(Intro Song)

Where oh where are you night? Why did you leave me and read on my phone? I searched the world o'er and thought I found true love. You met an AI and poof you was gone.

Jeff: Hi, this is Jeff Pennington, host of You Teach the Machines. No Mary Jane today. Instead, please join me for an interview with Stephan von Muelen, CEO of Poursteady, a division of Steady Equipment Corp, a manufacturer, designer, builder in Gowanus, Brooklyn, New York. Stephan and I discuss onshoring of manufacturing, domestic manufacturing, supply chain issues, and—important to this AI podcast—the potential for AI to actually aid in just-in-time manufacturing using automated methods like CNC and 3D printing. Hope you enjoy. Please check out Poursteady at poursteady.com. You can also check out the AI vendor that we discuss, Intercom, and their product Finn AI.

Stephan: So, I mean... don't worry about it.

Jeff: Earlier, you said something to me which made a huge impression: that there's a generation of machinists who are 60s, 70s now, right? Who picked up CNC, who picked up maybe 3D printing, sort of in the first wave of adoption of these things.

Stephan: Maybe. Maybe not, but yeah.

Jeff: Post-manual. Post-manual machining, right?

Stephan: And manual machining in general. Yeah.

Jeff: Okay. And then there are kids who want some connection between the digital world that they grew up with and the physical world.

Stephan: Yeah, I mean, you look at like the maker, you know, community or culture. Like, it's been kickstarted—I guess pun intended, no pun intended—by... by everybody sort of trying to do it themselves. You know, DIY, like do it at home. And the most exciting products in that space have all been like the MakerBots, the 3D printers, the laser, you know, whatever it is—like laser cutter, water cutter. You know, that stuff for 15 years has been what's sort of been the... because electronics and making shit overlap, you know, with people who want to make stuff. It's both now, all the time.

Jeff: Right. So there was... it is both. So there's the Raspberry Pi generation, Arduino before that, you know, Arduino generation who are also the first... the first home 3D printing generation.

Stephan: Yeah. And... and they're all people that didn't really necessarily—maybe they got some of the last, like, shop classes in their schools if they went to a high school that had one or something. You know, like all of that education has... has been gone for since Gen X on, right?

Jeff: Right. Well, that's the other—as part of that conversation, you said, there's the... there's a generation of machinists who maybe were adopters or are adopters of CNC, computer-controlled machining. Um, they still do manual machining too, whatever it takes.

Stephan: Yeah, no, I mean, the... the industry adopted CNC machining in the '80s and '90s. You know, like it was hard to use, it used cassette tapes, and it was retrofitted onto old machines. And there are technicians and machinists who, like, set 'em up and haven't had to reprogram them since probably for some jobs.

Jeff: Yeah.

Stephan: Because they... they know how to use them and they get the job done. But then there are these kids who grew up with Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and early 3D printers, and that, but no shop class.

Jeff: Right, but no shop class. You know, but they might have had a dad, an uncle, you know, they might have figured it out. And that's... that's how I—I didn't... I was not brought up to be a machinist, you know. Like, I went to Catholic school and college and stuff. And it was like after college that I... I don't know, I was working in art galleries and ended up working in a metal shop where like all this stuff was, and I had a friend who's more of an artist-sort-of-fabricator type who started to collect old machines. And so I like got to touch a lathe.

Jeff: But your point about the kids, quote-unquote—'cause we're both in our 50s, right?

Stephan: Yeah, yeah. I think I'm older than you.

Jeff: You might be older than me. I'm rooting against you. Uh, but the quote-unquote kids want a connection to the physical world. They're not... they're not satisfied with just like purely digital and virtual. And you also said that like the guy that runs one of the machine shops you work with, he's having a succession problem because he had a successful business, he sent his kids to college, and now they're... they're bankers, right?

Stephan: Yeah. They're purely online, purely digital, not in the physical. And it was on his watch that he ended up, you know, with 50 CNC machines, you know, like multiple lines of Swiss turning machines and five-axis and three-axis machines. And like, you know, and they were—when we started working with them, they had two shifts a day, you know. They were doing 16 hours on 50 CNC machines with finishing and all the tracking and labeling and stuff for government work. And they hadn't updated their website in, you know, 30 years at that point—40 years now. Um, but yeah, it's... like time...

Jeff: Now, are they... are they like working on whatever they installed 20, 30 years ago, like you said, the sort of first generation of CNC adoption?

Stephan: Well, I mean, that whole industry sort of matured in a way, you know. Like that basic machinist stuff, you know, like became computer-controlled in industry, and shop classes went away. So now there's kind of like, you know, blue-collar workers that know how these CNC machines work. And there might be... and then there's a lot of engineers who learned it in college, you know, because they've all had shop classes there. That's where you play catch-up if you're an engineer.

Jeff: Yep.

Stephan: But, you know, if you're not an actual engineer—if you're a bullshit engineer like me—the normal path would be to like start to figure it out yourself. You know, DIY it.

Jeff: Right. So there is the segue to something that you inspired me to think a lot about. Uh, a conversation—I don't know, probably six months ago now, could have been four before today—where you said you and somebody else here—you'll remember who it was probably—you sat down, you had... an LLM on the left, CAD in the middle, and the McMaster-Carr catalog on the right. And you were... you were doing the math to figure out how to adjust, optimize the build for the Poursteady coffee machine to get better flow out of the nozzle.

Stephan: Yeah. And that was my first technical conversation with ChatGPT. Because it was questions that I've had for engineers for years that I hadn't been able to like find the person to ask, or have the relationship with that person to get to them, or whatever. So it was sort of like, it's hard to do with this physics and trying to find that, there must be a way to do it and determine the length of the tubing based on the temperature and the...

Jeff: So I haven't heard the resolution to that. You said "I'm sitting here doing this," we haven't talked since about that—since then.

Stephan: Yeah. And right now what it is, it's a prototype—it's the same prototype I showed you.

Jeff: Really?

Stephan: In an arbor press. So, a cast iron arbor press that isn't worth shit and some 3D printed molds. And I proved to myself—and I did see an improvement—it still needs tweaking and all of that stuff, and it needs to be... and it's not as long as what ChatGPT recommended. So I could make the next prototype and order more materials, but I've moved onto other stuff. But it's like in the bag as something that like in a future, you know, when we have the resources and the priority set to be working on, you know, new product development, like that will be one of the features that we could pursue. You know? Because we... yeah.

Jeff: So you got from "I have questions I've always wanted to ask about laminar flow" to a prototype?

Stephan: I actually started with... yeah. Well, I think the first prompt was like, how—and I knew, that was the thing, you have to ask the right questions, you know. And I asked, you know, how... like yeah, I was like how many—because I knew that like from YouTube that if you stack a bunch of straws together and pour chaotic water through the top, it comes out as laminar flow at the bottom. It's like a hack.

Jeff: Yeah.

Stephan: You know? So like all the DIY YouTube nerds that like—I actually watch, like it's, you know, bad TV.

Jeff: It's good TV.

Stephan: Like reminded, you know, I was like "Oh, that's laminar flow." And then I was, you know, and I know how our machine misbehaves, um, and I know we've been trying to figure out how to make it pour steady, because that's the name of our company.

Jeff: Yes.

Stephan: So, whatever. This is a little simple machine that runs in my mind for a decade. And so like, I knew enough to say... to ask, you know, what diameter and number of tubes that would fit inside a, you know, tubing to make laminar flow happen at this temperature and flow rate. Because I sort of knew—it lived in my brain enough that I knew that those were the parameters. So I was able to say like, "what the fuck does that..." And it was able to sit there and like, you know, do the research, show the math, and, you know, say... or whatever the fuck it was.

Jeff: Yeah, okay.

Stephan: Um, and... and then I was able to open up, you know, do some... use the ChatGPT also to search the internet to find a... tubing. Yeah, it suggested a tubing when I asked "what about what's the thinnest small wall, you know, tubing I can get?" I don't know if that was ChatGPT or my brain. I'd have to go back and look. But I found... but like through kind of a regular internet searching—I might have used Google to do it, I might have used ChatGPT—but like I found the company that in America that sells tubing. Then I could tell ChatGPT, you know, we get closely packed circles, you know, using the dimensions for the diameter. Then we get down to like, you can do six or nine or whatever it is that the circles that pack inside of a circle. So then suddenly it became like, you know, nerdy turn-of-the-19th-century like geometry pattern recognition, you know, stuff, which, yeah, show me a grid with information, you know, my brain starts moving back up.

Jeff: You got me thinking about the Brooklyn Bridge cables.

Stephan: Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah. So it looks like a cross-section—it's exactly, yeah—it looks like the cross-section of a cable. Right? And like, you can't do certain numbers because you don't go around the outside in a symmetrical way, you know, so you need either a center of one or a center of three to build around or...

Jeff: They light 'em up that way. They light 'em up starting at the bottom and they stacked... from... they stacked horizontal layers to get to the round result. So...

Stephan: So anyway, so I was able to have this, you know, we are like ADHD with ChatGPT and we're like off to the races.

Jeff: Right. So that got you to a prototype. The... the other...

Stephan: Yeah, I got it to a TRL of three, right?

Jeff: What's a TRL?

Stephan: Oh, technology readiness level. That's three.

Jeff: Is it zero to ten?

Stephan: No... it's like a... if a zero is like the idea, a one is like a drawing, and ten is like deployed in space. Okay? Never... like, you gotta send the space shuttle and a guy in the universe. Right? But also could be like the custom—I mean, if you take the, you know, aerospace metrics or whatever and apply it, it could also be like you have the customer has the tool in their hands. Right? You know what I mean? Like, it's fully... So the tie-back, or the... the closing of the circle with this conversation is that that access to expertise got you a whole lot further than you would have unless you knew a laminar flow engineer.

Stephan: Yeah. And I had hired somebody with fluid dynamic specialty in their background in their... in their... in their history, and he spent the better part of a year getting closer but not really solving that problem.

Jeff: Working on other problems too?

Stephan: I mean, yeah, but also like... you know, there are all kinds of engineers in the world and they all have their place. And this guy, um, you know, documented everything really well, but didn't really—wasn't really solving the problems we were trying to solve and wasn't able to... and he also wasn't managed properly. You know, lots of reasons. But, you know, there are engineers who can kind of pick their head up out of the hole and see what they're doing, and then there's other engineers that can just keep digging. And like, if you're keep digging, you know, you might get deep but it might be the wrong hole. Right? And that's a pretty big split between those personality types or those people.

Jeff: Right. So bringing this back around, the... in some ways you... could have... you were the kid who didn't have shop class, right? You are interested in and have built a... built a career, a life on... on the convergence...

Stephan: Yeah, but I was the technical director of the high school musical. And in college, I made some pretty trippy environments for a music festival. So, I knew how to like make stuff, but nobody had told me how exactly.

Jeff: You... and you've built a life making stuff.

Stephan: Yeah, and but you know, I wanted to be... like I wanted to be a painter at first and then... and then I...

Jeff: You've created something that is incredibly beautiful to me, which is a domestic electronic equipment manufacturing company, right? Design-build company. Successful, with positive profit margins.

Stephan: Yeah, I mean, some years, yes. Yeah.

Jeff: Um, but closing the loop on manufacturing, you are also looking at this—there's the sort of first generation of automated, semi-automated, um, computer-controlled manufact—machining. There's a generation of kids who are the... who are in the workforce, entering the workforce, and then there's—but they didn't have shop class, and they grew up in a service economy.

Stephan: They grew up in a service economy where they didn't—they ordered stuff, they didn't make stuff. Right? Like everything is a service.

Jeff: But they want to make stuff.

Stephan: Yeah, no, human beings want to make stuff. Amen to that.

Jeff: So... so you're looking hard around the Poursteady operation at what you can manufacture in terms of parts—basically how much vertical integration you can pull off with—so it's instead of design, specify, send out to a contract manufacturer, it's design, specify, make the part in-house, assemble into the finished product in-house.

Stephan: Um, and yeah, I mean, that's a... yeah. That's a moment in time right now. Yes. When the world changes and I change and my role changes and everything in between. But you know, what Poursteady... what Poursteady did intentionally from the beginning, like on purpose, was make stuff in America or make stuff with really short supply chains and not compromise on quality. So we have Swiss-made motor controllers and Japanese motors and... and Italian, you know, valves from commercial coffee equipment and stuff. We weren't trying to like, you know, reinvent the wheel, we just were going to make something without compromise and get the parts from where we cared and we could tap into the machine shops and sheet metal shops and stuff that we'd worked with for other projects in New York for years. Or not New York—Pittsburgh, wherever the founders had done stuff.

Jeff: Yeah.

Stephan: And my partner also at the time really liked—was an engineer's engineer and didn't want—he wanted to keep things efficient and like, you know, if he'd had his way we wouldn't have sold anything internationally. It would have been a like a couple-year project of making some nice stuff and then moving on. Um, instead we ended up kind of catching waves in different parts of the world and it went for 10 years. Right? But we intentionally made it so that like all of our suppliers were as close as possible as we could. And the exceptions we made for proximity was um, a long-term relationship. So we had some shops in California that we'd never replaced because they were good at it and we'd worked or one of my founders had co-founders had worked with them before. And then just industry standards, so we were getting motion control from Switzerland and Japan and... and you know, espresso commercial coffee equipment parts from Italy. Like, um, it all made sense. Yeah. But what's happened in the meantime is that we can't even get the metal cut and finished here anymore.

Jeff: It's getting harder and harder.

Stephan: It's getting harder and harder. Like vendors that we've had are not, you know, aren't making as good parts with the same time, and it costs more. And that was happening all by itself, and then the tariffs happened and this stupidity like, you know, inflation was experienced for multiple reasons all at the same time.

Jeff: Their inputs got more expensive because of tariffs.

Stephan: Yeah, and as a result, our margins went down and our sales were threatened in... in our markets overseas. You know, like double whammy. From both ends, yeah. And um, so all alternatives are, as far as I can tell, to like... and our... you know, our mantra for next year is to bring cost down across everything because we need to be profitable, right? Um, and yeah, our... our options for bringing prices down um, means we still need to find quality, well-finished, accurate parts for our metal. And while it's served us really well to do that stuff domestically for our careers until now, that system is just broken and the online portals to Chinese factories are mature. And the way I frame it, like either we make it ourselves like in-house, in-house, or we let the market compete and we take the best deal. Where before we were like a lifestyle business and we didn't want to have to deal with international suppliers in Asia—like I'd done that once in another job and you know, it just seemed like not a good idea for us. And then it really paid off during the pandemic when that supply chain crisis happened before all the tariffs. You know, we were able to catch a wave in the Middle East and make a bunch of machines because we had kept all of our supply chains so short and with relationships and not dependent on, you know, industry scale beyond ours. We were insulated from a lot of that stuff.

Jeff: Right. So making in-house or letting the market compete. And the...

Stephan: And we have to compete with the market. So suddenly like, is a 3D printer in-house better than a CNC machined aluminum part in... in, you know, Thailand or China or Mexico or wherever? Right? And if the CNC—if the 3D printed part can perform mechanically in the same way as this machine part, we don't need to get a $20,000 used CNC machine and keep it running or we don't have to get a $100,000 new one and hire a $100,000 machinist to run it. We can print these parts with like a little extruder and it works just as well. Then we'll do that, you know. And suddenly we're like freed up from, you know, the old laws of physics and we have a new, you know, looser laws of physics with other compromises or trades, but if it's spec'd and engineering—an engineered to spec, then or manufactured to spec, then we can do the same. Right? With... with the design-build speeded up and made more accessible for you here. Like, or when... when you...

Stephan: I mean, we've made a really complicated product. Like, so design-build is... yeah, kind of. Like, you know, we assemble everything.

Jeff: Yeah, I'm... I'm saying you design... design-manufacture part. Not design-build machine. Got it. Design and manufacture part. You design the part. Like you were show—

Stephan: I mean, we... we specify parts. Right? So we're either using—we use off-the-shelf parts or we can, and then we make, you know, the custom bits that we need.

Jeff: You showed me a 3D printed—you showed me a model for... a part that when printed out of—when printed out of... plastic...

Stephan: Filament and carbon fiber.

Jeff: Carbon fiber and whatever... will replace four pieces of...

Stephan: Five. One part can replace five.

Jeff: And those are all—those are all CNC machined aluminum bits?

Stephan: Yeah, they're simple parts that are machined. So like whether they're machined by hand or CNC, I'm sure they were CNC because they were sort of repeatable. But there's nothing about the geometry of that that makes them like—it could have been an extrusion. I mean, it could have been an extrusion, the holes could have been drilled on a manual machine or you could have had jigs made and then do it, you know, in an old-school way—or an old-school way. And we could still do that. Like I could make a drill jig with drill bushings that lay out all the holes on all of it.

Jeff: How hard is it for you not to do that? That's... that's me knowing you well, knowing that you're like, "fuck it, I'll just make it with a drill press."

Stephan: Yeah, no, I mean, and there's a drill press—there's, you know, there's three drill presses within 100 feet of me that I can go jump on right now, you know. And there's also an old Bridgeport and, you know... But like, you know, how old's Chep?

Jeff: He's ten—nine, almost. Connie?

Stephan: Seven, almost eight.

Jeff: Yeah, well 10 years ago you had the time to use the drill press, now you don't 'cause you have two kids. Um, but the... the point here is—and you showed me the... the model or the design of that of that one plastic part that replaces five metal parts—that... that modeling in CAD is something that you bootstrapped yourself to—taught yourself to be able to do.

Stephan: I mean, I was exposed to it in graduate school and then my first job required that I do it and I had shop experience where I'd used the output of those things before grad school. So by the time I sat down with SolidWorks and was paid to do it, I'd been receiving it for forever and was going to be operating the machines that I was designing the parts for. Okay? So, yeah. I mean, I... I was a professional machinist by the time I became a professional machinist. Got it. Uh, I'm running out of brainpower this afternoon.

Stephan: Yeah, we talked in the... we're so ADHD'd out that it's hard to break—keep the thread. It is. It is. But bottom line, this make it in-house or let the market compete.

Jeff: Yeah. As opposed to keep your supply chains short. Right? Because we paid a penalty, you know, in... literally in price. We've been leaving money on the table for years. Because the truth is, is like we were using domestic CNC machine shops and sheet metal shops that serve government and medical industry. You know? And we're making—we're making a commercial piece of coffee equipment, an industrial piece of equipment. It's a business-to-business sale and that was why we picked, you know, that's why we entered the coffee market is because you could make a $10,000 machine that you were competing with $10,000 machines over. It wasn't unheard of so you could do this stuff without compromise at the scale that we could manufacture them because we had some of the means of manufacture and could integrate stuff. Um, but now, you know, the price we paid for those parts or what, you know, the market asked for—but, you know, like I said, we're not Lockheed Martin and we're not even the MTA, you know. We're... we're these pissant geeks trying to make coffee equipment with really high standards. And, you know, the—what... when we've discussed this, it seemed like for you, the quality slipping, the unpredictability of the quality and also the... um, time cost of the relationship.

Stephan: The emotional labor of my employees into these, you know, into these... I'm sorry, I love all my vendors, but, you know, it's a lot of work to make like, you know, my peer group, my colleagues', you know, culture work with the aging out, you know, military machine shops of the tri-state area. Yeah, and so that's... it's a lot of work. It's easier to find an interface online or, you know, communicate. And so that—

Jeff: And you didn't—like when we've had this conversation, at no point did you say upfront "they got too expensive." What you started with was "it just got harder to get good stuff." Right?

Stephan: Yeah. Yeah. No, and their prices went up and, you know, their margins went down. Yeah. I mean, but that's inflation, you know. Like I get that. You know, like that's inflation, they're experiencing, you know, they're paying... Like if you had to pay them 20—if you had to pay them 20% more and you were still getting... I mean, we were paying them 20% more from where we started, you know. But where we started was—by the time the tariffs hit and we started to decide to like look at what where we could trim and open up the doors to like the whole world to see what we were could expect to pay for stuff—you know, yeah, our prices definitely went up 20, 30% since we started. Um, but um, we started at three to five times the price of what we could be getting in Asia then. What you could have back then. So like even now with the tariffs and them doubling the price and all that kind of stuff, it still should come in roughly half, you know, at the volumes we're doing of what we're paying now. To go overseas. Yeah. You know, so—and we have golden articles. You know, we have perfect samples. Because we've been selling products that the guys that made those samples can't seem to do reliably anymore. You know what I mean? Like, okay. And the communication problem with Asian manufacturers used to be, and to some extent probably still is, you gotta fly there, you gotta like, you know, show that you care. But if you have the right relationship or the right network and you're using the right software to communicate between parties and you have a sample you can share, then suddenly, you know, we're all looking at the same things and there's enough trust built in the network that you can get your parts. This is not me arguing—arguing for or against letting the market compete. Are there—are there domestic suppliers, domestic machinists, domestic suppliers that could—instead of like it's half as much by going overseas, it's um, you know, three-quarters from where you are now and you've got a—it's not the supply chain isn't, you know, four blocks that way, it's four states that way. I mean, it doesn't matter. That doesn't matter now. You know, because it's... if, you know, the hard part in getting things made is communicating your intent to the person who's doing—making the part or, you know, swinging the hammer or applying the brush to the wall. You know, whatever it is that you're doing. That's the hard part. If you're an artist or an engineer, you have a vision that requires specialization and you find those specialists to do that part of the labor. Um, and that communication is breaking down now because the conversation is sort of one-sided. The other conversation—the other side of the conversation—is aging out. Or whatever, or I'm not having the right conversations with the right people, but, you know, our supply chain is getting old and starting to show its age. Full stop. You know? And there is not a generation of small businesses in the tri-state area to fill those shoes. Like in the Bay Area and in Boston, there's more. You know, and you have design firms and engineering firms and medical device companies and robotics companies and those things kind of exist. I think they're bucking the same change over time at a different phase. Maybe, maybe not, maybe now things will change. I don't know. You know? But New York is like old school. You know, as far as manufacturing goes. We're a finance company or state or entertainment or agriculture or whatever, but we're not a manufacturing powerhouse. And, um, yeah. So the communication with the Gumbas that are still around gets harder and harder as they get older and my employees get younger. You know? It's like it's just there's just a divide—a cultural, generational, technological, communication divide. Also a div—a divide in sense of urgency. Right? Yeah, no, those guys have been—I mean, you know, they did a great job. They made it to like retirement, you know. Their succession planning isn't great, but you know, they—they're living a version of the American Dream. You know, like our sheet metal guy just moved to Portugal or something, and you know, whatever. The other guy sent his kids to expensive schools and Goldman Sachs and he's piecing out, but I think he's frustrated 'cause he'd like to be machining, but he's just, you know, he's tired. He's 90. He's 90. Yeah, 90, 90, 90. I so—I'm gonna try and like tie a bow on it, which is always—which is always interesting. Uh, the in-house manufacturing with automated machinery because now it's—it's capital, not labor, to produce the part.

Stephan: Right. But also the capital has come down by an order of magnitude for some things. The printer, right. Yeah, but not necessarily the CNC machine. Not necessarily the CNC machine, but like, you know, whatever. I have a very smart employee who's a recent engineering grad who graduated, you know, last year, and he had some shop experience for sure. Um, but in two days he was able to like get the CNC router next door up and running and created a little like user guide for the other members of the studio just by being smart and relatively unafraid and using ChatGPT for every step. Right. You're helping me—you're helping me put a bow on it, which is that the accessibility, the democratization, the sort of transfer of expertise through LLMs, right, can... has the potential to do what you just said, which is take somebody... have somebody on your team teach people to fish pretty quickly on... on a simple—on a relatively straightforward machining task.

Stephan: Yeah. I mean, yeah. Like I want everybody to be makers. You know? Like I want the people assembling the machines and designing the machines to like want to make stuff like I do. And that's... that's a bias ultimately, you know, and to do that responsibly is the challenge. Right. Um, and to be profitable as a small business trying to grow um, is another challenge. You know, so it's a pretty constrained problem. The best ones are. Right. Yeah. But a constrained problem is actually not bad in a... constrained problems are awesome. Because then you and especially with an LLM you can like, you know, talk about the constraints and get some expertise tailored for your... needs. And get... and get to the point where you've got a laminar flow with a TLC—TCL—technology readiness TRL—TRL of three. Yeah, whatever. I not to be quoted, you know, I to—I'll look up what the TRL—well tell you what the TRL is later, we'll find the chart that gives us the definition. But yes.

Jeff: All right. Well, we've had a—I really appreciate this conversation. Um, I... I'm always searching, looking, trying to find a path for the technological changes that we're undergoing right now to work out better for people than for faceless corporations. Yeah. And you and this—and Poursteady, I... I always find inspirational in that regard. And I spent the morning with Derek seeing how your small business is able to scale um, because of Derek's incredibly like thoughtful, creative, and ultimately like highly accountable use of Intercom and Finn AI to... to help customers get a better—get a better resolution to the support problems that they have, right? Without, you know, without breaking the bank here, right? You guys—like talk about a constrained problem, there was no way your margins were going to support a call center. It just couldn't. Right. So what do you do? Right? And so in that—in that regard, like five years ago, three years ago, you were between a rock and a hard place when it came to... to scaling the business because there's an inherent—you build products that aren't throwaway, they are—

Stephan: No, and we used that—we made lemonade out of that. Because what we were able to do was let everybody from the company experience, you know, what our customers were experiencing. So kind of throughout the culture, like everybody sort of knew what was important and what needed to get fixed and what was not important. And it was because, you know, we were less than 10 people in a room in a way and the support ship was so painful that you kind of had to play hot potato with it. Um, and everybody that accepted that potato did an amazing job. So like we had the dataset because we were communicating, you know, on digital tools and so when Derek—you had emails, you had Google Sheets, you had—and Derek was the last one to hold the potato and he needed to put it down so he... he like used all of the information we had. He is such a joy to... to learn from with all of this, right? Like it's... it's really remarkable. I think the... and now to some extent you have that as a success ongoing, always learning, iterating, improving, optimizing. And you're going to... you are trying to see how much of the rest of your company can thrive, grow more specifically in... in how you... how you make the stuff you make. Yeah. All right. We'll wrap up with that.

Stephan: Yeah. Thank you, Jeff.

Jeff: Thank you so much. Not long after we recorded that interview, Stephan voluntarily stepped down as CEO and promoted his CFO or head of the business side of things, Travis, to CEO, which was a very mature step for a CEO of a company that is completely invested in what he's doing so much so that he saw that he wasn't the best fit for the job. He's now director of product and engineering.

(Outro Song)

Ones and zeros, vectors and scalars, what do you see in the machine? I gave you my heart, my warmth, my Snapchat. You chose a robot now I'm alone.

Jeff: You Teach the Machines is hosted and produced by me, Jeff Pennington, and co-hosted by my daughter MJ. Look for my upcoming book, also called You Teach the Machines, in the summer of 2025. Please take a minute to review and subscribe to You Teach the Machines wherever fine podcasts are downloaded. Copyright 2025. Any and all use of the audio recording of You Teach the Machines for training or other contribution to artificial intelligence models or their application is expressly forbidden without the permission of the creator. And we'd love to give you permission, so long as you come on the show.