Intro

Aaron Slodov — CEO of Atomic Industries, a company he co-founded back in 2019 and has raised over $20 million from leading investors like Toyota Ventures, Impatient Ventures, Narya Capital, 8090 Industries, and others!

Atomic is on a mission to exascale the American manufacturing sector, starting with making tool and die-making orders of magnitude easier and faster through advanced automation.

Through the lens of Aaron’s underlying techno-industrialist philosophy, we’ll unpack what exascaling our industrial base even means, confronting the post-industrial myth and the rich history of manufacturing in Ohio, the opportunity for technology and the implications of automation in building physical things, why more young smart ambitious people should consider careers in manufacturing and heavy industry relative to software-as-a-service companies, the pursuit of Monozukuri, Atomic Industries role to play in all of this, and a whole lot more.

(You can find a link to Aaron’s techno-industrialist manifesto, published in February of 2024 in the show-notes to this episode)

Prior to Atomic, Aaron studied physics in college, pursued a PhD in power systems engineering where he focused on electrical grid infrastructure and energy storage systems, had a stint at Google as an Operations Engineer, and then went on in 2014 to co-found Remesh, an AI-market-research startup, which has gone on to raise over $40mm in funding. 

This was one of my favorite conversations on the podcast so far — Aaron’s passion for applying technology to solve big-picture social and scientific problems and his ambition to build companies to that end is inspiring!

(As a disclaimer to this episode, I am personally a small investor in Atomic Industries)

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LINKS:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/abslodov/
https://twitter.com/aphysicist
https://www.atomic.industries/
https://www.piratewires.com/p/techno-industrialist-manifesto
https://twitter.com/newindustrials

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Past guests include Justin Bibb (Mayor of Cleveland), Pat Conway (Great Lakes Brewing), Steve Potash (OverDrive), Umberto P. Fedeli (The Fedeli Group), Lila Mills (Signal Cleveland), Stewart Kohl (The Riverside Company), Mitch Kroll (Findaway — Acquired by Spotify), and many more.

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