Jul 26, 2024 · 50m · sourcery
Text-to-CAD: AI Revolutionizing Hardware Design with Jordan Noone of Zoo · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of Sourcery, host Molly O'Shea interviews Jordan Noone, Executive Chairman of Zoo and former co-founder of Relativity Space, to explore how Zoo's GPU-optimized computational geometry engine and AI-driven Text-to-CAD tools are modernizing hardware engineering.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Molly holds 11.9% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Molly as informed peer 3.1 Guest teaching 5.5 Guest disagreement 0.9 Molly pushing back 0.4
speaking balance: gold is Molly, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 27:20 Dismissal of shallow CAD tools and dashboard companies
Jordan forcefully dismisses legacy software incumbents and modern 'dashboard startups', pointing out that there has not been an engineering software IPO since 1986 and that browser ports fail to solve real workflows.
Hardest push from Molly ▶ 1:21 Reframing the dense technical elevator pitchMolly interrupts Jordan's dense initial pitch to demand context, explicitly asking him to step back and clarify the real-world scale and target customer before going deeper into tech jargon.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 10:05 Explaining the loss of computational geometry skillsJordan educates the host on how modern software talent completely shifted toward ML, causing core 1980s algorithmic skills in computational geometry to become an almost extinct discipline.
Molly holds their own ▶ 2:25 Prompting aerospace development cycle comparisonsMolly demonstrates industry grasp by contextualizing Jordan's 60-year disruption claim and framing the discussion around specific aerospace engineering cycles and interface bottlenecks.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Molly as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Molly pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jordan Noone on the Text-to-CAD Launch | 3 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Molly introduces Jordan Noone and gently resets the conversation after a heavy technical pitch, asking him to step back and contextualize the market size. Jordan explains the trillion-dollar hardware development ecosystem still stuck using 1980s mouse-driven paradigms. | |
| Traditional CAD vs. Modern Computation | 4 | 6 | 2 | 1 | Molly prompts Jordan to explain the traditional aerospace CAD workflow. Jordan details how geometric design has remained essentially unchanged since Autodesk's AutoCAD in the 1980s, explaining the combinatorial explosion of manual interface communication. | |
| Addressing the Hardware-Software Gap | 3 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Molly asks which specific niche of hardware development Zoo targets. Jordan educates on the asymmetry between modern automated software CI/CD pipelines and manual, bottlenecked hardware engineering workflows. | |
| Zoo's Product Suite Overview | 3 | 7 | 1 | 0 | Jordan gives a deep technical explanation of Zoo's GPU-accelerated computational geometry engine built in CUDA from scratch, describing computational geometry as a lost art abandoned since the 1980s. | |
| Sponsor Announcement: Archer Aviation | 1 | 4 | 0 | 0 | The segment begins with a sponsor read by Molly for Archer Aviation, followed by Jordan describing Zoo's v1.0 unification of Text-to-CAD and direct modeling tools to solve prompt-engineering limits. | |
| Developer Platform and Open-Source Dogfooding | 4 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Molly poses two competing questions regarding onboarding non-technical mechanical engineers versus providing open-source APIs. Jordan explains their dual strategy of dogfooding open tools while protecting and monetizing the backend geometry engine API. | |
| The Origins and Leadership of Zoo | 3 | 6 | 2 | 0 | Jordan shares his backstory from USC Rocket Propulsion Lab to SpaceX, Relativity Space, and Embedded Ventures, explaining how CEO Jess Frazelle's frustrations at Oxide Computer led to the inception of Zoo. | |
| Technical Team Breakdown and ML Training | 3 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Molly inquires about the team's composition. Jordan breaks down their specialized engineering groups across computational geometry, ML, infrastructure, and virtual dataset generation via parallel cloud computation. | |
| Hardware Lifecycle and CNC Toolpathing | 4 | 7 | 1 | 0 | Molly asks why a software company requires an in-house factory and data center. Jordan explains their expansion downstream into CNC toolpath generation and design-for-manufacturability, necessitating in-house physical hardware verification. | |
| Returning to Relativity's Original Headquarters | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Molly notes Zoo's location in Inglewood and asks about their venture funding history. Jordan explains operating lean on $6M, highlighting their lead investor Venrex and angel backing from former GitHub CEOs Nat Friedman and Tom Preston-Werner. | |
| Future Product Roadmap and Milestones | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Molly asks for the roadmap over the next 6-12 months. Jordan recaps the upcoming launch allowing manual editing of Text-to-CAD outputs and beta testing of end-to-end manufacturing workflows before Molly closes the show. |
Statements from this episode (19)
Noone: Hardware development labor and software represent a $1 trillion market
“And so for us, we view it as about a trillion dollar sized market. That's both the labor and the software license costs for actually running those hardware development programs.”
Noone: Hardware design software has not been fundamentally updated since the 1980s
“Then it last was updated in the eighties. And it's still a industry fully driven by engineers with a mouse clicking on a screen.”
Noone: Manual CAD interfaces scale engineering communication complexity quadratically
“It's a very, again, labor-driven, very slow process that ends up compounding, you know, the number of times or number of parts you have interfacing squared. That's the number of interfaces you have. That's the number of engineers you have having kind of cross …”
Jordan Noone: Zoo sees highest adoption from combined hardware-software teams
“The people who we tend to see the most adoption from are people that see software development and hardware development side by side.”
Noone: Zoo built the first GPU-optimized cloud CAD geometry engine using CUDA
“So our view was we would start with this geometry engine. That's the world's first GPU optimized cloud-based API accessible CAD engine. We built that from scratch. So that's CUDA, which is kind of GPU level machine language CUDA level implementation of those c…”
Noone: Hardware engineers historically lacked code-based CAD automation tools
“And that code allows scripting, automation, scaling, things like equations and database lookups and logic, things that sound obvious to anyone who's done software before. Of course, you'd think that software could write a loop that changes the geometry of a fe…”
Zoo to merge Text-to-CAD directly into CAD modeling app in V1.0
“Right now we're doing a push for what we call version one point O of both of those products. Those will actually merge together that rather than generating text to CAD and having a part, you can now do that in the modeling app and then make downstream changes.”
Noone: The inability to edit outputs is generative AI's biggest bottleneck
“You get 95% of the way there, and there's one feature in your image that you need different, and there's nothing you can do about it. Then, other than try to slightly change your prompt, slightly perfect your prompt, it's a huge bottleneck in the generative AI…”
Noone: Zoo monetizes the majority of its traffic via API
“And the reason we started open sourcing those tools is one that those tools still drive traffic through our API. That's where we monetize a majority of our incoming traffic and is that they still create traffic on top of us.”
Noone was the youngest person to receive FAA rocket launch clearance
“I was the first person in the world, the youngest person in the world to get FAA clearance to fly a rocket to space.”
Noone: Relativity Space has 1,200 employees and raised $1.2B
“Relativity is now a 1200 person company, raised about 1.2 billion in private capital it's headquartered down in Long Beach here in Los Angeles.”
Noone: There has not been an engineering software IPO since 1986
“There hasn't been an engineering software IPO since 1986. It's been 40 years of the same major incumbents.”
Noone: Zoo users generated 13,000 CAD files on Text-to-CAD launch day
“The day we launched text-to-CAD in December of last year, we had 13,000 CAD files generated the first day of launching the platform.”
Noone: Zoo is building its first local GPU data center
“We're starting to build out our first local data center. And for our own GPUs, both for the geometric rendering side and the ML training side, we use those on both sides of the stack there.”
Noone: CNC toolpath generation is the costliest part of machine shop prototyping
“Generating a CNC toolpath is the expensive part of running a machine shop, especially something doing cutting edge hardware where you're prototyping, you're making one off runs. Most of that cost is going into engineering labor to generate the instructions for…”
Noone: Programmatic Design for Manufacturability checks do not exist without human review
“There is no way to programmatically do a DFM check. You know, for a part, there's some software that kind of does it. You're still going to be sending it to your machinist. You're going to send it to the manufacturing engineer.”
Noone: Zoo will launch text-to-CNC toolpath generation within 18 months
“If it's text straight to the CNC machine, then that will be a capability that will come out in the next year, year and a half from us as a company is you can have your text prompt, send something to a CNC machine because you have that toolpath generated in pro…”