Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S6E23 Mihir Shah | Buying & Growing a High Performing Machine Shop
In this episode, Aaron Moncur interviews Mihir Shah, an engineer-turned-entrepreneur who shares insights from his diverse career spanning Tesla, Inspect AR, and now Tomai Engineering. Mihir discusses his journey through engineering, startup growth, investment strategies, and the importance of first principles thinking.
Main Topics:
- Engineering career path
- First principles thinking in business
- Design for manufacturability (DFM)
- Startup and acquisition experiences
- Hardware FYI newsletter
- Investment strategies with Shaw Ventures
About the guest: Mihir Shah is an engineer and entrepreneur with a diverse background in hardware design, startup leadership, and industrial investment. He holds electrical engineering degrees from Santa Clara University and the University of Pennsylvania. His early work included roles at Tesla and Axon. In 2018, he co-founded inspectAR, an AR tool for PCB debugging, acquired by Cadence in 2020.
He currently serves as President of TOMI Engineering, a CNC machining and assembly company serving the aerospace, defense, and medical industries, where he drives growth through investments in talent and technology. Mihir is also a Principal at Shah Capital Ventures, a family investment firm with holdings in industrial businesses like Summit Interconnect and Royal Circuits.
Additionally, he co-founded Hardware FYI, a growing platform with over 12,000 subscribers that supports hardware engineers through resources like newsletters, job boards, and interview guides. His broad expertise makes him well-suited to speak on engineering leadership, startups, and the future of hardware.
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About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us
The hardest part is starting. Most people you talk to, they talk about doing a business, they overthink it, this and that. But man, if you just get started, it is so much easier the second, third, fourth time around and you candidly, I think you need to have the first two, three experiences you
Aaron Moncur:Hello and welcome to the being an engineer podcast. Today's guest is Mihir Shah, a seasoned engineer and entrepreneur currently serving as president of tomai engineering, an as 9100 certified CNC machining company supporting aerospace, defense and medical industries with a background that includes engineering roles at Tesla and axon co founding inspect AR acquired by cadence and leading ventures through Shaw capital ventures and the hardware FYI newsletter. Mihir brings a unique blend of technical depth and business acumen to the conversation. Mihir, thank you so much for being with us today. Thanks, Aaron, happy to be here. Awesome. Been excited to talk to you, because you have such a rich background, right, not only with engineering, but also entrepreneurship and business and so we'll dig into all of those topics. But let me start with the the standard first question I ask everyone, which is, what made you decide to become an engineer?
Mihir Shah:Well, it's funny. I started college kind of with the idea of, oh, maybe I'll go be a doctor. And I remember I got back my first some bio, whatever course exam I had a D on it, I was like a heart attack. But, man, I can't figure this out. I don't know if I was if I was very math in high school, and I don't really know what I do. And I had some people in the hall and the dorm I was staying in, and they were mechanical engineers. And I was like, Okay, maybe it was a bio engineering I wasn't ready to leave the bio. I didn't really know the world outside that. And took this digital logic course. I think that was one of the first engineering courses that I took, and I just found it really interesting. And then I think it kind of dawned on me more like, wow, I'm actually enjoying this and kind of driving why I want to do this stuff, from like a first principle standpoint, outside of what seemed to me on the other side of just taking classes purely for the purpose of preparing for an exam for some accreditation to go be this doctor. I wasn't even sure, you know that whole world, I just have no anyways, I like the course. I kept taking more of them, and I said, this is what I like to do, and I'll kind of figure it out from there.
Aaron Moncur:Fantastic. And that that led to a job eventually with with Tesla. And then from there, you now are the president of tomai engineering, CNC machining shop. How have some of these experiences so working as an engineer at Tesla, you started inspect AR, and I don't know if you started, I shouldn't have said that. I know that you were an integral I was a co founder
Mihir Shah:of the Okay, co founder, the my other co founders actually technically started it, and I was lucky enough to meet them a little bit later on the journey and kind of join them and find a way to grow the business together, yeah,
Aaron Moncur:and then be acquired, right? Selling it, correct?
Mihir Shah:Yeah, one of the largest kind of EDA companies cross semiconductor all the way up to the PCB level beyond, yeah. And
Aaron Moncur:so now, through Shaw ventures, I think you've acquired to my engineering and your president there is that accurate?
Mihir Shah:I'm sorry, I just said Somebody's at the door. I've actually got the machine shop right now? So there are
Aaron Moncur:lots of hats, sure. So my question is, all these diverse experiences you've had as an engineer, as a startup, co founder, as president of a company, how have all these experiences shaped your approach to leadership in the engineering environment? I
Mihir Shah:It's, God, it sounds so corny, but I, I really think it just comes down to first principles, thinking and kind of understanding the root of why I'm doing something, or if there's a problem, instead of panicking, being like, Okay, well, what are the symptoms? What's kind of one order away from that? And you could think of, you know, I always kind of use the example of, like, Okay, if you plug in a PCB and suddenly something sparks, there could be a number of things that went wrong, and you kind of started the spark. You kind of go back and you have the multimeter out, or whatever it is, you start to disconnect things from it and test one at a time, and you just really get that first order understanding of why things went wrong, and you're able to kind of piece and segment things apart. And again, that sounds kind of generics, not broad, but that is a reasonably good way to kind of approach most problems, I think, in life, and that's generally worked for me so far, even when we're buying. Looking for companies to buy when we come in here, and we're looking for ways to grow companies on the sales side and buy new equipment on the CNC side or at the PCB shops, whatever it is. So long answer, but first principles thinking from the beginning, and yes, obviously part of the I subscribe to the Tesla dogma of that first principles thinking, but it generally works, and we just try to stay true to that.
Aaron Moncur:I love that I read Elon Musk's biography a year or so ago. I thought it was fascinating, but one of the parts I really enjoyed was his first principles thinking, right? And a concrete example of that that I thought was so neat, and I had never thought about it this way until reading it in his book, was the cost of a product that you're producing, if you just look at the raw materials. So how much did the steel cost to produce this product? Whatever the product is, it's going to be, you know, X amount of dollars. And then if you look at the final product, it's going to be X amount of dollars for the raw material, plus whatever labor and processing was required to get it into its final form. And if that final number is is significantly greater than the raw cost of the material, there might be a problem or an opportunity for improvement in your processing. And I thought, Man, that's it's such like a simple, basic way to think about it, but I had never thought about it that way. And I always thought that was a great example of first principles thinking
Mihir Shah:Correct. I mean, you it's, you're basically deriving what a profit and loss statement is that way, right? It's like you have your revenue and cost of goods, and you really got to hold that gross margin as a true number and constantly benchmark it and kind of keep dialing it in. And we do that at all of our businesses, we do a monthly flux. We're checking on a kind of bi weekly basis where we have versus our forecast. And it's not just for some spreadsheet reporting guy in an office kind of level. It's just, Hey, why did this go up? Maybe it doesn't matter, but I sure want to know. I just want it on the floor level, understand everything that's happening, from the cost of coolant to, hey, why is the coffee up by 20% it doesn't matter. I'm not thinking about cutting costs. All is about just it's easier to go get more sales and try to optimize the business, but you still kind of know what's going
Aaron Moncur:on. I've always thought that engineers make great business owners because they're trained to look at the numbers, that they understand numbers, and they can follow trends based on numbers. Did you always know that you wanted to get into the business of engineering, or was that more of a recent realization in your career, one
Mihir Shah:of our recent but no, I don't think I really had a plan starting out, and I just took these classes. I really liked it, and I was lucky enough to get an internship at Tesla, which is really what it was. And then it led into more full time, but it really was an internship, so I got in there, and I don't know, I just I started being able to surround myself by smarter and smarter people. I think that's I also realized, man, I'm not probably going to make it as some Principal Engineer at Tesla. I just don't think I have it, and maybe I don't enjoy it, but candidly, I just didn't think I have the technical acumen to really excel and be that valuable at that level to a company like Tesla. And so, you know, I tried math elsewhere, and this and that, and I just found that I enjoyed selling things or products or services, and found that man, like I enjoy this whole side of things, and I'm I've seen what excellence looks like. I'm able to recruit smart people to kind of join me in different parts of the business, and that basic philosophy, and I guess, ability to really figure out the customer profile, find a way to get them interested in whatever it is, and then, on the back end, be able to build a team of excellent people around me that has basically been the high level, simple playbook every business that we've been involved with, good and bad, but it's all endured in some capacity.
Aaron Moncur:I'm hearing a lot of parallels with my own journey. I I've always felt like I'm never going to be that superstar engineer. I was good enough at what I did, and I earned a living as an engineer, but really, I'm a lot better with people in organization and communication. I enjoy the business side of things, I'd say more than I like the engineering at this point. So it's always fun to talk with people who have had, like, similar backgrounds and mindsets. So right now, at tomai engineering, you guys, calling you a machine shop probably doesn't do you justice with all the different you know, processes that you do there, but one of the questions I wanted to ask you is, running a machine shop. How do you refer to to my engineering? Do you call it a machine shop? Or do you
Mihir Shah:call it something else? Sometimes I find that the terms machine shop and job shop are kind of used interchangeably. And of course, there's nothing wrong with job shops. Many, many people build incredible careers to make more money than us, a lot more building running job shops. This is. More of a programmatic aerospace and defense, you know, complex machining and assembly business, but, yeah, we're a machine shop
Aaron Moncur:for machine shop, all right. I mean,
Mihir Shah:I'm sure, I know people can't see the screen, but here's a part we make for our platform. Here's a part we make for, you know, a different missile system. And there's all sorts of different interesting components that we make for the mission, mission critical platforms, generally, at some volume, and we've been able to do it repeatedly and successfully. And I say we really, it's the founders of the company and the team that's been here for 20, 3040, years. We were lucky enough to join the business via acquisition in November of last year, and now it's been, you know, almost six months, and it's, it's going well, but that's, uh, yeah, that's how I refer to it. It's today we are, in many ways, and will continue to be a machine shop, a great one, an amazing one, a niche, focused one, but a machine job, correct? I have no doubt, an amazing
Aaron Moncur:one this. This might be too in the weeds for you in the president role, but let me ask it anyway and see if you have any comments on here. What are a couple of the design choices that engineers make that lead to parts that are just expensive, unnecessarily expensive, to manufacture, maybe
Mihir Shah:not going down to, like, the specific design choices, but these are kind of some of the immediate ramifications that we see on our side. A lot of times, there are some choices made that require custom tools. So it's more saying, like, hey, think about, are you making that cut, or how we're going to get into it. Some times, like, the tolerances that people put kind of as a broad stroke over the print may or may not actually be required, but that does have a downstream effect, and not just how we machine it, but also how we inspect it, and the time going back and forth to get it to that level. So there's always opportunity to change it. And what we found is, on our side, we always try to be a DFM partner, and so we almost always, at the quote stage, we'll send even a simple kind of PDF or Word doc. There's a platform we'll use it. Hey, here's a couple things. If you change this, change fill radius here. Change this, if you guys wouldn't mind going to this, or if there's a strong reason, maybe help us understand it. Almost every time we've done that over the last four months, 90 plus percent. We've gotten the changes we asked for quickly, and that's why some of these customers we have are just fantastic, and made the part a lot more manufacturable. We were able to produce the lead time and the cost absolutely went down. We didn't have to go get custom tools, you know, created or ground down. We didn't have to go get a wide number of tools. We didn't have to go plan for a lower yield, or whatever it is. So that's huge. Yeah, that's huge. Thinking about that, I would say is it's not so much about every part's different, but just always think as you're designing, like, how am I going to machine this thing is, or how am I going to make it? And by the way, same thing applies on the PCB side. Do I need traces to be so thin? Do I really need this tight, tight lack of clearance, really, between the traces. Do I really need that extra two layers? Do I need this specific thickness? Blah, blah, blah, and etc, etc. Just, why are you choosing things you're doing? If you can bring it down, if you can, just, how is this going to be manufactured? I think there's a question if you're always asking yourself, and by the way, it's not like we expect everybody to know. When I was an electrical engineer, I really didn't know until I worked on the PCB manufacturing side before to my will just reach out to the shop that you may or may not you know you may work with, and we'll do a DFM call and we'll walk through your print and the stem file in real time. We do that all the time. You
Aaron Moncur:the product development expo or PDX is your chance to learn from subject matter experts, providing practical hands on training for dozens of different engineering topics, Gd and T advanced surface modeling, DFM, plating and finishing techniques, programming, robots, adhesive, dispensing, prototyping, tips and tricks and lots more. PDX happens October, 21 and 22nd in Phoenix, Arizona. Learn more at PD Expo. Dot engineer, that's p, d, e, x, p, O. Dot engineer, you here, speaking of PCBs. So inspect AR was a company that you helped grow and and was acquired, yeah, and it was focused on AR tools for PCB debugging. Can you tell us a little bit about how that worked and maybe one of the challenges that you all encountered growing the business on the technical side, and how you overcame that challenge? Oh,
Mihir Shah:oh, yeah. I mean, that was, I guess the problem could be distilled down to the constant context switching if you're an electrical engineer, especially in the lab, and also just a lot. Lack of information readily available when you have especially at the final stage, you've designed the board, you've gotten it back, maybe it's assembled inspector was also thought of this being useful in the assembly stage. But afterwards, you got on your bench, and you're doing debugging, right? You're turning it on. You're going through stages. You're probing different points. Wait, I forgot to add a test point, or I did add a test point. What's this? In six out of whatever 60 plus do? Is this? The input? Is this? The ITC line? I forget the silk screen isn't Oh, I got to cut a trace. Where should I cut it? But all the things that I've been through on a free board, maybe I just haven't designed the best boards, but I've been through it. A lot of my coworkers have been through it. This basically brought it all together, your schematic, your actual layout file, even parts of the drawing and the notes, and overlays it onto a physical view of the board. So on your feed, as you're with the board underneath it and you're debugging it, you can see, oh, all the things extracted and basically an AR point to click on a part, and it'll tell you everything about it pulls up the data sheet, etc, etc. So just all the things that I would normally have, a printout of my schematic. I would have my layout on my computer. I might have another screen or monitor something there tied to just the web. So I can go on Digi key or go look up a particular part, see the data sheet. Everything's now in one place, point, click. That was kind of the idea. A lot of challenges, building the tool and definitely growing the company. I mean, we're using a reasonably novel technology, certainly at the time, in an area that I would say is super advanced, but in a lot of ways, somewhat slower to change for I think a lot of the right reasons. But, yeah, I mean, it just, we're building it from scratch, and a lot of the kind of framework we've been using is, was largely for gaming, kind of the Unity engine and things like that. And so we had to find different frameworks to get to you, what if your hands in the way, and the board is at an angle. Things start to break on those edge cases. And so we found some other AR framework, or you want to call it from South Korea, and I remember me and our CTO were on a call. We're negotiating this package, and we get it, it totally improved the software to a point we're able to get a big contract because we can handle, you know, the tool working in that customer's environment, and that then helped us kind of get to the next level and be a more attractive acquisition target for a company like cadence, which was the right thing for the business at the time, because it was still a pretty novel and somewhat infant technology that just needed more resources. And, you know, not sure how venture backable or scalable the business this was. So this was really the right, the right outcome for the business. And you know, everybody did quite well on the exit.
Aaron Moncur:Terrific, terrific. Well, congratulations on that. Let's, let's talk about the the acquisition side for a moment. So you're not only an engineer, you're not only a business owner, but you're also an investor through Shaw venture capital. How? What are some of the criteria that that you use when you're trying to identify whether you know investing in a particular company is is going to pan out or not?
Mihir Shah:Yeah. I mean, first of all, this investor is, I think giving me too much credit. You know, a lot of people go on these podcasts and they're like, Oh, I'm an investor. I'm this, and I don't know, we've done a few good deals. In fact, I guess every deal we've done we're happy with. We have a long road ahead of us, but we're pretty early in our journey, and deals is another broad term. Generally speaking, we only get involved in businesses. We can have an outsized influence in and so of course, we think, therefore we can have an outsized return because we're in control. And what we mean by that is we're generally looking for companies to more majority or fully acquire, whether they they would like, you know, generally speaking with for the businesses on the the more mature kind of like machine job or PCB business, these are generally owners that are kind of looking at 10 years out, where are They going to be? Where's the business going to be? Maybe it makes sense to find a good technical partner that wants to continue investing the business and taking care of the employees. That's where we're a really good fit. And then on the startup side, unless we're running it, and I guess this applies to all of our businesses, unless me, my brother, my cousin, one of us is, like, incredibly involved in the business, basically running it, or very close to in whatever circumstance that makes sense, we're probably not going to invest. We're certainly not being speculative investments. We're not randomly angel investing, if we really think we can have an outsized influence. And therefore return, and we have some unfair advantage, which is a very small number of businesses. We we think we're smart, we think we're great. I don't think we can have that much positive influence on a wide variety of businesses. It's pretty niche, but we stick to our lane, then we do that. So the latest, and I don't mean to ramble, but the latest. Software company that we got involved with this is a startup we actually got Nick and Matt, two of my former co founders from inspect AR, and we put them together with my brother Mahul, and we started this company with them. We all added together called Ground Control. Ground Control automates this one standardized report, is what they do today. But well, okay, the tagline really is mission critical software for highly regulated industries. But what the heck does that mean? Well, today, what that means is we automate this one hyper specific but absolute necessity, required report and any shop or any business selling or shipping parts to aerospace, but they have this as 9100 certification. Well, that means you need to do a as 9102 first article inspection report. This is a standardized but laborious form that just takes time to fill out. People have. Most businesses have a person, maybe two, sometimes more in some of our businesses, we have more full time basically filling this report out to ship parts out to these prime contractors and larger aerospace OEMs. Well, we basically built software to automate the majority, if not all, of it, and assist and enable these teams to basically do more within their businesses. And then, you know, we have a whole roadmap beyond just this report. There's other reports, there's other places that you can make a big impact within these kind of aerospace and highly regulated environments, medical, etc, but that's something where we put the team together. We live the experience. We knew this was a problem, and we live it. And we, you know, we put our money where our mouth is. We put the team together. We invest in the business, but more importantly, we use this tool every day at tomai and all of our other businesses, and it makes a huge difference. It's actually impactful piece of software, which is kind of rare in manufacturing, where oftentimes it's the output is data that we can then do something with. Maybe that's not as interesting as just I got this problem. My job is to make and ship parts. The shipping parts, if you can make that part faster, great. That's kind of where we think about things. And so that's an example of a startup that we got involved with. They, you know, they're part of the latest Y Combinator batch. I had my own thoughts on that, but they're gonna kick ass regardless. I think it's only a good thing that even other people on all sides of the aisle. See value in it. So that's kind of how we do it. Even co factor is another company that we invested in early stage. We did not take anything like a large stake in the company. This is more like an angel type investment, but influence in the sense of we really found value in the tool, and we became major customer of theirs. Early on, they've since grown far past us being, you know, some, some large kind of part of their business, but we're able to give them a lot of feedback. We use the tool. We got a lot of value, and I think that traction helped them continue to grow. They've grown to they have probably 10 times more employees now than when they did when we originally started working with them. So Law Firm, we like to get involved in businesses that we really want to use the product, or we see some way that we can help we have some unfair advantage in our ecosystem, or a thinking that we know is going to get this thing to grow, and there's not that many businesses that fit that model. So we're pretty selective, and that's kind of how we do it sounds
Aaron Moncur:like that leads to compounding enhancements or improvements. If you're already in a business that requires that tool, that software, now you start using that and and then it just grows to other places, other areas of the business. It's amazing to me that a business can be built around a single form, automating the completion of this single form. I mean,
Mihir Shah:I'll get in trouble if I talk too much about how many customers and snap. But it's, it's, it's kind of crazy. I mean, there's, it's factories, and the better part of the comfort states in this country using this tool across verticals, within manufacturing, okay, it's discipline six. There's a wire harness, there's print circuit board assemblers, machine shops, distributors, fastener companies, this and the other. So there's a lot of folks using ground control today, and this is a company that's been around for less than a year. It's just amazing. So we're going to continue to find ways to be involved in the business, support the founders, keep using the tool and be a design partner them, and, of course, continue investing in the business, because when we find something that we know is working and we we like being a part of we're going to double down.
Aaron Moncur:I think a lot of engineers become engineers because they truly enjoy solving problems, and as engineers, that's what we do. We're professional technical problem solvers. Issues, would you say that you find the same enjoyment on the business side of things, where you're just you're solving problems. They're different problems than engineering problems, but they're problems nonetheless. And that's what attracts you to the business side of engineering, or is it something else that really motivates you to be there? Yeah, you
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Mihir Shah:I think you summed it up well, the best engineering the toughest engineering problems I solved were the ones where I didn't necessarily feel like a Mechanical Turk, and they said, Oh, go, here's exactly this defined perfect spec, and there's a block that fits it. Just go Google it and bring it and put it in there. It was always loose. It was always, I don't know, how do we make this thing more efficient or just work? And just, that's your job is to figure out a way to do whatever the high level goal is, and just, you know, not perfectly hit it, because as close as you possibly can. And there's a lot of different options. And I guess maybe the short way of saying that is always thinking in terms of trade offs, not necessarily absolutes, and always trying to continuous improvement things like that. So, you know, I can use this power supply versus the other one, or whatever, this DCDC converter, and this one costs more than the other, but this one has a smaller footprint, and this one has less IO, and it's easier to program. And there's whatever the case may be, it has a wider range of inputs I can handle, and there's less ancillary components that are needed to really integrate this module. Thinking like that. It's not like there's an obvious choice. You really got to think about trade offs, and the same thing goes with business and with hiring, or with acquiring a company or investing in a business, or deciding what machine to buy. That's largely an engineering problem, but there's a whole business element, especially when it's your company and you're really the only one that has the lead on what machine you're going to buy. I don't know. We just have to deal with that. Let's go see all the different machines. Let me understand what is one to one, they all label similar spec in a different way. We'll have to normalize it somehow and find a way to compare it. And then the business side and the engineering side, at a certain point, you have to make a decision go for it. So, yeah, that's kind of an intake. I
Aaron Moncur:can't remember who said it, but there are no solutions, only trade offs. I don't know if that's 100% true, but it's a clever saying that I like makes sense. Well, let's talk about hardware FYI first. This is a newsletter that you and a co founder started and are growing. It's about a year old and already has over 12,000 subscribers, which I found to be so impressive, just a year in 12,000 subscribers already. What was the gap that you were trying to fill with hardware, FYI and and how did you grow so quickly to 12,000 subscribers in a year?
Mihir Shah:Well, okay, so this was something actually I started three, maybe four years ago, or something like that. And I, you know, this was around the time of i We had just sold inspector, I'm thinking of another company. I don't have any great ideas, but, man, morning brew just sold for an incredible amount of money to Business Insider and pen gaming and bar store, all these kind of the concept of inbound marketing, proprietary media was pretty interesting to me. And I said, Okay, well, I've technical background, and I find these things interesting. I read a lot about what's going on, and I have friends in all these interesting companies, they're always feeding me interesting information. Maybe there's a way I can compile some of this in a way that is interesting to other people. It started as that way, and then the thought very quickly went to well before we had acquired another one of these circuit board businesses, we had the two other ones, Royal circuits and advanced assembly. And how do you reach engineers? How do you reach electrical engineers in particular? Well, the option, generally speaking, of where to maybe put marketing dollars or effort into is trade shows LinkedIn, which are all totally fine, and we still do all those things, but there's different kind of ROI every year, LinkedIn, every month, whatever the price goes up, but you're, you know, you don't get necessarily that many more leads or clicks that are actually that relevant. Trade Shows are fine and good, and I think there are plenty that are absolutely excellent. Yeah, but there's only so many of them here. Is there somewhat of an inbound marketing channel out there first, let's just see if there's something out there. We looked and there's all these kind of more industry publications, but they're really to like, if you're a service provider or a machine shop or a printed circuit board assembler or fab shop, you you're getting sold to. You're the customer. In that instance, for me to reach my customer, an electrical engineer at a rocket company or something like that, that's a bit more difficult. And so there really was nothing out there. Where do these Is there a common place where engineers like myself read or go online? Maybe there's some forums? Okay, it sounds like a gap. We can just go build it. So I started writing this newsletter. Got a small following. I was able to get up to like, 1500 1200 readers, which, when you're just writing something actually is kind of a big that's amazing to me. And how do you monetize it? Well, this is more inbound for our core business in the back. If I can get eyeballs, I can get people in a room, maybe then I can offer them these services in a non salesy way as third party. And so we started doing that. And then, long story short, Benji, who had started to more of interview, Pep cheat sheet, not so much a newsletter. Had this thing called hardware FII. I like the name. He reached out. And I had heard of it, but I'd never reached out to him. He reached out first, and I, I was, happened to be in San Francisco the next week, I met up with him for for lunch, and then I remember at the end, I was like, You know what? This makes a ton of sense. Why don't we write you a check to quit your job and do this full time? This is not something that I think is going to be this venture scale opportunity, but I actually think we could do quite well in it, because we're generating real revenue. People are paying us 10s of 1000s of dollars, and they actually see the ROI because it's there. This is the business. Why don't we go formalize it, build a bit of a team now, with Benji on there, incentivize them and empower them to go full time and basically keep this high technical integrity in the writing, and let's go build this thing. And man, in the last year, Benji, I will candidly have been a little less involved in the last couple months, just being involved with tomline, everything else we're doing. But I still go to the events. I'm still editing the newsletter to the best of my ability, but Benji, we're able to bring on one of my other former inspector, co founders, Liam, to help us as well. So we got a small team of us, but we're writing this thing now twice a week. We have events, generally every month, mostly on the West Coast, done other ones. And we built what I would call a community. And there are people that, I mean Tomah, in some ways, has benefited, because there are people that know about the company, and I've met because they read the newsletter. I just kind of call actually, before this from the founder of i this from the founder of a really interesting company automating control panel design and development manufacturing, that was a reader the newsletter. And it's really, really cool to see that community been built. It's cool to see that nobody feels that they're being pushed or shoved a sales agenda. It's just highly technical. Technically integrity, integral. Oh my god. What was trying to say? High technical integrity, content, proprietary content. And it's fresh, it's consistent. We don't really miss an issue every week ever, and that's what it is. We want to be the most interesting and consistent place that you can go to to just keep your engineering curiosity. Learn about news happening, especially in the startup side, there are people developing Where are jobs available? And it's more of an all encompassing resource. And there's, you know, some offshoots from that, and we're continuing to develop that. So it's, it's growing. We're looking, actually looking, to partner with other publications. So if you have any recommendations and that, we'd love to find a way to bring people into the hardware FYI ecosystem as we grow the company.
Aaron Moncur:And where can people go if they want to sign up for hardware FYI? You can just go
Mihir Shah:to hardware fyi.com you can Google the hardware sub stack. That's where we publish the newsletter on the substack platform. But all roads basically lead to the newsletter and putting your email in, and we'll get you signed up. We post recently, often on LinkedIn and things like that, but online is probably the best place, and probably the links in the description of this podcast, terrific.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah. We'll definitely add a link there in the podcast. Well, let's see. I think we can wrap things up. Nihir, anything else that we didn't hit on that you think would be interesting or useful for folks to hear?
Mihir Shah:No, I think, look, I appreciate you interviewing me. I'm glad this is also going to be really helpful, most relevant to heart of FYI. And just if we can, if I can be a resource to anybody great, I have accomplished a few things in my own right. I don't think I'm this sage business wizard, and I got a long way to go, because I just I got long ago. So it's cool for people to hear this, because I think I've also done random podcasts years before, and this is a whole jump from them. And I hope the next podcast I do is at a whole different. Stage as we continue to grow all of our businesses. So I appreciate if anybody even listened this far. You can reach out to me personally on LinkedIn, just you'll find me and just add meal. DM me. I'm easy, pretty, pretty, pretty responsive, wonderful.
Aaron Moncur:We'll have a link to your LinkedIn profile as well in the show notes, thank you. All right. Well, Mihir, thanks again. So much for being on the show. Congratulations on the variety of different successes you have had, and I'm sure you will continue to have in your career. And thank you for contributing to the podcast content. I appreciate it. Thanks
Mihir Shah:for having me, Aaron, and yeah, nobody ever talks about the failures. There's probably 15 between each one. The failed newsletter at two other field companies that even the companies that we sold, in a lot of ways, it didn't meet the full expectation. I almost have to like end with that to be like, Man, if anyone wants to talk about that, that could be a 10 times longer podcast, and it will probably be 50 times longer in 10 years, after all the things we're going to try that won't work out, but that's, you know, we just keep moving.
Aaron Moncur:Well, we might need to do a second podcast where we talk about that, and maybe just with like, the, you know, 30 seconds a minute we have left here. What, what is one of the, the greatest lessons that you have learned from one of your failures? Uh,
Mihir Shah:probably, man, when I was a, when I was at axon on the side to try to try to start a cleaning business. I don't know. I just didn't have any other ideas. Let me just try something. How can I make a buck? I was just trying to think, can I make $1 for the internet? Can I make $1 a person? And it was, at the time, almost insurmountable to make a website. I have to find a cleaner. How do we get a customer? And we're going to sleeping like, I don't know if I can do this. How am I going to think of this? And I'm like, a cleaning company. This is not difficult now, but it's the biggest lesson I got. And that did not end up doing well. I didn't grow it into some successful business at all. But man, I started, I got a couple customers, repeat clients, and I was like doing this on the weekends and after work. It the hardest part is starting. And most people you talk to, they talk about doing a business. They overthink it, this and that. But, man, if you just get started, it is so much easier the second, third, fourth time around. And you can, I think you need to have the first two, three experiences. So just jump in with whatever stupid idea you have, whatever. Let it run its course. Go to the next one. Go to the next one. You will hit one that's a little bit bigger than you. From what I think is the case, you'll be able to keep going bigger.
Aaron Moncur:I love that you say that the part about after you start your first couple of businesses, it gets a lot easier technically. Pipeline is my second business that I've done. The first business was a really small photography company that I ran part time with a friend for like, three or four years, and it was great. And then I started pipeline, and this has been 15 years, you know, and going. So this has been wonderful. And I agree with you now that looking back like starting another business does not seem daunting at this point. It's like, Yeah, I know the things that I need to do, and, you know, just go out and do them. So, it's just interesting how perspective changes over time and experience totally well. Thanks, Aaron, yeah, thank you so much. Mihir. I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please share the episode to learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R D services. Visit us at Team pipeline.us. To join a vibrant community of engineers online. Visit the wave. Dot, engineer, thank you for listening. You
