Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S6E2 Derek Pietz | Industrial Automation, Losing A Million Dollars, & Successful Startups
This episode is a re-run.
Derek Pietz shares his journey into engineering, his experiences founding and leading a startup called Lab to Fab, and the challenges and successes he's faced in the automation industry. He discusses the importance of teamwork, communication, and adaptability in engineering. Derek also provides insights into the trends and future of automation, as well as advice for aspiring engineers.
Main Topics:
- Derek's path to becoming an engineer and his early entrepreneurial ventures
- The founding and growth of Lab to Fab, including a dramatic week of highs and lows
- Balancing career and personal life during the startup phase
- Insights on engineering processes, teamwork, and overcoming challenges
- Derek's current role at Intuitive and the world of robotic-assisted surgery
- Trends and future of automation, including the impact of AI-powered vision-guided robots
- Sharing success stories and lessons learned from failures in engineering
About the guest: Derek Pietz is the Director of Automation Equipment and Test Engineering at Intuitive, a trailblazing company at the forefront of robotic-assisted surgery. Prior to his role at Intuitive, Derek has been a part of four start-up ventures including one as a co-founder. He has built and led engineering and operations teams, designed machines, run a P/L, pitched investors, obsessed over supply chain, developed sales strategies, taught robots to make pizza and fixed customer problems.
Links:
Derek Pietz LinkedIn
Intuitive - Website
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
Hi everyone. We've set up this being an engineer podcast as an industry knowledge repository, if you will. We hope it'll be a tool where engineers can learn about and connect with other companies, technologies, people, resources and opportunities. So make some connections and enjoy the show.
Derek Pietz:we get a letter from our large customer, that Wednesday, one of our projects has been struggling, has been rejected, and that we owe them a million dollars.
Aaron Moncur:Hello and welcome. To the being an engineer podcast today, we are so privileged to be speaking with Derek Pietz. Derek is the director of automation equipment and test engineering at intuitive, a trailblazing company at the forefront of robotic assisted surgery. Prior to his role at intuitive, Derek has been a part of four startup ventures, including one as a co founder. He's built and led engineering and operations teams. Designed machines run a P and L, pitched investors obsessed over supply chain, developed sales strategies, taught robots to make pizza and fixed customer problems. Derek, thank you so much for being with us today. Yeah, thanks for having me. Aaron, all right, so what made you decide to become an engineer? You
Derek Pietz:know, I think it was largely to keep life's and nosy family members out of my business. I felt like people started asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up, when I was like too young to have a good context to answer that question. At some point, I said, I'll be an engineer, and then everybody was good with that answer. From then on, maybe in parallel to that, I really wanted to be an inventor as well. I didn't actually know what that meant when I came up with that idea. But turns out, engineers do that too.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, engineers make very good adventures. So even at a young age, did you really understand what an engineer was? No
Derek Pietz:no idea. I don't think I fully understood it when I got to undergraduate, what it entailed, or what the job really entailed. I know people in the movies, they did it. They wore short sleeve white shirts and narrow ties, and seemed to, you know, they made, some create incredible things, but some had some pretty rough time at work, and I didn't, but learned on the job. I guess
Aaron Moncur:that's that's interesting. What would Derek today tell Derek 1520, years ago that you wish you had known about engineering back then,
Derek Pietz:yeah, we should have known just how broad and impactful of a career path it can potentially be. Engineers have their hands in I don't know, every every aspect of modern society, from entertainment to health care to, you know, transportation and everything else that we could imagine in between. And I think if I had known that, and if other people thinking about what they want to do when they grow up, and known that, I think it'd be a lot more people be interested in doing this.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, I think in a very little way, engineers are the people who make the world function the way that it does, and I think that we are the unsung heroes of the world. I'm certainly very proud to be an engineer myself, and I know you are as well, and you've been a part of several startups. One of what you co founded. Can you tell us a little bit, what was the path that led you there, and what did the company do?
Derek Pietz:Yeah, so I thought about interested in starting a company from, I don't know, maybe high school. I ran a bike repair business out of my parents garage when I was at 15, first job. And so it kind of like a interest in entrepreneurial pursuits. Pretty young and had started to get this idea that he may be some sort of engineering consulting company would be a fun thing to do. Now I got to college, a friend of mine and I started kicking around some different ideas of what we might actually go after nothing really gelled up for quite a few years, until I was working at my first startup at Solyndra, and just really enjoying taking a new technology to market, and thought like, Could you come up with a business that did this where, like, instead of taking one awesome idea to market every couple of years, Could you, could you do this professionally and have several per year that you could help launch? And so, partner and I decided that was an awesome idea. We got after it, we found it LTF, which stood for lab to fab, laboratory to fabrication. And our goal was really to help hardware innovators accelerate the market more quickly. And what that was in early stages was engineering consulting and custom equipment design, but we pretty quickly. Began to realize that automation, in particular, robot centric automation, was where our market was the best, where our strategy could work, and where there was the absolute and greatest need for that type of work, especially Silicon Valley based. There's not a ton of manufacturing done in California for the last couple of decades, and that meant for even fewer automation companies that were there to provide the customer foot and solutions. And so latched onto the fact that, Hey, there's this gap, there's a renewed interest in local manufacturing and reshoring, and there's no one to build the machines to do it. Let's go for it. And had a contract fall in our lap and the heart after that, let's get started. Amazing.
Aaron Moncur:So hindsight is always 2020. If you could change one thing about how you managed that company, what would it be?
Derek Pietz:Yeah, we were really focused on growth, which was a good plan and led us into some really awesome project, but we got a little out of control along the way, and in kind of every aspect you could. We didn't manage finances as tightly as we could. We didn't manage our sales pipeline as tightly as we could. We didn't we weren't choosing enough about the projects that we would take on. We thought because we had this great sort of workflow that we've used for for taking a project from start to finish that event, we could do anything in the industry. And turned out there was just enough nuance between automotive and pharmaceuticals and food manufacturing and all the other crazy stuff that we had our hands in that we weren't really world class at any of it. And it wasn't until some, you know, really emotionally trying, pivots part way through, that we trimmed that down and found food automation. Food Service Automation in particular was what we were most passionate about and the most successful at, and that's really when the company was able to be truly successful.
Aaron Moncur:You mentioned some emotionally trying situations. If you don't want to talk about it, that's completely fine, but I I sense that there might be an interesting story there that people could learn from. Is there anything about that time that you're comfortable sharing? Yeah,
Derek Pietz:you know you're you're co founder or founder yourself. I'm sure you've had some of these weeks. Let me just tell you about one week that we had, and it really sums up the whole startup experience I've been so we finally got around to forming up our board of directors. We had our first board of director meeting on Monday, and we showed them our whole plan, our financials and how we're going to grow the business, different things we're going to get into. Board says, Can you guys step out for a minute talk? Turns out, when a board asked to do that, that's a bad sign. We come back in and they say, Okay, you guys are almost out of money, and if you continue on your path, you're going to be broke in 10 weeks. So you need to go fire 75% of your staff and report back in two weeks how you're going to do it. Okay, we were not expecting that, so we started licking our wounds from that. They also told us, You guys need to focus. You need to get down to just one thing that you're really going to do. Well, the outcome of that was how we made the decision to go all in on food service automation, but we'll get to that. So that's Monday, Tuesday, the letter in the mail that we made Inc 500 not only do you make Inc 500 but we were second place engineering firm in the United States. We had number 237, on the list, with 13 100% three year growth rate. Wow, wow. What an honor. That's pretty great. So back top of the world, Wednesday, we get a letter from our large customer that one of our projects has been struggling, has been rejected, and that we owe them a million dollars. Oh, so if you think back to Monday, we do not have a million dollars. So like, Okay, we're back back in the dumps again. On Thursday, this guy shows up looking to, you know, meet some people in the area, looking for some maybe collaborators. He wants to grow his presence. And he owns an integrator in China, and he's looking for, you know, some us friends to make. And this is one of those moments where my partner and I were just absolutely on the same wavelength and like, could have said the same thing at the same moment, we stepped out of the room, looked each other eyes like, Let's go ask this guy for a million dollars right now. And so we go back in there, we tell him, like, Look, we're not looking for friends, where we're looking for a strategic investor. If you want to invest at least seven figures, then we want to talk more. Otherwise, you know, great to meet you. Have a great day. And he leans back, he says, I'll come back tomorrow. So one of our board members who is still in town, who's also from China, so. Takes the guy to dinner, calls up about midnight and says, Actually, he doesn't want to give you a million dollars, maybe $3 million because he wants to be in an equal part with you guys. And you guys need to come in. He's gonna meet you on Sunday for breakfast. He's gonna fly his CFO in from China to meet you, and you have to pitch him on Sunday morning. So we stay up, you know, all night, for the whole weekend, we pitch him, and by like, Monday afternoon, we shaking hands on a deal
Aaron Moncur:that is one of the most incredible stories I have ever heard. Wow, that was a good roller coaster of the week, yeah, oh, I can't imagine the high you must have been on at the end of that week.
Derek Pietz:It was almost it was just totally surreal. It was like walking through a dream, or like the last scene in an action film, or like everything's on fire, and the hero just sort of standing there looking around. And that's the kind of feeling that you had through that
Aaron Moncur:Wow. Now, other than you being on the same wavelength as your partner and asking for the money, was there anything else you think you had done or prepared, or even things you had done to facilitate the maybe the luck of this guy finding you, or was it just completely happenstance?
Derek Pietz:There's probably two things there. One, there were not a lot of integrators our size in Silicon Valley. By that point, we were like 35 people. We were quite capable. We had a really prestigious customer list with Apple and Tesla and SpaceX and countries like that on our marquee. And my partner is just the most incredible networker you've ever met. He's a connector to his core to a level that I've never seen. One hit, fantastic,
Aaron Moncur:wow. I just love that story so much, so much that I feel like you could write a book just around that one week, maybe. Well, you co founded this company, of course. And in my own experience, founding a company often comes along with a lot of work, a lot of time that gets spent. Was there a time during that period when you had to prioritize your career over your personal life? And how did you navigate that decision? What impact did it have on your personal side of things, absolutely,
Derek Pietz:I don't think you get anything off the ground without having to put in some hours. And certainly our our moment was my partner landed us an opportunity again, because He's the world's greatest connector that we were we had the opportunity to take on a project for apple that two previous companies had already failed at. And the thing was, the timeline was just bonkers. It was to take two robots from purchase order to shift. We need to be done in seven weeks. Wow. And that's aggressive, yeah. And keep in mind, this is a company that is currently myself, Sean, and one controls engineer and a couple of contractors, and we had, like, a little rented space with no heat, no, no air conditioning whatsoever, freezing that winter. But anyways, we went for it. We landed it. And you know, the two of us and our one employee, did you know, 100 hours a week for those six weeks in a row, slept in the office more than once during that period of time? Wow. And managed, managed to do it, and we got the thing out. Actually hilarious. We slept in the office one night, or I used me Sean slept in their day in a row. And the customer shows up, the project manager from Apple comes in, and here's Sean putting on his shoes in our lobbies, and at this couch in the lobby, that's where we'd slip. And he comes, like, did you sleep here? Like? So he's coming on before we comes in for factory acceptance test. And, you know, nailed that, and machine was out. But because of the material project, we put in all those hours, we racked up a bucket cash, and so we flew the machines to China, got them installed, 100 hours lease there. We come back with this pile of money. We'd also, you know, demonstrated to this one investor that was really interested in the board member I mentioned later on ended up investing at that point, like, Wow, these guys are really serious. They can really pull the stuff, cut stuff off, and that generated enough money that we're able to go hire five more people. Once we had, you know, a team 10, we could get a very different set of projects than the team three. And then that, once you had that set of projects and that type of customers, well now you could get even bigger, better projects. And so then we're, we got to 25 people in the 25 person company that completely different projects. And then you're 10 person company. So it really, you know, had we not done that, it never would have
Aaron Moncur:happened the 100 hour weeks, I'm sure were a sacrifice. Were there any other sacrifices that you made during that time, especially during the earlier days of the company you could think of that ended up being really essential to the long term success of the company. And maybe even more interesting question, were there any sacrifices that you made that you thought were essential at the time that turned out to really not be that important?
Derek Pietz:Oh, man, hard to say what wasn't wasn't important in given time. And there were some that were certainly uncomfortable. And there are a couple of times of like, you know, need to wake up the vice in the middle of the night to find the checkbook so we can make payroll that were was never fun, but this was critical to get it done, you know, things that didn't turn out to be so important. I mean, I'm sure we probably could have figured out how to delegate more along the way, or been made a few better hires along the way that would have made a difference overall. But I don't know would have been like materially different over that entire period of time, probably not. It's just, yeah, a certain, certain degree of challenge and sacrifice. Yeah?
Aaron Moncur:Okay, well, moving on from the startup a little bit. You've been doing engineering for a long time. What? What are a couple, one or two things that you have seen commonly slow down the speed of engineering, yeah,
Derek Pietz:I'd say one of the key ones is where people actually think they're going fast by skipping certain steps, but they're actually slowing down because they end up getting in a situation where they built the wrong thing, or they need to rework a lot of them because they skipped certain steps. Number one, persistently bad requirements. Every every company I've ever been at really has struggled with requirements up front, and that's not it's not always possible to develop really good requirements for a project upfront, but you still have to try. You have to do your best to write down what you know. And even if your spec sheet is full of guesses, that's fine. You have to put a value in there and then write down that as a guess. And along the course of the project was actually something that LTF specialized in, was we sold a lot of people their first robot. And if you've never bought a robot before, you have no idea how to write a user requirements document for that robot, and so rather than have you write one that just wasn't very good, we would do that. So we interviewed the customer, and we had to make a lot of assumptions about what they were asking and the business problems that we were trying to solve. But what we were good at doing is, over the course of the design phase, we would converge our requirements and our design, so that by the time we actually were ready to buy the machine, they had synced up pretty well. And so by the time we were doing factor acceptance testing, we're usually on the same page with our customer. That tended to go a lot a lot smoother. So you can't skip that up front step. You do want to write out your architecture a little bit. You do want to have, sort of like a high level concept plan, and then measure to that plan and execute against it. And if you've got guesses, don't be afraid to guess. Just make sure you advise those along the way.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, our engineering manager likes to say, when you need to go fast, slow down. Can you think of a story that you can share that illustrates one way in which you've been able to accelerate the speed of engineering? You know, whether it's your own work directly or or someone on one of your teams, thoughtful
Derek Pietz:teamwork is, I'd say, the key to absolutely maximizing your your schedule. So you do that requirements work in the beginning, you take the next step of break up the system into whatever, break all the work streams into the different sub components, get someone who fully and completely owns that work stream, assigned to each one just the right number of people. Too many people can slow down a project too few people can slow down a project and make sure that someone is ultimately responsible for the overall success of the program, someone that is going to coordinate all those people together. And then, if they're on the same page of requirements, and they have complete ownership of what they're going to be doing, you can just let them go. You. Yeah. Well,
Aaron Moncur:let me take a very short break here and share with everyone that our company, pipeline design and engineering develops new and innovative manufacturing processes for complex products, then implements them into manual fixtures or fully automated machines to dramatically reduce production costs and improve production yields for OEMs. We're speaking with Derek Pietz today. So Derek, you are currently the director of automation equipment and test engineering at intuitive Can you share a little bit about what intuitive does? What what are the core products that intuitive sells, and what are they best known for?
Derek Pietz:Yeah, absolutely. So intuitive is best known for the Da Vinci Surgical System, which is a forearm surgeon guided robot that performed laparoscopic surgery. And that's been the market about 20 years. And Intuit is really the pioneer of robotic assisted surgery. Da Vinci did 2.2 million cases last year. Is by far the broadest accepted surgical platform, robotic surgical platform on the market today, my work specifically is in a upstart business unit within intuitive as the ion business unit. And our platform is intended to provide access to the outer extremity of the lung so that we can perform primarily biopsies. Today is what the device is used for.
Aaron Moncur:I was actually at intuitive a few weeks ago, and I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to drive one of these DaVinci systems, and it was one of the most incredible experiences that I've had in recent memory. There's this really neat I call it the command center. I'm sure there's a more formal name that you all use for it, but command center, well, the surgeon sits down and looks into kind of a it almost feels like the old days photography, where the photographer would kind of throw a hood over his head. There is no hood, but it's that kind of dark cave that you look into. And there's a screen in there, high definition screen, and then these little controllers that you grab with your your hands, almost like video game controllers, similar anyway, and you begin to manipulate these controllers, and it is like a miracle watching what you're doing with your hands appear on the screen, which is giving you an image of a remote robot that is mirroring the manipulations, the movements that you're making with your hand. So in my case, the robot was just four or five feet away. But in theory, you could be in a separate room even, and the robot would be doing exactly what is your doing. And it was the most just kind of uncanny, surreal sensation to watch this happen and see what fine motor control I could command through this, this little controller, this hand controller, the first time that you got to drive one of these. Derek, did you? Did you have a similar experience? Thankfully,
Derek Pietz:yes, because the general manager of the ion unit had me test drive the ion robot during my interview. Oh, man, really doesn't go well. This is good for me. I'm not much of a gamer, so I've kind of slowed a technology, great pickup. And thankfully, it's, it's just super easy. The Ion robot is UI. Is a deconstructive mouse. You've got to be able to roll forward. You've got a bald aim, and that's it. You just go for it.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah. Well, what are some of the biggest challenges that you've encountered in designing and engineering equipment for robotic surgery systems like Da Vinci
Derek Pietz:for us, there's a really huge variety of equipment used to make the instruments that we do, and it ranges from, in some cases, requiring extremely precise motion for aligning things to thermal processing, to volume part manufacturing, and very difficult process qualifications, which is really why I like it so much. Is this tremendous variety of equipment that we designed. No two pieces is exactly the same. No two problems are exactly the same. And so we just really get to play with a lot of different things. It's
Aaron Moncur:a candy store for engineers, right? We love solving problems, and new problems are fun, absolutely.
Derek Pietz:And what I particularly love about what I'm doing in the current role is ion being sort of startup mode or scaling very quickly. My team designs the equipment, writes the software for it, introduces it to production, and then once successful, we get to reproduce it at scale for our operations in other factories. Nice.
Aaron Moncur:What a rewarding role that must be. Yeah,
Derek Pietz:it's kind of like going back to, like the highest growth days of L, 2f but even minus the cash flow problem,
Aaron Moncur:yeah, from what I hear, intuitive is growing quite rapidly with such an incredible product. I'm not surprised. Well, are there, are there any trends or patterns that you've seen in. See over the past few years in the automation industry, what? What do you think is going to change or continue or stop in the next three to five years?
Derek Pietz:I see an increasing impact from Ai powered vision guided robots, and the vision guidance is going to be incredibly impactful for inspection applications for robot guidance, for any number of things past life, COVID area, we specialize in item picking for the logistics industry, and what the massive variety of items that they're able to pick and handle all off of the generalized model is just unbelievable. And technologies like that infancy today, just trying to see real traction in several markets. That's gonna be a game changer in the variety of applications that robots are able to thrive. Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:I saw there's a company called micropsy out there. I think they're a newer company, and they have an interesting product. It's robotic, motion controlled with AI. And there's no programming language for this robot. You literally show it what you want it to do, and then it does that thing, which is really cool. And they were doing something like placing a screwdriver on a hook, you know, something like that. So they would place this screwdriver on a hook, and I think there was some little tab of the hole in it, so you could hang the screwdriver off this hook, and the robot would watch that through a motion or a camera, a vision system, and then you'd put the screwdriver down, and it would pick it up, and it would put it on that hook. And even if you move that hook, it would it would find the hook, and it would still place it on and even if you were moving the hook as it was trying to find the hook, it would adjust to wherever you're moving it dynamically and still put the screwdriver on the hook, all without any any real programming, just showing it what to do, and then it understanding what the goal was and executing really, really cool stuff. Like you said, this stuff is all still in its infancy, but wow, 510, years from now, I can't even imagine how sophisticated that will become. Yeah, that's incredible. You've already shared some really incredible stories. Thinking back across your career, can you think of a success story and a failure and ideally something that we can all learn something from.
Derek Pietz:Well, I'd say the first project that I got my hands on when I joined covariant was a really interesting one, very aggressive timeline team that had to be sort of rebuilt along the way would have been a little bit of attrition. Recently, they were a little, you know, down in the dumps from being beat up in the previous, you know, one or two projects before that hadn't gone as well as they could when I took over the team there. And so, you know, I had a bit of a morale issue on my hands, in addition to a hard project to solve, and to be able to get that back on track, and get that team, like, really aligned and organized and motivated and focused on the right things, and able to deliver something that they really didn't think they could do. Was was incredibly awesome. They pulled together, they got it built and got it out, and, you know, very, very happy with the result.
Aaron Moncur:What were some things that you did to improve the morale? I
Derek Pietz:like to think that one thing I'm pretty good at is scrounging for resources. And so it'll beg, borrow and steal whatever I need within an organization to help the team out, so able to scare up a few head counts, shake loose a little extra money, pull in a few people from another team that were really good at things, both one or two people are on loan, plus one is able to transfer to our team. And then at the same time, leveraged the community of great contractors and distributors and integrators that I knew to be able to augment the team, and to remember, hey, if we just fill a couple of these key skill sets, we can actually do this. And let's get really focused. Let's protect you from all the other distractions within the organization so you can deliver this really hard thing that they ask you to do. And you guys are plenty smart. You're playing motivated. You can do it if you just focus on these couple of things. Terrific.
Aaron Moncur:How about that? Maybe we should have reversed the order so we ended on a positive note. But can you think of a failure in your career and what you learned from it? Yeah,
Derek Pietz:I feel like I probably keep bumping into the same lesson over and over, and maybe haven't learned it all the way. And you know, without hitting on specific failures, like, Don't over complicate things, and don't assume that just because the team's often busy with something that they really have it. You have to stay engaged with them. You. Checking with them, check with the current maturity level on that project is, do they really understand the requirements? Do they really understand the technologies that we're using? They have the resources? They asking the right questions and just, you know, help help them understand when they're stuck, and help them get unstuck along the way and that. And I'd say that's true for engineering teams, it's true for operations teams. That's also true, you know, at home with the kids their homework or their chores, or, you know, any, any new thing that you might be trying to get someone to help you out on.
Aaron Moncur:It sounds like that comes down in large part to communication. Is that accurate? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that communication gets you every time. Yeah.
Derek Pietz:You know, I saw your podcast on I listened to one with nikkila. That's really what made me want to come on the show and talk to you a little bit more. I even shared that with Jennifer, my wife, and she's off writing a flow chart now for how to troubleshoot things.
Aaron Moncur:That's hilarious that you listen to that episode, that was a lot of fun to make, and we both really enjoyed it. Yeah, okay, well, I'll have to let her know that, for those of you don't know, who don't know, that's my wife, Kayla, and I'll have to let her know that her her episode convinced a great automation engineer to join the show as a guest. What advice would you give to engineers who are interested in going into automation or robotics?
Derek Pietz:Just do it. There's an incredible number of opportunities that are out there, and in doing like one, one sort of like Pitfall, I see people who first get into this falling into a lot is attempting to do the whole thing, you know, the mechanical, the electrical, the software, the vision, and assuming that, because they're, they're super bright engineer, they can, but a lot of people who can Do a lot of those things, okay, but it really is a lot better to specialize in a couple of areas and then find some some teammates that you really think you're going to be successful with and do together. More fun, too.
Aaron Moncur:What tool that doesn't exist, but if it did, would allow engineering teams to work better, smarter, faster, 10x their productivity. And this can be something that's within the realm of known physics, or something completely out there, like teleportation.
Derek Pietz:Yeah, we've been talking about this, talking about this a lot over the water cooler, if you will. And I want an AI tool that's going to check the design against whatever standard that we're trying to build it to. Maybe that's an ISO standard. Maybe that's customer standard. Use the requirements document. It's our internal methodologies that we want to use. But I want to feed something into it and have it come up with feed my design review deck into it, and have it highlight all the areas that I didn't hit the mark, and give me a task list to go back and work on.
Aaron Moncur:It's so interesting that you say that I had not quite the same idea, but a very similar idea for a design review AI right where it gets programmed, or it knows some common pitfalls, like, hey, there's a little bit of interference between these parts. I don't think that should be there. Or this 1024 screw is going into a 1028 threaded hole. That's not right. Things like that. I actually pitched it to an investor, who summarily turned me down, but I thought it was a pretty good idea. That's an interesting twist on it, though, with the like the ISO standards or ANSI standards. Okay, well, let's see. We've got, I think, just one more question here, and then we'll, we'll wrap things up specifically within your your role as an engineer. What's one thing that frustrates you and one thing that brings you joy,
Derek Pietz:I just simply love building stuff, like seeing the machine come together, where you've got an empty spot in your warehouse, and then the parts start to trickle in, and then you start to see some sub assemblies there. A little while later, the whole thing is built, and you see it robots moving slowly, and then it's moving fast, and then the customer comes in. They're happy within the thing that gets shoved into the back of the truck. We've just seen that like complete and flow. It is just absolutely unbelievably fun. And what's frustrating in that same process is that the details matter so much that you might have a multi million dollar piece of automation waiting on one snap ring, and without that one snap ring, the thing doesn't matter. I
Aaron Moncur:echo what you say. I think there's something so magical about going from an intangible thought in someone's brain. Into this physical thing that performs meaningful work. We just not quite finished, but hit a milestone on one of the projects we're working on right now, and it's probably the largest machine we've ever built. It's the motion is not complex. In fact, it's very simple motion, but just today, for the first time, we got the motion running, and seeing this thing with its giant size moving around was really, really fulfilling to watch. That's awesome. Yeah. Well, Derek, thank you so much for being on the show. What a delight it was to talk with you and hear some of your insights into the industry. I'm sure a lot of people are really going to appreciate everything you you shared today. How can people get in touch with you?
Derek Pietz:Looking up on LinkedIn, reach out and look
Aaron Moncur:no home address, huh? Next time. Okay, next time. All right. Well, Derek, thank you again, so much. I sure appreciate you being on the show today. 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 turnkey equipment, custom fixtures and automated machines and with product design, visit us at Team pipeline.us. Thanks for listening. You.
