America wants to re-industrialize. The harder question is who’s going to build everything.
“I spent years walking machine shops in LA before AdAstra,” says Seyka Mejeur of AdAstra Talent Advisors. “Watched five-axis machines cut metal to tolerances thinner than a human hair, and watched the people who can actually run and program those machines become fewer and fewer.”
When demand is high and supply is low, prices rise, and so do the timelines on every hard tech roadmap that depends on those parts. In this episode of VHTB, Seyka is joined by Justus Kilian (Space Capital), and Matt Gjertsen (BUILT) dig into:
- Why decades of pushing college over trade schools left a gap in skilled manufacturing talent
- How much hands-on expertise lives inside small mom-and-pop machine shops, and how to modernize and scale it
- Where automation helps, by lowering the barrier to entry and multiplying what each skilled person can do
- How companies are building their own talent through apprenticeships and knowledge transfer before experienced workers retire
- Why hard-won manufacturing capabilities, brought in-house, could become one of the most defensible advantages a hard tech company can build
VHTB | A VC, a headhunter and a Trainer Walk Into a Bar: Your guide to the talent, culture, and capital forces shaping the hard tech startup ecosystem.
Watch: https://youtu.be/QoxOMvZ1M0c
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/
Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/
RSS: https://vhtb.captivate.fm/
