I’m excited to announce that I’m joining Plethora - a next-gen manufacturing startup! I’ve been following the company since before my friend Nick founded it and it’s great to finally be a part of the team.

About Plethora

Plethora is striving to empower engineers and designers by making hardware manufacturing insanely easy. Our initial focus is on reducing time to go from designing a part to getting it in your hand.

We have a plug-in for CAD (design) software that gives users instant feedback on price and manufacturability; then, a user can order their part from within the software and we’ll make it in just a couple days. This is a dramatic improvement over the alternative: spending hours discussing terms with local machine shops and then waiting a week or two to get your part. Try us out and you’ll get $250 of free machining (probably enough for your first part).

I can’t go into specifics about the long-term vision, but it’s about supercharging the hardware design process and reducing the barriers to creation. I’ve always been scared away from founding a hardware startup because it much more complex and risky than starting software / web companies. As Plethora succeeds, we’ll be making hardware as easy as software.

My Role

My role is Business Operations and Strategy - an intentionally nebulous description that will morph with the needs of the company.

I’ve been consulting with Plethora since February and my initial focus is marketing, sales, and business development, building the engines that will drive our user adoption and growth.

I’m very excited about the future of Plethora. My criteria for joining any company is always:

  • Do they have a great vision?
  • Is there a realistic roadmap for reaching that vision?
  • Do they have the right team and culture to pull it off?
  • Is there interesting work that I can help with?

Plethora answers all of those questions with a resounding yes. I’m looking forward to working with an awesome team on very interesting problems to dramatically reshape how hardware is designed and manufactured.