How Renan Devillieres from OSS Ventures Is Reinventing Manufacturing with SaaS and AI

Renan Devillieres is the CEO of OSS Ventures. Renan Devillieres is a CEO who is passionate about making a positive impact on society and the environment, and who believes in using technology to drive change. Renan has a wealth of experience in areas such as manufacturing operations, SaaS, and venture capital. 

Timestamps

01:00 – Renan’s unconventional path from Google search to joining McKinsey.

03:00 – Transition from factory director to building a tech startup; early failures and pivots.

05:10 – Moving to San Francisco, finding product-market fit, and exiting the company.

06:30 – Renan’s “two-brain” perspective: manufacturing ops + tech nerd.

07:45 – The “McKinsey Mafia” mindset and lessons in execution and client obsession.

09:10 – Building a business in Brazil due to GDPR limitations in Europe.

10:30 – Insights into Brazil's leapfrog into mobile-first B2C products and the “Brazil Tax.”

12:20 – Founding OSS Ventures to marry tech and factories.

13:50 – Crawling 400 industrial startups and discovering lack of deal flow.

15:30 – OSS Ventures’ two-track model: invest or build startups from scratch.

17:00 – 22 companies launched, 11 have reached Series A, $34M ARR collectively.

18:15 – OSS is geography agnostic; scaling across 2,200 factories globally.

19:30 – U.S. vs. European ecosystems: founder mindset vs. investor influence.

21:00 – Lack of scale-stage capital and talent density in Europe.

22:40 – AI’s impact: blue-collar factory jobs have already been reduced—white-collar roles are next.

24:00 – Supply chains must adapt to geopolitical uncertainty and rising material costs.

25:30 – Manufacturers now facing extreme swings in inputs like cocoa and need vertical integration.

27:15 – War economy forces creative supply chains; rethinking of products and processes.

28:30 – Advice to manufacturing founders: swing for big markets; this space is hard but rewarding.

29:40 – Learning from Elon Musk: physical innovation and first principles over optimizing CTRs.

31:10 – A cultural shift: new builders prefer solving real-world physical problems.

32:40 – The 12-week co-founding trial to test for resilience and fit with OSS.

Renan’s Links 

LDN– https://fr.linkedin.com/in/renan-devillieres

Website – https://www.oss.ventures/

My Links 

Podcast: https://lifeselfmastery.com/itunes

Newsletter: https://partner-grow.beehiiv.com/subscribe

YouTube:  youtube.com/lifeselfmastery

Twitter: https://twitter.com/rohitmal

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohit857/

Agency: https://bit.ly/41YuNnx