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Welcome Scott Miller, CEO of Dragon Innovation!
- Scott was originally on The Amp Hour in episode 113
- Dragon raised money from VCs and was acquired by Avnet 2 years ago.
- Non traditional customers (avocado example) don’t want to stand up a hardware team
- Dragon/Avnet built a toolbox for IoT, so don’t need to recreate
- Scooters
- Education is important for customers
- BOM health risk assessment
- MLCCs had 72 week leadtime
- Supply chain risk over time
- Dragon is now moving up the chain
- “Product as a service” (PaaS)
- Pricing in the costs of repairs and support
- Not many other companies doing that sort of thing these days (yet)
- GE was trying to do with engines
- Risk is that the customer goes another direction
- There are now stockholders to think of (being part of Avnet)
- Scott is seeing a trend in the US of a constriction of B2C startups, but more industrial IoT
- High profile bankruptcies
- Anki
- Mayfield Robotics
- Excited about growth in Europe, including more building in EU.
- Companies moving out of China quickly (due to 25% tariffs) but into other Asian countries
- Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia
- RFQ would normally have 3-5 quotes, maybe half of them from China.
- Now doing it on a more global basis
- How are factories being chosen?
- Looking to get to domestic factories every month to build out their “Contract Manufacturer Database” (CMDB). Vetted factories are a service that Dragon provides to customers.
- “Vietnam is like China 10-15 years ago”
- 2000 global factories on the CMBD
- Trying to build up the list for Mexico factories.
- What are some of the cultural differences for things coming back on an RFQ?
- China is more vertical. Or at least it looks like it’s vertical. Integrated CM would make their own cardboard!
- Labor costs are $5-6 per hour in China right now.
- Depending on the region and the factory
- Factory owners are really focused on automation
- Making their own soldering iron robot
- Home grown automation
- Focus on flexibility of the robots
- Strategic focus from every factory
- Tier 1, 2 ,3 contract manufacturers
- Tier 1 has access to more capital, so have fancier technology
- Level of tracking is really good, to tell for returns
- Used to be a prof at Olin
- Took all the lectures and put them on Dragon Website
- Scott does AMA sessions as well!
- Pulling manufacturing knowledge back into design
- Get to 80% done to bring in a factory
- Pulling data back into the process for BOM
- BOM health risk assessment
- Most Dragon customers are between 5000 units -1M
- Pebble and Dropcam examples
- Most started small, needed to get in early
- Ring example
- Dragoninnovation.com
- DFMA courses