đď¸ From Midwest Outsider to Movement-Leading Industrialist: Choosing the Uphill Challenges and Rebuilding American Manufacturing w/ Aaron Slodov, Remesh & Atomic Industries
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In this episode of Outsider Inc., our guest is Aaron Slodov, co-founder of Remesh and co-founder and CEO of Atomic Industries. Aaron shares insights from his unique journey from a child tinkering in Cleveland to working at Google X, and founding a series of innovative companies. The discussion delves into the challenges and opportunities in American manufacturing, the impact of globalization, and the role of software and AI in modern industrial systems. Aaron also touches on his vision of re-industrializing America, his belief in tackling complex problems, and his leadership in fostering a new movement through the Re-Industrialize Summit and the New American Industrial Alliance.
Show Notes:
(04:34) The Formative Years: From Cleveland to Google
(11:23) The Birth of Remesh: A Social Experiment
(15:09) Challenges and Lessons from Remesh
(18:00) A New Beginning: The Genesis of Atomic Industries
(20:36) The Flaws in Global Manufacturing
(24:10) Building a Testbed Factory in Detroit
(26:21) Merging Software with Physical Production
(30:23) Scaling a Movement: Reindustrialize
(33:26) Encouraging Talent in Hard Tech
(36:00) Personal Insights and Reflections
(40:01) Beyond the Bio with Aaron Slodov
â Host: Ian Hathway - Co-Founder & Managing Partner, FOVC
â Guest: Aaron Slodov, Founder & CEO, Atomic Industries
Produced by Spellbinder Media. Executive Produced by Bridge Five Ventures. Copyright Šď¸2025, Bridge Five Ventures, LLC, All rights reserved.
Listen & subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or at outsiderinc.substack.com.
AI-Generated Transcript
Aaron Slodov: [00:00:00] I think we take a lot of this for granted. Nobody really knows or cares about how all the crap that we have gets made. We just wanna buy it, you know, at a decent price. But ultimately, the people that wanted to push a globalization agenda. Weâre well-meaning because industrializing a poor nation will help uplift people out of poverty.
Itâll help advance their cultures. But thatâs also just saying we think itâs okay for somebody else to basically pay slave labor wages, right? And like working in awful conditions just so I can get like cheap socks or a TV or a computer. Somebody else should do that, and itâs okay if theyâre a slave laborer.
Itâs good for them, actually, and I just think thatâs psychotic.
Ian Hathaway: Welcome to another episode of Outsider Inc. Iâm your host, Ian Hathaway. Todayâs guest is Aaron Slodov, founder engineer, movement builder, and one of the most original [00:01:00] voices in Americaâs industrial revival Today. Heâs the co-founder and CEO of Atomic Industries.
A hard tech startup built in the Midwest thatâs re-imagining software as the solution to revamp the ancient craft of tool and die making, but that description barely scratches the surface. Atomic isnât just a factory, itâs a blueprint for rebuilding Americaâs industrial base With 21st century tools, Aaronâs team is building generative AI for manufacturing training models on site with their own supercomputer and deploying tech that could make producing physical goods as scalable as writing software.
This story starts with a kid in Cleveland, soldering circuits for fun, a physics major grinding through school while working full-time, and a restless mind drawn to both big ideas and hands-on invention. After a stint at Google working on the early self-driving car project, Aaron co-founded Reesh a real-time group insight platform that reached all the way to the White House.
That experience showed him whatâs possible when technology and imagination align and what can go wrong [00:02:00] when incentives donât. After a tough exit, he pivoted hard, attempting to build a hardware product and running headfirst into Americaâs broken manufacturing system. What followed was a full on obsession, launching atomic to turn tribal knowledge into scalable infrastructure.
Since then, heâs gone even bigger, founding the re industrialized summit and the New American Industrial Alliance. His vision isnât just to build a company, itâs to start a movement. Today weâll talk about challenging a culture addicted to short-term thinking and why Aaron believes American industry is the defining project of our time.
Aaron, thanks for stopping by. Thanks for having me, Ian. Itâs good to see you. Iâm glad we could finally make this happen. We have a ton to dig into today, including some recent news that you have a major fundraising round. Congratulations. But Iâd like to start with a window into your worldview and approach.
You are a mission oriented person who believes that you should be spending your time tackling the hardest problems imaginable. [00:03:00] That pursuit ultimately led you to revive Americaâs industrial base, but that mindset. Choosing difficulty. Chasing the uphill problem isnât how most people operate. Most people donât swim upstream.
They follow the path of least resistance, but you donât. And so Iâm just curious, where does that come from you and what do you think it reveals about how you see your role in the world?
Aaron Slodov: Iâd like to imagine that Iâm not necessarily a soft handed technologist that has never experienced the grit and hard nature of the true world, but Iâve been through a lot of stuff myself, and I guess where this comes from is a deeply profound appreciation for my existence.
I donât wanna waste a second of it. I think as time moves forward and as technology becomes more and more advanced. Every single moment is the next highest leverage moment. And I think thatâs really empowering in a lot of ways because everybody can have [00:04:00] superpowers on some level. I never thought I would be doing the things that I am doing right now, but it is just kind of the, the era of you can just do things and I am really embracing that.
But it does come from a long time in life lived of. Decent hardship and growth and. Exploration. So I think ultimately I just kind of wanna grab life by the reigns and make the best of it.
Ian Hathaway: You mentioned you can just do things. You feel like this is the era we can do that. I feel like thatâs part of your story from the beginning.
So to rewind, just for a minute, you grew up in Cleveland, soldering electronics as a kid. Working menial jobs, eventually grinding your way through college at nearby Kent State while working full-time. Thatâs not common for a lot of startup founders today. But looking back on that, what kind of kid were you and when did you first realize that you saw the world through that engineerâs [00:05:00] lens, right?
That builder, that doer, that instinct to fix and tinker.
Aaron Slodov: I had an interesting upbringing. My mother worked at the Natural History Museum in Cleveland, and so Iâd like go to work with her and steal her keys and like run around like it was night at the museum and people would just stare at me like, how does this little kid have the keys to go behind exhibits and stuff, you know?
And like go into secret doors, like, yeah, this is badass. And then my grandfather on her side was an electrical engineer at GE in Cleveland for 40 plus years, and he. Was like a ham radio operator. He invented miniaturized Christmas light bulbs and a, a bunch of other crazy stuff. It was just interesting, like having a, a tinker around all the time.
My first instinct was to just rip things apart and try to figure out why they were, and like put âem back together. I was a terrible kid. I got in trouble a lot. I guess Iâm kind of a pot stir in in a lot of ways, but I wanna make people think and I like to question things a lot, [00:06:00] and I donât think anything gets done unless you do that.
I like barely made it through high school. I actually had to go to a community college to do remedial like math before I even applied to go to a state school. There was a big awakening moment when I was 17, 18. Thatâs probably the subject of a whole other podcast, but it was a, a very enlightening and like awakening moment for me, and thatâs kind of when I just grew this appreciation for what I have basically, and I needed to apply it.
So that was the moment where I was kind of like. I really wanna explore the underlying nature of the universe, and I studied a bunch of different religion and then ultimately came to physics as kind of my backstop, and thatâs kind of what I poured myself into.
Ian Hathaway: I feel like thereâs so many elements there that makes sense.
What youâre doing today, you have this kind. Family, DNA, of tinkering of curiosity, even electrical engineering being a component of that, not [00:07:00] being a rule follower, but being super smart. I feel like those are common traits of many entrepreneurs. You mentioned you studied physics as an undergrad. I know you were working full-time while putting yourself through college.
That certainly made your path slower, but I have to imagine that it also made you more grounded or maybe more appreciative, or maybe you had more ownership over it. How would you say that experience? Doing it in that way shaped you as a builder, as an operator? As an entrepreneur, and maybe did it change how you approach risk, ambition, or even building teams?
Aaron Slodov: Yeah, I didnât take like the traditional route either. So after high school, I did a bunch of menial jobs, then I got serious and then went and did some of this remedial stuff. During all of this, it did let me keep more ownership over all of it because nobody was paying my way and every loan that I took out was basically like a big oof.
So I had to [00:08:00] build relatively pragmatic. But it was cool because I was also exploring a lot of things that were very new to me and very exciting at the same time. But I kind of dual tracked a lot of this stuff, and I still want to kind of take a. Pragmatic approach to anything. Even my first company or when I was working out at Google or in Atomic or anything that I do, I guess has that same kind of architecture and it is more grounded.
I think it does benefit people to be an anthropologist or sociologist on some level. I think thatâs whatâs actually pretty interesting about good product leaders in software too. They just understand basic human behavior. So I think taking a lot of those principles and applying it to. Really simple stuff like what kind of company would I wanna work at?
What kind of summit or conference would I want to attend? We all have these like prescriptive, rote behavior types of things that we all go through and still attend or join or build ultimately. But why donât we do new things, [00:09:00] or at least be a little non-prescriptive about it and try something different?
Occasionally.
Ian Hathaway: Before you started your founderâs journey, you did move to Silicon Valley. You worked at Google as part of Google X. On the self-driving car project more than a decade ago, Iâd love to hear about that. What did that teach you about whatâs possible when smart people are well resourced and wanna change the world?
Aaron Slodov: I think everybody pines for this idea of a Bell Labs type environment where you have unlimited resources. A couple things I noticed, which were really inspiring was being on the bleeding edge of everything 15 years ago was super cool. You definitely feel really badass working on these things day to day.
Even then, right when Google was like a fraction of the people that it is now today, you could still feel. Bureaucratic friction. And in something like self-driving, it was just very apparent that the regulatory friction outside of the company would be a huge barrier, let alone the [00:10:00] internal friction of just the chain of command and how the system itself was being built and invented was actually pretty fascinating.
So in some way, I think a lot of the things that. Made Silicon Valley really cool and interesting. Originally, like way back in the day, just this permissionless kind of culture. There were less rails everywhere and people were just trying to build stuff and get stuff done, and I think what working there exposed me to was the level of excellence that I hadnât been exposed to.
So I kind of understood what was absolutely exceptional, what was not. I guess the dream for people, maybe like me or maybe a lot of other people, is just a giant sandbox with unlimited resources,
Ian Hathaway: a giant sandbox with unlimited resources and very few rules. Yeah. It sounds like a great place for your coming of age.
Right, and thatâs the thing, like not enough people study the, the history of Silicon Valley, the true history, which is it wasnât the most obvious winner. Even [00:11:00] in the us It really comes down to. Some seismic shifts in culture of openness, collaborative competition, and supporting people to spin out and do new things.
You eventually left Google. I know you were working on a PhD in Energy Systems Engineering. You spent a lot of time in research roles, so I guess it makes a lot of sense that. Your first startup Reesh was born from this kind of spirit of helping people engage more meaningfully with a larger group, almost like a researcher living inside of a live experiment.
Tell us a little bit about Reesh. What was kind of the original aha moment that led you to start the company, and when did it click that this was actually a business worth building rather than just a tool to use and to work on?
Aaron Slodov: When I was kind of winding down my job out on the west coast and coming back, I ended up talking to my longtime friend who I [00:12:00] went to undergrad with, Andrew Conia.
This was like during the other really big, you know, Israel Palestine flareup in, in 20 11, 20 12, and they came up with a framework based on some really fancy math about like collective speech. Andrew was surrounded by. Israelis and Palestinians in his PhD program, and everybody was kind of like, yeah, weâre chill, but our governments are psychotic and theyâre trying to kill each other.
And the idea was what would happen if we got massive groups of people together and were able to sift through their sentiment and comments and allow them to communicate group to group? What would that look like? So they developed an interesting mathematical framework for collective speech. And then when I moved back, I tried to bring some of my Silicon Valley experience back to this, right?
And like, yeah, we should totally start a company around this and productize it. And the first year was joining. A local accelerator program in Cleveland, [00:13:00] running around on college campuses, taking the initial product that we built and trying to get groups of Republicans and Democrats or like men and women to, to speak to each other on our platform.
So it was, it was a really interesting social experiment.
Ian Hathaway: Company starts in 20 13, 20 14. You had success early, right? You, you got some of that local early capital. You went to Techstars in New York in 2015, raised a C round shortly thereafter from coastal firms in raised a series A in 2018. From General Catalyst, which is sort of a legendary venture capital firm, but there you are in Cleveland, and so youâre kind of traversing Cleveland, New York, raising money from elite investors on the coast.
How did you do that? How did you initially get the company capitalized? What was the relationship between Cleveland and New York? You know, weâve had this discussion before. Was Remesh a Cleveland company? Was it a New York company? And why would that [00:14:00] matter
Aaron Slodov: ultimately? Yeah, I mean, we headquartered, it started it in Cleveland, but it moved headquarters to New York after Techstars, and then we were located there and bounced around in the city until after COVID and then it went, you know, remote.
Ultimately getting a couple of those rounds done was hinged on being in in New York City. There was like an expectation that a good dearth of the company was gonna be located there and then. Moving it back after COVID, nobody cared.
Ian Hathaway: It doesnât sound like the decision to be in New York was driven by the company or maybe even an ability to find and recruit talent.
Was it purely being driven by investor demands or was there something that felt like being in New York was beneficial?
Aaron Slodov: Both definitely at that time it was way easier to just get on a train and have meetings all over the city. Thereâs a lot of customers there as well for for that product too, so it was a lot easier to have those types [00:15:00] of meetings really easily without friction.
Ian Hathaway: I know COVID changed the business in many ways as it changed. Lots of other businesses. Every startup has its share of growing pains and setbacks. But Remesh went through something much deeper. You had aggressive growth mandates, investor expectations. Ultimately, the company was restructured in a way that wiped out.
A lot of early stakeholders. Could you share a little bit about what that experience was like for you, and then maybe how that positions you today, how you think about control, how you think about long-term ambition as a founder, how you think about stakeholder alignment as youâre considering partners, investors?
Aaron Slodov: Yeah. Itâs never a great topic to have to cover something like that because we wanna just celebrate all the victories, but there is important scar tissue that. People should understand, at least like when you get into a game like this that you know is, is at stake. [00:16:00] And ultimately, I think a lot of this was just bad market timing.
We had a really awesome potential exit, and this was like right before the market took a nosedive in. 22, where a lot of high growth tech was just completely devalued by the market and the glint in, in everybodyâs eyes with the available multiples going into the toilet, took the light out of their eyes.
I wasnât willing to go along with the restructuring. I didnât really think it was a fair thing, and I wanted to go my own way and maintain my relationship with everybody. So that was ultimately the best path forward. It sucks, but sometimes you gotta do that, even if your exit isnât close to the expectation of what an investor thinks.
They can just veto that, especially if they have control. I think a lot of founders also want Zuck level control when theyâre starting out and itâs like a, a push pull kind of relationship where the investors wanna [00:17:00] maintain some kind of. Downside protection. Obviously founder led companies are going to be the most successful at the end of the day.
Giving founders control, I think, is some people would argue that you should do that because they need to just do whatever they need to do to build like zero barriers, zero friction, but then on the other side, youâre gonna. Release like an Untamed Beast and it has no control. What if they just like kill the company?
A lot of people try to figure out what a good quality founder looks like, right? Like a world class founder. I donât think that those people are minted. Theyâre forged. Itâs not something that you just kind of like pop out and youâre an Elon all of a sudden, like Elon went through 25 years of pain and suffering to get where he is, and heâs still learning, right?
Like he doesnât have all the answers either. These are just
Ian Hathaway: experiments. Some work, some donât. I think how you handle the ones that donât says more about you than how you handle the ones that do. You left the company [00:18:00] 2020. You wanted a fresh start, build something that youâve never touched before, led you down this route of building a physical consumer product.
Tell us a little bit about that journey. I know you ultimately end up with Atomic. Weâll get there in a moment, but. Just talk about like what you were thinking as you were jumping right into your next thing, coming outta that tough exit and wanting to do something that was unfamiliar to you, something that was so different.
Aaron Slodov: Very simply. That was it. Iâd done software, done some goofy hardware stuff. I wanted to actually like make something. Iâm a dork and I play Dungeons and Dragons and Iâm getting old, and something that I kind of noticed is that elder nerds were like spending tons and tons of money on tabletop games and collectible stuff because a lot of these things evoke.
A sense of nostalgia from like when we grew up. And I thought that was interesting. I had no interest whatsoever in doing like a venture backed [00:19:00] company at that moment at all. This was just like a passion project and I was gonna build a company that made figurines like monsters and all kinds of goofy stuff for these games.
And then when I got to that step. I was like hitting up my friends that still worked out in the Bay Area. Itâs like, how do you actually manufacture shit? And theyâre all like, yeah, just go to China. Itâs this magical thing. And you just give it your designs and money and then your product shows up. I had a a really nightmarish time doing that and a lot of people suggested you gotta go live in the factory for a little bit.
Like you have to go to China and and go do that. And I was just like, no. Why do I have to do that? I just thought that was the worst imaginable thing I could, you know, spend my time on. I donât run factories, like why do I have to go sit there and make sure they make my stuff? And then that set off a whole chain of trying to figure out if American manufacturers were interested in stuff like this.
And none of âem are because itâs more commodity. I thought this was a very, [00:20:00] very interesting thing. How did we get to this point and why is it so hard to just make a stupid plastic toy, especially where the Venn diagram of speed to market quality and price all kind of converged to a point where I could actually execute on it?
And I thought there has got to be a better way to do this. If itâs this hard to make a toy, how hard is it to make every other thing on the planet? A really eyeopening moment.
Ian Hathaway: What was the fundamental problem facing manufacturing in America as it related to the questions you were trying to answer?
Aaron Slodov: Mostly that the practice of globalization put us in a really strategically onerous position. And on a philosophical level, I think we take a lot of this for granted. Nobody really knows or cares about how all the crap that we have gets made. We just wanna buy it, you know, at a decent price. But ultimately, the people that wanted to push a globalization agenda were [00:21:00] well-meaning, because industrializing a poor nation will help uplift people out of poverty.
Itâll help advance. Their cultures, but thatâs also just saying we think itâs okay for somebody else to. Basically pay slave labor wages, right? And like working in awful conditions just so I can get like cheap socks or a TV or a computer. Somebody else should do that. And itâs okay if theyâre a slave laborer.
Itâs good for them actually. And I just think thatâs psychotic. Weâre not gonna escape that anytime soon. But the whole system of like labor arbitrage, industrialization is very untenable to me because a country like China over the last 40 years. Starting with basically nothing other than the advantage that they were cheap and we let them into the WTO allowed them to come in and ultimately sell into the market, and they werenât good in the beginning.
And obviously over four years, youâre gonna [00:22:00] become extraordinarily good. At making things right and they are, can you keep repeating that process over and over and over again? Are we gonna do that basically to every country? Itâs not like if we industrialize Thailand, right? Theyâre going to challenge America on the world stage.
But a country the size of China, obviously is doing that now. Ultimately tying our economies closer together is creating more conflict, not less so. It was like, great try, but we need to like reselect the level of globalization that we wanna operate at, because when youâre potential adversary and at least ideologically youâre done, thatâs not a good position to be in.
People point to
Ian Hathaway: NAFTA as crippling the us, but they overlook Chinaâs ascension into the WTO, which was the real Big bang event. Shifting gears a little bit, in addition to seeing this sort of global manufacturing and supply chain problem, you started really seeing it as a software and manufacturing problem.
When did that shift happen? Was [00:23:00] there any resistance to that realization and how did that shape ultimately launching atomic and building what youâre building today?
Aaron Slodov: I knew the tailwinds of. Software, materials, robotics, all these different fields, were just not gonna slow down. I knew it was just gonna become easier to do this.
And the reason I think our problem is super interesting is a lot of the work that weâre trying to tackle comes down to. Non repeatable, complex engineering, thatâs all rooted in physics and mechanics, and it was more of a computational problem that could be solved. Iâm trying to tackle a very low dimensional system, like a mold is basically two blocks of metal that get cut up, and in the middle of that thing thereâs a cavity that represents some unique shape and it just blasts out that shape all day long.
Thatâs a controlled physics problem. My whole conceptualization of this is that as we kind of built it and addressed the [00:24:00] problem, new things would kind of evolve, that I could integrate into what we were building. So even at the core, a lot of the foundational software continues to evolve every day.
Ian Hathaway: You built your own testbed factory in Detroit and you have an in-house supercomputer to train your models.
Why was it so important for you to control the full stack from day one and what does building it in Detroit unlock for you that doing it in California couldnât? We did not start
Aaron Slodov: with the
Ian Hathaway: factory.
Aaron Slodov: Ultimately, the way that we evolved was starting with the software just alone, right? And like a small 10 person team.
And then demonstrating that we could actually compete with a human expert or set of experts on very specific. Sub design tasks that are involved in this process. That is kind of what unlocked the seed round that got me the factory. But the reason that I think itâs essential is in manufacturing, right?
The thing that weâre trying to solve [00:25:00] is being able to, one shot a production process. Somebody sends you a CAD file, they only care about getting the parts out the other side. Thereâs all this crazy stuff that happens in between making it up in CAD and then actually holding the part in your hand and collapsing that whole process as far and fast as possible is the mission.
People that have no experience in manufacturing. A lot of them think that they can just make software and then magically the product of what comes outta their software is somebodyâs gonna just execute on in a factory somewhere. But when you do that, thereâs always like a gap between reality and what comes out of a piece of software.
So I would just prefer. If the software were dictating reality, and the only thing youâre feeding into it is like a requirement, a KAA CAD file, and the software basically understands how to design the thing and then ultimately execute that design by orchestrating CNC machines and printers and like drills because it knows how to cost optimize every fabrication step.
The other huge part of it, obviously, is the data collection. Youâre never gonna [00:26:00] be able to train a software model well enough for hyper-efficient design and manufacturing unless itâs connected, basically just like a self-driving car. So a lot of the stuff that I do, I take principles from building self-driving car systems, and I think itâs very analogous to production.
Ian Hathaway: Iâd love to talk about this a little bit more, this seeming divide between. Itâs a world of bits in the world of atoms and tech and venture, and Iâm very convinced that thereâs a huge opportunity for companies that can merge software with physical production. I think thereâs a small but growing chorus of people who agree with that as well.
Manufacturing could be much more valuable than software, but itâs also much harder to innovate in. I know. Youâve talked a little bit in the past about just culturally in the tech world, so many people are chasing these short-term returns and optimizing for funding rounds rather than like shaping the future and building real infrastructure.
Why do you think this gap still persists, and [00:27:00] maybe more importantly, what needs to happen to close that divide?
Aaron Slodov: I think everybody should just come to her factories, basically have a more thorough understanding of how something goes from design to production. And without that, itâs all just some kind of intellectualized version of what they think manufacturing is.
And until you actually see. Somebody try to take a CAD file and then turn it into G code and then actually like machine, a block of metal and then put it together somewhere that really shatters peopleâs confidence in terms of just understanding the full structure of the system and how it functions in reality, and thereâs not a lot of room to replace a lot of those things.
On a one-off basis because theyâre just so ingrained in the engineering and manufacturing world, and to your point, right, itâs extremely expensive to do reps in the physical world. So itâs a tremendous disconnect because people just havenât been exposed to the horror of. How bad everything is in [00:28:00] manufacturing, but at the same time, thatâs the size of the opportunity too.
Youâve got old and new and friction there, but also depending on what youâre talking about, especially manufacturing old still holds all of the actual valuable. Trade knowledge, it isnât being transferred to new like it needs to be. You
Ian Hathaway: raised this $17 million seed round from folks like Fallon at Nariah.
You also had early backing from yc, but you just also closed a $25 million series A round led by Mac and DTX. Congratulations. Not the easiest fundraising environment, especially when youâre doing something hard and something truly different. How does it feel to have secured a fresh round of capital, particularly in this environment, and what are you planning to do with it?
Aaron Slodov: It just puts more pressure on, Iâm already thinking about the, the full next like 24 months and executing along that [00:29:00] and how quickly I can get to the next milestone. Itâs good in some ways because now you get to take a breather for a second, but just one second. Yeah. No, no more. These companies arenât super easy because you have to juggle not only like.
World-class, cutting edge software development in bizarre areas where there just like arenât really skill sets for these types of engineers, right? Like applied ai, physics simulation, numerical solvers, all kinds of crazy stuff to actually build this software. I think a lot of mistakes that are made.
Historically, so far in this very specific niche area of tech enabled manufacturing is that people arenât actually developing enough technology that lets them scale into more. Infrastructure. Infrastructure. Itâs great if you can buy hundreds of machines and everything, but if your technology doesnât allow you to actually efficiently use that, if [00:30:00] youâre still linearly or worse scaling with like people in machines, then thatâs not really like a super scalable thing.
So Iâm basically just trying to de-risk my ability to infinitely scale into machines and infrastructure with the tech. So Iâm like. Itâs a balancing act.
Ian Hathaway: Speaking of scaling yourself and scaling your company, youâre also scaling a movement. At a certain point, you realize your mission wasnât just about building atomic, that no one single company could actually re industrialize America alone, and so you launch.
Re Industrialize, which is a summit that brings people together who are actually building things, engineers, founders, machinists, policy makers even. And that eventually gave rise to the New American Industrial Alliance. What do you feel like was missing from the national conversation that made you believe that this was a space that required a more permanent infrastructure around it?
And how are you thinking [00:31:00] about building this two movements into something thatâs lasting?
Aaron Slodov: We donât have a lot of things to point at. With respect to inventing a new industrial base, thereâs not a ton of people out there trying to build sci-fi factories. Elon has done a really great job of making the factory the product and hopefully getting the point across that mastery over production methods is incredibly important.
And it doesnât matter if youâre making cars or rockets, but the idea that you can actually. Affordably produce things here is very important to people because I guess going back to the whole globalization in China thing, you donât need to be like a China Hawk to just realize and understand that China cannot be a.
The only game in town, it doesnât matter if weâre number one or number two, there just cannot be one. Thatâs unacceptable. And something I repeat over and over again is just that the amount of r and [00:32:00] d and innovation in manufacturing is tragically low. We became so wealthy and so smart that we just. Gave up on innovating there, and I think the perception of manufacturing is this kind of like low value process on the edges of design and r and d, and then sales and distribution is kind of insane.
You canât simultaneously complain about China being a threat, not being able to make ships and drones and submarines. Then completely ignore the fact that like weâve just decimated our industrial base. Thatâs just a non-starter. So what does that mean? That means that all the OEMs that wanna make a bunch of stuff either have to deal directly with our adversaries, or theyâre not gonna make anything because there arenât suppliers to do it.
So you wanna scale production of something and you canât. Thatâs not a great place to be. We should actually focus on the building blocks of industrial [00:33:00] society from like raw materials through widgets and like the actual machines that do these things. I think all of that is important in building this movement.
And the thing that people are missing are these really basic ideas and concepts that we take for granted, ignore, or donât want to talk about because theyâre too costly or theyâre not high enough margin or theyâre bad businesses, like who cares? Figure out a way to make them viable. And thatâs kind of what weâve done.
Youâre tackling
Ian Hathaway: the established ways of doing things, the existing power structures, any good movement requires talent. So how do you. Encourage young, smart, ambitious people to look beyond building apps and software, to tackling the challenges like fixing the grid, building factories, solving these real world problems.
What do you say to early career folks who are curious about what youâre doing, but might be too intimidated by hard tech? And [00:34:00] what do these people need most? How can we accelerate the talent pipeline?
Aaron Slodov: Itâs a huge combination of different things. I think that the incentives need to change a little bit. A lot of engineers went into computer science and electrical engineering rather than things that were necessary for societal stability.
The field that I went into was power systems engineering, and thatâs the kind of applied study nature of the electrical grid. The electrical grid is. A disaster. And is that because we didnât have enough engineering talent going into it? Probably âcause everybody was leaving to go into computing. I think incentives will always be king.
Exposure is another. Go walk around in a factory, get a tour. We need more content around this stuff too. I think people are fascinated by making things and by manufacturing. We have to eliminate the idea of blue collar altogether because it just pigeonholes you into the idea that [00:35:00] youâre less than where a lot of manufacturing cognitively is way more advanced than a lot of knowledge workers.
Itâs unbelievable that we. Classify those things as like low skill or like a hundred percent compared to, you know, an accountant or something. Sorry, accountants, I guess. But it blows my mind that like we stratified things that way and I think that this stuff needs to evolve. I think we should change labor laws, right?
Like touching a machine shouldnât mean that youâre relegated to an hourly wage and you canât have a salary. At some point, the overriding mission will, will drive a lot of people to this too because itâs a growing and burgeoning kind of field right now. So I think itâs just a mixture of incentive of people building and funding new companies to, to funnel this talent into, as dumb as it sounds like, more content around this stuff, like people just need exposure to it.
And then we need companies to have wins and like grow and we need to build new industrialists, [00:36:00] literally.
Ian Hathaway: I guess closing that out and maybe focusing a little bit on you as a leader. Obviously any movement is reflective of the people who are driving it. Iâm not surprised youâre doing this. In fact, we first crossed paths in 2017.
This just feels like a natural extension of who youâve been all along, company builder and community builder at the same time, this is also a show about outsiders, right? People who donât fit the mold of what theyâre doing. You are now seen as one of the key voices in Americaâs Reindustrialization movement, and yet youâre not a defense industry insider.
Youâre not a legacy industrialist or a beltway operator. Youâre a startup founder from Cleveland. You didnât go to MIT, you didnât go to Stanford, but there you are at the face of this movement. How have you been received in that world? What perception hurdles have you had to overcome as someone whoâs not an industry insider and maybe what kind of [00:37:00] advice might you have for other outsiders about how to break into something from that outsider stance?
Aaron Slodov: I think itâs a challenge that a lot of people ultimately face. Nobodyâs gonna pay attention to you until it matters or un, until you really cause enough commotion. Thereâs like this really important gap or delta where youâre an unproven quantity and you have a lot to prove, or you have such a important story to tell, and it just takes the will of somebody else to pull you across and give you the chance to do that.
Thankfully, one of the great things that AI has done actually is kind of like break down some of these silos where people previously wouldnât take it seriously, but now theyâre like, holy shit, Iâve seen what AI can do on other things. And Iâm like, now questioning if that would happen in what I do. And itâs crazy because even five years ago talking about AI powered factories and things like that, people would just be like, get the hell outta here.
But I do think this is one of the largest benefits building like crazy stuff, is [00:38:00] breaking down peopleâs barriers around what the art of the possible is. Thereâs some level of showmanship and some level of execution that you have to also balance, but on the individual builder level, itâs just keeping your head down and making stuff happen.
Sometimes you have to make a big splash, but most of the time you donât. I personally try to balance this. I struggle with, you know. I donât need to be the center of attention, but nobody else is doing it at the same time. So who else is gonna do it? What I do care about is that this message is pounded into peopleâs brains.
Ian Hathaway: Youâre on a generational mission. What youâre doing successfully done will take decades, not years. So with that in mind, when we get together 10, 20 years from now, and weâre looking back on what you accomplished with atomic. What youâve accomplished with this reindustrialization movement in America. What do you hope that we can look back on and say mission accomplished?[00:39:00]
Aaron Slodov: Maybe that we feel safe and comfortable with the state of things? You know, that would probably be a good. A good outcome is this gonna be something that benefits your children and grandchildren and the future? Somebody ultimately has to do this and itâs probably one of the best investments that our country could possibly make, and I think that, you know, it could help us rebuild the middle class.
I think it could elevate. A lot of the economy in ways that we just donât even know yet. Big aspirations for sure.
Ian Hathaway: Well, I think itâs a noble mission. Iâm glad that youâre doing it. You touched on that last point. Helping the middle class. Itâs something growing up in a manufacturing town in Ohio myself, I got to witness that firsthand.
The population in my community peaked the year I was born and has been on the decline ever since, and so itâs definitely something that I feel personally and I know you do as well. My hatâs off to you and I, [00:40:00] Iâm wishing you the best of luck. Weâre almost outta time, but before we go, weâd like to finish with a segment called Beyond the Bio.
So these are just some quick hit questions that let us go a little bit beyond your resume and dig into you. So whatâs a quick piece of advice from a mentor that stuck with you along your journey?
Aaron Slodov: Itâs kind of a weird one âcause it wasnât necessarily advice. It was more of like a moment, I guess I got fired from a landscaping job by the owner of the landscaping company because I reminded him too much of himself and I always thought that was really fascinating and I was like, wait, what?
Why am I getting fired for that? He was like, you need to be building your own things. And I guess the takeaway that I got from that was. To never not pursue something that I like wanted to do. And that happened pretty early. I think I was like 16 when I got fired by that guy. Iâll never forget that
Ian Hathaway: he saw something in you maybe you didnât see in yourself yet.
So who is an [00:41:00] unsung hero in your life and what has been the impact theyâve had on you?
Aaron Slodov: Both of my parents, âcause they each brought a different. Piece of resiliency that I couldnât find anywhere else, and they both had like their own unique way of supplementing their form of resilience in in my life.
Each of them kind of gave me a really unique and useful piece of them through that.
Ian Hathaway: How did growing up in northeast Ohio shape you as a person and as an entrepreneur?
Aaron Slodov: Midwest people are kind of interesting and unique because they have four seasons and like half of their year is depression. Basically. I think what it helped me ultimately understand was suffering is actually good for you as it builds character.
I think ultimately growing up in the Midwest and in Cleveland probably exposes you to a level of. Unfortunateness that may maybe not everybody has to go through.
Ian Hathaway: Yeah, I would say the Cleveland Browns are [00:42:00] definitely unfortunate. So who is someone in your local startup community or your broader network who does a lot behind the scenes and deserves a shout out from you?
Aaron Slodov: There was a guy named Bob Soko, who was part of the ecosystem in Cleveland for a long time. He was just a force of nature and he was part of Case Westernâs entrepreneurial ecosystem. He was a total machine. Could make anything happen for anybody at a given momentâs notice, which is kind of crazy. His whole thing was connecting people and making stuff happen, and Iâve never seen anybody kind of like operate at that level, and I try to do as much of that as I can as well.
He obviously deserves a massive shout out and I would definitely put that behind Bob for sure.
Ian Hathaway: I didnât realize Bob had passed, but he was, as you said, a force of nature. Thanks for mentioning him. Tell us something most people donât know about you, something outside of work. [00:43:00] Maybe a hobby, travel spot, guilty pleasure, or even a hidden talent.
Aaron Slodov: Most of the time outside of work that I spend is tending to my Husky, Loki, and so yeah. All of my free time goes into hanging out with him basically, and taking care of him. So,
Ian Hathaway: hey, nothing beats unconditional love of a dog. So what are one or two songs youâd like to add to our Spotify founderâs Playlist?
Maybe something that fuels your workday or has inspired you as an entrepr.
Aaron Slodov: Iâm pretty weird when it comes to music, so if Iâm doing like really crazy, intense work, I just listen to droning cinematic, orchestral kind of music with no words. My favorite composer was Johann Johansson, who did like the soundtracks for.
Movies like Sicario, a lot of his work is really, really awesome and can really put you into that work hole where youâre just like totally locked in. Otherwise, a really [00:44:00] weird song, I will put it on randomly is No Quarter by Led Zeppelin. Not weird at
Ian Hathaway: all. Weâre definitely adding that one. Whatâs a book youâd recommend?
Aaron Slodov: K Land on the Koch Brothers. You wanna know how like a ruthless business empire is built at the weirdest levels of detail. Go read that book. Itâs fascinating in a lot of ways and gives you like a really eye-opening view into like how those guys built what probably is still the largest private company on the planet.
Ian Hathaway: Oh yeah. The footprint of that family business is insane. It is orders of magnitude bigger than most people think. Okay, last question. If you could give one piece of advice to someone whoâs about to start their founderâs journey, particularly someone whoâs a bit of an outsider like you, what would it be?
Aaron Slodov: Congratulations. Youâre gonna hate it. Welcome to Hell Yeah, basically. I mean, the chewing glass analogy [00:45:00] is very true. Itâs a lot of work and itâs alienating and isolating. So get ready. I mean, itâs gonna be a blast, but also make sure you have a good support structure to like fall back on. So making like group chats with other founders is super, super valuable, especially as you all kinda like grow together.
Ian Hathaway: Itâs a great way to end. Aaron, thanks so much for being here. Iâm so glad we finally got to do this, and I canât wait to share it with our listeners.
Aaron Slodov: Awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It was really, really a good time.
Ian Hathaway: Thatâs a wrap for todayâs episode of Outsider Inc. A big thank you to Aaron.
Slow off for sharing that candid, hard won story. Curiosity took him from Cleveland to Google X, and the scars from Remesh sharpened his view on control incentives and building for the long term. Instead of retreating, he ran it our broken manufacturing system, all while convening builders through re industrialized and the new American Industrial Alliance.
What stuck with me most is Aaronâs posture. Choose the uphill problem, [00:46:00] respect the craft, and align stakeholders for the long game if we want resilient supply chains in a stronger middle class. Thatâs the mindset it takes. If you want more from outsider, inc, donât forget to subscribe to the platform@outsiderinc.substack.com.
Itâs packed with highlights from todayâs episode. And bonus insights you wonât wanna miss. You can follow Outsider Inc on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn at. Outsider Ink Pod. You can also follow me on X at Ian Hathaway Outsider Inc. Is produced by Spellbinder Media. Weâll be back soon with another fascinating outsider conversation.
Until then, thank you so much for listening and remember, great entrepreneurs can come from anywhere. See you next time.