Episode #45: Leveraging Venture Capital and Technology in Manufacturing with Renan Devillieres
In this episode of U.S. Manufacturing Today, Matt Horine talks to Renan Devillieres, Founder and CEO of OSS Ventures, about the evolving landscape of American manufacturing. Renan, with his unique background in economics, venture capital, and industrial operations, discusses the importance of innovation in manufacturing, the intersection of startups and industrial technology, and the significant role of sustainability and resilience in reshoring and supply chain management. The conversation delves into the venture studio model's effectiveness in manufacturing, the importance of pragmatic and long-term strategies in industrial policy, and the critical alignment of capital, talent, and policy for ensuring future industrial strength.
Links
- OSS Ventures Website
- Renan Devillieres on LinkedIn
- Navigating Trump 2.0
- Veryable Is Revitalizing U.S. Manufacturing
- Sign Up on the Veryable Platform
- Veryable Shop
Timestamps
- 00:00 Introduction to US Manufacturing Today
- 00:15 Meet Renan Devillieres: Economist Turned Manufacturing Innovator
- 03:37 The Birth of OSS Ventures
- 05:59 The Future of Manufacturing: Reshoring and New Shoring
- 10:52 Challenges and Opportunities in Industrial Tech
- 13:04 The Venture Studio Model in Manufacturing
- 17:05 AI and Automation in Manufacturing
- 24:33 Sustainability and Strategic Resilience
- 27:13 Advice for Founders, Operators, and Investors
- 31:56 Looking Ahead: The Future of Manufacturing
- 37:03 Conclusion and Contact Information
Episode Transcript
Matt Horine: [00:00:00] 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 manufacturing, the changing landscape policies and more.
Today's guest brings a perspective we don't get often enough in manufacturing conversations and someone who sits at the intersection of operations, venture capital, and long-term economic strategy. Renan Devillieres is a founder and CEO of OSS Ventures, a venture studio focused on building and investing in technology companies specifically for manufacturing and operations.
Before that, Renan worked as an economist at OECD, co-founded startups internationally and has spent years helping organizations. Navigate the accelerating pace of technological change. Rein's work is grounded in a simple but powerful idea. Manufacturing is still the backbone of real economic sovereignty, but the way we build, invest, and scale industrial technology must evolve.
Today we'll talk about how startups are reshaping [00:01:00] manufacturing, how capital is flowing. We're misfiring in industrial tech, why sustainability and resilience matter more than hype and what investors and operators need to understand as we look ahead. Renan, and welcome to US manufacturing today.
Renan Devillieres: Hey, thank you for having me.
Matt Horine: We're very excited to have you on the show today, and I think there's a lot to talk about from the macro standpoint, but first and foremost, want to get into it a little bit about your background and what you're doing. You've had a pretty diverse path. An economist, a startup founder, venture studio builder.
How did you first become interested in manufacturing and operations specifically?
Renan Devillieres: So it was basically by pure luck. I did two years at the OECD and I was aist, but I was classically trained as a mathematician and data scientist. I figured out that long term economy and blah blah, I wasn't for me because it was too long.
So I went to McKinsey and Company and at McKinsey Company, they took me, I think from my math background, I couldn't read the p and l. The very first mission that I was [00:02:00] given was literally some guy saying, Hey, I have that gigantic organization. I need to redo the supply chain. I need someone who's good at math.
And they were like, that new guy seemed to be good at math, and I knew not think about factories, nothing about Manufac factory, but they just fell in love. I fell in love. It was like eight weeks of hardcore mathematics and supply chain and everything, and I just fell in love with manufacturing and I couldn't go back after that.
So I made my whole career in operation of manufacturing medicine.
Matt Horine: Wow, that's really good exposure. And the on the ground p and l maths sometimes is a little different than mathematics. I won't out myself here, not a math student myself, but do enjoy manufacturing. How did your time at the OECD shape how you think about industrial policy, productivity and long-term economic resilience?
Renan Devillieres: I have only two modes now, which is either you think on the global stage with like 20 to 30 years horizons, or you think that next quarter and you're on the shelf [00:03:00] floor. And I think it's the correct way of looking at a manufacturing company because there's no return anymore. And so OECD. Helped me having that very long term ized vision because like even if you are a small shop owner in Alabama, you need to be thinking that the dependency to China is going down and how it affects your business, even if you're like a 30 people operation.
Matt Horine: It certainly does the compacting of the global supply chain. I think everybody's felt it over specifically the last number of years where it became more evident. It snuck up on everyone pre 2020, and then we realized how interdependent we are with that. Starting OSS ventures, what gap did you see in the market that led to the founding of this group?
And maybe a little bit more background on, on the founding of your company now.
Renan Devillieres: As a lot of things in my life, it happened by a combination of luck and me just thinking I had just exited my previous startup, made some money and I had nothing to do, and [00:04:00] my wife told me, you need to get out. I took something of your life.
Sure I visited Tesla fragrance. It was the time where they had put like dents on the parking to assemble cars, which is like an interesting concept. And what I saw in that factory was so far ahead in the future compared to everything I knew. And I had visited like hundreds of factor. I thought to myself, okay, so for me, I thought, okay, I am actually in the position of a guy in the sixties who discovered the first little factory, so you know where the world is headed in the next 20 years and the world is not yet there.
I said to myself, okay, I need to bring tech to all the factories in the west. So everyone in China, I told myself, okay, what's the best way of doing that? And turns out the best way of doing that to bring tech at scale to the world of manufacturing was creating startups. But instead of just being an investor, [00:05:00] because it's very tough to create a startup for manufacturing instead of being an investor, I chose to use my money.
Actively create all companies with the founders. And my job is basically to go to the factories, to take founders with me, to ask for pain points and look what we can do with tech. And when we have a pretty good idea, then we say, okay, let's build a company and it's free until it works for the factory.
That's how it started a little over five years ago. Since then, we have created 22 companies. We are live in 3000 operational sites. We have 100,000 monthly users of our solutions.
Matt Horine: Yeah, no, that's scaled really nicely and it's nice to hear from the venture standpoint and from the capital standpoint, the bridge to the operating environment, there's sometimes a gap.
You see it all the time and on on shop floors especially, something gets rolled out and implemented. But technology in the manufacturing space, there's plenty of it, but what actually works and having the eyes and ears on the ground to make sure it's being deployed correctly is a really big thing. [00:06:00] I want to turn a little bit to what we are seeing in the US and I think particularly in the West.
I like the way you frame that, by the way, in the West with this reshoring and realignment of supply chains in the US calling it reindustrialization. We talk a lot on this show about those topics. From your vantage point, as an investor and builder, is this cycle fundamentally different from past ones or is this just something that kind of is cyclical and maybe we've seen it before, we'll see it again, but what do you think is really different about it this time?
Renan Devillieres: Yeah, I, I think there is some sameness, but also a lot of change. By the way, I hate the term reassuring. I think we should use the term new shoring because, so basically we are out of 30 years of sending our factories abroad to countries where they don't give them about worker rights and labor cost is very low.
So we need to put factories in countries. We do give a damn about human rights. And wages are high. And so it's not [00:07:00] the same factories, but it's also not the same product. And if we are serious about producing locally, what we use, which is very important, like for everything, for our social contract, for our dependency, for our strength, is there is a war.
If we're sales by that, then we need to rethink the products and the factories to go well with the current set of constraints, which is different from the set of constraints that was in the 30 years of basically ization. And so the new thing is what does the factory doing mass production look like in a high wage human rights aware country?
And pretty much the answer is. Get factories, lights out factories, automated factories where basically your guys are as paid as tech companies because you achieve some level of scale. And so that's what I'm trying to build, resource venture and help. But we're already seeing [00:08:00] that. And so the ones who are winning at reassuring, reassuring.
Are the ones we've given Dick.
Matt Horine: Yeah. To compete in this day and age. It's a technological advantage for sure. I like that phrase. New, new shoring, because we had a guest on this show a couple weeks ago, John Gardner, and I'm gonna butcher his quote, but basically implied that a post-industrial economy is actually a pre-industrial economy because it's not going back to the exact same way that it was.
You look at productivity enhancements, you look at all kinds of different things from a tech standpoint, but also. The muscle memory, right, that maybe people passed generationally down or that people, that institutional knowledge reconstituting that, and building a tech will be certainly be a big building block for it.
What role does geopolitics supply chain risk and industrial resilience play in how capital is now being allocated? Because that is something, we talk about it all the time from a geopolitical level, but now people really have their eye on how they're allocating capital and what they're funding to us.
Renan Devillieres: It's a bit like climate change. [00:09:00] The very bizarre thing is everyone knows it's important, but nobody acts on it anti it bites, and so we are post by the bite was 2020, and so now that people have been burned, we are seeing a lot of innovation. A thing that we are consistently seeing is you, the supply chain won't change if it's too expensive to change, like there is no premium.
Acceptance to more local supply chain. If the cost is the same, then there is infinite preference for local. And the last thing that we are seeing is that most companies, most very big companies, they are mapping their dependencies and they are nurturing sub-scale players that are more expensive today.
But if they scale and the supply chain get cut like without notice. Then those local actors can scale. What we haven't [00:10:00] seen right now is the full reassuring of entire supply chains that are. More expensive than the alternative. We haven't seen that there is no willingness to pay the premium.
Matt Horine: It's always a cost question and, and the heat of the moment, and you know what we could call like fog of war because the supply chain dynamic has basically been a war for five, five to six years.
The cost pressure is significant to firm survival. It's something that before all those things that you mentioned, labor arbitrage or finding cheaper labor, and the reason for offshoring bringing it back is. Presents issues around margin compression and looking for alternative sourcing. And I, that's the feedback we've gotten on this show a lot, is that, of course, everybody would like to do it here or they would like to do it local, but they're looking for that, that cost out or that structure that they can make it happen.
I think tech has a big thing to do with that and how it evolves. Do you think. Investors are truly committing to manufacturing, or are many still treating it like a legacy sector, or do they see it as [00:11:00] forward-looking or more of a legacy sector?
Renan Devillieres: Yeah, I have, I have a lot of talks with investors. I see. I tell them like out of the four biggest hits in Venture today, three are hard.
What I see is Tivity Hardware and manufacturing is actually an even more extreme version of the Power Lo. If you are creating a new company doing cars, you are either Tesla or you are known one, and if you are producing satellites, you're static or you are known one. If you are doing human with robots, you are figure or you are.
No one. So the power law is more extreme, but it's supposed to be the job of venture capitalists. So what I see is that on the venture side, it's being invested heavily with an even more extreme power. On the private equity side, what we're seeing is that everything touching defense just got a premium.
What we're seeing also is that the actors [00:12:00] with a longer time or reason. So family offices, institutional investors, they are starting to reinvest because they know that in the long term, probably it's a good investments because things are going to be more heavily made locally, and so it may just make sense to start to have exposure to the asset class.
The thing that is not sure right now, which goes with a new shoring and everything is will that movements be captured by legacy actors versus new actors? And that's a question mark. And so I feel like a lot of institutional investors, they're also asking themselves. What to do because they don't know who will benefit from the inevitable thing, which is we're going to make more things happen.
Matt Horine: Yeah. That's a key part of your longer time horizon. Right? The gap between the shop floor in this quarter to how do we look a couple years out, and we'll get to that at the end of the show. But I, you said some very interesting things there and wanna talk specifically about your group [00:13:00] OSS ventures, and you're focused on creating startups, not just founding them.
Why does the Venture Studio model work particularly well in manufacturing?
Renan Devillieres: When I met some money, my wife asked me if I would consider working less. Turns out I'm working more with my new venture and my venture studio life, but at first I just wanted to be an investor. I was picturing myself. Sipping coffee like in Fancy Cafe and just investing and turns out, I truly think this doesn't really work for industrial tech for a good reason.
So in the grand scheme of things, operations and manufacturing globally, if you put like logistics, warehousing and everything, it's 37% of the global GDP. It's 0.4% of this. So it is. Usually not in the right direction. And also it's 0.7% of all the startups created are for the world of operations. So [00:14:00] there is a gap.
There's just no difference. The good founders don't go to that space because of the very bad rap that manufacturing gets. And the third thing that is more important is when you do get a good funder, which is like pure luck. Opening the door of an of a factory is like six to nine months. Then doing your first iteration is six months more because it's hard to beat in manufacturing.
Let's say a startup survives to those 14 mark. Okay? Then you go to the IT director. The IT director says, Hey, cyber three, T and O, you need to connect to this and that before you able to scale. So you are already two years in and you're very tired and you have one client. And so manufacturing has a tendency to kill starters on site.
So when I realized that because the way I went about starting Manual Investor life was to make 400 calls with startup founders operating in manufacturing because I like to visit it. So when I realized that, I said, [00:15:00] okay, my right to wing as an investor is actually to destroy all those barriers to entry.
So what I did is I called one of the factories and I said, Hey, share with me your biggest pain points. I will do everything. To be able to work with you and to have pre-vetted everything and it's free until it works and it'll really be my money. So I pre-qualified a lot of things. The second thing is I hire tech people to create a basic tech project that connects to the RP that is, should be basically community compliant, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So I basically erased those bullshit 12 months that killed a lot of startups. The third thing that I did is I went to the best founders and I told them, Hey, do you want to create another freaking like bad food delivery app that the world doesn't need? Or do you want to save the manufacturing world? And 10 persons of top tier [00:16:00] founders said, okay, I love the vision.
Let's go. And so I started four companies at start and turns out to have those, out of those four companies, three. Are currently on their way or have surpassed 10 million a RR, which like big milestone, 10 million revenue. And so I said, okay, that seemed to work. And I just iterated. And so I didn't love the Venture studio model.
I have no particular love for the thing, but I think manufacturing complexity. Manufacturing tendency to key startups, manufacturing, high cost to entry, and barrier to entry, which is like cyber security. Everything makes it uniquely suited. For the venture leader model because you basically put all the reputable things away, all the bullshit is taken care of, and you just focus on creating value as fast as specific, which is what the startup is supposed to do.
Matt Horine: The time to value in manufacturing is a little different than some tech startups, right? It's some folks are selling up. Just a SaaS product or they're selling something that maybe makes your [00:17:00] daily life easier, but solving problems in the real world and on the shop floor is a very different dynamic.
Speaking of that, what kind of problems in manufacturing operations are most ripe for a startup innovation today? Where is something, obviously with ai, there's plenty of things to look at or KPIs to address, but where do you see the most particular set of problems?
Renan Devillieres: There are three big things that we love.
The first is. People with a very complex job that is just pushing data lot. So planners, quality people, process engineer. When you think of a process engineer, they look at the process, they get some data, they make hypothesis, they run the machine differently and it runs betterer. Okay? That is literally data work that an AI agent can do.
So that's the first reality. Tech sciences, we have launched quite a few companies in this space. Another that we really like is end-to-end by chance. A lot of the relationship between a supplier and a client is just a male and there's no reactivity, there's no shared data stream [00:18:00] that's allow for like global optimization instead of local optimization.
So that's another area that we're really, really interested in, that we like quite a lot. And the third is what we call elevating job roles. And so elevating job roles is, for example, how to match. In Neutralization manager 10 times more efficient because of AI and because of the tools that he or she has.
And so those are the three themes that we think are right for disruption. In the grand scheme of thing, I think in 10 years there will be like at least 40% less people white collars in manufacturing, but they will be paid like tech people and their leverage point will be very high. And so you can pay them where.
Also, I think most of supply chains will be data integrated to a level of integration that is not seen today.
Matt Horine: That's a good time horizon window, about 10 years because we've seen a lot of false starts in the space where people think most of the conversations around artificial intelligence that we've had on the show [00:19:00] involve people losing their jobs to it as opposed to being individually augmented in their productivity enhanced, which is probably more of the reality.
One thing that is interesting, and I've seen a lot, not just in my role, but actually out in the real world, is that a lot of companies that build software or platforms for operations, they differ from building consumer SaaS companies. What do you think are some of the main differences? It's not just a one for one replacement.
If you were. Say if you were a worker, like somebody who was in a commercial role for that, selling a consumer-based SaaS model is a little bit different than selling something to a manufacturing company. What's, what are some of the main differences?
Renan Devillieres: So the first difference is that when you do a system for a factory, you're working for the factory, not for the user.
And so typically you want to create value for the system, and you want the user to understand his other role in the system and make sure that the system is good. When you sell to the user, you sell to the user, but [00:20:00] it's a very different thing to be done. Another thing that I think is widely different is the cost of mistakes.
Like you cannot vibe code something from manufacturing and hope it goes right, like Vibe is not a world of world in a manufacturing setting recently. And so there's a certain level of discipline responsibility. Yeah. And ability to not break things. That is very important in industry setting.
Matt Horine: I think that's the notable quotable, is that it's to the system, not the user, and definitely not a lot of vibes going on the shop floor.
It's very process driven, so that's really good. Really good point. What mistakes do founders make when they underestimate the complexity of industrial environments? I'm sure you've seen people underestimating it or maybe overestimating it could be more simple, but what are some of the things that you've seen out there?
Renan Devillieres: One thing that is cool in manufacturing is that when you put something live, you know very sweet if it works, that if you are misjudging the complexity of something. [00:21:00] You will know very soon the signs of pure misjudging. The complexity level or something is usually the outcome will be false for a lot of reasons that you have not foreseen.
And so the best founders, they get the, they have the humility to realize that this is going. So they go back to the shop floor and they understand the complexity. The magic thing is that when you capture the complexity, but you are able to do a superior system, industrial, love it, and you can make so much money.
Now, one of our, one of our cultural competence called S, okay, they're doing agent supply chain plan for one of our clients. We are talking about 12 million per year recurring gains and going from 25 to five. That's hard work. That's a lot of complexity for one of the factories. The agents has 3000 different tools that they need to follow to create an optimal planet, and you [00:22:00] better not forget one, it took them like four months to really fully doing do the thing, but now it's life, it's worse.
And so I think that creating software for that kind of environment require humidity, thoroughness. And being mindful of the cost of mistakes, but when it does work. It's nothing short of magical.
Matt Horine: I think it balances the world of tech optimism with shop floor reality when you've actually achieved something and made a worker's life better, but you've enhanced the productivity of an organization.
There's a lot of fulfillment in that, similar to how there's just a lot of fulfillment in manufacturing in general because you're making and building something. Final question on this topic. From an investor's lens, how do you separate signal from the noise in industrial tech? Because. That's something that in the age of artificial intelligence and automation and data, there's a lot of noise out there about what's really gonna bring value to the shop floor and to the company.
But how do you separate those kinds of signals and what will [00:23:00] really work in reality?
Renan Devillieres: So the other thing that I just love about manufacturing is that they know how to pay for debts, but they won't scale something that doesn't work. So the only signal. Is industrials actually paying the big buck because they get the big results.
You take all the AI companies, cool, hip and young, and they are very willing to speak about everything, say for one thing, which is their revenue. And so it's okay to spend three years because you're solving something really hard and you need some money to be able to solve those things. But at some point.
Need to solve the thing. And so everything, prema revenues is an hypothesis. And it's okay to have hypothesis, but don't bullshit me and tell me you solve the thing. But then when you get to the big revenue, okay, you solve the thing now or less scale these things. And so I have a portfolio of 22 companies.
We are having 3000 operational sites. [00:24:00] We are doing 41 million revenue per year. And intend to double this year. So that's like a manufacturer doesn't write a 1 million check without thoroughly knowing that the return is here. And so that's the signal you're looking. Everything else is bullshit, including fundraising, founder pitch, big visions, like all of that is good.
It's important, but the only signal. Industry not making a check.
Matt Horine: That's very true of manufacturing because you're living in the very, very real world. You highlighted something earlier too that I think is really interesting in some of the macro conversations that we're having, because a lot of this is about sustainability.
We talk a lot about resilience and agility, and I think sustainability plays a big factor in a lot of manufacturing environments. Not just framed as like compliance or ESG, right? But you approach it as strategic resilience on the sustainability question. Could you tell us a little more about that?
Renan Devillieres: I [00:25:00] was short sustainability before it was cool, and it's the short definition of sustainability is some guy paid by the government making edits and file with CO2 or whatever and telling me things to do.
Then I'm out. But every single sense, respecting industry. Has been looking at raw material availability. Quality has been looking at description in their supply chain because of natural resource depletion and every self-respecting industry knows that this is a thing. And so we industrials and I say we, because I was briefly a factory director, also include myself in that.
I'm very proud of that. We are very good at managing things that are hard to manage. So sustainability and natural resource and everything should be managed this way. Okay? What is that raw material dependency? What is the cost? What is the projective cost? What are alternative materials I can use? How different is my process?
Okay. What [00:26:00] is my dependency on natural resource extraction? Okay. What is my CO2 footprint? Okay. What if CO2 gets a price and then amount of business? Okay, so industrials are incredibly good at managing that, but it needs to be pragmatic. It not, it needs to be most critical and it needs to be handled by engineers.
Not like sad pretty for sales major. No offense.
Matt Horine: Yeah, no. It's something that from an engineering standpoint, it's not compliance, it's not ESG, it's not handled by bureaucrats. Right? Like it's if bureaucrats are making decisions and if there's one truth bureaucrat's making decisions. For people who are in the industrial space, they're often not informed.
It's something that's an idea to them. It's on paper. They haven't seen a shop floor and don't realize where a lot of their stuff comes from and how you've seen that play out on geopolitically over the last couple years. And now everybody talks about it, at least in the United States, about the inputs that go into manufacturing energy costs being the first driver.
To de inflate things, to de [00:27:00] inflate raw materials, costs and those types of things. So the sustainability, I do like how that's matured a little bit because 10 years ago you would say that it would immediately be like the BlackRock ESG talk versus the shop floor manager and somebody who understands it at that level.
Let's turn now what I call to maybe some of the free advice of the show that you could provide or insights to our listeners and maybe some advice to founders or operators or investors. For founders building and manufacturing, what's the most important thing they need to understand early?
Renan Devillieres: The one thing I always tell to our portfolio is most startups should not exist, but you don't find out until a lot later than in the world.
And so for startup to have a right to exist, you need to solve something big and important. And the more thing is take time to go to the shelf floor, take time to go there, understand what's going on, and then. Decide on a big thing that you'll be solving. For example, that agent planning solution, when we went to [00:28:00] the shop floor and everything, there was a lot of Excel people running around to try and plan things and we said, okay, we're not going to help those people with an Excel to do marginally better Excel fight.
We're going to have agents doing one at a times more things than those Excel people will do. And those Excel people will be in charge of managing a fleet of agents that are doing a one better job. And so I see always startups and startup founders failing because they don't dream big enough of a big, bold vision and solving big thing soon.
20, like I've been in this business for five years. I think it's easier to solve big problems than small problems.
Matt Horine: That's a really good insight because. People want the solution. It's like you said, to solve regular problems may be quite transactional just because of the pace of technology. So solving the big problems.
We'll pin that one. For operators, because you've been on the operation side for operators evaluating new technology, how should they think about partnering with a [00:29:00] startup? That's a big question in our space.
Renan Devillieres: The third thing is free proof. The key is opening your doors, like it has more value than money.
You would be like, I'm talking to these fields. You would be surprised when you have a big issue. You just try and find a startup and you say, Hey, go and work for me for six weeks without pay, but prove to me that it works. These for pre-revenue, pre-approved startups as an immense value. You can get two tenfold grads for $0 sleeping on your trunk floor, solving one thing for you if you smart about it.
By the way, if you want that, I can provide the same for grads, because that's initially my base. So that would be for free proof. Okay. Then for post proof, so a starter coming and say, Hey, I did for 12 clients. Open your doors and show the thing. The key insight is if you really want the gains, you need to change the way you work.
So for example, let's take back that T planning thing. The [00:30:00] work of the planners is totally different. Totally different. So if you think you can work the same way, put some A on top and make gains, they're going to happen. It's changed the way you work, and so you need to be prepared for that. Acknowledging that and actively pushing for it.
Matt Horine: That makes a lot of sense. You could see some value before you just jump on and try to solve a problem in a hurry as opposed to thinking about it strategically. The final component of that for investors looking at industrial tech, what's one blind spot you see repeatedly?
Renan Devillieres: Market size. So I'm French, as you can tell.
We have a bureau in Boston and a bureau in Paris. When I went back to Paris to launch versus ventures, I talked to one of the top venture capital guy and I told him, Hey, I'm going to do that, and blah, blah blah, and manufacturing. And he told me, isn't manufacturing a niche? I told the guy, okay, the share in wrong, the glasses you're wearing the shirt on your back.
Literally the wall, the wine boards, everything has been done in a [00:31:00] factory. What. They consistently misjudge market sales. Like for example, I was in a SOX factory in Turkey last week. The SOC factory, the SOX business in Turkey is 9 million turnover you can build. If you solve the top three issue from the side business just in Turkey, you can be the 100 million a RR software basis.
Just for sucks. Just thank you. The market size is humongous, but for some reason, like investors say it's a niche. What the hell, man? Just because you and your Silicon Valley, France never went to a factory, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Matt Horine: People have a real big disconnect about where everything is made.
Like what? And the of globalization made that very apparent that when you take away that sovereignty, and it's not just the process and the products that are outsourced, but the thinking, the critical thinking about where things come from and what they actually mean is outsourced too. Looking ahead a little bit and just a few predictions before we we [00:32:00] wrap up the show.
If we fast forward 10 years, and you mentioned this earlier, what will Manufacturing organizations that got it right have done differently?
Renan Devillieres: I think they will have had the courage of inventing things that we are not existing. Creating a model that is not just copy pasting what China is doing in a totally different setup, nor just waiting for things to happen.
Engine copying, like have actually the courage to invent some of the missing parts of the puzzle. I think also they will manage human capital like with the highest reward because AI is probably going to automate like 30, 40% of our eco jobs, but also the remaining jobs are going to be totally different.
So you need to re-skill massively everyone, and you need to take care of the human capital. And also our expertise with AI says that to really implement ai, you need to be really good at your job because you need to tell AI what to do, and you need to be able to tell AI that did [00:33:00] some not good things.
And so we think it'll provide, and we think the performance of those who management text will be of the highest order.
Matt Horine: It's a pretty big prediction, but one that seems like a natural outcome of if you're doing it the right way and decluttering the noise, that's where it all leads to. What gives you optimism about the future of manufacturing in the US and globally?
Renan Devillieres: I'm more optimistic about the US than the globally. Look, I started those ventures just before COVID and I was screaming in deserts. Nobody came down. COVID happened and then suddenly everyone understood and then the US got serious about it. There will be more factory construction in the next five years than in the previous 15 combined.
And. Like I went to Detroit to that event. Gallery Industrial, realize there are so many young people, patriotic young people say, Hey, this is the battle of a generation and we're going to win. And [00:34:00] the best tech people, they want purpose and they want to go to the factories and they want to make America like into the powerhouse of industry.
And they are very serious about it, and the character is there and everything. And so there's. All the reasons to be optimistic and also taking a page from when Japan was doing better electronics than you guys. I think US is best when there is one very annoying country that is doing something better than the US and then the US in 10 years.
Yes, like far ahead. And so that seems, that's good wellbeing done.
Matt Horine: Yeah. That's really, yeah, very optimistic and something that as an American, yes it does get under your skin until you decide to do something about it. That's I probably the nature of manufacturing, are we gonna do something about it or not?
That's a really good point. Final question, where should capital, talent and policy aligned to ensure that long-term industrial strength? This one thing we do talk a lot about on the show is an industrial policy. [00:35:00] There's people that wanna do it. Just like those folks you saw at that rein industrialized conference.
The talent's there, the capital seems to be there, and now where's the start? Where's the where? Where does it play to that strength?
Renan Devillieres: When you look at what happened with Japan, the government set up guidelines and like very predictable avenue for capital and saying, this is there. And I think the space race also aligned a lot, all the technology so.
There is a central rule of providing some long-term guidance and some predictable avenue for capital allocation and revenue saying, Hey, for the next 15 years, this is what's going to happen because industrial strength happen at best five, but the really 10 years to 15 years timeframe, you need to rebuild.
Entire supply chain, you need to re-skill like 5% of the US population, like this is massive. And so to be able to do that in some kind of long-term thinking, the long-term capital [00:36:00] is already aligned. I, I talked routinely with investment fund, with pension funds, with value offices. They are acutely aware that this is a 10 to 15 years timeframe thing and they are lighting on that.
I think government can do a better job of providing some light. The guidelines and like kickstarting that on that thing. I have to say the CCP 50 year plan and five year plan are very powerful tool because it aligns a whole society on those other the things. Just do the things, and I think we'll get to a part where this is very clear.
These alliance came throw talent.
Matt Horine: Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. The CCP, famous for the central planning, but sometimes the execution and some of the other bigger things. I think one thing about the West in particular is that all that's there, all the components are there. Is there alignment and is there enough to drive it to being the dominant force in the 21st century?
And we're just at the start of it really. I guess we're quarter of the way in, but really the shape of the [00:37:00] next 50 to 75 years is just now taking off. Reen, where can our listeners find out more about what you're doing and more about OSS and your thoughts on the manufacturing space?
Renan Devillieres: Sure. So you can find us on our website, OSS Ventures.
You can hit me by email, by Twitter, and also I write about reassuring on reassuring, as I like to call it, and everyth. So you can find us on Medium Have Week Newsletter.
Matt Horine: Excellent. Thank you very much for coming on the show today and it's been a fantastic conversation and we're looking forward to what the year has in store for you.
Renan Devillieres: Thank you, Matt.
Matt Horine: For listeners, we'll link to OSS Ventures and Rein's work in the show notes. And if you're a founder, operator or investor thinking seriously about the future of manufacturing, it's a voice worth following.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.