Theo Saville on customer adoption
From #1 Theo Saville of Cloud NC on Transforming Manufacturing (Full Episode) · · EntrepreneurFirst
“It was very difficult to convince factories to talk to us because we had this totally risky idea — finding factories who would talk to us and then talk to investors was very very difficult; an awful lot of cold calls before we found people who would take a chance on us.”
On , Theo Saville, Cofounder at CloudNC, spoke about customer adoption during #1 Theo Saville of Cloud NC on Transforming Manufacturing (Full Episode) on EntrepreneurFirst.
About Theo Saville
Theo Saville, cofounder of Cloud NC, discussed the company's work on automating CNC milling machines in a 2018 episode of the podcast Scaling Ambition. He described CNC milling machines as responsible for manufacturing over a hundred billion dollars worth of components annually, including items such as iPhone bodies and jet engine turbine blades. Saville stated that the machines "should be automatic but they are not today," and that the process currently requires a highly skilled machinist to manually program the cutting of metal blocks, which he said makes single-unit production "more than 10 times as expensive as it should be." He explained that Cloud NC is building software that automates this task by using "a vast artificially intelligent mathematical optimization" to find the fastest way to make a part from a 3D file, reducing the time from hours to minutes. Saville noted that the technical challenge was greater than initially anticipated, saying that he and his co-founder Chris thought it would take two working years but instead required "a team of 14 software engineers two and a half years" and was not yet complete. He also described early difficulties in convincing factories to engage with the company, citing the perceived riskiness of the idea and the need for "an awful lot of cold calls" to find partners willing to take a chance. Saville emphasized the importance of hiring and of founders automating themselves out of tasks, and he characterized himself as unsuited for corporate employment, stating that he cannot "sit still" or "do what I'm told" and is motivated by solving problems.