Jon Clark

Welcome Dana Wensberg, Founding Engineer at Paperless Parts on this episode of 🔥 The Lantern 🔥 Paperless Parts is a quoting and estimating platform for job shops (people who make parts out of metal & plastic) all over the country and Dana is a software engineer who has been with the company for almost 8 years 🔍 What’s going on inside Paperless Parts this fall? 🔎 Dana has done a bunch of different things across the org over his time at the startup. Now he’s working on algorithm and machine learning development extracting technical data from files in their database. When you need a part made, there is a 3D model that describes the geometry and a 2D PDF document that describes the different manufacturing items. His team is helping to interpret that information to help their customers quote more accurately. Paperless Parts sits on a large dataset of over 5M unique files that represent actual parts that exist in actual products made and distributed across the world. A powerful moat that opens up a lot of opportunities! 🤔 What has Dana learned from building Paperless Parts? 🤔 #1: Don’t force it in both your career growth & development. Dana has done engineering & product management and enjoyed all of it. But when he was in Product he felt like he had to exert more force to see results and found that Engineering was a better fit for his career. #2: In the early days of Paperless Parts on the GTM side, they were tempted to retrofit their tech to business cases that weren’t perfect. They ended up chasing their tail with longer onboardings and higher churn. When they invested more time in better understanding their ICP, things went faster. 🤝 How can we help? 🤝 Paperless Parts is hiring across GTM, Engineering & Product. If you think manufacturing is cool, check them out! The Lantern is brought to you by MGMT Boston

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So excited to share my next adventure leading Product & MRV at Charm Industrial I remember when Peter Reinhardt took me on a factory tour in the early days of Charm, I thought he’d lost his mind. We were staring at these pyrolyzers next to these huge bales of corn stover and he was telling me about the problem of the rocks 🪨 getting stuck in the conveyor in Kansas which was causing the machine to jam. "Seems hard" I thought. But then I read Speed & Scale...the 2019 IPCC report...experienced the worsening "wildfire days" locked indoors...had two amazing kids who are growing up on this planet...built CDR.fyi with some amazing internet friends...and learned that the path to net zero & a sustainable economy now *requires* carbon removal And – unfortunately for 🌍 – no one is removing carbon at scale just yet Fast forward to today and Charm’s operating across the US, removing thousands of tonnes of CO2 per year from the atmosphere. The plan from here? Scale Charm by a factor of ~10000x, faster than almost any other technology in human history, while creating new clean jobs across the US, mitigating catastrophic wildfires and plugging some of the millions of abandoned oil wells across the country 😅 The scale of the ambition is only matched by the thoughtfulness of the Charm team. I’m so grateful to be able to work alongside some of the most brilliant technical minds (Grace Connors Brian Jamieson Jacob Ferrall-Wolf Saumya Jain) combined with most fearless ops (Katie Flannery Holligan Dillon Card Robert Bronson Marie Antoinette Matschuck), GTM (Sebastian Smith & Harris Cohn), policy & community builders (Nora Cohen Brown & Alison Kelman) and finance & carbon experts (Tim Thomson Max Lavine Thomas Leese). Total dream team. Thanks to the many friends & climate advisors who’ve helped me get here: Alexander Rink, Robert Höglund, Kohzy Koh, Christopher Nixon, Calvin French-Owen, Ilya Volodarsky, Lauren Reeder, Jeff Eiden, Filippo Varini, Tank Chen, Ryan Orbuch, Kim-Mai Cutler, Peter Minor, Joanna Klitzke, Claire G. Kiely, Quentin Servais Laval, TITO JANKOWSKI - AIRMINER, Dominic Lüdin, Peter Olivier, Sebastian Manhart, Eamon Jubbawy and so many more 🙏 Gigatons or Bust! 🚀 https://lnkd.in/g6_k468U

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After a number of #VC and #startup events over the years, I arrived at this conclusion. Worded another way: investors don't care about startups or good ideas or even #MVPs. They want a finished product, with some sales traction. Henry Ford understood this concept quite well and discussed it in his book "My Life and Work." At the turn of the 20th century Ford was facing tough financial challenges, and banks were approaching him, urging him to borrow funds to stay afloat. He reasoned that the time when banks are asking you to borrow, is probably the worst time to borrow. And when they least want to approach you, is probably the best time to borrow. For homebuyers this is obvious: good credit = lower interest rate. So the same reasoning goes for approaching #investors. It's when you most desperately need their funds that they are reluctant to give them to you. So find another way. Grit your way through. Then, when you do not so desperately need their money for survival, it's then at that time you will likely hear from them... and so many others. Stick with it #founders #entrepreneurs

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"WHY I'M COMING TO REINDUSTRIALIZE" Said differently, how I realized manufacturing is a multiverse 🤯 A compilation: * * * "Highly relevant as my office implements the National Defense Industrial Strategy we published earlier this year" Julie Loiland Deputy Director, Industry Engagement, OSD(A&S) * * * "Seems like a great gathering of industrial founders, investors, etc. Let's exascale the industrial sector!" Adam Gluck CEO/Founder, Copia Automation * * * "Meet US Series A/B space companies consuming additive manufacturing" Kevin Compher Vice President, In-Q-Tel * * * "Our Venture fund is focused on digital transformation in legacy industries. Reindustrialize is focused on these key technologies segments." Mason A. Partner, Industrious Ventures * * * "I’m interested in the future" Joshua Steinman 🇺🇸 CEO/Founder, Galvanick * * * "Hear cutting edge perspectives and proposed solutions to the greatest challenges facing a broad host of industrial challenges facing our defense industrial base" Edward Miskowski Innovation, Capability and Modernization (ICAM) * * * "To assess the potential for industrial projects and to network for strategic partnerships" Benjamin Kohlmann Investor, Cubit Capital * * * "Bits to atoms is the next frontier of industrial growth" Van Espahbodi Partner, Generational Partners * * * "Support movement to scale advanced manufacturing in the United States to advance national competitiveness" Liza Tobin Senior Director for Economy, SCSP * * * "To support our portfolio companies and strengthen relationship with people who are passionate about next-gen manufacturing" Kei Onishi CEO & Managing Director, Yamaha Motor Ventures * * * "We are very interested in supporting startups and nontraditional defense companies as they explore pathways to scale" Ariel Kayne Commercial Engagement Analyst, Army Applications Laboratory * * * "Been reinventing the tool and die business for years" Austin Schmidt President, Additive Engineering Solutions * * * "To learn more about Investing in the Future of AI Infrastructure for the Industrials sector" JD Weinstein Global Director, VC Practice, Oracle * * * "Foster economic vibrancy in Michigan" Daniel Feder, CFA Sr. Managing Director, U of M Endowment * * * "I want to meet founders and potential co-investors that are interested in collaborating with Newlab." Alex Prather Director of Ventures, @Newlab * * * "To deepen relationships with cutting-edge technologists shaping the future of the U.S. industrial base and to network with key leaders from technology, industry, and government sectors. Ultimately, towards making impactful investments fostering collaborations that support the American agenda" Andrew Schoen Partner, NEA * * * "To engage across sectors with others in the advanced manufacturing space" Brandon Bodor Global BD - Defense, Parker Hannifin Corporation #REINDUSTRIALIZE

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Alex Schultz highlights a crucial point: if you’re releasing code every two weeks while your competitor does so every week, after two months they’ve learned ten times more about their product than you have. Consider a company developing a new app. The product team conducts market research and defines specifications before passing them to engineering. Marketing waits until the product is nearly complete before crafting campaigns, often involving external agencies that are even more disconnected. This sequential, siloed process can take months, hindering the company’s ability to adapt to market changes swiftly. As a result, companies may act on incorrect data, rely on superficial vanity metrics like page views, or suffer from such internal fragmentation that they miss out on powerful growth opportunities because they can’t connect the dots. Many companies continue to struggle with this traditional model instead of embracing cross-functional teams that combine diverse talents and skills. By focusing intensely on continuously testing numerous tweaks to a product, its features, user messaging, and the methods of user acquisition, retention, and revenue generation, companies can unlock every bit of growth potential. This approach involves using qualitative research and quantitative data analysis to gain deep insights into user behavior and preferences, combined with rapid idea generation and testing, and applying rigorous metrics to evaluate and act on the results. Inspired by Giuseppe Cristiano and his recommendations 💡 #HackingGrowth

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Hey y’all. I’ve launched and run a distributed, thimble-sized software company, and we’ve created a government so small you can fit it in your pocket. Our customers are mostly indigenous and separatist movements, including this one in the Pacific Northwest (see the link).Domestically our target market is the large percentage of Americans that live in unincorporated communities and in small towns, most of whom have not felt the beneficial halo of a government for generations, if ever. Internationally we focus on transitional and developing economies with a large “shadow economy,” which is not the same as a black market. A “shadow economy” is that which would be technically legal if people were declaring the income to the tax authorities, and our value proposition is incentivizing people to formalize this shadow economy, which helps them maintain a state of communal autonomy, vis a vis criminal enterprise and black market which tends to seek a safe haven within shadow economies during times of hardship and political upheaval. Our technology is “private label,” and our customers publish the app within their communities without the necessity to reveal that we are behind the scenes, anonymously maintaining the platform. The app and architecture itself has the capacity to function almost invisible to mass surveillance, making it attractive to those seeking autonomy within the malignant halo of oppressive governments. The app is what’s called a progressive web application (or a “PWA”), which is an architecture first introduced by Twitter in 2017, enabling apps to be distributed outside the stores without the necessity of a device being jailbroken. The app handles ordinary currency, but is technically a web3 app, so if and when a community is ready, we can help them transition to the use of a complementary currency which is introduced as a “buy local first“ program. Outside this endeavor I volunteer my experience within a variety of open-source projects, most of them related to privacy and security, putting into service my decades of hard/earned professional experience in the domain of product development in Fortune 1000 and large privately-held corporations in the information security and anti-fraud space.

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Always be asking: Do our team members have extreme clarity? Or will our stock soon be 30% off? 🗞 Following weeks of headlines about autonomous driving and executive compensation Tesla is again making news with more sweeping layoffs. Above all of these distractions I see a most pressing concern: Its astonishing how quickly Tesla went from having a crystal clear mission and strategy to having neither. For a growing number employees, investors, and customers Tesla is now adrift. S&P 500 is up 6% YTD. TSLA is down 26% YTD. This change in sentiment happened within just a couple quarters and it could happen to anyone who takes their eyes off the ball. The lesson here is to always and constantly be asking: Do our team members know the mission we are on, the strategy to achieve it, and our top priorities? Do they have extreme clarity? 🙏 Give your employees the remarkable gift of getting to YES. #strategy #execution #transformation #okrs #outcomes #outcomesobsessed #extremeclarity #collaboration #productvity

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This is the hidden cost of growing. Your internal tools get bigger, more cumbersome, and more mission critical. In my experience, pricing and packaging evolution incurs the most internal tool debt of all. This graph is an example of how simple changes require robust homegrown systems. Every engineer hour spent on an internal tool is an hour not spent on your own product. Even worse, internal tools are usually hard to use, slow, and expensive to extend - forcing your business users to work around issues, do things manually, and bug your engineers. In retrospect, I wish I had understood this cost when building products at in the past. In the moment, it feels easier to build a light internal tool vs. finding and implementing robust third party tooling. But in reality, that upfront speed comes at tremendous cost - before you know it, adding a new pricing tier takes months and the business is constrained. #saas #b2b #pricing #packaging #internaltools

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When Tarun and I started BOULT in 2017, we didn’t have it all figured out—just a shared vision and the drive to make it happen. The early days were all hands-on deck: from manufacturing to sales, we did it all ourselves, immersing deeply in every step of the process. Fast forward to today—seven years, a bootstrapped journey, and over 700 crores in revenue. It’s been both challenging and incredibly rewarding, and the journey has taught us some invaluable lessons: • No dream is too big or too small. It’s all about how you’re willing to shape it and make it big. • Funding isn’t the only path to growth. Knowing when, where, and how to invest smartly can drive sustainable progress. • Industry knowledge is key. Deep understanding of your market enables you to create real impact and stay ahead. • Stay involved at every level. As founders, no one knows the vision better than you. Mold your team and build a culture that reflects it. Remember, no task is too big or small. The hustle, the resilience, and the will to do it right—that’s what defines the journey. Here’s to the next chapter! #BoultJourney #Entrepreneurship #GrowthMindset #Boult #Bootstrapped

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This week I rode in a Waymo for the first time and it immediately made me think of the parallels between autonomous vehicles and smart home technology. Both are about taking complex and inefficient systems, removing friction, and creating a seamless experience for the user. With Waymo there’s no driver to guide the car yet everything feels intuitive and effortless. In smart home tech it’s the same goal: to give people solutions that simplify their lives—whether it’s automating temperature control, streamlining access, energy efficiency or customization. What excites me most is how these technologies are evolving to not just meet expectations but exceed them. The common thread is efficiency and time—freeing people to focus on the things that matter most. It’s amazing to see how these innovations are redefining industries and how much potential there is ahead. Smart tech isn’t just about convenience—it’s about creating a better way to live.

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Has anyone else used an Opportunity Canvas to drive full business segment alignment prior to launching a new product line? We recently started experimenting with the concept as a cross-functional team here at Defense Unicorns. We are trying to use it to specifically align on - Problem: customer, pain points, current work arounds - Business Case: reach, impact, confidence and urgency vs other priorities - Solution: viability, first iterations, differentiation in the market - Launch: What we will measure, messaging, delivery method, terms, pricing As we scale, we are trying to leverage more and more lean processes and hoping this will be one that helps! Carly Charbonnet Cody Gentry Drew Belk 🦄 Victoria Wyler Joshua Oates Adam Martelon Barron Stone

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A bit more about the work that I do.

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Let's assume we drive 1000 miles a month. Cheapest EV car: Nissan Leaf @ $30,000 MSRP Monthly payment with 10% down ($3k) and a 7-year loan: about $400 Gets about 3.5 m/kWh. @ .12 $/kwH = $.0342 per mile. Fuel: $34.20 + Loan: $400 = $434.20 /mo Cheapest Gas car: Nissan Versa @ $16000 MSRP Monthly payment with (the same $3k down) and a 7-year loan: about $200 Gets about 35 mpg @ $5/gal = 0.1428 per mile Fuel: $142.80 + Loan: $200: = $342.80 /mo This doesn't include the cost of installing a sub-panel in your home, and differences in insurance (which EVs are higher). Also, EV batteries need to be replaced somewhere between 10-15 years. I'm all about electric vehicles (and definitely want one), but saying they are cheaper comes from a very privileged place, and still isn't true.

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Hope you’re all well! I typically don’t share much publicly about @AptDeco. Most know me as a heads down kind of guy. But today I felt compelled to share some important and exciting developments. We launched a community investment round for AptDeco and I'm excited to share that we've raised over $3.5M from our customers, supporters and institutional investors. The overwhelming response from our community is truly humbling. Nothing is more validating than customers choosing to invest given their belief in the AptDeco team and our mission. Given this enthusiasm, our track record, and our plans for the future, I felt it was time to share this with all of you as well. When we started AptDeco, we set out to build a marketplace to make buying and selling furniture easy. But here’s what most people don’t know—under the hood, AptDeco is so much more than that. There’s a powerful tech engine driving everything we do, and that’s the real magic behind our success. With over $84M in furniture sold, partners like West Elm, Pottery Barn, Article, and many others + reaching profitability, we couldn’t be more excited about the years ahead. We’ve built a platform that has outgrown and outlasted our competitors - All who were much better funded. Now we no longer have competition. We’re the last man standing. Based on our current business trends, immediate plans, and a $58B market ripe for the taking, 2025 is poised to be AptDeco’s breakout year. With that we’re providing access to invest alongside the AptDeco community and our institutional investors. If you’re interested or just want to catch up feel free to message me (It would be great to hear from you :) or you can learn more about our progress and investing here:

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New swag alert 🧢 Here’s the story behind our logo: 1️⃣ M stands for Machina, derived from the Greek word for “machine.” 2️⃣ The design shows two robots teaming up to shape metal. 3️⃣ Spot the infinity sign? It represents limitless processes in manufacturing with our platform!

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I'm often asked about the difference between full-time and fractional product work. Here's one of the things I always tell folks -- fractional is all about impact, impact, impact 🔥 This means that the ability to develop context quickly, ramp up (and get educated) around new problem spaces & industries and sniff out potential challenges for a product and team are crucial...and also what makes the role so damn fun and dynamic. Side-note: This is not to say this isn’t the case with full-time work. The best full-time folks certainly adopt this mindset. But I know this to be *particularly* the case with fractional work and what you should expect when working with a stellar fractional professional.

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OK, OK, I know - I'm a marketer so it's in my best interest to collapse into the fainting chair at the idea of a company 86'ing its whole marketing team. So here's a different take. It's not that marketing, per se, is somehow a magical art without which a company must inevitably shrivel and die. Rather, it's that most, if not all, people can only think about things from one perspective at a time. So if you're asking me to be a salesman I'm thinking about how to close THIS deal THIS quarter, because that's where my incentives are - it's unreasonably to ask me to think about whether it might be strategically a better move to skip this deal...but if my job was marketing I'd be more open to the strategic skip and likely flippant about the importance of its closing this quarter. Most of us, if we're honest, don't fully understand the scope and complexity of each other's roles. But understanding that a person with a different perspective, and different set of incentives, can offer a view that you just can't generate on your own right now is tremendously valuable. Elon - you may be a genius, but you're going to miss having someone see things from another angle and helping you not to make easy-for-everyone-else-to-see missteps ;) https://lnkd.in/ghMXF8ec

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Couple people reached out about this GeekWire article yesterday by Taylor Soper covering supply chain tech in Seattle, asking more about it. I really believe Seattle is a great spot for the following reasons: 1. Modern supply chains are built from the ground up to serve customers. While Amazon helped cement this, others deserve credit for their commitment to customer focus. Many of those companies are in Seattle (Nordstrom etc). I really believe that every supply chain will fail to modernize if it doesn't reorient towards its respective customer at the center. The 90s era operating models of push-based cost management and misaligned incentives will prevent true modernization. Because Seattle has had so many companies with this at their cultural core, a lot of the supply chain tech talent here is committed to this attitude. 2. Technology, in particular cloud based software engineering, and supply chain operations are now so intimately intertwined, that you can't have an operator who isn't technical (or have someone who is technical but doesn't understand operations) and still expect to modernize. Seattle is also a technology epicenter, with Microsoft/Amazon and dozens of excellent public and private companies shedding supreme technical talent. It has allowed a higher hit rate of leading technologists to infiltrate logistics tech. 3. Similar to above, I believe most supply chain problems are probabilistic in nature. There is little certainty in supply chains. This means data is the root most important thing to modern supply chains, but also that true data science with real data scientists powering real ML and AI models is critical to successful supply chains. Data science talent is all over the place here in Seattle. 4. Lastly, hard to put a finger on this one, but there is something interesting about the intersection of the profiles of startups (high risk based profiles) and supply chains (low risk based profiles). Startups and startup culture embraces change. You have to in order to be successful. Seattle is definitely a top startup ecosystem in the country, so a lot of people here are comfortable pushing boundaries. Meanwhile, operations and supply chains are historically risk averse, and for good reason. Physical atoms are involved. It's the heartbeat of organizations. Most tech is 90s era on prem stuff. It's really hard to change. I think there is something compelling about each side counter balancing each other for the best ideas for innovation coming out of it. When I look at the startups on Taylor's list, it's a lot of ideas are targeting the highest value and most fertile problems of supply chains. I think the talent here is focused on meaningful change that industries can absorb, versus too risky of ideas that will never be adopted or too small of ideas that will never make an impact. https://lnkd.in/gm4bikHb

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🚨 New Schematic feature! I think this one is pretty magical. See what your customers see. When I change pricing, packaging, or my product's purchasing experience, the first things I want to do are: - Confirm the change has happened - Make sure my customers' experience is as expected Now you can with Schematic's preview feature. See how your customer's portal looks from their POV - with their plan, usage, limits, overrides, etc. Make changes with confidence, no need to impersonate or set up test environments.

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