We design circuit boards, which are the heart of every modern electronic products. This is what Diode is trying to do. Electronics was not a solved problem. Apple has clearly solved electronics at scale for production, but our prototyping like cycles and the speed at which we could iterate was a fraction of what I was used to in Shenzhen. I will not trust somebody that tells me, "Oh, China can do it because the labor is cheap." That's not true anymore. They are incredible at automating things. We have to like replicate that type of excellency here in the US. When Amazon started making AWS available to a ton of companies, building became incredibly more democratized. This has not happened in the hardware world for many reasons, and I think that we need AWS for electronics. On AWS, you don't own the server, but you do own all the infrastructure. We want to be that for the printed circuit board industry in the United States. If you can bring the speed at which software companies move to the hardware world, in my opinion, we'll see a hardware renaissance. What we want to achieve as a company is to actually put beautiful copper in the hands of our customers in the form of circuit boards. Around the 2000s, the West outsourced a critical layer of the electronic stack to Asia. Printed circuit boards. These copper and fiberglass planes the size of postage cards may not attract the same attention as silicon, but they are essential to create any kind of electronics product. From a phone to a drone, to a humanoid robot. Davide Nastagi is trying to bring that layer back to America. He's the co-founder and CEO of Diode, a Brooklyn-based startup using AI to design and manufacture circuit boards in the United States. The company's ultimate ambition to build the West's answer to Foxconn, optimized for the AI era. While there's a long way to go before Diode approaches that Taiwanese giant scale, they're off to a strong start. Since its founding just 2 years ago, Diode has landed Physical Intelligence and Seronic as customers and partnered with Anthropic to help its Claude models become better electrical engineers. In today's episode, Davide and I discuss the 3-week YC pivot that defined Diode, what Shenzhen actually does better than Silicon Valley, and what it means to build the AWS for hardware. I'm Mario and this is The Generalist. This episode is brought to you by dot.tech domains. I spend a lot of time speaking with founders and builders who are building the next generation of technology companies. For all of them, finding a compelling and distinctive company identity is essential to breaking through the noise. That starts with a great name and a great domain. That's exactly the thinking behind dot.tech domains. 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So, every insight, every answer, every recommendation is grounded in verified knowledge, not outdated information or hallucinations. When your teams and your AIs share one trusted foundation, everything moves faster with fewer redos, fewer blind spots, and more confidence in every decision. Because in the age of AI, truth isn't just power, it's protection. See what Guru is doing for thousands of companies like Spotify, DHL, and Stripe at getguru.com. That's getguru.com. Davide, uh it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Uh you're building a really fascinating company, I think. One of the the companies that I'm sure people will be hearing more about over the next few years. And the reason I was so excited to talk to you is I think you're unblocking a really fascinating bottleneck in the sort of current uh AI ecosystem and and sort of broader electronics ecosystem. So, anyway, that's a a long way of saying great to have you here and excited to go deep on on you and Diago. It's a pleasure being here. Thank you for having me. I'd love to start with uh the way that you describe yourself, which I think your GitHub calls yourself a a copper merchant, which is a a great way of of phrasing what you do. Why is that that the way that you you think about your work? I am first and foremost an engineer, but building a company has taught me in a very humbling way that the merchant part of selling copper is incredibly important and probably the most correlated with my success. And what we want to achieve as a company is to actually put beautiful copper in the hands of our customers in the form of circuit boards. And this is what I get to do every day by coming to work, designing boards, uh delivering them to customers, and making sure they actually make their way through the product. So, in some ways we are shuffling copper from one place to another. I love that. Uh and for for folks that are watching the video version, they can see what your work every day looks like, which is, you know, you're in a sort of cavernous, exciting-looking factory, I imagine, in Brooklyn. That's right. Straight in Brooklyn. We actually have views of Manhattan. There's it's a bit too bright, but a wonderful place to work. Well, let's talk a little bit more about uh you know, the selling copper. In sort of the the simplest level for folks that that maybe aren't familiar with with you or your space, what does Diode do and and why does it matter? I think every company has effectively three tiers of description. Like one is what we actually do. And what we do is we design circuit boards, which are the heart of every modern electronic products. And we manufacture them and ship them to our customers. In this way, we are a very easy business to understand. This is something that's been done for like since the 1970s really. Like since the early days of Apple manufacturing. We design, manufacture, and ship. And our goal is to deliver circuit boards that work. And we will do everything in our power to do it. The the second layer description of what Diode does is we are doing this in the United States. And the reason why we are so focused on designing and manufacturing in the US is that I I have had the opportunity to live in Southeast Asia and absolutely appreciated the craft and the efficiency with which that happened. And we think that there is a very like important reason why we have to like replicate that type of excellency here in the US. So we work with a lot of like domestic customers and European customers to design and manufacture these circuit boards in local factories. And the third layer is the reason why we do this and the reason why it's important is that if you can bring the speed at which software companies move to the hardware world, we in my opinion will see a hardware renaissance, which is something that I really um interested in like seeing in the world. So this is what Diode is trying to do. And there's a lot of things that we do like to make this happen. Like we use large language models to design the board removing like a strong bottleneck. We use new newer manufacturing techniques that take care of the data. I'm happy to talk into details, but at the very core level we design and manufacture circuit boards for our customers. I love that. And and hopefully we'll go through all those three levels and you know, more besides. Just to put even a finer point on that that sort of third layer. If Diot sort of succeeds to your wildest ambitions to the fullest extent, how does the world look different in your view? What do you hope is is different? >> The best way that I have been describing like what our success path looks like is when Amazon started making AWS available to a ton of companies, we effectively got rid of the tragedy of the commons of everybody having to spin up their own server and building became incredibly more democratized. This has not happened in the hardware world for many reasons, and I think that we need AWS for electronics. Like manufacturing layer that every single hardware company can use feeling ownership. Like in on AWS you don't own the server, but you do own all the infrastructure. There is somebody responsible for doing that. We want to be that for the printed circuit board industry in the United States. You mentioned that you had a experience to live in Southeast Asia and also, you know, other parts of the world. You know, the the Davide Maggi clearly is a an Italian name and I I know that from studying you. Where where did you grow up? >> I grew up in a fairly small town between Lake Como and Milan in the northern part of Italy. What's the small town out of curiosity? It's called Meda. Mhm. Okay. My grandmother lives in Fino Mornasco. So, not too Oh, no way. Yeah. Oh, that's actually very close. That's wild. But it was a like wonderful place to grow up. A lot of beauty, a lot of aesthetics, surprisingly a lot of like small manufacturing, um but not a ton of science. Like I I I think that the moonshot projects have I've always associated to the US. Um and I I came here for high school uh in fact in Minnesota. How did that happen? My grandfather was a like a traveled the world like he lived in Peru like building infrastructure projects when he was younger and he basically told me look like sounds like you're interested in scientific progress. Uh if I were you I would basically pack it up and leave for the US. And so during high school the like Italian high school give you like a small scholarship opportunity that you can take and do one year abroad and I decided okay I'm going to try and do everything that I can to actually go to the US. I I didn't specifically pick Minnesota but I'm I'm actually kind of glad I did. It's been uh a wonderful way of seeing like a parts of the US I would probably otherwise not have seen. I I spent the rest of my time in the US in either San Francisco or New York which are very peculiar cities. Yes. It sounds like maybe you were the sort of kid that was, you know, building electronics of their own or taking them apart as uh at a young age. Is that sort of how you got started and interested in this world? So the other thing that Italy gave to the world which I'm very very proud of is Arduino. A large part of my formative year was spent messing around with like small Arduino boards. There's uh the concept of an electronic fair is still alive and well in Italy. Like you can still go to Alba which is actually very close to Finomornasco. Uh and like uh buy components. So there's going to be like resellers. Because the northern Italian small manufacturing industry is still alive and kicking you you have all these like small electronic manufacturers. And so I bought my first Arduino there and it was like an incredible like thrill to be able to build things that didn't exist before. Uh and and this was apparent. I think it was kind of the only person that I knew that was interested in this kind of stuff. Um but my friends were definitely interested in the things I could build with it, which was even more exciting for me. I'm always interested in, you know, uh, how often it feels like hyper ambitious people, founders, often have a an experience early on where they go to another culture, uh, and maybe that, you know, opens their horizons in some way, maybe it scales their ambition in some sense. For you, going to Minnesota, like what functionally, what did that sort of how did that change you? So, I've always I've been very interested in the like academic pursuit, like more like research-y type roles. And like a lot of the things that I did in Southeast Asia were like robotics research and like papers. But when I came to the US, I was in this relatively small town, it's called Winona, Minnesota. And I kid you not, there's like two Fortune 500 companies that came out of this like really small town. Like one of them is Fastenal, and then like 3M is like very close, it's been, you know, like half an hour away. And everyone everyone was either like working at these companies or like a a small company. Like all my friends had this like wonderful drive to do things. Uh, and it it was very different than back home. It was right after the financial crisis, and so like jobs were scarce in Italy. Uh, it's just like paint to the picture, like, you know, like statistically, like a catch and release, like a you random sample a place in the United States, and this like relatively small town that I had never heard of before has incredible entrepreneurship and like people that they give back to the community, they donated to the local high school that I was part of. Like that was very eye-opening. It was like, oh, like you can actually do this and it has a meaningful impact. And if he if this happens in Winona, Minnesota, I wonder what goes on in San Francisco, you know? On that subject, you know, I I didn't grow up in Italy, but Italian heritage, certainly. Uh, why do you think there aren't as many great Italian founders, even compared to other European countries that, you know, it feels like Italy maybe is is batting under what you would expect from it as an economy. >> I think that this is a fairly complicated multifaceted answer. If I had to give like a single like point, it's probably that the financial markets and the way that the pension funds work is set up very different in Anglo-Saxon countries like the UK and the US and Switzerland, which is not Anglo-Saxon, but like conceptually it's a very fiscally like liberal than in Italy. Like Italy is a very has a very specific capital market. So there is like some very logistical reason why I think that this does not happen. Um there are some like cultural reason that like we can get into, but fundamentally you live a beautiful life in Italy and the friction that it takes for you to actually be like I need to effectively decrease my quality of life by 10x to then maybe have it like better maybe like a you know, 1% chance of actually like hitting it big. The incentive are not like super aligned. Uh and I like maybe this is a weird opinion to have. I think that this is perfectly fine. Like I know people that are truly happy. It's just not for me, but like I believe that it is a beautiful world because there are places such as Italy where you don't have to keep running for you to feel successful. Uh there there there there there is a space for this in the world. But I also know very strong founders in Italy. Like Bending Spoons come to mind. There's a like a lot of people that I truly respect. And of course like if if you look at Bending Spoons, there's a really interesting part about the financial markets. The way that they structure the acquisition business does go through Switzerland, the US and like getting potentially public. So there's a lot to unpack there, but I I I think it's a I love Italy. I still like go back. My family lives there. But to do what I like want to do, I think that the United States right now is a wonderful place. Well, I I agree with both those sentiments. Uh I'm going back to Italy next week, so uh I always I always like an excuse to do that. You eventually come back to America for for more sort of studying for for university, and then have sort of these stints in in Asia. I I'm curious, yeah, when you think about you know, you've lived, I think, Italy, Berkeley, Shenzhen, and and maybe Hong Kong, also? That's right. I was mostly in Hong Kong and then like going commuting to Shenzhen. Okay, got you. And and and now New York. Uh which of those cities do you feel like changed you the most? I think Hong Kong is probably the largest amount of learning rate I uh have done in like a compressed period of time before starting this company. In many ways, starting this company has filled out like what I it was filling in in Hong Kong. I think the reason is that up until then, I was uh like one of the most knowledgeable people about electronics around me. Back home in Milan, like I would effectively hold all my like small embedded projects. But, going to Hong Kong is an incredibly humbling experience. I think culturally, uh China and Hong Kong both have a very strong preference for the hard sciences. So, there's actually fewer people that go in pure computer science. Your parents are more proud of you if you are a physicist or an electrical engineer than just like a pure software major. And this is changing in many like ways. But, so many of my friends were just four standard deviation above average like knowledge in electronics. People that had been building electronics for like years. Uh and, you know, they they were immersed in this culture. And I think that that left a profound impression that this not only can be done, but also there are people that are immensely more knowledgeable than I could ever like hope to be at that point in my life Uh and they are incredibly graceful at teaching this kind of stuff. There's this person specifically Alex Wong and he him and I like worked on a couple of papers on like robotic hand for prosthetic devices. And like he was 19 at the time and to this day he's probably like at that point in time of his life one of the best electronic engineers I've ever met and I've met a lot. So it was just like a really interesting time to to absorb from people like this. What was it that had drawn you out there? Was it to you know do specific types of research? Was it you know just to get that sort of different experience? It was really like I truly enjoyed my time in the United States and I knew at that time that electronics was a very important part of my life. And it seemed wise to sample what the rest of the world has to offer in a domain that I truly care about. Like arguably Shenzhen to this day is one of probably the most lively hardware hotspot in the world and you want to be close to these type of centers to at least learn. And there's there's a lot of learning like also negative learning that happened. Like for example starting a company in Hong Kong and China has drawbacks. IP is more complicated. The legal system is slightly different than the United States and these are all things that are very hard to learn if you don't live in immersed in the culture. Like I was an exchange student in Hong Kong and a lot of the exchange students are there for like a semester and they effectively create a loan like their own social bubble but because I I was a a full year the idea was a I was actually like hanging out with people from either mainland China or like native Hong Kong and the cultural difference was just staggering like in in many ways and and it was a wonderful experience to learn that. What are some of the things that Shenzhen does much better than Silicon Valley in your experience? It's very hard to say better. Uh I think that like Shenzhen is a fundamentally slightly different beast. Like in Silicon Valley, you had these wonderful network effects because if what is limiting your productivity is a keyboard and a computer, the network is largely composed of social relationships. And social proof, the ability to know that there is vouched talent at the like fingertips has been an incredible engine of Silicon Valley. What I see in Shenzhen is a radically different thing where it's not necessarily just about social relationships. It's actually about the community as a whole dividing complex manufacturing processes into like a divide and conquer approach, and then each of the individual manufacturer like brewing uh manufacturing expertise, and then being able to hand it off to the next step. And so the the knowledge of how to make things permeates and like percolates through the various like layers of the stack in a way that like Silicon Valley I don't think has been focused on achieving so far. It's not that it couldn't, it's just that it didn't seem like the right problem to be solving because a lot of the other problems were uh how do we improve productivity by like unlocking new software like new computing paradigms. Uh and I think both of these type of realities have been very successful, and I think that there's a lot to learn from both. Like I think that it's very hard to replicate what Shenzhen has, but not impossible. And in fact, I am seeing a lot of what I used to see with my friends and like people that are starting companies in the manufacturing space. To put a finer point on that, like what what sort of things are you seeing? Like is it cultural things? Is it sort of operational things? I meet somebody for coffee in Silicon Valley, and then four weeks later they need a board made fast. And this is not like the exact service that we provide. Like what we provide is we will design and manufacture. And because we can co-design these two things, we are massively more efficient at the manufacturing. But if you're my friend, I'm just going to do this for you. And if you are happy with this type of service, I'm happy to like basically expand this to a proper business relationship. Or I have a customer that needs motors. And I know David Hansen in Silicon Valley who's building a motor company. Hey, like you guys should talk. Um and so because the stack is very wide, like printed circuit boards are very hard to build holistically, but also incredibly narrow in the stack of what it takes to actually build a full product. I get so much more reward from being able to introduce my customers to the people that will fix their pain points. And everybody wins. Like uh and this I am seeing more and more and more and more. And it's quite wonderful to see. You come back to the states and and you sort of spend quite a lot of time at uh Apple in their sort of special projects division. I'm sure there's uh a lot of things you you can't talk about, but what did you learn from sort of being part of, you know, the the the best hardware company in the world arguably? So special projects is a very unique part of Apple. So I don't want to pretend I understand Apple as a whole. Like I had a very peculiar experience. Um and the experience was largely determined by working with some of the best people in the world whose relationship I cherish to this days. Like my manager at Apple was a wonderful person that had a ton to teach from a like interpersonal relationship perspective. The the thing that was missing for me from that experience is that you are uh like if you work at Apple, you own a very very narrow part of the stack, but you do own it incredibly deep. And that is like very good for holding a very specific skill set. But the moment you want to own a little bit more, it's very hard and for very good reason. Like the the were folks that were owning a larger portion of the stack with lower depth and these people had done it all. Like these were some of the best engineers in the world that had like a system engineering background and were responsible for requirements and capturing. And I think that like apart from like many technical things I learned and it was a wonderful experience. The thing that I learned the most is that like electronics was not a solved problem even for like company in the US that is largely the best at doing this. Like Apple has clearly solved electronics at scale for production but our prototyping like cycles and the speed at which we could iterate was a fraction of what I was used to in Shenzhen. And I think that that was a like fairly shocking realization. Like it felt that this is like a systemic problem not a like individual company problem or like any issue that comes from lack of resources or lack of knowledge. I think that that was the the key learning I made. Psychologically, uh you know, people who become founders I think often struggle to be in as structured or as large an environment for for such an extended period of time. I think that you might be spot on with your read. I was there for about 2 years. There was a part of you that was itching to to to to take on some of that more some of that responsibility. I think so and in fact uh like when I left Apple, on paper that was a questionable decision. >> >> Uh like I left Apple for a much smaller company. I left Apple in the middle of my like visa proceedings. And this was not out of frustration. Like it was a wonderful place to work. It's very hard to work in an environment that does not reward you basically killing yourself over your job. And like this is not really good good for everybody, right? Like you don't want everybody having to like work to the max. But in this specific period of my life, I generate such a high amount of personal enjoyment for from like dedicating myself 100% to like this one thing. And Apple was a great place to be, but it's not structured so that you like you basically have a tapered off reward with the more work you put in. Like you you can stop working at a certain point and it's like mostly fine and everybody will be happy. And it just felt like I wanted to be in an environment where I could place as much of myself as I could into the like craft. >> Have you always been that way that you want to sort of kill yourself for things that you're passionate about? My fiance will be very mad that I say it kill myself. Let's say being very passionate about >> >> something. That's better language. It just feels that I have a incredible privilege of loving something that is very like is perceived as valuable in the modern world. Like if if I were like a musician, for example, it would be much harder for me to just dedicate 100% to my craft and like also pay bills, right? But like because the things that I love are very very aligned with what the modern world that like deems like financially rewarding from a like as an engineer, you can make a living, no problem. I just feel like an obligation of basically like this is the the few set of talents that I have. I want to be able to pour myself into it. I also like you I find it super fun. Like I I this is just a I would do it for fun anyway. Like I I studied biomedical engineering in my undergrad because I think that biology and physiology are like a completely different tier of complexity than electronics or even silicon. It's just a a language we don't understand yet and I wanted to like learn more about it. But my personal things right now electronics even during undergrad. Like I I would do it even if I weren't paid. So It feels like the optimal use of my time. I just get a ton of like joy out of it. That's amazing. You you mentioned, you know, you you go to the smaller startup Chromatic and it's there that you meet your your future co-founder Lenny. Yeah, what was it about Lenny that you saw something that that that you felt like maybe this was a a larger partnership or or someone you hope to, you know, work with for hopefully many years to come. So, funny enough, I actually met Lenny on my very first job out of college. So, I started working for this company called Butterfly Network. Wonderful, wonderful people, incredible product. It was a custom silicon ASIC that would allow you to do ultrasound imaging in like the space of a handheld like ultrasound machine. This is like revolutionary technology. Very, very fun to work on, lots of technical challenges, very smart people. And I had a master's degree at that point. Like I did my undergrad in 3 years and my master's at Berkeley. And then for some reason I think that that counted as like work experience. And so they assigned an intern to me. Even though I had no like no reason to would need or like deserve an intern. And that person was Lenny. Wow, wow. >> And it was very clear that he was way smarter than I am, incredibly capable. He had done an internship the year prior on the iOS team, which is very different than like hardware. And he was incredibly well versed in machine learning, front end, like just like a true full stack engineer. Like while I go like kind of embedded software down to the metal, he goes embedded software up to like the cloud. And so it it felt like a a super fun set of combination. Like it's a very complimentary technical skill set at least like in software plus hardware. And I just enjoyed working with him. And then when I joined Chromatic, everybody knew Lenny and liked Lenny. And we lobbied very hard for Lenny needed with us. And so purely coincidental that you ended up at Chromatic at the at the same time after that experience at Butterfly. I think it like we like I was part of why Lenny like came and joined. I think that there were two people like one person that also worked with Lenny and we were like yeah he he he needs to join like he should join Chromatic. And Chromatic is also like probably the most fun I've ever had as a employee. Like it was just a wonderful company to learn. Also incredible founders we are still very close to this days. We learn a lot from them and like it it's quite humbling to see how many things they got just right. And as I like build a company it's just like how did they do it? Like what what can I like learn from from that from their experience? Incredible people very very grateful to have met them. And it was at Chromatic that you sort of have this sort of first inkling of this need that becomes Diode. How how did that sort of come to fruition or or you know come into your your frame of vision? I think that it was a culmination of observing the same problem over and over and over at different like complete different scale of companies. Like Butterfly was like pre-IPO company Apple obviously like largest company in the world by capitalization at the time. And then Chromatic like a fairly small like a startup company. And every time that we had to spin a circuit board despite that not being the most complicated thing that we were doing like as a team it would just go wrong. Like the manufacturing would take weeks more than it was supposed to take. The boards would come back and have a yield rate that was abysmal like less than 50% and you would ask yourself like is the problem in the design? Is the problem in the manufacturing? Like what what's going on? And it felt just wrong. And so like I started diving deep into this and it turns out that a large reason why this is the case is that a lot of smart people have poured their hearts and souls into making silicon design like more efficient because the cost of getting silicon wrong is in the millions of dollars. The cost of getting software wrong is virtually zero. Like you just like you just like push a patch. This is there's some caveats like you obviously if you get something wrong on a security like they can be very strong. But let's say during prototyping you can basically just fix it as you go. And PCBs or circuit boards are just in the middle. They're like this weird middle child that's like hasn't been loved enough. And like a wrong spin may cost you between 10 and 80,000 dollars which is bad but it's not the the strong your company bad especially with like US companies. And so a lot of like very standard problems that you'd think like sorry but like this should be solved they haven't been solved. And I think that it was incredibly apparent when we taped out this incredibly beautiful piece of silicon that way smarter engineer than I like put together. And like this guy got it right first time. Like he designed it for silicon and the silicon just worked. I was responsible for like a small part and I was wetting bullets. I was like if this goes wrong like the entire silicon is not going to work. I I was responsible for the boot loader in the device. And then the the silicon comes back and the circuit board that it was on was like full of mistakes. And it was like through nobody's fault. It was not like that you could say oh the person that designed the circuit board made a mistake. No like the tools were not helping the manufacturing was not helping. Like we had to diagnose like yield problem. Like all these like little things that slowed down the most beautiful moment of you get back your chip and you know that it works. And like the chip worked first try. I am still amazed that that was the case and it was absolutely wonderful. And it's really a testament to how good the team was and also how good the tools that were designed around that were. But it it felt that we deserved better tools around the circuit boards as well. This episode is brought to you by Brex. If you're a founder, the hardest part isn't the idea. It's scaling fast without getting buried in back office work. That's where Brex comes in. Brex is the intelligent finance platform for founders. With Brex, you get high limit corporate cards, easy banking, and high yield treasury, plus a team of AI agents that handle manual finance tasks for you. They take care of things like expenses, all according to your rules, so you can move faster while staying in full control. One in three startups in the US already runs on Brex. You can, too, at brex.com/ario. Just to restate it in in the sense that to make sure I understand it, it's like, you know, so much effort, investment, intelligence has gone towards optimizing the silicon because it's so important and expensive to get wrong. And then software has these fast cycles that are sort of forgiving, and so there's, you know, plenty of architecture around that. But the the circuit boards are in this weird middle zone where it's not that forgiving, but it's also, you know, not catastrophic to failure. And so, it sounds like it's sort of remained almost, I don't know, artisanal, ad hoc, where there's really not this infrastructure around it. I guess, one, you know, am I sort of capturing the the contours of this correctly? And and then two, why has there not been more effort dedicated towards this until now? Because clearly there's been plenty of investment in this ecosystem. Why is this part just been sort of overlooked beyond that maybe structural issue? So, I think that you captured it beautifully, but there is one important like and huge caveat. This has been solved in Southeast Asia. Which was the geography where this mattered the most. Like effectively Western countries around the 2000s collectively abdicated a part of the stack that they perceived to be, you know, not catastrophic failure, not necessarily my core IP like the same way as the silicon. They abdicated it to geographies where they could out like outsource it or offshore it for a cheaper price. I see. >> And if you look at like a modern circuit board factory in China, there is nothing artisanal about that. The artisanal nature which I think you captured beautifully. Like it's quite beautiful because you can actually build a circuit board by hand, something that like you obviously cannot do with silicon. So it is truly like if you have a good artisan you can build a fully working circuit board by hand. There's some caveats of course, but the the thing that is more interesting to me is why do we not have like the level of precision and quality control that we have for silicon for circuit boards? And like if you see the machines behind me, these are industrial machines. These are machines that are meant to address the gap between artisanal product and mass manufactured product. And it's not true that people have not solved it, but where it hasn't been solved especially in the US is fully autonomous pipeline that takes you from your design to a manufactured product. Effectively like the case that it's like the US market has been optimized around is I have a design. We have iterated on it. Now it's time to build 100,000 of them. There's a lot of incredibly competent shops that will do this in the US and this is not true for circuit boards only. It's true for CNC machining, like really any like type of manufacturing. The best manufacturing shops stateside thrive in volume because variance is the enemy of yield. As soon as you need variance, there's a lot of like complicated calculations that you need to do. Like for for a PCB, it's like you need to figure out how to place the components. You need to figure out how to place the solder paste. You need to figure out the optimal reflow profile of your oven. You need to figure out if your optical inspection machine is calibrated correctly to spot mistakes because this is a manufacturing process. There will be mistakes. It's just how do you minimize them. It's not like this is like always going to work. And I think that because China started with cheap labor and then effectively like the labor progressively became more expensive, they truly invested in wonderful automation. So I I will not trust somebody that tells me, "Oh, China can do it because their labor is cheap." That ain't true. That's not true anymore. They are incredible at automating things and automating them in a way that makes them cost-competitive. And yes, there are a lot of things that are you know, there's an 80/20 of automation where the 20% is filled in with cheap labor, but if you look at the a modern circuit board like factory, it it is incredibly automated. And I think that this is very hard to replicate de novo if you don't do something radically different. And our bet is that that radical difference is that you co-design the circuit boards with the assembly line in mind. Like if you have these two concepts in your head at the same time, which is a very painful process to have, it will make design harder to know that like if you place a via with a annular ring that is not like to spec of the machines that I'm using to drill the bare boards, it will cause a problem to the manufacturing. It it it is very restricting. But the bet that we are making is that the models don't care. Like you can let the model iterate until the design is as manufacturable as you possibly can. And so this yield a much more like amenable path to full automation design to production. In a way, it sounds like you're sort of uniting these two pieces of the input and the output. You know, you have the the ability to have the you know, this the system understand the inputs you need to make, but also how those get translated into the actual outputs and the sort of capabilities that you have on hand. And like I'll I'll go one step further, which is like if you look at the cultural stance that like my friends in Hong Kong used to have, every board is designed thinking of, "Oh, I'm going to make this one-sided, even if it costs me like a little bit longer design time, because this way it doesn't have to go twice through the assembly." I see. >> ask them like, "Why? Like just designing both sides, like who cares?" And they're like, "No, no, no, no. This will have to like go twice through the assembly. Like the yield will go down because you're re-flowing the components twice. Like if I can do it, I'll just do it like one-sided." And that like cultural mode is just like has been uh diluted in the US because it's so removed, right? In a lot of ways when you send your design to Southeast Asia, they will tweak it to make it more manufacturable without necessarily telling you, which is quite interesting in my opinion. Yeah, that is interesting. What are the the companies that sort of dominate the industrial scale production of this in China? Is is it sort of like actually a market that's relatively diffuse or are there a few sort of big players? I think that there's two clusters. There's a Foxconn and Pegatron. Like these companies are huge companies. They don't do just circuit board production. They really actually do the full stack. We would classify them as EMS like electronic manufacturers. These companies are incredibly successful. Uh like the the story of these companies is wonderful. Like Break Neck by Bunnie Huang has a lot of like really interesting tidbits about like how these specific companies were founded and generated. And like I I think that these companies are one end of the spectrum. But then you have other like younger companies. There's a lot of mom-and-pop shops, by the way. Like it's not true that like PCB manufacturing is a monolith in China. And of these, I think that some of the more famous companies in the US are like JLCPCB, for example, which is this Sequoia China-backed company. Incredibly interesting company that doesn't do just PCBs anymore, but they started with circuit boards. And like if you look at the way that they're automating a lot of the stack, it it basically makes the same bets that we are making. Like like don't want to claim ownership of the ideas that we are putting forward. I'm just like looking at what's working and basically saying, "Okay, they do it in this way." Like for example, they have a wonderful library of components. They hand annotated. You cannot do it if you don't have very cheap, highly skilled labor, which we don't have in the US. Like the electrical engineers in the US are incredibly talented and very expensive. You cannot like just do that. So, how do we do that with a large language model? Like a large language model, if you make it capable enough, will be able to replicate some of the mix of ingredients that make something like JLC very successful, in my opinion. You've taught me a ton in the last 10 minutes that I after a ton of research didn't fully understand. So, that's that's really helpful and really interesting. To to to jump back into the the sort of diode story, you have this moment where you you know sort of realize how little has been invested in understanding, you know, in in in making circuit boards really have the sort of level of fidelity one would want in the US at least. You and Lenny applied to YC, but with a sort of a different approach. What was the the sort of initial version of it? The pain that we were feeling back then was I want to catch mistakes before they happen, right? So, like large language models, if you teach them like electronics very carefully in a very calculated way, for example, by representing the schematics as code, representing the layout in a way that like multimodal models understand, there's a lot of you can catch. But and I think that this goes back to the comment that you made about being a copper merchant versus uh like just an engineer. Like this was a pain point as a as an engineer I was feeling. But if you try to sell just this small part of the solution, you are selling vitamins to companies that don't have an express pain point right now. The pain point that this company had was not how do I marginally make my designs less mistake prone. The pain point they had is I cannot hire an electrical engineer. I need a board now. Yes. >> And I need it fast. And so in the exploratory space of the technology can do this, I know that this is a problem because I've had it myself. Can I sell this? We effectively stumbled into huh, like if you truly like in order to train the model that would catch the mistakes, we built a model that would generate boards. And so we effectively use the same infrastructure, but basically say, "Oh, like we can actually generate the board that you want." Like a lot of the boards that we like in in in San Francisco, there's a lot of robotic startups. And these robotic startups maybe need some tweaks on some existing off-the-shelf boards. And this is a relatively easy to do. And so it turns out that people do want this. And and you know, I think that this was like another incredibly underrated like thing about YC. Like it was basically like you should follow what people actually say they want. And and it has been very humbling, but also like incredibly rewarding because in the process of switching from a solution-oriented uh like mindset to a "Tell me your problem. Let me see if I can fix that." Like first, we also figured out another like beautiful things about like companies, which is incentive alignment. Initially, we were thinking about this design platform, right? Like just like make the design streamline and more efficient. But if you think about a design company that has no stakes in delivering a product, you're not held accountable to the same standards, right? Like, if you as a company will suffer the pain of having to rework 150 boards that were designed in roughly the wrong way, your incentives are incredibly aligned to make the best design software that will not do that. And so, we live and buy like we we live by this tenant. Like, incentive alignment with our clients has has been a wonderful a wonderful thing. And you know, you mentioned robotics companies. You've you know, have have some impressive customers and and partners that you guys are working with. To understand the customer journey from sort of design to getting the board, what does that look like through Diode? Like, are they entering your software first and sort of doing you know, some part of it themselves? Maybe sort of just going through that journey would be useful. Of course. So, this is something that's in flux and the like the current process is we will capture a specification document with you. This is partially done like on a call. Like, right now every one of our customers is incredibly dear to us and we love them very much. And so, whatever it takes to make them feel like their spec is being captured correctly, we will do. We also have a version of this where you can effectively explain your specifications to the model and the model has incredibly high context about parts availability, parts that are already being designed and so they can be reused with minimal likelihood of failing what is in our like library. And so, we we have this like we call it the spec builder. So, the the first step is as a customer, we will build a specification with you. That specification becomes our Bible. Like, that is the source of truth. And then, what we do is we have multiple uh, agents that take the specification and do a first approximation of the design. We work with Anthropic to effectively bake some of our design language into the general availability models. We are very invested in large language models becoming better at electronics because our goal is to effectively automate as much of this process as possible. And schematics are on their way to be fully automated. Like I estimate like 90% of a schematic that we do is a the model can one shot it now. 90%? >> Yeah. Like schematics are like they're beautiful because they're very ideal. They're they're like a logical graph. It's it's very very similar to code. Then one of our engineers, we we hire incredibly talented engineers because our goal is to actually build boards that work, will review the output and then we have a platform where our customers can confirm that this is what they wanted. Maybe like they realize that they said they wanted A but they really wanted B. This is the platform that we expose alt.diacomputer for example. I am very proud that this is just a visualization of the code. Like this is pure like if the LLM touches the code, the like you will see it in a human readable way. Like we generate schematics which the models are they have a hard time like visual reasoning is hard. So we use the code as a hook for the models. We generate schematics for the humans. Yes. >> And then the next step is the layout. So here is where we do a lot of research. Layout is not 90% automated. I estimate it's closer to like 40 and 50% for us internally. It's like very good at placement, less good at routing. We have a few companies that we really look like uh, up to. Like Quilter is working on this problem. Like there's an entire company just dedicating to one thing that we do, which is routing. And there's another company called DPCB that we actually like have uh, like worked with in the past. And both of these companies are wonderful and I like hope that they succeed because our goal is to automate everything end-to-end. But we do a lot of research in-house and some of it is non-public sadly, but our goal is to let large language models become much better at routing. And I think that this will unlock the next like layer of productivity for us. You know, it's the the sort of partnership with Anthropic I thought was super interesting and it makes sense that, you know, the way that you talk about this that you want these LLMs to become amazing at at these parts of the process because it, you know, it just just makes your sort of full stack approach more effective. What does that sort of say about where you think value ultimately accrues in this business? Like does it become the manufacturing side? Is it just sort of I don't know, all all all these things sort of concatenated together and managing that full process? It depends on how AGI pill you are. Mhm. If you truly believe that the models are going to become radically better at anything that has to do with a computer, there is a reasonable like like a a belief that you can hold that the design portion will eventually be just the cost of the tokens that it takes to design this specific part. And the bet that we are making is that first like this is a non-trivial problem to solve. Like today, this is not something that just works, right? The models are getting better and we are very happy about this. But this is something that we like think will take a couple of years at least before you have full automation on the design. The spot that you want to be is a one-stop shop where you can let your model design and then you receive a board. And this is really like I think where we eventually will want to be. You said you know, depending on how AI AGI pill one is. How AGI pill are you? Like what how do you build your business around these sort of horizons? The beautiful thing is that this is a great business even at the current stage. Like the the thing I blessed my lucky stars for every day is that like first this is what we are good at. We we design boards, we bring them up, we make sure they work, and we ship them to customers. And this has a very large amount of value, even if you're just like 50% more efficient. Like our schematic automation allows us to be 50% more efficient, which translates to radically faster design timelines. So this works today, and I am very agile built. In fact, we are building the company by effectively assuming that a lot of these problems are just getting better, and we saw it like day by day. Like things that were completely out of the question 6 months ago are now table stakes. All of our library management, which is a very very sensitive part of electronic development, there's like dedicated person at large companies the librarian, which will religiously take care of symbols and footprints and data sheets and everything else. This is all done by the model. Uh and maybe you'll see something coming out soon in this domain, but this is working. Like this is something that like lifts hours and hours like from our timelines. Uh and we can do it on demand. So I'm very happy like to see that that it like progress is being made. We are very far from being able to build RF board that is very layout heavy. Like this is still needs a human touch, and we do it for some of our like Fortune 100 aerospace customers, and like they can compress their timelines from 9 months to like a month including the like the the factory delivery. And so this has been just an incredible amount of value that we get out of this. With these LLMs with writing or with code, maybe you know, a better example, uh it's capable of producing performant code or competent code that sort of hits the bill or meets the brief, but it's not always necessarily the optimal code, right? Like you know, a a truly exceptional software engineer would find a better way to solve a certain problem. I would assume that's the same dynamic for you, but because it's less forgiving, you know, maybe the stakes are are higher. How do you sort of deal with that? Like, I imagine there are circuit boards that are viable that a unbelievable electrical engineer would say like, "Yeah, sure, it's it works, but, you know, if I was doing it, I would do it in XYZ way." The usual telltale sign of this behavior is in the routing. Like, the schematics, it's arguably more correct than what uh like the schematics are So, first of all, they are easier to verify. We have incredibly strong simulation harnesses that give uh optimization function to the model. This this is like a core part of what you need to do to validate a schematic is good. The other part is that schematics are largely uh they're they're a much simpler domain than like pure layout. The ability in which you can compose code is massively easier. Like, the tooling around electrical engineering has not evolved so that there are shared libraries of a lot of these things. People have tried, but there are a lot of like complicated gotchas that can be solved, but they're they're fairly hard on the schematic side. No one complains about the validity of the schematics. Everybody complains about the aspect, like the the visual elements of them. It's a very human thing. Like, people are very receptive to how good a schematic looks, even if it's correct. Like, you can have a correct schematic that looks bad, and people will perceive it as like poor craftsmanship. For example, the way I like to put it is that the universe of boards that we can tackle is always expanding. And today, like, you know, if you start from individual components, the librarian is great. And the librarian can also generate reference designs, which are like you can think about it as the minimum viable board that you can build around a single component. And now the models are starting to be so good that they can stitch them together and also build the layout. And our bet is that this will just like keep expanding to the point that the the universal board that you can build is so vast that you can just do it all. Super interesting. I I love this idea that often things that look wrong to to humans are actually sort of the the best version of something, you know, it's like the chess move that makes no sense and then, you know, 10 moves later actually turns out to be right. >> To be clear, we spend an unbelievable amount of time to make sure that our schematics are very palatable to humans. Like this is a decision that we made at the beginning of the company. It's like you can take the stance, which is like basically don't look at the schematics, just trust the model. And we have a trust but verify stance. Our customers will get schematics. They will they basically get the same output that a human would give them, right? Because there is a human at the end of the day like cleaning up the little edges. And this is what gives them the most value, even as a just archival format. So we do spend a lot of time on that. It's not just that we blindly trust the model. I see. So because humans otherwise would have trouble trusting it essentially. Like there might be a version in the future where uh Oh, for sure. >> Yeah, that's less necessary, but for now in this transition it's sort of important. >> Yeah, and I I think that this is like the difference between building a research project and something that your customer can actually use in production. Like you need to deliver it to them a small package that they can open in their EDA tool of choice. Like if they use Altium, they should be able to open in Altium. If they use KiCad, they can open in KiCad. Cadence, the same thing. We work very hard to make sure that we are not just a like helper tool, but a proper like productivity suite that we actually like can deliver good results on. Yeah, you mentioned KiCad and and Cadence. In the The run, I would assume your goal is to devour that workflow within your platform, right? We have a slightly different stance on KiCad. Like our like I cannot speak about Cadence. Cadence is like a closed like software. I'm pretty sure that Cadence cares much less about their PCB software than they care about their ASIC software. That's where most of their revenue comes from. But KiCad is a wonderful piece of software, which is free and open source. Say that you are Italian stonemason in Florence or a Italian leather craftsman. The tools are not necessarily what makes the artifact important. Like the artifact, the end product is really what matters. So our goal is not to devour KiCad or Cadence. It's to build an automation layer that becomes something that you dispatch work to. You can think about it as a we are a layer of automation on top of KiCad. And in fact, all of our designs are built in a way where the agent can use KiCad as a tool and we contribute back to mainline KiCad. If you go on the repo, like we have a lot of patches that we have contributed about manufacturing, fixing like some of the problems that we had internally. We are about to contribute another like tool. KiCad and the tool should be open source. In fact, our our compiler is open source. It's called PCB. github.diading/pcb. Fully open source. Our goal is not to gatekeep the compiler. Our goal is to build a electrical engineer that uses the compiler to build boards. I'm curious where you see sort of like the the most natural early adopters here. It sounds like robotics has been one, but yeah, what where do you expect Diode to sort of make most headway over the next few years? In many ways, like we work with a lot of enterprise customers, which are wonderful and were an important part of the initial set of hypotheses we were testing. It's like can you deliver value at large enterprise corporations? This is like a an important part of building a lasting company. It's like incremental adoption is so important. Every like a lot of the founders I respect the most have given me this advice. It's say, if you try to build a radically different system by throwing away everything from the old system, you are going to just face an uphill battle. But, there's another like lesson that you can learn from Stripe. Like Stripe in the early days had a wonderful product market fit with a lot of developers that did not already have a payment provider. These were folks that effectively were building wonderful things on the internet and needed a new solution that would work for them with them. And you could spend a lot of time like trying to retrofit Stripe into a existing solution, or you could go after all these new universal players that just expanded immediately. We want to do both because we think that it is important to like make sure that we are a good like good with enterprise customers. But, the most fun that I personally have is with some of our wonderful clients in the like series B to series C range, where they have an incredible appetite for boards. They just need to build so many boards, and it's so hard to hire like a hundred electrical engineers because the United States just does not have this talent. And the people that are >> Yes. incredibly good electrical engineers are kind of like they became incredible electrical engineers through a long career, and now they are deservedly resting, investing, or if I am at SpaceX, I'm going to be waiting for the IPO. Like I'm not going to join a like grinding startup. Like I've already made it. Like there's a lot of like this archetype of people. Uh and these are incredibly smart people that you want to learn everything from, but maybe they don't want to be like going back to square zero and like build a a hundred board from scratch. And so, this is where we come in. This is our the people that we have a ton of fun working with. And we will do whatever it takes to design those a hundred boards with them. And then, we hope to become the best partner to bring them from like new product introduction to actual like large-scale manufacturing. We have a lot of partnership with people that are set up for the world of here's one design that's done. Let's build a 100,000. And so even before we have the ability to do it, like this is very largely like a prototype line. This is not a line that will scale to millions of units. But this is something that we can do for our customers and we want to be that type of provider. We want to be the new generation like Stripe but for uh electronics and for hardware. I think every great company ends up having at least one near-death moment. Have you had to go go through one of those yet with Diode? I am very fortunate that like I think that the near-death like moment was in the very first few weeks where because Lamine and I were just like we are very deeply like the engineering mindset is very deeply ingrained in both of us. And as an engineer a large portion of what you are trained to do is someone will give you a problem statement from A to B and your goal is to get from A to B in the most efficient and optimal way possible. Like what I have found like building a company is like is you are given A and you're asking yourself what is B? Not even where it is, it's like what like what type of shape will I have in B? And so like figuring out a business model that allows us to go where I want to go, which is I want to see the United States be as nimble as it is in software. Like the United States has such wonderful software talent. This is probably the thing I'm most in love with like about this country. It's just like you come here and like yeah, you walk around Berkeley and you see people that are like so talented in the software domain and they just find hardware unapproachable enough that they they they find it hard to actually like go and apply those talents into that domain. I need that to not be the case. I want like the US to become as nimble as hardware as it is in software. This is like the third tier like description of diode. Like if diode wins, what we will see is much larger portion of talented and smart people being able to whip up electronics the same way that they can spin up a SAS server. This is what we want to achieve. So in in that sense, you know, every every company is unique. So making comparisons isn't always helpful, but for the sake of sort of clarity, it almost sounds like the ultimate goal is an American Foxconn for the AI era. Is that like how close am I there? I think that you're incredibly close. I think it's also it's very flattering of being compared with Foxconn. Like these are the aspirations, right? That's right. There is a lot of work that needs to be done. And the work that we are focusing on today is wonderful design and design for manufacturing platform that holds these two ends of the like problem together. I'm curious uh about you and uh the way you run the company as a CEO. What What is the sort of culture of Diode that you care about and and what are the things that maybe you've chosen to do differently than some of the other places you've worked? I think that there's actually a lot of like other places that I've worked. I don't know that I have anything reactionary. There's a lot of like picking the parts that I love the most about different places that I've worked. I think that uh I am obsessive about the talent that we bring in. I spend a lot of time here. And when I spend time here, I like love doing it with people that are engaging and I respect incredibly highly and I are fun to be around. Uh and I'm I'm very very proud of like the entire team. So I I think that like we have been very deliberate about hiring. Um in a way that like like the the bar is very high and we have so much work and it would be so easy to just you know give in and be like okay like we'll let's just hire like 20 people because there there is enough like work but I I think one of the things that we have been doing slightly differently is we have been focused on where is the pain? Like where where is the pain coming from? Where is the thing that is not scaling? Like it used to be schematics and now schematics is gone and now we see layout as the next like big hill to climb. And that signal has been very strong. But we are hiring and in fact I am hiring very aggressively. So if anybody listening is incredibly excited about electronics and you are either very talented electrical engineer or a super smart software engineer that loves to like dip their toes in the hardware pool, please we'll fly you to New York. Come come see the factory. Like this is like truly I think like a hallmark of building a good company is like how excited are you to see your co-workers and this is something that I have like been blessed with like being very excited about it many many times in the past and this is the number one thing that we want to hold true. I think that the differentiating factor is in like how high we keep the bar for hiring. Well, hopefully we we book you a few factory tours for from that. >> Please. >> >> Also, living in New York big perk. There you go. Yeah, absolutely. Where do you find you come up with your best ideas? Like are you still I don't know fiddling around with with electronics in your spare time to to understand these things? Is it on a walk? You know, sports, whatever it might be. I would like be a truly unhappy individuals if I did if I stopped building boards. There was a like a mandate of building at least one board per week. Like I I need to be the least productive electrical engineer at the company with one board a week. Okay, there you go. Like I am the low bar. I am the worst EE at Diode and I still need to be a board. And I think that this is starting to be harder because like we have incredibly like high-stake customers and then we want to deliver a wonderful experience. So what I'm doing today is I'm building a lot of the hardware that goes into the factory. Like a lot of the problems that we find is that the machines that you see are mostly meant for manual operation and we need to figure out a way to truly automate them from like figuring out the right data model, figuring out which piece of hardware can talk to what. Even like the conveyor belts, they are not particularly smart. How do you make them smarter? How do you stop them take pictures, stuff like this. So I I still build a lot of the hardware. And I think that the best ideas actually come from talking to Lenny. Like it is truly underappreciated how much talking with somebody much smarter than you kind of unlocks new modes of thinking. I think that I am more prolific in the like set of ideas that I generate and Lenny is much better at discriminating which ideas are worth pursuing. And so this dynamic has helped me so much because he will basically say like okay, like you have 20 ideas. The rate at which you're generating it is probably going to kill the company. Let's focus on like these three. And I'm like, "No, no, but I really like five." And he's like, "Why do you like five?" And then we discuss like he like 90% of the time he's like, "You were right. Five is probably something that we can kick to later." And 10% of the time I'm like, "Oh, actually we we get to do five. That's fantastic." And and I think that that has been like I have I bless my lucky stars that Lenny is my co-founder because it's a wonderful person to have on this journey. Amazing. Well, that would be it. I've enjoyed this so much and I always love to end with a few sort of more thought experiment questions for you. If you had the chance to run any experiment with no operational constraints and unlimited resources, what's an experiment you'd like to run? Is this in the realm of just like Dogpatch as a company because there's a lot of like larger experiments that I think like should be run. >> No, no. It It should be It should be as large as you'd like. Dogpatch in San Francisco needs to be the new like we This is the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It's like a part of New York that was like developed like in the I think '50s and now it's like an industrial space that just overlooks the city. I need Dogpatch to become like the Brooklyn Navy Yard of San Francisco. I think that like largely there's a lot of companies that we know in the industrial sector that are there and I think that like Astanis is there, the American Industrial Center is there. One experiment I would love to run is you take the entire surface and you make it like a industrial city. I I think that that would be incredible for like bringing Silicon Valley closer to what Scien Gen is and I think it will happen and hopefully we are a part of making that happen eventually. Okay, final question for you. If you had a the chance to assign a book to everyone on Earth to read and and know that they would understand it, what would you want to assign? There's really two and I think that they should be like done in sequence. So like if I have to pick absolutely one, it's going to be Chip Wars. Yeah, it's so good. It's just like no flaws. Like before starting the company, I spent like the year prior reading a ton of like both domain expertise books like Chip Wars and science fiction. I think it's tremendous how much science fiction actually captures what the ethos of progress was like felt like like 1970s science fiction. Like what did people 50 years ago like think? But I I do think Chip Wars is a wonderful primer to understand truly and deeply how much American government like the American government has had this outsize influence in developing silicon and how and why like RAM production was outsourced to Singapore and Vietnam and like Taiwan and and like how it happened and how like Japan was like at this incredibly strong powerhouse and then like the balances of power that have shifted over the last like 60 years. I think that if you do not understand the geopolitical angle, it's very very hard to understand reindustrialization. Like it's very easy to devolve into like us versus them mentality like for many reasons, but I do think that if you do understand the incentive structure that operate at a nation-state, you you can understand why even if you like are a full pacifist like and you don't care about rivalry between like geopolitical rivals, having a strong industrial base is just important for like your long-term prosperity. And this is something that I think Europe has like not done particularly well and I would love to see more. Like I think that Europe has a such like all these machines are European by the way. Like it is wild. Yes, it's wild how many like high-end industrial machinery is still made in Europe. But there's this weird middle ground where it's like I want to transition to a services economy, but then I have like this like small and medium businesses that do manufacturing. Like I I I think that this is not a country a contrarian opinion anymore, but like the geopolitics is just very very important to understand how the next 50 years will play out and why China has been like largely so successful, which is I think something that it's worth learning and admiring the good parts of and recognizing where like there are bad parts that you can avoid. Okay, so Chip War is recommendation one. You you said it there's two. What what's what's the second one? Breakneck is just like in order to like and this goes again like demonizing like a country like China is bad for everybody. Like you should learn to understand it. And then once you understand it, you can have a nuanced opinion. And there's things that you can denounce and there's things that you can admire, but you truly need to understand like the idea of an engineering culture and an engineering nation is very profound and very powerful and like very scary and in like some ways like social engineering for example. But like Break Nexus I think like a wonderful like book to begin and understand that and like be able to capture the good parts without like throwing the baby with the bathwater type of thing. Well, those are two great recommendations that I feel like capture a lot of the spirit of this conversation. So thank you again Davide. I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed it too and thank you for having me. This has been wonderful. That's it. 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