The Dynamo Show: a Dynamo Ventures Podcast

In this episode, host Madelyn O’Farrell sits down with Rakesh Kumar, University of Illinois professor and semiconductor expert, to explore the technology and economics behind the global chip industry. Kumar explains how the rise of AI is driving demand for chips while high factory costs, long construction timelines, and uncertainty about future demand make it difficult for supply to keep pace. They discuss the risks those dynamics could create for AI companies and the broader economy, what gives Nvidia its competitive advantage beyond CUDA, and whether the CHIPS Act and U.S. export controls are achieving their goals. The conversation also examines how flexible designs, general-purpose chips, and chiplets could make supply chains more resilient, and looks ahead to possible advances in optical communication and three-dimensional chip architecture.

Highlights from their conversation include:

• Rakesh Kumar’s Path Into Semiconductors (0:46)
• Why Chips Matter to the Public and Policymakers (2:02)
• Rising Chip Costs and the Economic Risks of the AI Boom (6:51)
• Nvidia’s Competitive Moat Beyond CUDA (13:19)
• The CHIPS Act: Spending, Research, and Results (15:09)
• U.S. Export Controls and China’s Chip Industry (19:19)
• Why Semiconductor Supply Chains Are Fragile (22:32)
• Building Resilience With General-Purpose Chips and Chiplets (25:58)
• The Future of Computing: GPUs, Photons, and 3D Chips (27:58)
• Final Thoughts and Takeaways (32:00)

Dynamo Ventures is a venture firm backing founders upgrading the physical economy. As intelligence moves into critical infrastructure and technology collides with physics, industry is entering a new era of transformation - the industrial renaissance.

Born from the dirt and grit of supply chains and shaped by operations, not spreadsheets, Dynamo focuses on the complex realities of building in the real world. We invest in companies transforming infrastructure, manufacturing, logistics, transportation, and the systems that power global commerce.

Dynamo works closely with founders who combine ambition with a bias to action, bringing a builder mindset to venture capital through deep operational insight, systematic pressure-testing and hands-on partnership.

Our purpose is simple: to back the relentless shaping the industrial renaissance. Learn more at www.dynamo.vc.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Madelyn O'Farrell talks with Tom Delahunty, VP of Operations for Asset Lifecycle Management at Iron Mountain, about what happens to IT hardware after its first life. Tom makes the case that decommissioned equipment is a secondary supply chain rather than a waste problem, pointing to 88% year-over-year growth in Q2 as AI and data center buildouts push assets out of service. The conversation covers how a hyperscale decommission works, from data sanitization and secure chain of custody through remarketing that cascades from full systems down to components, and how GPU-dense infrastructure and liquid cooling raise the bar on testing capability. The takeaway for listeners: plan for end of use early, expect used GPUs to become a normal part of procurement, and watch for more R&D investment in reuse and critical mineral recovery as the industry matures toward something closer to the used car market.

Highlights from their conversation include:

• Introduction to Tom Delahunty and Iron Mountain (0:29)
• What Iron Mountain Is and Who It Serves (1:43)
• Record Revenue Growth and Scaling Operations (4:23)
• Data Sanitization, Mobile Shred Units and Chain of Custody (7:00)
• How Reuse Rates Vary Across Decommissioning Projects (8:58)
• Why GPUs Should Follow the Same Longevity Curve as CPUs (11:20)
• Generating Demand Before Assets Arrive (14:40)
• Bottlenecks and Wishes for the Secondary Market (17:21)
• Design for End of Use Improving Among OEMs (18:50)
• Whether the ITAD Industry Can Handle Coming Volume (20:59)
• The Case for R&D Investment in ITAD (23:56)
• Planning Future Compute Needs Around Used Supply (28:40)
• Final Thoughts and Episode Wrap-Up (30:55)

Dynamo Ventures is a venture firm backing founders upgrading the physical economy. As intelligence moves into critical infrastructure and technology collides with physics, industry is entering a new era of transformation - the industrial renaissance.

Born from the dirt and grit of supply chains and shaped by operations, not spreadsheets, Dynamo focuses on the complex realities of building in the real world. We invest in companies transforming infrastructure, manufacturing, logistics, transportation, and the systems that power global commerce.

Dynamo works closely with founders who combine ambition with a bias to action, bringing a builder mindset to venture capital through deep operational insight, systematic pressure-testing and hands-on partnership.

Our purpose is simple: to back the relentless shaping the industrial renaissance. Learn more at www.dynamo.vc 

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Halton Group executive Shuresh Maran joins Madelyn O’Farrell to explore how Halton designs mission-critical HVAC and ventilation systems for the most demanding environments, including cruise ships, naval vessels, nuclear facilities, offshore oil and gas, offshore wind, and modern data centers. Shuresh explains how Halton’s core strengths—high-integrity engineering, rigorous testing, and long-life reliability—carry across sectors, and why their equipment must function flawlessly in rare but life-or-equipment-saving moments. He outlines the company’s growth strategy to double revenue by 2030, driven by rebounding cruise demand, long-cycle nuclear buildouts (including small modular reactors), and booming offshore wind. The conversation also covers the shift to unmanned offshore platforms, the importance of cybersecurity and supply chain resilience in defense and energy, the rising expectations of data center owners around longevity and climate adaptation, and Halton’s cautious approach to IoT and remote monitoring in security-sensitive environments. A key takeaway is that as energy and digital infrastructure scales, getting the physical built environment “right” from day one—by partnering with experienced suppliers—dramatically reduces operational risk and cost over a project’s lifecycle.

Highlights from their conversation include:

• Shuresh’s Background and Global Career Journey (0:51)
• What Halton Group Does and Its Four Divisions (1:47)
• Why Ventilation Is Mission Critical in Extreme Environments (3:00)
• Operating Differently Inside Halton for Demanding Sectors (4:47)
• Growth Strategy and Doubling Revenue by 2030 (6:06)
• Offshore Wind vs Oil and Gas: What Transfers and What’s New (7:18)
• Naval and Defense Demand, Long Project Cycles, and Cybersecurity (9:14)
• Data Centers, Reliability, and Climate Adaptation Pressures (11:41)
• Supply Chain, Standardization, and Reducing Bottlenecks (14:06)
• IoT, Remote Monitoring, and Cybersecurity Constraints (16:09)
• Future of Mission Critical Built Environments and Final Takeaways (18:44)

Dynamo Ventures is a venture firm backing founders upgrading the physical economy. As intelligence moves into critical infrastructure and technology collides with physics, industry is entering a new era of transformation - the industrial renaissance.

Born from the dirt and grit of supply chains and shaped by operations, not spreadsheets, Dynamo focuses on the complex realities of building in the real world. We invest in companies transforming infrastructure, manufacturing, logistics, transportation, and the systems that power global commerce.

Dynamo works closely with founders who combine ambition with a bias to action, bringing a builder mindset to venture capital through deep operational insight, systematic pressure-testing and hands-on partnership.

Our purpose is simple: to back the relentless shaping the industrial renaissance. Learn more at www.dynamo.vc.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Rachel Permut draws on decades of experience in distributed energy and virtual power plants to explain how demand-side flexibility is becoming a critical grid resource. She breaks down what DERs and VPPs are, why customer enrollment and revenue mechanics matter more than the “shiny” technology, and how fragmented U.S. markets create both complexity and opportunity, with DR payments now reaching up to $100/kW in some regions. Rachel dives into the evolving role of data centers, including flexible AI and batch workloads, water-based cooling trade-offs, and emerging models where data centers pay others on their circuit to reduce load. She outlines the full demand response lifecycle from contract and enrollment through dispatch, baseline measurement, and payment, highlighting where programs typically fail and how better communication, software, and market design can unlock more value. Ultimately, she argues that DERs and VPPs are not a silver bullet but are fast, cost-effective tools that must play a much larger role alongside new generation to address growing grid stress.

Highlights from their conversation include:

• Meet Rachel Permut And Her Energy Industry Background (0:29)
• Why Rachel Focused On Demand-Side Energy And Flexible Load (1:28)
• What DERs Are And How Virtual Power Plants Work (3:23)
• How Much Flexible Load Is Worth Across Different US Markets (7:08)
• Role Of Aggregators And Market Selection For Industrial Operators (9:37)
• Data Centers As Flexible Load And Deferrable Compute Workloads (11:06)
• Where Demand Response Programs Fail and Opportunities For Startups (16:44)
• Measurement, Verification, and Baselines For Load Curtailment (20:25)
• Why DERs and VPPs Should Be A Bigger Part Of Grid Solutions (22:40)
• Policy, Market Design, and Local Capacity Value (24:16)
• ERCOT, PJM, and How Markets Are Evolving For Flexibility (26:35)
• How Industrial Operators Should Approach Aggregators (27:52)
• Closing Thoughts Episode Wrap-Up (28:38)

Dynamo Ventures is a venture firm backing founders upgrading the physical economy. As intelligence moves into critical infrastructure and technology collides with physics, industry is entering a new era of transformation - the industrial renaissance.

Born from the dirt and grit of supply chains and shaped by operations, not spreadsheets, Dynamo focuses on the complex realities of building in the real world. We invest in companies transforming infrastructure, manufacturing, logistics, transportation, and the systems that power global commerce.

Dynamo works closely with founders who combine ambition with a bias to action, bringing a builder mindset to venture capital through deep operational insight, systematic pressure-testing and hands-on partnership.

Our purpose is simple: to back the relentless shaping the industrial renaissance. Learn more at www.dynamo.vc.
 

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Highlights from their conversation include:

Dynamo Ventures is a venture firm backing founders upgrading the physical economy. As intelligence moves into critical infrastructure and technology collides with physics, industry is entering a new era of transformation - the industrial renaissance.

Born from the dirt and grit of supply chains and shaped by operations, not spreadsheets, Dynamo focuses on the complex realities of building in the real world. We invest in companies transforming infrastructure, manufacturing, logistics, transportation, and the systems that power global commerce.

Dynamo works closely with founders who combine ambition with a bias to action, bringing a builder mindset to venture capital through deep operational insight, systematic pressure-testing and hands-on partnership.

Our purpose is simple: to back the relentless shaping the industrial renaissance. Learn more at www.dynamo.vc.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From time to time, we’ll re-air a previous episode of the show that our newer audience may have missed. In this episode, founder Phoebe Tan shares how her background at Amazon and Singapore Airlines led her to build Taelor, a “Netflix for outfits” circular fashion platform focused on busy professional men. She explains Taelor’s two-sided model, where subscribers rent curated outfits and partner brands monetize inventory and gain rich feedback to improve product design. The discussion dives into how circular systems transform traditional supply chains, the AI and data challenges of working with 100+ brands and non-standard sizing, and how reverse logistics and operations are built for scale from day one. Phoebe also highlights the power of unbiased customer feedback, why access-over-ownership and personalization will accelerate circular fashion over the next 5–10 years, and how sharing models can extend far beyond apparel into other categories of underutilized goods.

Highlights from their conversation include:

Dynamo Ventures is a venture firm backing founders upgrading the physical economy. As intelligence moves into critical infrastructure and technology collides with physics, industry is entering a new era of transformation - the industrial renaissance.

Born from the dirt and grit of supply chains and shaped by operations, not spreadsheets, Dynamo focuses on the complex realities of building in the real world. We invest in companies transforming infrastructure, manufacturing, logistics, transportation, and the systems that power global commerce.

Dynamo works closely with founders who combine ambition with a bias to action, bringing a builder mindset to venture capital through deep operational insight, systematic pressure-testing and hands-on partnership.

Our purpose is simple: to back the relentless shaping the industrial renaissance. Learn more at www.dynamo.vc

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Madelyn O’Farrell interviews Eesha Pathak, Senior Director of Product Management at Crusoe, about her unconventional career from software engineering and branding to leading enterprise AI at Google and now building AI-first infrastructure. They discuss Crusoe’s vertically integrated, energy-first approach to cloud and data centers, capturing abundant energy (like stranded gas and renewables) and turning “electrons into intelligence” via GPUs and a custom cloud stack. Eesha explains how Crusoe’s gigawatt-scale campuses and modular Spark edge deployments complement each other to deliver both scale and low-latency inference, dives into the Managed AI platform with its model marketplace, self-serve and tailored deployments, fine-tuning, and upcoming reinforcement learning, and highlights why judgment and holistic thinking are critical in product and engineering. She also unpacks Crusoe’s close partnership with NVIDIA, its role in enabling physical AI and robotics with low-latency compute, a flexible data and partnership strategy, and her long-term vision of Crusoe becoming the most helpful company for people building AI, so customers can focus on their products instead of wrestling with infrastructure.

Dynamo Ventures is a venture firm backing founders upgrading the physical economy. As intelligence moves into critical infrastructure and technology collides with physics, industry is entering a new era of transformation - the industrial renaissance.

Born from the dirt and grit of supply chains and shaped by operations, not spreadsheets, Dynamo focuses on the complex realities of building in the real world. We invest in companies transforming infrastructure, manufacturing, logistics, transportation, and the systems that power global commerce.

Dynamo works closely with founders who combine ambition with a bias to action, bringing a builder mindset to venture capital through deep operational insight, systematic pressure-testing and hands-on partnership.

Our purpose is simple: to back the relentless shaping the industrial renaissance. Learn more at www.dynamo.vc.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Turner Construction’s Drew Kerr, Vice President and General Manager of xPL Offsite, explains how xPL is redefining construction through offsite manufacturing and deep supply chain integration, starting with data centers and expanding into sectors like semiconductors, healthcare, and industrial facilities. He contrasts traditional, fragmented construction with xPL’s unified model that centralizes manufacturing, supply chain, and field installation to handle unprecedented demand and labor shortages. Using a rapid 30MW data center deployment as a case study, Drew shows how close coordination, prefabrication, and early procurement decisions enabled timelines that would be impossible under conventional methods. He also discusses the limits of true “manufacturing” in construction today, xPL’s use of automation and robotics, and why he believes modularization will become the dominant way we build in the next century.

Highlights from their conversation include:

Dynamo Ventures is a venture firm backing founders upgrading the physical economy. As intelligence moves into critical infrastructure and technology collides with physics, industry is entering a new era of transformation - the industrial renaissance.

Born from the dirt and grit of supply chains and shaped by operations, not spreadsheets, Dynamo focuses on the complex realities of building in the real world. We invest in companies transforming infrastructure, manufacturing, logistics, transportation, and the systems that power global commerce.

Dynamo works closely with founders who combine ambition with a bias to action, bringing a builder mindset to venture capital through deep operational insight, systematic pressure-testing and hands-on partnership.

Our purpose is simple: to back the relentless shaping the industrial renaissance. Learn more at www.dynamo.vc

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Madelyn O’Farrell and Santosh Sankar unpack the data center boom and the idea of compute as the next utility powering an “industrial renaissance.” They explore how AI models are commoditizing, shifting value to the application layer, and draw historical parallels to industrialists like Rockefeller and Carnegie in terms of capital intensity, vertical integration, and long-lived infrastructure. The discussion dives into the biggest bottleneck (access to energy and grid capacity) along with underwhelming GPU utilization, the need for better observability and efficiency, and trends like prefab “constructuring” in data center construction. They also highlight labor and skills constraints in specialty construction, tools like Record Lens to digitize field operations, and the potential for a Foxconn-style contract manufacturer for electrical equipment. The episode closes on what excites them about founders in this space: deep problem understanding, real industrial pain points, and the ambition to build in the physical economy rather than chasing AI hype.

Highlights from their conversation include:

Dynamo Ventures is a venture firm backing founders upgrading the physical economy. As intelligence moves into critical infrastructure and technology collides with physics, industry is entering a new era of transformation - the industrial renaissance.

Born from the dirt and grit of supply chains and shaped by operations, not spreadsheets, Dynamo focuses on the complex realities of building in the real world. We invest in companies transforming infrastructure, manufacturing, logistics, transportation, and the systems that power global commerce.

Dynamo works closely with founders who combine ambition with a bias to action, bringing a builder mindset to venture capital through deep operational insight, systematic pressure-testing and hands-on partnership.

Our purpose is simple: to back the relentless shaping the industrial renaissance. Learn more at www.dynamo.vc

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Manna founder Bobby Healy explains how his company designs and operates autonomous electric delivery drones, achieving over 300,000 flights and 97% availability in harsh Irish weather by running operations like a low-cost airline focused on high utilization and efficiency. He discusses why a recent U.S. policy shift and forthcoming Part 108 regulations prompted Manna to go all-in on America, starting with a citywide drone delivery mesh in Tulsa, Oklahoma, chosen for its suburban density, aerospace ecosystem, and pro-drone stance. Bobby outlines why he sees players like Wing, Zipline, and Amazon more as fellow builders in a massive, non–winner-take-all market, and why partnering with aggregators such as DoorDash and Uber Eats is the most efficient go-to-market path. He also covers Manna’s recent $50 million fundraise to scale manufacturing, operations, and R&D, and shares his 10-year vision in which drone delivery becomes the dominant, far cheaper, and faster last-mile solution for tens of millions of U.S. suburban homes.

Highlights from their conversation include:

Dynamo Ventures is a venture firm backing founders upgrading the physical economy. As intelligence moves into critical infrastructure and technology collides with physics, industry is entering a new era of transformation - the industrial renaissance.

Born from the dirt and grit of supply chains and shaped by operations, not spreadsheets, Dynamo focuses on the complex realities of building in the real world. We invest in companies transforming infrastructure, manufacturing, logistics, transportation, and the systems that power global commerce.

Dynamo works closely with founders who combine ambition with a bias to action, bringing a builder mindset to venture capital through deep operational insight, systematic pressure-testing and hands-on partnership.

Our purpose is simple: to back the relentless shaping the industrial renaissance. Learn more at www.dynamo.vc.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.