VentureFizz’s Post

Transcript

I'm Bill Flaherty. I am the Director of Applications and Technology Development here at Alloy. So we are a 5 year old startup that has a novel method of manufacturing metal components that we primarily apply for thermal management devices because we can achieve some unique geometries and capabilities for thermal management that you can't get with both traditional and other additive manufacturing technologies. We've got about 30 engineers spread across the engineering organization broken up into a couple of different groups. So we have our software team, our process team and our machines team, and they are primarily focused on the internal processes and tools that we use to actually make parts. And then the applications team, which the applications team I think of as kind of the technical link between our customers and. The process. And so we're providing that kind of technical liaison between them and Alloy, ensuring that their parts are designed for our process and then also bringing to bear kind of our unique capabilities to design even higher performing parts than the customer might be expecting to get. I think one of the more interesting markets that we're working in right now is, is data center cooling, right? So both just the general Internet cloud computing revolution combined with kind of this latest surge in in AI has really pushed data centers to their limits in terms of what they can do with thermal management and an alloy. We're designing unique devices to cool those high-powered chips, right CPUs, GPUs, things like that. And we have this really cool what we call micro. Applied technology which allows us to make these really tiny cooling channels that still have kind of three dimensionality to them. And so you can put all these different features into them that gives you really, really high performance cooling in a kind of single piece metal package that you really can't get other places. And so we've been doing a lot of work kind of developing products for that market, some of the latest NVIDIA and AMD GPUs as well as some of the CPUs that those companies put out. And we've been really successful in rapidly iterating there, right? Like one of the first products that we put out, we went from clean sheet to a delivered product to a customer in about 5 weeks, which is a really exciting thing for, you know, a clean sheet design and showing incredibly competitive, you know, kind of industry leading performance on that device. For design and CAD work, we use Onshape, which is a browser based CAD software, a little bit nontraditional compared to what folks might be used to with like SolidWorks in Creole. Andre's actually owned by PTC now. So it is like a major tool owned by a major CAD company and it's really come a huge way in the last 5-10 years to where it is an enterprise grade CAD tool now, but with some really unique features in that I can share CAD either with a customer or a. Coworker with just a single link right which is a really awesome thing especially when we have customers that are located across the entire world right and so that's a really powerful thing so yeah on shape is our primary CAD tool we have simulation we use another browser based tool called simscale which allows us to do cloud based simulation of computational fluid dynamics structural things like that and then other than that the tools that we use are primarily built in helps so as we. Take a a solid model and turn it into a a sliced file that we can put on to our machines. That entire text stack was built here by our software team, and so both the applications engineers and the production engineers leverage that both to turn the parts into something we can manufacture and to run the machines themselves. So typically you start with a screening call with myself, right? And really the purpose of that call is just to kind of establish a relationship, get to know you and get an initial read on both capabilities. And then also alignment to the role, right? Making sure that the role is what the candidate expects and, and is aligned with their career interests and then ensuring that kind of their experience and their capabilities aligned with what we need for the role. And so that's kind of that. Initial Screener, we typically do that via Zoom. It's like 1/2 hour to an hour call depending on the role. And then after that we typically will bring people on site for about, you know a few hours. And that on site interview includes a kind of three different steps. The 1st is a site tour, right? So we kind of walk you through the facility here. We have our production facility as Co located with our engineers here in Burlington, MA. So we take you around the production. Or show you the process, show you some parts, let you ask questions about, you know, how the process works and kind of how that intersects with the applications engineering team. After that, we do a technical interview with the applications team and that is more focused on kind of the design, design for manufacturing skills, right? Like how do you go about taking apart and turning it into something that we can manufacture, assessing things like maybe your knowledge of thermal, thermal. Thermal management, that's what I was going for, yeah. Looking at your knowledge of thermal management, CAD design, all of that. Typically there's a small kind of design exercise that we bring as part of that as well to kind of give you an opportunity to demonstrate your CAD skills and your design skills. And then the final piece is a cross functional interview. Typically that's somebody from the process team and someone from the production team. And the idea there is you're going to have to work closely with these people through your time at Alloy and so just ensuring that. You know, they get a chance to weigh in to evaluate your capability for kind of that cross functional work and then also giving you an opportunity to talk to them and understand a bit better how the applications team works with the process team, the production team to bring apart to life. I think Alloy has, I'm gonna give you 2 answers here. But First off, our technology is, is really exciting, right? Like we can just do things that nobody else can do. And I feel like every week we're learning new things that we can do with our technology. So the ceiling is incredibly high. I think the market that we've chosen in thermal management is really ripe for the technology that we're bringing to it. And that gives us a lot of market opportunity, a lot of chances to do new things to cool. Things that we're gonna see out in the wild and making a real impact across, you know, variety of industries. So that's like, I think what gets me out of bed every morning is I love the technology. I love the challenges that we get to face. But I think maybe even more important than that is the kind of culture of collaboration that we have here. Alloy, it's one of my favorite things about working here is there's really, there's no closed doors, there's no artificial walls, there's no silos that we build between teams. It is really incredibly collaborative. I can look out the window of the Roman right now and see my applications team and they can just stand up and talk over 1/2 wall and be talking to a process engineer. And I see that happen 10 times a day, 20 times a day, right. And that kind of breaking down those walls between teams enables us to both work so much faster, but also to. To do better, right, to generate more interesting, more effective parts and results because we have that kind of open communication, that ability to work together. And I think that just makes it a joy to come in here every day.