About this episode

Alex Huckstepp discusses the intersection of technology and manufacturing, focusing on the challenges faced by small machine shops.

Alex Huckstepp has spent his career where new technology meets the people who make things. A mechanical engineer out of USC who graduated into the wreckage of 2010, he spent the next decade running commercial strategy at four hardware startups in a row: 3D printing, metal additive, robotic forming, composites. All of them fundamentally new ways of making physical things. Then he and his co-founder Benny got tired of begging investors for money to build complex hardware, and went looking for a problem they could solve with software. They found it inside the tens of thousands of small high-mix shops across the country. Before writing a line of code, they spent three months inside twenty to thirty machine shops, trying to be flies on the wall and failing, because curiosity got the better of them. What they learned shapes the best part of this conversation. Shops don't dislike software because they're behind. They dislike it because software has never served them. And work doesn't leave the country over the labor rate anymore. It's energy and materials, it's tariffed machine tools, it's the two or three people in a nine-person shop tied to a desk doing paperwork, and it's the…

People in this episode

Host: Jim Mayer

Guest: Alex Huckstepp

Topics covered

• technology
• manufacturing
• software
• hardware startups
• machine shops
• commercial strategy

Keywords

• manufacturing
• software
• machine shops
• 3D printing
• hardware startups
• commercial strategy
• engineering

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: USC

Places: San Jose, California

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• Hexagon's Shop Floor Social Dallas | The Shiny Object vs. the People Who Make It Work · July 3, 2026 · 52 min
• Becca Wolfinger | Saving People Headaches and Heartaches · June 30, 2026 · 36 min

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