The Exchanges

Q Carta's fund administration platform supports over 9000 funds and SPVs, Representing nearly one hundred eighty five billion dollars in assets under management, with tools designed to enhance the strategic impact of fund CFOs. For more information visit Carta.com slash sorcery. That's C-A-R-T-A dot com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. Production lines are fun. You are helping re-industrialize America. I want to talk about you as a critical power player. So what is Dirac?

A Dirac is a company driving America towards context-aware production planning. It's a new, new one-liner I'm going with, uh, lately. We at Dirac have built, uh, actually, let me, I can give a little bit of background about myself just for a little context. So, um, my background's originally in electrical engineering and robotics. Spent a little bit of time over at Northrop Grumman, you know, did a little bit of electrical engineering work, some mechanical engineering work, a little bit of technician work, and just got to see how unfortunately archaic all of the infrastructure was in the manufacturing side of things. I want to just do something about it, right? I was starting to get the feeling that the West was forgetting how to build great things, and I want to make sure that didn't happen. And so, uh, Dirac, uh, at, at our company, we're building what we call the first automated work instruction platform. So we'll take a CAD file or a three D model of an assembly as an input, figure out the assembly sequence automatically, and then automatically generate 80, 90% of the assembly instructions for that system that we're trying to assemble. Um, you can sort of liken it to, you ever build IKEA furniture? You know, a little paper instruction book tells you how to build the thing. Imagine that, but instead of being like paper, which is what we actually have today in like most manufac…

AI assessment note: “we're building what we call the first automated work instruction platform.”

Q So does this make it easier for workers, more efficient? Like what, how, like what are the positive externalities of this?

A I'm sure it's a lot. Um, instead of, instead of taking like weeks or months to do your production planning, you can do a couple minutes, couple hours, couple days, tops, making the work instruction. And then what ends up happening is, you know, we like to say like a picture's worth a thousand words, but an animation's worth a million. Instead of a like literal Ikea, you know, how awful it is to follow Ikea assembly instructions. Imagine somebody's like, all right, build this missile. With this picture, guys on the shop floor are looking at that and they're like, wow, like, I don't know how the hell this thing. So tons of questions, things are built wrong. Things are built, uh, really poorly. Unfortunately, in many cases, scrap rates are super high because of that in many different cases. And so what we found is not only have like as our software made it fun and like actually enjoyable to do like to make work instructions, but it makes lives a lot better for the guys on the shop floor. And so operators like technicians who are actually doing the assembly on the shop floor, Have this like interactive, three D animated guide to like, you know, tell them how to make a thing. And we found that it also radically reduces like the, the high skill labor requirements needed to like bring new folks into your manufacturing facility. A lot, a lot of teams are reliant very, very heavily on t…

AI assessment note: “makes lives a lot better for the guys on the shop floor”

Q You have been traveling around the U S knocking on doors, going directly to the manufacturing facilities and factories. What is the state of, I don't know, the market? What is like the on the ground read? Like how are these facilities actually running?

A Um, people cannot get product out of the door fast enough. Um, it's sort of this, there's two problems that we see, maybe three that there's, For some types of systems, they aren't getting the demand that they used to. And so we're seeing like Second, third, fourth order effects that result from offshoring where like a tier two supplier in Long Island, for example, that used to sell to like a tier one supplier that was based in Connecticut. Um, that Connecticut based facility was like offshore to China. And now like China has much, you know, much cheaper labor. They have their own supplier base. And so it becomes a lot more difficult for that tier two supplier to sell. So we're finding that's the case. And then a lot of the times when you have like really complex, um, Very sophisticated and interesting, like sub products or like different sub assemblies that you might like want to sell. You, they might've been super useful and, you know, solve a really, really important problem. 20 years ago as like a product, but because the people that you're selling to have built their own supply chain somewhere else, um, this like net new, interesting novel product, like doesn't really have demand anymore. And so you're facing like, There's not as much demand and then the supply when they do actually want to like build that thing because somebody orders it or something like that, um, their …

AI assessment note: “there's two problems that we see, maybe three that there's”

Q Talking about passion and pride for America, we are at Reindustrialize. What excites you most about this year at Reindustrialize?

A So there are a lot of, so last year's Reindustrialize was really great in that we got a bunch of different companies to come together and try it out. Like, you know, this is, there are manufacturing conferences all over the place. These are not like new things that happen, but there hasn't been so much of a Like a Silicon Valley tech orientation towards them. And they haven't been positioned with such a level of aggression. Like the, the mission of re-industrialize is we cannot let the American industrial base degrade anymore. Um, you go to the, you know, your average manufacturing conference. We were at automate this year. Um, really cool conference. A lot of really cool companies also here in Detroit is actually down the block. It was about a month or two ago. But the, you know, the vibe there, the, the environment there is not sort of, um, there, there is an urgency. And re-industrialize is about urgency. It's about addressing a really, really dangerous trend that we're all witnessing happen to the American industrial base, and that's its degradation. And, uh, if that degradation continues, it will eventually result in collapse, and with that, our way of life. So that is the sentiment. That is the, Patriotism and fervor and energy that a lot of people are bringing to the conference, this year especially.

AI assessment note: “Patriotism and fervor and energy that a lot of people are bringing to the conference”