Episode #28: Empowering Local Industry: The Digital Revolution in Manufacturing with Andrew Kornuta
In this episode of U.S. Manufacturing Today, hosted by Veryable, host Matt Horine speask with Andrew Kornuta, Founder and CTO of Noramark, and discusses the challenges and opportunities in the American manufacturing sector. Kornuta shares insights from his career, including his experience at Amazon, which highlighted the over-reliance on Chinese manufacturing and the need for a modern digital infrastructure to connect U.S. manufacturers. He explains Noramark's mission to simplify collaboration through a trust-driven platform that modernizes the fragmented offline sourcing model prevalent in American manufacturing. Kornuta also touches on the geopolitical threats posed by China's strategic economic practices and emphasizes the importance of reshoring manufacturing for national security. The episode delves into how Noramark's trust score can help U.S. manufacturers scale their businesses by minimizing risk and enhancing operational transparency.
Links
- NoraMark Website
- Andrew Kornuta on LinkedIn
- Navigating Trump 2.0
- Revitalizing U.S. Manufacturing
- Sign Up on the Veryable Platform
Timestamps
- 00:00 Introduction to U.S. Manufacturing Today
- 00:41 Meet Andrew Kornuta: From Amazon to Noramark
- 01:17 The Challenges of U.S. Manufacturing
- 03:20 The Vision Behind Noramark
- 04:34 Historical Context and Modern Challenges
- 11:36 The Role of Trust in Manufacturing
- 14:23 Building a Trust Score System
- 15:52 Improving Valuation and Wages in Manufacturing
- 18:00 The Golden Age of Blue-Collar Work
- 18:34 The Importance of Trust in Manufacturing
- 19:04 Challenges in Contract Manufacturing
- 21:52 The Role of Government in Industrial Policy
- 23:40 China's Industrial Strategy and Its Impact
- 33:34 The Future of US Manufacturing
- 36:07 Conclusion and Contact Information
Episode Transcript
Matt Horine: Welcome back to US Manufacturing today, the podcast powered by Veryable, where we talk with the leaders, innovators, and change makers, shaping the future of American industry, along with providing regular updates on the state of the industry, the changing landscape policies and more.
Our guest today is Andrew Kornuta, Founder and CTO of NoraMark, a network that connects trusted U.S. manufacturers via a transparent relationship driven platform. Noramark is designed to simplify collaboration, strengthen our domestic supply base, and bring coordination to the fragmented offline sourcing model, many shops still rely on.
Andrew, welcome to the show.
Andrew Kornuta: Thank you for having me.
Matt Horine: Yeah, we're excited you're here today and let's just jump right into it. I'd love to hear a little bit more about the founding of Normark and your background. You went from systems engineering work to founding Normark and spent time, I think at Amazon would love to hear about it.
Andrew Kornuta: So I've been in in software for 25 years. I spent eight years at that time at Amazon. That was my last employer before quitting and starting normark. While I was at [00:01:00] Amazon, I had the opportunity to work on a, uh, some really exciting stuff. I ran the, I was within Amazon ads. Created and ran the developer Experience program.
We worked with tons of sellers, thousands of sellers. We worked with companies that worked with the sellers to help them to sell more things. It was very exciting to get to operate at that scale. One of the things that became apparent to me while I was working there, you see all this stuff, maiden Shine, right?
Doesn't really hit you until you start working directly with these sellers and you see the percentage of sellers that are based in China or working directly with China, importing from China. This was something that I had always been maybe like abstractly concerned about. I think a lot of people are concerned about it or think about it.
My grandfather was in construction and very traditional kind of American story. He would build stuff. He would buy American. He was a union worker, only drove American, made cars and all that, and always repaired anything that broke. Just very into it. Building and making stuff. And a lot of people in my family were in that space.
And so I grew up a lot of that [00:02:00] influence. And so it was always back of my mind. But while I was at Amazon, it became like really visceral. And then at one point my brother, who's my co-founder in NoraMark, came to me and he was looking to have a product made, and my brother's been in manufacturing and fabrication for his whole career.
He was looking to have a product made. It was a product that was made in the us. They just couldn't get it. They just couldn't keep it in stock. This particular manufacturer was a simple product. It was like a, kinda like a putty knife, flexible spreader thing. And he said, Hey, you work at Amazon, you work with all these companies that make stuff and sell stuff, right?
Do you have a, a connection or some way we can get a product like this made? And so I said, of course I can reach out to people. This will be easy. And it turns out it was super easy if you wanted to have it made in China. Or India or Vietnam or even Taiwan. But if you wanted to have it made in the US like this product was, it was almost impossible.
This picture started to come together in my head. It was very interesting. The first impression a lot of people get is. America just doesn't make stuff. That's why you can't get this. And that's an easy, that's an easy answer, and I think a [00:03:00] lot of folks stop there and they think, yeah, America doesn't make stuff that's wrong.
America does make, so America makes a ton of stuff. We're still the second largest manufacturer in the world and not that far behind China in terms of manufacturing output. The problem isn't that we lack factories or shops, right? We have the ability and the capacity to make stuff. What we lack is a modern digital infrastructure to connect this all together.
When I took that lens back to what's involved in making something in China, for example, you go to Alibaba and you can literally take a picture of the thing you want made, drop it into their search box, and you'll get connected with people who say, we can make this for you. I'll give you a quote in hours, right?
Sometimes less and they stay, they'll chat with you. They stay on top of it. This didn't happen by mistake. So this digital infrastructure that exists in China and in other countries was purposefully built by those countries, right? They, they came together and they put together systems. China in particular has Alibaba and another [00:04:00] system called 1688.
These systems actually help to balance demand across their entire industrial base. This is, I'll talk about where we can plug some of those gaps, but Veryable and companies like Veryable can also play an important role in, in, in plugging some of these gaps in the us. It's just never happened, right? Like we, we had this like.
Booming industrial base through obviously World War ii. Things ramped like dramatically. It continued through the 1950s and sixties as the United States essentially replaced all the infrastructure in the entire world that had been destroyed during the massive war. And as countries retooled. And then as you got into like the 1970s, starting with Nixon reopening trade with China, and then schools pumping out MBAs that were like, Hey, take your factory and send it over here and you'll make more money.
So I feel like what happened was as, as far as like the technical infrastructure goes. It almost became frozen in time. In, in, in this time when all the smart people were saying to, to offshore and move things outta the country. We stopped investing [00:05:00] in the more modern parts of infrastructure that make businesses work today.
So when you look at how manufacturing works in the US today, it doesn't look that different than that point in time where people started saying to offshore things, right? You have people meeting at trade shows, collecting business cards, hitting them on a corkboard, and those are the folks that they call.
So a big part of what we want to do with NoraMark is actually help to modernize this infrastructure. I'm not a huge. Fan of asking the government to get involved in these problems. I think the very American ways to do it ourselves, and I don't wanna piss off all the industrial policy people. I think they all have very good arguments out there, right?
Like we probably should have a US industrial policy that, that, that favors us businesses. I think we need a little more protectionism, maybe a lot more protectionism in this space. Because our ability to manufacture is directly tied to national security, that that is just an obvious statement. We saw a visceral example of this.
During COVID, you could walk into a store [00:06:00] with your mask on, right? You walk into a store and the shelves are empty. You'd go on Amazon. I remember going on Amazon to buy masks and seeing masks. That would've been eight bucks or whatever for a box of masks a few months earlier being hundreds of dollars if you could even get them.
Imagine, and people forget this, people often forget this, but we are not friendly with China. Maybe we're friendly with China. China's not friendly with us. And the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP that is in control of China today, they view themselves as being at war with the United States. And we stepped in and stopped their civil war from finishing in 1949 by preventing them from invading Taiwan at that point.
We've been in this position of conflict with them since 1949. Many Americans don't see this. Your average American is, oh, China. Yeah. They make cool stuff. They make cheap stuff, good food, whatever. But like from the perspective of the Chinese government, this is a humiliating stop where we're like, wait, we're in the middle of this war and we're stopping it.
We literally [00:07:00] had a hot war with China during the Korean conflict, which Douglas McCarthur wanted to take it all the way into China. Truman at the time, was like, wait, you can't do that because the Russia's gonna get involved. The Soviets are gonna get involved, which they wouldn't have. I think historically, we can see that now.
At the time it seemed like common sense. We've just forgotten about all this, or maybe we just haven't felt threatened by it. In pre-World War ii, we were like really strong allies with Chana. The point is we're in this precarious situation today where so much of what we have made is made in China. China has not been playing nice.
They've been very purposefully growing this dependency on them because it's a strategic advantage for them. And we've seen this with the tariffs and other things like they've caused pain for Americans. And you can imagine if a hot war or something were to break out or something like COVID, even that just disrupted shipping.
Things get very painful for the US very quickly. So there's this strategic problem with having a trade partner who is adversarial. I think a lot of people are realizing this and there's a, there's an increasing [00:08:00] understanding that we need to make more stuff on shore. So this, again, this is already a multi-trillion dollar industry and now we see in the news numerous companies that are poised to, or in the process of pumping trillions more into US manufacturing.
It's a big, huge commitment from Apple. Whole bunch of pharmaceutical manufacturers are starting to look at reshoring. We've seen numerous companies that are investing in reshoring because of tariffs, because of national security concerns. And even if you take all that off the table, what sort of thinking is, Hey, this thing I want to have made, I haven't made 9,000 miles away.
The why today is it's just easier. Like I can just go into that magical search box, throw my picture of the thing I want made in there, and it gets made, and then it just shows up. So we can change that though. Industrial policy is great, but we don't necessarily need that. I think in the very American.
Spirit of things, like we can bootstrap this and we can do this through private industry. So that's a big part of where we see normark fitting in, right? So we need to get [00:09:00] this living graph of who does what in the us, what are the capabilities? Not even the US government has this today through through dibs and sam.gov and the government procurement systems and defense system.
They have visibility into some of the capability that we have in US manufacturing, specifically the companies that they're doing business with. But I think everyone is aware of the hurdles involved in getting set up in these systems, and there's a whole bunch of capability out there. The US government doesn't know about or isn't easy to discover, but it's, but there's a lot of advanced manufacturing capability out there.
So looping this all the way back to this thing with my, my brother said, Hey, how do we get this thing made right? We realized what a problem this was and what an opportunity it is. As we start to think about what does it take to bring. Us manufacturing into the future, into the present day. Even so there's, there's a lot of smart people out there, a lot of smart people with all sorts of interesting hard tech, deep tech startups and some, and of course, the established players in the space that are [00:10:00] building amazing things that are inventing new ways of making things, new processes.
That's fantastic, but. There's this core digital infrastructure that's present in other industries that's missing in US manufacturing.
Matt Horine: I want to jump on that because I do have a lot of questions on the geopolitical side of this. There's a ton to cover, and I'd like to unpack that a little more here in the show, especially like the Douglas MacArthur component and American Caesar, if you remember the book and his firing by Truman and Nixon, China, and all of those things.
I would love to talk more about that. And also you hit on something really important right here, which is the, and I think what you're trying to address through that trust factor and that variability factor with NoraMark, because there are a lot of systems like this in other industries, it's very common.
And when you get into manufacturing and working with the government, I'll say it, 'cause you, you said, not getting into some of those challenges. It's very difficult right now to work with the government. There are a lot of overhead requirements, a lot of types of certifications, things that may or may not matter.
When you're looking at the [00:11:00] defense industrial base, but nail on the head earlier when you were talking about the supply chain and the national security problem, the COVID pandemic era was a war, essentially, it boiled down to wartime footing. We're still on wartime footing, in my opinion, just because we discovered the constraints to our capacity.
I don't know if we've done anything to solve it. And that is in some degree, yes, people are bringing things back, reshoring and reindustrialization without the action or just buzzwords. And it feels good. It looks good, it's happening and there are things that are happening. But I'd love to tap into what you mean on the trust factor with Normark and specifically part of your platform.
'cause that's something that is missing and we haven't heard much about.
Andrew Kornuta: So when we said, okay, we need Alibaba for North America. Easy and that sounds great. It's very easy to say. So we went out and we started talking to manufacturers and some trade orgs as well, and we said, listen, we're gonna build this system.
It's gonna be Alibaba for North America, and you can just click your capability on there. You can plug in. Every manufacturer we spoke to was like, yeah, that's a great idea. I love it. I am not going to participate. We were like, [00:12:00] why? And it was just gonna be a whole bunch of noise, right? It's gonna be, it's gonna be people price shopping.
We're gonna have competition from foreign entities. There's this IP theft risk we're, it's just gonna be a big distraction for us, and it's not good for our business. And by the way, we have some people we're already working with and we're making enough money, right? I got my truck, I got my boat, I got my, my, my house on the lake.
And so we were like, wow, how do we deal with that? We realized there's very low trust. Understandably, there's multiple factors in that. I mean, one is typically we're talking about expensive machines with expensive materials that have a very fixed cost to operate. So if you're running one shift or two shifts at your shop.
Or you are running three shifts and your machines are maxed out with the current work you have, like any business owner, you wanna grow, but you can't just add users and scale in the cloud with manufacturing. So taking on that extra job might mean buying a machine or hiring a shift manager and hiring people to operate that machine.
And if the person that you're, maybe you have, maybe [00:13:00] the person listen to pay you in 30 day terms, or 90 day terms, or 120 day terms, whatever. So you've gotta made this big investment for someone who you don't know. And this is taking the IP concerns and the race to the bottom line pricing. This is literally just, if you decide to take the work you're taking on a risk that could end up costing you money.
It could end up costing you your business. And how do you know if you want to take that risk on? And there's there that, that's a big consideration. And so part of what we. Big part of what we realized was the problem here was just this trust. And the other thing that fed into the trust issue was also these businesses being told us, manufacturers being told, you're crazy if you're still making stuff in America.
And a lot of these people can have continued to do it for multiple reasons. There's the folks working with defense, very compliance, ITAR and all that. And that's a section, that's what most people think of when they think of US manufacturing. But there's a lot more, and for a lot of people it's just. This is what they like doing.
Maybe it's a point of pride. Maybe it's the skill that they've learned and they want to keep doing it. It could even be a family legacy. We see a lot of multi-generational family businesses [00:14:00] out there, and they all have different concerns. So one could be taking on this cost risk. The other could be their name is over the door and they want to keep things going the way that they've been going.
So the trust score comes in, and if you go and you meet someone at a trade show or in someone you've been working with for. Multiple generations, whatever, you can trust these folks, you meet them in person, but just opening up your shop to internet orders is a lot of noise. So we realized we needed to build a system that allowed people to scale beyond the handshake, but have the same level of confidence in that relationship.
So we decided to create this, this trust score. And the foundation of the trust score is people who have worked together. So it's, if you've done work with this other company, then that helps build and they thought the work was good. That helps to build on your trust score. And when we say that work was good, what we mean is did you actually do it the way you said you were going to do it?
Did you make it in the us? Did you make it in your shop or did you just, did you turn around and offshore it to to Alibaba? And that's a real, that's a real concern. I was actually surprised to learn about this. [00:15:00] There's shops in the US that actually have capacity, and they make stuff in the us but when they take on a new job to de-risk it, they'll just.
Turn around and set it off overseas. And so that's the sort of thing where, you know, a, a cautious buyer's gonna look into this. A lot of times they'll go to the shop to see the first run of their part. And so all of that will feed into the trust score. If someone satisfies a job for someone else and is it's done good, then they can give them a positive referral.
It feeds into the trust score. And over time, someone builds up a trust score that can be used by others. Wow, this person did work with these other people. They all said it was good. And this Trust Corps, of course, is rooted in whether or not something is made in the us. It's, that's the core principle of our network.
And so they know that they can trust them also. And so you can start to, you can start to scale that handshake relationship, which is really positive for the buyer. It's also really positive for the seller in, in, in ways that aren't immediately obvious. One, one of the, one of the factors that drags down US manufacturing is this financial factor.
When it's time to [00:16:00] move on to retire, to exit, for whatever reason, a lot of shops will sell for some discount on the value of the real estate and equipment. And this is why we've seen a lot of legacy shops that where a family member doesn't want to take it on. Just close. That's a, that's a big problem.
And it's because those relationships were tied up with the owner, right. And the owner who had been running the shop for 50 years, he had a good relationship with this shop down the street and the shop down the street. When he goes, if he sells to someone else, whether even if it's a machinist, someone's been working there for a while, those people may not know that person.
And that's a time to go and reevaluate who you're doing business with. But the other thing, going back to the trust that gets eroded after decades of offshoring, there's a lot of private equity will sometimes buy shops and turn around, keep the name over the door, but offshore the work. And so what our TriCore helps to do is, is actually establish this history of relationships between.
A shop and the folks that are buying from them, and it takes it out of just the owner's head and [00:17:00] gives them something tangible that through the sale process they can say, here's the trust score for my shop. Here's people that I've worked with over the years. Here's my recurring revenue, and, and this is an expression of the value of my business.
Beyond just what I know, and I hope we haven't, this is gonna take a while to actually see this impact, but our hope is that this can help to improve the valuation of shops at the time of exit, which I'm gonna, I'm gonna put on my economist hat here. It be a little philosophical, but, but what this should ultimately do is if you can continue to increase the value of shops, you can increase the wages.
That shop workers are getting paid as well, right? If we saw this in software, when I started in software, we didn't get paid that much. I didn't start in software because we didn't get paid a small amount, but it was good pay. But it's gotten crazy. And the reason it's gotten crazy is because the value, the multiple of a software business is so high that the wealth created by a software business is so great that the employees of those businesses get paid more.
And I'd love to see the same thing happen in [00:18:00] manufacturing right there. There was a time in our history where a machinist working at a car maker or aerospace or wherever could make a living wage that supported a family with kids, stay at home, wife and all that, right? Buy a house with a dishwasher, a new car, all that stuff on one salary from someone who was working in a blue collar role.
I think that's fantastic, and I think that this can all be done through free market economics. It doesn't require the government to come in and say, oh, you must pay machinists a certain amount. No, it's just, it's an expression of the value of the company, the value creation chain. It happens naturally. The trust score on the one end of the spectrum is, Hey, let's replace that handshake and make it scalable.
And on the other end of the spectrum, we think it can become a, an embodiment of the value. Of a business that helps to actually change the multiple that's applied at exit time.
Matt Horine: That's a huge picture view and one that you know can be executed at 10,000 foot or below and keeps the 30,000 foot view. I think.
One [00:19:00] thing that you said that really stood out to me was this trust factor. I've worked with contract manufacturers. I've worked in that space, and at first everything seems fine until you do get a big order and there's demand, and all of a sudden you're getting visibility into your bomb, into your building material.
We don't have X, Y, or Y screw because we order it from China and it's baffling because you think I can pick this up at the hardware store if I wanted to. And you've got these, you contract manufacturers or other folks trying to make things that have to go order it from the or the origin point. And that is a huge problem because you get into like critical industries when you talk about medical over the past few years of any kind of manufacturing there, that's not gonna work.
If you talk about pharmaceutical, same thing if you talk about defense, absolutely. And, but the things that really rock the boat on the consumer level is all of a sudden your demand dries up. People starting to go buy toilet paper in bulk because there's, that's scarcity. And so that is, if you take that and it extrapolate it over the industrial base.
We're talking [00:20:00] about pure panic, so the trust factor is huge. I know that's one thing that we're both pretty passionate about, just because, yeah, handshakes do go a long way, but also the possibilities. It's infinite capacity in terms of what you can build and what you can do, and most people, the feedback that I've gotten from a lot of folks in the reindustrialization space.
Reshoring spaces, I can't get somebody to answer the phone. There is a complacency in a lot of, in a lot of places where it could be a generational family business. It could be, Hey, we've got so much work, we don't need to get to that. The answer should never be, we don't need more work. Like that is one of the things that is so limiting to this reshoring effort because people don't want to spend more for the neighbor down the street that they've got versus getting it cheaper and having it 9,000 miles away.
That mentality's gotta be flipped on its head. So the trust factor is huge.
Andrew Kornuta: The very like immediate, practical application of the trust score is when you're looking at RFQs in our system and you're trying to decide, okay, do I want to grow my business? How do I grow my business? When you see a req, when you see demand come in from someone [00:21:00] who has a high trust score, they've done a bunch of work with other folks and they're very like US manufacturing centric, and they're not just kinda race to the bottom price comparing, Hey, I'm gonna take the time to bid on this one.
And that's like an immediate application of the trust score. And conversely, if you're out there buying. You've got people bidding on your RFQ, you're gonna look at the folks who have a higher trust score because you know that they've got the work, they've done the work. So you don't have to take the time to really, you'll hopefully get to know them over time.
We want, we don't want to be in the middle of these relationships, right? We want people to transact on the trust score, but we want them to form the relationships themselves as well. And then the trust score helps scale beyond that. But that's exactly right. Rather than saying, oh, I can't get this thing. I dunno how to get this thing, you don't have to know who you're dealing with.
You just have to know what their trust score is and then you can decide who you wanna work with and grow your business.
Matt Horine: That's how it should be. I like the free market aspect to it because it really is at hand of the free market. The trust enables that. We'll turn now to a little bit more of the macro picture.
'cause I think you said a lot of great things at the start of the show. One of them is [00:22:00] the kind of industrial policy where there's some kind of heavy hand of the government. It's interesting to frame it this way because most of us probably think of the free market. We probably think of traditional American politics, maybe center right to center.
One of the things that separates it from a, a competitive country is that if you are on a war footing, if you are facing an adversary, and if people are not looking at China as an adversary, they're wrong. I've seen a ton of chatter on this, on X by the way. They talk about this global free market where everything's flattened.
But the reason we're in this situation is because those countries are helping their own industrial bases through subsidies, through tariffs of their own. That's why we talk a lot about reciprocity. So you know this, this kind of policy in action from the government is saying, here is the protectionism and it's a dose of it.
It has nothing even close to what we saw during like Smoot Holly in the thirties, or even going back to the 19 hundreds early teens. 1910s, 1890s where tariff revenue was actually most of the revenue that the government took in, there was no personal income tax. It was the fight of the time to even recognize.
And that's for [00:23:00] another show to talk about my thoughts on that. Uh, that is one thing that is super important that people don't, I don't think have captured that we are moving out of this globalism era from the offshoring of the eighties, nineties, 2010s. And it was different actors every time it was Japan in the eighties.
There were movies made about the Japanese automotive groups that were coming in. There was a great one with Michael Keaton in the nineties when the World Trade Organization recognized China. That's when it started happening. And you see this kind of consumer shift to like, how much cheap stuff can I buy?
And you look at our consumer debt and it's through the roof. You look at American manufacturing towns that were hollowed out there, factory towns, the place and the ramifications of that. We are in a war footing and I think people should take that seriously. The second part of that and really like to dig in on China, 'cause I think it's worth talking about, we've had guests on this show, we've talked about it in in past conversations, the IP theft.
It's not something that happened in the nineties and early two thousands. There are things that go on if you want to get a mold or die or anything out of China not happening and they're able to move their logistics around [00:24:00] in a way that's like the third party country and we're doing all that kind of stuff.
How does this help the Reindustrialization movement and its specific focus on American suppliers? Because like you said, they are here. How important is that as part of your core mission?
Andrew Kornuta: Let me, let's talk about government policy first. Anytime there's government policy, it screws something up, right? Like, you know, it's inevitable.
I, in the best case scenario, it becomes codified in law and it's really good at first, and then it gets so big and self-serving over time that it stops becoming so good. It's like mind boggling that so much of what we take for granted today didn't exist before. Roosevelt, FDR R. He had so much expansionism of the federal government under FDR.
It's really wild. I've actually been reading this biography on Edgar Hoover, the FBI, Edgar Hoover. Right. And it really interesting character, but like just the growth of the FBI under Hoover and specifically FDR growing the FBI, they had very little jurisdiction prior to the [00:25:00] 1930s and post 1930s, almost like a national police force in some ways.
That's just one tiny example, but just ma, massive expansion and growth of the government social security system and all this stuff, which nowadays we look at a lot of this, not the FBI so much, but like social security for example. And we're like, yeah, I don't know if that's working still. Right. Does that make the most sense?
Today we spend more on healthcare than national defense. That's, and a government spends more on healthcare national defense for retired folks. Medicaid and all that. It's, it is crazy like trying to fix all that stuff. Again, there, there were probably good programs when they were put in place that probably solved a particular problem, but they start to get outta out of hand or, or they just stay calcified for such a long time that they get outta hand.
So when we think about industrial policy, there's this question like, do we really want the government to step in and fix this? But I think there are some areas that literally require government involvement. For example, China has practiced aggressive dumping into foreign markets in order to destroy foreign markets and increase the [00:26:00] reliance on them.
And when we talk about this, like in, in the us, no one's in control of US industry. It's thousands of CEOs and maybe a few. Organizations, maybe there's labor here and there, but for the most part it's not a, it's not controlled in a singular fashion. You compare that to the authoritarian regime in China, like the CCP controls industry in an authoritarian fashion.
It didn't matter when they put together Alibaba in 1688. Didn't matter if a shop said, oh no, we don't wanna do that, because, no, it was like, you're doing this or you're out. That's it. We've seen this multiple times where the CCP has stepped in and taking control over software companies in China, gaming, right?
They limit the amount of time that people within China can be on games. They have their whole great firewall that limits what can, who can see what on the internet, like they're very hands-on in their industrial policy and the operation model of their companies. And so they operate as a singular force, a large singular force.
In a very strategic way, and we don't, and so if there's a, if there's a particular industry or market that [00:27:00] China wants to dominate in, they can destroy it in other countries by dumping cheap electric vehicles, cheap batteries, cheap solar panels, whatever, and make it just impossible to compete in that space.
I think that's an area where US industry does need some protection. And we've seen, I think with Trump 47, we've seen some initiatives. In this space, some of the tariffs we're starting to go in this direction. There's probably a lot more that can be done here just to protect from like really aggressive activity.
What's shocking to me is the most important thing is that people need, like you said, Matt, the most important thing is people need to understand that we. Are dealing with an adversary. And this isn't just, Hey, free trade, get, come on guys, let's just all play nice and buy the cheapest thing. No, there, there's a reason this is happening.
There's a reason why Chinese companies will literally lose money for prolonged periods of time and be funded by the government. There's a guy, an ex who who's done some amazing analysis just of making nitrile gloves in the us. The reason why we, we can't, and we don't make nitro gloves in the [00:28:00] US is because we just can't compete on raw material costs.
China, the CCP, is buying embargoed oil, which is the majority of the material costs in nitro gloves. They're buying embargoed oil from countries that we can't buy oil from in the free market. I don't know how they're still part of the WTO, it blows my mind, but somehow they're buying embargoed oil and using it to produce gloves at a fraction of the cost that anybody else can produce them, because they want to keep that stranglehold.
On that particular market. And these are the sort of things like, I'm not saying that the US needs to engage in similar practices. I, I think they're unethical, but we need to protect ourselves from them. We can't just be Pollyanna head in the sand. No, everyone's nice. The world is a nice place. It's one of the things I realized.
I lived in Asia for a year and a half. Prior to working at Amazon, I was working at a company. We had a, we had an office in Singapore. I ended up going and living in Singapore for a year and a half. And the world is a very scary place. Like I think so many Americans just take for granted that everyone's friends, everyone's nice.
We can complain about [00:29:00] the government. Everything's just gonna keep happening the way it happens. After spending time in Malaysia, Indonesia, a lot of time in China and when I, the time I spent in China, I wasn't in Beijing and Shanghai. I was like, I went deep into China into places that most Americans don't go.
I was in this like mountain town staying with a farmer and his family, and they hadn't seen an American since 1989 or something like that. And the surprisingly is a lot of people are like, wow, you're actually pretty nice there. There's a pers there. There is a very strong perspective that Americans are evil, bad, terrible people.
That just want to destroy China and hate Chinese people, and this is not, this is an accident, right? All of the media in China is propaganda a hundred percent, and it's all oriented towards reminding the people of China that America wants to destroy those, and it's just such a different mindset than we have here.
Here we're like, what? China, who? I don't know what that is. We just keep buying this cheap stuff. We just don't even, we just don't even connect it. We don't even connect it. Their population does connect it. They're like, yes, [00:30:00] America's a bad guy. We're gonna make these things super cheap. We're gonna do this thing because we're gonna win and we're at war.
And so I, I lived through the Cold War. I'm not saying. That's fun or positive or anything, but there's just no difference in the world Today. We're in probably a more serious cold war with China today than we ever were with the Soviets there. There's the same number of nukes pointed across the globe and probably more willingness to use by the ccp.
They the, she has made the statement that the world cannot exist without the ccp, and the way that's interpreted is. If they're losing, they nuke everything.
Matt Horine: That is something that there were flares of it during the Cold War. If you look back to the Cuban Missile Crisis or missile placement in Turkey or something to that effect, and this one just happens to be the same thing, but it's the world's largest hub of semiconductor manufacturing.
And so it's one of those things that it as a reason to be a hot zone. If you need a case study on it, look no further than the Chinese fishing fleet. It's uh, right now, it is dredging the oceans. It's creating an ecological disaster. And it's one that people also don't [00:31:00] realize. It's not just a numbers game, it's militarized.
Every boat that is made in China, everything that every ship that's built is a military grade. What does that mean? It's not your American battleship, but our shipbuilding capacity is completely decimated, and they are making commercial fishing vessels that would be ready for war if need be.
Andrew Kornuta: And by the way, that exact same strategy was used by England.
By Germany prior to World War I. Two great effects by the way, like, and it's a very good naval military strategy, but again, it's another thing where we're, we have thousands of these ships in our harbors all the time, and we're just, oh, yeah, who cares? Whatever. I don't know. It's, it's just so many Americans are so unaware of this that if you say, Hey, we, we need to make more stuff in America and industrial revival is national security, it's very important.
A lot of people will react to that in a strong way. What are you talking about? That's racist, that's bigoted, that's unfair. That's, and it's just like you guys, how do you not, it's the weirdest like psyop of our time, in my opinion, that we don't recognize what a massive threat this is. And every day you were talking about workers [00:32:00] wages being gutted and all this in small towns like we, the effects of this are hitting our lives every.
Every day, and I, I'm actually very excited about this TikTok handover that's happening, but I, I actually, I believe that the fact that we allow adversarial foreign media to operate on our soils is a big part of this problem. I don't want to get into conspiracy land because I, because I prefer to stick with the facts, but there's gotta be a reason why we're just always, so many people are so oblivious to this because the facts are there.
You just read a history book. You'll see. I love that you referenced American Caesar earlier, a fantastic book. I think Captain Douglas MacArthur is maybe a controversial figure for some people, but that book was really fantastic and really gives a good perspective into kind of China's opinion about whether or not they're in a conflict with the us like.
100% are
Matt Horine: Oh, absolutely. It's the long march for them. It's something that is continuous and is an eternal long march for them. And so that mentality has been one that the discourse I've seen on X, it's very rare. They usually get [00:33:00] ratioed for saying things like I'm about to say, but they, I. Basically suggests the hand of the free market and we have to let China compete or we have to, who would let their adversary compete and above equal footing?
That is something that I don't think people truly understand. They think that China just did it and they did it better, and they did it faster. They did it. They're not held to the same standard. They are not playing by the same rules and they are playing to win. So that is something that. Really needs to make its way into the consciousness of the greater population and manufacturing manufacturers know they've been fighting that war for years.
Turning a little bit to back to NoraMark and making sure we can get our listeners in touch with you. First question I have is, it's one I ask a lot of guests by 2030. Three to five years, which that's something crazy to say from your vantage point right now, are we moving in the right direction where US industrial supply chains will be more decentralized and network via tools like NoraMark?
Or do you think that we're gonna have a little bit longer of a time to, to decompress?
Andrew Kornuta: No, I, I think by 2030 this, take a picture of a product you wanna make or an AI generated picture. [00:34:00] Take that picture, drop it into NoraMark, and it will be made for you. Like that's the direction we're heading in, and I feel very optimistic about that.
We touched on a lot of different topics here, but even if everything just stays static the way it is today, like the direction that we're heading in manufacturing technology and just the infrastructure to connect US manufacturers together in a reliable way, I think is going to allow for a rebalancing of supply and demand and a modernization.
Of kind of the digital infrastructure that goes around all of this. The problems I hear about in manufacturing today are, they're solved problems in other industries and the fact that we're, some of us, a lot of us in the re industrialized movement are waking up to this and taking our learnings from other industries and go in and focusing on US manufacturing because it's so important.
We're gonna fix this. We're gonna 100% fix this. If there was a hot conflict, I think the fixed time gets accelerated dramatically. Because it has to and we've seen history, we will do it. America is incredibly resilient. Never bet against America you'll lose every time, but, but I'd [00:35:00] rather think of a more optimistic future, a more rosy picture future where like we don't even need to worry about that.
We are able to make everything here and make it. Fast and easy, and we become unconcerned with what's or less concerned with what's going on with China and North Korea and the bad guys in the world, and we police them the way we ought to or the way we choose to. But as far as US manufacturing goes, I think by 2030 we will have Alibaba like capabilities.
And that happens not solely from NoraMark, but I'd like to think NoraMark played a big role in that. It also happens through a lot of the advanced software that's going into machining, a lot of new processes being invented around machining and developing factories, operating factories, standardization across manufacturing.
But I do think we get to this point where you want to have something made. And you can have it made very quickly right here in the us, even if you're not an engineer,
Matt Horine: A great way to view it and a huge vision and something that the country desperately needs. I think there's this overwhelming sense that we've gotta get back to the way things were [00:36:00] not through a vision of nostalgia.
I think there's some element of nostalgia, but it's actually survival. And so that hopefully NoraMark is playing a big role in that. And if our listeners wanted to learn more about Normark or connect with you, where can they go to find you?
Andrew Kornuta: NoraMark.com It's the best place to go. I'm also an X if you want the spicier take, but yeah. Noramark.com, the place to go. The system is designed for US manufacturers specifically. So if you are a manufacturer, go and sign up. There's a good chance we have your business in our directory already. You can go claim it and operate it and set it up as you see fit.
Matt Horine: That's great. Be sure to check out NoraMark and Andrew, thank you so much for coming on today. There's a ton of fascinating points and we're really excited to see the growth of your company.
Andrew Kornuta: Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.
Matt Horine: To stay ahead of the curve and to help plan your strategy, please check out our [00:26:00] website at www.veryableops.com and under the resources section titled Trump 2.0, where you can see the framework around upcoming policies and how it will impact you and your business. If you're on socials, give us a follow on LinkedIn, X, formerly Twitter, and Instagram. And if you're enjoying the podcast, please feel free to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube, and leave us a rating and don't forget to subscribe. Thank you again for joining us and learning more about how you can make your way.