June 6, 2025 • 39 mins
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.
Links:
Click here to learn more about simulation solutions from Simutech Group.
🚀 Join Us at PDX 2025! 🚀
PDX 2025 is the Product Development Expo designed for engineers who want hands-on training from industry experts. PDX focuses on practical skill-building, cutting-edge tools, and real-world solutions.
📅 October 21-22, 2025
📍 Mesa Convention Center, AZ
🔗 https://reg.eventmobi.com/product-development-expo-2025
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
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Mihir Shah (00:00):
The hardest part is starting. Most people you talk
to, they talk about doing abusiness, they overthink it,
this and that. But man, if youjust get started, it is so much
easier the second, third, fourthtime around and you candidly, I
think you need to have the firsttwo, three experiences you
Aaron Moncur (00:28):
Hello and welcome to the being an engineer
podcast. Today's guest is MihirShah, a seasoned engineer and
entrepreneur currently servingas president of tomai
engineering, an as 9100certified CNC machining company
supporting aerospace, defenseand medical industries with a
background that includesengineering roles at Tesla and
(00:49):
axon co founding inspect ARacquired by cadence and leading
ventures through Shaw capitalventures and the hardware FYI
newsletter. Mihir brings aunique blend of technical depth
and business acumen to theconversation. Mihir, thank you
so much for being with us today.
Thanks, Aaron, happy to be here.
Awesome. Been excited to talk toyou, because you have such a
(01:12):
rich background, right, not onlywith engineering, but also
entrepreneurship and businessand so we'll dig into all of
those topics. But let me startwith the the standard first
question I ask everyone, whichis, what made you decide to
become an engineer?
Mihir Shah (01:28):
Well, it's funny. I started college kind of with the
idea of, oh, maybe I'll go be adoctor. And I remember I got
back my first some bio, whatevercourse 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 wasvery math in high school, and I
don't really know what I do. AndI had some people in the hall
(01:50):
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. Ididn't really know the world
outside that. And took thisdigital logic course. I think
that was one of the firstengineering courses that I took,
and I just found it reallyinteresting. And then I think it
kind of dawned on me more like,wow, I'm actually enjoying this
(02:13):
and kind of driving why I wantto do this stuff, from like a
first principle standpoint,outside of what seemed to me on
the other side of just takingclasses purely for the purpose
of preparing for an exam forsome accreditation to go be this
doctor. I wasn't even sure, youknow that whole world, I just
have no anyways, I like thecourse. I kept taking more of
(02:36):
them, and I said, this is what Ilike to do, and I'll kind of
figure it out from there.
Aaron Moncur (02:40):
Fantastic. And that that led to a job
eventually with with Tesla. Andthen from there, you now are the
president of tomai engineering,CNC machining shop. How have
some of these experiences soworking as an engineer at Tesla,
you started inspect AR, and Idon't know if you started, I
(03:03):
shouldn't have said that. I knowthat you were an integral I was
a co founder
Mihir Shah (03:07):
of the Okay, co founder, the my other co
founders actually technicallystarted it, and I was lucky
enough to meet them a little bitlater on the journey and kind of
join them and find a way to growthe business together, yeah,
Aaron Moncur (03:18):
and then be acquired, right? Selling it,
correct?
Mihir Shah (03:21):
Yeah, one of the largest kind of EDA companies
cross semiconductor all the wayup to the PCB level beyond,
yeah. And
Aaron Moncur (03:28):
so now, through Shaw ventures, I think you've
acquired to my engineering andyour president there is that
accurate?
Mihir Shah (03:37):
I'm sorry, I just said Somebody's at the door.
I've actually got the machineshop right now? So there are
Aaron Moncur (03:43):
lots of hats, sure. So my question is, all
these diverse experiences you'vehad as an engineer, as a
startup, co founder, aspresident of a company, how have
all these experiences shapedyour approach to leadership in
the engineering environment? I
Mihir Shah (04:01):
It's, God, it sounds so corny, but I, I really think
it just comes down to firstprinciples, thinking and kind of
understanding the root of whyI'm doing something, or if
there's a problem, instead ofpanicking, being like, Okay,
well, what are the symptoms?
What's kind of one order awayfrom that? And you could think
of, you know, I always kind ofuse the example of, like, Okay,
if you plug in a PCB andsuddenly something sparks, there
(04:26):
could be a number of things thatwent wrong, and you kind of
started the spark. You kind ofgo back and you have the
multimeter out, or whatever itis, you start to disconnect
things from it and test one at atime, and you just really get
that first order understandingof why things went wrong, and
you're able to kind of piece andsegment things apart. And again,
that sounds kind of generics,not broad, but that is a
(04:49):
reasonably good way to kind ofapproach most problems, I think,
in life, and that's generallyworked for me so far, even when
we're buying. Looking forcompanies to buy when we come in
here, and we're looking for waysto grow companies on the sales
side and buy new equipment onthe CNC side or at the PCB
shops, whatever it is. So longanswer, but first principles
(05:10):
thinking from the beginning, andyes, obviously part of the I
subscribe to the Tesla dogma ofthat first principles thinking,
but it generally works, and wejust try to stay true to that.
Aaron Moncur (05:25):
I love that I read Elon Musk's biography a year or
so ago. I thought it wasfascinating, but one of the
parts I really enjoyed was hisfirst principles thinking,
right? And a concrete example ofthat that I thought was so neat,
and I had never thought about itthis way until reading it in his
book, was the cost of a productthat you're producing, if you
(05:47):
just look at the raw materials.
So how much did the steel costto produce this product?
Whatever the product is, it'sgoing to be, you know, X amount
of dollars. And then if you lookat the final product, it's going
to be X amount of dollars forthe raw material, plus whatever
labor and processing wasrequired to get it into its
final form. And if that finalnumber is is significantly
greater than the raw cost of thematerial, there might be a
(06:09):
problem or an opportunity forimprovement in your processing.
And I thought, Man, that's it'ssuch like a simple, basic way to
think about it, but I had neverthought about it that way. And I
always thought that was a greatexample of first principles
thinking
Mihir Shah (06:25):
Correct. I mean, you it's, you're basically deriving
what a profit and loss statementis that way, right? It's like
you have your revenue and costof goods, and you really got to
hold that gross margin as a truenumber and constantly benchmark
it and kind of keep dialing itin. And we do that at all of our
businesses, we do a monthlyflux. We're checking on a kind
of bi weekly basis where we haveversus our forecast. And it's
(06:48):
not just for some spreadsheetreporting guy in an office kind
of level. It's just, Hey, whydid this go up? Maybe it doesn't
matter, but I sure want to know.
I just want it on the floorlevel, understand everything
that's happening, from the costof coolant to, hey, why is the
coffee up by 20% it doesn'tmatter. I'm not thinking about
(07:09):
cutting costs. All is about justit's easier to go get more sales
and try to optimize thebusiness, but you still kind of
know what's going
Aaron Moncur (07:16):
on. I've always thought that engineers make
great business owners becausethey're trained to look at the
numbers, that they understandnumbers, and they can follow
trends based on numbers. Did youalways know that you wanted to
get into the business ofengineering, or was that more of
a recent realization in yourcareer, one
Mihir Shah (07:37):
of our recent but no, I don't think I really had a
plan starting out, and I justtook these classes. I really
liked it, and I was lucky enoughto get an internship at Tesla,
which is really what it was. Andthen 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 beingable to surround myself by
smarter and smarter people. Ithink that's I also realized,
(07:59):
man, I'm not probably going tomake it as some Principal
Engineer at Tesla. I just don'tthink I have it, and maybe I
don't enjoy it, but candidly, Ijust didn't think I have the
technical acumen to really exceland be that valuable at that
level to a company like Tesla.
And so, you know, I tried mathelsewhere, and this and that,
and I just found that I enjoyedselling things or products or
services, and found that man,like I enjoy this whole side of
(08:23):
things, and I'm I've seen whatexcellence looks like. I'm able
to recruit smart people to kindof join me in different parts of
the business, and that basicphilosophy, and I guess, ability
to really figure out thecustomer profile, find a way to
get them interested in whateverit is, and then, on the back
end, be able to build a team ofexcellent people around me that
(08:45):
has basically been the highlevel, simple playbook every
business that we've beeninvolved with, good and bad, but
it's all endured in somecapacity.
Aaron Moncur (08:56):
I'm hearing a lot of parallels with my own
journey. I I've always felt likeI'm never going to be that
superstar engineer. I was goodenough at what I did, and I
earned a living as an engineer,but really, I'm a lot better
with people in organization andcommunication. I enjoy the
business side of things, I'd saymore than I like the engineering
(09:19):
at this point. So it's alwaysfun to talk with people who have
had, like, similar backgroundsand mindsets. So right now, at
tomai engineering, you guys,calling you a machine shop
probably doesn't do you justicewith all the different you know,
processes that you do there, butone of the questions I wanted to
ask you is, running a machineshop. How do you refer to to my
(09:43):
engineering? Do you call it amachine shop? Or do you
Mihir Shah (09:45):
call it something else? Sometimes I find that the
terms machine shop and job shopare kind of used
interchangeably. And of course,there's nothing wrong with job
shops. Many, many people buildincredible careers to make more
money than us, a lot morebuilding running job shops. This
is. More of a programmaticaerospace and defense, you know,
complex machining and assemblybusiness, but, yeah, we're a
(10:07):
machine shop
Aaron Moncur (10:08):
for machine shop, all right. I mean,
Mihir Shah (10:11):
I'm sure, I know people can't see the screen, but
here's a part we make for ourplatform. Here's a part we make
for, you know, a differentmissile system. And there's all
sorts of different interestingcomponents that we make for the
mission, mission criticalplatforms, generally, at some
volume, and we've been able todo it repeatedly and
successfully. And I say wereally, it's the founders of the
(10:33):
company and the team that's beenhere for 20, 3040, years. We
were lucky enough to join thebusiness via acquisition in
November of last year, and nowit's been, you know, almost six
months, and it's, it's goingwell, but that's, uh, yeah,
that's how I refer to it. It'stoday we are, in many ways, and
will continue to be a machineshop, a great one, an amazing
(10:54):
one, a niche, focused one, but amachine job, correct? I have no
doubt, an amazing
Aaron Moncur (11:00):
one this. This might be too in the weeds for
you in the president role, butlet me ask it anyway and see if
you have any comments on here.
What are a couple of the designchoices that engineers make that
lead to parts that are justexpensive, unnecessarily
expensive, to manufacture, maybe
Mihir Shah (11:19):
not going down to, like, the specific design
choices, but these are kind ofsome of the immediate
ramifications that we see on ourside. A lot of times, there are
some choices made that requirecustom tools. So it's more
saying, like, hey, think about,are you making that cut, or how
we're going to get into it. Sometimes, like, the tolerances that
people put kind of as a broadstroke over the print may or may
(11:42):
not actually be required, butthat does have a downstream
effect, and not just how wemachine it, but also how we
inspect it, and the time goingback and forth to get it to that
level. So there's alwaysopportunity to change it. And
what we found is, on our side,we always try to be a DFM
partner, and so we almostalways, at the quote stage,
we'll send even a simple kind ofPDF or Word doc. There's a
(12:05):
platform we'll use it. Hey,here's a couple things. If you
change this, change fill radiushere. Change this, if you guys
wouldn't mind going to this, orif there's a strong reason,
maybe help us understand it.
Almost every time we've donethat over the last four months,
90 plus percent. We've gottenthe changes we asked for
quickly, and that's why some ofthese customers we have are just
(12:25):
fantastic, and made the part alot more manufacturable. We were
able to produce the lead timeand the cost absolutely went
down. We didn't have to go getcustom tools, you know, created
or ground down. We didn't haveto go get a wide number of
tools. We didn't have to go planfor a lower yield, or whatever
it is. So that's huge. Yeah,that's huge. Thinking about
(12:46):
that, I would say is it's not somuch about every part's
different, but just always thinkas you're designing, like, how
am I going to machine this thingis, or how am I going to make
it? And by the way, same thingapplies on the PCB side. Do I
need traces to be so thin? Do Ireally need this tight, tight
lack of clearance, really,between the traces. Do I really
need that extra two layers? Do Ineed this specific thickness?
(13:07):
Blah, blah, blah, and etc, etc.
Just, why are you choosingthings you're doing? If you can
bring it down, if you can, just,how is this going to be
manufactured? I think there's aquestion if you're always asking
yourself, and by the way, it'snot like we expect everybody to
know. When I was an electricalengineer, I really didn't know
until I worked on the PCBmanufacturing side before to my
(13:28):
will just reach out to the shopthat you may or may not you know
you may work with, and we'll doa DFM call and we'll walk
through your print and the stemfile in real time. We do that
all the time. You
Aaron Moncur (13:44):
the product development expo or PDX is your
chance to learn from subjectmatter experts, providing
practical hands on training fordozens of different engineering
topics, Gd and T advancedsurface modeling, DFM, plating
and finishing techniques,programming, robots, adhesive,
dispensing, prototyping, tipsand tricks and lots more. PDX
(14:07):
happens October, 21 and 22nd inPhoenix, Arizona. Learn more at
PD Expo. Dot engineer, that's p,d, e, x, p, O. Dot engineer, you
here, speaking of PCBs. Soinspect AR was a company that
(14:29):
you helped grow and and wasacquired, yeah, and it was
focused on AR tools for PCBdebugging. Can you tell us a
little bit about how that workedand maybe one of the challenges
that you all encountered growingthe business on the technical
side, and how you overcame thatchallenge? Oh,
Mihir Shah (14:50):
oh, yeah. I mean, that was, I guess the problem
could be distilled down to theconstant context switching if
you're an electrical engineer,especially in the lab, and also
just a lot. Lack of informationreadily available when you have
especially at the final stage,you've designed the board,
you've gotten it back, maybeit's assembled inspector was
also thought of this beinguseful in the assembly stage.
(15:11):
But afterwards, you got on yourbench, and you're doing
debugging, right? You're turningit on. You're going through
stages. You're probing differentpoints. Wait, I forgot to add a
test point, or I did add a testpoint. What's this? In six out
of whatever 60 plus do? Is this?
The input? Is this? The ITCline? I forget the silk screen
isn't Oh, I got to cut a trace.
(15:33):
Where should I cut it? But allthe things that I've been
through on a free board, maybe Ijust haven't designed the best
boards, but I've been throughit. A lot of my coworkers have
been through it. This basicallybrought it all together, your
schematic, your actual layoutfile, even parts of the drawing
and the notes, and overlays itonto a physical view of the
board. So on your feed, asyou're with the board underneath
(15:57):
it and you're debugging it, youcan see, oh, all the things
extracted and basically an ARpoint to click on a part, and
it'll tell you everything aboutit pulls up the data sheet, etc,
etc. So just all the things thatI would normally have, a
printout of my schematic. Iwould have my layout on my
computer. I might have anotherscreen or monitor something
there tied to just the web. So Ican go on Digi key or go look up
(16:21):
a particular part, see the datasheet. Everything's now in one
place, point, click. That waskind of the idea. A lot of
challenges, building the tooland definitely growing the
company. I mean, we're using areasonably novel technology,
certainly at the time, in anarea that I would say is super
(16:41):
advanced, but in a lot of ways,somewhat slower to change for I
think a lot of the rightreasons. But, yeah, I mean, it
just, we're building it fromscratch, and a lot of the kind
of framework we've been usingis, was largely for gaming, kind
of the Unity engine and thingslike that. And so we had to find
different frameworks to get toyou, what if your hands in the
way, and the board is at anangle. Things start to break on
(17:04):
those edge cases. And so wefound some other AR framework,
or you want to call it fromSouth 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 pointwe're able to get a big contract
because we can handle, you know,the tool working in that
customer's environment, and thatthen helped us kind of get to
(17:25):
the next level and be a moreattractive 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 infanttechnology that just needed more
resources. And, you know, notsure how venture backable or
scalable the business this was.
(17:49):
So this was really the right,the right outcome for the
business. And you know,everybody did quite well on the
exit.
Aaron Moncur (17:56):
Terrific, terrific. Well, congratulations
on that. Let's, let's talk aboutthe the acquisition side for a
moment. So you're not only anengineer, you're not only a
business owner, but you're alsoan investor through Shaw venture
capital. How? What are some ofthe criteria that that you use
(18:20):
when you're trying to identifywhether you know investing in a
particular company is is goingto pan out or not?
Mihir Shah (18:27):
Yeah. I mean, first of all, this investor is, I
think giving me too much credit.
You know, a lot of people go onthese 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 guessevery deal we've done we're
happy with. We have a long roadahead of us, but we're pretty
early in our journey, and dealsis another broad term. Generally
speaking, we only get involvedin businesses. We can have an
(18:50):
outsized influence in and so ofcourse, we think, therefore we
can have an outsized returnbecause we're in control. And
what we mean by that is we'regenerally looking for companies
to more majority or fullyacquire, whether they they would
like, you know, generallyspeaking with for the businesses
on the the more mature kind oflike machine job or PCB
(19:13):
business, these are generallyowners that are kind of looking
at 10 years out, where are Theygoing to be? Where's the
business going to be? Maybe itmakes sense to find a good
technical partner that wants tocontinue investing the business
and taking care of theemployees. That's where we're a
really good fit. And then on thestartup side, unless we're
(19:33):
running it, and I guess thisapplies to all of our
businesses, unless me, mybrother, my cousin, one of us
is, like, incredibly involved inthe business, basically running
it, or very close to in whatevercircumstance that makes sense,
we're probably not going toinvest. We're certainly not
being speculative investments.
(19:55):
We're not randomly angelinvesting, if we really think we
can have an outsized influence.
And therefore return, and wehave some unfair advantage,
which is a very small number ofbusinesses. We we think we're
smart, we think we're great. Idon't think we can have that
much positive influence on awide variety of businesses. It's
pretty niche, but we stick toour lane, then we do that. So
the latest, and I don't mean toramble, but the latest. Software
(20:18):
company that we got involvedwith this is a startup we
actually got Nick and Matt, twoof my former co founders from
inspect AR, and we put themtogether with my brother Mahul,
and we started this company withthem. We all added together
called Ground Control. GroundControl automates this one
(20:39):
standardized report, is whatthey do today. But well, okay,
the tagline really is missioncritical software for highly
regulated industries. But whatthe heck does that mean? Well,
today, what that means is weautomate this one hyper specific
but absolute necessity, requiredreport and any shop or any
business selling or shippingparts to aerospace, but they
(21:02):
have this as 9100 certification.
Well, that means you need to doa as 9102 first article
inspection report. This is astandardized but laborious form
that just takes time to fillout. People have. Most
businesses have a person, maybetwo, sometimes more in some of
our businesses, we have morefull time basically filling this
(21:24):
report out to ship parts out tothese prime contractors and
larger aerospace OEMs. Well, webasically built software to
automate the majority, if notall, of it, and assist and
enable these teams to basicallydo more within their businesses.
And then, you know, we have awhole roadmap beyond just this
report. There's other reports,there's other places that you
(21:45):
can make a big impact withinthese kind of aerospace and
highly regulated environments,medical, etc, but that's
something where we put the teamtogether. We live the
experience. We knew this was aproblem, and we live it. And we,
you know, we put our money whereour mouth is. We put the team
together. We invest in thebusiness, but more importantly,
we use this tool every day attomai and all of our other
(22:06):
businesses, and it makes a hugedifference. It's actually
impactful piece of software,which is kind of rare in
manufacturing, where oftentimesit's the output is data that we
can then do something with.
Maybe that's not as interestingas just I got this problem. My
job is to make and ship parts.
The shipping parts, if you canmake that part faster, great.
That's kind of where we thinkabout things. And so that's an
(22:27):
example of a startup that we gotinvolved with. They, you know,
they're part of the latest YCombinator batch. I had my own
thoughts on that, but they'regonna kick ass regardless. I
think it's only a good thingthat even other people on all
sides of the aisle. See value init. So that's kind of how we do
it. Even co factor is anothercompany that we invested in
(22:48):
early stage. We did not takeanything like a large stake in
the company. This is more likean angel type investment, but
influence in the sense of wereally found value in the tool,
and we became major customer oftheirs. Early on, they've since
grown far past us being, youknow, some, some large kind of
part of their business, butwe're able to give them a lot of
(23:08):
feedback. We use the tool. Wegot a lot of value, and I think
that traction helped themcontinue to grow. They've grown
to they have probably 10 timesmore employees now than when
they did when we originallystarted working with them. So
Law Firm, we like to getinvolved in businesses that we
really want to use the product,or we see some way that we can
help we have some unfairadvantage in our ecosystem, or a
(23:29):
thinking that we know is goingto get this thing to grow, and
there's not that many businessesthat fit that model. So we're
pretty selective, and that'skind of how we do it sounds
Aaron Moncur (23:38):
like that leads to compounding enhancements or
improvements. If you're alreadyin a business that requires that
tool, that software, now youstart using that and and then it
just grows to other places,other areas of the business.
It's amazing to me that abusiness can be built around a
single form, automating thecompletion of this single form.
(24:00):
I mean,
Mihir Shah (24:01):
I'll get in trouble if I talk too much about how
many customers and snap. Butit'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 countryusing this tool across
verticals, within manufacturing,okay, it's discipline six.
There's a wire harness, there'sprint circuit board assemblers,
(24:21):
machine shops, distributors,fastener companies, this and the
other. So there's a lot of folksusing ground control today, and
this is a company that's beenaround for less than a year.
It's just amazing. So we'regoing to continue to find ways
to be involved in the business,support the founders, keep using
the tool and be a design partnerthem, and, of course, continue
(24:42):
investing in the business,because when we find something
that we know is working and wewe like being a part of we're
going to double down.
Aaron Moncur (24:50):
I think a lot of engineers become engineers
because they truly enjoy solvingproblems, and as engineers,
that's what we do. We'reprofessional technical problem
solvers. Issues, would you saythat you find the same enjoyment
on the business side of things,where you're just you're solving
problems. They're differentproblems than engineering
problems, but they're problemsnonetheless. And that's what
(25:12):
attracts you to the businessside of engineering, or is it
something else that reallymotivates you to be there? Yeah,
you
Unknown (25:26):
can your project benefit from simulation, get in
touch with the team at simitechGroup, a trusted partner in
Engineering Simulation andconsulting. Simitech Group
empowers engineers with cuttingedge ANSYS simulation software
expert consulting andcomprehensive training, whether
you're tackling structuralanalysis, fluid dynamics or
electromagnetics, their team ofcertified engineers helps you
(25:49):
innovate and optimize. Join theranks of top performing
engineers who trust simutechgroup to bring their ideas to
life, visit simutetgroup.com tolearn more and discover how they
can support your success.
Mihir Shah (26:04):
I think you summed it up well, the best engineering
the toughest engineeringproblems I solved were the ones
where I didn't necessarily feellike a Mechanical Turk, and they
said, Oh, go, here's exactlythis defined perfect spec, and
there's a block that fits it.
Just go Google it and bring itand put it in there. It was
always loose. It was always, Idon't know, how do we make this
(26:26):
thing more efficient or justwork? And just, that's your job
is to figure out a way to dowhatever the high level goal is,
and just, you know, notperfectly hit it, because as
close as you possibly can. Andthere's a lot of different
options. And I guess maybe theshort way of saying that is
always thinking in terms oftrade offs, not necessarily
(26:46):
absolutes, and always trying tocontinuous improvement things
like that. So, you know, I canuse this power supply versus the
other one, or whatever, thisDCDC converter, and this one
costs more than the other, butthis one has a smaller
footprint, and this one has lessIO, and it's easier to program.
And there's whatever the casemay be, it has a wider range of
inputs I can handle, and there'sless ancillary components that
(27:09):
are needed to really integratethis module. Thinking like that.
It's not like there's an obviouschoice. You really got to think
about trade offs, and the samething goes with business and
with hiring, or with acquiring acompany or investing in a
business, or deciding whatmachine to buy. That's largely
an engineering problem, butthere's a whole business
(27:29):
element, especially when it'syour company and you're really
the only one that has the leadon what machine you're going to
buy. I don't know. We just haveto deal with that. Let's go see
all the different machines. Letme understand what is one to
one, they all label similar specin a different way. We'll have
to normalize it somehow and finda way to compare it. And then
the business side and theengineering side, at a certain
(27:52):
point, you have to make adecision go for it. So, yeah,
that's kind of an intake. I
Aaron Moncur (27:58):
can't remember who said it, but there are no
solutions, only trade offs. Idon't know if that's 100% true,
but it's a clever saying that Ilike makes sense. Well, let's
talk about hardware FYI first.
This is a newsletter that youand a co founder started and are
growing. It's about a year oldand already has over 12,000
(28:18):
subscribers, which I found to beso impressive, just a year in
12,000 subscribers already. Whatwas the gap that you were trying
to fill with hardware, FYI andand how did you grow so quickly
to 12,000 subscribers in a year?
Mihir Shah (28:37):
Well, okay, so this was something actually I started
three, maybe four years ago, orsomething like that. And I, you
know, this was around the timeof 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 ofmoney to Business Insider and
pen gaming and bar store, allthese kind of the concept of
(28:58):
inbound marketing, proprietarymedia was pretty interesting to
me. And I said, Okay, well, I'vetechnical background, and I find
these things interesting. I reada lot about what's going on, and
I have friends in all theseinteresting companies, they're
always feeding me interestinginformation. Maybe there's a way
I can compile some of this in away that is interesting to other
people. It started as that way,and then the thought very
quickly went to well before wehad acquired another one of
(29:22):
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 electricalengineers in particular? Well,
the option, generally speaking,of where to maybe put marketing
dollars or effort into is tradeshows LinkedIn, which are all
totally fine, and we still doall those things, but there's
(29:45):
different kind of ROI everyyear, LinkedIn, every month,
whatever the price goes up, butyou're, you know, you don't get
necessarily that many more leadsor clicks that are actually that
relevant. Trade Shows are fineand good, and I think there are
plenty that are absolutelyexcellent. Yeah, but there's
only so many of them here. Isthere somewhat of an inbound
marketing channel out therefirst, let's just see if there's
something out there. We lookedand there's all these kind of
(30:07):
more industry publications, butthey're really to like, if
you're a service provider or amachine shop or a printed
circuit board assembler or fabshop, you you're getting sold
to. You're the customer. In thatinstance, for me to reach my
customer, an electrical engineerat a rocket company or something
like that, that's a bit moredifficult. And so there really
(30:29):
was nothing out there. Where dothese Is there a common place
where engineers like myself reador go online? Maybe there's some
forums? Okay, it sounds like agap. We can just go build it. So
I started writing thisnewsletter. Got a small
following. I was able to get upto like, 1500 1200 readers,
which, when you're just writingsomething actually is kind of a
(30:52):
big that's amazing to me. Andhow do you monetize it? Well,
this is more inbound for ourcore business in the back. If I
can get eyeballs, I can getpeople in a room, maybe then I
can offer them these services ina 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
(31:16):
this thing called hardware FII.
I like the name. He reached out.
And I had heard of it, but I'dnever 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 himfor 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 youa check to quit your job and do
this full time? This is notsomething that I think is going
(31:38):
to be this venture scaleopportunity, but I actually
think we could do quite well init, because we're generating
real revenue. People are payingus 10s of 1000s of dollars, and
they actually see the ROIbecause it's there. This is the
business. Why don't we goformalize it, build a bit of a
team now, with Benji on there,incentivize them and empower
them to go full time andbasically keep this high
technical integrity in thewriting, and let's go build this
(32:02):
thing. And man, in the lastyear, Benji, I will candidly
have been a little less involvedin the last couple months, just
being involved with tomline,everything else we're doing. But
I still go to the events. I'mstill editing the newsletter to
the best of my ability, butBenji, we're able to bring on
one of my other formerinspector, co founders, Liam, to
help us as well. So we got asmall team of us, but we're
(32:24):
writing this thing now twice aweek. We have events, generally
every month, mostly on the WestCoast, done other ones. And we
built what I would call acommunity. And there are people
that, I mean Tomah, in someways, has benefited, because
there are people that know aboutthe company, and I've met
because they read thenewsletter. I just kind of call
actually, before this from thefounder of i this from the
founder of a really interestingcompany automating control panel
(32:46):
design and developmentmanufacturing, that was a reader
the newsletter. And it's really,really cool to see that
community been built. It's coolto see that nobody feels that
they're being pushed or shoved asales agenda. It's just highly
technical. Technicallyintegrity, integral. Oh my god.
What was trying to say? Hightechnical integrity, content,
(33:08):
proprietary content. And it'sfresh, it's consistent. We don't
really miss an issue every weekever, and that's what it is. We
want to be the most interestingand consistent place that you
can go to to just keep yourengineering curiosity. Learn
about news happening, especiallyin the startup side, there are
people developing Where are jobsavailable? And it's more of an
(33:30):
all encompassing resource. Andthere's, you know, some
offshoots from that, and we'recontinuing to develop that. So
it's, it's growing. We'relooking, actually looking, to
partner with other publications.
So if you have anyrecommendations and that, we'd
love to find a way to bringpeople into the hardware FYI
ecosystem as we grow thecompany.
Aaron Moncur (33:47):
And where can people go if they want to sign
up for hardware FYI? You canjust go
Mihir Shah (33:51):
to hardware fyi.com you can Google the hardware sub
stack. That's where we publishthe newsletter on the substack
platform. But all roadsbasically lead to the newsletter
and putting your email in, andwe'll get you signed up. We post
recently, often on LinkedIn andthings like that, but online is
probably the best place, andprobably the links in the
description of this podcast,terrific.
Aaron Moncur (34:13):
Yeah. We'll definitely add a link there in
the podcast. Well, let's see. Ithink we can wrap things up.
Nihir, anything else that wedidn't hit on that you think
would be interesting or usefulfor folks to hear?
Mihir Shah (34:27):
No, I think, look, I appreciate you interviewing me.
I'm glad this is also going tobe really helpful, most relevant
to heart of FYI. And just if wecan, if I can be a resource to
anybody great, I haveaccomplished a few things in my
own right. I don't think I'mthis sage business wizard, and I
got a long way to go, because Ijust I got long ago. So it's
(34:50):
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 nextpodcast I do is at a whole
different. Stage as we continueto grow all of our businesses.
So I appreciate if anybody evenlistened this far. You can reach
out to me personally onLinkedIn, just you'll find me
(35:11):
and just add meal. DM me. I'measy, pretty, pretty, pretty
responsive, wonderful.
Aaron Moncur (35:17):
We'll have a link to your LinkedIn profile as well
in the show notes, thank you.
All right. Well, Mihir, thanksagain. So much for being on the
show. Congratulations on thevariety of different successes
you have had, and I'm sure youwill continue to have in your
career. And thank you forcontributing to the podcast
content. I appreciate it. Thanks
Mihir Shah (35:38):
for having me, Aaron, and yeah, nobody ever
talks about the failures.
There's probably 15 between eachone. The failed newsletter at
two other field companies thateven the companies that we sold,
in a lot of ways, it didn't meetthe full expectation. I almost
have to like end with that to belike, Man, if anyone wants to
talk about that, that could be a10 times longer podcast, and it
will probably be 50 times longerin 10 years, after all the
things we're going to try thatwon't work out, but that's, you
(36:00):
know, we just keep moving.
Aaron Moncur (36:03):
Well, we might need to do a second podcast
where we talk about that, andmaybe just with like, the, you
know, 30 seconds a minute wehave left here. What, what is
one of the, the greatest lessonsthat you have learned from one
of your failures? Uh,
Mihir Shah (36:16):
probably, man, when I was a, when I was at axon on
the side to try to try to starta cleaning business. I don't
know. I just didn't have anyother ideas. Let me just try
something. How can I make abuck? I was just trying to
think, can I make $1 for theinternet? Can I make $1 a
person? And it was, at the time,almost insurmountable to make a
website. I have to find acleaner. How do we get a
customer? And we're going tosleeping like, I don't know if I
(36:38):
can do this. How am I going tothink of this? And I'm like, a
cleaning company. This is notdifficult now, but it's the
biggest lesson I got. And thatdid not end up doing well. I
didn't grow it into somesuccessful business at all. But
man, I started, I got a couplecustomers, repeat clients, and I
was like doing this on theweekends and after work. It the
hardest part is starting. Andmost people you talk to, they
talk about doing a business.
They overthink it, this andthat. But, man, if you just get
(37:00):
started, it is so much easierthe second, third, fourth time
around. And you can, I think youneed to have the first two,
three experiences. So just jumpin with whatever stupid idea you
have, whatever. Let it run itscourse. Go to the next one. Go
to the next one. You will hitone that's a little bit bigger
than you. From what I think isthe case, you'll be able to keep
going bigger.
Aaron Moncur (37:23):
I love that you say that the part about after
you start your first couple ofbusinesses, it gets a lot easier
technically. Pipeline is mysecond business that I've done.
The first business was a reallysmall photography company that I
ran part time with a friend forlike, three or four years, and
it was great. And then I startedpipeline, and this has been 15
(37:43):
years, you know, and going. Sothis has been wonderful. And I
agree with you now that lookingback like starting another
business does not seem dauntingat this point. It's like, Yeah,
I know the things that I need todo, and, you know, just go out
and do them. So, it's justinteresting how perspective
changes over time and experiencetotally well. Thanks, Aaron,
(38:06):
yeah, thank you so much. Mihir.
I'm Aaron Moncur, founder ofpipeline design and engineering.
If you liked what you heardtoday, please share the episode
to learn how your team canleverage our team's expertise
developing advancedmanufacturing processes,
automated machines and customfixtures, complemented with
product design and R D services.
(38:28):
Visit us at Team pipeline.us. Tojoin a vibrant community of
engineers online. Visit thewave. Dot, engineer, thank you
for listening. You
The hardest part is starting. Most people you talk
to, they talk about doing abusiness, they overthink it,
this and that. But man, if youjust get started, it is so much
easier the second, third, fourthtime around and you candidly, I
think you need to have the firsttwo, three experiences you
Aaron Moncur (00:28):
Hello and welcome to the being an engineer
podcast. Today's guest is MihirShah, a seasoned engineer and
entrepreneur currently servingas president of tomai
engineering, an as 9100certified CNC machining company
supporting aerospace, defenseand medical industries with a
background that includesengineering roles at Tesla and
(00:49):
axon co founding inspect ARacquired by cadence and leading
ventures through Shaw capitalventures and the hardware FYI
newsletter. Mihir brings aunique blend of technical depth
and business acumen to theconversation. Mihir, thank you
so much for being with us today.
Thanks, Aaron, happy to be here.
Awesome. Been excited to talk toyou, because you have such a
(01:12):
rich background, right, not onlywith engineering, but also
entrepreneurship and businessand so we'll dig into all of
those topics. But let me startwith the the standard first
question I ask everyone, whichis, what made you decide to
become an engineer?
Mihir Shah (01:28):
Well, it's funny. I started college kind of with the
idea of, oh, maybe I'll go be adoctor. And I remember I got
back my first some bio, whatevercourse 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 wasvery math in high school, and I
don't really know what I do. AndI had some people in the hall
(01:50):
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. Ididn't really know the world
outside that. And took thisdigital logic course. I think
that was one of the firstengineering courses that I took,
and I just found it reallyinteresting. And then I think it
kind of dawned on me more like,wow, I'm actually enjoying this
(02:13):
and kind of driving why I wantto do this stuff, from like a
first principle standpoint,outside of what seemed to me on
the other side of just takingclasses purely for the purpose
of preparing for an exam forsome accreditation to go be this
doctor. I wasn't even sure, youknow that whole world, I just
have no anyways, I like thecourse. I kept taking more of
(02:36):
them, and I said, this is what Ilike to do, and I'll kind of
figure it out from there.
Aaron Moncur (02:40):
Fantastic. And that that led to a job
eventually with with Tesla. Andthen from there, you now are the
president of tomai engineering,CNC machining shop. How have
some of these experiences soworking as an engineer at Tesla,
you started inspect AR, and Idon't know if you started, I
(03:03):
shouldn't have said that. I knowthat you were an integral I was
a co founder
Mihir Shah (03:07):
of the Okay, co founder, the my other co
founders actually technicallystarted it, and I was lucky
enough to meet them a little bitlater on the journey and kind of
join them and find a way to growthe business together, yeah,
Aaron Moncur (03:18):
and then be acquired, right? Selling it,
correct?
Mihir Shah (03:21):
Yeah, one of the largest kind of EDA companies
cross semiconductor all the wayup to the PCB level beyond,
yeah. And
Aaron Moncur (03:28):
so now, through Shaw ventures, I think you've
acquired to my engineering andyour president there is that
accurate?
Mihir Shah (03:37):
I'm sorry, I just said Somebody's at the door.
I've actually got the machineshop right now? So there are
Aaron Moncur (03:43):
lots of hats, sure. So my question is, all
these diverse experiences you'vehad as an engineer, as a
startup, co founder, aspresident of a company, how have
all these experiences shapedyour approach to leadership in
the engineering environment? I
Mihir Shah (04:01):
It's, God, it sounds so corny, but I, I really think
it just comes down to firstprinciples, thinking and kind of
understanding the root of whyI'm doing something, or if
there's a problem, instead ofpanicking, being like, Okay,
well, what are the symptoms?
What's kind of one order awayfrom that? And you could think
of, you know, I always kind ofuse the example of, like, Okay,
if you plug in a PCB andsuddenly something sparks, there
(04:26):
could be a number of things thatwent wrong, and you kind of
started the spark. You kind ofgo back and you have the
multimeter out, or whatever itis, you start to disconnect
things from it and test one at atime, and you just really get
that first order understandingof why things went wrong, and
you're able to kind of piece andsegment things apart. And again,
that sounds kind of generics,not broad, but that is a
(04:49):
reasonably good way to kind ofapproach most problems, I think,
in life, and that's generallyworked for me so far, even when
we're buying. Looking forcompanies to buy when we come in
here, and we're looking for waysto grow companies on the sales
side and buy new equipment onthe CNC side or at the PCB
shops, whatever it is. So longanswer, but first principles
(05:10):
thinking from the beginning, andyes, obviously part of the I
subscribe to the Tesla dogma ofthat first principles thinking,
but it generally works, and wejust try to stay true to that.
Aaron Moncur (05:25):
I love that I read Elon Musk's biography a year or
so ago. I thought it wasfascinating, but one of the
parts I really enjoyed was hisfirst principles thinking,
right? And a concrete example ofthat that I thought was so neat,
and I had never thought about itthis way until reading it in his
book, was the cost of a productthat you're producing, if you
(05:47):
just look at the raw materials.
So how much did the steel costto produce this product?
Whatever the product is, it'sgoing to be, you know, X amount
of dollars. And then if you lookat the final product, it's going
to be X amount of dollars forthe raw material, plus whatever
labor and processing wasrequired to get it into its
final form. And if that finalnumber is is significantly
greater than the raw cost of thematerial, there might be a
(06:09):
problem or an opportunity forimprovement in your processing.
And I thought, Man, that's it'ssuch like a simple, basic way to
think about it, but I had neverthought about it that way. And I
always thought that was a greatexample of first principles
thinking
Mihir Shah (06:25):
Correct. I mean, you it's, you're basically deriving
what a profit and loss statementis that way, right? It's like
you have your revenue and costof goods, and you really got to
hold that gross margin as a truenumber and constantly benchmark
it and kind of keep dialing itin. And we do that at all of our
businesses, we do a monthlyflux. We're checking on a kind
of bi weekly basis where we haveversus our forecast. And it's
(06:48):
not just for some spreadsheetreporting guy in an office kind
of level. It's just, Hey, whydid this go up? Maybe it doesn't
matter, but I sure want to know.
I just want it on the floorlevel, understand everything
that's happening, from the costof coolant to, hey, why is the
coffee up by 20% it doesn'tmatter. I'm not thinking about
(07:09):
cutting costs. All is about justit's easier to go get more sales
and try to optimize thebusiness, but you still kind of
know what's going
Aaron Moncur (07:16):
on. I've always thought that engineers make
great business owners becausethey're trained to look at the
numbers, that they understandnumbers, and they can follow
trends based on numbers. Did youalways know that you wanted to
get into the business ofengineering, or was that more of
a recent realization in yourcareer, one
Mihir Shah (07:37):
of our recent but no, I don't think I really had a
plan starting out, and I justtook these classes. I really
liked it, and I was lucky enoughto get an internship at Tesla,
which is really what it was. Andthen 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 beingable to surround myself by
smarter and smarter people. Ithink that's I also realized,
(07:59):
man, I'm not probably going tomake it as some Principal
Engineer at Tesla. I just don'tthink I have it, and maybe I
don't enjoy it, but candidly, Ijust didn't think I have the
technical acumen to really exceland be that valuable at that
level to a company like Tesla.
And so, you know, I tried mathelsewhere, and this and that,
and I just found that I enjoyedselling things or products or
services, and found that man,like I enjoy this whole side of
(08:23):
things, and I'm I've seen whatexcellence looks like. I'm able
to recruit smart people to kindof join me in different parts of
the business, and that basicphilosophy, and I guess, ability
to really figure out thecustomer profile, find a way to
get them interested in whateverit is, and then, on the back
end, be able to build a team ofexcellent people around me that
(08:45):
has basically been the highlevel, simple playbook every
business that we've beeninvolved with, good and bad, but
it's all endured in somecapacity.
Aaron Moncur (08:56):
I'm hearing a lot of parallels with my own
journey. I I've always felt likeI'm never going to be that
superstar engineer. I was goodenough at what I did, and I
earned a living as an engineer,but really, I'm a lot better
with people in organization andcommunication. I enjoy the
business side of things, I'd saymore than I like the engineering
(09:19):
at this point. So it's alwaysfun to talk with people who have
had, like, similar backgroundsand mindsets. So right now, at
tomai engineering, you guys,calling you a machine shop
probably doesn't do you justicewith all the different you know,
processes that you do there, butone of the questions I wanted to
ask you is, running a machineshop. How do you refer to to my
(09:43):
engineering? Do you call it amachine shop? Or do you
Mihir Shah (09:45):
call it something else? Sometimes I find that the
terms machine shop and job shopare kind of used
interchangeably. And of course,there's nothing wrong with job
shops. Many, many people buildincredible careers to make more
money than us, a lot morebuilding running job shops. This
is. More of a programmaticaerospace and defense, you know,
complex machining and assemblybusiness, but, yeah, we're a
(10:07):
machine shop
Aaron Moncur (10:08):
for machine shop, all right. I mean,
Mihir Shah (10:11):
I'm sure, I know people can't see the screen, but
here's a part we make for ourplatform. Here's a part we make
for, you know, a differentmissile system. And there's all
sorts of different interestingcomponents that we make for the
mission, mission criticalplatforms, generally, at some
volume, and we've been able todo it repeatedly and
successfully. And I say wereally, it's the founders of the
(10:33):
company and the team that's beenhere for 20, 3040, years. We
were lucky enough to join thebusiness via acquisition in
November of last year, and nowit's been, you know, almost six
months, and it's, it's goingwell, but that's, uh, yeah,
that's how I refer to it. It'stoday we are, in many ways, and
will continue to be a machineshop, a great one, an amazing
(10:54):
one, a niche, focused one, but amachine job, correct? I have no
doubt, an amazing
Aaron Moncur (11:00):
one this. This might be too in the weeds for
you in the president role, butlet me ask it anyway and see if
you have any comments on here.
What are a couple of the designchoices that engineers make that
lead to parts that are justexpensive, unnecessarily
expensive, to manufacture, maybe
Mihir Shah (11:19):
not going down to, like, the specific design
choices, but these are kind ofsome of the immediate
ramifications that we see on ourside. A lot of times, there are
some choices made that requirecustom tools. So it's more
saying, like, hey, think about,are you making that cut, or how
we're going to get into it. Sometimes, like, the tolerances that
people put kind of as a broadstroke over the print may or may
(11:42):
not actually be required, butthat does have a downstream
effect, and not just how wemachine it, but also how we
inspect it, and the time goingback and forth to get it to that
level. So there's alwaysopportunity to change it. And
what we found is, on our side,we always try to be a DFM
partner, and so we almostalways, at the quote stage,
we'll send even a simple kind ofPDF or Word doc. There's a
(12:05):
platform we'll use it. Hey,here's a couple things. If you
change this, change fill radiushere. Change this, if you guys
wouldn't mind going to this, orif there's a strong reason,
maybe help us understand it.
Almost every time we've donethat over the last four months,
90 plus percent. We've gottenthe changes we asked for
quickly, and that's why some ofthese customers we have are just
(12:25):
fantastic, and made the part alot more manufacturable. We were
able to produce the lead timeand the cost absolutely went
down. We didn't have to go getcustom tools, you know, created
or ground down. We didn't haveto go get a wide number of
tools. We didn't have to go planfor a lower yield, or whatever
it is. So that's huge. Yeah,that's huge. Thinking about
(12:46):
that, I would say is it's not somuch about every part's
different, but just always thinkas you're designing, like, how
am I going to machine this thingis, or how am I going to make
it? And by the way, same thingapplies on the PCB side. Do I
need traces to be so thin? Do Ireally need this tight, tight
lack of clearance, really,between the traces. Do I really
need that extra two layers? Do Ineed this specific thickness?
(13:07):
Blah, blah, blah, and etc, etc.
Just, why are you choosingthings you're doing? If you can
bring it down, if you can, just,how is this going to be
manufactured? I think there's aquestion if you're always asking
yourself, and by the way, it'snot like we expect everybody to
know. When I was an electricalengineer, I really didn't know
until I worked on the PCBmanufacturing side before to my
(13:28):
will just reach out to the shopthat you may or may not you know
you may work with, and we'll doa DFM call and we'll walk
through your print and the stemfile in real time. We do that
all the time. You
Aaron Moncur (13:44):
the product development expo or PDX is your
chance to learn from subjectmatter experts, providing
practical hands on training fordozens of different engineering
topics, Gd and T advancedsurface modeling, DFM, plating
and finishing techniques,programming, robots, adhesive,
dispensing, prototyping, tipsand tricks and lots more. PDX
(14:07):
happens October, 21 and 22nd inPhoenix, Arizona. Learn more at
PD Expo. Dot engineer, that's p,d, e, x, p, O. Dot engineer, you
here, speaking of PCBs. Soinspect AR was a company that
(14:29):
you helped grow and and wasacquired, yeah, and it was
focused on AR tools for PCBdebugging. Can you tell us a
little bit about how that workedand maybe one of the challenges
that you all encountered growingthe business on the technical
side, and how you overcame thatchallenge? Oh,
Mihir Shah (14:50):
oh, yeah. I mean, that was, I guess the problem
could be distilled down to theconstant context switching if
you're an electrical engineer,especially in the lab, and also
just a lot. Lack of informationreadily available when you have
especially at the final stage,you've designed the board,
you've gotten it back, maybeit's assembled inspector was
also thought of this beinguseful in the assembly stage.
(15:11):
But afterwards, you got on yourbench, and you're doing
debugging, right? You're turningit on. You're going through
stages. You're probing differentpoints. Wait, I forgot to add a
test point, or I did add a testpoint. What's this? In six out
of whatever 60 plus do? Is this?
The input? Is this? The ITCline? I forget the silk screen
isn't Oh, I got to cut a trace.
(15:33):
Where should I cut it? But allthe things that I've been
through on a free board, maybe Ijust haven't designed the best
boards, but I've been throughit. A lot of my coworkers have
been through it. This basicallybrought it all together, your
schematic, your actual layoutfile, even parts of the drawing
and the notes, and overlays itonto a physical view of the
board. So on your feed, asyou're with the board underneath
(15:57):
it and you're debugging it, youcan see, oh, all the things
extracted and basically an ARpoint to click on a part, and
it'll tell you everything aboutit pulls up the data sheet, etc,
etc. So just all the things thatI would normally have, a
printout of my schematic. Iwould have my layout on my
computer. I might have anotherscreen or monitor something
there tied to just the web. So Ican go on Digi key or go look up
(16:21):
a particular part, see the datasheet. Everything's now in one
place, point, click. That waskind of the idea. A lot of
challenges, building the tooland definitely growing the
company. I mean, we're using areasonably novel technology,
certainly at the time, in anarea that I would say is super
(16:41):
advanced, but in a lot of ways,somewhat slower to change for I
think a lot of the rightreasons. But, yeah, I mean, it
just, we're building it fromscratch, and a lot of the kind
of framework we've been usingis, was largely for gaming, kind
of the Unity engine and thingslike that. And so we had to find
different frameworks to get toyou, what if your hands in the
way, and the board is at anangle. Things start to break on
(17:04):
those edge cases. And so wefound some other AR framework,
or you want to call it fromSouth 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 pointwe're able to get a big contract
because we can handle, you know,the tool working in that
customer's environment, and thatthen helped us kind of get to
(17:25):
the next level and be a moreattractive 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 infanttechnology that just needed more
resources. And, you know, notsure how venture backable or
scalable the business this was.
(17:49):
So this was really the right,the right outcome for the
business. And you know,everybody did quite well on the
exit.
Aaron Moncur (17:56):
Terrific, terrific. Well, congratulations
on that. Let's, let's talk aboutthe the acquisition side for a
moment. So you're not only anengineer, you're not only a
business owner, but you're alsoan investor through Shaw venture
capital. How? What are some ofthe criteria that that you use
(18:20):
when you're trying to identifywhether you know investing in a
particular company is is goingto pan out or not?
Mihir Shah (18:27):
Yeah. I mean, first of all, this investor is, I
think giving me too much credit.
You know, a lot of people go onthese 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 guessevery deal we've done we're
happy with. We have a long roadahead of us, but we're pretty
early in our journey, and dealsis another broad term. Generally
speaking, we only get involvedin businesses. We can have an
(18:50):
outsized influence in and so ofcourse, we think, therefore we
can have an outsized returnbecause we're in control. And
what we mean by that is we'regenerally looking for companies
to more majority or fullyacquire, whether they they would
like, you know, generallyspeaking with for the businesses
on the the more mature kind oflike machine job or PCB
(19:13):
business, these are generallyowners that are kind of looking
at 10 years out, where are Theygoing to be? Where's the
business going to be? Maybe itmakes sense to find a good
technical partner that wants tocontinue investing the business
and taking care of theemployees. That's where we're a
really good fit. And then on thestartup side, unless we're
(19:33):
running it, and I guess thisapplies to all of our
businesses, unless me, mybrother, my cousin, one of us
is, like, incredibly involved inthe business, basically running
it, or very close to in whatevercircumstance that makes sense,
we're probably not going toinvest. We're certainly not
being speculative investments.
(19:55):
We're not randomly angelinvesting, if we really think we
can have an outsized influence.
And therefore return, and wehave some unfair advantage,
which is a very small number ofbusinesses. We we think we're
smart, we think we're great. Idon't think we can have that
much positive influence on awide variety of businesses. It's
pretty niche, but we stick toour lane, then we do that. So
the latest, and I don't mean toramble, but the latest. Software
(20:18):
company that we got involvedwith this is a startup we
actually got Nick and Matt, twoof my former co founders from
inspect AR, and we put themtogether with my brother Mahul,
and we started this company withthem. We all added together
called Ground Control. GroundControl automates this one
(20:39):
standardized report, is whatthey do today. But well, okay,
the tagline really is missioncritical software for highly
regulated industries. But whatthe heck does that mean? Well,
today, what that means is weautomate this one hyper specific
but absolute necessity, requiredreport and any shop or any
business selling or shippingparts to aerospace, but they
(21:02):
have this as 9100 certification.
Well, that means you need to doa as 9102 first article
inspection report. This is astandardized but laborious form
that just takes time to fillout. People have. Most
businesses have a person, maybetwo, sometimes more in some of
our businesses, we have morefull time basically filling this
(21:24):
report out to ship parts out tothese prime contractors and
larger aerospace OEMs. Well, webasically built software to
automate the majority, if notall, of it, and assist and
enable these teams to basicallydo more within their businesses.
And then, you know, we have awhole roadmap beyond just this
report. There's other reports,there's other places that you
(21:45):
can make a big impact withinthese kind of aerospace and
highly regulated environments,medical, etc, but that's
something where we put the teamtogether. We live the
experience. We knew this was aproblem, and we live it. And we,
you know, we put our money whereour mouth is. We put the team
together. We invest in thebusiness, but more importantly,
we use this tool every day attomai and all of our other
(22:06):
businesses, and it makes a hugedifference. It's actually
impactful piece of software,which is kind of rare in
manufacturing, where oftentimesit's the output is data that we
can then do something with.
Maybe that's not as interestingas just I got this problem. My
job is to make and ship parts.
The shipping parts, if you canmake that part faster, great.
That's kind of where we thinkabout things. And so that's an
(22:27):
example of a startup that we gotinvolved with. They, you know,
they're part of the latest YCombinator batch. I had my own
thoughts on that, but they'regonna kick ass regardless. I
think it's only a good thingthat even other people on all
sides of the aisle. See value init. So that's kind of how we do
it. Even co factor is anothercompany that we invested in
(22:48):
early stage. We did not takeanything like a large stake in
the company. This is more likean angel type investment, but
influence in the sense of wereally found value in the tool,
and we became major customer oftheirs. Early on, they've since
grown far past us being, youknow, some, some large kind of
part of their business, butwe're able to give them a lot of
(23:08):
feedback. We use the tool. Wegot a lot of value, and I think
that traction helped themcontinue to grow. They've grown
to they have probably 10 timesmore employees now than when
they did when we originallystarted working with them. So
Law Firm, we like to getinvolved in businesses that we
really want to use the product,or we see some way that we can
help we have some unfairadvantage in our ecosystem, or a
(23:29):
thinking that we know is goingto get this thing to grow, and
there's not that many businessesthat fit that model. So we're
pretty selective, and that'skind of how we do it sounds
Aaron Moncur (23:38):
like that leads to compounding enhancements or
improvements. If you're alreadyin a business that requires that
tool, that software, now youstart using that and and then it
just grows to other places,other areas of the business.
It's amazing to me that abusiness can be built around a
single form, automating thecompletion of this single form.
(24:00):
I mean,
Mihir Shah (24:01):
I'll get in trouble if I talk too much about how
many customers and snap. Butit'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 countryusing this tool across
verticals, within manufacturing,okay, it's discipline six.
There's a wire harness, there'sprint circuit board assemblers,
(24:21):
machine shops, distributors,fastener companies, this and the
other. So there's a lot of folksusing ground control today, and
this is a company that's beenaround for less than a year.
It's just amazing. So we'regoing to continue to find ways
to be involved in the business,support the founders, keep using
the tool and be a design partnerthem, and, of course, continue
(24:42):
investing in the business,because when we find something
that we know is working and wewe like being a part of we're
going to double down.
Aaron Moncur (24:50):
I think a lot of engineers become engineers
because they truly enjoy solvingproblems, and as engineers,
that's what we do. We'reprofessional technical problem
solvers. Issues, would you saythat you find the same enjoyment
on the business side of things,where you're just you're solving
problems. They're differentproblems than engineering
problems, but they're problemsnonetheless. And that's what
(25:12):
attracts you to the businessside of engineering, or is it
something else that reallymotivates you to be there? Yeah,
you
Unknown (25:26):
can your project benefit from simulation, get in
touch with the team at simitechGroup, a trusted partner in
Engineering Simulation andconsulting. Simitech Group
empowers engineers with cuttingedge ANSYS simulation software
expert consulting andcomprehensive training, whether
you're tackling structuralanalysis, fluid dynamics or
electromagnetics, their team ofcertified engineers helps you
(25:49):
innovate and optimize. Join theranks of top performing
engineers who trust simutechgroup to bring their ideas to
life, visit simutetgroup.com tolearn more and discover how they
can support your success.
Mihir Shah (26:04):
I think you summed it up well, the best engineering
the toughest engineeringproblems I solved were the ones
where I didn't necessarily feellike a Mechanical Turk, and they
said, Oh, go, here's exactlythis defined perfect spec, and
there's a block that fits it.
Just go Google it and bring itand put it in there. It was
always loose. It was always, Idon't know, how do we make this
(26:26):
thing more efficient or justwork? And just, that's your job
is to figure out a way to dowhatever the high level goal is,
and just, you know, notperfectly hit it, because as
close as you possibly can. Andthere's a lot of different
options. And I guess maybe theshort way of saying that is
always thinking in terms oftrade offs, not necessarily
(26:46):
absolutes, and always trying tocontinuous improvement things
like that. So, you know, I canuse this power supply versus the
other one, or whatever, thisDCDC converter, and this one
costs more than the other, butthis one has a smaller
footprint, and this one has lessIO, and it's easier to program.
And there's whatever the casemay be, it has a wider range of
inputs I can handle, and there'sless ancillary components that
(27:09):
are needed to really integratethis module. Thinking like that.
It's not like there's an obviouschoice. You really got to think
about trade offs, and the samething goes with business and
with hiring, or with acquiring acompany or investing in a
business, or deciding whatmachine to buy. That's largely
an engineering problem, butthere's a whole business
(27:29):
element, especially when it'syour company and you're really
the only one that has the leadon what machine you're going to
buy. I don't know. We just haveto deal with that. Let's go see
all the different machines. Letme understand what is one to
one, they all label similar specin a different way. We'll have
to normalize it somehow and finda way to compare it. And then
the business side and theengineering side, at a certain
(27:52):
point, you have to make adecision go for it. So, yeah,
that's kind of an intake. I
Aaron Moncur (27:58):
can't remember who said it, but there are no
solutions, only trade offs. Idon't know if that's 100% true,
but it's a clever saying that Ilike makes sense. Well, let's
talk about hardware FYI first.
This is a newsletter that youand a co founder started and are
growing. It's about a year oldand already has over 12,000
(28:18):
subscribers, which I found to beso impressive, just a year in
12,000 subscribers already. Whatwas the gap that you were trying
to fill with hardware, FYI andand how did you grow so quickly
to 12,000 subscribers in a year?
Mihir Shah (28:37):
Well, okay, so this was something actually I started
three, maybe four years ago, orsomething like that. And I, you
know, this was around the timeof 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 ofmoney to Business Insider and
pen gaming and bar store, allthese kind of the concept of
(28:58):
inbound marketing, proprietarymedia was pretty interesting to
me. And I said, Okay, well, I'vetechnical background, and I find
these things interesting. I reada lot about what's going on, and
I have friends in all theseinteresting companies, they're
always feeding me interestinginformation. Maybe there's a way
I can compile some of this in away that is interesting to other
people. It started as that way,and then the thought very
quickly went to well before wehad acquired another one of
(29:22):
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 electricalengineers in particular? Well,
the option, generally speaking,of where to maybe put marketing
dollars or effort into is tradeshows LinkedIn, which are all
totally fine, and we still doall those things, but there's
(29:45):
different kind of ROI everyyear, LinkedIn, every month,
whatever the price goes up, butyou're, you know, you don't get
necessarily that many more leadsor clicks that are actually that
relevant. Trade Shows are fineand good, and I think there are
plenty that are absolutelyexcellent. Yeah, but there's
only so many of them here. Isthere somewhat of an inbound
marketing channel out therefirst, let's just see if there's
something out there. We lookedand there's all these kind of
(30:07):
more industry publications, butthey're really to like, if
you're a service provider or amachine shop or a printed
circuit board assembler or fabshop, you you're getting sold
to. You're the customer. In thatinstance, for me to reach my
customer, an electrical engineerat a rocket company or something
like that, that's a bit moredifficult. And so there really
(30:29):
was nothing out there. Where dothese Is there a common place
where engineers like myself reador go online? Maybe there's some
forums? Okay, it sounds like agap. We can just go build it. So
I started writing thisnewsletter. Got a small
following. I was able to get upto like, 1500 1200 readers,
which, when you're just writingsomething actually is kind of a
(30:52):
big that's amazing to me. Andhow do you monetize it? Well,
this is more inbound for ourcore business in the back. If I
can get eyeballs, I can getpeople in a room, maybe then I
can offer them these services ina 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
(31:16):
this thing called hardware FII.
I like the name. He reached out.
And I had heard of it, but I'dnever 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 himfor 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 youa check to quit your job and do
this full time? This is notsomething that I think is going
(31:38):
to be this venture scaleopportunity, but I actually
think we could do quite well init, because we're generating
real revenue. People are payingus 10s of 1000s of dollars, and
they actually see the ROIbecause it's there. This is the
business. Why don't we goformalize it, build a bit of a
team now, with Benji on there,incentivize them and empower
them to go full time andbasically keep this high
technical integrity in thewriting, and let's go build this
(32:02):
thing. And man, in the lastyear, Benji, I will candidly
have been a little less involvedin the last couple months, just
being involved with tomline,everything else we're doing. But
I still go to the events. I'mstill editing the newsletter to
the best of my ability, butBenji, we're able to bring on
one of my other formerinspector, co founders, Liam, to
help us as well. So we got asmall team of us, but we're
(32:24):
writing this thing now twice aweek. We have events, generally
every month, mostly on the WestCoast, done other ones. And we
built what I would call acommunity. And there are people
that, I mean Tomah, in someways, has benefited, because
there are people that know aboutthe company, and I've met
because they read thenewsletter. I just kind of call
actually, before this from thefounder of i this from the
founder of a really interestingcompany automating control panel
(32:46):
design and developmentmanufacturing, that was a reader
the newsletter. And it's really,really cool to see that
community been built. It's coolto see that nobody feels that
they're being pushed or shoved asales agenda. It's just highly
technical. Technicallyintegrity, integral. Oh my god.
What was trying to say? Hightechnical integrity, content,
(33:08):
proprietary content. And it'sfresh, it's consistent. We don't
really miss an issue every weekever, and that's what it is. We
want to be the most interestingand consistent place that you
can go to to just keep yourengineering curiosity. Learn
about news happening, especiallyin the startup side, there are
people developing Where are jobsavailable? And it's more of an
(33:30):
all encompassing resource. Andthere's, you know, some
offshoots from that, and we'recontinuing to develop that. So
it's, it's growing. We'relooking, actually looking, to
partner with other publications.
So if you have anyrecommendations and that, we'd
love to find a way to bringpeople into the hardware FYI
ecosystem as we grow thecompany.
Aaron Moncur (33:47):
And where can people go if they want to sign
up for hardware FYI? You canjust go
Mihir Shah (33:51):
to hardware fyi.com you can Google the hardware sub
stack. That's where we publishthe newsletter on the substack
platform. But all roadsbasically lead to the newsletter
and putting your email in, andwe'll get you signed up. We post
recently, often on LinkedIn andthings like that, but online is
probably the best place, andprobably the links in the
description of this podcast,terrific.
Aaron Moncur (34:13):
Yeah. We'll definitely add a link there in
the podcast. Well, let's see. Ithink we can wrap things up.
Nihir, anything else that wedidn't hit on that you think
would be interesting or usefulfor folks to hear?
Mihir Shah (34:27):
No, I think, look, I appreciate you interviewing me.
I'm glad this is also going tobe really helpful, most relevant
to heart of FYI. And just if wecan, if I can be a resource to
anybody great, I haveaccomplished a few things in my
own right. I don't think I'mthis sage business wizard, and I
got a long way to go, because Ijust I got long ago. So it's
(34:50):
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 nextpodcast I do is at a whole
different. Stage as we continueto grow all of our businesses.
So I appreciate if anybody evenlistened this far. You can reach
out to me personally onLinkedIn, just you'll find me
(35:11):
and just add meal. DM me. I'measy, pretty, pretty, pretty
responsive, wonderful.
Aaron Moncur (35:17):
We'll have a link to your LinkedIn profile as well
in the show notes, thank you.
All right. Well, Mihir, thanksagain. So much for being on the
show. Congratulations on thevariety of different successes
you have had, and I'm sure youwill continue to have in your
career. And thank you forcontributing to the podcast
content. I appreciate it. Thanks
Mihir Shah (35:38):
for having me, Aaron, and yeah, nobody ever
talks about the failures.
There's probably 15 between eachone. The failed newsletter at
two other field companies thateven the companies that we sold,
in a lot of ways, it didn't meetthe full expectation. I almost
have to like end with that to belike, Man, if anyone wants to
talk about that, that could be a10 times longer podcast, and it
will probably be 50 times longerin 10 years, after all the
things we're going to try thatwon't work out, but that's, you
(36:00):
know, we just keep moving.
Aaron Moncur (36:03):
Well, we might need to do a second podcast
where we talk about that, andmaybe just with like, the, you
know, 30 seconds a minute wehave left here. What, what is
one of the, the greatest lessonsthat you have learned from one
of your failures? Uh,
Mihir Shah (36:16):
probably, man, when I was a, when I was at axon on
the side to try to try to starta cleaning business. I don't
know. I just didn't have anyother ideas. Let me just try
something. How can I make abuck? I was just trying to
think, can I make $1 for theinternet? Can I make $1 a
person? And it was, at the time,almost insurmountable to make a
website. I have to find acleaner. How do we get a
customer? And we're going tosleeping like, I don't know if I
(36:38):
can do this. How am I going tothink of this? And I'm like, a
cleaning company. This is notdifficult now, but it's the
biggest lesson I got. And thatdid not end up doing well. I
didn't grow it into somesuccessful business at all. But
man, I started, I got a couplecustomers, repeat clients, and I
was like doing this on theweekends and after work. It the
hardest part is starting. Andmost people you talk to, they
talk about doing a business.
They overthink it, this andthat. But, man, if you just get
(37:00):
started, it is so much easierthe second, third, fourth time
around. And you can, I think youneed to have the first two,
three experiences. So just jumpin with whatever stupid idea you
have, whatever. Let it run itscourse. Go to the next one. Go
to the next one. You will hitone that's a little bit bigger
than you. From what I think isthe case, you'll be able to keep
going bigger.
Aaron Moncur (37:23):
I love that you say that the part about after
you start your first couple ofbusinesses, it gets a lot easier
technically. Pipeline is mysecond business that I've done.
The first business was a reallysmall photography company that I
ran part time with a friend forlike, three or four years, and
it was great. And then I startedpipeline, and this has been 15
(37:43):
years, you know, and going. Sothis has been wonderful. And I
agree with you now that lookingback like starting another
business does not seem dauntingat this point. It's like, Yeah,
I know the things that I need todo, and, you know, just go out
and do them. So, it's justinteresting how perspective
changes over time and experiencetotally well. Thanks, Aaron,
(38:06):
yeah, thank you so much. Mihir.
I'm Aaron Moncur, founder ofpipeline design and engineering.
If you liked what you heardtoday, please share the episode
to learn how your team canleverage our team's expertise
developing advancedmanufacturing processes,
automated machines and customfixtures, complemented with
product design and R D services.
(38:28):
Visit us at Team pipeline.us. Tojoin a vibrant community of
engineers online. Visit thewave. Dot, engineer, thank you
for listening. You
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com