 years, working at SolidWorks, everything that I did seemed like this was the best ever project that I ever did. This was the most loved project ever that I ever did. And then the next couple of years were the beginning of three experience platform. And those years were the toughest ones, because we create a bunch of products which we launched, and none of them, they don't even exist in the market today. But you know, I would claim that those were the those were the best learning experiences of my life. If I had not failed during those years, I would not be sitting here either. So to me, failure is the best possible thing that can happen to you, as long as you're learning from it and you're improving your your vision for the future. So failure is extremely important.
Aaron Moncur:So you've talked about this at a high level. I wonder, is there a failure that you can think of, and maybe we shouldn't use the word failure a building block that you can think of, where things didn't pan out the way you hoped they would at the time. But is there a specific example that you can share, and you know what happened. And then kind of, what did you learn from that experience, and how did you apply it to future experiences? Well,
Manish Kumar:this is the version that we created. This was the pre concern to x design in 2009 2010 ish time frame we built the product. This was even before it was possible to build a web application and a browser. So it was a client server, kind of CAD application that we built, we released it, and then we had to drop it off, because it was again, a siloed product which was not talking to anything else. And at that time I was, I was, I was one of the team members working on that product. And when it was killed for a long time, it, it kind of, it was extremely hard to get over that, that failure, that, why did I not think about making it more integratable with everything else and so on. So it was pretty hard, in fact. So after that, we created another product. Conceptual designer. Was the name, which does not exist anymore, and even that, I don't think we found any users at all. So it was a product coming from SolidWorks brand and not being able to find a single user. You can imagine that the feeling of me walking in the corridors that how many, how many users do you have? No, no, oops. So humble this. What it taught me was that to create a product is not enough. You mean to create a product that users are going to adopt, or, in fact, I would say, the very first user you are able to get who buys your product. That feeling. It is amazing feeling, because after that, in fact, after that, even two more products that we created, they all fail. Then only the x Design series of applications came. And then when we started to see our customers start to use x design, they started to love it. That is when I felt like, Okay, this is this is cool. So getting the very first user, and this is true even for startups, most of them, I would say, to get that very first paying user, that is essentially you. You'll be on cloud nine. What a great feeling we the best part was that. I was, I was in SolidWorks, so I was my job was pretty secure. I did not have the fear of next month's paycheck is not going to come if I'm not able to find the user. But I was still able to have that startup kind of environment sitting inside SolidWorks, which was amazing. So being on the edge that will I, will my product succeed? Will I be able to get my first user that that is that was pretty, pretty interesting.
Aaron Moncur:What do you think? Thank you, by the way, for being so vulnerable and sharing that. What a great story. What do you think the biggest factor was in getting from from one product that didn't quite have the success you'd hoped for, to to x design, where now you are starting to see really great adoption. Users love it. How did, how did you go from one to the next to the next until, okay, here's the 1x design. This is the one that's working.
Manish Kumar:Um, even there, I would say one of the reasons was that we were not willing to take the risk which was big enough. We were always trying to remain in our comfort zone. Because the first couple of products, they were all products which were installing locally and connecting to data being on the cloud. Then I remember a night when I had to discuss with someone I cannot name, but after that discussion, I was able to convince that person that taking a bigger risk and going in the browser, kind of environment where there is no installed application whatsoever, that was The turning point, because that was the biggest risk we could have taken. We took that risk, and that made the big difference. Because before that we were trying to take, I should say we were trying to go forward, but in a limited way, going taking a leap of faith, was when we went for text design, and that made the big difference.
Aaron Moncur:Wonderful. That's That's amazing.
Manish Kumar:In fact, it's funny. Now you You're making me think. In fact, it was funny that when we were trying to calculate the risk and we were trying to reduce the risk, we were releasing products, but they were not any takers for those products. The day we decided that get rid of this calculated risk. We are going to take a much bigger risk. Forget about whether we are going to be successful or not that became successful. So it's funny how life comes out to be.
Aaron Moncur:It sounds like you being CEO, not just anyone is going to be appointed to that position. So there are inherent skills that one needs to have to to reach that level. And when you were talking about the discussion you had with this individual, whoever it was, it sounds like you, you had to sell it. You had to think of a compelling enough argument that whoever this person was ostensibly someone with authority and the power to say, yes, okay, let's do it. You had to convince this person to take a big risk. How did you do that? Where does this, this, this salesmanship, come from?
Manish Kumar:I would claim that everyone is selling something to someone. If you are a developer, you're trying to sell your code to your manager. If you are a manager, you trying to sell your projects to your superiors. So there is selling is always involved. I would say in any organization, 100% of the people are trying to sell something to someone. Now the difference that makes in convincing someone is the, I would say, the knowledge that you have acquired. And if you speak with authority having that knowledge as the baseline, and if you are standing on top of that, that foundation, and then you speak with authority, where you are able to convince the other person about a dream, that the other person that you share with the other person, you can captivate the other person's interest. So I would say it is not the functionality that I tried to sell. It was a story that I sold. It was a story that I sold where we were all the heroes, that we were all the protagonists, where we were the ones who were trying to take the biggest possible risk, rather than taking very calculated risks. So I would say story, selling story is what made me convince the other person it was not functionality. It was definitely not functionality that I was trying to sell.
Aaron Moncur:Brilliant, really, Manish. Thank you so much for for your time today. You're a busy man. You've been very generous sharing your time. And your experience and some very captivating stories, I appreciate it. I know that our entire audience is going to appreciate it as well. Is there any closing remarks? Anything that you'd like to say before we sign off here?
Manish Kumar:I think we have already said enough. Where my what I would say is, a lot of people I have, I've learned it myself, that it is very easy to be to maintain status quo, to be happy with where you are, to be happy with what you're doing and so on. It is extremely tough to embrace change. It is extremely tough to go out there and say that change, okay, come my way and I'll embrace you. But I would say status quo will not get you anywhere if you have to change the world. Embrace the change the day you embrace the change you are going to change the world a
Aaron Moncur:visionary statement. Thank you again. So much Manish for being on the show and sharing all of your wisdom and experience with us.
Manish Kumar:Thank you so much, Aaron for inviting me again.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please share the episode to learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R and D services. Visit us at Team pipeline.us. To join a vibrant community of engineers online. Visit the wave. Dot engineer, thank you for listening. You.
