Greg Paulsen: Pizza is the Way to an Engineer’s Heart

We have been talking a lot about digital manufacturing and how it's transforming the way products are created today. And the traditional model of contract manufacturing customers like you are often locked into specific factories and foot the costs for delayed products suffer from lack of communication and transparency, and overall loss of control with manufacturing of your product. None of it is easy or frictionless, but doesn't have to be this way. Macro fab offers a true cm marketplace with elastic factory capacity. This means that when you place your order with macro fab, we will find the best factory in our network to deliver high quality PCB assembly and system integration with no friction at competitive prices every time all through a completely digital online experience. Go from prototype to high volume production with one cm visit macro.com today and try our free demo of our digital platform.

Welcome to the macro fab engineering podcast. I'm your guest, Greg Paulson.

And we are your hosts Parker Dolman

and Steven Craig.

This is episode 181.

Greg is the leader of the application engineering team at xometry. An online instant quoting platform for custom manufacturing projects, which utilizes a professional network of 1000s of manufacturers, Greg's team handles special case projects that require attention to material selection, designed for manufacturing and technical engineering resources. Greg also plays a vital role in vetting new technologies and materials to add to xometry manufacturing portfolio. Greg's background is in product development, using rapid prototyping, focusing on the various applications of industrial 3d printing and advanced manufacturing.

So Greg, thank you for coming onto our podcast. Happy to be here. And what is xometry? And then who are you?

Yeah, so xometry is a marketplace that we've created to solve this problem of custom manufacturing and procurement. Procurement typically is a very opaque industry, not just for large OEM work, but also for custom manufacturing projects, which is still in itself, you know, about $80 billion of the industry. And typically, it's local to local. And we have actually created and created an AI driven system that connects your project needs with a national distributed network of professional manufacturers. So it starts with our website where you can upload a 3d CAD file that actually instantly interprets a CAD file and actually will give you a price and lead time for multiple technologies from CNC machining to sheet metal to your thin cast to we have six, six plus 3d printed technologies number 16 materials from those. So at a click of a button, and within seconds, you're getting instant pricing, a clickandbuy, whatever you have your part fully SPECT out. And of course other side is or manufacturers, which is more like a Uber for them. They're looking at what technologies and what, what the project scope is, and understanding if it's in the price, or we're gonna pay in the lead time. They click Yes. And it's instant work for the small business manufacturers, it to get quality parts out and threw it back to our customers.

That sounds really cool, Greg. So what got you into Did you like, how do you start at at xometry?

Yeah, so this is actually really interesting. I, I worked in product development, and I was working for a company as a part of the product development team. And I was working on rapid prototyping. So I was running a selective laser sintering and I myself was doing anything that needed the rapid prototype, it was kind of coming through, through me to source so whether it was a DMLS project FTM that's less even some CNC works that we couldn't do in our internal shop. It was coming through me so I was actually feeling this kind of pain already of like having to buy you know, sending out a spreadsheet saying please call quantity one 510 2550 You know, waiting a few days and working through that. And meanwhile I'm also working on the engineering project system engineering, and and running the RP lab that we had internally. I was missing 3d printing friends. I was doing this in northern Virginia area and turns out in that area, there is no professional manufacturers for 3d printing. So one day, I run across a who's now a colleague of mine, a guy named Dave Tedder wrote something on a LinkedIn forum that I was for, that was on for 3d printing. And there's a great comment and then it said, Maryland, Director of additive manufacturing, I was like, What the heck is this? I ended up Finding the company and applying to it the day afterwards because it's like, please, I need more colleagues I need I need my 3d printing friends, and, and join on the team through business development. And that was five years ago, that was actually right at the very beginning of the company. So it started off with the entire team could sit at a conference table, you know, and worked everything from you know, sales, to engineering to manufacturing to fulfillment deliveries, like we all were sipping at the end of the day. And now we are over 200 employees in this company after five years, and we've raised $180 million. I mean, it's been a whirlwind, from there. But yeah, my background was just making stuff, getting my hands dirty, failing a lot, deal with a lot of technologies, a lot of parts. And it'd be very well here, because we offer so many technologies, we make a lot of parts,

as well. And in your bio you you're also in charge of onboarding new materials and figuring out how that works out. Right?

Yeah, yeah. So we've added at a decent pace different technologies and materials. I keep in touch with the industry. And I work with an internal team as well. And we figured out what our customers asking for, like, who like, what are these custom material requests? We look at the business case behind them, we also look at certain things like can we reproduce this, so not just does it exist, but as a past academia, is it something where I can have multiple manufacturers and if I say build this, the there's a reasonable expectation that the quality and the consistency is going to be there between multiple manufacturers. So in some cases, that gets more boring, like, for example, like FDM, there's a bajillion FDM printers out there, we're using probably the most standardized most industrial ones. So there's our FDM Fordist machines from Stratasys. But that gives us you know, high levels of repeatability and consistency across a vast network. So we you know, by far have the largest capacity of any, you know, 3d printer, because we're utilizing, you know, bureaus upon bureaus upon bureaus with that.

So one of the things that I find really interesting is the parallel between xometry and macro fab, because macro fab is effectively the same style of platform, but for PCBs. So you upload your files, you tell them how you want your PCB to be, you give them your bill of materials, and in a few weeks, some stuff arrives at your door. The thing that is different, in my mind is that us as electrical engineers, are a lot more used to giving electronic design files to somebody, having them interpret it and give us what we expect. I mean, all of the stuff that we needed for that board is typically baked into those files. So that's something where we, it sits really nice with us. But when it comes to manufacturing a physical object out of another material, regardless of the style, that's, at least in my experience, that's a lot less conducive to just packaging it up in electronic file, giving it to someone say, Here you go make me something. So something I'd love to really like dive into is the making CNC manufacturing, 3d printing, whatever you pick the style, like, how is the digital world? Like? How is how is that evolving into manufacturing? And how are we kind of going from a guy just showing up at your door with a manila folder with drawings? How are we changing that over to a digital world?

Oh, yeah, yeah, that's a, it's very interesting, you know, the barrier to entry for xometry, and I'm sure macrophages in the same case is you need that model, you need at least at a bare minimum, that 3d model to do any interpretation, and to work with us because that is going to be what's going to transfer from our instant pricing and our AI algorithm in our interpretation there like computational geometry behind that, to what you're ordering to what's going to be interpreted by the shop floor, those machines, etc, etc. It all starts with 3d, which wasn't always the case. In fact, actually, I've seen a big switch as time has gone on from you know, even five years ago and actually in a lot of industries still the case the print is king. And then there's a model. And yeah, now we're now we're actually really in an industry where model winds, printers guidance, and so it's really really important as the industry is flipped over this way to understand that especially when, when it comes to implications for manufacturing, so CNC machining to your points, even like when you're looking at machining a lot of our customers, our customers who are very experienced in the industry, they do very nice PDF drawings. It's fully specked out, they know exactly what they want. When they go on some free they can click upload, say, Hey, this is 7075 aluminum I need my COC is a materials certs just a couple checkboxes away. You know, a lot of them are ITAR, it's one more checkbox, they can go with specify tight tolerances, threads have holes insert part needs to be your data, click, you know, Cam film, there you go, upload your drawing. And that is enough information for us to get a quote based off how you specify and our drop down selections. But there still is that manual interaction postorder from the machine is interpreting the works in between. So there's that stuff. And then there's the future, which is the model based definition where you put all that information embedded in your CAD file and you upload to the to your system. And it's like, I know what material I know what process and know what specs and what your tight tolerances are. And I've automatically extracted that to give you an accurate quote, we're not there, we have some really cool stuff happening in that area. We have add ins for for example, for veteran SolidWorks that you can download for free@xometry.com. And you can get those add ins. So in SolidWorks, it actually can interpret some of that data like you put in 6061, it'll interpret that and automatically apply it to your part, you can always override it saying, Hey, I'm doing CNC machining. But I really want to make this out of select blades or send a nylon because I'm just in a prototyping phase right now. But it tries to get ahead of you before. So you don't have to do the extra dropdowns and clicks. But right now, it's that it's more of a dance of knowing what you want upload your file and specifying with the ease and speed that our site gives on the preorder side.

So So you think we're already at a point where drawings are secondary, in a way?

I think so. I, I'll give you example. All right. So say I have a unilateral tolerance. So unilateral tolerance on a drawing would be like a plus zero minus 10 1000s. And a lot of times when drawing was King, say it was like part has to be one inch long plus zero minus 10 1000s, when drawing was King, that part would be designed at one inch, I actually should probably say plus 10 minus zero to make my make my analogy better here. But if they like if the machine has got that information and just started cutting metal, and then was referencing dollars, the chance that they accidentally cut that part out of spec, like their first pass is much, much higher in that cat cat scenario where the cat is built at the maximum condition. Now, if you are designing now, where cat is king, the drawing can still have the exact same call outs. But I actually may be I may be modeling to the middle. So to the nominal of that. So say for example, point 995. And what that does is it allows me this, almost a mitigation of risk on the machinery side, because a machinist is no longer like typing in code. They're using their own CAD interpretation programs to figure out the machine steps. So you want to keep that digital traceability, like kind of like what we call the virtual machine as long as possible before we actually go and cut metal. So how can I create my virtual part, which is to the nominals and made in a way where it can be mitigated for any tight tolerances that I need? How does it get transferred through xometry system and then our job board portal, which is all a digital kind of back end that our partners use to manage and track their jobs? And how does it get to their machine, which are usually uses of like Master cam or other programming software, which is interpreting a 3d model. And then they cut metal, you know, and so like, so the more tightly can couple, the digital experience all the way up to the digital machine like virtual simulation of the making the part, the more future proof, you're going to be sure you're sure for your design. Yeah,

that makes sense. And I guess so in preparing for this podcast, one of the things that was going through my head is if I'm just providing a 3d model, a 3d model in so many ways is is highly highly dependent upon the person drawing it and their mindset at the time of drawing it, especially when it comes to stack up and how, like take, for example, in my industry, there's a lot of tendency to pick a corner of a panel, and that is 00 whereas some other people will pick dead center of the panel and that 00 And if if it's properly dimensioned on a drawing, whoever's looking at it to machine it will be able to adjust properly for that. But in terms of a 3d model, maybe not. But once again, it all just depends on who He's drawing it right.

Yeah. And we have. So we have general manufacturing standards. And again, they vary like I, you know, I work in 910 different technologies on a daily basis. And each one of them has what we consider a general tolerance as well as you know, what we consider accept acceptance criteria. For them. machining is what we know. And it's something most used to where I could go and trim down to those tolerances needed. But you're right, if I'm, if I met design apart, that is not within those general tolerances. So if the wiggle room if it can't wiggle, like you can only go like you know, to sow versus the standard five cow, you really need to either do something to your model to give you some more more wiggle room, like make that hole into a slot, for example, which is something that I see a lot in sheet metal design, you know, where it has a longer creep, especially the more you bend it, the more you have unpredictable, stretches that happen when you bend. So adding that adding a slot may save your life and save your project there. Or put a drawing in. And so call it out, put a drawing and just make sure that the thing you're highlighting is the thing that is tighter than the general tolerance. So it's saying, Bring your eyes to this, please. This is what I need to make my product successful. Machining tight tolerances and things. This is not impossible stuff. It's just something that we need to be aware of at the project beginning. And it's sometimes cost more because it may require specialized tooling. Or, you know, it may require a different setup approach than what you typically do with those parts. So yeah, it's it's really interesting. So we were talking a little bit earlier, and you kept on mentioning stackup, and assemblies. And it's funny for me, because although stackup is important, especially if I'm making clamshell pieces and injection molding, when you're not just making you know, a clamshell piece, but you're making 1000s of them, you kind of want that repeatability in your design. But it's usually not the first thing spoken about. But for you because you deal with PCBs, you're always in the middle of something, you're always in the middle of the enclosures that we may be making that xometry. So it's actually really interesting how high you elevate stack up and this interference and building into assemblies. Because even if you're right, you're wrong, you'll still get blamed by the me if something doesn't fit and fit in there. They're They're beautiful, pristine, you know, print, or they're machined housing, or they're injection molded apart, they're gonna be like, how do these ease not telling me the size of my board? Or, you know, how did this right? Yeah, exactly. It's always like, I used to sit literally, between the ears on my left hand side, and to me, it was kind of like, across the hall, but like, you know, I could throw a rock at him, and just listen to them bicker back and forth. And it was just so funny. And again, it was all friendly banter, but it was always like the me is asking for can you make this this part smaller because I want to hit this form factor. And they thought they were being gracious every time they gave up like a cubic centimeter. Like they're like I made a little larger for you Come on, make it work, man. Like, there's always just felt so gracious on their side, they were very proud of themselves. That's,

that's funny. And, you know, we've talked about this multiple times on the podcast, but like having a good solid understanding of the other people that are having to deal with your crap is really, really important. And that goes to other people dealing with the double E's because you make a change to a an enclosure, and that then modifies the ease PCB, that's not something you just snap a finger and it's changed, you know, because you may have just encroached upon that person's critical antenna territory or whatever that goes on that board. Right?

So just make the toroid smaller. Right? Yeah, just just

do it, you know, it'll be fine.

Just do that. It's easy. Yeah. And actually, you know, just from my observation is usually the more senior, the Emmys are, especially in the, in the product development, electromechanical systems, the more they are aware, and they become a little bit of Electrical Engineers themselves. Like they already know, like, what type of board circuit says what type of cleaner and say are they're designing for. And I see that too. Like the like, you can really tell the difference between someone who's done it before, like, you know, skin, their knuckles on I am or other projects, versus those whose their first run like and even like, how do you see parts made together how the drawings are made, you can tell those differences. And that's actually a lot of what my team does, as well as we look at interpret and try to figure out for our customers, what is the next six weeks look like for you? What does the next six months look like for this project? And what are the next six years look like for this project? Because if you get answers to all those questions, you kind of get a reality check on where they are in the product design process. And especially if there's a DF Same issue that could be worked around. And you know, quantity two or three to hit you for that, you know, that short period of time won't be an issue. But if you're like, hey, I want to move this up to 550 units, or I want to move it up to 1200 units, then all of a sudden, I'm really gonna say, Listen, you got a 30 foot wall here. And I need this type of setup, this type of tooling, this type of slowdown to make this happen. And you're gonna have a scalability issue on price. So we can if you make a little bit thicker, then now we have a design for production units. So that's where there's little tiny design tweaks become much more sensitive when you think production versus low volume custom.

Oh, absolutely. And last week, we were we were talking with Chrissy Meyer, who designed for in the millions. And we were talking a lot about those little, those little tweaks matter a lot. And that point 1% failure rate really start to show up when, when you start manufacturing that kind of quantity.

Yeah, I actually I'll give her a shout out to that podcast, because I'm like, don't listen to me, you guys listen to Christie's podcasts, it was awesome. The something that I took away that I think was very interesting was very relevant to what I've heard on injection molded side is, you know, I want this to look Apple good. And kind of rebroadcast, it seems like Apple can't afford a 20% scrap, like Apple can't afford for our first product line to throw out throw away one out of five things to get a product that looks beautiful to our customers. But for the most part, we can work in this low volume custom. I mean, a lot of times you're working on IoT devices or things that don't even have that level of scale where well, that level of margin to be able to do that level of margin like he can can't afford it. So it's very interesting to see what the strengths and trade offs are stupid tons of money. Yeah, I mean, do you want a more textured finish? Or can you do B blast here, you know what, we can get stuff and bring it to 85%. And it's still beautiful, like manufacture products. I mean, there's still so much that you can do that is standardized. So stuff, we see a fully integrated product line, like the things that you're seeing around your desk every day, especially in electronics. It's they make that tool, they make that part, they make that design. And then they tweak it again and they tweak it again. And they do you know build ups, cut downs, build ups cut down, and they make a highly repeatable process. But it's not the first go. Oh, for sure. It is it is. Yeah, it is engineering change orders Ecco to work that way,

you know, something real quick to interject into there that I think is super important that a lot of people miss is when you're defining? Well, not even when you need to define what quality is. And I truly do mean to find that in like writing, write out what good is. And that's sort of like the kind of like, almost opening statement to your quality document as a whole across your company. Like, what does it mean when we say good job, and when you're talking the correct way. But when you're talking about actually doing an inspection of something, you actually have to boil it down. Like think of think of whoever's doing the inspection, think of if they were a robot, how would you tell them to define what quality is literally say, like, hold this two feet from your face for an indefinite period of time. And if you can't see blends, then that's good, you know that that's a definition? Because I mean, if you just hand something to someone and say, Is this good? Well, everyone's gonna look at it differently. Some guy might throw it under a microscope, and you put anything under a microscope, and it's gonna be it's gonna fail. Right? You know, so, like, I just a short tangent, but define that?

Well, yeah, it's, it's like defining, you're going from treating it like art to an engineering sample, or engineering or manufacturing specifications at that point, where if you had if I hand something to Steven, say, Does this look good? That's subjective, absolutely make an objective.

And I can tell you, again, we're working with you know, 10 plus technologies, you know, seven, or six, seven 3d printing technologies, and then you have your sheet metal CNC, there's, there is so much a difference of expectation between those and you may be the best CNC designer on the planet. But you may not know what SLA looks like, for example, in 3d printing. And one of the things that, you know, is a big part of my job and actually, this end of 2019 we're building up knowledge hubs and more guides. I'm actually just doing a video on surface finishes and I'm doing a video on anodized Chem film, metal plating when the choose those, but trying to get visual, and sometimes like audio visual explanations of surface finishes and the expectation from a process to our customers is sometimes the biggest thing because you can just click and drag and select it. impressed by it, but sometimes the knowledge that when you say clear anodized on a CNC part, it anodized inherently clouds. So if you have this beautiful 32 ra CNC part that looks, you know, just, it's one of the things you put on the front your website, when you anodized it, it doesn't necessarily make the part bad, but cosmetically it actually clouds it up a little bit it makes gives a little bit of a haze. And so having an understanding that these processes do affect your parts affects your cosmetics and, and understanding what that looks like, is sometimes half the battle. Um, 3d printing is is right there too. It's it's more of a Help Me Choose and help me understand right now because no one knows all these technologies. So the more visual guys the more we have an online design guides or FAQs, application engineering team, I mean, we're all there because we need we need to be to elevate the customer's projects and make sure that not only are they choosing the material process that works best, but also that they have the expectation that when they press buy, this is what they'll receive

that clear anodized reminds me of my Jeep Wagoneer because they have a bunch of polished aluminum on it that actually what happened over like the last 50 years of this vehicles life is the anodizing has failed and scratched and gotten terrible looking. And so I stripped it all off and I made it all nice and polished. And now I'm like, do I really want to get it anodized and clouded again? Or am I going to spend every month polishing aluminum?

I was gonna say well, you're gonna get that natural oxide layer anyways, so expect corrosion is I mean, the Polish is going to help right it's going to help prevent little micro gaps but expect corrosion until you do some level of protective coating to it. Yeah,

that should be the name of this podcast. Expect corrosion expect.

You said you should find a way to Nickel Plate. That is beautiful. I love nickel plating.

Weren't you? Weren't you doing something similar to that Parker? Oh, you were electroplating?

Right? Yeah, well, nickel plating you do it with electrolysis. Right. But

you were doing something not nickel. Right? Plastics. That's right. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. There's interesting.

Tupperware in car batteries in the backyard?

No, actually just a little lab power supply. You don't need a lot. Oh, you

don't need that much juice.

Are you plating plastics with metal? Is that what you're working on? Or is it the plating? Yeah,

like spray painting with like a conductive paint? And then you can play it over that? It seems it works. Okay. I actually I haven't gotten anything that I'm like, would be like, That looks amazing. But I'm like, okay, I can see that this process actually works.

I actually have a little piece of nickel plated SLS right in front of me. Oh, nice. Yeah, so we have nickel plating, as it's the only option that we have for plated part is nickel plated SLS. And what it really is, is a four thousandths of an inch buildup of nickel. So they do kind of what you're talking about. It's not a paint, but it's a proprietary process where you build up a small layer, like think like half a 1,000th of copper. And then that creates that conductive echo shell, and then you will do a bath and played it up with nickel. What's unique about 3d printing versus other processes is other processes are usually like plate down. I have a very clear chemical path for this plating to build up on with 3d printing usually have much more organic design, so they actually have to place your anodes and cathodes kind of custom. So it's almost like a custom wire project that looks like a little roller coaster going around the part in order to get an even build up of this 3d printer parts. But something I noticed it's not cosmetic, like in in SLS, you have this natural kind of sugar QB finish to at least some ombre, so granny finished you to the material. It's nylon, it's built in a powder bed, it gets that powder finished inherently to it. And it just exaggerates it's more like Princess and the Pea. It'll make the nickel buildup will just show the layer show the graininess more, but it does increase stiffness and strength probably about 5x or so. So, if I want to make a design that is ruggedized outdoor use, and it will be cost prohibitive to 3d printed metal or to thaw that five axis mill and make a very complex part. Sometimes nickel plating is the best option is also for EMI shielding, of course.

You know you were mentioning kind of adjusting that your knowledge base to include a little bit more of these topics or images on those things. And I think that would be images with a disc like a little bit more of a description would be incredibly helpful. It's interesting this week, I've kind of been doing some, some shopping online for some metals for some stuff that I'm quoting out. And one thing that I've found is just, it's difficult to get people to commit to even write something about the aesthetics of a surface finish, like you'll get, you'll get someone describing a mill finish or something. And it's just a description of the functionality of a mill finish. Or if somebody says, like stainless steel number four brush finish, they'll just describe that it was sent through a timesaver with X grit or something like that. And all of that is great in terms of the functionality. And in so many cases, us as engineers, like that's what we care about, right? You know, that's mill finished good enough to kind of thing, but to have a good image of a mill finish and say, you know, you wish you could expect XYZ, in terms of the aesthetics, I think that's actually very important. And something that you don't really see very often,

that and to that point, I mean, it's, it's sometimes difficult. I mean, it's, it sounds sounds weird, but I'll give you an example, when we met our manufacturing partners. So we go through first kind of like the online side, which is working through a pros profile, completing an onboarding and also completing the NDA. Once we get them through that stage, we send them a job. And that job is test parts. And they're able to make this test part, the steps part, they have the exact same CAD model. Yeah, the same drawing. And we get these back, the parts look different. And so say the offer 32 thirds or 63, finished to them something to notice that when I measure that the tool that is used to measure finishes the profilometer, and it looks like kind of like a almost like a record needle that will extend a little bit out and then kind of drag back along that part. And all it's looking for is that variation of how much up and down on movie to tell you what that surface finish is. So I can actually get achieve like a 63 or 32 Finish through ScotchBrite. Like some you know, it's more beautiful when I do it through mill, like I you know, get this, you know, point seven, five inch end mill and do these nice, clean Pat final passes. And that's what I love. I love seeing that, that stuff. But you can achieve the same surface finish, which is technically to spec through different means. So when I say, you know, when we ask for these pictures, it's actually really interesting, because like, you know, there's the as milled standard finish. But there's also ways to achieve that, where you may require a manual process, and it looks very different. It looks brushed, even though measuring is equivalent.

Right, right. It's it's so hard to you, it's so hard to describe this in words, the final product, I think that's why people like Apple have armies of people who have a very well defined, this is what it should be.

Yeah, well, even like, I know, molding, if we have prior experience. So if they're doing a forever change, and they have an example of what they want, I was worth its weight in gold, because we get to help set their expectations and manage it that way. I even think like an injection molding, again, in various well established industry in the industry all about reproduction. There are, you know, very well defined like SPI finishes, and more texturing finishes that really do help you achieve a unanimous expectation of what the results are going to be because it's again, it's measurable or for, for example, bolttech comes from Motek. It's from one location. So there's equivalents of that. So a lot of times like the the beat blasts, you can get the equivalent, something like the 11010110 to zero finishes. But some of that is you know, is almost proprietary, and it does control it does create repeatability, and that factor. So it's different. Depending on the process, there's different levels of standardization. And again, even depending on the shop, like so CNC, their finished may be different from the next door machine shop. So you know, it's on drawings, pictures of prior work, even what we have it's arbitrary is we oftentimes will look at repeat work and make sure that it goes to that same shop. Not only does that help the shop out because they already have the pathing and everything set up so it helps them but it helps the consistency and expectations for our customers. So we have some of this stuff embedded. But yeah, it's a can of worms, talking about the first run what you're going to get you guys get feedback after you make it but your part literally has never existed before. Before we make it so it's you know, it's very hard to get that feedback up front on your first run.

For sure, and and you know, it's interesting. So you mentioned consistency, and it kind of goes segues into the next kind of thing I wanted to talk about, which was the breaking or the continuing of the traditional client manufacturing. A relationship. There's, I mean, the classical way is that you establish a relationship with a manufacturer that you trust that you know. I mean, from past experience, one, I mean, one manufacturer I had, we didn't even call them by their first name, we called them by the contact, her name was Vani. Like, everyone was like, Did you contact Vani to get our, you know, 50,000 pieces of XYZ, you know, like, we had a direct human relationship going on in this manufacturing? Well, xometry kind of breaks that in a way, but does it like, I don't know the details behind all that?

Well, I'll definitely say we have strong relationships with our manufacturing partners, there's a lot of them. But if you look at our partner team, it's exactly like that. It's they are, they do everybody, by the first name. Usually, sometimes it's because something suddenly happened one time, when we had a lot had to have a longer conversation. But you know, on our side, I always describe xometry for the customer, as a sword and shield, we are there to fight for you to make sure the quality is right. And really work on the customer's behalf to to ensure that, again, they're getting parts that the full ordered, you know, on time to spec on our partner site, though, our work is totally dependent on the success for manufacturing partners. So we have the relationship and for our partners, we are perceived both as a partner as well as a tough customer to them. So it's a little bit different, because they you know, you don't know what you're getting tomorrow. And that ways, but we we do keep the work coming through our online job board platform. So what our manufacturers expect from xometry is a continuous flow of work that they can take on demand. You know, so if they have, you know, say they have a power outage or something like that, they don't need to take work, you know, they can, they could pass but once they come back on, they can, they can continue working and taking the jobs and, and you know, as a complete and as a good as a good a decent quality score. So we have kind of like a score from, you know, up to 100, called the partner success score, they can take more work and more work in parallel. So we have these benchmarks, we have these things to build the relationship with our partners stronger both digitally through like a process driven workflow, as well as you know, our partner management, our case management team, you know, there's many touch points that they have within xometry. And, you know, by no means do we feel separate from them, like we're, you know, we're in the trenches with them, making sure that everything comes out successfully. I also want to take note that a lot of us, including myself, we came from manufacturing backgrounds. So a lot of the our team members are professional machinists, you know, mold, mold Tech's mold makers, you know, I have a decade plus experience and added professional additive manufacturing, like, I've never touched a desktop printer, I've only worked on, you know, industrial additive manufacturing my entire career. And it's just something I'm very, very comfortable with. And we have other folks in, you know, direct metal laser sintering experts, SLA experts on our team, and these people have, you know, built their own work centers work for, you know, developing companies, they've worked for, large, you know, OEM entities. And so when we get on the phone a lot of times, you know, we're not just there to be like, Hey, what's going on here, but we're like, How can I help? Like, you know, we have our on our board machine team, you know, most of these guys have 30 plus years experience, believe me, they could walk through and figure out where the issue is. I remember my colleague, Jason, he, he was talking through a project I think, was like 40 pieces. And he was able to remove eight hours of build time per piece. And the beautiful thing, beautiful work out of this was not only do they save a project and sleep time, but then he's like, now they have all this capacity, can you take this job to like it was kind of like, it's like, let's, let's, let's give you some more work. Now.

That's pretty cool. Because Because technically, I guess in a way, people supply you with work, and then you supply someone else's work. So you are a middleman. But not only are you just like dumping work on somebody, you're also providing expertise that goes above and beyond that.

Yeah, this is the this the new realm of manufacturing as a service. And I mean, very much you guys are in the same realm like you're a platform that does the matchmaking of capabilities. With those who are best to produce that keep that that works. And I think that's really important to note is that we are more focused on the project by project basis, and what's needed to most successfully complete that project and who can do that best than necessarily the customer to manufacture relationship. So we're we're more focused on making good parts and building up that we're building up our repertoire, making good parts as far as between the customer, the customer experience and knowing that we are a marketplace platform.

Right well And the thing is, manufacturing never fits in one bucket. It's never, it's never just one thing that works for everyone. And you just press a button and go. And macro fab as an example, like you mentioned earlier, the idea of like a kind of a small run IoT device will take that versus another small run. But say it's like a really high tech military device that's gonna go in a fighter jet. There's both small volume, but they have incredibly different requirements to them. And I know macro fab can say like, oh, okay, so here's the IoT device. Here's a manufacturer that will be really good for that. But this military application is going to require all these certifications, all this other stuff, we've got another guy who's happy to do that, too. And it's nice to be able to upload a macro fab and have macro fed make the decision on where that goes right to be the fork in the road.

I always use the Amazon analogy, like you go order your, your robot vacuum your toothpaste, and like a back scratcher. And they may be in three warehouses, but all you care about is Amazon, when you press order, it's like your personal ship Thursday. And so all you care about as a customer, in your experience, is that they you know, they ship out Thursday, and they arrive at your door Friday, and you get your parts and you're you're good to go. And that's that's kind of the xometry experiences, we take care of supply chain, you put up a urethane cast right next to FDM 3d 3d printed right next to the sheet metal right next to a brass CNC right next to a 41/45 axis with you know, tight tolerances, high specs, and you press place order. And we figure out the best way to distribute that across our manufacturing network. So you get all your projects, you know, on Friday,

yeah, yeah, sure. Makes makes total sense. So actually, so about approvals and certifications. To be honest, I'm not super aware of what approvals and certifications would apply to just a standard manufacturing facility in terms of like a machine shop or something. But it say a customer has a specific requirement. Do you guys try to work that out with the customer and find someone who can meet those requirements?

Yeah, so it starts with your online dashboard. So there's the quote management tool. So you click drag upload, and you start to specify. And what you're doing is you're kind of running a love letter to the manufacturers, you're uploading your part and you start to you start to specify all these things. You upload your drawing, and just certain certain checkboxes that you put in so you put it so I'll I'll take ITAR thing I chose a very obvious example. And it's something very relatively new. And I think we're very popular for the ITAR marketplace. As soon as he just like direct ITAR, several mechanisms happen on our dataset to make sure that those parts will never go non ITAR like as soon as you check it, like even if you uncheck it, it's like we have to hard code it out. Because we were like this part, maybe ITAR and it a closes up which manufacturing partners will be able to see that job, regardless of the process. Once it's ordered, and, and this all those partners have certain protocol, like they have to make sure that they have updated on their site. Relevant and non expired ITAR certs, which are they renew every year. And then you start selecting more things, select CoCs, you select material certs, you, you put a finish on use a select a certain material, let's say you take titanium for example, and put a custom finish on it. All this stuff will then reference back to our vast manufacturing network over 3000 partners. And look at all those and say who fits this, you know who fits this. And that is the organization in which you're able to push that work to, like no one else will see that work. So harbor quality assurance is making sure first off the people who see the work are the right shops. The other side is that feedback loop. So when we start these manufacturing partners out there not just direct shipping to our customers, we expect the parts to be right. But they come to xometry first to our Maryland, Maryland location, where we do a second QA and it goes through our QA facility. In fact, actually, we used to have a machine shop and we still you know a lot of machine works and now it's mostly we have QA and shipping. Like we have this beautiful QA department and we're getting again, different piece parts in all the time every single day. And we're running through we're looking at the Digital traceability like a partner to upload their records or inspection reports in process photos. So we have their traceability and their you know their reports and then we can actually cross reference or do our own reports our own inspection in house to make sure that the parts are right before they go to the customer. Once this customer is built up a high repertoire of what you know say they have a 98 PSs, which is a partner she's gonna score. We start to move them to Earth. Imago, which is that direction, where if we can find that the quality that they're performing that is the same quality that we expect internally, then we, you know, they're able to direct ship. And they, there's some benefits to that. So you have a little bit extra working time and some or some other great things. But, you know, our goal is to bring all our manufacturing partners up to that. Because we can elevate them through our platform, like you get feedback, you get more feedback from our system than you would with your customers. Your customers just don't come back usually, like, you know, with us, we're like, hey, you know, this bumped up your score, your score went down, because you're a day behind here, and you can actually see almost like a stock ticker, like your your success or like, what's jobs affected? And

why? On your credit score? Manufacturing,

it's kind of cool, though, because you get more than just a date, you get a goal. On top of that, you know, a lot of times what the customer is just like, I give you money, here's a date, give me my thing. And we'll talk again, when I need more thing. Getting getting that kind of like, what comes to mind is like the blood drive thermometer, you know, that goes up and down, like you get something to shoot for, as a whole company, right?

Yeah, and even like, you know, parallel work. So when a partner starts off, they can only take one job at a time. So even this goal is you build up your partner success score, but up of work, you can start doing more parallel work and take higher revenue jobs. And all that is, you know, if you're maxed out, if you could take three jobs concurrently, you have three jobs in, you kind of want to finish that job, because you can know that a slot opens up and boom, you can take another one through, and the more he does for you build up. I mean, it's it's a very positive reinforcing feedback loop. Like I mean, positive, like the happy smiley face positive way, where it's, you know, we want to elevate our manufacturers up. And even us, we're elevating them to at least at ISO 9001 standardization just by using our interface. And then xometry itself as as 9100, which is the aerospace standard.

That's, that's pretty hardcore. I've looked into I've worked 9001 before, but the, the other one is, I've looked into it, like, oh, gosh, it's, it's more documented. It's a pain in the ass. That's what it is.

Yeah, I think it's something important to notice, you know, it's not just individual product developers who are using us, actually, several of our investors were customers first. So BMW, GE, Bosch just joined on. Dell computers, like, all these investors in xometry, actually, were clients, and we're using us and they're like, this is pretty cool. Like, it's one of the things like, I think I was listening to like a podcast on, you know, guy from Stonyfield. And he's like, the hardest part about selling my project was 18 inches from your hand to your mouth, like, how can I get that spoon in their mouth, and then, you know, they're like, Man, this, this yogurt is awesome. And that's kind of like for us, like, as soon as you go on the site and upload a 3d CAD file, and you see how, like, it's not like submit your quote here. It's like, you upload. And it's like, boom, two and $14. You're like, hold up, hold up. I haven't thought about this yet. Alright. And as soon as you select, boom, updated, all right, now, it's went to seven business days. And you see this in real time. And when you started, as soon as you see the site, the value prop, it's just like, holy crap. I've been doing it wrong for years like this is it's right there. And you're getting, you're getting everything else out of it that you've been looking for. Awesome.

Okay, so one other thing, actually about approvals and shirts that kind of goes along. In the past, my experience has been

that a lot of people like to do like a, like a walkthrough of the factory and they like to meet the people and they like to see the guy who's running the mill, and there's that kind of like salesy, like walk around and shake hands kind of thing. Is what what, what is there to allow for that? Or is there anything?

It's, that is interesting? My answer is kind of yes and no, right. So we have a, we have a dedicated group of account executives, which of course have you know, they've worked several projects and and usually very good and have built up very strong relationships with growth of our customers. That being said, you know, our site is not where the magic happens, you know, the magic is happening at this distributed manufacturing marketplace that we've created. So it's really hard to say, you know, first off, we don't typically predict where the parts are going to go. Before you press order, like, you know, all that pricing everything, it's not RFQ bid system, it's our AI algorithm saying, hey, parts like this, with this type of features will cost this much. And, you know, it's so that's, that's our algorithm spitting that out. So even upfront, it's, it's very hard for me to say, you're probably going to end up here to kind of do the meet and greet. What we can do is give confidence by our process. You know, again, who works as long as our case studies the content that we're building out, talking with application engineers is sometimes very good, because they're like, oh my gosh, yeah, these guys know their, their stuff. And, and we want to give confidence that when you press buy, you're gonna get what you want. But here's the walkthrough. It's not a thing in the past because I've seen it, we've done it for certain customers or certain clients, especially production runs. But it's something that may not be necessary to start the relationship anymore.

That totally makes sense. Your value is not in manufacturing floor, it's you being what you said earlier. You're there short, sword and shield, so to speak. Yeah, that's,

by the way, that's exactly how I answer for our customers. Because I don't have a canned answer for for customer walkthroughs. I'm like, let's see,

well, because like in thinking about this, this product podcast, doing prep for it, what's going through my mind is all of the doing air quotes here, older engineers that I've worked with, that have a very set way of doing things. And practically everything about xometry breaks, everything that that makes them comfortable. And and I could just hear the kind of arguments that would go in the engineering department of like, we can't use it because of XYZ, you know. And so that's why I'm asking a lot of these questions, because I'm curious myself on how does xometry fit that mold?

See what the problem there Steven is, those people just want their free like lunches from salespeople.

I've never seen an engineer turn it down. I've free lunch. Like every actually.

So So speaking of. And I honestly I really do mean this for listeners. If there's a team and you guys want to learn more about this, what you do buy pizza, we do. company specific webinars, if you give me your 15 engineers in a room, oh, man, you're gonna get pizza and cookies, but it gets, you know, we'll make it happen. We'll do a remote webinar and just go through a quoting engine. It's that simple. And I do webinars, I do public broadcasts of webinars, very frequently, for xometry. I have, you know, one coming up on tolerances and just one that's just here's a website, you know, walk through it, use it, to help through that. But yeah, a lot of it to your point is there's some people that will just never go and search for this. And how do you you know, how do you earn their trust? I think some of the best experiences usually, like

through their stomach.

Pizza wins, man pizza works, does. But sometimes it's someone else on their team order something. And I've seen, you know, customers who have millions of dollars to work with us start with a $24 SLS part. Like sometimes there's just a it's even though they their job bread or butter or spec manufacturing, they found us for 3d printing, and we just happen to offer so many technology. So we show up, they ordered that SLS part, they go through the guys like had a great experience, some quarters, another part and you start building momentum actually on the engineering team. And then you know, you go in and you try to you try to get pizza for the whole team, right? Or you go and work with your procurement. But it's it's a different strategy. But it's something that, you know, I think we've showed the value prop very well, when we do, you know, we do work through and again, that site sells a second yet, but you're like, oh my gosh, like it just I've seen people just kind of drop when they see how quick it is, especially the people who've had that pain of procurement for such a long time.

Procurement, procurement sucks when when your boss is saying, we need to get a quote to the customer. And you've got five different things that have to come from five different manufacturers. And like you said earlier, you need to get a quote for one 525 and 1000 and the customer and you know, like you're trying to meet a deadline, and then that guy comes back with a quote for 500 which was not a number you asked for. And so you kind of have to guesstimate and backtrack or, you know, like work that it's awful. It really

is, I've been say, you know, we vet out new technologies, and part of the vetting is just getting parts you kind of realize like, Man, I love xometry I can't wait to get this technology xometry site because you know what, you're vetting out these new technologies I have to order it I have to do the exact same thing like RFQ process and then I have to go through a thorough procurement referrals and stuff like that. And and, and it's just, you know, I just want you know, my x tiles, I just want my little you know, pieces to evaluate and work with and yeah, it's, it's amazing because again, once I have that up on my site, I could just click I went to 17 I typed in one seven, press enter and uploads and then compress or it updates and I press buy. It's you know, it's there's there's no back and forth. There's a lot of save time.

I was talking to Parker earlier and I said it's like macro fab for metal or plastic or whatever.

Yeah. Well, again, we have the same client base like we have, you know, most of a lot of what we said what we make is not large mechanical, you know, components A lot of it is enclosures and electromechanical with systems and You know, and we have so many use cases, so many materials and even like the onset of 3d printing more as a production tool, especially for a lot of these low volume parts where your rev may change, you know, after the first like 133 units, so sometimes it doesn't make sense to tool up. So if you can get away with 3d printing, and get your customers to accept the weather, whether the surface finish or some subsequent issue that historically hasn't been well accepted, but people are getting used to it now, then go for it. It's a great option,

especially if your product is highly customizable. We see that a lot. That's right.

So you have like, mass customization is a term and even like Local Motors, you know, you have mass configuration, which is it's not a bajillion options, but it's 48. It's still more than three, you know, and so, yeah, it's, it's something that 3d printing is very powerful

for you. Just out of curiosity, have you ever had anyone upload something where you just don't have the capability to make that or the certification? Or, like, is there anything that's like, so far beyond? That? Can't do

it? Yeah, I mean, I want my

thing printed on the moon dust.

So first off, I can tell you, that, please. We're past academic. Right. So, you know, I mentioned that, you know, we're looking at more standardized processes. So, you know, finishes, materials, anything that, you know, you read about, like, first, you know, I saw this beautiful thing the other day on a 3d printed heart valve, but it's completely in a science lab right now. And it's, you know, a completely custom appointment. It's not, it's not repeatable. And if you're like, hey, I have $100 Right now, can I get make this out of this material? They'll say, No, it's, you know, there's an engineering effort in between.

Have you Have you had anything that you just can't do?

Yeah. Yeah. So, so yeah, stuff that I stuff that we can make, we often have alternatives for, you know, and again, we're representing general manufacturing. So if you know,

Mars dust,

yeah, closed? Exactly. You know, if if someone's like, Can I have this? You know, can I make this out of this custom super alloy that exists out of one vendor? And this one year? Yeah, I need this finish by the finish that can only happen in Nasik data, because there's only one to invented this third sort of type of plating for their satellites. It's something where I can be like, Can I help you prototype this? Can I help you? You know, can I machine so 7075 for you, that brings you up to this kid I know, a lot of times actually finishing tends to be a bottleneck because especially in aerospace, sometimes they have a specific finishing need. And sometimes the best conversation with that is saying, Listen, I could build this part to spec all day long, you know, certain materials, this, you know, this grade finish tolerances, you name it, the finished surface finishes, the finishing for like this certain chemical that that you're doing is not available on an open marketplace. So can we get do the part for you, and then you take care of the finishing. And so sometimes it's more of a, this is what we can do, you know, and the 94% chunk of it, and we move into that level. But certainly we we get that works in the good job that our application engineers do is say, Hey, here's what we can do. Here's some alternatives. What do you think? And they have that conversation directly with our customer. Sure, yeah.

I remember multiple times at macro fab, there was, there was things that were not turned down. But but, you know, aid was given to the engineering teams, because the things that they had designed, were just, they weren't ready for manufacturing, or they were just completely incapable of being manufactured. But like that kind of thing exist for sure. But But Parker, have you ever run into anything at a macro fab? That is, like, just so far beyond the capabilities that it was just like, well, we can't do this?

Yeah, it really depends on it's mainly like, component selection at that point, when you get to, like, certain type of packages, like actually doing wafer packages, where, or what's called Flip chip, where chip on board, so part is like, yeah, chip on board, where the part is, like epoxy almost to like a PCB and you gold jump bond over to the PCB to like, and then you know, encapsulates, like, we don't have anyone that really does that, you know, in our network, or we don't have that type of machine. And, or we've actually had people ask us, if we could package dyes into ICS before, that's cool. And it's like, well, that's not really what a PCB assembler does, but here's some contacts that you can go in, you know, hit them up, hopefully they can help you out.

That's, it's interesting, because you're right, there's a and actually when I think about PCBs, it is interesting cuz you have more of a standardized base, right? It sounds like sheet metal, where you have like a standardized base and then your, your forming forming function, you know, punching it doing engraving, material deposit, but It's still, a lot of times it's seven layer, you know, it still has some consistency to to your expectation. And so like there's, there's wiggle rooms, and like you said your bottleneck may be component level, it may be like, What am I assembling into it? And I think for us again, it's yeah, it's a, it's a non standard materials and non standard finish. Is it, you know, the side of a house? Like, you know, there's certain things where standard manufacturing, you know, even on large marketplace, it's, if there's one place in the world, or one place in the US that produces parts like that, then very likely, like, it's, it's specialized manufacturing, and it's not general manufacturing,

you should probably go to that person and talk to them.

Yeah, or, and, you know, sometimes we is we've put miracles out all the time. So we always, we always start with, have you upload your file yet, because a lot of times we will take a look at the file. And, you know, I get a lot of these questions like How big can you how small can you like these, you know, these loaded questions like how small the whole key make, and a lot of times it's like, how deep is a hole? What material? Is it in? You know, there's, there's, there's these follow up questions where the intuition is instantly there What happened 3d file, I just take a look at it and like, measure measure, whole diameter process? Yes. It's, it's, so a lot of times these questions come before we have the CAD model, where the first thing you do is just upload your CAD model and see what comes out.

Speaking of what you just said, side of a house, so someone like uploaded like a sheet metal building, probably get that quoted, yeah, what's

the craziest thing that's been uploaded?

Although architects, architects are better now, but keep in mind software has been catching up to 3d printing technologies. So software, some of the more traditional software for architecture for sure, just doesn't know how to make scale model parts and know when to scale down a building and things like your handrails are going to be, you know, the size of an atom like or the thickness of the atom and, and so you have to actually do a lot of post work to bring these files up. So sometimes I'll actually will ask, like, you know, hey, I want scale models, my nuclear facility. And we're like, Great that like, so I just tell them, do your best to export this as STL as one solid body, if at all possible, scale it down, send it over to us don't press order, because very likely, like you have screws and nuts and bolts that are just in that file, it's just data, like it's just all it does is make the make the file bigger. And we have some tricks of the trade to help simplify that, like I use a tool called shrink wrap a lot, which helps thicken the body. So I can say like, I want all my minimum features to be at least 40,000 thick. And it just goes and kind of like it does exactly what it's described as it's free grabs that goes and kind of like melds around the features digitally, and then ignores everything else on the inside. It just kind of basically makes the solid out of it. So you could do some some tricky things when you're doing scale models. But yeah, once someone uploads something huge, I mean, it'll upload it to our side, and it'll say, error and you could press you can press for a review on the site. And I'll go to our team and we'll take a look. And sometimes it's a you know, a sanity check thing, like where someone is working on like a helicopter design, and they have a panel but they forgot that the screw that was in the assembly is still way out there in the origin, you know, 12 feet away, it makes the part overly huge and then you delete the screw and now it's buildable part. So sometimes it's just us we're feeling that to figure that

out exact same thing with PCBs especially especially when the scaling of a PCB but the scaling of the drill drawing are different units or or something you'll you'll try to import that to a Gerber viewer and it looks like your board is an inch by inch but the whole thing is 48 feet by 120 feet or something like that because the drill drawing is so huge. That is a drill drawing like a vias the jewel drawing is just basically NC code that shows here's the all the holes and here's their size, but a lot of times they get exported as a different unit than the actual PCB data.

The experiment Steven seen on that drill file this is like going way down rabbit hole to drill file to is the problem is with those is most EDA tools which are electronic design applications. The when they export that Exelon drill file, they don't export what format. They're exporting it as most time it's default what's called to four, which is like four decimal places and then to what's what's pre decimal, pre decimal places. Numbers yeah number three numbers before the decimal place. This is a special name for leading digit leading digits that's it. But a lot of them won't print that in there in the header. And so we you assume it's two four but a lot of EDA tools will do like two to six, or we'll do something else. And that's what happens with Stephens explain where it just will explode into this like crazy, ginormous PCB.

And I'll kill this rabbit hole. But I do have to say STL files are same way. They're unitless, volumetric volume meshes. And so if if you're a CAD designer, and you design a modeling program that exports as STL, or OBJ, you may be designing and let's say you're designing benches, you make a part that's two inch by two inch by two inch. When you export it, the STL just says up to like, it just, it just doesn't say anything else. And then you upload it to our site, and we have kind of like a millimeter to inch converter. But if if the site interprets as millimeters, which is what it does, it'll start at two millimeters and say, Your part smaller than a P, do you want to, you know, change these units?

Are you sure you're really sure?

Yeah. Are you sure. And we we have had one customer complaint. I think it's in the Google reviews somewhere, which overall great positive, where the guys like my part was smaller than a grain of rice and the order of DMLS parts that I think they wanted to be six inches long, and it was like six millimeters. And we were resolved like we made it but they they almost it was almost so unexpected that they found it funny. Like when they got this, like grain of rice piece of stainless steel look like little macaroni tube. And they're like they're expecting like a muffler.

That's impressive. But you guys actually made

you well, it was it was like right in the middle of the resolvable area. So we were just like, yeah, sometimes people want that stuff. So it's, it's good.

You didn't question it? Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. We weren't we ran into that issue a lot when we were starting was, like, you'd look at something and be like, this is the customer really want that. Like we can make it but that's that's weird as making anyways.

That was that was early xometry. To To be fair, so we're just kind of like our customer's always right, you know. And so now we've, we have

a process or something. Yeah, we've implemented St. We we went through the same thing is, we used to, like people had to confirm the rotations of their parts and stuff. And because as an engineer, that's something I would like to do, like, make sure the parts are rotated correctly. On the flip side, there are people that just go next door and look at it

don't figure it out.

Well, you look at like, well, the person said, Okay, on this diode, that's this way, but clearly the silkscreen wants it to go the other way. Well, the customer said, Okay, on the rotation, so we're going to build that way. Yeah, it's always wrong. And then the customers mad, and

what do you do?

But the customers, right? customer's always right, even if they were wrong the first time, Hey, that's

my motto is when I talk to people about customer services, even when you're right, you're wrong. Like just understand, like, even if they did something a mistake, it's like, it's, you know, it could have been the UX, it could have been something else that we need to improve upon. You know, we, you know, instructions or engineering workarounds, right, you know, it's a, we want to build a system that's so seamless here, that it's so intuitive, that the customer can, again, understand what they're ordering. When they press go like they they have a full review and full knowledge of what they're saying. I'm buying.

Yeah. And it's that balance of having a seamless transaction and being able to, to put in all the information you need, just so that y'all can build the part, but also reducing the friction of them placing that order. Yeah,

don't over specify, like if if they have to redo their entire drawing on our website. We've done it wrong. Yeah, correct. I

would get zero orders if that was the

case. Yeah. RZ Yeah, zero high value spec orders. Because I think that's a large client base of ours, because it's so easy for them to specify their on their site. We get that but yeah, I can imagine it's like, oh, what you have, you know, 48 recordable dimensions. Can you click add, click add, click Add, that would be miserable. So we keep it simple at xometry.

Very good. Well, you do you have any anything to add to that? Parker got anything more you want to go through?

I don't think so. Oh, great. How

about you, Greg?

No, this is fun. I love talking shop. And like I said, I've been geeking out with you all like you have probably back, you know, about six years ago when I was working with electromechanical systems and and the, you know, PC board manufacturing and, you know, us building a board with 2020 pieces just to find out one prototype, you know, like and like, again, there's this industry has evolved just as much as the custom manufacturing industry has. So I love geeking out this is great.

Well, thanks so much for coming on and In talking to us about your platform and kind of the future of digital manufacturing,

yes, thank you, Greg.

Thank you guys.

Well that would you'd like to sign us out.

That was a macro fab engineering podcast. I was your guest Greg Paulson,

and we're your hosts Parker, Dolman.

And Steven Greg. Let everyone take it easy

Thank you. Yes, you our listener for downloading our show. If you have a cool idea, project or topic, let Stephen and I know Tweet us at Mac fab at Longhorn engineer with no O's or at analog E and G or emails at podcasts at Mack fab.com. Stephen and I get all those emails that you send in. Also, check out our Slack channel. There's a URL for the invite for the Slack channel in the podcast description below. If you're not subscribed to the podcast yet, click that subscribe button. That way you get the latest episode right when it releases, and please review us wherever you listen, as it helps the show stay visible and helps new listeners find us