For more than sixty years, engineers have tried to automate circuit board design, and the best tool they've built is one the industry openly hates. The motherboard inside your laptop still takes a person months to draw by hand. I sat down with Sergiy Nesterenko, founder and CEO of Quilter and a former SpaceX radiation effects engineer, who is building AI that designs circuit boards on its own by starting from physics instead of from past attempts. He breaks down why hard problems that are simple to state refuse to let smart people go, why founders should fall in love with the customer before the solution, and why everyone outside his industry assumes this problem was solved decades ago. Then he takes us inside SpaceX's culture of shocking competence, what Elon looked like as a leader up close, and why thinking by analogy will only ever get you as far as the people who failed before you.
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Chapters:
0:00 - Intro
0:30 - Fear Of Failing Vs The Joy Of Building
1:43 - Why Hard Problems Choose You
3:04 - Obsess Over The Customer, Not The Idea
4:13 - How To Fall In Love With Your Customer
5:25 - The Circuit Board Problem
7:10 - The Hidden Boards In Everything
8:09 - The Problem Nobody Has Solved In Sixty Years
9:32 - Inside SpaceX's Shocking Competence
11:13 - How SpaceX Filters For Intensity
13:01 - What Makes A Great Engineering Culture
14:32 - Elon As A Leader
16:05 - First Principles Vs Thinking By Analogy
17:47 - Catching Rockets With Chopsticks
19:33 - Setting The Right Limits On A Hard Problem
21:31 - Book Recommendation
Book Recommendation:
Build by Tony Fadell
About Sergiy Nesterenko
Sergiy Nesterenko is the founder and CEO of Quilter, a Los Angeles company building physics-driven AI that designs printed circuit boards on its own, turning weeks of manual layout work into hours. Before founding Quilter in 2019, he spent five years at SpaceX as a senior radiation effects engineer, making sure the electronics on Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Dragon could survive the radiation of space. Quilter trains its AI with reinforcement learning on the physics of electronics, including electromagnetics, thermodynamics, and signal propagation, rather than on human designs. The company raised a Series A led by Benchmark, followed by a twenty-five million dollar Series B in 2025 led by Index Ventures, bringing total funding to forty million dollars from investors including Benchmark, Index Ventures, Coatue, Root Ventures, Lip-Bu Tan, and Tony Fadell. He holds a triple major in chemistry, physics, and mathematics from UC Berkeley. He argues that the only way to crack a problem that has beaten engineers for sixty years is to stop building on their attempts and start from physics.
Follow Sergiy Nesterenko on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergiynesterenko/
About the show
Inside the Silicon Mind takes you behind the scenes with the founders, CEOs, and VCs building the future of technology. Every week, Firas Sozan sits down with the operators and investors rewriting the rules - from deep‑tech startups to the security challenges created by AI.
Hosted by Firas Sozan.
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https://www.linkedin.com/in/firassozan/
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