Prediction Not checkable as stated
Susan: Physical industries will produce full-stack giants like Tesla and SpaceX
“My vision is we're going to see a lot of Teslas and SpaceX and NVIDIA is being built across those physical industries like energy, supply chain, defense, et cetera.”
Disclosure
Bright Machines' Flex partnership struggled after CEO Mike McNamara departed
“And it works amazing in the first three years, and then Mike left. It got much harder with the new leadership, nothing about those people, but it's more like, I did not have the same trust I had with Mike, but yes, you a thousand percent right. It was pure tru…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lior Susan: Back-end electronics assembly remains 98% human-based
“Now you take the PCBs and now you need to take the plastics piece, the PCBs, the magnets, the lighting. It's called the backend, the assembly and the sub-assembly. That's 98% human based today.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Susan predicts iPhone and GPU manufacturing will be fundamentally reinvented
“In my lifetime, people are going to design iPhones and GPUs in a different way, and they're going to manufacture them in a different way in the way that has been done in the last 50 years.”
Insight
Susan: Large enterprises will not let two-person startups touch mass production
“If you are going to start with two guys in a presentation, none of the largest companies in the world is going to let you touch their mass production product. So actually, if you want to create the transformation, you almost need to have a certain scale out of…”
Disclosure
Bright Machines agreed to un-scoped revenue commitments across Flex factories
“We almost agreed that we will partner an X amount of dollars, and then during the year we will identify through an SOW, what will be the specific needs of each of their factories. They have 200 factories around the world.”
Insight
Lior Susan: Robotic assembly generates critical manufacturing data humans cannot provide
“We don't collect data when humans, humans build products. When you start using robots, you collect a lot of data that maybe you never had around how much force you're putting and how that's potentially hurt the PCB and it will fail down the road.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Susan: Onshoring manufacturers cannot match China's labor volume due to attrition
“Now they are struggling to find those people. There is incredibly high attrition. They want to onshore manufacturing, so they cannot have the same amount of people they had in China.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Susan: Bright Machines robots surpassed humans in throughput and assembly quality
“So we started in the first couple of years just matching. Can we do the same unit per hours as a human? Can we do it in the same quality as a human? And then we start, oh, we actually can do more per hour than a human. Oh, we can actually do in a higher qualit…”
Disclosure
Susan admits Bright Machines is almost always late on project timelines
“We Rarely meet the timeline. And we almost always late to what we commit or will do.”
Assertion Supported
Susan pulled the plug on Bright Machines' SPAC at the last minute
“We almost SPAC the company about two and a half years ago. And kind of in the last moment, I decided that we're far away from being a public company ready, and I pulled the plug and said no to a very large financing, and I needed to do some significant riffs.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Musk told Susan that Tesla had weeks of cash left multiple times
“Elon told me a couple of, they had four or five times a Tesla With weeks in cash, and he was like begging to the states of California to give him a loan, and without that loan, there was no Tesla today.”
Insight
Susan: Physical tech startups cannot rely on 'build it and they will come'
“This industry, especially physical industries, if you just build it, that it's not mean that they're going to come. You need to constantly iterate on the product, and we are still constantly iterating on the product, and you cannot do it without having a few v…”
Disclosure
Susan: Bright Machines was carved out of Flex in 2017
“I left in beginning of 2015 to start Eclipse, and then in 2017 came back to Mike and the Flex boards and say, hey, I want to carve out that team to a new company that I will create it called Bright Machines, and that was the birth of Bright Machines.”
Disclosure
Susan: Eclipse Ventures incubates two to four companies annually
“From 2017 till today, we build about three companies every year. And give, and it depends on the, I would say two to four.”
Assertion Supported
Susan: Bright Machines secured tens of millions in annual revenue from Flex
“We actually got, I think we did a really good job understanding that we needs Flex to provide us a couple of a low tens of millions of dollars in revenue every year for the next couple of years so we can just focus on them rather than go out and trying to sell…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Susan: Front-end electronics manufacturing is already fully automated today
“The front end of electronics manufacturing is pretty much fully automated already.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Susan slashed Bright Machines' headcount from 700 to roughly 200 employees
“At the peak, we were 700 people, and now we are about 200.”
Assertion Supported
Susan: Eclipse Ventures raised $125M for its debut fund
“I did not know how hard this To raise a hundred and twenty five million dollar to your first fund fund.”
Assertion Contradicted
Flex's Zhuhai manufacturing campus in China employed 80,000 people
“I flew to Juhai one of the largest facilities of Flex. In China, there's about 80,000 people on that campus, just to give you a sense.”
Assertion Supported
Flex's $30 billion scale made Bright Machines' startup equity financially immaterial
“And remember, it's a thirty billion dollar revenue company. They don't care what the equity is going to be worse. It's anyhow below the line for them.”
Assertion Partly supported
Susan: Flextronics employs about 300,000 people globally in electronics manufacturing
“And yeah, if the people that don't know who is Flextronics, it's like the American version of Foxconn. So about 300,000 people around the world doing electronics manufacturing.”
